It’s been a short week, but nonetheless a surprisingly busy one. Below are some interesting stories and discussions that can hopefully hold some of your interest over this weekend - jump off wherever you’re interested most. Missing the bigger picture: I tend to appreciate what I read over at Bloomberg, but commentary from John Berry earlier [...]

Deutsche Bank will reportedly conduct at top-to-bottom review of its various mortgage operations, according to a news brief published Friday at National Mortgage News. Citing an unnamed spokesperson for the bank, NMN confirmed that Deutsche Bank will reassess its mortgage business in the first quarter of 2008; the spokesperson is quoted as saying “there may [...]

Sales of new homes fell to their lowest level in more than 12 years in November, as the nation’s housing crisis continued unabated. Purchase volume fell 9 percent on a revised monthly basis in November to 647,000, the Commerce Department said in a report released Friday; that number is 34.4 percent below year-ago levels. October’s new [...]

Both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been classified as adequately capitalized through the third quarter of 2007, according to a statement released late Thursday by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. Fannie Mae had a 5.9 percent surplus above the OFHEO-directed requirement, the regulator said, 30 percent above the required minimum capital for Q3 [...]

Jay Hancock over at the Baltimore Sun provides a look behind the curtain within Maryland’s mortgage regulatory framework, and what he finds isn’t pretty. Hancock obtained access to a mortgage audit by the Maryland Department of Legislative Services, which found that state regulators were as much as two years late in performing required examinations of brokers/lenders [...]

Wachovia CEO Ken Thompson made the PR rounds earlier today, granting a wide-ranging interview to the Associated Press in which the chief executive of the fourth largest bank in the U.S. affirmed his company’s earlier mortgage-realted loss estimates. Saying he does not expect a recession to result from the housing correction, Thompson was liberal with blame [...]

On the heels of a ratings downgrade by Standard & Poor’s last week, bond guarantor ACA Capital Holdings said late Wednesday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has ceded control of the company to the Insurance Commissioner for the State of Maryland. The troubled insurer said it had entered a Letter [...]

Purchase and refinance applications dropped precipitously during the week ended Dec. 21, according to data released Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association. The Market Composite Index, a measure of overall mortgage loan application volume, fell 7.6 percent on a seasonally-adjusted basis to 603.8; in spite of the weekly drop, application activity remained up 9.9 percent [...]

Goldman Sach analysts said Thursday that Citigroup Inc. may cut its dividend by up to 40 percent as the financial giant faces mortgage-related writeoffs that could total $18.7 billion in the fourth quarter. According to Reuters, who obtained a copy of an investor newsletter penned by Goldman analysts William F. Tanona, Betsy Miller and Neil [...]

It may seem at times as if every residential mortgage-backed security — particularly in subprime — is in the process of being downgraded (which is, to a large extent, exactly what’s been going on). You may be surprised, however, to learn that not all RMBS deals are collapsing under the weight of a housing market [...]