Real estate investment trusts that focus on residential MBS continued to pare their investments in the fourth quarter, a trend that may last through the remainder of the year. Interest rate volatility and continued reports of “illiquidity” in the MBS market remain key factors plaguing the sector. Still, prices for agency product remain strong and, as Inside MBS & ABS noted recently, commercial banks and thrifts continue to add to their holdings, which reached a record $1.643 trillion at yearend 2015. The 16 public mortgage REITs tracked by this publication held $233.17 billion of MBS at year-end, 92.4 percent of which included Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae product. The non-agency market continues to shrink as legacy nonprime securities ...

In another legacy residential MBS legal action, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System this week reached a record $130 million settlement with Moody’s Investors Service over the ratings service’s allegedly erroneous ratings of AAA-rated structured investment vehicles in the run-up to the financial crisis. Back in 2009, CalPERS sued Moody’s – along with Standard & Poor’s and Fitch Ratings – after the pension fund claimed massive losses from investments in three structured investment vehicles that depended on the liquidity of assets that proved to be illiquid, such as subprime MBS, collateralized debt obligations and other ABS. In the lawsuit, CalPERS accused Moody’s of making “negligent misrepresentations” by assigning its highest credit rating to the investments. This caused significant losses as the market ...

Two Harbors Investment is preparing to issue a jumbo mortgage-backed security that will include loans subject to the TRID integrated disclosure rule. The deal could help resolve the so-called “TRID-lock” seen in the jumbo secondary market as industry participants try to sort out the liability posed by the controversial rule. “TRID has proved to be a very strong headwind,” Diane Wold, a managing director at Two Harbors, said last week at the ABS Vegas conference produced by ...

One of the major obstacles to increased issuance of non-agency mortgage-backed securities remains the lack of a deal agent to protect investors. Until last week, investors had not even agreed on the general responsibilities for a deal agent, suggesting that the implementation of the concept was a long way off. A working group, co-led by Alessandro Pagani, head of securitized assets at Loomis, Sayles & Company, announced principles for a deal agent last week ...

Ginnie Mae securitization of rural home loans declined in 2015 as securitization volume in the segment fell in the fourth quarter, according to an Inside FHA/VA Lending analysis of Ginnie Mae data. A total of $18.1 billion in USDA loans were securitized in 2015, with the top five issuers accounting for $10.2 billion delivered into Ginnie (based on numbers below) MBS pools. Some $4.5 billion of MBS backed by rural home loans with the U.S. Department of Agriculture guarantee were issued in the fourth quarter, down 12.5 percent from the previous quarter. USDA MBS issuance also dropped 9.0 percent in 2015 from 2014 volume levels, with all of the top five issuers losing ground year-over-year as well as in the fourth quarter. Chase Home Finance remained the top issuer of securitized rural home loans, accounting for $5.6 billion in Ginnie MBS issuances last year. Second-place Wells Fargo, ... [ 1 chart ]

A working group led by potential investors in new non-agency MBS detailed principles for the role of a deal agent this week, signifying some progress in reform efforts. However, a revival of the non-agency MBS market looks a ways off as other industry participants consider how a deal agent will actually function. “We are now at a transition point for non-agency MBS reform efforts, where some market participants can start moving from a principles-level discussion to contractual negotiations,” Monique Rollins, deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department, said at the ABS Vegas conference produced by Information Management Network and the Structured Finance Industry Group. The Treasury helped facilitate...

Years of warnings from securities issuers and investors about regulatory uncertainty appear to have shifted to actual consequences as liquidity in the MBS and ABS markets has declined significantly in recent months. Almost every panel session at the ABS Vegas conference produced by Information Management Network and the Structured Finance Industry Group this week included comments regarding liquidity and regulation. Daniel McGarvey, the head of U.S. asset-backed products origination at Societe Generale, noted that in recent months spreads on MBS and ABS have increased due to illiquidity. “Credit risk is not currently a driver of credit spreads,” he said. “This should be a concern for all of us in the securitization market.” Delinquencies and losses, traditional factors in liquidity, remain...

The great irony of the mortgage market can be found in the MBS holdings of depositories: Even though banks are ceding origination market share to nondepositories, they continue to gobble up bonds backed by home mortgages. As Inside MBS & ABS noted last month, bank holdings of residential MBS hit a record $1.643 trillion at yearend 2015, a 2.2 percent sequential gain. Of course, a large chunk of that gain can be explained by Bank of America increasing its MBS holdings by a hefty $36.7 billion during the fourth quarter. The big question for banks – as well as real estate investment trusts – is...

Analysts at Morningstar Credit Ratings have begun to see non-agency single-property investor loans materialize with a new twist: less dependence on the borrower’s ability to repay and more reliance on the cash flow stream of rental income. “The majority of loans made to landlords backed by single properties are underwritten as consumer loans, not business-purpose loans. The lender will scrutinize the borrower’s credit, income and assets,” RMBS analysts Brian Grow, Becky Cao and Olgay Cangur said in a new report. Also, rental income is included as part of the borrower’s overall income when calculating the borrower’s personal debt/income ratio and, thus, the probability of default. “Recently, Morningstar has been presented...

The California Supreme Court late last week issued a ruling in a case where a borrower challenged the foreclosure of a loan that was included in a non-agency MBS issued in 2007. The court allowed the borrower’s claims to proceed, which could prompt a significant increase in foreclosure-related litigation for California mortgages in non-agency MBS. An opinion authored by Kathryn Werdegar, an associate justice of the California Supreme Court, stresses that the court’s ruling in Yvanova v. New Century Mortgage is narrow. “We hold only that a borrower who has suffered a non-judicial foreclosure does not lack standing to sue for wrongful foreclosure based on an allegedly void assignment merely because he or she was in default on the loan and was not a party to the challenged assignment,” Werdegar said. The ruling left...