At the start of this blog, I predicted that the financial crash would cause the government to spend huge money bailing out the people who caused it, adding a great deal to the national debt and sparking a crisis of confidence in the country’s ability to repay it, which would lead to a policy...
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Tags: bailout, derivatives, foreclosure, fraud, market, poverty
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The New York Times’ David Streitfeld visits the woman whose foreclosure allegedly started what some are calling “foreclosure-gate.” While I’m not sure how anyone can say for certain that this is the Alpha case, it is a very good story. Streitfeld quotes and describes the borrower, Nicolle Bradbury, who hasn’t paid in two years....
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Tags: foreclosure, foreclosure gate, gmac, mortgage fraud
Posted in Crash Course | 89 Comments »
So Friday Bank of America stopped its foreclosures nationwide in order to “review” its foreclosure practices. As WaPo reports, “We’ll go back and check our work one more time,” CEO Brian Moynihan told the National Press Club in Washington. Things are spinning up faster and faster. And there’s a new wrinkle—one I neglected to...
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Tags: alan grayson, bank of america, foreclosure, mortgage fraud, naked capitalism
Posted in Crash Course | 69 Comments »
I think this will just delay the floor, and lower it, as lawsuits cloud titles on hundreds of thousands of empty houses.
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Tags: foreclosure, gmac, mortgage fraud
Posted in Crash Course | 79 Comments »
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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Tags: bailout, Fannie mae, FHA, foreclosure, Freddie Mac
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Monday brings more ongoing trials rather than triumphs for local restaurateur and former Top Chef contestant Timothy Dean. Dean filed for bankruptcy in May for his former ventures, Timothy Dean Bistro and T.D. Lounge. Now The Sun is reporting that his Prime Steakhouse (reviewed in City Paper last week) is scheduled to go up...
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Tags: foreclosure, prime, Timothy Dean, Top Chef
Posted in Feedbag | 55 Comments »
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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Tags: bailout, Fannie mae, foreclosure, hamp, home affordable modification program
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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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Tags: Fannie mae, foreclosure, mortgage fraud, wells fargo
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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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Tags: Fannie mae, foreclosure
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The housing crisis seems to be entering a new phase, with government programs that had been designed to try to keep people in their homes now being subtly shifted into a program meant to ease them out. One sign was this e-mail that came today with the headline, “Understanding the New Rules of the...
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Tags: citigroup, foreclosure, HAFA, short sale
Posted in Crash Course | 49 Comments »
Gaithersburg-based AmeriDream, Inc. is prominently mentioned in a Huffington Post story looking at seller-funded down payment assistance (DPA) programs for new home buyers. The programs allow home builders to give a three percent down payment to possibly unqualified buyers by laundering it through a nonprofit corporation, which takes a fee for the service. As...
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Tags: ameridream, foreclosure, nehemiah
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Michael Greenberger, Rock Off Crew, Robert Strupp, and many other Baltimore folks are featured in a video clip viewable on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! site It’s a preview of Leslie and Andrew Cockburn’s new documentary, American Casino, which illustrates how credit default swaps and other derivatives sank the economy—and how a few pols (cough,...
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Tags: derivatives, foreclosure, Phil Gramm, wells fargo
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