The settlement noted that the subprime MBS from ResCap included mortgages with looser underwriting standards than the underwriting guidelines that were disclosed to MBS investors.

The MBA is considering its options to appeal the FTC's decision regarding the trade group's request for a mortgage-servicing exemption under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.

The CFPB’s appeal asserts that the court’s ruling on the constitutionality of the agency’s structure ought to be reconsidered because it “sets up what may be the most important separation-of-powers case in a generation.”

Freddie Mac is set to issue a $459.92 million Whole Loan Securities transaction, according to a presale report from Moody’s Investors Service. The firm didn’t rate the senior tranche of the deal but did place a Baa1 rating on a mezzanine tranche of Freddie Mac Whole Loan Securities 2016-SC02. The government-sponsored enterprise priced the latest WLS transaction this week, with the deal expected to close next week. “We are pleased with the pricing levels and depth of investor participation in the WLS program,” said Kevin Palmer, senior vice president of credit risk transfer at Freddie. “We look forward to continued issuance in 2017.” Freddie has issued...

Investors are trying to make sense of the new political/economic landscape following the election of Donald Trump to be the next president, and how best to navigate his uncertain, and at times contradictory, signals during his campaign. Much of the conversation over the last week has focused on the likely effect the new regime will have on the Federal Reserve and its chair, Janet Yellen. Trump, who has been a fierce critic of the U.S. central bank, has indicated he won’t outright replace Yellen, but neither will he nominate her for a second term. And of course, what happens with the Fed will spill over, one way or the other, into the financial markets. “The Fed will normalize...

The government-sponsored enterprises’ credit-risk transfer programs have been wildly popular with investors and many policymakers, but other industry observers see problems. One of the most outspoken critics is Tim Howard, a former Fannie Mae CFO, who sees a big difference between today’s CRT programs and the GSEs’ traditional method of laying off credit risk before they were taken into government conservatorship. “When I was at Fannie, the companies purchased...

Three financial-industry trade associations submitted a joint amici brief to the Supreme Court of the U.S. seeking an end to the confusion over whether extender statutes that refer only to the “statute of limitations” should apply to the “statute of repose” as well. The circuit courts are split on the issue, with four courts deviating from a 2014 SCOTUS ruling in CTS v. Waldburger, in which property owners tried to hold CTS Corp., operator of an electronic plant in North Carolina, liable for damages from toxic contaminants on the land. The property owners filed...

Low mortgage interest rates appear to have contributed to a decline in applications for non-qualified mortgages at Impac Mortgage Holdings in the third quarter, according to officials at the nonbank. “A decline in mortgage interest rates generally increases the volume of conventional refinance products over non-QM loans,” Impac said in a quarterly filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission last week. Of the 58 banks that report to the Federal Reserve on the market for ...

A start-up is working to allow retirees and other individual investors to buy into non-qualified mortgages, a market that so far has been dominated by hedge funds and other large institutional investors, along with occasional inclusion in non-agency mortgage-backed securities. Brad Walker, CEO of Income&, said the new platform offers an alternative to traditional fixed-income investments. He said Income& is trying to create a higher-yielding, lower-risk fixed-income instrument ...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s recent actions against an unspecified number of lenders that offer non-qualified mortgages prompted some criticism about how the regulator enforces standards in the ability-to-repay rule. The CFPB cited lenders for originating non-QMs that allowed “alternative income documentation” for salaried borrowers. The CFPB said the products offered by the lenders relied primarily on the assets of each borrower when making an ATR determination ...