Real Estate News

Who Owns Your Mortgage Note?

4:47 pm EST October 12th, 2010 | Economy | 8 Comments

The folks at SEIU have set up and easy-peasy website to help you find out who, exactly owns your mortgage and where the note is. As they note:

When Wall Street banks securitized, packaged, sold, and resold our mortgages, they created a system where it is often impossible to figure out who actually owns mortgage notes and therefore has the authority to foreclose on properties. But the big banks are getting tangled up in their own web. Recent events have exposed a handful of banks that are throwing families out of their homes even though they don’t have the mortgage note that proves they actually have a legal right to do so. There have been instances of two banks trying to foreclose on the same home, and in at least one case, of a bank trying to foreclose on a house where the homeowner had never even taken out a mortgage with anyone in the first place.

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They Hate Liberals That Fight Back

8:22 pm EST April 7th, 2009 | News | 46 Comments

Glenn Reynolds links to the below video of Rep. Barney Frank ably defending himself against the fallacy that is now Republican gospel about who had what role in the mortgage crisis (somehow the fact that the economic collapse happened under a conservative Republican obsessed with deregulation never comes up, or Bush campaigning on subprime mortgages). What’s even funnier is that Reynolds says Frank is being “defensive”. Well, people often defend themselves when they are attacked, and in the case of Rep. Frank, Instapundit has been one of the attack dogs leading the fallacious charge.

Reynolds calls it a “meltdown” as well. The only thing melting in the last couple years has been the economy and conservative credibility.

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Them & Their Silly Tea Party

4:03 pm EST February 27th, 2009 | News | 50 Comments

The wingers are in town for CPAC this week and in the midst of all that crazy (joking about Chicago being nuked, for instance) they’re having their Rick Santelli inspired tea parties – which is just the latest version of the Joe The Plumber (who called for journalists to be shot today) brand of stupidity that the right substitutes for actual thinking. This moron here with a sign saying “Your Mortgage Is Not My Problem” does a brilliant job of summing up just why the conservative movement is now in the extreme minority in America.

Your neighbor’s mortgage is your problem. America is not a Katrina-style you’re on your own nation. That abandoned house down the street and the millions like it will become an incubator for crime and ruin, and then your house will lose value and our society will be the worse off for it.

It’s still amazing to me that these people who claim to be Christians conveniently skip over some relevant text:

And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?

– Genesis 4:9

(By the way, remember when conservatives said liberals were stupid to protest things?)

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Too Bad, Mortgage Industry

1:46 am EST January 26th, 2009 | News | 33 Comments

The mortgage industry is fighting against new laws and regulations that would allow courts to readjust mortgage terms. In normal circumstances they might have a leg to stand on. But it happens we’re standing in the middle of a global recession aided in part by a mortgage industry that essentially printed money in an unregulated environment.

So when they bawl about being regulated now, this is what we used to refer to on when I was a child on the playground as something called “tough titties”.

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The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Did Not Cause The Mortgage Crisis

9:08 pm EST September 28th, 2008 | Democrats, Republicans | 57 Comments

The Republican party is just trying out the latest version of the Southern Strategy.

First of all, even if Fannie and Freddie were the most awful companies in the history of the planet, its books chock-a-block with non-performing loans, none of the financial contagion—none of it—would have happened had not greedy financial institutions invented the risky securities that used mortgages as their foundation, via procedures that created economic incentives to write non-performing loans. We explained that a long time ago, here. Second of all, as we explained yesterday, loans that fulfilled the anti-redlining Community Reinvestment Act, performed better than the average mortgage.

Third of all: the part that makes you sick to your stomach. The pattern being drawn across the right—the Big Lie so notorious it’s hard to belief they’d even dare it—is that this financial mess is something black people have done to white people.

The difference this time is that this blood libel is being debunked by liberals who aren’t spineless. Wall street made this mess with an assist from their conservative pals, and yet again Democrats are needed to clean up a Republican’s economic mess.

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McCain Wants Freddie Mac Lobbyist On Transition Team

10:29 am EST September 23rd, 2008 | News | 3 Comments

After this campaign is over there’s got to be some in depth examination of why John McCain so strongly desired to surround himself with lobbyists. The latest is William Timmons Sr., tapped to lead McCain’s transition team, who is a Freddie Mac lobbyist. God willing, this transition team will exist only in theory.

The lobbying firm of the man Republicans say John McCain has chosen to begin planning a presidential transition earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac, one of the companies McCain blames for the nation’s financial crisis.

Timmons & Co., whose founder and chairman emeritus is William Timmons Sr., was registered to lobby for Freddie Mac from 2000 through this month, when the federal government took over both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Newly available congressional records show Timmons’s firm received $260,000 this year before its lobbying activities were barred under terms of the government rescue of the failed mortgage giant. Timmons, 77, is listed as a lobbyist for Freddie Mac on the company’s midyear financial-disclosure form.

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Conservative Larry Kudlow Blames Financial Crisis On Poor People

6:52 pm EST September 18th, 2008 | News | 21 Comments

I’m tempted to say that CNBC’s Larry Kudlow came to this conclusion because he’s back on drugs, but it’s even worse than that. Kudlow, and many conservatives, are not in fact chemically imbalanced but seriously believe this crap.

In this clip from Morning Joe, Kudlow details how he believes that the poor multibillion-dollar firms on Wall Street were forced to give mortgages to the thuggish poor, and that is what caused the current meltdown on the market. The reality of course is, as always, Wall Street got greedy, had no oversight, and then promised many people the chance to own a home and sold them a bill of goods built on a mountain of sludge.

On the other side were many speculators who thought they could flip these houses quickly, and that buying led to an increase in the bubble and again Wall Street was just handing out money like it was going out of style without government oversight.

But no, Larry Kudlow says, its the poor people’s fault for wanting to own a home and its the government that forced the poor Wall Streeters to do this. Off to the debtor’s camps with them!

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Republican Recession Watch: Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac To Be Turned Over To The Government

11:28 pm EST September 5th, 2008 | News | 24 Comments

Running the federal government is, indeed, “hard work”. Republicans, for the past decade or so, have worked hard at getting elected then once in office they think the job is done – mission accomplished. That’s why they argue so strenously against the government we are all a part of. That is why their goal is to privatize as much of it as they can while sending as much money into the hands of their friends, families and other associates. But this great nation didn’t become great by our government sitting back and letting the robber barons belly up to the table. We need the government to mind the store, to referee, to regulate and legislate so we can keep the country running. Bush and his fellow Republicans like McCain fiddled while the mortgage crisis grew and now the fallout is almost daily.

Senior officials from the Bush administration and the Federal Reserve on Friday called in top executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance giants, and told them that the government was preparing to place the two companies under federal control, officials and company executives briefed on the discussions said.

The plan, which would place the companies into a conservatorship, was outlined in separate meetings with the chief executives at the office of the companies’ new regulator. The executives were told that, under the plan, they and their boards would be replaced and shareholders would be virtually wiped out, but that the companies would be able to continue functioning with the government generally standing behind their debt, people briefed on the discussions said.

It is not possible to calculate the cost of any government bailout, but the huge potential liabilities of the companies could cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars and make any rescue among the largest in the nation’s history.

It is interesting how swiftly the Bush-McCain Republicans moved to bail out the millionaires at Bear Sterns but have kept hitting the brakes when the issue of average American mortgages have been in play. It’s like they’re a bunch of rich guys who don’t care about the rest of us.

Or something.

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Republican Recession: FDIC Borrowing Money From Treasury

8:03 am EST August 27th, 2008 | News | 5 Comments

green jelloAs John McCain says, the fundamentals of our economy are strong

Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) might have to borrow money from the Treasury Department to see it through an expected wave of bank failures, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The borrowing could be needed to cover short-term cash-flow pressures caused by reimbursing depositors immediately after the failure of a bank, the paper said.

Strong like the Jello they serve at a retirement home.

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