Author name: Ricky Vasquez

This summer, San Diego municipal leaders were forced to allow more dense housing along transit lines to comply with a new state law. Now a court may decide to rid even more barriers to housing density after pro-housing organizations sued, alleging that cities disqualified too many urban parcels in their maps, now subject to state […]

For decades, the Agency Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) market operated on an implicit, foundational constant: a loan’s representative credit score meant Classic FICO. Capital markets desks built trading algorithms around it, risk engines calibrated duration based on it and specified pool buyers paid billions in pay-ups resting on their predictable prepayment behavior. That baseline is shifting.

We love it when a plan comes together. Heading into yesterday’s Fed announcement, the hope was that a rate hike would reassure investors in longer-term bonds (like those that underlie mortgage rates). We also didn’t expect that benefit to necessarily play out on the day of the hike itself (it didn’t).  In fact, Fed day