Back in September SLS – a subsidiary of the publicly traded Stewart Information Services – bought key assets of Allon’s Allonhill LLC for an undisclosed sum.

The settlement covers damages suffered by Fannie Mae from misrepresentations Lehman was alleged to have made regarding the quality of non-agency product it sold to the GSE.

Investment banking and mortgage executives believe the departures at MRP could mean that the industry’s battle against the use of eminent domain is over and that the strategy is now kaput.

Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, R-WV, said many credit unions and community banks “feel that they’re not going to be able to have the flexibility to give the farmer, the medical student, the single mother, the ability to get the home because they’re not going to fit into the QM box.”

Mortgage topics don’t always make the President’s State of the Union speech, but President Obama Tuesday night may touch on the issue of credit availability and whether the government has “gone too far.”

The cost of mortgage compliance was a topic making the rounds at the recent ABS Vegas show in Nevada. Attendees, of course, wanted to know who might pay for all the new added costs.

“It’s nearly impossible to get the information to the right person to vote on it,” said Bill Moliski, a managing director at SG Capital and former managing director at Redwood Trust.

The consensus among speakers at the ABS Vegas conference this week appeared to be that the MBS market is unlikely to change significantly this year. “The status quo is comfortable,” said Larry White, an economics professor at New York University’s business school. Issuers of non-agency MBS are working on reducing the government-sponsored enterprises’ dominance of the secondary market for mortgages, but the chicken-and-egg problem persists. New non-agency issuance has ground to a standstill, and Congress has been slow to move housing-finance reform legislation. In the meantime, industry observers expect...

A Manhattan federal judge last week ruled that Bank of New York Mellon may proceed with repurchase claims against a General Electric unit in connection with a $900 million non-agency MBS. BNYM, in its capacity as trustee for a pool of loans known as GE-WMC Mortgage Securities Trust 2006-1, filed suit against GE Mortgage Holdings and WMC Mortgage LLC in New York state court in 2012, where the defendants promptly moved the legal action to federal court to dismiss it. Following the court’s denial of the defendant’s motions to dismiss, GE Mortgage filed...

Who at the GSEs (or at the Federal Housing Finance Agency) was responsible for telling Fannie and Freddie to set aside so much money for loan losses and were those assumptions way off base?