Tag Archives: Bank of America/Merrill Lynch

JPMorgan Chase's $4 billion settlement with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) reached late last week ""sets a relatively high bar"" for the 13 other banks still facing litigation from the federal agency, according to Fitch Ratings, which suggested Tuesday that some of the banks may need to increase their litigation reserves before settling. The $4 billion is about 12 percent of the original face value of the private-label mortgage-backed securities for which FHFA sought damages.

The home improvement sector is seeing a lot more activity thanks to investors who are demanding homes in need of repair and homeowners who are tackling renovations they once avoided. According to a Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Research report, renovation spending now accounts for about half of the construction expenditures market; historically, renovation spending has made up about a quarter of the market.

American International Group Inc. (AIG) filed a lawsuit Monday against Bank of America claiming the bank's subsidiaries, Countrywide and Merrill Lynch, withheld information from its investors regarding loan quality. AIG hopes to secure more than $10 billion from BofA to recover losses resulting from the alleged non-disclosures. The insurance company accuses BofA of giving investors a false account of the performance of its residential mortgage-backed securities. BofA maintains that AIG is responsible for its own losses and rejects AIG's accusations of fraud.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch announced this week that Alan Todd will join the group in August as head of U.S. commercial mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) research. Todd joins the company from JPMorgan, where he served in the same capacity as head of U.S. CMBS research since 2005. He also spent five years at Bear Stearns, also in CMBS research.

Another lawsuit centered around mortgage securities backed by faulty loans may be brewing. The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) has threatened to sue four banks and investment firms unless they refund more than $50 billion for mortgage-related bonds that went bad. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America's Merrill Lynch unit, Citigroup, and J.P. Morgan Chase are named as the targets of NCUA's legal threats. The regulator says mortgage securities sold by these companies led to the collapse of five wholesale credit unions.

Mortgage bankers originated $110 billion of commercial and multifamily mortgages during 2010 - an increase of 36 percent from 2009, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. A separate report from Jones Lang LaSalle corroborates the trade group's assessment of a resurgence in the financing market and indicates even stronger growth in 2011, even without the predicted surge is distressed sales. Wells Fargo is ranked as the largest servicer of commercial and multifamily mortgages.

Experts agree that job creation is critical to getting the housing and mortgage markets back on track - both in curbing delinquencies by ensuring homeowners have the ability to make their mortgage payments and in giving consumers the confidence to become homebuyers. If unemployment remains elevated for an extended period, the housing recovery is expected to grind along at a snail's pace. Currently the nation's unemployment rate sits at a 26-year high. But what can we expect heading into the new year?

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) has released its mid-year ranking of commercial and multifamily mortgage servicers. Wells Fargo tops the list, with 40,292 loans worth $462.8 billion in its commercial/multifamily servicing portfolio. Also among the top five are PNC's Midland Loan Services, Berkadia, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and KeyBank Real Estate Capital.

Fitch Ratings has upgraded the individual and preferred stock ratings of Bank of America. But the agency says the upgrades are tempered by the bank's high level of nonperforming loans and the likelihood of large volumes of mortgage repurchase requests from the GSEs and other secondary market investors, largely because of the loans the bank inherited from its Countrywide acquisition. Fitch also expressed concern about BofA's exposure to home equity loans, especially those with loan-to-value ratios above 100 percent.

The FDIC has closed on a sale of securities as part of a securitization backed by approximately $471.3 million of performing single-family mortgages from 16 failed banks. This pilot program marks the first time the FDIC has sold assets in a securitization during the current financial crisis a method which could allow the federal agency to clear billions of dollars in seized loans from its books, while maximizing the value of these assets for the failed banks' creditors.