Private-label

Lenders including Bank of America Corp. and Citigroup Inc. are accelerating their sales of soured U.S. mortgages as investment firms compete to buy the debt.

Amid a growing investor appetite for risk, efforts to standardize private-label securities are key to helping ensure the market's healthy return.

Genworth Financial's private mortgage insurance business was a rare bright spot for a company that overall, lost $1.2 billion during the fourth quarter.

One of the most widely discussed ideas at ABS Vegas for boosting issuance of private-label residential mortgage securitization involves hiring a third party to monitor the quality of the collateral.

Hedge funds that profited on residential mortgage debt after the financial crisis such as Pine River Capital Management and Canyon Partners are trimming their bets as prices rise.

It's a mortgage on top of a mortgage, and at least one lender is making these loans again through brokers.

WinWater Home Mortgage is preparing another plain-vanilla private-label residential mortgage securitization.

Standard & Poor's $1.5 billion settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, more than a dozen states and the biggest U.S. pension fund today will let the world's biggest rating company move beyond a bruising legal battle, at a steep cost.

The widespread return of the subprime mortgage business will be the big event for the mortgage industry in 2015.

TCF Financial took $44 million in charges to rid itself of mortgages made before the housing collapse. A distressed-asset investor purchased more than $400 million in loans from the company, and another pool of bad mortgages may be marked for sale soon.

Banks have made progress cutting their exposure to risky home equity lines of credit, ahead of a key 10-year threshold when billions of dollars of them will reset to higher monthly payments. But there are some prominent exceptions, especially among regional banks.

Regulatory attention is supposed to be laser-focused on servicers right now, especially when it comes to how consistent they are in applying workouts. So regulators should be looking closely at whether loans have forbearance.

Joining the hunt for higher-yielding niche loans, the asset management unit of NewOak Capital has quietly launched a private fund to acquire nonqualified residential mortgages.

Arch Capital Group is repurposing a subsidiary to insure mortgages that are headed for private securitizations. Insuring such loans separately from the unit that works with Fannie and Freddie lets Arch offer more favorable terms to lenders.

This isn't the kind of non-qualified mortgage securitization that investors have been clamoring for.

The pension fund sector owns hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities. But MBS holdings are such a small percentage of their portfolios, pensions may not be aware of their heft in the industry.

Standard & Poor's is close to an agreement to pay $1.4 billion to settle claims by the Justice Department and states attorneys general that it inflated subprime mortgage-bond ratings before the financial crisis, according to two people with knowledge of the talks.

Canyon Partners is paring its bullish investments in the mortgage-bond market after the hedge fund made about $7 billion in the past decade capitalizing on opportunities leading up to and following the financial crisis.

Justin Wheeler, who was named CEO last week of Berkadia Commercial, the commercial-mortgage business owned by Berkshire Hathaway and Leucadia National, said global investors are increasingly betting on U.S. property.

Standard & Poor's will be suspended for a year from rating bonds in one of its most lucrative businesses in a $60 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.