Compliance

Boxing reminds me a lot of today's lenders. Most lenders get into the ring every day, fighting until someone drops. The reason however is not to win a match, but to prevent a repurchase.

The bankruptcy trustee for Thornburg Mortgage this week agreed to settle for $6.5 million a lawsuit against the company's former executives and legal counsel to settle charges that they engaged in a conspiracy to secretly use the failed jumbo lender's employees and assets to launch a new company.

WASHINGTON - Federal officials and state attorneys general released new documents Tuesday about the $25 billion multi-state servicing settlement, but still have yet to release a final settlement term sheet.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is seeking industry and public comments on a prototype billing statement that residential servicers send homeowners to collect monthly mortgage payments.

How much does Bank of America loathe the mortgage business? Let us count the ways: it kills its wholesale and correspondent units, trims its warehouse group down to nothing, allows its departing high-performance loan officers to leave and then starts lopping off huge chunks of its servicing portfolio.

Carrington Capital Management, a unit of Carrington Holding Co., and American Home Mortgage Servicing (AHMSI) have agreed to bring to a close the action filed by Carrington against AHMSI in 2009.

The California Housing Finance Agency has revised a policy that resulted in it foreclosing on homeowners who were current on payments but had been renting out homes financed through the agency. The policy went into effect last week.

Barclays Capital analysts said in a report released last week that large region-specific note and REO auctions have become a regular feature in the past year.

Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase have been sued by the law firm Baron and Budd alleging that the financial institutions illegally levied excessive and deceptive default service fees against borrowers who were late on mortgage payments.

Bond insurer MBIA Inc. has admitted to making errors in its application to regulators seeking to split the company in two.

FACTS - On Jan. 30, William Tro Goings of Sacramento, Calif., pleaded guilty in federal court to participating in a conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his role in a mortgage fraud scheme that defrauded a failed Sugar Creek, Mo. bank of more than $8.5 million.

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.

In addition to the national mortgage servicing settlement, Nevada has reached a side deal with Bank of America, state Attorney General Catherine Masto announced late Thursday.

The $25 billion 'robo-signing' settlement with the five mega-servicers includes a new set of servicing standards - and a mortgagor's ‘Bill of Rights' - to prevent future processing and foreclosure abuses.

FHA indemnification agreements have been running at an average rate of 1,282 each year for the last seven years, according to a Collingwood Group executive who spoke during a conference call Wednesday afternoon.

A federal judicial panel denied a motion to include the Dallas County district attorney’s lawsuit against Merscorp in the ongoing multidistrict litigation against the private loan registry in Phoenix.

The $26 billion 'robo-signing' settlement with five major servicing banks announced Thursday morning could yield nearly $35 billion in principal reductions, according to Housing and Urban Development secretary Shaun Donovan.

Early Wednesday afternoon it appeared that New York and California would not be part of the 'robo-signing' deal and then - from what we're told - the White House put the full court press on the two, laying out the political ramifications for these two very Democratic states.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris and New York AG Eric Schneiderman Wednesday afternoon joined a multi-state settlement with the top five mortgage servicers, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.