In Wednesday’s edition of The Scoop, we ruminated on the earth shifting very suddenly in the servicing world. A day later, Chris Whalen shared an intriguing take on why PennyMac got rocked so hard: Bill Pulte & Team Trump. According to Whalen, Fannie & Freddie bought so much MBS in Q4 that they distorted the market.

“This market manipulation tightened mortgage spreads 15-20 bps and increased mortgage prepayment speeds without a corresponding offset from hedges in the Treasury market,” Whalen wrote. “This set up PennyMac and other mortgage lenders for a disaster."

We’ll touch more on that in today’s edition of The Scoop, plus the freshest GSE securitization data, ICE’s earnings & more. And just for Mortgage Scoop Insiders, we’ll dig into the implications of Experian’s fascinating Own Up acquisition & what it means for retail LOs (scroll to the bottom 👇 plz). 

(🙏 If you like what you’re reading, tell a fellow mortgage junkie to sign up here.)

Whalen says that MBS spreads have tightened another 10 bps since the Jan. 8 announcement that the GSEs would hoover up an additional $200B of their own MBS.

“Trump’s order was aimed at lowering high mortgage rates and boosting housing affordability, but instead he caused significant losses for some mortgage lenders and investors,” he wrote. “Specifically, the MBS purchases by Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac increased demand for bonds, which helped decrease mortgage rates – but only for a brief time. The appreciation of MBS crushed buyers of interest-only securities (IOs), as model speeds for prepayments are now faster and option-adjusted spread (OAS) values lower. How is this helpful?”

To Whelan’s point, an IMF analysis of bank earnings showed that servicing was the main cause for Q4 declines. Fourteen banks reported a combined $509M in net servicing income in Q4, down $119M, or 19%, from Q3. JPMorgan Chase alone reported a $43M decline in servicing income. Check out our reporting from Wednesday here.

Total agency MBS issuance was $116.8B in December ‘25, compared to $121.3B in November ‘25 (a decrease of 3.7%) and $95.4B in December ‘24 (an increase of 22.4%). A decrease in month-to-month issuance between November & December has been observed in each of the past five years. 

Fannie Mae issued $30.8B in December ‘25, compared to $31.4B in November ‘25 (a decrease of 1.9%) and $26.9B in December ‘24 (an increase of 14.5%). Freddie Mac issued $37.1B in December ‘25, compared to $37.9B in November ‘25 (a decrease of 2.1%) and $27.2B in December ‘24 (an increase of 36.4%). Freddie Mac accounted for 54.6% of the conventional market share in December ‘25. For the full year, Freddie Mac grew conventional new issuance origination market share of 52.4% in ‘25, up from 50.9% in ‘24. 

Ginnie Mae issued $48.8B in December ‘25, compared to $52.0B in November ‘25 (a decrease of 6.2%) and $41.3B in December ‘24 (an increase of 18.2%). Ginnie Mae accounted for 41.8% of total agency securitizations in December ‘25, down from 42.9% in December ‘24. 

This report is brought to you by Milliman. Milliman provides strategic and quantitative consulting services across the mortgage market with expertise in origination, servicing and capital investment. 

Source: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae MBS Data Disclosure

The reaction on LinkedIn to Experian’s acquisition of mortgage marketplace Own Up has been largely what you’d expect: They’re buying up a mortgage marketplace b/c they’re losing trigger leads. They’ll use the acquisition to stack the deck in favor of their biggest credit clients, etc. This is a nothing burger 🍔 . 

But I believe the acquisition is a very big deal, & it has nothing to do w/ trigger leads: Experian acquiring Own Up is further evidence of the rapidly evolving Big Data-AI Mortgage model. Companies like Rocket, NerdWallet, Credit Karma, Red Ventures (Bankrate) & Experian are spending billions of dollars to stand up marketplaces that get to consumers first 👀 & don’t rely on real estate agents. They’re also getting better at it.

Heck, we just saw Bed Bath & Beyond make a play w/ Figure to get the customer on a platform w/ mortgage services. That’s not a casual decision.

The reality is that few mortgage lenders understand how to utilize data at scale, which makes them vulnerable in future cycles. For Mortgage Scoop Insiders, we break down what this deal means for the broader mortgage industry.