Securitization

Volkswagen is in the market with a €7.5 million German auto ABS deal that will be publicly placed.

The aggregate value of commercial real estate (CRE) loans priced by DebtX that back CMBS rose to 79.9% as of Feb. 28 from 79.8% as of Jan. 31.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury will begin an orderly wind down of its remaining portfolio of $142 billion in agency-guaranteed MBS. Beginning this month, it plans to sell up to $10 billion in agency-guaranteed MBS per month, although this would be subject to market conditions.

Lender Processing Services (LPS) reported its February 2011 month-end mortgage performance statistics from its loan-level database of nearly 40 million mortgage loans.

REO services provider Default Resource hired James Zeldin as executive vice president and chief sales officer.

After helping banks weather the financial crisis and oversee the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), Richard Neiman is expected to step down as New York banking superintendent in April.

As the mortgage servicing settlement talks stall, some observers are wondering whether the two main parties — the banks and the attorneys general — would be better off without making a deal.

Ally Financial, which hopes to go public this year, has agreed to sell $1.25 billion of bonds related to excess mortgage servicing rights.

JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon recently sat down with analysts at Citigroup Global Markets and told them what many smaller players in the mortgage business have believed all along: that a 20% downpayment definition on the 'qualified residential mortgage' (QRM) test will benefit the nation's megabanks.

Mortgage lenders funded roughly $33.2 billion of Jumbo mortgages during the fourth quarter, a handsome 57% gain from the same period a year earlier, according to survey figures compiled by National Mortgage News and the Quarterly Data Report.

The Japanese crisis had the most impact on CMBS secondary market activity versus all other securitization sectors tracked by capital markets data provider Epirasign Strategies.

JPMorgan Chase Bank is marketing a FFELP student loan-backed deal called Scholar Funding Trust 2011-A. The $268.3 million, 144A transaction is managed by JPMorgan Securities.

A powerful Republican congressman late Thursday introduced a GSE reform bill that would push Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship after two years and fully privatize them at the end of five.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) sued three top executives of Washington Mutual Bank, alleging their "extreme and historically unprecedented risks" in the bank's mortgage lending operations helped cause the biggest failure in U.S. history.

As state and federal officials struggle to reach a global settlement with the largest mortgage servicers over problems in the foreclosure process, regulators have grown frustrated with the lack of leadership on their side, saying no one is making an effort to corral the multitude of agencies involved.

In a decision issued late yesterday, P Kevin Castel, a judge in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, ruled against a class action suit versus Countrywide Financial Corp.

While regulators are moving toward requiring high downpayments for the majority of home buyers, there are still ways to aid first time buyers, according to Obama administration officials.

The practice of voluntary asset buy-backs is prompting Fitch Ratings to keep several RMBS transactions in South Africa on Rating Watch Negative (RWN), the agency said in a report looking at the expected performance of the country’s structured finance sector this year.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) late Wednesday filed civil charges against a former operations chief at the now defunct Colonial Bank, accusing her of playing a key role in $1.5 billion warehouse lending related scam.

Trepp acquired Investcap Advisors, a privately held, Massachusetts-based firm. Investcap offers Web-based applications for U.S. CMBS loan and property surveillance.