Finance

Although insurance conglomerate MetLife failed to unload its residential lending division, it has found a buyer for its warehouse business, according to industry officials close to the matter.

Assured Guaranty has filed a lawsuit against UBS' real estate securities unit over breach of contract claims.

Risk appetite in the U.S. triparty repo market is slowly returning, according to Fitch Ratings in a new report.

In the past month, the Trepp CMBS delinquency rate has been hovering within a narrow band. For the last three months, the delinquency rate has shifted back and forth only slightly higher and lower. During this process, the rate has not gone over 9.60% or below 9.50%.

Wholesale lending is back! OK, not exactly. Citigroup announced its exit from the channel this past week and some trade journals - not knowing their stuff - seemed to think it was the biggest story since the Hindenburg disaster. Wholesale only accounted for 9% of Citi's production.

Even though the vast majority of its services are as an outsource solution, Bensalem, Pa.-based ISGN also provides contract employees to help meet transitory needs in the mortgage industry, including IT staff.

A Senate bill that would bar members of Congress from trading on confidential information was amended Thursday to include a ban on paying bonuses to executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It appears that possible salary and bonus caps at the GSEs are not hurting the recruiting efforts of at least Fannie Mae.

The Obama administration is working toward producing a plan to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner.

Cash-out refinancings hit a 26-year low in the fourth quarter as 85% of borrowers maintained the same loan amount or reduced their principal balance after refinancing, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.

Capstead Mortgage Corp. earned almost $42 million in the fourth quarter, flat from 3Q, but a 27% jump from the same period a year earlier.

Freddie Mac saw its 2011 multi-family volume increase by 32% over 2010 to more than $20 billion. Of that total, $16.5 billion, or 81%, of new purchase volume was through the Capital Markets Execution program – the largest annual volume amount to date.

Fannie Mae did $24 billion of multi-family mortgages last year, of which 98% were put into mortgage-backed securities. The leading Delegated Underwriting and Servicing program originator was Wells Fargo Bank NA.

CitiMortgage is throwing its wholesale division overboard – again. Readers of the National Mortgage News website (and weekly) might recall that two years ago Citi scaled back its broker channel significantly only to re-grow it a bit. But at last check, wholesale production accounted for just 10% of its overall production and some brokers I talked to are not sorry to see them go.

The analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods predict investors would be willing to take on more interest rate risk in light of the Federal Reserve Board's intention to keep rates low through 2014 and that should keep their interest in mortgage real estate investment trusts growing.

One of the takeaways from the entire mortgage meltdown and the current brouhaha over Freddie Mac's obscure hedging techniques is this: If you can't explain something, you shouldn't be doing it.

CitiMortgage, the nation's sixth largest residential wholesaler, Wednesday afternoon informed its loan brokers that it will cease table funding loans next week as it prepares to exit the channel.

Military generals are cautioned to avoid fighting the last war; time and opponents have a way of producing new ways to contest a battlefield, catching unwary leaders off guard. When it comes to housing policy and political power, are Washington observers missing the next conflict?

There has been a relative increase in builder debt issuance this week and more may be on the way.

December was the best month of 2011 in terms of primary new mortgage insurance written by the current membership of the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America.