Ally Financial Corp. this week announced what it calls "modest" layoffs in its correspondent lending division, but declined to specify how many workers were cut.

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke Wednesday afternoon said the central bank might scale up its purchases of agency MBS if conditions warrant, but not right now.

The European Union FTQ bid led to a decline in mortgage rates for the week ending Nov. 3.

Cantor Fitzgerald hired a former Gleacher & Co. credit chief to help lead its fixed-income group, the firm said today.

Citigroup has sold a $1 billion CLO for Guggenheim Investment Management, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Banque PSA Finance will issue a €500 million ($687 million)securitization of auto loan receivables.

Sapient Global Markets will design and build the European DataWarehouse, the first European central data repository owned and operated by the market for the market. It is also endorsed by the Eurosystem.

CIT Group launched its CIT Real Estate Finance, which will originate and underwrite senior secured real estate transactions in the Boston, New York City and Washington, D.C. areas.

The U.S. homeownership rate rose unexpectedly in the third quarter from 2Q11 as rental vacancies climbed – with new evidence suggesting that tenants are tiring of rising rents.

The CMBS delinquency rate considerably rose in October, according to Trepp. October showed delinquency rates for U.S. commercial real estate (CRE) loans in CMBS increasing 21 basis points to 9.77%.

Esoteric deals are gaining traction with drug and container ABS currently in the market.

The $2.2 billion term loan backing Kinetic Concepts' buyout was probably not the best test case for using shorter dated loans to appeal to maturing close, a banker involved with the transaction said today.