Guess who wrote this and when:
“We are sitting on a time bomb,” the mortgage analyst said — a huge increase in unconventional home loans like balloon mortgages taken out by consumers who cannot qualify for regular mortgages. The high payments, he continued, “are just beginning to come due and
This weekend, the New York Times featured an unusual story on housing. Its argument goes like this: The government has done a lot to ensure that home prices do not slide too precipitously. But houses are still too expensive — and if the government were to pull its interventions, More…
A recently released convict describes how the foreclosure crisis changed the economy in prison:
[B]lack market prices were suddenly going through the roof. The price of a deck of smokes tripled. There was an actual economic reason about this.
At FireDogLake, David Dayen has done great work to show how the Home Affordable Modification Program — the Obama’s signature effort to keep financially distressed homeowners in their homes — has not just failed, but has actually hurt the people it is meant to help.
Today, Neil Barofsky, the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or SIGTARP — in layman’s terms, the government’s watchdog over the program to stabilize the banking sector and housing market — released a quarterly report on how things are going. TARP programs did well to stabilize More…
Today, the Department of Housing and Urban Development released a new monthly scorecard on the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP — the Obama administration’s signature effort to keep underwater and distressed homeowners in their homes.
The report is, well, not great. And the accompanying press release is More…
Fannie Mae, the ailing government-sponsored entity that buys mortgages on the secondary market, has bumped up penalties for strategic defaulters. Now, it will lock out anyone who could afford to pay her mortgage but chooses not to, and defaults instead, for seven years.
It is not entirely More…
Despite the media and political attention paid to strategic default, we actually don’t know that much about it. The phenomenon is as old as the Great Depression, but has not been common in decades. We do not know how prevalent it has become. We do not know the More…
As I’ve noted on the blog, since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September 2008, their roles in the housing market have changed dramatically. They aren’t profit-motivated, but stability-motivated, a government liquidity instrument to make sure mortgages remain affordable despite the credit crunch and housing More…
In a new study, the Center for Responsible Lending analyzes the demographics of the foreclosure crisis, and finds that foreclosure has disproportionately impacted black and Latino homeowners. All in all, a home owned by a black family is 76 percent more likely to go through foreclosure than a home More…
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