It’s not as though some Congressman or Senator is about to introduce consensus GSE legislation...

The top three reverse lenders in 2017 were American Advisors Group, Reverse Mortgage Funding and One Reverse Mortgage…

The weighted average credit score is 701 and average LTV is 76.8 percent...

Nearly all of the loans are 30-year fixed-rate mortgages and have seasoned for an average of 2.1 months.

Fitch had a good year too, rating $17.51 billion of non-agency MBS…

Legislation that would protect veterans from predatory lending that was passed by the Senate recently could have lasting impacts on the VA home-loan guaranty program, according to legal experts. S. 2155, the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act, passed on March 14 by a vote of 67-31. Sixteen Democrats and one Independent joined all 50 Republicans in passing the bill. Primarily, the bill would loosen stringent rules in the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act designed to prevent the bad business practices that led to the 2008 financial crisis. A stand-alone bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Thom Tillis, R-NC, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, in January was added to S. 2155 shortly before the Senate vote. The Tillis-Warren bill, Protecting Veterans from Predatory Lending Act of 2018, addresses the issue of serial refinancing, or loan churning, in which the victims are veterans. Churning refers to the ...

Ginnie Mae has passed the $1 billion mark for mortgage-backed securities issued through the Federal Home Loan Banks’ Mortgage Partnership Finance program. The MPF government MBS product was available initially to eligible participating members of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago. The Chicago FHLB launched the MPF program in 1997 to give approved participating members access to the secondary mortgage market. Specifically, the program provided an outlet other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for member institutions to sell fixed-rate mortgage loans (conventional, government, or jumbo). Most of the institutions participating in the MPF are small banks, thrifts and credit unions with assets of less than $400 million. The MPF government MBS product arose from a 2015 partnership between Ginnie Mae and the Chicago FHLB to issue Ginnie MBS backed by ...

Securitization of USDA loans by Ginnie Mae fell in the fourth quarter of 2017. Approximately $19.9 billion of USDA loans were delivered into Ginnie MBS pools in 2017, notwithstanding a 9.2 percent drop from the previous quarter, agency data show. On the other hand, year-over-year securitization of rural housing loans with a government guarantee rose 5.8 percent from 2016. Top-ranked Freedom Mortgage saw its USDA loan deliveries to Ginnie drop 16.2 percent during the fourth quarter, while its USDA securitization volume rose a whopping 78.9 percent from the previous year. Overall, Freedom accounted for $3.6 billion of USDA loans pooled in Ginnie MBS last year. Second-place PennyMac closed the year with $3.1 billion of securitized USDA loans, while Wells Fargo reported a 13.1 percent drop in the final quarter to end 2017 with $1.4 billion of rural housing loans in Ginnie MBS. Chase Home Finance sprang out ... [ Chart ]

Fannie Mae adjusted its automated underwriting services last summer to make more loans with higher debt-to-income ratios eligible for approval without lenders needing to provide compensating factors.

DBRS took over as the top rating service in the non-agency MBS market last year, as more deals carried multiple ratings in 2017, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS ranking.