Finance

New record lows in mortgage rates provided a modest 1.3% stimulus in mortgage application activity for the holiday-shortened week ending June 1.

Former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. chair Sheila Bair is at helm of a new private sector, volunteer group, The Systemic Risk Council.

Fitch Ratings said in a press release Tuesday that the California Proposition 29, the Tobacco Tax for Cancer Research Act, could reduce payments that all states receive from the Tobacco companies under the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement (MSA).

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York plans to sell $7 billion from its Maiden Lane III portfolio which will include assets from seven CDOs .

JP Morgan said this week that its buyside survey shows that U.S. investor participation in U.K. RMBS has increased since September 2011.

Ocwen Financial Corp., a provider of residential and commercial loans based in Atlanta, Georgia, bought Aurora Bank’s commercial servicing portfolio.

As head of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA), David H. Stevens spent the last year warning that excessive and ill-considered regulation could drag down the mortgage market.

In a short note released this morning, Standard & Poor's analysts said that benchmark European covered bond issuance was €12.5 billion in May, up from €6.6 billion in April.

Bank of America (BofA) over the past two weeks has unloaded roughly $12.4 billion of legacy mortgage servicing rights, selling most of it to Nationstar Mortgage, Lewisville, Texas.

The mounting pipeline of summer CMBS deals are likely to price wide across the capital structure as investors react to macro-economic uncertainty, Bank of America Merrill Lynch analysts said in a CMBS securitization report this week.

The Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA) approved 35 issuer licenses last year and hopes to approve about the same this year, according to agency president Ted Tozer.

Home prices – including distressed sales – increased in April for the second consecutive month (by 2.2%), the first time this has happened in almost two years, according to new figures compiled by CoreLogic.

Greece's RMBS sector would be one of the victims of the country's exit from the eurozone, which appears increasingly likely in the run-up to June 17 elections between parties supporting and opposing austerity measures, a condition of the country's bailout.

A federal judge Friday agreed to consolidate two suits National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) has brought against Wall Street banks for their sale of faulty RMBS that went bad and helped cause the failure of U.S. Central Federal Credit Union and WesCorp Federal Credit Union, the two biggest of five corporate credit union failures.

Foreclosure sales have been declining for more than a year, while short sales have been gaining ground, according to a CoreLogic economist.

BlackRock has launched its global real estate securities capability, which is an investment platform born from BlackRock's experience in the real estate investment business.

Issuance of collateralized loan obligations, which had been running well ahead of last year’s levels, now appears to be on hold until credit markets stabilize, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

European issuers of covered bonds have sought to diversify their investor bases in recent years as European investors approach their limits in those securities, and new regulations such as Solvency II and Basel III favor issuance of covered bonds over ABS.

Treasury Department officials are working with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) on ways to structure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac MBS, allowing private investors to share in some of the credit risk on government-guaranteed securities.