Secondary

President Obama's State of the Union and a recent regulatory speech as prepared for a securitization group's conference drive home the fact that generally the government's view of whether it wants to encourage the industry to lend more or not remains conflicted.

The Williams Capital Group LP has added a new structured finance unit to serve corporate, federal, state and local government clients and hired an executive who had held several key leadership positions within Lehman Brothers' mortgage and securitization businesses to head it.

Banc of Manhattan Capital, Woodland Hills, Calif., entered the correspondent mortgage channel late last year, buying $50 million worth of product in the month of December.

As Rep. Scott Garrett seeks to pass the first significant financial reform law since the Dodd-Frank Act, a lot of forces are aligned against him.

Evidence of insufficient or misleading disclosures during RMBS sales will be a focus of the new Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group under President Obama's Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force, according Robert Khuzami, director of the SEC's division of enforcement.

One of the co-chairs of the new federal/state Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group is preparing to file cases in the next few weeks against Wall Street firms involved in the packaging and selling of MBS.

JPMorgan Chase late last week told a federal court in Wichita that NCUA's negligence suit against top executives of WesCorp Federal Credit Union proves it was the shortcomings of those executives - and not any misrepresentations by the Wall Street bank's sales force in the sale of MBS - that caused the failure of WesCorp and three other corporate credit unions.

Certain categories of specially serviced U.S. CMBS loans are likely to keep increasing through 2012, according to a recent Fitch Ratings report.

The new collaboration between the federal government and certain states to investigate pre-crisis mortgage fraud will have 55 dedicated attorneys, investigators, analysts and support staff, officials said Friday.

Bank of America is ready to unload yet another multi-billion package of mortgage servicing rights, according to bidders and industry advisors familiar with the bank's plans.