Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ Fannie mae ’

A federal grand jury indicted mortgage broker Joshua S. Goldberg today, alleging he helped steal $2.5 million from various lenders through a mortgage fraud scheme in Baltimore. City Paper first outlined the scheme in this 2008 story. As the financial crisis worsened Goldberg and his husband, Bayardo Alvarez, continued to get big mortgages and...
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A federal jury on Tuesday found the flamboyant founder and CEO of bankrupt Florida mortgage lender Taylor Bean and Whitaker guilty of fraud. Lee Farkas appears to be the first CEO convicted of a crime in the five-year-old mortgage crisis. He faces life in prison at his July sentencing. Farkas, a college dropout, founded...
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So the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced Thursday that the cost to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, The People’s two mortgage guarantors, could top $363 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported early in the day. That’s about the cost of a year’s worth of The Most Powerful Military in the History of...
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Picture every occupied house in Baltimore city. Now picture them empty. That’s the situation we have now, all spread across the country.
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So far something like 400,000 have received permanent modifications—but more than half of HAMP borrowers get bounced from the program for non-payment.
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The Sun’s real estate reporter, Jamie Smith Hopkins, writes today that a record 4 percent of Maryland homeowners are in foreclosure. The number of delinquencies is much higher: All told, almost 14 percent of Maryland borrowers are behind, including those in the foreclosure process and those just a month late on payments. As Calculated...
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Go with the fraud and make big bux or fight & get fired, earning the right to battle for your job back in court for five or six years, with a less-than-10-percent shot at winning.
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New reports show redefaults of modified mortgages have doubled. It’s still a small number—something like one percent of the modded mortgages. But people who watch these things expect the number to increase, both in absolute and percentage terms. Meanwhile, there still seems to be some “debate” over what caused the crash. Was it, a)...
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The Federal Housing Administration’s boss is saying he’ll need no bailout, “absent any catastrophic home-price decline.” The New York Times is flashing red on this one, and it’s an entertaining read. U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.): A 7-plus percent FHA foreclosure rate is no bad thing: “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that...
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The Chief Financial Officer of Freddie Mac apparently committed suicide this morning or last night. The New York Times says there is no way to know yet whether his death is related to an ongoing investigation of Freddie’s finances. Meanwhile, Fannie and Freddie have reported a 70 percent surge in delinquencies of prime mortgages...
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The financial weirdness continues this week with a plan–or proposal, maybe–hatched Sunday night to give the U.S. taxpayers a 40 percent stake in CitiGroup, the biggest (and arguably most insolvent) of the nation’s large banking institutions. As I’ve tried to explain, Citi is to financial prudence what a 1950s movie monster is to culture:...
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A brilliant, kind, patient, and acerbic wit died Sunday after a nearly three-year bout with ovarian cancer. Doris Dungey, 47, was a Marlboro-based mortgage banker who began blogging under the name Tanta in 2006, and explained in detail what was about to take place in the financial world. Although her true identity was known...
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