Ginnie Mae this week meted penalties to two of the nine issuers that received warnings from the agency for excessive refinancings of VA mortgages. Bloomberg reported that Ginnie barred NewDay Financial’s and Nations Lending’s from the more lucrative multi-issuer mortgage-backed securities pools, forcing them to issue custom pools. The restrictions became effective immediately. The agency’s action could reduce mortgage interest rates by 50 basis points for FHA and VA loans, which would benefit first-time homebuyers, said Jaret Seiberg, an analyst with Cowen Washington Research Group. On the other hand, the issuers Ginnie limited to issuing custom pools will end up making loans with higher rates, the analyst noted. Ginnie’s action is part of a joint effort with the Department of Veterans Affairs to crack down on loan churning and faster prepayments of VA loans pooled in Ginnie securities. Loan churning ...

Ginnie Mae’s anti-churning efforts have narrowed the spread between Ginnie and Fannie Mae mortgage-backed securities, prompting executives to say things are almost back to normal. In an interview with Inside FHA/VA Lending this week, Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Ginnie Mae, said the market and investors have responded positively to the agency’s efforts to resolve the churning and prepayment problems. “The Ginnie spread has fallen almost half a point and our securities have become more liquid,” he said. “We want to make sure we’re giving investors CPRs (constant prepayment rates) that they can model.” Bright said he cares less about the overall level of prepayment speeds. What he truly cares about is ensuring that when an investor purchases a Ginnie security, the prepay speed is correlated to changes in the interest rates and not the ...

Ginnie Mae’s credit-risk sharing concept is generating a lot of excitement among private credit enhancers, according to the company’s acting president. A planned risk-sharing pilot with FHA scheduled for later this year has the industry on its toes, said Michael Bright, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Ginnie Mae, during an interview this week with Inside FHA/VA Lending. “There is a line out the door of private companies willing to provide and take on credit risk and work with us on transactions where private capital would assume some of the risk,” he said. Ginnie is currently looking at ways to facilitate risk sharing between FHA and a private third party that would assume a first-loss position on a Ginnie security backed by FHA loans. Bright brought up the idea during remarks at the Structured Finance Industry Group conference in Las Vegas in February. He has been fielding calls since from ...

FHA insured approximately $1.9 billion of ineligible mortgage loans made to borrowers with delinquent federal debts or who are subject to federal administrative offset for past-due child support payments, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s inspector general. Approximately 9,500 loans were ineligible because the sources used by lenders to identify ineligible borrowers lacked sufficient information to raise red flags. In addition, FHA failed to guide lenders adequately in reviewing child support payments, the IG said. Federal law prohibits loans, loan guarantees or insurance to delinquent federal debtors, including those with delinquent child support subject to administrative offset, until the delinquency is resolved. Auditors drew a statistical sample of 60 loans from 13,927 FHA-insured loans that closed in 2016 and analyzed data on their related borrowers in the ...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is siding with Republicans when it comes to changing the structure of the CFPB, favoring a shift to a bipartisan commission and Congressional control over the agency’s funding. The Chamber, a business-oriented lobbying group with strong ties to the GOP, outlined 23 recommendations in six categories, such as enforcement, supervision and education. The organization has long argued that the financial industry and consumers would benefit from substantial ...

If the CFPB wants to make the civil investigative demand process less painful for companies, it might consider installing a high-level approval process before a CID even gets off the ground, according to another government agency – the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC late last week filed a comment letter on the CFPB’s request for information on CIDs, suggesting ways the agency can relieve the burden on investigative demand recipients. Mortgage lenders that have received one or more CIDs have ...

Proposed changes to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act have become a key flashpoint of controversy in the advancing effort to reform the Dodd-Frank Act. The Senate last week passed legislation that would exempt depository institutions that have relatively small mortgage operations from new HMDA disclosure requirements – and some existing ones – that were mandated by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The expanded HMDA reporting regime is taking effect for mortgage (include one data chart) ...

The CFPB recently issued a final rule that the agency said would help mortgage servicers communicate with borrowers facing bankruptcy. The rule amended the timing requirements for servicers to provide periodic statements to consumers in bankruptcy. The rule will go into effect on April 19. At that point, servicers will be required to send monthly billing statements to consumers in active bankruptcy cases and certain cases in which the debtor’s personal liability was previously discharged. To give ...

The Mortgage Bankers Association recently met with CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney to discuss CFPB reform priorities regarding the bureau’s requests for information. The MBA wrote to Mulvaney following the meeting to offer further thoughts to improve the agency’s operations. Mulvaney launched a “call for evidence” in January to review the bureau’s enforcement, supervision, rulemaking, and other activities, and has so far issued eight RFIs. MBA said it appreciated the agency’s effort to engage ...