ABS

Wilmington Trust Corp. warned Wednesday that its fourth-quarter loan-loss provision rose sevenfold from a year earlier, because of deterioration in commercial and consumer portfolios.

Wells Fargo & Co. on Wednesday named a pair of former Wachovia Corp. executives, Robert Engel and Jonathan Weiss, to run its investment banking and capital markets businesses.

French business school EDHEC launched a monthly index for commercial property in France, with the help of real estate research institute Institut de l'Epargne Immobilière et Foncière (IEIF).

The European Union's (EU) plans to get banks and other users of credit default swaps to get on board a centralized clearing house have failed.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Wednesday said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be eliminated and replaced by private-sector mortgage guarantors regulated like utility companies.

Former Ernst & Young Chairman and CEO Ray Groves was named as the ombudsman for Standard & Poor's.

The delinquency rate on home equity lines of credit reached its highest level ever in the American Bankers Association's (ABA) third quarter 2008 consumer credit delinquency bulletin.

Investment funds affiliated with PennyMac — a "scratch and dent" firm headed by a former top executive at Countrywide Financial Corp. — have purchased a $558 million portfolio of 2,800 residential loans from the government using a cashflow sharing arrangement.

Wells Fargo & Co. said late Monday that it bought $730 million of loan and lease receivables from General Electric Co.'s GE Healthcare Financial Services-Equipment Finance.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has agreed to delay for 90 days the implementation of a RESPA rule that would ban builders from offering discounts to home buyers that use their affiliated mortgage companies.

Roughly 50 different investors received confidential bid packages on IndyMac Bank, the insolvent thrift that is also the nation's ninth largest residential servicer.

Javid Jaberi, senior vice president of servicing operations for Residential Capital Corp., Horsham, Pa., has left the company as part of a reorganization, according to a memo provided to ASR sister publication MortgageWire.

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision today issued the consultative paper Principles for Sound Stress Testing Practices and Supervision.

A new mortgage firm has been launched for consumers to receive free advice on, and arrange, their mortgage via email.

In a report from Merrill Lynch, analysts recommended returning to neutral in lower coupon 15s relative to 30s.

After more than a week of market speculation, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) announced a nearly $14 billion deal Friday to sell IndyMac Federal Bank to a private-equity consortium led by the head of Dune Capital Management.

As expected, John Courson has taken over as the president and chief executive of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) as of Jan. 1.

The Treasury Department used its asset guarantee authority in taking a second-loss position in a $308 billion pool of mortgages to help stabilize Citicorp. But going forward it expects to use asset guarantees "sparingly," it said in a report to Congress.

KBC group said in a press release last week that it expected its full-year net earning to fall by €900 million ($1.2 billion). This is a result of further downgrades by Moody’s Investors Service made on a range of CDOs held by the group.

Real estate economists Michael Sklarz and Norm Miller, co-founders of Collateral Intelligence, say the widely followed Case-Shiller home price index has exaggerated home price declines for most homeowners.