Bloomberg reports that that staple of mortgage funding, the 30 year fixed rate mortgage, has seen its interest rate increase from 3.48% a month ago to 4.16% as of yesterday. By contrast, the highest rate the 30 year mortgage reached in the previous year as of mid-March had been 3.85%.
One analyst, Mark Hanson, sees evidence that the dropoff in refinancings has been impressive
Read more...Warning: mortgage modifications can be yet another exercise in bank predation.
Read more...The head of Carrington, which is known as an established distressed debt investor and more recently, an early entrant in the single family home rental business, said this week it was no longer buying houses for lease because dumb money had ruined the market.
Read more...You thought corporate personhood was a bad thing? Think twice. You should be so lucky as to be a corporate person. They don’t just get treated like you and me, they are increasingly being treated better than you and me.
Read more...We’ve been skeptical of the private equity land rush to snap up single family homes for rentals. They’ve been a big enough force in the housing market nationwide to lead some commentators to question how solid the housing “recovery” is. Yet the combination of rising enthusiasm for housing and a richly-valued stock market is leading a raft of PE firms to ready IPOs as a way to take profits and establish valuations for their profit participations.
Read more...Good progressives like MoveOn, New Bottom Line, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, AFR, Elizabeth Warren, and Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO have all fallen in line with Obama’s nomination of Mel Watt, Representative from Bank of America North Carolina.
It might help if they looked harder at Watt. If they were honest about it, there’s not much to like.
Read more...Jon Stewart piled on to the widespread criticism of the Independent Foreclosure Review fiasco.
Read more...Here’s what you helped us to do. Hoisted from comments:
Read more...Rust Consulting, which handled the borrower mailings during the Independent Foreclosure Review and is now acting as paying agent, continues to screw up in every way imaginable.
Read more...During the protracted negotiations over what was to become the 49 state/Federal mortgage settlement, New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman was hailed as a progressive leader and California’s Kamala Harris was characterized as an opportunist.
Turns out the opportunist cut a much better deal for her constituents than the supposed true believer.
Read more...A relatively unforeseen implosion in housing markets figured prominently in the 2007 meltdown in capital markets and the subsequent downturn in the global economy. This column presents new research on the political geography of subprime lending. Congressional leaders – as well as other recipients of campaign contributions – may have benefited from gains to trade in the direction, pricing, and sizing of subprime mortgage loans.
Read more...By Abigail Field, an attorney and writer
Eric Schneiderman gets buyers’ remorse. But can he do anything about it?
Read more...Wellie, we finally witness an exception that proves Krugman’s rule about hopeless partisan rancor. Republicans and quite a few Democrats gave the raspberry to Obama’s nomination of Mel Watt to replace Ed DeMarco as the head of the FHFA, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.
Read more...By Nathan Tankus, a student and research assistant at the University of Ottawa. You can follow him on Twitter at @NathanTankus
Discussions of centralized planning in the West often take it for granted that the Soviet Union and similar social systems are the only ones with centralized planning. This is a basic (albeit ideological) confusion that results from the belief that markets and centralized planning are incompatible. This is not the case
Read more...It appears that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Fed dropped the ball yet again on vetting firms involved in the Orwellianly-named Independent Foreclosure Review (IFR) for conflicts of interest. Michael Olenick’s expose on Allonhill, one of the “independent consultants” hired by Wells Fargo, led to Allonhill’s role being curtailed considerably.
But there’s no way to curtail the role of Rust Consulting, a firm that has been central in the Independent Foreclosure Reviews virtually from their onset. And as we’ll see, Rust has ample conflicts of interest when it was engaged to handle mailings and outreach under the IFR, and is about to become even more conflicted.
Read more...