Ginnie Mae officials have moved beyond whether they should consolidate the agency’s two MBS programs to how they should do it, but it remains much less certain that similar proposals to restructure the Fannie/Freddie market will take root. The newer Ginnie II MBS program has become significantly more popular than the original Ginnie I security, both in terms of new issuance and the outstanding supply of securities. Speaking at the Mortgage Bankers Association secondary market conference in New York this week, Ginnie President Ted Tozer said...
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There appeared to be considerable enthusiasm at the Mortgage Bankers Association secondary market conference this week about the highly anticipated risk-sharing experiments by the government-sponsored enterprises – and some lobbying about the most suitable structures and participants. The first transaction is likely to be a senior-subordinate structure and be issued as a credit-linked note, rather than a conventional cash securitization, said Richard King, chief executive officer of Invesco Mortgage Capital. He said the deal will likely be syndicated...
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Officials at Redwood Trust suggest that the change in pricing for AAA tranches on new non-agency MBS in recent months has been driven by supply and demand, not concerns about the quality of issuance. “The market had come too far, too fast, and the supply and demand imbalance initiated a correction,” Redwood said. The premium on Redwood’s latest transaction was about 1.75 percentage points above an interest rate benchmark, resulting in a 2.59 percent premium for investors. Redwood said deals it issued in January sold with premiums as low as 97 basis points with yields of less than 200 bps for investors. The real estate investment trust said...
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As more firms contemplate issuing jumbo MBS, there are growing concerns that there could be a few speed bumps along the way, namely rising whole loan prices, and an increase in the cost of money for investors that use swaps to fund their purchases of the AAA-rated tranches. The increase in whole loan prices is less of a concern, because it was somewhat anticipated given the “hot” nature of the market. Over the past few months, prices for jumbo whole loans have risen to as high as 103, compared to 101 and 102 last year. Craig Cole, a jumbo consultant and a former top production manager at Union Bank, San Francisco, told...
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As default rates on vintage non-agency MBS have improved, performance and investor proceeds this year will largely be based on servicers’ actions, according to Standard & Poor’s. Loss mitigation, work-out timelines and other servicer behaviors are of particular concern for investors. S&P said its outlook for performance of vintage non-agency MBS is stable. Feedback from servicers indicates that the number of new loan modifications on mortgages in non-agency MBS this year will be near levels seen last year and well below activity in 2010. Instead of quantity, S&P said, servicers have focused on quality. “It appears...
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Standard & Poor’s was the most active rating service in the non-mortgage ABS market during the first quarter of 2013, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis, while DBRS continued to dominate the non-agency MBS space. S&P rated a total of $31.9 billion of newly issued ABS during the first three months of the year, or 67.8 percent of total issuance. That was up from the company’s 58.1 percent share of ABS ratings for all of 2012. S&P was particularly strong in rating credit card ABS, covering 86.1 percent of that market after grading just 50.3 percent of last year’s card deals. Because nearly all public deals have multiple ratings, the sum of the ratings by firms exceeds...[Includes two data charts]
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The retained mortgage portfolios of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continued to decline through natural attrition during the first quarter of 2013, falling by 4.9 percent from the previous quarter, according to an Inside MBS & ABS analysis of earnings reports released by the two government-sponsored enterprises this week. Fannie and Freddie held $1.13 trillion in mortgage assets as of the end of March. With heavy refinance activity, the rate of decline in early 2013 was faster than it had been; GSE holdings were down 13.6 percent from year-ago levels. There was...[Included one data chart]
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Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s multifamily businesses hold “little inherent value” and would be less viable absent the government guarantees the two government-sponsored enterprises currently enjoy, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In a new report, the agency also noted that the sale of the GSEs’ multifamily businesses would yield “little or no value” to the U.S. Treasury or to taxpayers, while at the same time it could be a huge disruption to the commercial real estate markets. “The new ‘stand-alone’ businesses would primarily depend...
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Bank of America and MBIA announced a settlement this week of a long-running dispute regarding representations and warranties on mortgages securitized by Countrywide Financial. The settlement benefits non-agency MBS wrapped by MBIA, according to industry analysts. The settlement applies to all outstanding rep and warrant claims and all other claims between the bank and bond guarantor. BofA agreed to pay MBIA approximately $1.6 billion in cash and remit to MBIA all of the outstanding notes in the firm that BofA acquired in December. BofA also will terminate...
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