The Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent $12.7 million settlement with First Mortgage Corp. and several of its top executives over an allegedly fraudulent sale of toxic MBS to investors reveals the agency’s hidden role as a regulator of Ginnie Mae issuers, attorneys at Mayer Brown warned. Though seldom in the news, the SEC continues to bring enforcement actions against public companies that commit fraud involving Ginnie MBS, as seen in the FMC case, and previous enforcement actions against Taylor Bean & Whitaker and Radius Capital, the attorneys noted in a recent analysis. When bringing these cases, the SEC seeks...

Upgrades of ratings on structured finance products hit an all-time high in 2015, according to a study released this week by S&P Global Ratings. The study tracked ratings across sectors and the world, while the U.S. residential MBS sector showed mixed performance. S&P said it had 30,359 ratings outstanding on global structured finance securities at the beginning of 2015. During the year, 9.8 percent of the ratings were upgraded. The rating service said upgrades in 2015 were most prevalent on structured credit deals in Europe and the U.S. Some 11.2 percent of S&P’s ratings were downgraded...

The nonprime mortgage-backed security issued last week by Lone Star Funds could spur an increase in MBS backed by non-qualified mortgages, industry analysts say. The $161.71 million COLT 2016-1 Mortgage Loan Trust was the first MBS backed by non-QMs to receive a rating. Some 51.8 percent of the mortgages in the deal were non-QMs. All of the mortgages were originated by Lone Star’s Caliber Home Loans. The A-1 tranche of the MBS priced at spread of ...

New criteria from Fitch Ratings for rating non-agency mortgage-backed securities include provisions regarding due diligence grades and the deal agent position planned by some issuers. The criteria published this week include a “realignment” of items that result in C grades and D grades on mortgages reviewed by third-party due diligence firms. The changes include reviews for compliance with the Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act ...

Ocwen Financial faced mixed results in servicing litigation recently while avoiding further downgrades of its corporate issuer default rating. Last week, Ocwen announced that it had agreed to settle two lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice involving the Home Affordable Modification Program and FHA mortgages. The pending $30 million settlement involves alleged violations of the False Claims Act, among other issues. The lawsuits were brought in 2012 by ...

Ginnie Mae has good reason to be concerned about rapid demographic change in its relatively small issuer community. Nonbank institutions – many of them relatively newly formed and based on nontraditional business models – are taking over the market. Nonbank issuers accounted for a whopping 69.4 percent of Ginnie’s issuance of single-family mortgage-backed securities during the first quarter of 2016. A year ago, their share was 64.6 percent. Two years ago it was 46.7 percent. With those kinds of gains on the production line, it’s not hard to see why nonbanks are claiming a growing share of Ginnie servicing outstanding. At the end of March, nonbanks owned 46.7 percent of Ginnie single-family mortgage servicing rights, up a hefty 11.5 percentage points in one year. That rate of growth can’t be accomplished just by producing new MBS because the servicing market simply doesn’t grow that fast. (Although the Ginnie market has grown significantly faster than any other segment of ... [ 2 charts ]

Lenders will face higher penalties for violations of agency rules and regulations as the FHA and the Department of Veterans Affairs adjust their respective maximum civil monetary penalties for inflation. The adjustments are mandated by the Federal Civil Penalties Inflation Adjustment Act Improvements Act of 2015, which also requires publication of an interim final rule showing the current and adjusted penalty amounts. Effective June 22, 2016, VA’s maximum civil monetary penalties for false loan guaranty certification increased from $10,000 to $21,563, and from $5,500 to $10,781 for fraudulent claims or statements in any VA program. Comments on the VA interim final rule must be received on or before Aug. 22, 2016. Meanwhile, the FHA also is making inflation adjustments for its maximum civil penalties through an interim final rule that will take effect Aug. 15, 2016, the day before the ...

A new Inside Mortgage Finance analysis reveals that nonbank mortgage lenders have dramatically increased their share of new production over the past two years. Nonbank lenders captured an impressive 48.1 percent share of mortgage originations during the first quarter of 2016, in a database of over 170 lenders. That was up from just 39.1 percent two years ago in early 2014, and 45.2 percent in the first quarter of 2015. While new first-lien origination volume by the 88 banks in the database fell 4.0 percent from the fourth quarter of 2015, the 81 nonbanks managed...[Includes two data tables]

CRT Capital Group has begun winding down its mortgage research division, Sterne Agee CRT, casting a shadow over publicly traded residential stocks and dashing the hopes of any nonbanks that were hoping to pull off an initial public offering this year. As one equities researcher told Inside Mortgage Finance this week: “It’s not fun being a stock analyst these days.” And commenting on the recent – and unexpected – drop in rates, he added: “Some of these firms may get smoked.” Four years ago, Sterne Agee was...

The Structured Finance Industry Group late last week published a final draft of the standards for due diligence firms to use when testing loans for compliance with the Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act disclosure rule. “The underlying premise of this documentation is to establish a best practices approach to pre-securitization testing logic that will drive the due diligence conducted by third-party review firms,” SFIG said. The RMBS 3.0 TRID Compliance Review Scope documentation addresses...