03/11/2010 - Family goes directly to bank CEO, but there's no way out of mortgage - Rosalina Gomez is a $13-an-hour janitor who cleans the U.S. Bancorp executive offices every night. Last month, Gomez tried to meet with Richard Davis, U.S. Bancorp's chief executive, to ask him to halt the foreclosure of her Minneapolis duplex and to give her family a mortgage that reflects its reduced valuation and their ability to pay. - www.miamiherald.com
03/11/2010 - Many ideas, but no single answer on stopping spread of negative home equity - With home prices expected to keep falling in many parts of the country, experts said finding a fix for the underwater crisis will be difficult. Banks can't afford to bail out homeowners without another bailout from the government. Even if federal help comes - either for the homeowner directly or for banks - taxpayers ultimately will be on the hook for the debt. Do nothing, and homeowners and communities continue to suffer. - www.miamiherald.com
03/11/2010 - Struggling for a way out of a home worth less than the mortgage - More than one out of three properties in the state with a mortgage is underwater. In metro Detroit, 47.4 percent of properties with a mortgage, or 131,262, were underwater as of December, reports First American CoreLogic, a real estate data firm based in Santa Ana, Calif. Michigan ranks fourth in the nation with 38.5 percent of properties - or 532,774 - with a mortgage underwater. - www.miamiherald.com
03/10/2010 - Treasury Getting More Comfortable With Principal Write-Downs -- Sort Of - At a background briefing Monday afternoon, a senior Treasury Department official indicated that the department is headed in the direction of writing down mortgage principal more often -- the one thing underwater borrowers need the most. Market observers and consumer advocates have long been calling for such a shift. - www.huffingtonpost.com
03/10/2010 - Payday Loans May Be Exempt From Consumer Protection Rules - Senator Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is playing a crucial role in bipartisan negotiations over financial regulation, pressed to remove a provision from draft legislation that would have empowered federal authorities to crack down on payday lenders, people involved in the talks said. The industry is politically influential in his home state and a significant contributor to his campaigns, records show. - www.nytimes.com
03/10/2010 - No Help For Nearly Two-Thirds Of Homeowners In Obama Foreclosure Program - Data Shows About 66 Percent Still Waiting Despite On-Time Payments - Only about a third of the homeowners who have successfully completed the trial period of the Obama administration's mortgage modification program have been offered permanent relief, according to new federal data obtained by the Huffington Post. - www.huffingtonpost.com
03/08/2010 - Can't make your mortgage? Get an emergency loan - The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency offers the jobless and those suffering financial hardship loans of up to $60,000 for as long as three years to cover their monthly payments or take care of their arrears. Created in 1983, the program boasts an 80% success rate in preventing foreclosures. - www.cnn.com
03/07/2010 - Obama Administration Will Pay Some Struggling Homeowners To Sell At A Loss - This latest program, which will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way, is one of the administration's most aggressive attempts to grapple with a problem that has defied solutions. - www.nytimes.com
03/05/2010 - Consumer Groups Urge Regulation of Nonbank Financial Institutions - lawmakers have been grappling behind the scenes over whether and how to regulate payday lenders, debt collectors, check-cashing outlets, title and installment lenders and even pawnbrokers. - www.nytimes.com
03/05/2010 - Obama Plan To Modify Second Mortgages Has Yet To Help One Homeowner - Nearly a year after the Obama administration announced a plan to help up to 1.5 million struggling homeowners modify their second mortgages, not a single homeowner has gotten any assistance. - www.huffingtonpost.com
03/02/2010 - Profiting From Recession, Payday Lenders Spend Big To Fight Regulation - The influential $42 billion-a-year payday lending industry, thriving from a surge in emergency loans to people struggling through the recession, is pouring record sums into lobbying, campaign contributions, and public relations - and getting results. - www.huffingtonpost.com
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 - Homeowners seek class-action status in suits against banks - More frustrated homeowners turned to federal court this week for help with their mortgages, saying Bank of America and Wells Fargo failed to provide promised payment modifications. - www.miamiherald.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
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