Despite assurances from government officials that the recession is gradually loosening its grip on the U.S., statistics released today by Zillow, Inc. paint a very different picture. Zillow is a real estate marketing site founded by former Microsoft executives that maintains a database of real estate information from around More…
This week, Reps. John Conyers (D-Mich.) and Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Edward DeMarco, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, asking them to justify Fannie Mae’s policy of penalizing or suing strategic defaulters — those who can pay their More…
If you cannot sell your house, you cannot move to a city or town with more jobs. It is an obvious point, but an important one for explaining the sustained, high rate of unemployment. Michael Fletcher explains today in The Washington Post:
Last week, I noted that House Republicans had introduced a motion to penalize strategic defaulters — underwater homeowners who simply stop paying their mortgages and surrender their homes to the bank — by barring them from obtaining Federal Housing Administration-backed loans in the future. I hadn’t noticed until 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
In another sign that the foreclosure crisis might have peaked, foreclosure filings declined 3 percent in May, RealtyTrac reported this morning. Florida, Nevada, California and Arizona remain the hardest-hit states. From the report:
“The numbers in May continued and confirmed the trends we noticed in April: overall foreclosure activity
Today, the Treasury and Housing and Urban Development Departments released April data on the Home Affordable Modification Program, the Obama administration’s effort to modify mortgages in order to stem the tide of foreclosures and keep families in their homes. Modifications increased 13 percent month-to-month, to 300,000.
“As the number More…
On mortgage giant Freddie Mac’s blog, “Featured Perspectives,” executive Don Bisenius takes on strategic defaulters — underwater mortgage-holders (that is, homeowners who owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth, meaning that if they sell their house they will still owe the bank money) who chose to More…
Bloomberg News’ Caroline Baum has a tart piece on strategic defaults and consumer spending — invoking the theory, first put forward by HousingWire’s Paul Jackson, that underwater homeowners are purposefully defaulting on their mortgages and using the funds to buy regular goods. That would explain why consumer spending More…
Blogging at Naked Capitalism, Edward Harrison provides a persuasive argument for why retail sales and consumption are increasing, despite persistent joblessness and a lack of income growth. He posits that homeowners in foreclosure or struggling with mortgage payments are deciding to stop sending checks to the bank, letting their More…
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