Several well-known actors, including Henry Winkler, Robert Wagner and Fred Thompson, have appeared in such ads over the past few years, vouching for the products and their safety.
The FHA expects to finalize the proposed rule in August of this year, according to HUD’s new regulatory agenda, although the agency rarely comes close to its projected rulemaking timelines.
With interest rates rising again, the future looks somewhat cloudy for real estate investment trusts that invest in MBS, a situation that investors have grown accustomed to the past few years. According to figures compiled by Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, the 28 mortgage investing REITs tracked by the firm had a combined market capitalization rate of $47.8 billion at the end of May, a slight drop from a year ago when the tally was $49.0 billion. Then again, not all of the 28 are...
The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority started publishing pricing data for a broad range of ABS this week in an effort to increase transparency. Industry participants suggest that the new disclosures will prompt a decrease in trading and have some impact on pricing. The ABS pricing details are available through the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine and include deals issued as 144A private placements. “The dissemination of transaction information in ABS is...
Notice of the final order on PHH sent the nonbank’s share price tumbling four percent at one point. Regulators say the MI kickback scheme started as early as 1995.
“Without nonbanks, today’s sluggish mortgage market would be much less vibrant,” according to research released this week by two researchers associated with Harvard University. Their working paper stresses that implementing bank-like standards for nonbanks isn’t the best strategy to mitigate risks in the housing finance system. The paper was authored by Marshall Lux, a senior fellow of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, which is part of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University; along with Robert Greene, a research assistant at the same center. They called...
Democrats in the Senate and the House this week re-introduced a regulatory relief bill that would grant qualified-mortgage status for loans held in portfolio, but only for smaller financial institutions. Banks and credit unions with less than $2 billion in consolidated assets which originate fewer than 2,000 mortgage loans per year could make loans that exceed the 43 percent debt-to-income ratio under the QM standard and still receive the QM safe harbor so long as the loan is held in portfolio, according to a summary of the draft. Depository institutions with less than $10 billion in assets would get...