The Federal Home Loan Bank System is seeking to boost its share of government-backed lending and the Ginnie Mae market with a new servicing-release option for FHA, VA and rural housing mortgages that are sold into the Mortgage Partnership Finance program. The new feature adds to an existing servicing-retained execution in the MPF Government Mortgage-Backed Securities program. The current servicing-retained component requires participating lenders to service loans they originate and sell into the MPF conduit. The servicing-release option from Nationstar Mortgage, a top-10 mortgage servicer based in Dallas, will provide lenders with greater pricing flexibility so they can become more competitive in the communities they serve, said Matt Feldman, president of the Chicago FHLB. Only FHLBank members that are participants in MPF can use the government MBS program. In order to ...

Three separate issuers of jumbo MBS shopped deals in the past week, giving a jolt to a market that has been somewhat subdued since the end of the first quarter. Industry analysts suggest that while liquidity for new jumbo MBS remains limited, the deals can be a good investment. Redwood Trust is set to issue a somewhat unusual $337.08 million jumbo MBS, Credit Suisse is preparing a deal and Five Oaks Investment issued a $251.27 million security this week, according to rating reports and filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. At the end of October, Two Harbors Investment issued...

A recent settlement between DBRS and the Securities and Exchange Commission suggests that in the years following the financial crisis, the rating service didn’t dedicate enough resources to reviewing ratings on outstanding non-agency MBS. The SEC found that between April 2009 and February 2011, DBRS employed only one analyst who was principally responsible for the majority of surveillance tasks for the firm’s outstanding ratings for non-agency MBS and real estate mortgage investment conduits. DBRS had more than 5,000 applicable ratings outstanding in that span. The SEC added...

The Structured Finance Industry Group and Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association plan to file a “friend of the court” brief with the Supreme Court of the United States in support of a defendant in a case affecting consumer ABS – the severity of which is a matter of debate. In the case of Madden v. Midland Funding, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals back in May determined that a debt buyer who purchased defaulted credit card accounts from a national bank is not entitled to collect interest under the National Bank Act at the rate set in the cardholder agreement. About a month later, SFIG and SIFMA filed...

First Republic Bank has contributed at least 21.3 percent of the loans that have been included in jumbo mortgage-backed securities issued in the first nine months of this year, according to a new ranking and analysis by Inside Nonconforming Markets. The bank was identified as having contributed $2.18 billion into jumbo MBS issued in the first three quarters of 2015, including $619.19 million in the third quarter. First Republic’s contributions to jumbo MBS issued in the third quarter alone topped the contributions of any other lender in the first nine months of the year. Jumbo MBS issuers and rating services generally disclose...[Includes two data tables]

While a number of jumbo lenders reduced their reliance on mortgage brokers in the years after the financial crisis, Primary Capital Mortgage has sourced a large share of its production from brokers. And the lender has earned strong assessments from rating services in the process. Moody’s Investors Service said 71 percent of the jumbo mortgages PCM originated between the second quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015 were through brokers. The lender originated $114 million in jumbos in that span. The majority of PCM’s originations are agency mortgages. The rating service said...

Returns on non-agency structured finance products declined in the third quarter of 2015 compared with the previous quarter, according to industry analysts. The shift appears to be due to macro issues as opposed to declining underwriting or performance. “The third quarter wasn’t a particularly happy quarter for non-agencies, with brakes on issuance and pullback in returns,” analysts at Bank of America Merrill Lynch said in a new report. “The latter half of the third quarter was characterized...

In an about face, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision is preparing to allow for the use of credit ratings as a gauge for credit risk when setting bank capital requirements. If the move isn’t adopted by U.S. regulators, industry participants suggest that domestic banks could be at a disadvantage. In a speech late last week, Stefan Ingves, chairman of the BCBS, acknowledged that the Basel committee’s December 2014 proposal to revise the standardized approach for credit risk wasn’t well received. “The response was both vigorous and clear: not many of you liked the proposals,” he said. Ingves said...

Fitch Ratings placed a negative outlook on a number of servicer ratings for Caliber Home Loans this week. The rating service said the revision from a stable outlook was due to “rapid growth and heightened regulatory scrutiny.” Caliber was the 19th-ranked servicer as of the end of the second quarter of 2015, according to affiliated publication Inside Mortgage Finance. The nonbank handled a $75.23 billion portfolio, which increased by 27.1 percent compared with ...

Pizza, hamburgers and doughnuts have helped fuel a record year for whole-business securitization. The deals, which gained some popularity among investors before the financial crisis, are backed by franchise royalty and license payments. Late last week, Standard & Poor’s assigned a preliminary BBB+ rating to the planned $1.63 billion Domino’s Pizza Master Issuer LLC 2015-1. The whole-business securitization will be backed by franchise royalty and license payments, Domino’s intellectual property, and profits from distribution arrangements. Earlier this year, Dunkin Brands issued...