In the first quarter, among the top ten, the biggest correspondent production gainers were Nationstar Mortgage and Stonegate Mortgage, both nonbanks.

A spokesman for Caliber Home Loans said that many of the lender’s non-agency mortgages will be non-QMs.

Former Treasury official Jim Millstein argues that taxpayers “stand to make an enormous profit” if the two are allowed to recapitalize, restructure and eventually are sold to “back to private investors.”

If you take away all the one-time gains at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two are barely profitable. Right?

Bank and thrift MBS holdings were up a modest 1.0 percent from the previous quarter, but it marked the first increase since the third quarter of 2012, when the Federal Reserve began aggressively buying agency MBS and Treasury securities.

In order for the GSEs to exit conservatorship with the full faith and credit of the U.S., they would have to pay the Treasury a fee equal to the value of the government’s backing under the terms of their preferred stock purchase agreements.

Fannie Mae has traditionally reserved the right to invoke margin calls if it needs to.

There seems to be a growing trend of foreign banks rethinking their position in the U.S. mortgage market.

Commercial banks and savings institutions held $1.521 trillion of single-family MBS in their retained portfolios as of the end of the first quarter of 2014, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking and analysis of call report data. Bank and thrift MBS holdings were up a modest 1.0 percent from the previous quarter, but it marked the first increase since the third quarter of 2012, when the Federal Reserve began aggressively buying agency MBS and Treasury securities. Significantly, the increase in bank MBS holdings came at a time when new issuance was plummeting. MBS purchases...[Includes two data charts]

RBS Securities – which is 64 percent owned by the government of the United Kingdom – is shaking up its mortgage trading operation in the U.S., cutting staff and taking a close look at its future in an extremely tough American mortgage market. Officials at the bank’s MBS headquarters in Stamford, CT, did not return telephone calls about the matter, but several lenders and Wall Street executives confirmed that cutbacks have been made at the company over the past week or so. Frank Skibo, a managing director for RBS in Connecticut, and Ara Balabanian, a director in the group, also could not be reached...