Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

American Predatory Lending and the North Carolina model

05/22/20

My coauthor Ed Balleisen has co-founded a program on consumer lending of interest to Credit Slips readers. Its initial data collection is particularly useful in documenting the North Carolina experience and its implications for other states.

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CARES Act mortgage foreclosure and tenant eviction relief

04/01/20

The final text of the act is now available here. The foreclosure relief is in Section 4022 and the eviction moratorium is in Section 4024. Mortgage borrowers with federally related loans (FHA, VA, Farmer's Home, Fannie or Freddie) may request 6 months of forbearance, i.e.

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COVID-19 Response: The Need for Speed

03/18/20

While Congress struggles to figure out the best way to respond to the coronavirus pandemic, it is very apparent that immediate relief measures are necessary, if only to buy time for a more comprehensive approach. Layoffs are already happening and with they continue, it will result in more economic disruption from diminished consumption.

1. Sending out checks isn't fast enough (and can't happen in two weeks)

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The Big Lie Lives On

02/15/20

The Big Lie just won’t die. The Big Lie, of course, is The Government Made Me Do It theory of the financial crisis, that the housing bubble whose collapse set off the crisis was the product of government policies encouraging affordable home mortgage credit.

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Mick Mulvaney's South Carolina Land Shenanigans All Under Seal

01/22/20

Last year the Washington Post covered Mick Mulvaney's South Carolina land deal gone sour. It was a pretty amazing case that is fantastic for teaching purposes. Mick's moves would have made some of the most sophisticated distressed debt funds (not to mention a real estate developer president) blush with shame (or green with envy).

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Consumer Bankruptcy, Done Correctly, To Help Struggling Americans

01/07/20

Today, Senator Elizabeth Warren unveiled her new plan to reform the consumer bankruptcy system. The plan is simple, yet elegant. It is based on actual data and research (including some of my own with Consumer Bankruptcy Project co-investigators Slipster Bob Lawless, former Slipster, now Congresswoman Katie Porter, and former Slipster Debb Thorne).

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Small Biz Reorg Act Sleeper Innovations

09/25/19

Two aspects of the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 intrigued me as I looked more closely at this important new twist on Chapter 11 for the other 99%.

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Playing with Fire: The CFPB's Proposed Repeal of the "GSE Patch"

07/25/19
CFPB today put out an advance notice of proposed rulemaking to amend the Qualified Mortgage (QM) Rule by letting the "GSE Patch" expire.  What the Bureau is proposing is truly dangerous.  While I haven’t liked some of the Bureau's other proposed rules (including under the Cordray Directorship), none of them were an all-out ideological gamble with the economy. This one, in contrast, is really playing with fire.
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Reverse Mortgage Meltdown ... and Gov't Complicity?

06/13/19

USA Today just came out with an interesting expose about reverse mortgages and their negative impact, especially in low-income, African American, urban neighborhoods (highlighting a few in my backyard here in Chicago).

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Home Contract Financing and Black Wealth

05/31/19

A remarkable new quantitative study finds that over two decades, African American home buyers in Chicago lost between $3 and $4 billion in wealth because of credit apartheid. The study authors from research centers at Duke, UIC and Loyola-Chicago reviewed property records for more than 3,000 Chicago homes.

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