Michael Bright, who tendered his resignation as acting president of Ginnie Mae, is headed for a securitization industry trade group. The Structured Finance Industry Group announced Thursday that it had named Bright as its president and CEO, effective Jan. 21. The post has been vacant since Richard Johns resigned in July amid a reported split with the group's board over compensation and advocacy results. Bright will lead SFIG’s education, policy and advocacy initiatives, which include...

The thing Michael Bright is most proud of as interim head of Ginnie Mae is his effort to combat churn in Department of Veterans Affairs-guaranteed mortgages. Rising cashout refinancing of VA loans risked turning investors off and potentially signaled predatory or misleading behavior by lenders. He says this effort was greatly helped by enlisting, and listening to, lawmakers, so that instead of slapping the agency down when it policed the mortgage industry, they were “cheering us on.” Bright...

FirstKey is reverting to a mix of first- and second-lien loans for its next offering of reperforming mortgage bonds. The $656.5 million Towd Point Mortgage Trust 2010-1 is backed by 4,603 loans acquired between 2014 and 2018, 93.4% of them first liens and 6.6% of them second liens, according to rating agency presale reports. By comparison, FirstKey’s previous deal, completed in December, was backed entirely by second liens. It was the first time the sponsor, which is controlled by Cerberus,...

Regardless of whether you think the inversion of the Treasury yield curve signals a recession, or is simply an unfortunate but inevitable side effect of the Federal Reserve’s unwinding of its balance sheet, the last several weeks have been challenging. Consumer lenders that rely on the securitization market for funding are unsure exactly how slower economic growth would affect their cost of capital, since it’s unclear whether credit spreads would widen more than base rates go down, or rates...

Navient Corp. is seeking a speedy resolution to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2-year-old lawsuit against the student loan servicer. On Thursday, it filed a request with a federal judge in Pennsylvania for a summary judgment in two counts against it, accusing the CFPB of failing to provide evidence. The CFPB filed suit against Navient in January 2017, when Richard Cordray was its director, alleging the servicer had unfairly and abusively “steered” borrowers into forbearance, which...