Secondary markets

A Senate bill that would bar members of Congress from trading on confidential information was amended Thursday to include a ban on paying bonuses to executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It appears that possible salary and bonus caps at the GSEs are not hurting the recruiting efforts of at least Fannie Mae.

The Obama administration is working toward producing a plan to wind down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, according to Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner.

Cash-out refinancings hit a 26-year low in the fourth quarter as 85% of borrowers maintained the same loan amount or reduced their principal balance after refinancing, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.

Capstead Mortgage Corp. earned almost $42 million in the fourth quarter, flat from 3Q, but a 27% jump from the same period a year earlier.

Freddie Mac saw its 2011 multi-family volume increase by 32% over 2010 to more than $20 billion. Of that total, $16.5 billion, or 81%, of new purchase volume was through the Capital Markets Execution program – the largest annual volume amount to date.

Fannie Mae did $24 billion of multi-family mortgages last year, of which 98% were put into mortgage-backed securities. The leading Delegated Underwriting and Servicing program originator was Wells Fargo Bank NA.

CitiMortgage is throwing its wholesale division overboard – again. Readers of the National Mortgage News website (and weekly) might recall that two years ago Citi scaled back its broker channel significantly only to re-grow it a bit. But at last check, wholesale production accounted for just 10% of its overall production and some brokers I talked to are not sorry to see them go.

The analysts at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods predict investors would be willing to take on more interest rate risk in light of the Federal Reserve Board's intention to keep rates low through 2014 and that should keep their interest in mortgage real estate investment trusts growing.

One of the takeaways from the entire mortgage meltdown and the current brouhaha over Freddie Mac's obscure hedging techniques is this: If you can't explain something, you shouldn't be doing it.

CitiMortgage, the nation's sixth largest residential wholesaler, Wednesday afternoon informed its loan brokers that it will cease table funding loans next week as it prepares to exit the channel.

Military generals are cautioned to avoid fighting the last war; time and opponents have a way of producing new ways to contest a battlefield, catching unwary leaders off guard. When it comes to housing policy and political power, are Washington observers missing the next conflict?

There has been a relative increase in builder debt issuance this week and more may be on the way.

December was the best month of 2011 in terms of primary new mortgage insurance written by the current membership of the Mortgage Insurance Cos. of America.

Fannie Mae's issuance of mortgage-backed securities jumped 20% in December after a similar increase in November, according to new figures released by the mortgage giant.

NCUA said Tuesday it disagrees with a tentative ruling by a federal judge that would dismiss its suit against RBS Securities in the failure of WesCorp FCU, a ruling that could jeopardize similar suits against JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo for the sale of risky mortgage backed securities to five failed corporate credit unions.

Mortgage application volume fell by 2.9% for the week ended Jan. 27 from the previous week, even though mortgage interest rates declined for fixed-rate mortgages, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.

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.