The Mortgage Bankers Association urged the Basel Committee this week to abandon its “overly simplistic” proposal to add onto institutional balance sheets layers of risk-based capital for interest rate risk.

Two more long-running legacy MBS lawsuits were resolved last week after defendants Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank separately agreed to settle with plaintiffs. The NECA-IBEW Health & Welfare Fund, a union pension fund in Decatur, IL, is seeking preliminary court approval of a $272 million settlement with Goldman Sachs on behalf of entities that purchased MBS issued by defendant GS Mortgage Securities and which Goldman underwrote. If approved, the settlement would put...

Securitization industry participants raised concerns after an appeals court last week refused to hear an appeal of an earlier ruling that reversed the long-held federal preemption that nonbanks have relied on to keep securitized loans exempt from state usury laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the appeal of Madden v. Midland Funding last week. No explanation was provided with the denial. The appeal was supported by the Structured Finance Industry Group and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, among others. SFIG said...

Issuers of non-agency MBS injected some variety into the market in recent weeks with a deal backed solely by non-qualified mortgages and improvements to the representations and warranties on a jumbo MBS. Lone Star Funds issued a $72 million non-agency MBS backed mostly by non-QMs originated by Caliber Home Loans, a lender owned by the private-equity firm. Bloomberg first reported on the deal, which was priced on Aug. 7. Details on COLT 2015-A have been...

The manufactured housing industry wants the Federal Housing Finance Agency to push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase more manufactured housing loans under its forthcoming “duty-to-serve” rule. The “duty-to-serve” rule was mandated by the 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act to steer the government-sponsored enterprises to support underserved markets. In particular, that included manufactured housing, rural housing and affordable housing preservation. A final rule has never been implemented...

The mortgage finance industry generally supports the final interagency statement on diversity policies and practices issued by the federal banking regulators, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Securities and Exchange Commission, but called for additional clarification on some of the data being sought in order to maximize its effectiveness – and to limit lender liability. The Mortgage Bankers Association said its members appreciate the flexibility of voluntary participation that is reflected in the final statement, but noted there remain some questions around how this voluntary information will be collected. Three key issues include how the information will be shared once it is collected, what examiners will expect to see, and how lenders should present the information to regulators. On the first question, the MBA raised...

While regulators sometimes give lenders the green light to implement new rules before the legal effective date, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau made no such recommendation for controversial new mortgage disclosures that take effect Oct. 3. An argument could be made for early adoption of the so-called TRID disclosures if they are truly beneficial to consumers and lenders have enough time to test the new forms, said stakeholders. The original effective date was Aug. 1, but that was moved back because of an administrative error by the CFPB. Some lenders have said they were ready for TRID, which consolidates four current forms under the Truth in Lending Act and the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act into two integrated disclosures, at the beginning of this year. The CFPB is...

If the Federal Housing Finance Agency implements a principal reduction program that applies to all delinquent mortgages serviced by the government-sponsored enterprises that have negative equity, the Housing Finance Policy Center estimated that 14,563 principal-reduction mods would be completed.

The metric will assess lender performance based on the lender’s default rate within three credit-score bands and compare it to an FHA target rate, rather than to the lender’s peers.

The Nonprofit Alliance of Consumer Advocates focuses on helping borrowers that have mortgages owned by a servicer subject to the $25 billion national servicing settlement.