Cowen notes: “…this latest flare up reinforces our view that Treasury is unlikely in 2017 to unilaterally change the profit sweep at Fannie and Freddie…”
Although Freedom is private, a few years back it launched a publicly traded REIT called Cherry Hill Mortgage Investment, which lately has been trading near its 52-week high.
Earlier this week, Flagstar closed on its purchase of the correspondent lending platform of Stearns Lending – a rare transaction where a depository was buying a key mortgage asset from a nonbank.
As Democrats in Congress worked on reforms after the financial crisis, issuers of MBS and ABS repeatedly warned that regulatory uncertainty would hurt the market. With Republicans now looking to roll back parts of the Dodd-Frank Act, industry participants are pushing for risk-retention requirements to remain in place, again citing the potential impact of regulatory uncertainty. “It’s foolish to think that we would try to tear it all down,” said Howard Kaplan, a partner at the law firm of Deloitte & Touche, during this week’s SFIG Vegas conference. Among many other changes, the CHOICE Act from Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, would repeal...
CFPB analyst Megan Thibos reminds consumers that, “During the foreclosure crisis, many borrowers with subprime mortgages faced sharply increased mortgage payments and were unable to make those payments.”
Secondary market gains headed south in the final three months of 2016, and so far it’s not looking too bright for the first quarter of 2017, which has about four weeks to go before it’s a wrap. According to a new report from Piper Jaffray, gain-on-sale margins declined to an average of 94 basis points in the fourth quarter, compared to a more robust 106 bps in the third. Piper said GOS is currently tracking at about 88 basis points. The research firm’s coverage universe includes...
But the numbers need to be put into perspective: Agency MBS production in the first two months of 2017 was up 36.3 percent from the same period last year…