Tag: housing

The MSM Notices Foreclosure Fraud

Cross Posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

The CBS News program, “60 Minutes” aired a Mortgage paperwork mess: the next housing shock? segment on foreclosure fraud which, as most economists agree, is the biggest threat to the US economy. Scott Pelley looks for the answer and a at the possible solutions to the question of “who owns your mortgage”:

It’s bizarre but, it turns out, Wall Street cut corners when it created those mortgage-backed investments that triggered the financial collapse. Now that banks want to evict people, they’re unwinding these exotic investments to find, that often, the legal documents behind the mortgages aren’t there. Caught in a jam of their own making, some companies appear to be resorting to forgery and phony paperwork to throw people – down on their luck – out of their homes.

Sheila Bair, Chairperson of the FDIC, says she will call for a clean-up super fund

   Banks so poorly handled documentation on millions of mortgages that many today cannot prove that they own the homes they want to foreclose on. The resulting rash of lawsuits from people seeking to save their homes has one of the government’s top banking regulators worried that the torrent of litigation will delay the real estate market’s recovery.

   Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Sheila Bair tells Scott Pelley banks should be forced to contribute billions to a clean-up fund that will help stressed homeowners stay in their homes and stave off lawsuits – there are 30,000 already – that threaten the economic rebound […]

   Like last year, banks are expected to foreclose on a million mortgages this year, a scenario that could generate more lawsuits over mismanaged paperwork. “I think that this litigation could easily get out of control,” says Bair. “…We’re already feeling like we’re falling behind it,” She thinks a large clean-up pool funded by the banks that would pay homeowners to accept a bank’s ownership claim without a lawsuit is necessary. “I would assume it would be billions [that the fund would need],” Bair tells Pelley.

But as, David Dayen points out, this “super fund” would not stop any claims in state courts on behalf of homeowners, federal regulators don’t have the authority to do that.

And the more banks resist it, the more liable they will become. In an important case this week, a judge in Alabama dismissed a foreclosure because the bank failed to comply with the pooling and servicing agreement for transferring mortgages to the trust. This would be a stunning ruling if applied broadly, though whether or not it will stand as precedent across other states remains to be seen; it’s far too early in the process to determine that. But we know that banks simply did not convey mortgages to trusts properly as a general rule. Foreclosure fraud can be seen as a coverup for that original sin. And if state courts are starting to make rulings based on that sin, banks will be stuck and unable to pursue foreclosures on tens of millions of loans.

The ruling in favor of the borrower endorses an argument we have made since last year on this blog, that the pooling and servicing agreement stipulated a specific set of transfers be undertaken to convey the borrower note (the IOU) to the securitization trust within a specified time frame. New York trust law was chosen to govern the trusts precisely because it is unforgiving; any act not specifically stipulated by the governing documents is deemed to be a “void act” and has no legal force. So if a the parties to a securitization failed to convey a note to the trust within the stipulated timetable, retroactive fixes don’t work. In this case, the note had been endorsed by the originator, Encore, but not by the later parties in the securitization chain as required in the pooling and servicing agreement.

Yves Smith at naked capitalism, has a problem with what Bair said:

One aspect that is distressing is that per her remarks in this clip, Sheila Bair does not appear to understand or worse, understands but is not willing to admit the seriousness of the chain of title issues. Often, the banks botched the transfer process in such a fundamental manner that retroactive fixes are not possible. This isn’t a matter of “if the banks spend enough time, they can prove the trust they are acting for owns the note” as Bair contends. It’s that in many cases the note didn’t get to the trust as stipulated, and the trust doesn’t have the ability under New York law, which governs virtually all of these trusts, to accept it now. A party earlier in the securitization chain is typically the owner, but no one wants that party to foreclose, since it would confirm the failure to handle the assignment of the note properly.

I’m not so sure that this Congress would be amenable to another multi-billion dollar bail out but this is a better proposal that the one that would strip homeowners of their right to due process.

(all emphasis is mine)

“I say that with absolutely no conviction.”

Real estate agent Steve Thoele is “curious” about the continuing decline in housing prices:

“You do kind of wonder where the bottom is,” said Mr. Thoele. “Sellers know in the back of their mind that their home is worth less than at the peak, but they’re still a little surprised when you tell them their $400,000 house is now worth $300,000.”

I kind of wonder, too.  Uh-huh.  If only there were data on home prices spanning back, say, a hundred years or so, that might indicate a somewhat stable historical mean house price.  Oh, wait a minizzle…what’s this?

Photobucket

This graph of the Case-Shiller index over the past hunnert-twenty years, or so, (last updated to 2010) shows that homes began outrageously over-shooting their historical value starting in about 1996-97.  The plot thickens.  It was a dark and stormy night.  A shot rang out!  Where could that housing bottom (and those weapons of mass destruction) possibly be?

Injustice at Every Turn — Part V: Housing



Scarlet Letter

Injustice at Every Turn (pdf) is a 122-page report of data gathered in 2008 by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the National Center for Transgender Equality concerning quality of life issues for transgender people living in this country.

Housing insecurity for transgender and gender non-conforming people is a crisis. Respondents reported direct discrimination by housing providers and negative housing impacts of discrimination in other critical areas of life such as employment, health care and criminal justice. Accordingly, respondents were forced to employ various strategies to secure places to live.

Previous “turns” have covered the basic data about who transpeople living in America are in Who we are — by the numbers, Part I: Education, Part II: Employment, Part III: Health Care and Part IV — Family.

Still to come are the analysis of the data on public accommodations, identification documents and police and incarceration.

Housing is About to Roll Over … Again.

According to Bloomberg today, US homeowners in the foreclosure process were an average of 507 days late on payments in 2010 compared to last years record of 406 days late in 2009 (a 25% increase).

According to Realty Trac a record 2.87 million properties received a notice of default last year, despite a 30 month low in December caused by the robo-signing scandal, and that number is expected to climb this year.

A record 1 million homes were foreclosed upon and nearly 7 million mortgages are at least 30 days in arrears, but FNM expects home prices to rise in 2011.

Foreclosures have weighed down U.S. housing prices as the nation’s unemployment rate is stuck at more than 9 percent. Home values may rise 0.6 percent for the year, the first annual jump since 2006, according to Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage buyer.

The Wall Street bailouts never stopped

  President Obama got up on the stage and gave the speech that we all wanted to hear.

 “I proposed a set of reforms to empower consumers and investors, to bring the shadowy deals that caused this crisis into the light of day, and to put a stop to taxpayer bailouts once and for all,” Obama said to supporters. “Today, thanks to a lot of people in this room, those reforms will become the law of the land.”

 It sounds really good. The problem is that it has no relationship at all to reality.

  The Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) released a report within hours of the president giving his speech, and its finding portrayed something very different.

 “Indeed, the current outstanding balance of overall Federal support for the nation’s financial system…has actually increased more than 23% over the past year, from approximately $3.0 trillion to $3.7 trillion — the equivalent of a fully deployed TARP program — largely without congressional action, even as the banking crisis has, by most measures, abated from its most acute phases.

 

We’re nowhere near the bottom.

The defining feature of our time will be the awful reckoning following years of denial.

Steve Pearlstein describes the false optimism bubbling up from the economy:

In recent weeks, a wave of relief and optimism has washed over the economy. The corporate sector is closing out another quarter of solid profitability. Business and consumer confidence is on the rise. The Dow Jones industrial average is flirting with 11,000. The Treasury secretary and the chairman of the Federal Reserve have declared that the economy is on a path of sustained recovery. State tax revenue is finally picking up. And on Friday, the Labor Department may even report that the number of jobs actually increased in March, ending two years of nearly uninterrupted declines.

Basically, we have moved Wall Street’s fraudulent assets onto the public spreadsheet, and Wall Street approves, thus perpetuating the fraud at public expense.  Hip-hip, Hooray!    

Who is HAMP Helping?

h/t to Huffington Post

This will be relatively short as my outrage meter seems to be peaking again.

As the next wave of defaults is churning its way through the prime mortgage market our saviors in Washington have come up with a new way to scam the general populace. Its called bailing out the banks, part II.

Years and Years and Years of supply

Jim Cramer Media Shill or Housing Whore?

On December 17th, 2008 Jim Cramer pronounced that the housing bottom will be in by June 30, 2009.

Well, I now have another contrarian point of view to proffer: The converted bears, as well as the panicked sellers desperate to bail out and nervous buyers afraid to jump in, will be dead wrong nine months from now, when housing prices bottom. In fact, I’ll call the precise date of the housing-market turnaround. It will begin on June 30, 2009.

In 2007 housings subprime market was just beginning to melt down all the while candidates were proclaiming that ours was a strong economy, and the Fed chairman was stating that subprime was contained, and there was no spill over into the broader economy.

These are the experts and yet they have been wrong at almost every turn. Listen to these asshats at your own peril. The government, media and banks are lying to you.

Take the jump to look at some numbers.

No HOPE for HAMP

  The Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program has been touted as a savor of distressed homeowners across America. The problem is that the numbers show an entirely different story.

 More than 650,994 loan revisions had been started through the Obama administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program as of last month, from about 487,081 as of September, according to the Treasury. None of the trial modifications through October had been converted to permanent repayment plans, the Treasury data showed.

None? NONE! Not a single one! WTF!

 Five months and 651,000 trial modifications and not one single borrower can get a permanent break? We throw hundreds of billions of dollars at these TARP banks and they can’t cut a single distressed homeowner some slack?

 These “trial” modifications only last 90 days, so its not like there hasn’t been thousands of mortgage holders who have tried to turn it around, and the banks then rejected.

Law of Unintended Consequences

There are those that would like you to believe that the worst for housing has passed. Stories about depleted inventory, or multi-year lows.

Government programs, first-time home buyer tax credits and gifts to the builders…. heck even our propaganda machine is pushing the idea of getting people to buy a home.

(CBS)   Real estate experts in many parts of the country are saying now’s the time to buy.

[..]

Early Show money maven Ray Martin weighed in on the Saturday Edition about whether buying is indeed the way go to now,

IS THIS A GOOD TIME TO INVEST IN REAL ESTATE?

Yes, it is, and for a number of reasons. For one thing, housing prices are declining just about nationwide. Plus, mortgage rates are at a serious low. Rates on a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage are at a level we won’t see again in our lifetime. Finally, if you buy before December 1, you’ll get an $8,000 tax credit if you’re a first-time buyer. For all those reasons, there’s really never been a better time to go shopping for real estate.

Manufacturing Tuesday: Week of 12.01.08



(My apologies folks, for the delay.  This was supposed to be published this morning, but I had rush a sick wiener dog to one of those emergency vet places.  Rest assured, he’s Ok, and probably won’t eat another sock again!)

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to another edition of Manufacturing Monday…er Tuesday!  Originally I wanted to post this on Monday morning, but I wanted to include the latest development from the Boeing SPEEA talks. Outside of this we got news from the steel industry, unfortunately not the good kind.  Sticking with steel for a moment, there’s an op-ed piece I wish to highlight that I thought you should look at.  We have news or alarm bells I should say about pensions.  Of course we also have some Green news, some ominous, but some good.  

But before we get to those, let’s take a look at the Numbers!

He was shocked, I tell you, shocked!

Man oh man, if there ever was a prime example of a revelation of the greatest flaw in libertarian economic theory, it had to be Alan Greenspan’s speech.  For those not in the know, the former Federal Reserve Chairman spoke before a Congressional committee yesterday.  Long one of the grand proponents of laissez fair capitalism, his decisions, ironically, probably has lead to the complete discrediting of such economics.  

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