Wells Fargo Settles with FHA for a Record $1.2 Billion. Wells Fargo, the largest player in the Ginnie Mae market, last week agreed to pay the Department of Justice and Department of Housing and Urban Development $1.2 billion to settle FHA underwriting claims. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Wells noted that the agreement “resolves certain civil claims that the federal government had pending” against the lender tied to FHA lending from 2001 to 2010. But it also covers “other potential civil claims relating” to the megabank’s government production in other time periods as well. The megabank, which also is the nation’s largest overall home lender and servicer, saw the settlement coming and booked an additional “legal ...

In November, Judge Sweeney denied Fannie Mae’s motion to quash or invalidate a subpoena issued by the plaintiff’s counsel…

During the subprime boom, HSBC owned Household Finance, a once-top ranked subprime lender and servicer that was later cited for lending and servicing violations.

Legacy RMBS-related legal action continued this week in both Washington, DC, and in New York City as the fallout from the financial crisis continues. In the nation’s capital, Morgan Stanley agreed to a second settlement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., this time for $62.95 million, to resolve RMBS-related claims stemming from the failure of three financial institutions in the wake of the collapse of the mortgage market. The institutions are...

Colonial National Mortgage was a beta site for the IDR and Allen Maulsby, executive vice president of the bank, said the IDR process is very “legalistic…”

Laurie Goodman, director of the HFPC, said lenders have “plenty of room to safely ease credit.”

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae produced a combined $88.96 billion of single-family MBS in January, a modest 1.4 percent decline from December, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. Ginnie production was actually up 7.2 percent from the previous month, while both the government-sponsored enterprises posted declines in new issuance. January’s agency MBS production included...[Includes two data tables]

A federal appeals court in Denver unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling that a claim of damage related to an originator/seller’s misrepresentation accrues when the loan is sold. Ruling in six cases involving plaintiffs Lehman Brothers Holdings and Aurora Commercial Corp. versus Universal American Mortgage Co. and Standard Pacific Mortgage, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected plaintiffs’ contentions that their claims were really “indemnification” claims that did not accrue until they bought the loans from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The overarching issue in this complicated case is...

Paul Hindman, a consultant at Grid Financial Services, had this to stay about the deal: “The more important question is what other mortgage-related companies are on Computershare’s shopping list….”

The case of Fairholme Fund v. The United States will continue to linger in the courts as the battle for getting the government to release the bulk of the documents pertaining to the preferred stock purchase agreements between the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the Treasury plays out with a motion filed this week. “We are now in a struggle with the defendants, both the Department of Treasury and FHFA, over claims of the deliberative process privilege they sought to keep from having to produce thousands and thousands of documents, even in redacted form,” Charles Cooper, attorney with Cooper & Kirk, the law firm representing the shareholder plaintiffs, told Inside The GSEs.