News Topic: Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

At the end of a lively session  yesterday at Duke Law School featuring Professor Stephen Ware of University of Kansas Law School, there was a brief discussion of whether shorter foreclosure timelines and clearer rules would promote more workouts of ... Read full article

Previously I mentioned this new paper on homeowners in bankruptcy  in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. The central goal of the paper was to investigate what makes homeowners more or less likely to have mortgage troubles as they head into ... Read full article

I had the privilege today of hearing Federal Reserve Board Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin deliver the keynote address to the Section on Financial Institutions at the American Association of Law Schools Annual Meeting.  Governor Bloom Raskin's topic: ... Read full article

I recently did a string of blog posts of the Permanent Editorial Board for the UCC's Report on the enforcement of negotiable mortgage notes. I'm still planning a final installment there, but I came across another document that just floored me in ... Read full article

This is a newly published paper  in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal  that I was lucky to work on with Daniel McCue and Eric Belsky at the ... Read full article

There's been a lot of media coverage of the recent ruling of the NY Supreme Court (that's the trial court, not the final Court of Appeals) in MBIA v. Countrywide, a suit by the monoline bond insurer against Countrywide for fraud, negligent ... Read full article

A Boston nonprofit, Boston Community Capital, is teaming up with some financial institutions, in particular Bank of America, in a pilot program that has the effect of writing down mortgages to close to home value. ... Read full article

Bill Black has an interesting new take on the role of Fannie and Freddie in the housing bubble . He sees their investment in non-prime mortgages as being driven by executive compensation, rather than a fight for market share against investment bank ... Read full article

Michael Olenick , Gretchen Morgenson , and Yves Smith have all written pretty damning things about the ... Read full article

Who knew that Mitt Romney had outflanked Obama on the left ? Well, it took Nixon to go to China, but I expect we'll see a lot of backpedaling here.  ... Read full article

As Alan White reported recently , the Uniform Law Commission in the U.S. has named a committee to consider the need for and feasibility of proposing a uniform foreclosure act and to report back to the ULC by early 2012. ... Read full article

The Administration seems to have cut a deal to extend the payroll tax cut, which is a smart economic move in terms of trying to support demand. But it's being paid for by an increase in the "G-fee" (guarantee fee) charged by FHA and Fannie ... Read full article

Foreclosure statistics obviously vary from local jurisdiction to jurisdiction, as well as from one time period to the next. For example, sometime back in 2008, New Mexico was 36th in the nation in the number of foreclosures, obviously lower than average. ... Read full article

It is getting really old, the exasperation of entitled financial journalists that ordinary folks are not walking away from their underwater homes as much as they supposedly should. The latest to sound this tired refrain is James Surowiecki in The New ... Read full article

States have passed a variety of changes to foreclosure laws and court rules in response to the foreclosure crisis, including new notice and mediation requirements to stimulate workouts between lenders and borrowers.  Some of these laws have been found ... Read full article

Occupy Wall Street have announced a national day of action around mortgage foreclosures and evictions, to be held on Tuesday December 6.  My comments on the protest and the current state of the foreclosure crisis at salon.com are here . ... Read full article

Pretty amazing opinion in Culhane v Aurora Loan Services of Nebraska byJudge Young of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Judge Young breaks out a fresh can of whoop-ass on MERS, which wasn't even a litigant. How are these choice ... Read full article

So the Administration has announced that it is expanding the HARP refinancing program to help underwater borrowers.  Originally, HARP enabled borrowers with up to 125% loan-to-value (LTV) ratios to refinance (105% for adjustable rate loans).  The revised ... Read full article