Mortgage and Housing Markets Fragile

The big federally backed mortgage firms are under the gun, as investors worry about the firms’ ability to finance the loans they hope will end the country’s housing crisis.
But Sacramento mortgage brokers said Tuesday they’re confident the region’s real estate market is withstanding the new turmoil – so far.
Fresh fears that the loan market [...]

California Mortgage Industry Reform Struggling in Legislature

(From LATimes.com opinion article)
The state Assembly’s response to the sub-prime mortgage catastrophe experienced its own meltdown in the Senate Banking, Finance and Insurance Committee last week. In a twist on the cliche, only the weak bills survived. The most ambitious Assembly bill, AB 1830, was tamed in advance by sponsor Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) to answer [...]

Mortgage Lending Restrictions Rejected By California Senate

(SFGate.com article…)
A slate of bills seeking to rein in the type of risky lending practices that contributed to California’s housing collapse ran aground in a Senate committee Wednesday.
The legislative package had previously passed the Assembly but ran into tough questioning from the bipartisan panel after bankers and brokers raised concerns.
“California’s economy, current borrowers and future [...]

California Mortgage Reform Moving Along Slowly

SACRAMENTO — As the worst foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression drags down the California economy, the Legislature is making only limited progress this year on proposals for sweeping changes in the home mortgage industry.
Amid fanfare this winter, lawmakers held televised news conferences and introduced an unprecedented number of bills that would more heavily regulate [...]

National Licensing Standards On The Way

(Excerpts from a Reuters article…06/05/08)
But it doesn’t take a newcomer to see that the U.S. mortgage brokerage business is facing big changes as a regulatory backlash follows an historic housing market bust. Congress and the Bush administration are pursuing reform proposals on how brokers qualify to do business; how they get paid; and how much [...]

We Are ALL Subprime Now…

First the Bloomberg………
 
 

“The movement in the forward Libor-OIS spreads is telling you that the market is concerned that things can get even worse before they get better,” said Carl Lantz, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Credit Suisse, one of the 20 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the Federal Reserve. [...]