Ezra Klein demonstrated how far he’s has to descend into the Humpty Dumpty world of words meaning just what he chooses them to mean in order to defend failed Administration policies.
Read more...We are in the midst of a sea change in terms of the relationship of ordinary Americans to the housing market. Policymakers are not only in denial as to its magnitude, but are actively enabling courses of action that are likely to prove destructive.
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
Every day a growing crescendo of housing cheerleaders posit the end of the foreclosure crisis. We’re flipping our way out of the mess that we flipped ourselves into, is their usual line of reasoning. I’ve looked at national data, local data, and even data on my own block here in Florida. I tried to make the evidence prove the market has found a genuine, sustainable bottom. There are clearly gimmicks giving a temporary boost, a great PR campaign that may or may not be coordinated, and some foreclosure flippers that may do well, until they don’t. But the evidence is overwhelming: home prices are anything but stable.
Read more...On the one hand, the dismal failure of the Administration’s cosmetic responses to the foreclosure mess is so evident that the New York Times is willing to acknowledge it, via a first page article titled, “Cautious Moves on Foreclosures Haunting Obama.” On the other, what the story offers is a whitewash, not an analysis.
Read more...While MERS has served to illustrate the utter recklessness of the securitization industry, in that its promoters apparently believed that they could implement it nationwide and simply force state law to comply. But as the banks have found out, the law is not always so obliging.
Read more...Although consumer-level “move your money” campaigns are popular, the sad thing is that many individuals are only marginally profitable as checking/savings account customers. So transferring your account out does not have enough of an impact to make a difference (unless you do so in a way that makes branch staff uncomfortable, by doing it in person and describing their banks’ bad behavior. Enough of that might make a psychological difference). The key to retail customer profitability is cross selling, usually at the time of account opening. So the checking account is the gateway product for them to get customers to sign up for retirement accounts/brokerage, credit cards, and (hopefully sooner rather than later) mortgages.
By contrast, bigger customers who use multiple products are a sweet spot for banks.
Read more...Readers may know I don’t do political endorsements. I’m making an exception because I’ve worked with Lisa Epstein and am extremely impressed with her knowledge, energy, and tenacity. And separately, readers may have come to recognize that county clerks and registers of deeds can be very important guards of the integrity of property records and legal processes. But only a very few, such as Jeff Thigpen in Guilford County, NC, and John O’Brien in Southern Essex County, Massachusetts, have bothered to investigate their own files and speak up about the large-scale problems they have unearthed.
Lisa is an oncology nurse who has become a self trained and formidable mortgage document and foreclosure procedures (as in abuse) expert.
Read more...The CFPB is proving to be tough minded on the mortgage front. The Wall Street Journal reports that it intends to require banks to consider a modification request before proceeding with a foreclosure:
Read more...All this talk of firing Ed DeMarco seems to have led him to decide to live up to his reputation.
Read more...Robert Shiller of the Case Shiller Index, spoke to Fox Business earlier this week (hat tip Ed Harrison). In this short chat, he stresses that the rise in housing prices so far this year look very encouraging, but could prove to be seasonal. He also points out that he is seeing what may be early bubble behavior in San Francisco and Phoenix, and even in Chicago and Atlanta.
If that is indeed happening, it’s not a bug but a feature.
Read more...If there’s any way for banks to cut the cake to work to their advantage, they do.
One example that has not gotten attention is that servicers will complete all the steps of a foreclosure, sometimes even scheduling the sheriff’s sale, and then not put in a bid.
Read more...Today, Acting FHFA Director Ed DeMarco wrote to Congress, after due consideration, reaffirming his position that he will not permit Fannie and Freddie to lower principal balances of mortgages of borrowers that are delinquent. This is despite the fact that the top analyst in this space, Laurie Goodman, has determined that principal modifications are the most effective form of mortgage modification, resulting in much lower refault rates than interest rate mods or capitalization mods. And that makes sense. Why should a borrower struggle to hang on to a home when even if they make all the payments, when they sell they they are stuck with a big tax bill? And as we’ve stressed, private label investors are overwhelmingly in favor of deep principal mods for viable borrowers, and that’s because foreclosure is costly and leaves them worse off.
As much as this blogger is firmly of the view that this is a poor economic decision (deep principal mods are a sound idea, as long as you have a decent approach for vetting borrower income and other debt payments to see if they are viable with a mod), I have to hand it to DeMarco as a bureaucratic infighter.
Read more...Romney may be determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of a possible victory. Business Insider reports that the newest addition to the list of possible VP candidates is…Florida’s Pam Bondi
Read more...On Monday, the financial services industry association (aka lobbying group) SIFMA said that it would exclude mortgages in localities that had condemned mortgages from the to-be-announced market, which is an important source of liquidity for new Fannie and Freddie loans. The promoters of the program, Mortgage Resolution Partners, issued a wounded-sounding response.
So what does this all mean? The short answer is that on the surface, this looks like a clever bit of banker thuggery.
Read more...This Bloomberg story is consistent with our current thesis: that despite the buoyancy of the stock market, conventional wisdom has it that a “recovery” is on and that the economy is on firmer footing than it really is.
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