MBS investors this week continued to bid up the price of agency product in the wake of rock-bottom oil prices and economic fears about Asia, Europe and any oil-producing nation that relies too heavily on the energy sector. According to figures compiled by MBS Quoteline, at one point this week investors were paying 105.10 for Fannie Mae MBS with a coupon of 3.5 percent. Back in October the bid on the Fannie 3.5 was a mere 101.83. “Who would pay 105...

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recently proposed replacing credit ratings with loan-characteristic metrics for determining capital requirements on bank holdings of residential MBS and commercial MBS. Federal regulators in the U.S. note that the proposal is preliminary and any changes to U.S. capital requirements will go through a notice and comment process separate from the BCBS’ activity. The current standardized approach established by Basel for determining capital requirement riskweights prescribes the use of external credit ratings for residential MBS and commercial MBS, among other holdings by banks subject to capital requirements. “While acknowledging that credit rating agencies play an important role in financial markets and that external credit assessments provide valuable information that may assist in the analysis of credit risk exposures, the hard-wiring of external credit assessments into standards, laws and regulations may often lead...

Bank of America’s never-ending litigation woes spilled into 2015 as Ambac Assurance hit the bank with a new lawsuit related to toxic mortgages. Credit Suisse and Wells Fargo also welcomed the new year facing MBS lawsuits. According to analysts at Stone Fox Capital, an investment advisory firm, Ambac is claiming $600 million in losses, which arose from insuring approximately $1.7 billion in MBS transactions from 2005 to 2007. The MBS were issued by Countrywide Financial, which BofA acquired in 2008 and has been the principal cause of its legal headaches ever since. Ambac emerged...

More investors would be willing to buy new non-agency mortgage-backed securities if loans in the deals had prepayment penalties, according to an industry analyst. The penalties offer investors protection, but their use has been limited by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s ability-to-repay rule, among other factors. Lawrence White, a professor and deputy chair in economics at the New York University Stern School of Business, suggested that the non-agency MBS market would see increased demand from investors, particularly insurance companies, if loans in non-agency MBS included prepayment penalties. “These institutions have largely stayed...

The outstanding supply of agency single-family MBS continued to grow at a subdued pace during the third quarter of 2014, and the biggest investor classes did most of the heavy lifting funding the market, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. On the supply side, there were $5.632 trillion of single-family MBS guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae outstanding at the end of September. That was up just 0.4 percent from the previous quarter but had enough growth rings to show a 1.2 percent gain from a year ago. As has been the case for the past few years, the Ginnie MBS market grew...[Includes two data chart]

The Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee held its last meeting of the year this week, keeping the federal funds target rate steady and continuing to reinvest principal payments from its holdings of agency debt and MBS into agency MBS and rolling over maturing Treasury securities at auction. Most of the pre-meeting buzz among investors was whether the FOMC would tweak or replace its boilerplate language about waiting “a considerable time” before moving to end its zero interest rate policy and begin “normalizing” rates. It did...

Defying the expectations of most industry analysts, investors have bid up the price of agency MBS over the past two weeks, pushing values into nosebleed territory. According to figures compiled by MBS Quoteline, the price of the Fannie Mae 3.50 percent bond recently reached 104.4. “This week and last week we saw new highs,” said Joe Farr, director of sales and marketing for the company. And that has made...

A coalition of global securities-market regulators proposed criteria late last week to assist the financial industry’s development of “simple, transparent and comparable” securitization structures. The proposed criteria from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision and the International Organization of Securities Commissions would apply to many types of MBS and ABS. The extent of involvement by the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding the proposed criteria is unclear. The SEC declined to comment on the proposal and the Bank for International Settlements wouldn’t reveal the members of the taskforce that worked to develop it. However, the SEC is a member of IOSCO and the agency noted that standards issued by IOSCO become the benchmark against which an IOSCO member’s regulatory practices are assessed. The BCBS and IOSCO said...

A federal bankruptcy judge last week ruled against increasing Lehman Brothers’ reserves for residential MBS claims. The ruling by Judge Shelley Chapman of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York was a setback for investors and trustees who asked the court in August to increase Lehman’s current reserves of $5 billion to $12.1 billion in a bid to force the defunct investment bank to repurchase legacy MBS., according to a Barclay’s Research report. The lawsuit against Lehman alleges...

The number of issuers offering jumbo mortgage-backed securities will increase in 2015, according to analysts at various rating services, but total issuance volume isn’t expected to grow by much compared with this year. Attracting investors willing to purchase AAA tranches of jumbo MBS remains a key obstacle. Some $5.4 billion in jumbo MBS were issued during the first three quarters in 2014, according to Inside Nonconforming Markets, including $3.1 billion in the third quarter ...