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This problem is very much underdiagnosed because the servicer is judge, jury, and executioner as far as its charges are concerned. Borrowers find it a pitched battle to get the detailed payment records from servicers, even with a lawyer’s help.
Homeownership is falling at an alarming pace, despite the fact that home prices have fallen, affordability is much improved and inventories of new and existing homes are still running quite high.
This is an interview conducted by Business Insider Editor in Chief Henry Blodget In Davos.
Of the 1,055 Arizona home owners who have applied, only one has qualified for help from the program. A National Bank borrower is slated to get $40,000 knocked off a distressed home loan.
What happened is that the benefits for originating bad loans exceeded the cost of these negative consequences – someone was paying enough more for bad loans to overwhelm the normal economic incentives to resist such bad underwriting.
I have not seen one case that DID NOT have "legitimate issues", ie lack of standing, no causes of action, induced default, false placed insurance, bogus loan mod offers, escrow manipulations, robo-signing, false affidavits, defective assignments...
It's a system that was built to encourage banks to make mortgages and keep being able to make more. But the system also means that when homeowners stop making mortgage payments, the lenders who issued the mortgages don't take the biggest loss.
Foremost among them is a much higher ratio of renters to homeowners than the Phoenix area has seen in recent decades.
The hard-hit region led the nation in homes actually lost to foreclosure, and saw the numbers rise 17 percent from 2009.
Mr. Market has woken up to the fact that the Charlotte bank is particularly exposed to litigation risk. We were very critical of BofA’s purchase of Countrywide. As we said in January 2008:
But I wonder. Had there been a Dutch Tulip Inquiry Commission nearly four centuries ago, it would no doubt have found tulip salesmen who fraudulently persuaded people to borrow money they could never pay back to buy tulips.
Buyers purchased the fewest number of new homes last year on records going back 47 years.
One problem with this math could be that Schnapp assumes there will be very little income growth because of high unemployment so the only way to get back to normal is to lower the debt side of the equation through foreclosures.
During their unveiling of the FCIC report, they used words like deregulation, leverage, imprudent risk-taking, reckless behavior, failures at credit agencies, and failed regulators. Left out were words like crime, fraud, looting...
The latest forecasts for the housing market's recovery have been pushed out by another year because of slower-than-expected job and population growth and a bigger glut of home foreclosures than anyone expected.
For a frightening way to visualize the foreclosure crisis, we're borrowing a Google maps technique described by Barry Ritholtz. The satellite map of Phoenix, Arizona gives you a good idea what the other 19 foreclosure maps look like...
One of the sorry reminders of the decline of the rule of law in the United States is the frequency with which incidents of what look like document forgeries take place in foreclosure cases.
For more than 18 months, local real-estate analysts believed they had called the bottom of the housing market back in April 2009.
So it is gratifying in a perverse way to see a case in which the perp not only looks to have engaged in chicanery, but the facts make it pretty hard for him to say he didn’t know he was pulling a fast one. And even more fun, it involves JP Morgan...
What's so important is that this is the process in California, Nevada and Arizona (AZ is both judicial and non-judicial), which have three of the top four foreclosure rates.
Bear Stearns mortgage executives sold securitized mortgages: The lawsuit's supporting e-mails, going back as far as 2005, highlight Bear traders telling their superiors they were selling investors like Ambac a "sack of shit."
Eight markets – Atlanta, Charlotte, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami, Portland (OR), Seattle and Tampa – hit their lowest levels since home prices peaked in 2006 and 2007, meaning that average home prices in those markets have fallen even further...
A funny thing happened on the way to the "wealth effect": we call it affectionately, the "poverty effect." At least for those who have homes. The November Case Shiller index confirmed that the double dip in housing is accelerating...
A new report today from Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance shows distressed sales, that is bank-owned properties (REO's) and short sales, where the home is sold for less than the value of the mortgage, made up 47 percent of all home sales...
If you want it distilled down into one sentence, it's this: You told us you were selling us good paper, and in fact you were knowingly selling us a box of dogcrap.
Now it is all the way up to 91% after a just released lawsuit by the bulk of the world's biggest insurance companies has been made public, in a fresh lawsuit again Bank of America/Countrywide over "Massive mortgage fraud."
The solution to the ongoing Foreclosure-Gate fiasco is so simply and yet so brilliant (in a way that benefits the banks naturally) is so brilliant, that it has to date evaded most... but not all. The solution: just shred it all.
It’s easy to see how the physical legal reality and the electronic record might not agree. As the lawyer keeps emphasizing in his questions, there is nothing here which would make a chain of transfers evidentiary of anything...
The implication is that MERS is superior to the local courthouse system. The evidence is the reverse. Chris Peterson has described the utterly unorthodox corporate governance system of MERS, where employees of other firms put on a MERS hat...
Is the biggest fraud in the history of the US housing market about to come unglued? If so, take our prediction of a $100 billion total in future BofA rep and warranty reserves and triple it.
