Finance

The Federal Housing Administration has revamped a little used program for refinancing underwater conventional loans, and extended its "short refinance" program until the end of 2014.

A federal judge declined Tuesday to dismiss charges that Barclays Capital packed a collateralized debt obligation it sold to Eastern Financial Florida CU with junk, hastening the demise of the one-time $2.4 billion credit union, the biggest natural person credit union failure ever.

We still haven't heard from Wells Fargo & Co./Wells Fargo Funding about its exclusionary list of mortgage banking firms - lenders that it will not buy loans from in the secondary market. As you might imagine the story we published Tuesday about the topic caused quite a stir in the industry plus a ton of traffic to the National Mortgage News website.

The former chief financial officer of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker on Tuesday pleaded guilty to covering up one of the largest mortgage frauds in U.S. history.

Federal Reserve limited liability companies created to respond to strains in financial markets have reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars the amount of agency securities the Fed acquired through open market operations.

In this week's National Mortgage News we published a story about an interesting warehouse lender called eWarehouseOne. EWO is interesting for several reasons, including the fact that it claims to have $3 billion in warehouse commitments, but many of the top warehouse managers that we've known for years have never heard of them.

The correspondent lending arm of Wells Fargo Bank this week began publishing a list of third-party originators that it will no longer buy loans from in the secondary market -- as a way to address what it calls "risks" in loan origination.

Mortgage bondholders are threatening legal action over the $25 billion national mortgage settlement, which will give the five largest servicers credits for principal writedowns that the bondholders may take.

Fannie Mae has priced its third multifamily DUS REMIC of the year, a $767 million deal that is notable in that it is the first ever to have separate tranches backed by both seven-year and 10-year collateral.

Freddie Mac's first offering of structured pass-through "K" certificates backed exclusively by multifamily mortgages with a five-year term is in the works this week, and is expected to settle on or about April 11.

In the old days every major Wall Street house and mega-lender had a whole loan trading desk. Some survived and some folded. Some continue to concentrate on CRA eligible loans, while others are actively trading nonperforming mortgages.

A company that has been helping to mitigate strategic default risk with borrower incentives for on-time payments, now is more broadly offering to help clients mitigate certain second-lien loan balance sheet concerns through rewards for accelerated pay-downs.

The Prestwick Mortgage Group is offering investors a GSE 'flow' servicing arrangement that could be as large as $720 million per year in MSRs.

A federal judge has indicated he plans to reject Goldman Sachs & Co.'s motion to dismiss NCUA's suit and continue the case challenging the Wall Street bank over $1.1 billion of faulty residential mortgage-backed securities it sold to U.S. Central FCU and WesCorp FCU, the two biggest credit union failures ever.

In case you haven't been paying close attention and reading the National Mortgage News website (and our paper weekly) the past year, there's a gargantuan shift underway in the mortgage industry. We correctly predicted that the servicing side of the business is 'deconsolidating.'

Chimera Investment Corp., a publicly traded REIT that invests in MBS, said in a new SEC filing that it has fired its accounting firm, Deloitte & Touche LLP.

The rate-indicative 10-year Treasury yield as of Friday just before noon had continued its upward movement to a point notably higher than the range it had been in previously, but hedged players in the industry so far appear to be weathering the move relatively well.

Farmer Mac earned $13.3 million for the fourth quarter and $13.8 million for the full year 2011, as the company saw increased net interest income and it was able to release funds from its allowances for loan losses.

It's known as the 'Oops' loan market - where Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac lenders get jammed on a buyback request not because the loan is delinquent, but because one of the GSEs finds an underwriting flaw and demands a repurchase or damages. The seller/servicer then takes that loan and resells it to another buyer.

With the overseers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac digging in their heels against the use of principal write-downs for troubled homeowners, Senate Democrats pressed their case for a course change on Thursday.