ABS

RoundPoint Mortgage Servicing Corp. has won a 50% equity stake in a $480 million pool of single-family loans from several hard hit states that it will manage for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC).

The biggest Ginnie Mae MBS issuers cleaned house in the fourth quarter by buying a boatload of delinquent loans out of Ginnie pools, but its new president says that will not be repeated in upcoming quarters.

Pending home sales rose 8.2% to a reading of 97.6 in February, far exceeding economists’ estimates and a positive sign for the housing market heading into the spring season, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported today.

Ace Securities Corp. filed a Form S-3 with the Securities and Exchange Commission to issue mortgage-related offerings.

As the distressed-asset market begins to stabilize, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) is shaking up the way it handles failed banks and their assets.

Manager Activity: Autos Book Runner Amount (US$ Mil) Rank Mkt.

Freddie Mac issued $29.5 billion in MBS in February, down 18.5% from the previous month and 27% from a year ago.

The 30-day delinquency rate on securitized multifamily mortgages spiked 330 basis points to 13.2% in March from February with the default of the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village project in Manhattan, according a Trepp report.

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has expanded the information that it makes available to the public related to the Maiden Lane portfolios.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) will consider changes to its regulations to ensure better disclosures and protections for investors in private-label MBS.

Deutsche Bank has electronically executed and cleared the first OTC interest rate derivative transaction through the bank's electronic trading platform called Autobahn and its new clearing infrastructure named dbClear.

Fixed mortgage rates were higher in the week ending April 1, with the 30-year rate breaching 5% after four weeks of sub-5% averages.

Resolving the primary drought for RMBS issues may have less to do with transparency and more to do with pricing. Nonetheless, a regulatory tsunami promises to hit hard and could wring out the more traditional players from the market's future.

While the FDIC prepares to take away the Safe Harbor privileges from ABS issuers, it has reaped the rewards of securitization by coming to market with three structured note offerings over the last month.

As Congress and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) debate the severity of restrictions to place on greedy lenders and Wall Street "securitizers" to ensure that they can never again jeopardize the global financial system while forcing droves of decent American families into homeless shelters, we would all do well to take a step back and consider where the U.S. housing finance system has been and where it is headed.

Extensions have become one of the latest loss-saving measures in European CMBS transactions after noteholders voted in favor of what would be the first extension of a European class of CMBS notes' legal maturity date.

For the last several years, Brazil's main real estate ABS security, the CRI, has often looked like the poor cousin to the FIDC, a popular vehicle that has proved a good fit for a wide range of assets, even real estate.

The recently-released Senate financial reform package contains a number of provisions designed to prevent a recurrence of the performance problems that triggered the recent financial crisis. The most widely discussed initiative requires "securitizers" to retain a minimum of 5% of the credit risk of any sale or conveyance of assets through the securitization process.

Totals for public ABS deals for the first quarter of 2010 dropped year-over-year, according to preliminary figures from the ASR Scorecard database.

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that shook a long swath of Chile on Feb. 27 left damage that could work its way into ABS deals, sources said. The most vulnerable asset class is related to real estate, including deals backed by residential mortgages and lease-to-own contracts, but there are safeguards that should help transactions avoid serious deterioration.