Separate appeals courts this week vacated legal victories that the federal government achieved in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The cases involve former officials at State Street Bank and Trust and a former MBS trader at Jefferies & Company. In 2014, commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 to reverse a ruling by the SEC’s Chief Administrative Law Judge involving James Hopkins, a former vice president and head of North American product engineering at State Street, and John Flannery, a former CIO at the bank. The ALJ had dismissed...
The Department of Justice plans to use the tactics that it employed in cases involving the financial crisis and MBS in efforts going forward to combat financial fraud, according to agency officials. “It is hard to overstate the creativity of this effort,” Michael Blume, director of the consumer protection branch at the DOJ, said during a speech late last week. He called it “a loosely centralized effort, employing civil penalty statutory provisions, involving close cooperation with regulatory experts and leveraging resources from the entire country.” He noted...
This lender said finding good appraisers can sometimes be a challenge and predicted that eventually appraisals on such mortgages could cost upwards of $1,000…
Standard & Poor’s rated some $84.64 billion of non-mortgage ABS issued in the U.S. during the first nine months of the year, making it the top rating service in the segment, according to a new ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. S&P was well represented in all the major ABS sectors, with its strongest showing in credit card ABS, where it rated 73.4 percent of 2015 issuance based on dollar volume. Fitch Ratings was...[Includes two data tables]
Industry analysts are generally optimistic that most of the large consumer ABS sectors will probably see a stable, positive year in 2016. However, they’re not very gung-ho about what kind of a year the government-backed student loan space is going to have. Analysts at Wells Fargo Securities think that consumer ABS should offer good relative value next year, based on solid credit fundamentals and robust structural protections. “We expect spreads to tighten in 2016 as the primary market recovers and the yield curve flattens along with Federal Reserve tightening,” they said in a recent outlook. “Spreads are likely to stay volatile and event-driven.” Further, “Weak demand and poor liquidity have been...
Search engine giant Google recently launched a new mortgage comparison tool that allows borrowers and lenders to search for the lowest rates, a development that will be carefully watched for the simple reason that, well, it’s Google. The mortgage tool is a part of Google Compare, a service that allows consumers to compare options for various products, such as credit cards and auto insurance. Though the effort is branded with Google’s name, the company has teamed up with Zillow and LendingTree to introduce this service. Compare allows...
The mortgage industry has notched one modest victory on Capitol Hill and continues to hope for more as lawmakers try to wrap up a spending bill for the government’s 2016 fiscal year. The victory is a new process for banks and others to petition the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to designate an area as “rural” or underserved for the purposes of the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rule. More flexible mortgage products, such as balloon loans, are permitted in such markets. The change was included...
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