The credit quality of the collateral backing the most active types of structured finance securities is slipping, but remains above pre-credit crisis levels, according to Moody’s Investors Service. In a report issued last week, Moody’s cited several trends that signal the potential for higher credit risk, but the rating service said that many sponsors are building in subordination levels and other structural features that result in higher credit quality. “The degree of weaker underwriting and collateral quality in structured transactions varies...

Securitization, particularly non-agency securitization of subprime and Alt A mortgages, has been widely blamed for the recent financial crisis, although less-studied home-equity loans also may have contributed, according to a government working paper. Results suggested that securitized home-equity loans have higher default risk and produce greater loss severity than similar loans held in portfolio by lenders, according to authors Michael LaCour-Little, a professor of finance at California State University at Fullerton, and Yanan Zhang, a financial economist at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The authors sampled...

Over the past few months, at least $407 million of re-performing residential mortgages have been auctioned off in the secondary market, according to a recent tally from Mountain View Capital Group, Denver. As for how many of these loans will wind up in an MBS, that’s a different matter. DBRS has rated what it calls 15 “seasoned” loan programs since 2009, only four of which it considers to be re-performing. But according to DBRS Managing Director of Structured Finance Quincy Tang, “There’s certainly no shortage of re-performing collateral in the market.” In other words, despite the improvement in the housing market, there are...

Even though the risk-sharing targets set for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been all but met this year, expect the two government-sponsored enterprises to come to market with risk-sharing transactions at least once a quarter, with the likely result of both firms exceeding the 2014 target “by at least” $20 billion, predicted an analysis by Wells Fargo Securities. The FHFA’s 2014 Conservatorship Scorecard directs the GSEs to reduce taxpayers’ risks by increasing the role of private capital in the market via several strategies, including tripling the credit risk transfer goals to $90 billion in 2014 from $30 billion in 2013. Year-to-date, Fannie Mae’s Connecticut Avenue Securities program has already achieved...

Morningstar Credit Ratings late last week published new rating criteria for non-agency MBS. While the firm has been active in the commercial MBS sector, the non-agency MBS rating criteria Morningstar released in 2012 never caught on with issuers. “We have taken a fresh, holistic approach to the residential MBS rating process to help investors gauge the relative default risk of a security against its peers,” said Vickie Tillman, president of Morningstar. Tillman joined the rating service in August after more than 30 years at Standard & Poor’s. Morningstar said...

Several top-tier commercial banks increased their holdings of first-lien mortgages during the first quarter of 2014, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. The growing portfolios were largely due to jumbo mortgages along with some conforming loans. Banks and thrifts held $1.74 trillion in first-lien mortgages in portfolio at the end of the first quarter of 2014, down 0.7 percent from the previous quarter ... [Includes one data chart]

WinWater Home Mortgage, a relatively new jumbo conduit, is preparing to issue a $249.47 million jumbo mortgage-backed security. The deal is set to receive AAA ratings from DBRS, Kroll Bond Rating Agency and Standard & Poor’s despite concerns about the lack of performance data for WinWater and the firm’s “limited financial capacity.” WinWater is partly owned by principals of Premium Point Investments, a residential mortgage investment advisor ...

CitiMortgage is preparing to issue its first jumbo mortgage-backed security of the year, a $217.99 million deal largely backed by mortgages originated by brokers. The top contributors to Citigroup Mortgage Loan Trust 2014-J1 are Stearns Lending (33.5 percent), Nationstar Mortgage (30.3 percent) and Freedom Mortgage (11.3 percent). The deal is set to receive AAA ratings from DBRS and Fitch Ratings with credit enhancement of 9.525 percent on the super-senior tranche ...

Redwood Trust could boost its jumbo acquisitions by $5.0 billion a year, according to industry analysts, due to a new partnership with the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago. The real estate investment trust announced last week that it has an exclusive three-year deal to purchase “high balance” mortgages from FHLBank members participating in a new product under the Mortgage Partnership Finance Program. Under the new MPF Direct, members of an ...

In December, the Federal Housing Finance Agency was set to increase the guaranty fees charged by the government-sponsored enterprises. However, Melvin Watt, the new director of the FHFA, put a hold on the planned g-fee increase and is taking a much more deliberate look at the fees, including a potential decrease in g-fees. The FHFA this month released a request for input regarding the g-fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, including questions about ...