Reuters notes that Wall Street types are complaining that coverage of the current foreclosure crisis — in which banks might have taken houses away from homeowners without the proper documentation — elides the fact that the defaulters are in fact in default.
“If you didn’t pay your mortgage, you
At the heart of the current foreclosure fraud scandal is an obscure piece of paper — dramatically titled the “note” — that proves how much a borrower owes a lender, and sometimes specifies what collateral the borrower has put up for the loan. In the case of housing, this note More…
Today, J.P. Morgan Chase revealed that it made a third-quarter profit of $4.4 billion, despite dwindling revenues. The bank set aside far less money — $6.6 billion, or 67 percent, less than it did at the same time last year — to cover losses on things like mortgages and More…
The unfolding foreclosure fraud crisis isn’t easy to understand, but here it is boiled down. Banks need proper documentation to repossess a home from a family. They need documents about everything from the family’s financial situation to its history of missed payments to its assets. And they need to verify More…
This afternoon, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader, released the text of a letter he sent to mortgage servicers in Nevada, asking them to stop foreclosing on homes until the legal fiasco around botched foreclosure documents is cleared up. Here is the full text:
I write to request that
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…
This weekend, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said that “it was too soon to say” whether the Obama administration might revive its $8,000 tax credit for first-time home buyers or $6,500 credit for other home buyers.
Last week, Fannie Mae announced it lost $1.2 billion in the second quarter and asked the Treasury Department for an additional $1.5 billion to see it through.
“Buy new with $1,000 down,” the advertisement says, the words resting atop a trim green clapboard house offset by a bright blue sky. “The time has come. Stop wasting rent check after rent check and start building equity in your own home. And with only $1,000 down, affordable monthly payments More…
HuffPo’s Ryan Grim reports that House Republicans have introduced a motion to penalize strategic defaulters — underwater homeowners who simply stop paying their mortgages — by barring them from obtaining Federal Housing Administration-backed loans in the future. Grim explains the Republican maneuver:
The GOP offered its provision as
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