AARP, the largest advocacy group in the U.S. for retired persons, sued on Tuesday the Department of Housing and Urban Development for promoting policy changes that led to the foreclosure of seniors’ homes.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of three surviving spouses of reverse-mortgage borrowers, who allege that More…
James Jones has spent the past five years trying to prevent foreclosures in Cleveland. Recently, his work as director of foreclosure prevention at the East Side Organizing Project, a community organizing group dedicated to improving neighborhood life in the city, has focused on targeting predatory lenders and trying to prevent More…
Yesterday, Elizabeth Warren, newly named as an adviser to the White House and Treasury Department on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, made her debut. She spoke at a forum on mortgage reform — on making information given to loan applicants cleaner and clearer, so that consumers more easily understand the More…
That is the worst-case scenario, according to Egan-Jones Ratings Co., quoted in a Bloomberg article making the rounds. The agency says that if home prices decline 20 percent from their current level — they are now off around 25 percent from their summer 2006 peak — losses will ultimately More…
In April 2005, 64,057 homes received some form of foreclosure notice. This April — with the foreclosure crisis ebbing — 333,837 did. The recession has upended the logic of the entire housing market, with a quarter of homeowners underwater, the administration trying to keep real estate prices stable More…
Two reports from the Mortgage Bankers Association today — one mixed, one troubling.
First, mortgage loan applications — measured by the MBA’s purchase index, which includes all mortgage applications for single-family homes — dropped 27 percent week-on-week, to 24 percent lower than a year ago. The news is not More…
Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, writes over at The New York Times’ Economix: “Adjusted for inflation, residential property values were still higher at the end of 2009 than 10 years ago. This fact raises the possibility that at least part of the housing boom was an efficient More…
I think it’s a bit above my pay grade to speculate on the broader sociological meaning of this. But for what it is worth, the arrested subject of this past weekend’s Times Square bomb plot is a homeowner in the midst of foreclosure.
Over at the excellent Atlantic Business Channel, Daniel Indiviglio runs through the three major overlooked issues in Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.) financial regulatory reform bill that economists and market-watchers flagged for The New York Times. The folks quoted cite credit runs in the shadow-banking sector (in English: old-fashioned More…
A few weeks ago, Citigroup and the real-estate investment firm Redwood Trust announced they had organized the sale of new mortgage-backed securities. They reported that they had picked 255 high-quality jumbo mortgages — mortgages too big to be backstopped by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — issued by More…
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