Secondary Market

As part of the continued effort to excise all deeply delinquent, non-performing single-family residential loans from its mortgage portfolio, Freddie Mac has announced its first-ever Extended Timeline Pool Offering (EXPO) auction.

The court ruled on Wednesday that no action taken by RBS executives amounted to fraud with relation to the mortgage-backed securities, according to the report, and two out of the three appellate judges shared this opinion. The majority opinion said that "[s]tatements of general corporate optimism, such as these, do not give rise to securities violations."

Also under the terms of the settlement, there was no disgorgement, civil penalty, or admission of wrongdoing on the part of any of the parties, according to a press release from Zuckerman Spaeder, the firm that represented defendant Patricia Cook.

In what was Ocwen's second report on consumer relief under the NMS, the Atlanta-based servicer reported that through the end of the fourth quarter in 2014, 21,257 borrowers had completed first-lien modifications and benefited from $1.9 billion in consumer relief.

Fannie Mae announced on Wednesday that it will make available for purchase to qualified bidders a bundle of approximately 3,200 non-performing single-family residential mortgage loans (NPLs) totaling about $786 million in unpaid principal balance (UPB). This will be Fannie Mae's first bulk sale of NPLs as the GSEs push to clear deeply delinquent loans from their mortgage portfolios at the behest of their conservator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA).

While this STACR offering will be similar to Freddie Mac's recent STACR transactions, the difference will be that losses will be allocated based on actual losses realized on the related reference obligations as opposed to allocating losses to the debt notes based on a fixed severity approach.

With Fannie Mae's announcement on Thursday that it is going to begin selling pools of non-performing single-family mortgage loans, it is clear that the GSEs are making a strong push to rid themselves of the backlog of deeply delinquent loans on their books five years after the peak of the foreclosure wave.

Fannie Mae announced on Thursday that it will begin offering up for sale pools of non-performing single-family mortgage loans to interested buyers in an effort to clear out deeply delinquent loans from its portfolio.

An independent monitor verified in his fourth report on JPMorgan Chase's progress under its November 2013 settlement with the government over the packaging and selling of faulty residential mortgage-backed securities that the bank has paid more than half of the $4 billion amount it agreed to pay toward consumer relief, according to an announcement from independent monitor Joseph A. Smith, Jr. on Thursday.

When he was asked if Fannie Mae could have predicted the magnitude of the housing crash, Mudd said the GSE's predictions "undershot" what eventually happened and that to his knowledge, no one at Fannie Mae could have accurately predicted the extent of the housing crisis.