News Topic: Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

While European markets have seen increases in mortgage foreclosures, more robust regulatory intervention seems to have kept defaults and foreclosures to much lower levels than we are experiencing in the United States.  At the peak of the crisis a year ... Read full article

As this NYT story  notes, the administration has been putting pressure on the AGs, particularly NY AG Schneiderman, for several weeks now, urging them to fall in line with the administration's hear-no-evil, see-no-evil position on MBS and servicing ... Read full article

That's the headline of the lead editorial today in The New York Times .  The Gray Lady urges the Obama Administration to adopt solutions that reduce principal to restore homeowner equity as an essential step to economic recovery.  Principal pay down ... Read full article

As we have discussed recently, here and here, the Federal Housing Finance Agency has asked for ideas about how to dispose of foreclosed properties in bulk.  But there is no reason we shouldn’t take this request as also encompassing reducing foreclosed ... Read full article

Jean Braucher has noted the FHFA's RFI on foreclosure prevention. A huge problem with any proposal is the time to implementation for anything. It took months to develop flops like FHASecure, Hope4Homeowners, and FHAShortRefi. ... Read full article

Story in the Detroit Free Press today here , and my commentary at Consumer Law & Policy here . ... Read full article

It’s old news that federal housing agencies need better ideas about what to do about the foreclosure crisis.  The new development is that they realize it and have issued a blunderbuss “RFI” (request for information) seeking ideas from anyone willing to ... Read full article

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has launched the first project in its "Know Before You Owe" initiative with the release of proposed mortgage disclosures. While the CFPB did its homework in designing these forms, including getting ... Read full article

NY AG Eric Schneiderman came out with guns blazing in the proposed Countrywide investor settlement litigation.  It his filing intervening in the action  and suing Bank of New York Mellon for breach of fiduciary duty, persistent fraud, and violations of ... Read full article

A major issue arising in foreclosure defense cases is the homeowner's ability to challenge the foreclosing party's standing based on noncompliance with securitization documentation. Several courts have held that there is no standing to challenge ... Read full article

Every time I think I've seen it all in the foreclosure fraud space, something new comes along and amazes me. This time it's not the banks or their vendors, but an AG. David Dayen at FireDogLake has a disturbing story that the Florida AG fired ... Read full article

Yesterday the Fed announced a settlement with Wells Fargo of claims that its subprime unit had 1) deliberately steered prime borrowers into higher-cost subprime mortgage refinancings and 2) falsified income documents to put subprime borrowers into ... Read full article

The National Consumer Law Center has launched a useful new resource for the bankruptcy community called the Bankruptcy Mortgage Project.  See here.   Those likely to find it handy include judges, consumers, trustees, mortgage servicers, attorneys, and ... Read full article

As challenges to whether a "bank" (usually actually a securitized trust) has the right to foreclose because it owns the note and mortgage become more common, rumors swirl about the ability to use such tactics to get a "free house." ... Read full article

The Obama adminstration's CFPB proposal took a lot of flak (and almost cratered) because of the inclusion of the "plain vanilla" provision (from the work of Profs. Michael Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir), which would have ... Read full article

The Obama Administration is finally goosing HAMP to try to deal with unemployment. Gosh, how long has that taken? The Congressional Oversight Panel was all over the need to do this starting in 2009, but the Administration was so wed to HAMP that it ... Read full article

Prompted by several comments to one of my earlier posts , I've been thinking about situations where a homeowner files an insurance claim for property damage to her home while she is in default on her mortgage.  The general practice, as I understand ... Read full article

A pair of very interesting foreclosure rulings were handed down today by the Nevada Supreme Court. They provide further evidence that documentation problems are rife in the mortgage industry, including documents showing chain of title. They also provide ... Read full article