Mortgage-backed Securities, Mortgage | featured news

With the Federal Reserve buying billions of dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities, you might think that mortgage rates are poised to fall even lower than the current rock-bottom levels. Maybe you should wait on that refinancing, you wonder, or delay purchasing a house until the market is even more favorable.

California is trying to determine whether BofA and its Countrywide Financial subsidiary sold investments backed by risky mortgages to investors in California under false pretenses, a source says. Investigators with the state attorney general's office have subpoenaed Bank of America Corp. in connection with the sale and marketing of troubled mortgage-backed securities to California investors, according to a person familiar with the probe.

A bellwether index of subprime mortgage bonds rallied, a day after the New York Fed suspended further auctions of so-called Maiden Lane II securities acquired in the AIG bailout.

Two lawmakers are set to unveil legislation to replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac with at least five private companies that would issue mortgage-backed securities with explicit federal guarantees.

Bank of America Corp's Countrywide mortgage unit has been sued by investors claiming they were victimized in a "massive fraud" when they bought mortgage-backed securities.

The board that sets U.S. accounting standards voted to adopt guidelines that could reduce the losses banks have been forced to report as the values of their securities have crumbled.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner will lay out a bank-rescue plan on Tuesday that will rely on public and private funds to take $500 billion of bad assets off banks' books, sources said.