At the end of last week, GMAC Mortgage, the United States’ fourth-biggest home loan lender, now called Ally Financial, admitted it has broken the law by rushing to file foreclosures as quickly as possible, fudging the paperwork in the process. And the Ally revelation is presumed to be just More…
Today, Ben Bernanke, the head of the Federal Reserve, testified before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on Too Big to Fail banks and the general financial collapse. (Find Bernanke’s prepared testimony in a PDF here.) But he is getting the most attention for a comment on housing, where he 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…
Testifying to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan and former Citigroup executives Robert Rubin and Charles Prince passed the buck. Rubin and Prince said they could not have understood Citigroup’s extraordinary exposure to the housing market or recognized the risk the bubble posed any earlier. More…
The Comptroller of the Currency keeps an eye on the mortgage market, and the results continue to be terrible. They monitor 64 percent of the mortgages in the United States, or 34 million loans, from most of the mortgage servers in a portfolio representing the larger market: About two-thirds of More…
By the way, if you’re going through the transcripts of the Consumer Advisory Council, you’ll see that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke attends the meetings, which are held three times a year in Washington, D.C.
We were curious: During the boom, did former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan ever go to More…
This time in Memphis. In fact, city officials are so fired up that they’ve filed a lawsuit charging the mortgage-loan giant with discrimination. The New York Times reports:
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Tennessee, marshaled a raft of statistics to argue that Wells Fargo offered one
The watering down of the proposal for a new consumer financial protection agency continues, with the latest victim the end of vanilla option. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee this week that the option was being dropped. Via Felix More…
Via Michael Shedlock, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reviews the growing problem of zombie subdivisions, those half-built developments you often see from a highway. Developers broke ground for these subdivisions near the end of the housing boom, and abandoned them when the mortgage crisis hit and financing dried up. Now More…
It’s hard to imagine now, but it wasn’t all that long ago when it could be hard to find average folks who knew or cared that much about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the oddly-named, government-sponsored entitites that own or guarantee about half the nation’s mortgages. The obscure workings of More…
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