The Federal Housing Finance Agency may pursue its residential mortgage-backed securities legal action against affiliates of Residential Capital LLC, Ally Financial’s defunct mortgage unit, a federal judge has ruled. Last week, Judge Denise Cote of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York denied ResCap’s request seeking an automatic bankruptcy stay of its numerous MBS lawsuits, including one filed by the FHFA last year. The FHFA, as GSE conservator, sued UBS Americas in July 2011 alleging that billions of dollars of MBS purchased by Fannie and Freddie were based on offering documents that contained “materially false statements and omissions.”

A subsidiary of Credit Suisse Group issued its second non-agency jumbo mortgage-backed security of the year last week. The transaction was backed by $425.09 million of jumbo mortgages, largely originated by MetLife Home Loans, which ceased originations at the beginning of this year. The privately-placed deal – CSMC Trust 2012-CIM2 – received AAA ratings from Standard & Poor’s and DBRS with credit enhancement of 8.25 percent on the AAA tranche. S&P also placed a AAA rating on CSMC Trust 2012-CIM1, the $741.94 million ...

Roughly 27 percent of outstanding Ginnie Mae MBS pools are eligible for the FHA’s revised streamline refinancing program, which could translate to $36 billion in new annual Ginnie Mae issuance, according to a report from Barclays Research. Barclays analysts estimated that about $293.0 billion of Ginnie Mae’s $1 trillion-plus 30-year loan pools were originated before May 2009. About 79 percent of the collateral backing these pools are FHA loans, which suggests that as much as $232.0 billion could qualify...

The gap between the performance and liquidity of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS continues to widen and a proposal to make their securities interchangeable is gaining traction among stakeholders. But unless a workable valuation solution is found, bridging that gap between the two government-sponsored enterprises will remain nearly impossible, said the Mortgage Bankers Association. Pricing differences between Fannie and Freddie have grown...

The outstanding volume of single-family agency MBS continued to grow during the first quarter of 2012, accounting for a slightly larger share of the overall mortgage market. Total agency MBS edged up 0.6 percent from the end of 2012 to reach $5.381 trillion – still slightly below the record of $5.430 trillion set at the end of 2009. The agency MBS market declined in early 2010 as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began buying distressed home loans out of MBS pools. While the agency MBS market was up in the first quarter, the amount of home mortgage debt outstanding continued to decline, dropping...(Includes one data chart)

If investors in non-agency mortgage-backed securities had easy access to the addresses of mortgages included in non-agency MBS, the sector’s market share would increase, according to a new proposal by the Reason Foundation, which promotes libertarian principles. “Ignorance of the borrower’s address and identity is a major disadvantage for the residential MBS investor or anyone trying to analyze residential MBS deals,” according to Marc Joffe, a research associate at the Reason Foundation and Anthony Randazzo ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities remained the preferred investment choice of the 12 Federal Home Loan Banks during the first quarter of 2012, with a modest increase from the previous quarter, according to a new analysis and ranking by Inside The GSEs based on data from the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Meanwhile, Ginnie Mae securities posted a decline within the FHLBank system during the first three months of the year. GSE MBS accounted for 70.7 percent of combined FHLBank MBS portfolios, up 2.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2011. The Finance Agency’s data do not separately break out Fannie and Freddie volume or share.

Most of the non-mortgage securitization market seems to be approaching the more normal levels that were seen prior to the financial crisis, according to market participants, analysts and observers gathered for the annual meeting of the American Securitization Forum this week in Washington, DC. “We’ve come a pretty long way, if you think about 2008, pre-2008 and post-crisis,” said Bob Behal, principal with The Vanguard Group. He noted that there have been healthy pricing levels in auto loan and credit card ABS and more active student loan and container sectors, as well as some interesting niche products and...

A proposal from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to begin disseminating data for agency MBS traded as specified pools could compromise the confidentiality of market participants and discourage them from future participation, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association. The FINRA wants to implement shorter reporting timeframes for MBS-SP transactions (initially two hours, then one hour), as well as real-time dissemination of trade information. Volume information would be capped at $10 million. Trades above that amount would be displayed as “10+.” “Our dealer and...

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac held onto their ample shares of mortgage-backed securities with something of a bump during the first quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside The GSEs analysis. The GSEs issued a combined $303.9 billion in MBS during the first quarter, a 13.9 percent increase from the fourth quarter of 2011. Compared to the first quarter of last year, Fannie and Freddie saw a 16.4 percent increase in MBS issuance. Between the two companies, Fannie and Freddie registered a plentiful 77.9 percent share of new MBS during the period that ended March 31, 2012, up from 77.1 percent the two companies held during the fourth quarter of 2011 and much farther apart from the 74.8 percent both GSEs held during the first quarter of 2011.