MBIA sues Countrywide

Confirming the insurance industry habit of substituting claims adjustment for underwriting diligence, MBIA is suing Countrywide according to Housing Wire:

The breach-of-contract lawsuit, filed in New York State’s Supreme Court, suggested that Countrywide developed a “systematic pattern and practice of abandoning its own guidelines for loan origination,” in effort to inflate its market share during the mortgage-lending boom. MBIA accused Countrywide of knowingly negotiating riskier loans “no matter the cost to borrowers, investors or guarantors like MBIA.”...

Overall, the case involves 10 residential mortgage-backed securitizations of more than $14B in mortgage loans.

This is going to be interesting. On the one hand, it seems obvious that mortgage quality did decline in the last years of the Greenspan boom. But can MBIA really prove that Countrywide abandoned its own loan underwriting standards - rather than simply changing them to adjust to `market conditions' - and that that was a breach of contract of the financial guarantees? If it can, we are going to see a lot more wriggling from the wrappers, and the lesson from Hollywood Funding - that insurers can't always be trusted to pay when you think they have written protection - will be driven home to a lot more people.