Origination

The mortgage insurance division of Genworth Financial is beginning to see a noticeable pick up in HARP refinancing applications, a sign that the '2.0' version of the program may finally be gaining traction.

How oppressive are distressed sales to the housing market? Try this: The top 50 sellers of homes are banks, according to Jonathan Smoke of Housing Intelligence, the research arm of the Hanley Wood publishing company.

In these times where dispensing consumer credit has been akin to doing it through an eyedropper, the use of alternative data sources is one way to possibly increase the flow of money, one proponent said.

The apartment sector is projected to lead the housing market on the road to recovery, but growth in the multifamily sector will be highly uneven, industry experts said last week in Orlando.

Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock Financial, is nobody's fool - not by a long shot. He cut his teeth at First Boston many moons ago, helped shape the MBS market, and then went on to create a financial services powerhouse: BlackRock

Often, companies adopt more aggressive compensation strategies hoping to maximize their competitiveness in the market. To do so, they will adopt practices that "sound" compliant but in actual practice clearly violate compensation rules. In other words, they have contracts that say one thing but practices that in fact violate the rules.

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke called on regulators to "look carefully" at rules which diminish the origination of prudently underwritten mortgages, telling a gathering of home builders that the health of the housing market is central to the vitality of the economy as a whole.

Salt Lake City-based lender Primary Residential Mortgage Inc. has created a new “enterprise risk management” group with the goal of managing risk through the entire loan origination process and ensuring that the company has appropriate monitoring and evaluation policies.

If the GSEs initiated a principal reduction program similar to the one outlined in the robo-signing settlement, roughly 650,000 borrowers could benefit, distressed sales would level off, and home values would “stabilize,” according to Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi.

Will Clint Eastwood walk through the streets of Minneapolis, proclaiming how the U.S. mortgage industry is back? If you're not sure what I'm talking about, go see last weekend's Chrysler/Fiat commercial during the Super Bowl. (As an aside, I think the whole political take on that commercial has been blown way out of proportion.)