Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

Fair Lending Law Developments

02/12/13

Race -it continues to determine the availability and the price of credit, and particularly home financing, as each annual release of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data reminds us.

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The Bubble According to Todd

01/25/13

Todd Zywicki has a long blog post criticizing the CFPB's Qualified Mortgage (QM) rule and using it as a jumping-off point for a call to transform the CFPB's leadership from a single Director to a commission.

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Inside the Foreclosure Reviews

01/24/13

Yves Smith has a pair of damning posts about the OCC foreclosure reviews (part I and part II).

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QM Impact on the Mortgage Market

01/14/13

The American Banker has a story (paywalled) about the impact of the QM rule on subprime lending. Subprime loans are unlikely to qualify for the full QM safe harbor because they are typically priced at more than 150 bps above prime. This means that subprime borrowers now have a possible foreclosure defense if they can show that the lender failed to properly account for their ability to repay.

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Who Owns the MBS Claims? AIG or the Fed?

01/14/13

Alison Frankel has a great column today on the fight going on between AIG and the NY Fed about who owns the securities fraud claims associated with the MBS that AIG sold to the NY Fed (or more precisely, its Maiden Lane SPV) as part of its bailout. 

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Usury Laws Are Dead. Long Live the New Usury Law. The CFPB's Ability to Repay Mortgage Rule

01/11/13

The CFPB has come out with its long awaited qualified
mortgage (QM) rulemaking under Title XIV of the Dodd-Frank Act.  The QM rulemaking is by far the most important
CFPB action to date and will play a crucial role in determining the shape of
the US housing finance market going forward. The QM rulemaking also rep

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CRA and the Housing Bubble

12/19/12

There's an interesting new paper out on the role of the Community Reinvestment Act and the housing bubble. The paper, called "Did the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Lead to Risky Lending?" is by Sumit Agrawal, Efraim Benmelech, Nittai Bergman, and Amit Seru (ABBS). It is a serious economic analysis, which is a major departure from much of the post-2008 grumbling about the CRA.

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No Foreclosure for the Holidays?

12/03/12

Fannie and Freddie are reportedly enacting a voluntary foreclosure moratorium for the holidays. Much obliged guv'nor! 

I've got a beef with this foreclosure moratorium. It captures everything that is wrong with how the GSEs and FHFA have handled foreclosures.

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Where Are the Foreclosures?

11/29/12

Bloomberg has a story Foreclosure Wave Averted as Doomsayers Defied. I think it's a great example of defining deviancy downward. There's no question that we haven't seen a foreclosure tsunami in the wake of the federal-state servicing fraud settlement. But there was little reason to expect one and let's not lose sight of the big picture--foreclosure levels are still incredibly high. 

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What’s Up With “Independent Foreclosure Review”: Boondoggle for Consultants and More Foot-Dragging by Servicers

11/18/12

After the robo-signing scandal broke in the fall of 2010, followed by a huge bureaucratic in-fight, a federal interagency review produced the Independent Foreclosure Review Program, announced with great fanfare in April 2011.

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