Purchase mortgages securitized by Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie in the first quarter of 2014 were down by 76.3 percent compared with the first quarter of 2013.

The first three months of 2014 represented the strongest quarterly ABS issuance number since the third quarter of 2009, when $53.27 billion of new deals were issued. It was up a modest 1.7 percent from the strong start in 2013.

The biggest decline in MI-insured business was in underwater mortgages that were refinanced while keeping their existing coverage under the Home Affordable Refinance Program.

Despite the results, four of the top 10 depositories sold more loans into the secondary market in 2013 than they did the year prior.

The only spurt of growth in the MBS market was in the non-agency sector, where new issuance was up 36.5 percent from the fourth quarter.

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase both had huge drops exceeding 40 percent on mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Also, new single-family MBS production by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac plummeted 15.6 percent from February to March as the GSEs posted their lowest quarterly production total in 14 years.

Most industry fortune tellers expect the mortgage market to rebound somewhat as home-buying season warms up. (There are daffodils in Washington.)

In its heyday, S&P used to rate more than 90 percent of new issuance of non-agency MBS, but in 2013 it accounted for just 40.0 percent of the market by dollar volume.

The top three HEL lenders in the market – Wells Fargo, Bank of America and Chase – originated a combined $17.8 billion in home-equity loans last year, but they still saw a $32.1 billion decline in their total holdings of HELOCs and closed-end seconds.