The housing bulls seem unable to contain themselves. Today, in a prominently featured Bloomberg story, “Sales of New U.S. Homes Exceeded Estimates in March,” experts cheerily discuss a “firming” housing market and call for a bottom this year. Funny how these predictions for a real estate recovery seem to be a moving target.
Read more...I’m not looking forward to months of pre-election image-burnishing fabrication. The nausea-inducing offering of the day, The Man the Banks Fear Most from the American Prospect, gives us an idea of what we have in store.
The good news is that this revisionist history on the craven sellout by Eric Schneiderman on the mortgage settlement appears to be in response to a damaging New York Daily News article last week.
Read more...Banks are manipulating the housing supply in an attempt to reignite a bubble to hide their losses, a strategy that’s temporarily working.
Read more...There’s nothing like watching someone who is already in a hole dig deeper.
Read more...The Administration has managed the impressive task of operating in a more cynical fashion than even its worst critics predicted.
Read more...Eric Schneiderman is finding out he sold out to the Administration for far too little.
Read more...One of our ongoing frustrations about media coverage of the mortgage mess is its failure to pay much attention to ample evidence of substantial servicer overcharges to borrowers. It’s bad enough that that happens, but far worse is that when servicers are told that they’ve been caught out, they refuse to make corrections and stonewall court-ordered remedies.
The facts that have surfaced in before one bankruptcy judge, Elizabeth Magner of the Eastern District of Louisiana, and one servicer, Wells Fargo, should give industry defenders pause.
Read more...The interaction of immovable objects and inexorable forces is seldom pretty. One example is housing finance in the US. If no one blinks, an ugly situation could get even worse.
Read more...A ruling in the Retirement Board of the Policemen’s Annuity and Benefit Fund of the City of Chicago et al v. Bank of New York Mellon is a game-changer in mortgage investor litigation.
Read more...Ben Geddes of the Florida Coastal School of Law, working with April Charney, has been putting together Google Maps of vacant properties in Jacksonville, with the aim of cataloging all of Jacksonville and northeastern Florida.
These images help give a sense of the scale of the problem in high distress areas.
Read more...Recall when yours truly attended Americatalyst, a real housing/mortgage nerd conference last November, and the panel that was asked to forecast housing had no one predicting more than a 2-3% decline? I was gobsmacked because no one seemed to be acknowledging the huge number of foreclosures in process plus those likely to happen (“shadow inventory”).
Moody’s has focused on one aspect of the issue and does not like what it sees.
Read more...By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, 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
While researching a HUD database for clues on Thomas Lawler, the frequently-cited foreclosure and heavy-metal loving “housing economist” often cited by the business media, and a favorite of Calculated Risk, I came across background information that raises more questions than it answers.
Starting in 1998 Thomas Lawler held the job of SVP Portfolio Management, SVP Financial Strategy, and SVP of Risk Strategy at Fannie Mae until he unceremoniously left in January, 2006, following an $8 billion financial fraud that occurred under his watch.
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Yves here. I hope you’ll take the time to read this important post. There has been a great deal of discussion of the many deficiencies of the mortgage settlement, but its biggest has gone pretty much unnoticed. It isn’t just that the settlement gives the banks a close to free pass for past predatory, illegal conduct, but it also has such lax servicing standards and weak enforcement provisions so as to give the banks license to carry on with servicing abuses.
By Abigail Caplovitz Field, a freelance writer and attorney who blogs at Reality Check
The mortgage settlement signed by 49 states and every Federal law enforcer allows the rampant foreclosure fraud currently choking our courts to continue unabated. Yes, I realize the pretty servicing standards language of Exhibit A promises the banks will completely overhaul their standard operating procedures and totally clean up their acts. But promises are empty if they’re not honored, and worthless if not enforceable.
We know Bailed-Out Bankers’ promises are empty, so what matters is if the agreement is enforceable. And when it comes to all things foreclosure fraud, the enforcement provisions are laughable. But before I detail why, let’s be clear: I’m not being hyperbolic.
Read more...It might surprise readers to learn that economists are still debating whether low interest rates in countries like Ireland and Spain were responsible for their housing bubbles. A new paper by Christian Hott and Terhi Jokipii at VoxEU looked at housing prices in 14 OECD countries from 1985 onward to assess the impact of protracted periods of low short term interest rates. Their conclusion was that they explained up to 50% of housing overvaluation in bubble-afflicted markets.
The interesting part of the paper is that they created a model for fundamental housing market values:
Read more...No wonder Geithner and the other financial regulators complained about Sheila Bair not being a team player. If you want to do what is expedient and you are confronted with someone who cares about fixing the problem, then yes, they aren’t on your side. And bully for them.
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