Blogs: Posts Tagged ‘ mortgage fraud ’

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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My friend William Black has an excellent (if badly proofread and edited) analysis of our economic situation here at HuffPo (via Benzinga). He explains how the liar’s loans—those no-documentation, no-underwriting home mortgage “products” that took over the market in the mid-2000s—caused all the trouble. The main problem is that the industry never defined its...
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Here’s Krugman on the “mortgage morass” now enveloping the foreclosure machine like a blob. He’s got this relatively well pegged (dig his dig on the WSJ plutocrats). But one of his commenters has a theory I think deserves some consideration. What if, as Mike O. of Oakland, Calif., suggests (actually, asserts), the banks and...
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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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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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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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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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The Washington Post seems to be catching on to a story Crash Course warned about last fall: that FHA is not in good shape, and may need a taxpayer bailout. As with most WaPo stories, the problem is depicted in the past tense: FHA Commissioner David H. Stevens, who joined the agency in July,...
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A federal judge dismissed Baltimore City’s lawsuit against Wells Fargo yesterday, saying it was implausible that the mortgage lender’s business practices had done as much damage as the city claimed. “In the present case, the city’s allegations . . . of a causal connection between Wells Fargo’s alleged misconduct and the damages the city...
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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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