We got us an industry catfight! As President Bush once said: Bring it on! This tiff started early last week at the Mortgage Bankers Association's National Secondary Market Conference in New York where -- according to reporting by National Mortgage News' Ted Cornwell -- trade group officials made a number of veiled public comments blaming the foreclosure crisis on, well, loan brokers. Some mortgage bankers believe that brokers work for incentives (commission, yield spread premiums) and could care less about a loan's long-term performance. National Association of Mortgage Brokers president Harry Dinham fired off a statement saying, "It is truly unfortunate that the president of the Mortgage Bankers Association has attempted to shift blame away from Wall Street, federally chartered banks, state-chartered lenders and underwriters for the subprime situation we find ourselves in today." NAMB is calling for the creation of a national registry "so that consumers can be protected by the bad actions of all originators whether they work in a bank, state-chartered lender, credit union or mortgage brokerage." MBA doesn't want a national registry because that means every single LO working for a mortgage bank will have to sign up. In short, that's a lot of paper work and compliance (read: money). In years past these two trade groups have talked about merging. I would advise that before they walk down the aisle they seek marriage counseling -- or at least a chat with Dr. Phil...
Ohio Savings Bank is no more. No, it didn't go out of business. The company is alive and kicking but the thrift -- one of the nation's largest privately held S&Ls -- recently changed its name to AmTrust Bank, a brand it has been operating under in states outside of Ohio. Moreover, AmTrust's new mortgage chief is none other than Jon Baymiller who used to run operations over at Principal Residential Mortgage of Des Moines. A few years back, PRM got snatched up by Citigroup. AmTrust's forte is originating mortgage loans and monetizing the servicing asset as soon as possible...
WeirdLoans, SourceMedia's loan search engine, got a haircut last night. Gone are about 320 defunct wholesalers and their 1,400 outdated loan programs. Chief search engineer Andras Malatinszky says he hopes this will stem the recent tide of complaints about WeirdLoans providing false matches involving programs that are no longer active or even companies that are no longer in business. He welcomes reports of any remaining loan programs in need of deleting sent to weirdloans@brokeruniverse.com...
Subprime lender WMC Mortgage has decided to stop answering quarterly surveys sent to it by the trade press. The General Electric-owned company has undergone massive layoffs and cutbacks. We can only hope that in time it begins disclosing its loan volumes once again...
Three high ranking Republican congressman on the Financial Services Committee want banking regulators to examine the role "liar’s loans" (stated-income mortgages) have played in the current subprime crisis. In a letter to the Federal Reserve and other regulators Reps. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio, and Judy Biggert, R-Ill., request that banking agencies force lenders to tighten their loan standards on such mortgages but without "installing roadblocks to homeownership"...
In 2002, Chinese investors owned about $100 million in U.S agency MBS. Now they own well over $110 billion -- a nearly 1,000-fold increase in less than five years...
ON THE MEND: Nationally syndicated housing columnist and NMN roving reporter Lew "Don't Call Me Lewis" Sichelman. Lew had recent surgery but assures us he'll be in fighting shape to pen his next "haunted house" column for Halloween.
WASHINGTON NEWS: The House of Representatives passed a GSE regulatory reform bill by a 313-104 vote after reaffirming that the new regulator cannot use systemic risk as a reason for scaling back the size of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's mortgage portfolios. The bill (H.R. 14270) tightens supervision of the two government-sponsored enterprises and requires Fannie and Freddie to make annual contributions to an affordable housing fund. For the full story see Brian Collins' story in Monday's NMN. Don't subscribe? Call (800) 221-1809.
MORTGAGE PEOPLE: Dover Mortgage of North Carolina has named Harvey W. Goldberg as its new president. Mr. Goldberg succeeds the company's founder, W. Edward Joye who resigned in March. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has promoted Paul Manchester to director of its financial institutions regulation division, which is housed in the agency's office of policy development and research.
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DATA NOTICE: Need reliable research on top funders and servicers dating back to 1999? NMN has available for purchase back issues of its popular Quarterly Data Report going back to the fourth quarter of 1999. (The QDR provides information on prime and subprime.) If you want details on the top funders of alt-A, payment-option ARMs, jumbos and more, check out the Alternative Products Quarterly Data Report. For more information e-mail
Have a very safe Memorial Day Weekend. Don't forget our men and women in the armed services.
