Rep. Maxine Waters, the ranking Democrat on the panel, is promising that GSE "stakeholders" will have input on her housing reform bill.

The loans in the new Redwood deal have the strong characteristics associated with jumbos, including an average credit score of 766 and a combined loan-to-value ratio of almost 71 percent.

When it comes to auditing mortgage lenders, does the CFPB know what it’s doing? It all depends on who you talk to. Also, the FHFA cracks down on force placed insurance (again).

One mortgage analyst who tracks the company said Nationstar is changing the way it “allocates capital” to certain of its business segments.

Standard & Poor's rated $11.65 billion of non-agency MBS issued through the end of September.

Two Harbors, a publicly traded REIT, is getting aggressive when it comes to MSR acquisitions.

Is the White House ready to give up on Rep. Mel Watt, D-NC, to be the next director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency? Don’t bet on it.

It was pretty much stimulus as usual at the Federal Open Market Committee this week, as the Fed showed not the slightest indication of when it would begin winding down the third phase of its quantitative easing program, known informally as QE3 when it was first unveiled, but increasingly referred to as QE Infinity by those who emphasize its long, drawn-out nature. The status quo results mean the Fed will continue adding to its agency MBS portfolio at a pace of $40 billion per month and longer-term Treasury securities at a pace of $45 billion per month, and keep plowing its principal payments from its agency debt and MBS holdings back into agency MBS and rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Among those voting in favor of keeping the Fed’s pedal to the metal were...

As leaders of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee continue their slow but steady efforts to craft a comprehensive, bipartisan mortgage finance reform bill, experts generally agreed on the necessity for some sort of government backstop for MBS but differed on the details. This week’s hearing was the first of several planned by Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-ID, as they work to build out their own reform legislation on top of the bill, S. 1217, filed earlier this year by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA. Johnson said...

The jumbo MBS market is frozen because investors in the AAA tranches are scarce and still lack confidence in the product following the housing bust and the ensuing tidal wave of litigation swamping issuers and underwriters. According to MBS pioneer Lewis Ranieri, there’s only one to fix the problem: give investors more information on the deals. At a speech this week during the annual convention of the Mortgage Bankers Association, Ranieri, the chairman and CEO of Shellpoint Partners, noted...