B of A buys almost $2B of ING’s $5B-Plus MBS

Bank of America Corp. bought the largest portion of U.S. mortgage-backed securities sold by the Netherlands, which acquired the debt as part of a rescue of ING Groep NV.

Bank of America bought bonds with a face value of about $1.8 billion, Goldman Sachs purchased roughly $1.3 billion and Morgan Stanley bought $788 million, The Hague-based Dutch State Treasury Agency said in a statement Wednesday, without disclosing prices. The five buyers purchased 316 home-loan bonds without government backing with a face amount of more than $5 billion. BlackRock Inc. managed the sale.

Credit Suisse Group AG bought $659 million of the bonds and Deutsche Bank AG $553 million, the Treasury said.

The Dutch government has started offering as much as $11 billion of the debt, saying the U.S. housing market has improved. The S&P/Case-Shiller national home-price index rose 11.2% in the third quarter from the same period in 2012, the biggest year-over-year advance since the first three months of 2006.

The auction is the largest widely marketed sale of its type since May, when Lloyds Banking Group Plc auctioned off almost $9 billion of such securities, according to Empirasign Strategies LLC, a New York-based provider of data on securitization-market trading.

Proceeds from the sale will be published when the remaining bonds have been sold, the Treasury said. It said it plans to sell the whole amount within 12 months.

The Netherlands is selling the bonds after ING, the biggest Dutch financial services company, received a capital injection of 10 billion euros ($13.7 billion) in 2008. The firm’s residential mortgage-backed securities held at U.S. units had plunged in value after foreclosures soared and property prices slumped.