News Topic: Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

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First some easy ones you all know: 1. The stock market will drop, perhaps precipitously, making now great time to rebalance retirement portfolios. 2. The price of gas will inch up and in the meantime, more states will add a little gas tax here and there ... Read full article

Apparently some mortgage lenders feel they can make this change unilaterally. Big changes are afoot in the process of granting a home mortgage, which could have a significant impact on a homeowner’s ability to fight foreclosure. ... Read full article

A lot of the mortgage servicing litigation over the past seven years has faltered on standing issues. Does the borrower have standing to sue the servicer? This has been a problem for RESPA and HAMP suits, where there are questions about whether there is a ... Read full article

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There are three major new regulations shaping the housing finance market:  QM (qualified mortgage), QRM (qualified residential mortgage) and Reg X.  QM is a safe harbor from the statutory ability-to-repay requirement that applies to all mortgages.  QRM is ... Read full article

The CFPB entered into a Consent Order with Flagstar Bank regarding its default mortgage servicing practices. This order is really important. ... Read full article

A long long time ago in this same galaxy, I wrote what may be Credit Slips' most popular post: What do bankruptcy mortgage servicing and phone sex in common? Today, I bring you a new comparison: bankruptcy mortgage servicing and ebola. At the outset, ... Read full article

One of the post-bubble conventional wisdom stories that has gotten a lot of traction is that housing is a bad investment and that consumers would do better to rent and invest in the stock market.  The problem is that it's wrong. ... Read full article

Mark Fogarty has a nice write-up in National Mortgage News of a book chapter about duties to serve in housing finance that I wrote with Jannecke Ratcliffe for a volume entitled  Homeownership Built to La ... Read full article

Just a quick note to follow up on previous posts ( here and here ) and report that the First Circuit reversed In re Traverse .  Thanks to ... Read full article

Larry Summers has a v ery interesting book review of Atif Mian and Amir Sufi's book House of Debt  in the Financial Times. What's particularly interesting about the book review is not so much what Summers has to say about Mian and Sufi, as his ... Read full article

I just read Jennifer Taub's outstanding book  Other People's Houses , which is a history of mortgage deregulation and the financial crisis.  The book makes a nice compliment to Kathleen Engel and Patricia McCoy's fantastic  The Subprime ... Read full article

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Paul Krugman has a column today about the blind, fundamentalist faith in efficient markets.  This is a phenomenon that Stephen Lubben and I have been discussing recently (did Krugman just preempt our paper idea?), as we've both encountered it in the ... Read full article

Thanks to all who commented on my earlier post on the interaction of §§ 544(a)(3) and 551 and homeownership in bankruptcy; as hoped, CreditSlip readers helped me frame the questions that I continue to have about Traverse and the larger policy questions it ... Read full article

The U.S. Supreme Court has denied a petition for writ of certiorari in Bank of America v. Sinkfield, an 11th Circuit case raising the issue whether a junior lien wholly unsupported by collateral value can be stripped off in chapter 7.  ... Read full article

Can’t get a mortgage?  Turns out it’s my fault.  As in mine, personally.  Yup.   That’s the claim in a Housing Wire written by right-wing banking analyst R. Christopher Whalen .  Here is Whalen’s argument in a nutshell:   ... Read full article