Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae pumped out a respectable $152.3 billion in new single-family MBS in April, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS market analysis and ranking. April’s issuance level was up 2.6 percent from March and reversed, at least temporarily, a two-month downturn in new production. The cyclical peak for the agency MBS market came back in November 2012, when a whopping $199.4 billion in new securities were issued. Although the market couldn’t sustain...[Includes one data chart]
Fannie Mae is discouraging some of its newly minted seller/servicers from issuing MBS through swap transactions and is instead pushing them toward its “cash window,” according to lenders and advisors familiar with the issue. “Fannie has increased its due diligence on lenders to ensure they are meeting, or are able to meet, the terms and conditions of an MBS issuance,” said Tim Rood, managing partner in The Collingwood Group, a Washington-based advisory firm. Rood, a former Fannie executive, told...
So far a “broad cross-section” of industry participants and other stakeholders support the steps the Federal Housing Finance Agency has taken to establish a new securitization platform for residential MBS, the agency said in a progress report issued this week. “In light of the importance of this initiative to the housing finance system, and reinforced by the comments received from the public, FHFA has directed the enterprises to move forward on the development of the [common securitization platform],” the agency noted. In early March, FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco said...
Federal regulators said they will collectively work with Congress to reduce the agency market share of MBS issuance. The members of the Financial Stability Oversight Council said completion of the qualified-residential mortgage rule will also help increase non-agency activity. “The council recommends that the Treasury Department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency continue to work with Congress and other stakeholders to develop and implement a broad plan to reform the housing finance system,” the FSOC said in its 2013 annual report, released late last week. Tobias Adrian, a vice president at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and contributor to the report, said...
Fannie Mae and IBM are working together on at least one big technology project: a new data center. But is the relationship about to go even further? Meanwhile, MBS issuance stayed hot in April.
The American Securitization Forum proposed a number of regulatory and legislative changes last week to increase non-agency activity. The proposed changes were prompted by recent meetings with members of Congress. “The proposals can be implemented in the short term to expedite the process of bringing private capital back to the mortgage market by incrementally reducing the government-guaranteed market well below the current 90 percent share,” the ASF said. The ASF called for reform of the ...
The FHA paid out more in claims than it had collected in premiums and note and property sales as of Sept. 30, 2012, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s quarterly report to Congress on the FHA Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund. FHA disbursed $19.5 billion at the end of the third quarter last year mostly to pay claims and booked $16.7 billion in collections, resulting in an outflow of $2.8 billion, the report stated. Cash flows from operations over the last year covered 80 percent of default losses, the report noted. Premiums collected over four quarters ending Sept. 30, 2012, totaled ...
Wells Fargo will reportedly appeal a federal judge’s decision that a $25 billion agreement Wells and four other banks made with federal agencies and 49 state attorneys general last year to settle allegations of servicing malpractices does not make the banks immune to future claims under the False Claims Act. The Feb. 12 decision by Judge Rosemary Collyer of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said that the landmark settlement she had approved in April 2012 does not release the from future False Claims Act claims the government may bring. Dating back to the U.S. Civil War, the FCA provides for treble damages for fraud that results in ...
The Department of Housing and Urban Development this week issued more detailed guidance to changes in the FHA Lender Insurance Program based on a final rule published in the Federal Register in January 2012. Under the LI program, high-performing direct endorsement lenders have the authority to conduct pre-endorsement reviews and endorse loans. Mortgagee Letter 2013-12 supersedes guidance HUD issued last month and provides additional details on initial and continuing eligibility for Lender Insurance. It also talks about HUD monitoring of program participants as well indemnification procedures, which were discussed in ...
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