RMBS

The amount of putbacks that Bank of America is being challenged for has grown to $84 billion. This covers 225 securitized deals, rising from $46 billion covering 115 deals in October, according to a Bloomberg report.

Redwood Trust's recent $280 million RMBS is generally viewed as the Mill Valley, CA-headquartered firm's second attempt to jump-start the RMBS market, but doubts persist about whether it will be any more successful.

The Obama administration's white paper on housing finance reform might have been short on details on how the government plans to initiate housing finance reform.

Although the Obama administration's white paper on housing finance reform came up short on details, it reemphasized the importance of the securitization market in the future of housing finance.

The joint Treasury/HUD report to Congress released this month was a major disappointment to market participants looking for a timely resolution to the status of the GSEs and the future of housing finance. While the white paper claims to lay out "the Administration's plan to reform America's housing finance market," it unfortunately amounts to a set of poorly defined policy options that will likely require years to codify and implement. Moreover, its core assumptions are unrealistic and ultimately border on wishful thinking.

Lawmakers laid out a series of ambitious deadlines in the Dodd-Frank Act, requiring regulators to complete roughly 170 new rules by July.

After waiting ten months, Redwood Trust issued a second Jumbo RMBS, injecting some optimism into the private-label mortgage securitization market.

The Dodd-Frank Act's Section 939A prompts banking regulators to remove any "reference to, or requirements of reliance on, credit ratings" in their regulations and capital requirements. The uncertainty of how regulators will interpret those words has the ABS industry bubbling and proposals emerging.

Borrower behavior changes over time and investors and lenders should constantly adjust the way they utilize the different credit score values to accurately predict loan performance, according to officials from FICO and VantageScore.

Redwood Trust, the only firm to dip its toe back into the Jumbo MBS market, earned $15 million in the fourth quarter, a 63% decline from the same period a year earlier.