RMBS

A group of mortgage originators, issuers and investors is close to a consensus on a new process for enforcing representations and warranties on private-label securities.

On a day when the stock market soared upwards, the three stand-alone mortgage insurers all saw their stock price drop. This is in apparent reaction to an article that appeared over the weekend in another publication.

The call for loan-level mortgage data sounded soon after the industry began to pick up the pieces from the housing market crash. It's grown louder since then and the information is slowly becoming more available. But without a way to identify and decipher what it means, the data are worthless. Luckily, there is new technology coming to market that provides lenders, investors and servicers the ability to monitor the loans being originated, evaluate their quality and monitor repayment performance.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place, some mortgage lenders are choosing to relax underwriting requirements ever so slightly to offset a dramatic drop in loan origination volumes.

In the first two of what promises to be several legal actions seeking compensation for the corporate credit union crisis, the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) sued two of the biggest Wall Street banks last week seeking to recover losses from the now-toxic mortgage-backed securities they sold to four of the five failed corporates.

Freddie Mac has entered into a proposed settlement with creditors of the Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. (TBW) bankruptcy that will allow the GSE to gain control of TBW-related mortgage servicing rights and $54 million in loan receipts in TBW deposits.

GNMA executive Christopher Haspel is, more or less, a household name to lenders and servicers that deal with the government agency, and soon will be wearing a new hat—that of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

The $200 million civil settlement with Regions Financial Corp.'s brokerage unit this week was the sort of case that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and state regulators believe should guide industry behavior.

A new Office of Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) survey will give home builders and Realtors more reason to complain that banks are continuing to tightened their underwriting standards and choke off credit to homebuyers.

Lawyers for former executives and directors of WesCorp FCU told a federal court here yesterday that National Credit Union Administration's (NCUA) new suits claiming JPMorgan Securities and RBS Securities misrepresented the sale of risky MBS to the one-time $34 billion corporate should disprove the agency’s claims of negligence in a multi-billion federal lawsuit brought against them.