Daily Dose

According to the survey, 70 percent of people who know their credit scores feel significantly more prepared to buy a home versus the 54 percent of those who do not know their credit scores. About 62 percent of homebuyers know that their credit scores could mean favorable interest rates to refinance their home.

The survey found that 65 percent of adult respondents said they were either "doing okay" or "living comfortably" as far as their personal finance situation, which represented an increase of 3 percentage points from the survey the previous year. Meanwhile, the percentage of respondents who said they expect their income to be higher in the next year jumped from 21 percent in 2013 to 29 percent in the 2014 survey.

The STACR offering priced on Tuesday is the GSE’s fourth this year and 13th overall. Freddie Mac began the STACR program in the second half of 2013 as part of the Enterprise’s goal of reducing risk to taxpayers by increasing private capital’s role in the mortgage market.

Counsel's Corner is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with default servicing attorneys around the country about the most pressing issues facing the default servicing industry. This installment features Linda Finley from the Atlanta office of Baker Donelson.

The deeply delinquent status of the loans, which are three years delinquent on average, indicates that the borrowers have already been evaluated for or are in some stage of loss mitigation, or are in some stage of foreclosure. Twenty-nine percent of the loans in the pool were loans that were modified that later became delinquent.

Economists have remained positive but cautious for 2015's outlook despite the Q1 growth they termed as "paltry." They were particularly positive in the area of housing; a substantial increase in housing permits was largely responsible for the April spike in the Conference Board's LEI.

Another key effort is the Fed's launch of the Comprehensive Liquidity Assessment and Review (CLAR) in 2012 as an annual assessment to give supervisors of financial firms a regular opportunity to respond to evolving liquidity risks. The Fed also enhanced the rules creating enhanced risk management standards for larger U.S. banks in addition to the rules in place for capital planning, liquidity risk management, and stress testing.

Risk layering is largely responsible for the increase in risk on mortgage loans taken out by first-time buyers, according to AEI. Seventy percent of first-time mortgage buyers in April 2015 had a combined LTV ratio of 95 percent or more and 97 percent of them had a 30-year term. Without substantial home price appreciation, the low down payment and slow amortization makes it likely that these first-time buyers will have very little equity in their homes for many years.

The researchers discovered that mortgage loans with a CDS were much more likely to default than those without a CDS, because banks often allowed the riskiest subprime loans to be packaged into securities with CDS coverage.

In fact, the industry discovered that simply analyzing data from the CFPB is not enough, especially since the database arrives with its own built-in bias—that bias being the very nature of the database itself. It collects complaints, not praises, and ignores the larger universe of loans serviced nationwide. To fill the void of well-rounded data, Black Knight Financial Services and the Five Star Institute jumped into the missing space and used data from the CFPB database and its own analytics to inform its latest white paper on CFPB complaints. This select print feature originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of DS News magazine.