Secondary

The former chief financial officer of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker on Tuesday pleaded guilty to covering up one of the largest mortgage frauds in U.S. history.

Federal Reserve limited liability companies created to respond to strains in financial markets have reduced by hundreds of billions of dollars the amount of agency securities the Fed acquired through open market operations.

In this week's National Mortgage News we published a story about an interesting warehouse lender called eWarehouseOne. EWO is interesting for several reasons, including the fact that it claims to have $3 billion in warehouse commitments, but many of the top warehouse managers that we've known for years have never heard of them.

The correspondent lending arm of Wells Fargo Bank this week began publishing a list of third-party originators that it will no longer buy loans from in the secondary market -- as a way to address what it calls "risks" in loan origination.

Mortgage bondholders are threatening legal action over the $25 billion national mortgage settlement, which will give the five largest servicers credits for principal writedowns that the bondholders may take.

Fannie Mae has priced its third multifamily DUS REMIC of the year, a $767 million deal that is notable in that it is the first ever to have separate tranches backed by both seven-year and 10-year collateral.

Freddie Mac's first offering of structured pass-through "K" certificates backed exclusively by multifamily mortgages with a five-year term is in the works this week, and is expected to settle on or about April 11.

In the old days every major Wall Street house and mega-lender had a whole loan trading desk. Some survived and some folded. Some continue to concentrate on CRA eligible loans, while others are actively trading nonperforming mortgages.

A company that has been helping to mitigate strategic default risk with borrower incentives for on-time payments, now is more broadly offering to help clients mitigate certain second-lien loan balance sheet concerns through rewards for accelerated pay-downs.

The Prestwick Mortgage Group is offering investors a GSE 'flow' servicing arrangement that could be as large as $720 million per year in MSRs.