Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

Obama to replace DeMarco at FHFA

05/01/13

with Mel Watt, according to an AP story today.  Congressman Watt of North Carolina was a moving force behind Miller-Watt-Frank, the mortgage reform legislation that eventually found its way into Dodd-Frank financial reform.  Given that our all-but-nationalized housing finance system is directed by this somewhat obscure agency, the occupant of this post can have a huge influence on the future direction of credit, housing and the economy.

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Qualified Residential Mortgages

04/24/13

The New York Times has a major article about the Qualified Residential Mortgage rulemaking under the Dodd-Frank Act. I think there's a lot of confusion about this ruling-making. I'm going to try and clarify a few things in this post.

What Is Actually Required by the Dodd-Frank Act.

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Adam Levitin awarded the Young Scholar's Medal of the American Law Institute

04/22/13

Congrats to Credit Slip’s Adam Levitin for winning a prestigious honor! Of course, this award is well deserved.

The American Law Institute announced today that Adam Levitin of Georgetown Law Center has been awarded its Young Scholar’s Medal.  ALI says that this honor is “designed to recognize early-career law professors whose work is relevant to the real world and has the potential to influence improvements in the law.”

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Mortgage Settlement Checks Bounce

04/18/13

Remember the $3.6 billion settlement the government made with huge lenders accused of wrongful evictions and other abuses? Wronged homeowners are beginning to get their settlement checks in the mail, only to find that some of them bounce. That’s right.

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Fannie/Freddie to Homeowners: Do Nothing and Help Will Arrive

03/27/13

Housing Wire is reporting that Federal Housing Finance Agency, the conservator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has launched a new loan modification program. The program is a major departure from HAMP and HARP (thankfully!). It puts mortgage servicers in charge of delivering relief, instead of requiring homeowners to run down, chase, and exhaust themselves contacting their mortgage company.

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Freddie Mac Indifferent to Homeowner Complaints

03/22/13

That is the finding of a report released yesterday by the Inspector General of FHFA, the agency that oversees our nationalized mortgage funders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Mortgage servicers are paid incentives by Freddie for quick foreclosures, but not for resolving homeowner complaints about mishandled foreclosure prevention and loss mitigation.  Bank of America took an average of 59 days to resolve homeowner complaints, well beyond the 30-day limit imposed by the servicer alignment initiative, and as of Januar

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Why the Independent Foreclosure Reviews Were Doomed to Fail

03/03/13

Apparently part of the bank flaks' talking points regarding the foreclosure reviews is that to the extent homeowners harmed by wrongful foreclosures, they were actually drug dealers. The message: we didn't foreclose on anyone who didn't deserve it. We were just foreclosing on some scumbags and doing you all a favor by getting the meth lab out of the neighborhood before it blew up. We're part of the war on drugs. 

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SCRA and Foreclosures

03/03/13

The more we learn about the mortgage servicing settlement, the more rotten it's looking. I really didn't think it was possible, but this piece in the New York Times details more problems, including with Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA) violations in the form of foreclosures on active duty military members.  

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Disclosure 2.0: Disclosure in the Lab

02/18/13

If, as I suggested in my last post, making the consumer smarter is hopeless, at least for those of us whose prenatal and early childhood environments can no longer be altered, what about disclosure?  Could point-of-sale disclosure equip consumers to make good financial decisions? 

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