The first jumbo mortgage-backed security from a subsidiary of Hatteras Financial received relatively strong reviews from rating services. The $231.18 million Onslow Bay Mortgage Loan Trust 2015-1 received AAA ratings with credit enhancement of 8.55 percent on the senior tranche. DBRS and Standard & Poor’s said that while they find Onslow Bay to be an acceptable aggregator, they increased the required credit enhancement on the MBS somewhat due to Hatteras’ lack of experience ...

Separate appeals courts this week vacated legal victories that the federal government achieved in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The cases involve former officials at State Street Bank and Trust and a former MBS trader at Jefferies & Company. In 2014, commissioners of the Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 to reverse a ruling by the SEC’s Chief Administrative Law Judge involving James Hopkins, a former vice president and head of North American product engineering at State Street, and John Flannery, a former CIO at the bank. The ALJ had dismissed...

Standard & Poor’s rated some $84.64 billion of non-mortgage ABS issued in the U.S. during the first nine months of the year, making it the top rating service in the segment, according to a new ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. S&P was well represented in all the major ABS sectors, with its strongest showing in credit card ABS, where it rated 73.4 percent of 2015 issuance based on dollar volume. Fitch Ratings was...[Includes two data tables]

The securitization of non-agency, nonprime residential loans appears to be heating up as 2015 draws to a close, but bond sizes continue to be – expectedly – quite small. Then again, that’s not the point of these deals, lending executives and investment bankers involved in the market, argue. The idea is to set the table by issuing securities backed by loans that fail to meet the qualified-mortgage test in the hope that, down the road, bond sizes will increase. Earlier this month, according to a report by Bloomberg, Lone Star Funds issued...

A non-agency MBS sponsored by CarVal Investors issued this week includes a new fee-based compensation structure for one of the servicers involved in the $474.2 million transaction. Mill City Mortgage Loan Trust 2015-1 is backed by re-performing mortgages that had seasoned for nearly nine years, on average. Some 90.1 percent of the loans had received modifications and almost all of the mortgages in the deal were current at the time of issuance. Shellpoint Mortgage Servicing will service...

PIMCO led non-agency MBS investors in the filing of a class-action lawsuit against Citibank last week, alleging that Citi didn’t adequately perform trustee duties on MBS issued before the financial crisis. The lawsuit claims violations of New York’s Streit Act, which has been cited in several other lawsuits against trustees. PIMCO et al v Citibank was filed in New York’s state supreme court. Other investors involved in the filing include AEGON, Kore Advisors, Prudential and Sealink Funding Limited, and the plaintiffs aim to include all that have invested in 25 non-agency MBS where Citi is the trustee. The deals were issued...

American Homes 4 Rent, the largest publicly traded player in the single-family rental market, late this week agreed to buy American Residential Properties in a deal valued at $1.5 billion. It was the second transaction involving real estate investment trusts in the SFR sector within three months, and has sparked talk of further consolidation, including perhaps mortgage REITs. A research note from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, penned right before the AH4R-ARP combination was unveiled, noted that mergers in the space are possible “given current valuation discounts ….” In other words, the share prices of single-family rental REITs have been...

Some investors won’t return to the non-agency MBS market until the federal government establishes minimum standards for issuers, according to Chris Katopis, executive director of the Association of Mortgage Investors. Speaking at the RMBS 3.0 symposium produced by Information Management Network and the Structured Finance Industry Group this month in New York, Katopis said investors are frustrated with the lack of action from the government to help the non-agency MBS market. “We know there’s a lot of work going on, but at some point the government has to set minimum standards,” he said.Katopis said investors are happy that SFIG is working on a new representation-and-warranty framework for non-agency MBS. However, the AMI is skeptical of voluntary industry standards. “Having ...

Acting on a new policy that increases the focus on prosecuting individuals for corporate wrong-doing, the Department of Justice is reportedly planning to file criminal charges against executives at JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland for the alleged pre-crisis sale of non-agency MBS to unsuspecting investors, the Wall Street Journal has reported. According to the report, the DOJ investigations were based on documents that allegedly suggested that shortly before the mortgage meltdown, executives at the two financial institutions securitized mortgages and sold them to investors knowing that the underlying loans were defective. The JPMorgan probe began after prosecutors uncovered crucial evidence from a related civil investigation in 2007: a memo from a bank employee cautioning senior executives about ...

The Structured Finance Industry Group and the Treasury Department continue to work on complementary initiatives to revive the non-agency mortgage-backed security market. SFIG’s upcoming plans include a push for transparency among issuers, while the Treasury has shifted its focus somewhat away from a benchmark non-agency MBS transaction. Eric Kaplan, a managing director at Shellpoint Partners and one of the leaders of SFIG’s RMBS 3.0 effort, said SFIG is ...