Secondary

We’ve been hearing complaints lately from loan brokers that some of their wholesalers have been telling them to “take a number” and wait if they bring a purchase-money mortgage to the underwriting window.

As originally designed, the Fed’s compensation rule tried to ensure that loan officers didn’t have any monetary incentives to steer borrowers into high-cost loans.

PennyMac Mortgage Investment Trust, a fast-growing buyer of mortgages from correspondents—including jumbos—recently inked a deal to receive a $100 million repo line from Barclays Bank PLC.

Stewart Information Services Corp. saw its net earnings increase 319% from 2Q11, while First American Financial Corp. had its best title margins since 2005 as it earned $73 million, more than double the $32 million in 2Q11 profits.

New advances are providing technology to mortgage industry and secondary market participants that allows them to access detailed information about residential mortgage-backed securities.

Hudson City Bancorp plans to sell more of its production into the secondary market going forward.

Now that Wells Fargo has tossed its wholesale division into the deep dark sea, the question becomes: who’s next among the megabanks to leave?

Moody’s calculates loan-to-value ratios for commercial mortgage-backed security debt transactions from more of a credit perspective.

Federal Reserve Board Gov. Sarah Bloom Raskin urged regulators to narrow a proposed exemption to the Volcker Rule, saying it may allow banks to avoid compliance with the ban on proprietary trading.

By now you’ve read the stories on the National Mortgage News website about private equity sniffing around the mortgage industry the past two years – and the chatter about some firm with $1 billion to spend. We don’t yet know the name of that fund but it’s interesting gossip nonetheless.