The mortgage refinance business began losing steam in the third quarter, but purchase-mortgage lending helped sustain agency single-family MBS production during the period, according to a new market analysis and ranking by Inside MBS & ABS. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae combined to issue $351.70 billion of single-family MBS during the third quarter of 2015, a slight 0.3 percent decline from the previous period. Even with the slowdown, year-to-date agency MBS volume of $976.40 billion had already topped the $929.49 billion in gross issuance for all of last year. The bright spot was...[Includes two data tables]
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Wall Street remains concerned about the level of standardization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac operations in a single-security environment where investors would be expected to treat them as completely interchangeable. The Structured Finance Industry Group this week reiterated its concern about the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s plan to avoid “complete alignment” of the two government-sponsored enterprises’ operations. In a May 2015 update on the single security, the FHFA said it would carefully assess business decisions that could lead to different prepayment speeds, but that buy-out and removal policies at the two GSEs are essentially the same. That isn’t...
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Ginnie Mae is considering the implementation of stress testing for MBS issuers to see whether they can withstand the worst economic and financial market conditions. Over the next couple of years, Ginnie Mae will develop a framework for stress testing modeled after the Dodd-Frank Act’s supervisory stress testing currently required of bank holding companies, said Gregory Keith, senior vice president and chief risk officer, during a recent Ginnie Mae summit. The test will subject...
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The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority has adjusted a proposal that would set margin requirements for to-be-announced MBS. The independent regulator made some concessions to industry participants compared with a proposal issued in January 2014. FINRA’s proposed rule change was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. Comments will be accepted for 21 days after the proposal is published in the Federal Register, which is expected shortly. FINRA noted...
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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...
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Over the past two years, roughly $13 billion in securities backed by single-family rental properties have come to market, a good start for a business that barely existed five years ago. But despite that growth, there are concerns that the “easy money” could be behind the sector. Some of that concern stems from the flood of entrants into the single-family rental market – a boom that turned red hot in 2012 and 2013 when it was first revealed that institutional investors such as The Blackstone Group and others were buying thousands of properties in once decimated housing markets with an eye toward renting them out. When investors began issuing securities backed by the rent rolls, even more money began pouring...
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Recent disappointing job creation numbers and continued concern about slowing economic activity around the globe have convinced an increasing number of Wall Street analysts, participants and observers that the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee will not raise interest rates at its next meeting, scheduled for later this month. Further, more market professionals don’t predict an uptick in rates until sometime in 2016. And a few are even speculating a liftoff won’t come until the year after that. According to Peter Schiff, CEO and chief global strategist for investment firm Euro Pacific Capital, “the downright dismal September jobs report that was released last Friday may prove...
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