Regular HW readers know that for the past six months I’ve been hounding the concept of “underlying assets” — the idea here is that for all of the ways aggregated cash flow tied to debt can be sliced and diced, performance still rests on a set of basic assumptions regarding payment of those debts. (And [...]

Triad Guaranty, Inc., a private mortgage insurer, said an increasing pace of mortgage defaults pushed the insurer into the red during the third quarter. The company reported a net loss of $31.8 million compared to $19.4 million in profits during the year-ago period, and “dramatically” increased reserves to account for paid claims and expected losses. From [...]

Not surprisingly, Bank of America said earlier this week that it would shutter its wholesale lending division in favor of a renewed focus on retail originations. From American Banker’s Harry Terris: Floyd Robinson, the president of the $1.6 trillion-asset company’s home loan business, said in an interview Thursday that the move is driven by an assessment of [...]

Industry bellwether Countrywide Financial reported its third quarter earnings this morning, reporting a loss of $1.2 billion or $2.85 per diluted share. The loss was larger than analysts expected, according to the Associated Press, which reported that analysts had been expecting a loss of $1.28 per share. The quarterly loss was the mortgage lender’s first reported [...]

Regular HW readers likely know that I’ve referenced two looming waves of resets as it relates to the mortgage market, although I haven’t gone into a ton of detail covering what this means just yet. I will now. To start, a picture is worth a thousand words: I’ve seen others like this over the last few [...]

Reuters’ Al Yoon — one of the few major media journalists who has a track record of being spot-on in his coverage — has co-authored a report that gets to the core of my questions yesterday over Countrywide’s push to modify $4 to $6 billion in troubled mortgages. I noted yesterday that Countrywide’s loan modification [...]

That so-called kitchen sink — a term regularly used to describe a company taking its lumps in one quarter — just got a whole lot bigger. Merrill Lynch said this morning that it has been bitten badly by the mortgage slump, reporting a stunning operating loss of $2.31 billion, or $2.82 per share, compared to [...]

Countrywide Financial Corporation, responding to widespread criticism that the mortgage industry hasn’t done enough to help troubled borrowers, today announced a $16 billion home preservation program targeting troubled borrowers facing an ARM reset by the end of 2008. The program will entail $10 billion in borrower refis and $4 to $6 billion in loan modifications, [...]

The Wall Street Journal today visits an issue that I blogged about here recently: how Chapter 13 filings are on the rise among troubled homeowners. (I originally wrote about the rise in prevalence of Ch. 13 filings in a discussion of the mortgage cram-down debate on October 7). From the Journal: Last month, as the nation’s housing [...]

First, the bad news: Assured Guaranty said tonight that it will take a $163 million after-tax loss on financial guarantees written on credit default swap contracts when it reports its earnings next week. The guarantor said that 70 percent of its reported losses were driven by market-to-market activity, and that CDS net par outstanding stood [...]