RMBS

The Mortgage Bankers Association's (MBA) weekly mortgage applications survey for the week ending Dec. 17 showed that the market composite index dropped 18.6% on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier.

Mortgage bankers originated $26.4 billion of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-backed loans in November, an 8.2% jump from the prior month, but delinquencies jumped as well.

Sales of existing single-family homes jumped 6.7% in November after falling 2% in October, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo filed a lawsuit against Ernst & Young (E&Y) charging the accounting firm with helping Lehman Brothers Holdings engage in accounting fraud, masking the true state of its balance sheet.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bought nearly 400,000 refinanced loans in the third quarter, an 82% spike from the second quarter, according to data released Tuesday by their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

The government's Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) finally gained momentum in November with servicers completing 30,000 permanent loan restructurings, a 15% rise from October.

If the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) has its way, federal regulators would not wait for Congress to create national servicing standards, but instead write such rules as part of risk retention guidelines set to be released soon.

Perella Weinberg Partners named six new partners. The partners have all been promoted to partner from managing director and are based in New York and London.

Wells Fargo & Co. on Monday agreed to modify more than $2 billion of risky payment option ARMs from two lenders that the mega bank bought during the last years of the decade: World Savings of Oakland, and Wachovia Corp. of Charlotte.

In recent months, servicing failures have led to executive mea culpas, Washington drubbings and a 50-state investigation of the country's biggest banks. As unpleasant as all of those things were, they have only dented large servicers' profitability.