Charles Smith at Seeking Alpha has an interesting post estimating that the number of people living in their homes but not paying their mortgages — people delinquent on their mortgages, people in foreclosure, strategic defaulters and others — might be as high as 4.4 million. He uses FDIC and More…
RealtyTrac reports that foreclosures reached their highest-ever level in March: “[F]ilings were reported on 367,056 properties in March, an increase of nearly 19 percent from the previous month, an increase of nearly 8 percent from March 2009 and the highest monthly total since RealtyTrac began issuing its report in More…
Today, a report from the Congressional Oversight Panel faults the Treasury Department’s efforts to stem the tide of foreclosures:
Treasury’s response continues to lag well behind the pace of the crisis. As of February 2010, only 168,708 homeowners have received final, five-year loan modifications — a small fraction of
As a quick follow to Annie’s nice wrap of yesterday’s gathering of the commission investigating the recent financial crack-up, it’s worth noting that Alan Greenspan — once contrite about the “flaw” surrounding his blind trust in free markets — is now making the claim that he’d been More…
Megan pointed this out more than a week ago, but today the editorialists at The New York Times are also highlighting the central flaw of the updated foreclosure prevention program announced by the White House last month: While the government offers financial More…
Subprime and even prime adjustable rate mortgages were one of the many triggers of the collapse of the housing market because, when the introductory rates ended, lenders often significantly and suddenly raised rates and thus monthly payments for many borrowers. Economists have been predicting that a new raft of rate More…
To much fanfare, the Obama administration a year ago launched a $75 billion program designed to prevent foreclosures by providing financial incentives to lenders and servicers who modified mortgages to keep them affordable. The program, the White House said, would reach between 3 and 4 million struggling homeowners. More…
A few weeks back, it was the House Oversight Committee’s domestic subpanel that examined the effectiveness of the White House programs designed to curb foreclosures. (They weren’t pleased.) Now, the full committee will have a crack.
Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the Oversight panel, just announced a More…
Long before the financial crisis, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were synonymous with moral hazard in the minds and classrooms of most economists. Everyone (including Fannie and Freddie) believed that if they got into trouble by making risky investments, the government would bail them out. Of course, the feeling that More…
Less then a month after the announcement that the federal government was going to start an incentive program to encourage buyers and banks to sell houses at depressed values without foreclosures, David Streitfeld of The New York Times has the details — and they’re a little More…
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