What We're Hearing

So, how is the buyback plague playing at smaller firms? One Florida lender wrote to me over the weekend, noting that her shop is getting hit with buyback requests almost daily. "It appears that the MI companies are kicking back to the investors and the investors are just giving up and not even going to bat for us," she writes that, "I feel that the banks are losing so much money that they are looking for anything to get us to repurchase these loans. I am looking at loans as old as 2005. Something is wrong with that." On Friday National Mortgage News reported that the nation's mega banks and other depositories repurchased roughly $30 billion in residential mortgages from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the second-half of 2009 and will suffer losses of up to 40% on the loans. That bit of market intelligence came from Credit Suisse...