Today, the Treasury Department revealed yet another scorecard for the Home Affordable Modification Program — the administration’s signature effort to stop the foreclosure crisis — showing dreary results. Here’s a good chart from Daniel Indiviglio at The Atlantic:
Today, the Obama administration announced it will spend $3 billion more to help jobless homeowners.
First, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is starting up the Emergency Homeowners Loan Program, created in the Wall Street reform bill.
Today, RealtyTrac reported that foreclosure notices increased in three out of four metro areas — cities with more than 200,000 residents — in the first six months of the year, compared with the first six months of 2009. The cities and states with the biggest bubbles and biggest collapses remained More…
Today, Edward Pinto, Fannie Mae’s chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989 and a prominent housing consultant, testified before the House Oversight Committee on the question of whether loan servicers are doing enough to prevent foreclosure and preserve homeownership. His bottom line: The Treasury Department’s Home Affordable Modification Program, More…
Sandra Monroe-Olcott of the Montclare neighborhood of Chicago is in the same position as hundreds of thousands of Americans. She lost her job on April 1, 2008. She applied for unemployment insurance — $804 every two weeks — and immediately started searching for another position. Her husband, now 74, had 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…
Today, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released its 2010 report on the state of the American housing market. The verdict? Not good, if stable. The bottom line:
The nation has not faced housing problems of this magnitude since the Great Depression. Heavy job losses and lingering high unemployment
In another sign that the foreclosure crisis might have peaked, foreclosure filings declined 3 percent in May, RealtyTrac reported this morning. Florida, Nevada, California and Arizona remain the hardest-hit states. From the report:
“The numbers in May continued and confirmed the trends we noticed in April: overall foreclosure activity
The Economic Policy Institute has posted a new study of the average duration of unemployment by state. The report shows that workers wait longest for jobs in Michigan and South Carolina, and that last month “the median length of unemployment in the United States was 21.6 weeks, up from More…
This morning, the Federal Deposit Insurance Co. announced that the banks it insures earned $18 billion in the first quarter of 2010, up $12.5 billion from the first quarter of 2009, as money set aside for loan losses decreased 17 percent. The percentage of banks losing money fell More…
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