Finance

The U.K.'s Financial Services Authority has "a number of investigations concerning Libor" beyond the case that resulted in a record fine levied against Barclays Plc last week, the agency's acting head of enforcement said.

A decline in applications for government-insured mortgage loans helped to drag down total loan application volume by 6.7% on a seasonally adjusted basis for the week ended June 29.

Ally Bank is telling clients that it is exiting the warehouse lending business but it will give them time to secure new lines of credit from other lenders.

DebtX priced 55,510 commercial real estate loans with an aggregate principal balance of nearly $766 billion that were collateral for securitizations in May.

KossREsource.com, an online information portal for the commercial real estate industry, has gone live. Among the features of the site is an extensive database of debt and equity financing alternatives which is user driven.

Spanish and Portuguese banks are leading European lenders in buying back their own mortgage-backed securities at distressed prices to bolster capital and stockpile eligible collateral for European Central Bank loans.

The TBA market is widely viewed as an essential element of a functioning mortgage market, serving as both the ultimate source of liquidity and a crucial pricing benchmark for housing finance.

Three industry executives attending the Mortgage Bankers Association’s National Secondary Market Conference in New York this year weighed in recently on the government and private secondary mortgage markets. And in the excerpt that follows, they discuss how the transition away from the former toward the latter might someday take place.

An American Securitization Forum report suggests market participants agree combining Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac mortgage-backed securities could eliminate pricing discrepancies between the two types of agency MBS.

Attorney Robert Maddox, who represents Ally Financial, calls the landmark foreclosure settlement earlier this year "a Trojan horse for the government to fix perceived problems in mortgage servicing" but others dispute the view that the punishment was too severe.

Fannie Mae’s mortgage purchases rebounded 30% in May after acquisitions plummeted 45% in April, while Freddie Mac released numbers showing a similar rebound in mortgage purchases for May.

In an effort to elevate tourism as an economic tool, Virginia has named the first project to benefit from its new tourism-related financing program.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the average profit per loan originated in the first quarter was $1,654, up from $1,093 in the fourth quarter.

The members of the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America wrote $8.7 billion in primary new insurance during May, compared with $7.1 billion in April and $3.9 billion for May 2011.

An independent government watchdog has a sharp message for the federal agency that must decide whether to allow principal reductions on hundreds of thousands of government-backed mortgages: Time's wasting.

One of two WesCorp executives still fighting NCUA civil charges over the 2009 collapse of the corporate credit union giant has called for testimony from senior NCUA executives.

Brian Vieaux has joined Flagstar Bank as senior vice president and head of its home lending division.

Fitch Ratings has downgraded seven classes from six different Home Equity Conversion Mortgage securitizations.

Interest rates for the 30-year and 15-year fixed-rate mortgage matched their all-time lows as the 30-year FRM was unchanged from last week's 3.66%, while the 15-year FRM fell one basis point to 2.94%.

After shunning homebuilders for the last five years, investment capital is starting to find its way back into the new home market.