Taken as a barometer of industry activity, Wells Fargo's prediction is hardly good news for a business that is facing an ugly 40 percent decline in fundings this year.
Loan modifications that reduce principal and interest payments by at least 10 percent perform significantly better than other mods, according to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
The Mortgage Bankers Association continues to trim its production forecast for 2014 as the year progresses. Still, some lenders are hopeful and most of them are nonbanks.
S&P rated seven of the 11 non-agency MBS issued in the first three months of 2014, or 78 percent based on dollar volume, according to Inside MBS & ABS.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will ramp up their risk-sharing transactions significantly in 2014, and may see a somewhat expanded share of MBS issuance, under a new conservatorship plan announced this week by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The revised “scorecard” also tweaks the project to develop a common securitization platform. The FHFA said it wants each of the two government-sponsored enterprises to structure transactions that transfer some portion of the credit risk on $90 billion of residential MBS this year, three times the level they were directed to reach last year. Both companies appear to be well on the way to meeting this requirement. Freddie late last month announced...
The Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee voted 13-to-9 to report out a revised version of the controversial housing-finance reform legislation, but the bill’s tweaks weren’t enough to win the support of the panel’s liberal Democrat members. Committee Chairman Tim Johnson, D-SD, and Ranking Member Mike Crapo, R-ID, released their initial draft in March, which built upon the bill submitted last year by Sens. Bob Corker, R-TN, and Mark Warner, D-VA. Though the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act of 2013, S. 1217, cleared committee with one more than the minimum 12 votes required, an affirmative vote of at least 16 of the 22 members of the panel had been seen...
An ambitious, bipartisan mortgage reform bill that would wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while repurposing the Federal Housing Finance Agency limped out of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. The measure is expected to die waiting for a floor vote that will never occur. The committee voted 13 to 9 to report out a revised version of S. 1217, the Housing Finance Reform and Taxpayer Protection Act.
The new director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency wants to set a path for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with less emphasis on shrinking the two GSEs and a greater focus on “the present.” In his first major policy speech, FHFA Director Mel Watt told a packed room at the Brookings Institution how he seeks to “reformulate” the agency’s past conservatorship goals for the GSEs. “Our task is to continue to fulfill our statutory mandates, to execute our strategic plan and to manage the present status of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,” said Watt.
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