News from the Wall Street Journal shows that two more Australian funds are feeling some heat. The funds in question are managed by Absolute Capital Ltd. — 50 percent owned by an ABN AMRO unit — and have halted investor withdrawals amid recent losses: … Absolute Capital Ltd., which invests in collateralized debt obligations, said it [...]

Ahead of its July 31 earnings call, IndyMac Bank reported last week that it’s seeing a pretty big jump in delinquencies and foreclosures, as per the company’s blog: … 30+ day delinquencies for our servicing portfolio in the second quarter of 2007 were 5.35 percent, up from 4.10 percent a year ago and 4.37 percent last [...]

A huge hat tip to Mathew Padilla over at the Mortgage Insider, who is breaking the story tonight that Alt-A lender Impac Mortgage Holdings laid off 20 percent of its workforce today. Back on July 19th, I’d speculated that the company’s decision to suspend its second quarter dividend was due to much larger problems than simply [...]

According to the MBA’s latest Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, mortgage application volume dropped 3.6 percent in the week ended July 20 — the Market Composite Index used to track aggregate application activity dropped to 609.0, near a 5-month low. A steep drop in purchase applications appears to be to blame here, with the Purchase Index dropping [...]

The NAR’s existing homes report is out today, which shows sales volume off 11.4 percent from year-ago levels, registering an annualized 5.75 million units in June. The June numbers are off 3.6 percent from May’s downwardly revised sales numbers, the NAR said, and represent the slowest pace of existing home sales in roughly five years. The [...]

Coming courtesy of TheStreet.com: Steve Stemlach, an analyst at Friedman Billings Ramsey Group, cut his ratings on PMI Group, MGIC Investment and Radian Group to market perform from a previous outperform perform rating. He cited valuation concerns and “expectations for a longer-than-expected downturn in the credit cycle and a more severe level of losses owing to [...]

The WSJ’s James Stewart, in Personal Journal, said yesterday that a value investing strategy in mortgage banking right now is a great way to lose money: Regular readers of this column are familiar with my strategy for buying lower, selling higher, using targets on a broad market index like the Nasdaq. Recently I’ve been deluged with [...]

The news that’s perhaps getting the most water-cooler buzz in the industry right now is Countrywide’s disclosure that it’s having some problems with prime home equity mortgages as the housing slump continues — to say nothing of a near 24 percent delinquency rate on the subprime mortgages it services. I’ve even seen a report from Rueters [...]

It’s not exactly a news flash, but the former glorious epicenter of the housing boom is now the infamous ground zero of the housing crash. DataQuick Information Systems reported today that California foreclosures shot up 158 percent during the second quarter from year-ago levels: Lenders filed 53,943 Notices of Default (NoDs) during the April-through-June period. That [...]

Countrywide reported second quarter earnings today, showing a 33 percent drop in second quarter income versus year-ago levels. Second quarter earnings came in at $485 million, down from $722 million in the year-ago period, driven largely by loan loss provisions ($417 million) and impairment charges ($292.9 million). At least that explains Mozilo’s market comments earlier last [...]