High profile mortgage industry lawsuits will continue for some time and I’ll continue covering them. Here are three lesser known suits that have bubbled up. (1) Taylor, Bean & Whitaker: the gift that keeps on giving. Most, if not every, mortgage company has an accounting firm. In what could be a very closely watched case, [...]

-S&P, Moody’s Downgraded to Irrelevant (SmartMoney) -U.S. Moving Away From Reliance On Ratings (Dealbreaker) -Loans With Mortgage Insurance Less Likely To Default (NatlMortgagePro) -Is CFPB Already Helping Banks, Not Borrowers? (HSH) -The Cult That’s Destroying America (Krugman) -10 Google+ Tips & Tricks (Mashable)

Rates were down slightly last week but there’s reason for caution coming into this week: there’s no deal yet on U.S. budget proposals and until there’s a budget agreement, the U.S. debt ceiling won’t be raised. The U.S. will reach its borrowing limit August 2, but it takes time to process legislation and money flows [...]

Moody’s Cuts Greece To Junk Moody’s cut Greece’s credit ratings to junk status (Ba1). Greece has been downgraded to non investment grade and Spain cannot seem to find any funding to rescue its savings banks. Of course, the rate on any fixed income security tied to Europe has gone up to compensate investors for the [...]

Signs of Life In Jumbo Mortgages There are definitely signs of the ice cracking in non-agency (or Jumbo) lending. For example, folks in the biz know that Quicken Loans is the largest online mortgage lender. But in recent weeks Quicken, who is also the 4th largest FHA lender, has moved into “private-label” originations. PHH, according [...]

Why You Shouldn’t Give Out Your Social Security Number On The Radio Does the name “Todd Davis” ring a bell? He is the CEO of a company called LifeLock, and he made the news a while back by broadcasting his Social Security Number in radio ads to show confidence that his identity couldn’t be stolen. [...]

Rates Up On New Home Sales & Durable Goods Numbers Today we had Durable Goods (very volatile) and a big New Home Sales number. Durable Goods were expected to be +.3% for March and originally reported as +.5% in February, the third consecutive monthly increase (although most of the gain in February’s number was due [...]

As most know from our weekly coverage over the last 64 weeks, the Fed has been using a $1.25 trillion budget to buy mortgage bonds since January 1, 2009 in order to elevate mortgage bond prices and push rates down. Rates are 1.125% lower than they were when the program was announced, and the Fed [...]

Porn King Offers Foreclosure Rescue To Octomom I couldn’t make this stuff up. “Octomom” is facing foreclosure, and a leading adult entertainment kingpin is offering to pay her mortgage. Only in America! What Happens to FHA Approvals When Lenders Merge or Acquire? Dear Abbey, “If a mid-sized lender that is not doing any FHA loans [...]

This report covers weeks 62-63 of a mortgage bond purchase program by the Federal Reserve—here’s weeks 60-61. In the last two weeks, the Fed bought $20b net of mortgage bonds as follows: $10b March 4-10, $10b March 11-17. For the past 6 months, the Fed has focused most of its weekly buying on 4.5% and [...]