The October surprises are now coming fast and furious as Obama’s lead is slipping in most polls and on Intrade. So empty gestures to boost turnout in his heretofore spurned Democratic party base are the order of the day.
I’m a day behind on this item, but nevertheless thought it was so cynical as to merit special notice.
Read more...Reuters describes how one of the funds that was first to get on the “buy single family homes out of foreclosure and rent them” bandwagon has decided to exit.
Read more...By Marcy Wheeler. Cross posted from emptywheel
As TPM’s Ryan Reilly noted yesterday, among the awards Attorney General Eric Holder gave out at yesterday’s Attorney General’s Award Ceremony was a Distinguished Service Award to John Durham’s investigative team that chose not to prosecute Jose Rodriguez or the torturers who killed their victims.
Read more...By Michael Olenick, creator of NASTIACO, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data
The meaning of the word “chutzpah” varies by context. In criminal court, it might refer to murdering one’s parents then asking for leniency because the perpetrator is an orphan. In family court, it might be invoked when abandoning a child, then pleading the child has been alienated from the parent who left.
We now have a property court usage: perpetrating a massive, well documented fraud then complaining that court bottlenecks – which exist solely because of fraud perpetrated by bank lawyers – cause expensive delays.
Read more...There’s an interesting sign of homebuyer champing at the bit to lever up again with all the “housing has bottomed” talk in a New York Times article last week, “Scrutiny for Home Appraisers as the Market Struggles.” The headline signals the new complaint about appraisers: they aren’t rubber stamping deals entered into by willing buyers and sellers! They are therefore holding back the housing market!
While this frustration among housing enthusiasts is a squeaky wheel in the housing market that probably does warrant comment by the Grey Lady, there are more serious market failures in appraisal land that also deserve attention.
Read more...In case you had any doubts about the wisdom of state-level actions to strengthen homeowner rights, the discovery of a new type of abuse, computerized robosigning, should put them to rest.
Read more...Last week, we saw a host of commentators rush to defend the mini October surprise of a sign of life from the heretofore moribund Mortgage Task Force, in the form of a filing by Eric Schneiderman against JP Morgan for fraud charges under New York’s Martin Act, even though we and others took a dim view of the suit. And even though a bit more information has come out, it doesn’t change our view that this and parallel cases (which the Mortgage Task Force has said it will launch) will be settled quietly, well after the election, perhaps even after Schneiderman’s current term expires, for comparatively little.
Read more...Just because the banks are on one side of an issue does not always mean they are wrong, just that they might be right for the wrong reason.
Read more...It looks like Eric Schneiderman is living up to his track record as an “all hat, no cattle” prosecutor. Readers may recall that he filed a lawsuit against the mortgage registry MERS just on the heels of Obama’s announcement that he was forming a mortgage fraud task force. The MERS filing was a useful balm for Schneiderman’s reputation, since it preserved his “tough guy” image, at least for the moment, and allowed his backers to contend that he had outplayed the Administration.
By contrast, we were skeptical of the suit, both in timing and in substance, and thought it had substantial hurdles to overcome. Indeed, despite invoking an impressive-sounding $2 billion in lost recording fees and other harm, the suit settled for a mere $25 million.
Schneiderman has churned out another lawsuit that the Obama boosters and those unfamiliar with this beat might mistakenly see as impressive.
Read more...Wellie, on schedule, we have our October surprise.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Eric Schneiderman has filed against JP Morgan for mortgage securitizations created and sold by its Bear Stearns subsidiary. I don’t yet have a copy of the claim and will update the post when I get it.
The article indicates that the Bear suit will serve as a template for other mortgage-securitization-related litigation against major originators.
Read more...Gretchen Morgenson has a good piece up today which again proves that no matter how bad you think the mortgage settlement is, it’s worse.
Read more...The mortgage settlement looks to be every bit as bad as cynics predicted. The most exacting and detailed reporting on the settlement terms came from attorney Abigail Field, who undertook the painful process of reading the entire agreement and making sense of what the detailed terms meant. And the latest word from the settlement monitor Joseph Smith is yet another confirmation of the settlement process as enforcement theater.
Read more...Established Naked Capitalism readers may have noticed that I’ve avoided commenting on the Elizabeth Warren/Scott Brown race in Massachusetts. That’s largely because this is a finance and economics blog, and aside from the fact that the Warren candidacy has led lots of out of state financial firms to pour money into the Brown campaign, the discussion of issues in that particular race hasn’t entered into terrain that would merit a stand-alone post (and Lambert’s able campaign coverage has chronicled their noteworthy dust-ups). And we criticized her decision to run for the Senate; we’ve said repeatedly that there were better uses for her talents and access to media if she wanted to help ordinary Americans.
But in a new post, Adam Levitin raises an issue that warrants more disclosure from Brown.
Read more...April Charney sent me a link to a post which had a condescending explanation of a recent piece by FICO that warrants further discussion. The FICO article attempted to justify its position that someone who enters into a short sale gets his credit score dinged as badly as for a foreclosure. Yes, you read that correctly. One of the reasons many borrowers go to the effort to arrange a short sale, as opposed to the faster and easier process of “jingle mail” is that they assume that the damage to their credit score will be lower.
Here is the rationale….
Read more...It’s hard to tell whether the situation described in an article the New Haven Register is very unusual, or just under the radar by design. But either way, it does not pass the smell test.
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