One can debate whether and how much aid subprime borrowers deserve, but a pair of articles Wednesday illustrates how difficult it will be to come up with any form of relief. In an underreported story, the FDIC hosted a session that included banking and mortgage industry leaders, legislators, investment bankers, and representatives from the SEC, […]
Read more...In theory, Monday’s Supreme Court decision to bar state oversight of subsidiaries of federally chartered banks was simply a confirmation of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s efforts to assert (and some would say extend) its authority, but the effect is to end the dual structure which permitted both federal and state regulation […]
Read more...The Housing Bubble Blog today features “YKYAAFB When….” which stands for “you know you are a fucked borrower”. And many are insightful as well as revealing: Some readers suggested a topic about how a borrower might know they are overextended. “On a thread yesterday somebody made a: ‘You know you’re a redneck when…’ joke. It […]
Read more...Although it hasn’t gotten much attention in the business press yet, the House Financial Services Committee is on the warpath to clean up subprime mortgage lending. Most of their ideas, such as tighter regulation of mortgage brokers, strike observers as reasonable. But one has created a great deal of alarm. The concept is “assignee liability,” […]
Read more...So far, it hasn’t gotten much attention in the mainstream business press, but Bloomberg and the Financial Times are very much on top of the story: the House Financial Services Committee is moving forward with proposals to impose new regulations on subprime lending. And Democrats and Republicans are largely on the same page. There are […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports that the National Association of Realtors has cut its forecast for 2007, from a fall in median sale price of 0.7%. The IMF also issued a report cutting its growth estimate for the US from 2.9% to 2.2%, based on the detrioration of the housing market. This is bigger news […]
Read more...Calculated Risk pointed us to a Washington Post article that highlighted the sharp increase in member defaults in condominiums and other homeowners’ associations. It’s yet another sign that the troubles we are seeing in the housing market aren’t simply subprime related, but indicative of the unwinding of a broader phenomenon, namely, the unwinding of a […]
Read more...A story today in the Baltimore Sun, which we found via The Housing Bubble Blog, suggests that foreclosures may be increasing faster than anticipated in some widely-cited mortgage market analyses. There are two troubling data points in this article. The first is that foreclosures are increasing at a rapid pace in the suburbs, a year-to-year […]
Read more...It’s a sad reflection of the times that we need to bone up on such matters, but this post at Calculated Risk goes into some detail on the terminology and process of foreclosures. It’s titled “Foreclosure Sales and REO For UberNerds.” I didn’t find it nerdy (my threshold is papers that have more formulas than […]
Read more...This post came from Yahoo Finance via Calculated Risk: Foreclosure Radar reports: California Foreclosure Sales Near $2B in March Of the $2B worth of properties sold in March, 4,796 [of 5,316] went back to the lender after receiving no bids, representing $1.82B. I’m pretty sure that all 5,316 properties, even the 4,796 that are now […]
Read more...In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess to having been wrong, but at least for the right reasons. I took issue with a post at The Street Light some time ago that assumed that commercial real estate defaults would be at the same level as residential. There wasn’t much logic to the reasoning […]
Read more...As you may have noticed, there was a lot of interesting non-housing stuff today, so I am a bit late to this very good post, from Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture: For those of you that follow this space, you definitely want to go read the latest work via Yale professor Robert J. Shiller […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal reports tonight on its website, and presumably tomorrow in its print edition, that Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday that ongoing issues in the subprime mortgage market could force bank regulators to rethink their enforcement of a 30-year-old law that requires banks to serve the credit needs in their communities…. […]
Read more...Faithful readers may have read our recent posts on the limits to the Fed’s regulatory authority, both relative to the subprime mess and to the proliferation of new instruments (see here and here and here). We had the spectacle last week of Roger Cole, the Federal Reserve’s director of supervision and regulation appearing before the […]
Read more...This is a great post by Tanta at Calculated Risk on the classic types of mortgage frauds and how they morphed into new forms due to a unique confluence of buyer naivete and broker/originator greed (oh, and sometimes buyer greed too). She clearly discusses recent versus traditional procedures. Tanta lays considerable blame at the lending […]
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