mortgages

This should sound familiar: Growing losses on Federal Housing Administration-backed mortgage loans are prompting fears the agency will be next in line for taxpayer help, The Wall Street Journal says.
The Federal Housing Administration, hit by increasing mortgage-related losses, is in danger of seeing its reserves fall below the level demanded by Congress, according to government [...]

CNN examines the stalled efforts to rework troubled mortgages, noting that only 6 percent of  4 million eligible homeowners have been helped so far under the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program. The piece notes that banks say they are trying to do loan modifications, but need more time to get up to speed on [...]

Despite the recent good news that U.S. home prices rose 2.9 percent in the second quarter of 2009, it’s too early to call a turnaround for the battered housing sector.

Startling requirements in out-dated, but still used paperwork raises questions about how well Treasury is overseeing the centerpiece of Obama’s foreclosure crisis solution.

One of the ideas for financial regulatory reform that President Barack Obama will outline today is the creation of a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency, modeled after a proposal from Troubled Asset Relief Program watchdog Elizabeth Warren for a Financial Products Safety Comission. As The Washington Post explains, this would be a new federal agency [...]

New HUD program allows first-time homebuyers to borrow against an $8,000 tax credit for downpayments, raising questions about what was learned from the housing crisis.

The Obama administration is considering stripping the Securities and Exchange Commission of some its oversight powers, and shifting that responsibility to the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg reports.
The proposal, still being drafted, is likely to give the Federal Reserve more authority to supervise financial firms deemed too big to fail. The Fed may inherit some SEC functions, [...]

Over at Hungry Hungry Hippos. they’ve taken me to task for my post Wednesday on efforts in Flint, Mich. to deal with abandoned and vacant properties by literally shrinking the size of their city — cordoning off the blight and leaving it behind. I had written that Flint and other cities facing overwhelming property abandonment [...]

Wells Fargo announced today it expects to turn a $3 billion profit for the first quarter of this year, some surprisingly good news from the troubled banking sector, CNNMoney reports.
Those results exceed expectations from analysts, and they sparked a stock market rally early today.

Mortgage giants made no public effort to inform housing attorneys of changes to anti-foreclosure and eviction program.