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.

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.”

In fact, 10 of the 17 banks tracked by Inside Mortgage Trends posted increased mortgage-banking income during the final three months of 2013, and all of them reported a positive showing.

By December, FHA financing was used by first-time homebuyers in 39.6 percent of home purchases, based on the three-month moving average.

Despite AEI’s findings, delinquencies on GSE loans continue to fall. In December, for example, Freddie’s single-family delinquency rate totaled 2.39 percent compared to 3.25 percent a year earlier.

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.

Besides Freddie Mac and FHA, the three other main competitors for Fannie in the multifamily sector are life insurance companies, banks and conduit lending programs.

Most of what Fannie and Freddie earn in the fourth quarter will go directly into the coffers of the U.S. Treasury Department.

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...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are likely to find the multifamily MBS space to be noticeably more competitive this year as increasing levels of private capital respond to improving market conditions, one top government-sponsored enterprise official suggests. One of the most influential factors that will determine how much volume the GSEs do in multifamily will be “more competition in the market in 2014 than we saw in 2013,” thanks to increasing levels of private capital, according to Manny Menendez, senior vice president of multifamily capital markets and pricing for Fannie. Besides Freddie and FHA, the three other main competitors for Fannie in the sector are...