Read Steve Schaefer’s piece on this morning’s roundtable.

For those who like the big picture, the chart compares the S&P 500 and the S&P/Case-Shiller 10-City Home Price Index.  The Home Prices were rebased to start at the same level as the S&P 500 in January 1987.

Source: S&P Dow Jones Indices, S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices

Standard & Poor’s Managing Director Vera Chaplin says: “While we are less pessimistic about global economic and credit conditions than we were in 2012, Australia’s RMBS market isn’t immune to the flow-on effects of some plausible downside global risks, such as contagion from the unresolved eurozone crisis, excessive fiscal tightening in the U.S., and a hard landing for the Chinese economy. Although less likely, rapid deterioration in the Australian economy that drives a rapid increase in unemployment and hurts house prices could adversely impact the performance of RMBS and new issuance conditions.”

Standard & Poor’s expects the strong issuance levels seen in  the past few months to continue in 2013, potentially pushing total RMBS issuance volume beyond A$20 billion. At the same time, we expect our ratings on outstanding RMBS to remain stable during the year.

See the full report here.

As of February of this year, more than 1.5 million homeowners have received a permanent modification through the U.S. federal government’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). Since the publication of our June 2012 article, there have been more than 400,000 additional modifications on outstanding mortgages (as of March 2013). This translates to roughly a 22% rate of growth in the number of modifications on an additional $2.4 billion in mortgage debt.

Under the HAMP Principal Reduction Alternative (PRA) program, which provides monetary incentives to servicers that reduce principal, borrowers have received approximately $9.6 billion in principal forgiveness as of March 2013. Interestingly, servicers have ramped up their use of principal forgiveness on loans that don’t necessarily qualify for PRA assistance. Indeed, among the top five servicers for non-agency loans, we’ve noted that principal forgiveness, as a percentage of average modifications performed on a monthly basis, has increased by about 200% since the latter half of 2011 (see Chart 1). We attribute part of this to the $25 billion settlement in February 2012 with 49 state attorneys general and these same five servicers: Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo). In fact, although principal reduction remains the least common type of loan modification among servicers, the percentage of non-agency modified loans that have received principal forgiveness has increased by 3% since June 2012 . Since 2009, servicers have forgiven principal on approximately $45 billion of outstanding non-agency mortgages.*

Click here to read S&P’s full report.

The “spagetti” chart shows how the 20 cities have performed since the composites hit bottom in March 2012. While everything is up since then, some like Phoenix are way up and others like New York are barely ahead.  Still others like Chicago appear to have peaked and fallen a bit.  (Click on the chart for a bigger image.)

The table compares the peaks and troughs of the 20 cities — where the gain was the biggest or the tumble was the largest.