Must-read links on latest housing recovery news/data.

Must-read mortgage & housing links for today.

More bank stress tests coming. Here’s why U.S. banks are pushing back on how tests work.

The big four banks combined to write $175.4 billion in new mortgages during the three months ended Sept. 30. That is 24% lower than what these lenders wrote a year earlier. BofA’s drop noted below is a big contributor to the overall drop. Wells Fargo originated $89 billion in new mortgages, down 12% from the [...]

Usually I don’t repeat foreclosure numbers, for a variety of reasons. But the latest numbers were so bad I had to say something: the number of notices of default jumps 25.9% from the second quarter. An estimated 71,275 notices of default were filed against California properties during the three months that ended Sept. 30, with [...]

One of the questions that folks in the mortgage conference hallways were asking was, “With BofA leaving correspondent, is someone like Chase going to be next?” There is a big difference between hallway chatter and Bloomberg headlines like “MetLife May Sell Mortgage Business.” Here’s the gist: Chief Executive Officer Steven Kandarian, who took the job [...]

Comparing performance of Bank of America vs. Wells Fargo is interesting study, and is much more than an $8.8 billion loss compared to a $3.95 billion gain. Bank of America “trimmed roughly 151,000 loans from its portfolio of delinquent and discontinued mortgages in the second quarter through foreclosure or short sales. However, there are still [...]

JPMorgan Chase weighed in with 2Q earnings results, the first of the “big boys” that smaller mortgage banks follow closely. The company had net income of $5.4 billion on revenue of $27.4 billion, up 7% from the prior year. Here’s an excerpt on their mortgage business: “With respect to our mortgage portfolio, delinquency and net [...]

In their June Home Price Monitor, JP Morgan revised down their peak-to-trough home price forecast to -37%. This means they’re estimating home prices to drop 4-5% lower than today to reach bottom in mid-2012. They acknowledge that local home price variability is wide. Below are key excerpts, a table, and link to the full report. [...]

JPMorgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke if regulators have gone too far by reining in the U.S. banking system and are slowing economic growth. “Dimon asked whether the central banker has measured the cumulative effects of new capital requirements, mortgage standards and other rules imposed on the system in [...]