Bond and MBS prices held steady this week, but market watchers expect that volatility, in general, will persist on pricing until the Federal Open Market Committee meets later in the month to discuss the fate of short-term interest rates. Deutsche Bank, among others, predicts that the FOMC will call for a rate hike then, but it isn’t entirely certain given China’s financial problems. If China continues to crater, the Fed could hold off. Others are predicting...

Legacy-era non-agency MBS litigation continues to be a ripe field of opportunity for U.S. regulators and industry attorneys alike, years after the financial crisis and Great Recession ended, thanks to some key recent judicial rulings. Late last month, Judge Alvin Thompson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut gave the green light to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to continue to pursue its claims against the Royal Bank of Scotland. The regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac alleged that RBS provided misleading statements related to $32.1 billion in RMBS the bank sold to the two government-sponsored enterprises between 2005 and 2008. The thrust of the FHFA’s complaint is...

Federal regulators have implemented a number of rules in recent years aimed at moving banks away from a reliance on credit ratings when making investing decisions. Officials at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. stress that if a bank’s management doesn’t have comprehensive understanding regarding a security, the bank shouldn’t invest in the MBS or ABS. “The gist of these new requirements is simple: banks should understand the risks associated with the securities they buy and should have reasonable assurance of receiving scheduled payments of principal and interest,” said Robert Hendricks, capital markets policy analyst at the FDIC. In an FDIC report, Hendricks provided...

Of course, there is a way to avoid the zero capital cushion dilemma. Congress can pass legislation to allow the GSEs to build capital or FHFA can act...

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle – and even some regulators – are pushing for legislation to broaden the types of loans that receive protections allotted to qualified mortgages. A number of issues remain in flux, including how widely the expanded QM definition would be applied and whether there is enough urgency to pass a bill before the end of the year. Last week, Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., detailed ...

Wells Fargo this week said it would reinstate certain credit overlays on its FHA business segment after expressing frustration over FHA’s republished proposal on loan-level certification. The lender, which ranked second on Inside FHA/VA Lending’s top FHA lenders for the first six months of 2015, reiterated the need for clearer rules in order to originate FHA-insured loans without fear of litigation or enforcement action. The bank said it is very disappointed with FHA’s revised certification proposal, which was republished in the Sept. 1 Federal Register. “In spite of much input to FHA from various consumer groups and lenders over a long period of time, [the] proposal falls short of what is needed,” said Mike Heid, head of Wells Fargo Home Lending. “As a result, this will now force us to add back certain credit overlays on the FHA single-family program.” Other FHA lenders could follow Wells Fargo’s lead as some did when ...

Securitized FHA,VA and rural housing loans in Ginnie Mae mortgage-backed securities totaled $188.5 billion in the first six months of 2015, fueled by significant purchase and refinance activity, according to an Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of Ginnie Mae data. An estimated $113.4 billion in FHA-insured mortgages were securitized during the first half of the year. Of that total, $60.6 billion were purchase mortgages and $44.2 billion were refinance loans. FHA purchase-loan production increased 58.8 percent in the second quarter from the prior quarter while refi lending jumped 160.8 percent over the same period as FHA’s reduced annual mortgage insurance premium began to take hold. The FHA loans that went into Ginnie MBS showed an average loan-to-value ratio of 92.8 percent and an average debt-to-income ratio of 39.7 percent. Borrowers’ average FICO score was 675.9, which was indicative of ... [ 2 charts ]

An FHA proposal to establish a deadline for filing insurance claims and revise existing policies that allow punitive penalties for missing FHA foreclosure deadlines could have a chilling effect on FHA lending and servicing, analysts warned. Housing policy analysts and industry attorneys say the two-part proposal issued on July 6 raises red flags for both borrowers and servicers and could potentially cause lenders to leave the FHA single-family mortgage insurance program. The Urban Institute describes the proposed rule as “a mixed bag, but on balance far more negative than positive.” “It represents a modest improvement to very harsh rules for missing established deadlines but imposes an unrealistic timeline for filing FHA insurance claims and an overly punitive penalty for missing that timeline,” the group said. Attorneys at K&L Gates in Washington, DC, are more ominous in their assessment of the ...

Many condominium projects in California are losing FHA and VA business because their agency approvals have lapsed or are about to expire, according to lenders. In Orange County alone, about 57 percent of condo developments have FHA or VA approvals that are near expiration, said Jon Shrum, vice president of Commerce Home Mortgage in Huntington Beach, CA. It is unclear how many developments have expired approvals but the number could be significant, Shrum said. Condos accounted for 2.9 percent of total FHA endorsements as of June 30, 2015, and that share has remained flat over the first six months of 2015 and on a year-over-year basis, according to FHA data. “We’re seeing a lot of condo complexes whose approvals are expiring, and they are not even aware of it,” he said. “As an FHA and VA lender, we try to reach out to the condo homeowners associations (HOA) to make sure they retain or renew their ...

The FHA has announced a new format for reporting results of quarterly post-endorsement technical reviews of single-family loans. Previously, the loan-level findings were grouped into five broad categories: file documentation, credit/underwriting, operation deficiencies, program eligibility and collateral/asset valuation. The top five reasons for an “unacceptable” rating were provided for each category. Loans were rated as “conforming,” “deficient,” or “unacceptable,” with the last two ratings based on the magnitude of the underwriting error. With the new format, the focus will be on the most prevalent unacceptable findings, regardless of category. The period upon which the reporting is based is also different, according to FHA.Instead of reporting the review findings on a loan sample in the most recent quarter, FHA will now wait for one quarter to pass before reporting on the sample. Emphasizing the frequency of ...