SEC eyeing firms on mortgage pricing

U.S. regulators are probing how financial firms priced mortgage securities and if they told investors about the declining value of those securities, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The SEC is looking at UBS AG and Morgan Stanley, in addition to previously reported investigations of Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. and The Bear Stearns Cos. Inc. regarding their valuation methods, people close to the situation told the Journal.
The probes are among the roughly three dozen investigations opened by the SEC tied to the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market, which is primarily tied to low-end borrowers, according to the report.
The regulators are also looking at whether the Wall Street firms put higher values on their own securities than on the ones they assigned to customers’ holdings, the Journal reported.