subprime

CompuCredit, an Atlanta subprime lender that specializes in high-rate credit cards, payday loans, auto financing and debt collection, is part of the country’s leading coalition on financial literacy.

Per my earlier post explaining the growing crisis of vacant homes piling up around the country, here’s one of the best explanations for why we should be alarmed by this problem, courtesy of The Chicago Tribune:
“It’s a concern for the same reason the subprime lending problem should have been a concern five years ago,” said [...]

Housing advocates have been pushing for years, without success, for changes in federal law to allow bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages. The idea was a non-starter during the Bush Administration, since lenders strongly opposed it. But American Banker (subscription required) reports today that lawmakers may have reached a comprise allowing the mortgage modifications in some [...]

Financial bloggers are in mourning today for Tanta, at Calculated Risk, who died on Sunday in Columbus, Ohio. As the tributes to her throughout the blogosphere make clear, her analysis of the mortgage crisis was closely followed and influential. She had spent 20 years in mortgage banking — she knew what she was talking about, [...]

The honeymoon period that most new presidents enjoy has probably been voided this time around. President Barack Obama will face a financial crisis that only threatens to become more severe at the start of 2009. And there are no simple fixes.

It’s not clear whether foreclosed homes selling at fire-sale prices are an encouraging sign — or just a false hope of a rebound that’s still nowhere on the horizon.

Mortgage Insider tallies up the carnage among subprime lenders since the foreclosure crisis began — and it’s grim:
The list of major subprime lenders for 2006 and 2007 resembles the casualty roster from the Battle of Verdun in World War I. Only difference: way fewer walking wounded this time.
Of the 30 biggest subprime home lenders in [...]

Charles Morris checks in with us to call the charge that poverty activists fueled the mortgage crisis “absurd.”
Our story Tuesday outlined that argument, in which conservatives blame the Community Reinvestment Act for the flood of subprime lending that led to the housing meltdown.
Morris, however, says it’s clear that competition drove bad lending. Consider a 2005 [...]

Part 2: The U.S. Treasury has been able to print dollars to service its own debt, but with the rise of the euro and yen, this may change.

Remember when the subprime crisis first broke out last fall, and the Bush administration’s first response was to suggest that people read the fine print on their mortgages and take financial literacy courses?
It would not be such a bad idea for Wall Street to do the same now.