Freddie filed repurchase requests on some $361.6 million of 2012 originations during the first quarter of this year, according to figures compiled by Inside Mortgage Trends.

It appears that looser underwriting has been driven by an increase in the number of lenders participating in the HARP program and copy-cat efforts that allow for LTVs of greater than 95 percent.

Piper Jaffray owns 8.72 percent of Bexil Corp., the parent of Bexil American Mortgage. Meanwhile, ICBA likes the Corker-Warner bill, but...

Depositories sold $396 billion of single-family mortgages into the secondary market in the first quarter, down 5 percent from the previous period.

Investors accounted for 20 percent of home purchases in May, based on the three-month moving average, the third consecutive decline in investor share.

Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that the central bank is leaning toward scaling down its MBS purchases later this year, and that rapidly rising mortgage interest rates don’t pose a major threat to the fledgling housing recovery.

The Mortgage Bankers Association called for the Federal Housing Finance Agency to update standards for representations and warranties provided to the government-sponsored enterprises and asked for more transparent underwriting standards. “Confusion and uncertainty around representations and warranties standards continue to cause lenders to add their own overlays to the existing GSE credit standards,” said Bill Cosgrove, the MBA’s vice chairman. “As a result, lenders are only offering mortgages to those with the most pristine credit for fear that any borrower default will trigger costly repurchase requests.” The MBA detailed...

With the Federal Housing Finance Agency working on a common securitization platform for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, market participants are beginning to ask whether the residential finance sector really needs two government-sponsored enterprises. This week, at a policy forum in Washington, MBS co-inventor Lewis Ranieri and former GSE regulator James Lockhart suggested that the industry doesn’t need both Fannie and Freddie. The thinking is that a common securitization platform will facilitate the transition to a standardized GSE MBS, with slight variations, that would eliminate the current pricing differentials between Fannie and Freddie MBS. Speaking at the Bipartisan Policy Center, Lockhart noted...

Freddie Mac's "low activity fee" will be mostly eliminated. However, it will still apply to originators that have not sold a loan to the GSE in 36 months.

A new “pragmatic” secondary market reform plan released by four housing experts closely resembles the bipartisan legislation being drafted by key members of the Senate, including an ambitious implementation timeline that says the overhaul could be accomplished in about three years. Sponsored by the Milken Institute, the Urban Institute and Moody’s Analytics, the “Pragmatic Plan for Housing Finance Reform” features a new government MBS guaranty that would cover catastrophic losses after private credit enhancement is exhausted. Like the legislation being drafted by Senators Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA, it would create a new Federal Mortgage Insurance Corp. to manage the new government MBS guaranty. Under the proposal, MBS insurers would be...