02/27/2010 - House Probes Banks' Lending To Small Businesses, Commercial Real Estate - U.S. bank lending last year posted the steepest drop since World War II, with the volume of loans falling by $587.3 billion, or 7.5 percent, from 2008. And some lawmakers are laying the blame on the policies of federal regulators. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/26/2010 - When It's Okay To Walk Away From Your Mortgage - Millions of Americans are now deeply underwater on their mortgage. If you're among them, you need to stop living in a dream world and give serious thought to walking away from the debt. No, you shouldn't feel bad about it, and you shouldn't feel guilty. The lenders would do the same to you-in a heartbeat. You need to put yourself and your family's finances first. - www.wsj.com

02/26/2010 - Homeowners seek class-action status in suits against banks - Three specific families are identified, one with a loan serviced by Bank of America and two by Wells Fargo - the nation's two largest mortgage servicers. They were granted trial modifications, according to court documents, but haven't received long-term modifications despite having submitted all required documents and made timely payments for more than three months. - www.miamiherald.com

02/26/2010 - New Home Sales Surprise Economists With Drop To Record Low In January Lowest Level In Half A Century - The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that new home sales dropped 11.2 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual sales pace of 309,000 units, the lowest level on records going back nearly a half century. The big drop was a surprise to economists who were expecting a 5 percent increase over December's pace. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/26/2010 - Obama May Prohibit Home-Loan Foreclosures Without HAMP Review - The Obama administration may expand efforts to ease the housing crisis by banning all foreclosures on home loans unless they have been screened and rejected by the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program. - www.bloomberg.com

02/26/2010 - House Lending Inquiry: Lawmakers Probe Banks' Lending To Small Businesses, Commercial Real Estate - House lawmakers are examining a crucial element of the economic recovery: banks' lending to small businesses and for commercial real estate. Small businesses are seen as a linchpin for the recovery, with the potential to expand and soak up some of the high unemployment that has ravaged the country and preoccupied Congress. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/26/2010 - Duck! Watch out for falling home prices - The average home price in the United States will fall by about 6% by September 2011, according to a joint report between Fiserv and Moody's Economy.com. And that's after plunging more than 27% in the past three years. - www.cnn.com

02/24/2010 - JPMorgan Projects Huge Housing Losses In 2010 - The nation's second-largest bank expects the number of delinquent home loans to skyrocket over the next year, echoing analysts' expectations of a gloomy housing market that is nowhere near recovery. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/23/2010 - Lyons: Bogus foreclosure claim not isolated - Reffers to the next story below - The way a Sarasota man almost lost his home after bogus claims by out-of-town foreclosure attorneys made a good front-page story. But some aspects of William Berta's story are not all that unusual. - www.heraldtribune.com

02/22/2009 - An abrupt eviction, narrowly averted - That declaration allowed Wells Fargo Bank to take possession of Berta's home in December without him ever knowing that a foreclosure case had been filed, and he had no chance to raise a defense. "They didn't want to find me," Berta said. "They tried to use their knowledge of the law to steal my house." - www.heraldtribune.com

02/23/2010 - Home prices fall another 2.5% - Home prices fell just 2.5% during the last three months of 2009 compared with the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a closely watched gauge of home price movement. That was a big improvement over the past three years. - www.cnn.com

02/23/2010 - Terry Hoskins: Ohio Man Bulldozes $350K Home To Avoid Foreclosure - Hoskins says he owes $160,000 on the house. He says he spent a lot of money on attorneys and finally had enough. About two weeks ago he bulldozed the home 25 miles southeast of Cincinnati. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/22/2010 - Miami's foreclosure auction Web site criticized as misleading - A little more than a month later, some of the newcomers who bought property online say they were misled by the site and ended up spending thousands of dollars on condo liens and properties that were laden with hefty mortgages. In some cases, after making purchases, they found the properties were still subject to foreclosure. - www.miamiherald.com

02/20/2010 - Mortgage Delinquencies Show a Sharp Decline In 4Q - The drop means the number of people losing their homes will start to fall. But some pain from the crisis is sure to persist. Because millions of people are already in foreclosure, deeply discounted houses will put pressure on home prices for years. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/19/2010 - Obama Housing Help Announcement: $1.5 Billion For Five Hardest-Hit States - Obama was to announce that housing finance agencies in the five hardest-hit states in the housing crisis will receive $1.5 billion to help spur local solutions to the problem. Those five are Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan and Nevada. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/10/2010 - No Longer Too Big To Fail? Credit Rating Agency Thinks So - The giant credit rating agency Standard & Poor's issued a stark warning Tuesday to creditors of Citigroup and Bank of America, two firms that up until now had been considered "Too Big To Fail". The message: We're not so sure the U.S. government will bail them out again next time. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/10/2010 - Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac Will Buy Back Delinquent Home Loans - The two companies are repurchasing mortgage loans for which borrowers have missed at least four months of payments. At the end of last year, Fannie had about $127 billion of such loans, while Freddie Mac had about $70 billion. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/05/2010 - Obama Moving to Expand Credit for Small Businesses - The proposal would help refinance up to $18.7 billion worth of commercial real estate per year that might otherwise be foreclosed and liquidated. To be eligible, small businesses must have certain types of first mortgage loans maturing within the next year. Firms would have to be current on payments for the previous year. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/04/2010 - California Deadbeats Ditch Their Mortgage, And Save Their Cash For Their Credit Card Bills - Consumers are paying down their credit cards while ignoring their mortgage payments. The company's most recent study found that a rising percentage of Americans are current with their credit cards but delinquent on their mortgage payments. - www.businessinsider.com

02/04/2010 - America's 7 Least-Trusted Banks: Is Yours On The List? (PHOTOS) - Bank of America ranked seventh worst, with 33 percent of customer respondents agreeing that the bank "does what's best for me, not just its own bottom line." - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/04/2010 - Obama Administration Knew Foreclosure Program Wasn't Working Right, Did Nothing - But rather than pressure the mortgage companies to start reducing the amount mortgage-holders owe, the administration simply sat back and hoped servicers would do it on their own. - www.huffingtonpost.com

02/04/2010 - Real estate's ticking time bomb - The commercial real estate dilemma - Industry observers have issued dire warnings for more than a year, suggesting that lenders are on a collision course with potentially billions of dollars worth of commercial real estate losses. Banks have already recognized about $50 billion in losses, or about 60% of the estimated cumulative losses, according to real estate research firm Foresight Analytics. - www.cnn.com

02/03/2010 - You lost your house - but you still have to pay - Former homeowners may still be on the hook if there's a difference between what they owed on their mortgage and what the bank could sell it for at auction. And these "deficiency judgments" are ticking time bombs that can explode years after borrowers lose their homes. It can even happen to people who got their bank to approve them selling their home for less than it is worth. - www.cnn.com

02/02/2010 - No Help in Sight, More Homeowners Walk Away - New research suggests that when a home's value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying. - www.nytimes.com

02/02/2010 - Banks Could Get Money From New Obama Proposal -- And Still Not Lend - The cost of the new capital under Obama's program would be five percent, which is what the banks will pay the government annually for its investment. If banks increase their business lending by 10 percent from 2009 levels, the cost would be reduced to one percent -- a locked-in rate they'd pay for the following three years. - www.heraldtribune.com

02/02/2009 - TIPPING POINT - 5.1 Million Homes Projected To Be Worth Less Than 75% Of Mortgage By June - New research suggests that when a home's value falls below 75 percent of the amount owed on the mortgage, the owner starts to think hard about walking away, even if he or she has the money to keep paying. In a situation without precedent in the modern era, millions of Americans are in this bleak position. - nytimes.com

02/02/2009 - OBAMA: MOVE MONEY FROM BAILOUT FUND TO COMMUNITY BANKS - Small Business Lending Fund: Obama To Unveil $30 Billion Small Business Plan - Obama travels to Nashua, N.H., on Tuesday to draw attention to a proposal highlighted in his State of the Union address last week: funneling $30 billion to local banks so they can lend small businesses money they need to grow their enterprises and create jobs. - huffingtonpost.com

02/01/2009 - Obama's $30 Billion Small-Business Plan Could Be Doomed To Fail - The fundamental flaw with Obama's plan, bankers and economists say, is that our current financial problems aren't a function of insufficient supply of money -- they're the result of a lack of demand, particularly from small businesses and consumers. - huffingtonpost.com

02/01/2009 - Pro-Obama Group Goes After Wall Street 'Pigs' - "When big banks went hog wild on Wall Street they left behind one fine mess on Main Street," the ad goes. "Their greed and recklessness left the economy stuck in the mud and over seven million Americans without jobs. - huffingtonpost.com

01/30/2009 - Tishman Speyer Walked Away From Its Stuyvesant Town, Peter Cooper Village Mortgage. Why Can't You? - Tishman Speyer Properties walks away from 11,232 Manhattan apartments because it can't pay its mortgage. That's good business. Rick Gilson, a college custodial supervisor in South Dakota, wants to walk away from the mortgage on his mobile home. If he does, he'll be a deadbeat. - huffingtonpost.com

01/29/2009 - Streamlined loan modification application process to begin June 1 - Treasury officials said Thursday that starting June 1, borrowers will be able to submit a streamlined package of documents, including two pay stubs, to qualify for the Obama administration Making Home Affordable loan modifications. If borrowers make their initial trial payments ontime, they will be give a permanent loan modification - blogs.trb.com

01/28/2009 - Treasury Announces Fix To Foreclosure-Prevention Plan, But Nearly 500K Homeowners At Risk Of Being Bounced - With as many as 450,000 troubled homeowners in danger of being bounced out of the Obama administration's signature foreclosure-prevention program due to documentation problems, the Treasury Department announced major changes Thursday to simplify and quicken the process. - www.huffingtonpost.com

01/28/2009 - Press Release: ADMINISTRATION UPDATES DOCUMENTATION COLLECTION PROCESS AND RELEASES GUIDANCE TO EXPEDITE PERMANENT MODIFICATIONS - "With more than 850,000 homeowners in trial and permanent modifications, we are providing immediate relief to struggling homeowners," said Phyllis Caldwell, Chief of Treasury's Homeownership Preservation Office. "Today's guidance represents our commitment to more efficiently move qualified homeowners into permanent modifications." - www.financialstability.com

01/28/2009 - Las Vegas: Most foreclosures of any city in 2009 - Las Vegas had the largest number of foreclosure filings of any city last year, with 12% of its households receiving at least one during the year, according to RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed homes. That was more than five times the national average. - www.cnn.com

01/21/2009 - Treasury May Offer Cash, Extended Grace Periods For Struggling Borrowers - The latest effort to accelerate the Making Home Affordable program - now widely viewed as a disappointment - comes as the administration faces growing pressure to do less for banks and more for households struggling with double-digit unemployment. - www.nytimes.com

01/20/2009 - States urge action on foreclosures - Cut loan principal for borrowers whose homes are worth much less than their mortgages. Attack the problem of option adjustable rate mortgages. Cut down on red tape. Those are some of the ideas in a plan issued Wednesday by a group of state officials who have been working for more than two years to stem the foreclosure tide. - www.cnn.com

01/20/2009 - HuffPost Interviews Joseph Stiglitz: 'We're More Strict With Our Poor Than With Our Banks' - During the economic turmoil of the last few years, Nobel Prize-winning economist and Columbia University professor Joseph Stiglitz has been one of the most strident and incisive critics of the historic bailout of the banking sector. - www.huffingtonpost.com

01/20/2009 - State Regulators Warn Of Failing Foreclosure Prevention Efforts - Lackluster foreclosure-prevention efforts and the dearth of principal reductions risk plunging more homeowners into foreclosure, state regulators warned Wednesday in a new report. - www.huffingtonpost.com

01/20/2009 - Harder to get an Uncle Sam mortgage - The wealthy have money problems, too -- yeah they do. Even refinancing a mortgage for their fancy digs or getting a new loan can be near impossible these days thanks to skittish lenders. And the higher the loan value, the more they worry. - www.cnn.com

01/20/2009 - $8 million in assets - and can't get a mortgage - The agency, which insured nearly a third of new mortgages in 2009, will increase the premium it charges for its mortgage insurance and require those with weaker credit scores to come up with larger downpayments. - www.cnn.com

01/19/2009 - Joseph Stiglitz: 'Freefall' Excerpt: Too Late To Fix The Biggest Banking Blunder In History? (BOOK) - The entire series of efforts to rescue the banking system were so flawed, partly because those who were somewhat responsible for the mess--as advocates of deregulation, as failed regulators, or as investment bankers--were put in charge of the repair. Perhaps not surprisingly, they all employed the same logic that had gotten the financial sector into trouble to get it out of it. - www.huffingtonpost.com

01/17/2009 - Reducing Principal For Struggling Homeowners Could Make The Crisis Worse - Many critics of the Obama administration's mortgage loan-modification program say it won't work because it doesn't do enough to address "negative equity," the plight of people who owe more on their home loans than the current value of those properties. Without equity in their homes, these critics say, borrowers have little incentive to keep paying and are apt to walk away as soon as things get tough, if not before. - www.wsj.com