FHA and VA are urging mortgagees and lenders to extend all possible assistance to borrowers who have been furloughed, laid off or suffered a decline in income because of the government shutdown.

Mortgage banking officials tracking the issue believe that if the agency is going to lower Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac loan limits for 2014 it will need to codify those changes by mid- to late October to give lenders time to update their technology systems.

It’s not every day that a stock comes public at $20 a share, falls 7 percent on its first day of trading and then continues to drift downward. Then again, if that stock is a mortgage investing real estate investment trust like Cherry Hill Mortgage Investment Corp., it’s no big surprise. Thanks to rising interest rates – which actually have been in decline during the government shutdown and uncertainty over the U.S. debt ceiling – mortgage REITs have been battered in the market. Cherry Hill, a spin-off of Freedom Mortgage of Mt. Laurel, NJ, went...

The nation’s top court this week may have sent a subtle hint to the more than dozen big bank defendants being sued by the Federal Housing Finance Agency when it flatly declined to receive their petition to dismiss their cases, notes a legal expert. The 13 financial institutions – including Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase – sought to argue before the Supreme Court of the United States that the FHFA waited too long when it filed suit against the banks in 2011 over non-agency MBS the government-sponsored enterprises purchased prior to the 2008 financial crisis. SCOTUS said...

The interaction between the qualified mortgage standard promulgated earlier this year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the qualified residential mortgage standard still being developed by other federal regulators is going to have a myriad of unpleasant side effects for the securitization sector, according to a top industry attorney. “Linking of qualified residential mortgages (QRM) in the risk-retention rules to the definition of qualified mortgage (QM) in the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rules will further deepen the divide between QM and non-QM loans in terms of pricing and availability,” said Stephen Kudenholdt, chairman of the capital markets practice at the Dentons LLC law firm in New York City. Speaking during a webinar this week sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication, the attorney indicated...

“Any future announcement will be made in conjunction with stakeholders to minimize volatility in the MBS market,” Ginnie Mae said, emphasizing that no decision has been made on the issue.

There is no mention in the SunTrust filing how much HUD/FHA might receive. A spokesman for the bank declined to provide a number to Inside Mortgage Finance.

“Linking of qualified residential mortgages (QRM) in the risk-retention rules to the definition of qualified mortgage (QM) in the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rules will further deepen the divide between QM and non-QM loans in terms of pricing and availability,” said attorney Stephen Kudenholdt of Dentons LLC.

The most important take away from this week’s loan limit reduction news: Congress warning DeMarco that he’d better defer to them on loan limits. His reply: radio silence. Meanwhile, Wells tosses Freddie overboard, sort of.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency holds the keys to the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac loan limit kingdom, but it’s giving no clues – or interviews – as to where it’s headed on the issue. Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on the regulator to do nothing. As far as the mortgage industry is concerned, it knows a change is coming and hopes that when FHFA finally lowers the current high-cost limit of $625,500 the implementation date will come deep into the second quarter of 2014, or at the very least, March 31.