Bank of the West executive Paul Wible said the lender believes, "A well-underwritten, interest-only mortgage can be a good choice for our customers" and are safe for the depository to hold in portfolio.

The settlement covers damages suffered by Fannie Mae from misrepresentations Lehman was alleged to have made regarding the quality of non-agency product it sold to the GSE.

Investment banking and mortgage executives believe the departures at MRP could mean that the industry’s battle against the use of eminent domain is over and that the strategy is now kaput.

Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, R-WV, said many credit unions and community banks “feel that they’re not going to be able to have the flexibility to give the farmer, the medical student, the single mother, the ability to get the home because they’re not going to fit into the QM box.”

Mortgage topics don’t always make the President’s State of the Union speech, but President Obama Tuesday night may touch on the issue of credit availability and whether the government has “gone too far.”

The cost of mortgage compliance was a topic making the rounds at the recent ABS Vegas show in Nevada. Attendees, of course, wanted to know who might pay for all the new added costs.

“It’s nearly impossible to get the information to the right person to vote on it,” said Bill Moliski, a managing director at SG Capital and former managing director at Redwood Trust.

The market produced $4.94 billion of new non-agency MBS during the fourth quarter, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking, the weakest output of the year.

The consensus among speakers at the ABS Vegas conference this week appeared to be that the MBS market is unlikely to change significantly this year. “The status quo is comfortable,” said Larry White, an economics professor at New York University’s business school. Issuers of non-agency MBS are working on reducing the government-sponsored enterprises’ dominance of the secondary market for mortgages, but the chicken-and-egg problem persists. New non-agency issuance has ground to a standstill, and Congress has been slow to move housing-finance reform legislation. In the meantime, industry observers expect...

The Structured Finance Industry Group announced this week that it will convene a taskforce to establish standardized representations and warranties for new non-agency MBS. The “Project RMBS 3.0” effort will involve a wide variety of industry participants in an effort to attract investors to non-agency MBS. If the effort sounds familiar, that’s because the American Securitization Forum issued benchmark reps and warrants in 2009 as part of its Project Restart initiative. “We want to resolve these issues once and for all,” said Eric Kaplan, managing director of Shellpoint Partners and one of the leaders of Project RMBS 3.0, during this week’s ABS Vegas conference sponsored by the SFIG and Information Management Network. He said...