I wanted to take a minute to wish every HW reader a very joyous New Year — I appreciate your support over the past year, and am looking forward to a very memorable 2008. HW will not publish on New Year’s Day. I’ll be busy watching my alma mater, the Univ. of Southern California, dispense with [...]

Wachovia’s allegedly aggressive move into underwriting of commercial mortgages may end up costing it as the mortgage crisis extends its reach, according to a report published Friday by Reuters: Analysts have estimated Wachovia’s net CMBS exposure at about $9 billion. They say the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank could face a related fourth-quarter write-down as large as [...]

Reuters reports: U.S. mortgage-backed securities issuance totaled $922.1 billion in 2007, down from $1.052 trillion a year ago, Thomson Financial said on Monday. Lehman Brothers was the top underwriter of U.S. mortgage-backed securities for 2007, maintaining its year-ago status, the financial data firm said. Lehman Brothers underwrote 111 issues of mortgage-backed bonds, totaling $95.8 billion, a 10.4 percent [...]

Confirming rumors that had spread earlier today regarding National City Corporation, an ABC News story from a local affiliate in Denver reports that the bank has shuttered its wholesale lending division. From the story: In a letter to customers, National City Mortgage said, “While this decision was not taken lightly, this business line no longer fits with [...]

The number of insured mortgages in default reached a record high in November, according to data released Monday by the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America. The trade group, which represents most of the nation’s mortgage insurers, said that number of insured borrowers falling more than 60 days late on payments jumped to 61,033 last month [...]

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis announced on Friday a new $100 million lending initiative, HomeRetain, to help FHLBI financial institution members assist families facing foreclosure. In a press statement, the FHLBI said that HomeRetain will split available funds between members in Indiana and Michigan, and that funds may be used to modify or refinance [...]

Waterbury, Conn.-based Webster Bank NA said Friday that it will shutter both its wholesale and correspondent banking channels, as part of plans to “streamline and reorganize” its mortgage banking operations. The Associated Press reported that the New England bank funded $3 billion in mortgage loans during 2006, and that it operated wholesale offices in Connecticut, Chicago, [...]

On the heels of its acquisition by Goldman Sachs, Fitch Ratings said last week that it has affirmed its servicer ratings on Litton Loan Servicing. The former C-BASS unit saw primary servicer ratings for subprime and HLTV products affirmed at ‘RPS1′; special servicer ratings affirmed at ‘RSS1′; and manufactured housing servicer ratings affirmed at ‘RPS2′. [...]

Last week, I’d written about the potential problems that states and cities across the U.S. are likely to face as the mortgage-industry led housing slump persists — namely, that state legislators are likely to pump out more and more complex legislation governing mortgage banking activity, right at the precise moment property tax revenue takes a [...]

Let’s start out with a basic fact: a whole bunch of people saw the mortgage meltdown coming. Many of these people, in fact, actually worked in the mortgage banking industry, and many were talking about it as far back as three years ago in earnest. I’m not referring to every free-wheeling mortgage broker that every [...]