subprime mortgages

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 Salmon, Mike Konczal at Rortybomb explains why this [...]

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 the subdivisions are a drag on surrounding [...]

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 the secondary market weren’t exactly [...]

In the latest issue of The New Yorker, James Surowiecki  weighs in on something TWI wrote about recently: The need for a new — and bolder — foreclosure strategy. Foreclosures continue to outpace loan modifications, even as the Obama administration presses the lending industry to do more. And in some communities, it’s not just the [...]

On Monday, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute slams the proposal for a Financial Products Safety Commission, using a Washington Post op-ed to call it elitist and contend it would limit financial choices to sophisticated consumers.
Are consumers “protected” when they are denied the opportunity to buy products and services that are available to others? [...]

There’s a lot of buzz already about New York Times economic reporter Edmund L. Andrews’ account of his personal financial crisis  in “Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.” Mainly it’s because more than a few financial blogs regularly linked to Andrews’ coverage of the financial crisis. The same veteran reporter who covered the Federal [...]

Staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission are recommending that civil securities fraud charges be filed against Angelo Mozilo, the once high-flying head of subprime lender Countywide Financial. The news was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, which explained that Mozilo has been sent a Wells notice,  a document alerting its recipient that he [...]

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke drew some headlines Tuesday when he said in a speech that it’s time to overhaul the nation’s financial regulatory system, and to appoint a powerful new regulator to oversee powerful financial institutions.
It’s something housing and community advocates also have been pushing — especially as they tried in vain for years [...]

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism has a great take on a story making the rounds on the Internet today, a New York Times piece on former Countrywide Financial executives cashing in on distressed mortgages. Obviously, this is very rich, considering Countrywide once stood as the nation’s largest subprime lender, turning huge profits on the subprime [...]

Andrew Sullivan takes a shot at the Obama administration’s plan to help homeowners, noting that he’s diligently paid three mortgages and now is expected to bail out people who gave in to “greed, wishful thinking, and recklessness.”  His comments follow on the heels of the now-famous Rick Santelli rant on CNBC, which — mistakenly, in [...]