The Federal Reserve Bank of New York will ask its primary dealers, as part of best practices, to raise their upfront cash collateral for MBS trades. A NY Fed spokesman denied that the change in collateral requirements was a reaction to the recent collapse of MF Global, a primary dealer. Since its last foray into the agency MBS business in 2010, the agency has been considering raising the margin for MBS deals, he said. The spokesman said a best practices guidance issued by the NY Fed’s Treasury Market Practices Group in September 2010 requires trading desks to consider...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency’s Office of Inspector General is attempting to grow the Finance Agency and the OIG itself into a larger-than-necessary entity, and that is a questionable objective given Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s “uncertain long-term future,” the FHFA head told lawmakers last week.FHFA Acting Director Edward DeMarco, testifying before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, noted the OIG’s “recurring conclusion” in its recent reports “that the FHFA is understaffed and that it should be more directly engaged day-to-day in the enterprises’ business activities.” That would include independently repeating and validating Fannie and Freddie’s business decisions and calculations.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency earlier this month issued a proposed rule to require the Federal Home Loan Banks to “monitor and assess the eligibility” of each Bank member for access to long-term advances through compliance with the Community Reinvestment Act and the member’s first-time homebuyer standards.To maintain access to FHLBank long-term credit and community investment products, Bank members are required to submit a community support statement to the FHFA every two years to document their CRA performance and record of lending to first-time homebuyers.

ABS issuers are scrambling to get a handle on complex new rules to mitigate conflicts of interest in the structured finance market that are being developed by the Securities and Exchange Commission and federal banking regulators. “At the end of the day, we’ll spend lots of time figuring out how to comply,” said Bianca Russo, managing director and associate general counsel at JPMorgan Chase, during a seminar sponsored last week by the American Securitization Forum. “It’s going to be a challenge to comply, however the rules turn out.” Complexity and consistency are...

For an all too brief moment last week there was bipartisanship on Capitol Hill as exasperated Democrats and Republicans took turns questioning and berating the CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and their regulator surrounding the issue of executive compensation at the two GSEs.Federal Housing Finance Agency Acting Director Edward DeMarco was called before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to explain some $13 million in performance bonuses to Fannie CEO Michael Williams and Freddie CEO Charles Haldeman and eight other senior executives at the taxpayer-subsidized firms.

One of the goals in the recent revisions to the Home Affordable Refinance Program is to stimulate more interest among lenders, largely through relaxed requirements on representations and warranties and some streamlining of the process. But HARP 2.0 also includes new guidelines on soliciting potential customers, both from the lender’s own portfolio and from borrowers currently serviced by another firm. A handful of lenders have begun touting the expanded program to consumers. The new program includes specific refi solicitation practices that lenders must...

The U.S. Supreme Court has granted certiorari in Magner v. Gallagher, thrusting itself into the debate over whether the Fair Housing Act allows plaintiffs to bring disparate impact claims, in a case that could have wide-ranging implications for the mortgage industry, potentially extending to fair lending litigation and even regulatory enforcement. In Magner, some rental property owners in St. Paul, MN, sued the city and a group of city officials, arguing that enforcing the city’s housing code raised their costs, thereby lowering the availability of affordable housing. They argued further that this had a disparate impact on...

The industry robo-signing foreclosure scandal took an historic turn this past week, with the first filing of criminal charges ever brought. Nevada Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto brought 606 criminal charges against two Lender Processing Services employees who allegedly directed and supervised a robo-signing scheme which resulted in the filing of tens of thousands of fraudulent documents with the Clark County (NV) Recorder’s Office between 2005 and 2008. California resident Gary Trafford has been charged with 102 counts of offering false instruments for recording (a category C felony), false certification on certain...

The mortgage banking industry has been lobbying the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Congressional staff recently, expressing its concerns in particular with the ability-to-repay/qualified mortgage proposed rule. Lenders of all sizes expressed their concerns about automated underwriting systems, widely accepted standards, implementation concerns, points and fees restrictions and the need for a legal safe harbor. But the legal safe harbor remains the most important of these issues to most lenders. “The QM ability-to-pay rule has enormous liability associated with it,” an industry lobbyist confided. “The issue there is, if we don’t have a really solid definition as to what a qualified mortgage is, and we don’t have a safe harbor and the guidelines are firm – the industry’s got enormous potential liability and is likely to be sued all the time.”

The regulatory burden of the Dodd-Frank Act creates pressure on community banks to hire additional compliance staff instead of customer-facing staff, reducing resources that could be directly applied to serving a bank’s customers, resulting in fewer mortgages getting made, slower job growth and a weaker economy, according to Steve Wilson, the American Bankers Association’s immediate past chairman. The Dodd-Frank provisions he cited as particularly troubling for community banks include risk retention, higher capital requirements, narrower qualifications for capital, and doubling the size of the deposit insurance fund – taking as much as $50 billion out of the earnings and capital of the industry in the process. “The Dodd-Frank Act also requires 20 new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting obligations,” Wilson said in a speech last week. “These and other reporting requirements will add considerable compliance costs to every bank’s bottom line.”