Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee were at odds during a hearing this week over whether there is much of a liquidity problem in the fixed-income markets today, and if so, to what extent the Dodd-Frank Act or Federal Reserve monetary policy may be responsible. Federal regulators, on the other hand, told the lawmakers that markets are functioning well enough and still evolving in a new, post-crisis environment. They suggested the thing to worry about is how much liquidity there will be in five or 10 years and how it will function. Sen. Dean Heller, R-NV, asked...
Federal and state scrutiny of lender-placed insurance has turned into a compliance nightmare for lender/servicers in recent years as legal scrutiny of industry practices intensified, resulting in regulatory actions and lawsuits, according to a new analysis by BuckleySandler. The LPI industry and its practices came under close scrutiny following the mortgage crisis and has continued ever since. It began with the filing of a host of lawsuits by the plaintiffs’ bar across the...
Over the past two years, PHH Corp. has lost $64 million on its mortgage business and now that Merrill Lynch has given notice that it wants to end some of its private-label contracts with PHH Mortgage, the nonbank’s future is beginning to look cloudier. Moreover, analysts and investors who follow the company wonder whether PHH’s private-label model – the bread and butter of its origination business – is fixable in the modern era of mortgage banking. Meanwhile, all of this is happening at a time when management hopes to sell the company, or at least field offers for some of its key assets, including a $226 billion servicing portfolio. The bad news for PHH started...
Some 59.6 percent of new issuance in the first quarter consisted of re-securitizations and deals backed by seasoned re-performing and nonperforming loans...
Although there hasn’t been a lot of good news on PHH of late, one analyst we spoke with noted a positive: “They still have plenty of cash on their books…”
The mortgage industry found some justification to hope for a return to a more traditional interpretation of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau took some judicial fire during oral arguments early this week in its dispute with PHH Corp. over the company’s captive mortgage reinsurance activity. The crux of the dispute is the bureau’s assertion that PHH violated RESPA and harmed consumers through a mortgage insurance kickback scheme tied to a captive MI company. Virtually all the major mortgage lenders used similar captive reinsurance entities prior to the financial collapse. In the run-up to this week’s oral arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the justices seemed...
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