Monday Morning Cup of Coffee

A look at the stories on HousingWire’s weekend desk…with more coverage to come on bigger issues: The industry buzzed this weekend over news of continued heavy losses at the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). Mortgage giant Freddie Mac (FRE: 1.14 -1.72%) posted a $5bn net loss in Q309 at $10.4bn net worth as of September 30. Unlike sister GSE [...]

Report: Foreclosure Inventory Hits Record Level in June

The nation’s housing markets are clearly developing a bi-polar disorder all their own: fresh evidence of a possible recovery is consistently tempered with equally fresh evidence of continuing trouble ahead. A new report released Wednesday morning by Jacksonville-based Lender Processing Services, Inc. presents the latest mixed bag of results, with fresh evidence that housing might [...]

Prime RMBS Index Postponed, MarkIt Says

It was such a small press statement, but one imbued with indelible meaning — Markit, the financial technology firm that manages indices for the subprime and commercial mortgage securities markets, said earlier this week that it had postponed a planned launch of a new index tracking against prime RMBS. “Following extensive discussions with major market participants, [...]

Markit Looks to Past for Latest ABX Addition

Markit, the financial information services company that owns the Markit ABX.HE inde — commonly referred to as the ABX, for short — said Wednesday that it plans to launch an ABX.HE 05-2 index on Oct. 2. The ABX.HE is a tradable synthetic index of U.S. sub-prime asset-backed securities. The addition of the new index, following a [...]

BIS: ABX Overstating Potential Subprime RMBS Losses

In its second paper this year to take aim that the so-called ABX indices, which are based on credit derivatives written on MBS backed by subprime mortgage loans, the Bank for International Settlements suggested again late last week that financial firms marketing subprime RMBS assets based on pricing inputs from various ABX contracts may be [...]

Bear Stearns MBS Vets Jump to RBS Greenwich

And the exodus of former Bear Stearns & Cos. MBS personnel continues — but, in a surprising move, more than a few have landed at RBS Greenwich Capital in recent weeks. Despite the industry downturn, the Connecticut-based fixed-income firm said Wednesday that it had added 16 professionals to its mortgage-backed securities team; fifteen of the [...]

BIS Piles into ABX Debate, Says Subprime MBS Index is Overstating AAA Losses

More than a few analysts have argued in recent months that the ABX index is overstating subprime losses, to varying degrees of success; the Bank for International Settlements, however, made wide headlines Monday for suggesting that ABX trading prices might be overshooting actual losses on AAA-rated securities by as much as 60 percent. The BIS report [...]

ABX Index Not Reflective of AAA RMBS Market: Standard & Poor’s

One of the most widely used performance-tracking indexes for the U.S. structured finance market, the ABX Index, might not be as good a gauge of credit risk for AAA-rated mortgage bonds as some might think, according to a recent report published by Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services. “While we believe the ABX provides insight into [...]

Subprime Mortgage Losses Nearly Done: Fitch

The subprime mortgage mess is mostly over, as global banks have already written down more than 80 percent of their losses from subprime mortgages and related assets, Fitch Ratings said in a report released Wednesday. The rating agency estimated that total market losses from subprime mortgage assets at $400 billion, though losses could go as [...]

Signs of recovery overestimated?

Here at HW, we’ve been covering what appears to be a potential rebound in the secondary mortgage market. But at least one senior exec is pulling a “not so fast” response to that sort of thinking. Via MarketWatch, late last week: The market for highly structured credit products exposed to residential mortgage securities hasn’t rebounded, American [...]

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