If the 5,000 plus demonstrators that marched to the Mortgage Bankers Assocation (MBA) annual meeting in Chicago on Monday are any indication, the city has had enough of the MBA.
Today, RealtyTrac reported foreclosure and home-sale information for September and the third quarter of the year, showing an extraordinarily weak housing market. Here are just a few data points:
Yesterday, Wall Street giant J.P. Morgan Chase announced a $4.4 billion profit in the third quarter. Wall Street analysts should have cheered. Instead, they golf-clapped, while the bank’s chief executive officer, Jamie Dimon, went on the defensive on an earnings call.
[Economy1] The reason: foreclosures, again threatening everything from More…
Soon after Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) came to Washington in 2002, a fellow member of the House Financial Services Committee told him to pick an arcane financial issue — any issue — and to make it his pet topic. Miller chose mortgage finance. He knew little about it. Banking lobbyists More…
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…
In the first week of July, Andie Davis’ husband, who worked in manufacturing, lost his job, as hundreds of thousands of Michiganders have since the onset of the recession. Soon after, he started collecting unemployment insurance benefits that might last the family of four as long as 99 weeks. Davis More…
Washington is initiating a program to help the unemployed stay in their homes: Qualified applicants will get zero-interest loans of up to $50,000 for two years to pay their mortgages while they remain jobless. But The Hill questions whether it might be banks benefiting from the More…
On Wednesday, Fannie Mae, the government-sponsored enterprise that buys up mortgage contracts from loan originators to keep the housing market liquid, announced new penalties for homeowners who strategically default. “Defaulting borrowers who walk away and had the capacity to pay or did not complete a workout alternative in 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…
Today, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission continues its fourth round of hearings on the origins of the recession, with the current and former Treasury secretaries, Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson, speaking on the shadow banking system — comprising financial companies like Goldman Sachs that are technically not banks because they More…
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