ResCap Liquidating Trust last week filed two new lawsuits against lenders as it continued its efforts to recover losses due to bad loans purchased from correspondents that later forced the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. No other details were provided by defendant attorneys with American Mortgage Law Group, which warned that the Dec. 2 filings in Minnesota federal district court may trigger a second wave of litigation by the trust. AMLG said it has been helping a number of lenders with pre-litigation demands from the trust and has seen increased activity on that front. On Nov. 16, a federal judge dismissed...

With November’s election potentially unraveling key features of the financial regulatory structure instituted over the past eight years, experts say it’s time for policymakers to figure out what’s working and what needs to be fixed. During a panel session hosted by the Bipartisan Policy Center, Richard Berner, director of the Office of Financial Research, said that more information is needed about liquidity because a lack of it is often cited as one of the unintended consequences of regulation. “Market liquidity is...

Freddie Mac successfully boarded many of its MBS issuance functions on the Common Securitization Platform on Nov. 21. The government-sponsored enterprise is now using the platform for its data acceptance, issuance support and bond administration activities, according to Freddie and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie reiterated...

“That’s a lot of work for an industry that apparently doesn’t exist,” said Richard Johns, SFIG’s executive director.

In case you’re not keeping tally, there are roughly 387 calendar days remaining before the “capital buffer” at Fannie and Freddie falls to zero on Jan. 1, 2018.

Back in late August, Ginnie Mae promised the mortgage industry that it would release a new and improved “acknowledgement agreement,” a document that defines collateral rights tied to agency servicing. But now it’s December, and no such document has surfaced. “It’s in legal,” an agency spokeswoman said, apologizing for the repeated delays. Meanwhile, there is new industry chatter that the revised acknowledgement agreement may not see the light of day for ...

The loans funded by Sterling and Lendsure entailed the use of bank statements to verify borrower income.

With rates rising almost 75 basis points since the election, more MSR packages should hit the market in the next few weeks.

Have any of the GSE stock speculators that bought on the cheap cashed out of their gains?

The one weak spot in the mortgage market during the third quarter was in traditional jumbo originations, a trend that was reinforced by a significant increase in production of agency mortgages in high-cost markets that exceeded $417,000. An estimated $101.0 billion of non-agency jumbo home loans were originated during the third quarter, down 1.9 percent from the previous quarter. At the same time, production of conforming-jumbo mortgages – loans greater than $417,000 that were securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae – jumped 27.7 percent from the second to the third quarter. Some of the disparity is...[Includes three data tables]