Compliance & Regulation

It's not quite too big to fail, but Ocwen is the country's largest servicer of subprime mortgages. So if it were forced to sell itself, or even failed, the transfer of some $410 billion in servicing rights could create havoc in the mortgage market, industry experts said.

Lenders must carefully ensure that all potential motivations for advice, recommendations, and referrals are provided to borrowers, as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has positioned itself to utilize Unfair Deceptive or Abusive Acts Practices claims as an enforcement tool.

Although the new rules address many of the issues presented by non-borrowing spouses, one of the rules' principal shortcomings is that they do not sufficiently outline the rebalancing of principal that is often required to substitute these new borrowers.

Ocwen Financial has tentatively agreed to sell a mortgage-servicing portfolio on $9.8 billion of loans to Nationstar Mortgage Holdings, and Ocwen hinted that more deals may be in the offing.

Recent court decisions against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders have put to rest the notion that the two mortgage giants exist as anything but instrumentalities of the U.S. government, according to a report by Kroll Bond Rating Agency.

If you want to know what a Greek exit from the euro would do to the €16.7 billion ($19 billion) of bonds out there backed by Greek assets, a good place to start is Argentina.

While the origination industry has begun to see the light at the end of tunnel, its headaches haven't subsided just yet, based on the results of a survey by recruiting firm Hammerhouse.

San Francisco's much-maligned Housing Authority is getting out of the management business.

Three more people from the Charlotte region have been sentenced as part of a sprawling mortgage and investment fraud investigation.

While many servicers are under pressure to sell of mortgage servicing rights, there's still a fair amount of interest in buying MSRs from other quarters of the market.