News

Embrace Home Loans recently announced that former CEO of Lenders One, Jeff McGuiness, has joined the national lender as its chief sales officer. McGuiness will assume responsibility for all three of Embrace’s production channels, including retail, consumer direct, and bank fulfillment, comprising of more than 275 loan officers and 50 locations nationwide.

Two hearings examining the activities of government agencies and two hearings covering the nation's monetary policy and economy will take place in Congress this week. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will be the lone witness in the two hearings on monetary policy.

Although home sales in the U.S. have reached their highest peak since 2007 during the first four months of 2015, foreign homebuyers are not adding to these growing sales. According to a blog by Frank Nothaft, CoreLogic’s chief economist, in relation to the same period one year ago, home sales jumped 9 percent with the help of lower fixed mortgage rates by one-half percentage point, but foreign buyers did not help with this increase.

The issuance of new U.S. prime jumbo residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) is set to exceed last year’s levels thanks to a strong second quarter of RMBS issuance, according to Fitch Ratings’ quarterly U.S. Prime Jumbo RMBS Trends report. The Fitch report notes that eight jumbo RMBS deals came to market in second-quarter 2015 from six issuers.

Consumer expectations for the housing market are showing a slightly more positive outlook for the U.S. economy, according to The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Center for Microeconomic Data June 2015 Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) released on Monday.

Stewart Title Guaranty Company recently announced in a press release that Tony Hale will join the team as western states agency district sales director, a new role in the company’s Agency Services Group. Hale will be responsible for building an effective sales strategy to attract new independent agencies and serve existing agencies in his new role.

Altisource Residential Corporation recently announced in a press release that Ashish Pandey has decided to step down as CEO of the company, effective June 30, 2015. Pandey stated that he will purse personal interests in India following his departure from Altisource.

Rick Sharga, EVP of Auction.com, discusses the June housing data and its impact on the overall market in a recent video released by the company. In the video, Sharga talks about the positive results seen in existing home sales, new home sales, and home price data. He questions whether this means the housing market is fully recovered and concludes that the market has not completely recovered and is still improving from previous years.

Today, Federal Reserve Chair Janet L. Yellen delivered a speech at the City Club of Cleveland in Cleveland, Ohio speaking on the recent developments within the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) and the economic outlook moving forward. Yellen addressed issues like recession recovery, labor market conditions, inflation developments, economic outlook, monetary policy, long-run economic growth.

Witnesses at a recent House Financial Services Committee hearing testified the Dodd-Frank Act has "reduced financial stability" and made Americans worse off financially in the controversial law's first five years of existence. The hearing, titled "Dodd-Frank Five Years Later: Are We More Stable?" was the first in a series of three full Committee hearings to examine the impact Dodd-Frank has had on American consumers and the country's financial system and economy since President Obama signed it in to law in July 2010.