Finance

A law firm that won an $8.5 billion settlement from Bank of America Corp. tied to faulty mortgage bonds said Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley failed to service $73 billion of similar securities, creating a default.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to purchase $40 billion in agency mortgage-backed-securities a month could hasten the wind down of the government-sponsored agencies’ giant mortgage portfolios.

When Fannie Mae agreed to pay Bank of America $512 million to buy the right to administer 384,000 loans last year, members of Congress questioned the size of the payment to the beleaguered servicer.

As of late last year Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had placed more than 300 high-risk counterparties on watch lists and stopped doing business with more than 40 of them.

Presale reports on the latest deal from the only consistent, current issuer of recent origination private-label mortgage-backed securities highlights its inclusion of relatively shorter-term loans.

One tenet of real estate investing is that you never should sell a home in a down market. And one tenet of mortgage banking has always been that you don’t sell servicing rights in a down market either.

Freddie Mac is adding some new innovations to upcoming commercial mortgage securities deals from its so-called K series.

Rep. Scott Garrett, R-N.J., is working a bill that would encourage the re-emergence of a private-label securities market by exempting certain loan pools from risk retention and SEC registration.

The Federal Open Market Committee said it would increase its holdings of agency mortgage-backed securities by $40 billion per month in a third round of quantitative easing.

The Federal House Finance Agency is committed to building a common securitization platform that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both will use to issue their own MBS, but there will be no blending of their products.

Confirmed: some banks are buying and funding nonprime mortgages -- but the effort is small.

Strategic defaulters, beware. The feds are coming for you—not the FBI, but the Office of the Inspector General at the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mortgage seller/servicers may need to cough up an additional $3.4 billion of damages to Freddie Mac for buybacks.

File this under rumor: residential mortgages that are not eligible for sale to Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/FHA (insurance) are being quietly originated and kept on the balance sheet of community lenders.

As other types of risk mitigation multiply, rewarding borrowers for continuing to pay on underwater assets continues to quietly gain traction.

Fannie Mae’s first multifamily delegated underwriting and servicing real estate mortgage investment conduit deal backed by floating rate collateral attracted banks as well as other buyers.

Some mortgage bankers that have perfected HARP refinancings are starting to hunt for servicing portfolios that are rich with program eligible loans.

Correspondent banking remains a tricky and risky business, but a growing number of bankers believe it can be lucrative.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Tuesday morning unveiled new representation and warranty policies that relieve seller/servicers of any repurchase risk if the borrowers make 36 months of consecutive on-time payments.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—under the auspices of FHFA—are issuing to their seller/servicers relief from onerous representation and warranty clauses on loans they purchase with particular emphasis on mortgages that are current for at least 36 months.