News Topic: Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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. ... Read full article

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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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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) ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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. ... Read full article

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. ... Read full article

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

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 ... Read full article

Alison Frankel has a g reat 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.  ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article

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 ... Read full article