The states and the federal government continue to rack up some key legal settlements with various mortgage servicers. One such settlement was brought about by the Ohio Attorney General and the state Department of Commerce against Carrington Mortgage Services involving a lawsuit that was filed against the subprime servicer back in 2009. The two Ohio agencies and Carrington agreed to mortgage servicing standards that will apply...

Good judicial fortune turned against Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems recently in a foreclosure-related case in Oregon despite previous positive precedence. In Hooker v. Northwest Trustee Services, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon granted the plaintiff's request for a declaratory judgment that defendants MERS, Bank of America and Northwest Trustee Services as successor trustee violated...

Illinois. A federal grand jury has indicted three partners in a failed Chicago North Shore development project, a title company executive and a loan officer for allegedly engaging in a $15.7 million residential mortgage and construction loan fraud scheme to help finance the failed mixed-use commercial development known as the Center of the Northshore. The government accuses

Office of the Comptroller of the CurrencyFederal Reserve SystemFederal Deposit Insurance Corp.Securities and Exchange CommissionFederal Housing Finance AgencyDepartment of Housing and Urban Development Credit Risk Retention – Proposed Rule: Comments Due. Public comments on the interagency proposed rule on credit risk retention are due June 10, 2011. (See...

The chairman of the House Budget Committee said this week that a full and transparent accounting of the cost to taxpayers of the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is the first, best step to determine how to wind down the two government-sponsored enterprises.During a hearing on taxpayer exposure in the housing markets relating to Fannie, Freddie and the FHA, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-WI, took aim at the White House’s plan for a post-GSE mortgage market. “While the Treasury Department has put forward a ‘framework for reform,’ the Obama administration still...

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority last week fined Credit Suisse Securities and Merrill Lynch for alleged misrepresentation of delinquency data and inadequate supervision of subprime residential MBS that ended up misleading investors about the performance of pool assets. “FINRA found that in 2006, Credit Suisse misrepresented the historical delinquency rates for 21 subprime RMBS it underwrote and sold,” the independent regulator said in a statement. “Although Credit Suisse knew...

New issuance in the agency MBS market declined again in May, falling to the lowest monthly production level since the depths of the global liquidity crisis over two years ago. According to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis and ranking, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Gin-nie Mae issued a combined total of $71.05 billion of new single-family MBS last month, a decline of 7.7 percent from April’s production. May marked the fifth consecutive decline in monthly agency MBS volume since last year’s refinance boom peaked in December. It was also the lowest monthly production level since... [Includes one data chart]

Fannie Mae this week nearly doubled the total output of the non-agency MBS market in 2011 with a new REMIC backed by FHA home-equity conversion mortgages. The government-sponsored enterprise provided a guaranty wrap on Mortgage Equity Conversion Asset Trust 2011-1, a $9.26 billion transaction backed by HECM loans originated and serviced by Bank of America. Through the first four months of the year, total non-agency MBS production came to just $9.98 billion – most of which were re-securitizations. Fannie said it intends to...

A revival in the non-agency MBS market may still be years away because of competing and seemingly contradictory government objectives for housing finance, according to a new analysis from Standard & Poor’s. The government is doing many things all at once to resuscitate the housing market and hasten economic recovery, but those efforts may actually place recovery on a slow track, said Erkan Erturk, an S&P research analyst and author of the report. Erturk concludes that the housing downturn drove the securitization market away from...