Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are still major forces in the non-agency MBS market, but their dominance is waning for the second straight year as competition for subprime and Alt A deals continues to intensify. A total of $55.17 billion of non-agency MBS were structured in securities classes comprised completely of conforming-balance loans during the first quarter of this year, according to the Inside Mortgage Finance MBS Database. That was down 14.3 percent from the… [Two data tables included]
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Government regulators and private accounting standard setters are moving more toward fair value accounting, with the Congressional Budget Office issuing a new report this week that recommends using this approach as the capital measurement for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The government-sponsored enterprises’ own safety and soundness regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, is considering incorporating fair value into its own oversight of Fannie and Freddie. This parallels efforts by the Financial Accounting…
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Inside Mortgage Finance Publications, the publisher of Inside MBS & ABS, this week announced it has filed a lawsuit against Credit Suisse in New York, accusing the Wall Street firm of copyright in-fringement. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Maryland, alleges that Credit Suisse systematically in-fringed IMF Publications’ registered copyrights by making unauthorized copies of the weekly newsletters Inside Mortgage Finance and Inside MBS & ABS as well as the biweekly newsletters Inside…
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The niche market in securities backed by financing for vacation timeshare units has shown stable performance trends over the last five years and modest growth in new issuance. Standard & Poor’s this week issued its first quarterly report on the market, the Timeshare Securitization Performance Index, which aims to capture the historical performance of S&P-rated timeshare term issuance; activity in the most recent quarter; key performance metrics on the underlying loans; and rating actions…
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Barclays Capital’s acquisition of HomEq Servicing Corp. from Wachovia has sparked a good deal of discussion on Wall Street on whether the British investment banker intends to expand even further in the American mortgage market. For the moment, all Barclays says it wants to do is use the $469 million cash acquisition as the foundation for growing its servicing business. “We are making an investment in this because we are looking at this for the…
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The non-agency MBS market surged to $1.70 trillion in outstanding securities in the first quarter of 2006, according to a new analysis by Inside MBS & ABS. Non-agency MBS, including jumbo, subprime, Alt A and securities backed by second mortgages, accounted for 31.5 percent of all mortgage-backed securities in the market as of the end of the first quarter. The sector has more than tripled in size since the first quarter of 2003, when the… [One data table included]
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Despite signing a major regulatory settlement and struggling to cope with a massive accounting and management overhaul, Fannie Mae this year appears to be regaining some market share from its rival government-sponsored enterprise. With monthly business summaries now updated through May, Fannie’s production of new MBS has jumped 11.2 percent from the same period in 2005. Over the same period, Freddie’s issuance of new mortgage securities is up just 2.0 percent. That trend held… [One data tables included]
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