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WASHINGTON – The desperation of homebuilders was a running joke among top Federal Reserve officials during the waning phase of the housing bubble in 2006, according to transcripts released Thursday. They laughed about the cars that builders were giving to buyers. They laughed about efforts to make empty homes look occupied. They laughed at a report that one builder said inventory was rising “through the roof.”

Media propagandists continue to advance the Democratic Party line. On December 21, Bloomberg News breathlessly reported, "The leading Republican candidates for president have embraced an explanation of the financial crisis that has been rejected by the chairman of the Federal Reserve, many economists and even three of the four Republicans on the government commission that investigated the meltdown." Reporter David J. Lynch further explained, "Both former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney lay much of the blame on U.S. government housing policies, saying they led to the real estate crash that almost brought down the banking...

Bank foreclosures and abandonment are causing high home vacancy levels in neighborhoods across the country. Scott Pelley travels to Cleveland, a city that’s fighting back against blight. Chances are the home you’re in isn’t worth what it used to be. You may not have indulged in the real estate bubble with its liar’s loans and Wall Street greed, but you were stuck with the bill. Home values have dropped so far, so fast, that nearly 25 percent of mortgage holders today owe more than their house is worth. And with unemployment so high, so long, many face foreclosure. If you...

The bust that began in 2007 has just begun to ravage tax revenues in communities from coast to coast. The problem is unlikely to subside soon. For instance, Baltimore collected $815 million in property taxes during the most recent fiscal year. Next year, the figure is predicted to shrink to $803.5 million. The following year, $773 million. The year after that, $735.7 million. The year after that, $729.4 million. “I don’t see any quick fixes over the next four or five years, to be honest.” Baltimore already faces a budget deficit of more than $50 million next year. “Obviously, it...

The New York Times op-ed page and the left-wing echo chamber. When Joe Nocera was given a regular op-ed column in the New York Times, there was kind of a collective “uh-oh� among people who have watched the gradual slide of that page into Krugmanism and ideological irrelevance. I was one of them, but thought there might be some hope. Some of his columns in the Times business section had suggested a glimmering of a willingness to consider other points of view and even facts.At first, I was disappointed. As he said in today’s column, he called my dissent from...

Nobel Prize–winning economist Vernon Smith on the financial crisis, Adam Smith’s underrated insights, and his journey from socialist to libertarian “I remember the ’30s like it was yesterday,” says economist Vernon Smith. And he’s not kidding. In 1935, when the future Nobel Prize winner was 7 years old, his family decamped to their Kansas farm to wait out the hard times. “On the farms,” Smith explains, “you can eat.” His parents only made it to eighth grade, but “they were people who read,” and they expected their son to go to college. They got their wish—and then some. Smith’s higher...

The real cause of the housing bubble and collapse is very simple: An Executive Order by Bill Clinton and enthusiastically championed by George Bush, 13166, forced banks to make bad loans or no loans at all. And Newt Gingrich was championing putting an end to EO 13166 years before the collapse of the banking industry. In the late 1990s, a grand compromise was reached between President Clinton and Senate Banking Chairman Phil Gramm. Long ago, government types decided that home ownership was the key to fiscal stability, but too many blacks didn't qualify for loans. The banking industry argued that...

It should be clear that among the causes of the recent financial crisis was an unjustified faith in rational expectations, market efficiencies, and the techniques of modern finance. That faith was stoked in part by the huge financial rewards that enabled the extremes of borrowing, the economic imbalances, and the pretenses and assurances of the credit-rating agencies to persist so long. A relaxed approach by regulators and legislators reflected the new financial zeitgeist. All the seeming mathematical precision that was brought to investment, all the complicated new products, including the explosion of derivatives, that were intended to diffuse and minimize...

Congressman: Obama should unilaterally ‘refinance every home mortgage’ [VIDEO] By Nicholas Ballasy - The Daily Caller 11:43 PM 10/21/2011 Virginia Democratic Rep. Jim Moran told The Daily Caller on Thursday evening that President Obama should “refinance every home mortgage” without congressional approval in order to “reset the economy.” “Absolutely, I think [Obama] should do that but there are not a lot of places where he can act unilaterally,” Moran told TheDC during Conservation International’s Oct. 20 dinner in Washington, D.C. “If he chooses to act unilaterally,” Moran said, “the likelihood is that there will be language in the appropriations bills...

Between the candidates’ debates and my conversations with the Occupy Wall Street protesters, it seems to me that there is a persistent, dangerous disconnect between our political conversation and reality. On the right, we’re still too focused on taxes, rather than on the spending that drives taxes. On the left, they’re . . . the Left, still, unfortunately for them. With an eye on 2012, here are ten important but sometimes counterintuitive facts to keep in mind:1.      There is no austerity.2.      There was no deregulation.3.      You can’t trust Republicans on spending.4.      Wall Street loves Democrats.5.      People who voted for Barack...

When the local mine closed the entire town of Empire, Nevada shut down too (Video by David Botti) Continue reading the main story Altered StatesForeign doctors in rural America Hispanic education in crisis Baseball from Far East Watch Mormon luau in Utah Watch Some outside observers have been quick to draw apocalyptic lessons from America's recent economic woes. But here in the Black Rock Desert, in remote north-western Nevada, it truly is the end of Empire. The former company town, built around a gypsum mine and drywall plant, is fenced off and silent. Inhabitants gone, houses empty, plant idle. A...

Now that Herman Cain has become a top-tier presidential candidate for the Republican nomination, he is receiving a greater degree of scrutiny than ever before. And that includes efforts by the mainstream media to do what they do best to conservative candidates: prove somehow that said candidates are unfit to serve. First it was MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell playing the role of the white liberal lecturing Herman Cain on what it means to be black. Now it's Chuck Todd wondering what did Cain know and when did he know it...about housing bubbles. During an October 11 interview (minute 4:58) on MSNBC,...

It's a good thing I heard this on the radio at about 11:00 a.m., because I might otherwise have missed it. With yours truly's opinion along for the ride, I'll let readers judge whether the news of the Lowe's home improvement chain announcing that it will close 20 stores and cut its new store opening plans by one-half to two-thirds deserved to be in the top ten business stories at the Associated Press as of 12:52 p.m. Lowe's to close 20 stores Home-improvement retailer Lowe's Cos. says it will close 20 underperforming stores in 15 states and cut 1,950 jobs...

CHICAGO – Three years have now passed since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the start of the most acute phase of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. Is the financial world a safer place today? Within days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the US had erected new and enormous security measures at airports throughout the country. Within a month, the US military was on the ground in Afghanistan. Within three years the US had an official report on the causes of the events of 9/11; the well-resourced expert commission that produced it identified the weaknesses of America’s national-security...

By Kenneth R. Harney October 2, 2011 Reporting from Washington— Negative equity and underwater homeowners are frequently in the headlines, but what about positive equity in Americans' homes? Is there much of it left after the wealth-killing recession and real estate bust? Where is it? Who's got equity? You might be surprised. A new study, conducted by mortgage and real estate data firm CoreLogic for this column, found that there are substantial reserves of positive equity across the country. CoreLogic maintains the largest database on home loans — 42 million active accounts, more than 80% of all existing mortgages —...

Home prices are unlikely to recover before 2020 and mortgage defaults will persist for years, says a survey of bank risk managers out Friday. The survey conducted by the Professional Risk Managers’ International Association for FICO, found that 49 percent of respondents do not expect housing prices to rise back to 2007 levels for another nine years. Only 21 percent of respondents said they would. The findings, which authors called “a decidedly pessimistic outlook”, are a sharp reversal from cautious optimism the survey respondents expressed late last year and in early 2011. In addition, 73 percent of surveyed bankers say...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes dipped slightly in September to remain in very low territory, according to an index released Monday. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index fell by a point to 14, on a seasonally adjusted index where readings above 50 are considered good. The index, which correlates closely with single-family housing starts, has held between 13 and 16 for the last six months.

Pending sales of existing U.S. homes fell in July from June in the latest sign of weakness in the housing industry, data from a real estate trade group showed on Monday. The National Association of Realtors Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in July, was down 1.3 percent to 89.7 from 90.9 in June. Economists polled by Reuters ahead of the report were expecting pending home sales to fall 1.3 percent. In a sign of how much the sector has recovered from a year ago, the index was up 14.4 percent from July of 2010.

Recent falls in the stock market and growing concerns over the cloud hanging over the U.S. economy has prompted more home buyers to cancel real estate deals or continue to sit on the sidelines, analysts say. The National Association of REALTORS® said in a recent report that home buyer cancellations in the last two months increased about 10 percent from a year earlier. Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, says the increase is due to low appraisals that do not match the mortgage amount, “overly stringent” lending standards, as well as waning buyer confidence. “The typical home buyer gets rattled when...

The Washington Post is reporting that President Obama has assigned his staff with the task of designing a new set of government guarantees behind the U.S. mortgage market. Although as the Post also reports the “approach could even preserve Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.” That’s correct. Despite their role in driving the housing bubble and the already $160 billion in taxpayer losses, President Obama appears to be considering just putting the same failed system in place. Of course, we’ll be promised that it will all work better this time. Perhaps most offensive is that the Post reports that Obama “officials...

The housing boom in Australia is now an escalating bust. Many Australian homeowners put every cent they had into their homes and they needed double incomes to just scrape by. Unfortunately, those jobs are disappearing in a construction and commercial real estate bust.  I warned about this event for years, but in Australia, like everywhere else "It's Different Here" until it's not.  60 Minutes Australia picked up the Secretly Broke story in "The Big Squeeze". Click on link for a 60 Minutes video. Here is a partial transcript.ALLISON LANGDON: To the world, Tracy and David Dodd are the very model of Australia’s...

If someone you knew claimed to have bought a new house for $16, you'd probably expect it to be a rundown hovel. But for Kenneth Robinson, that princely sum could see him as the new owner of a $300,000 home in an well-manicured part of Flower Mound, Texas. On June 17, Mr Robinson took advantage of a little known Texas law to move into the abandoned home. The house had been in foreclosure for more than a year and its owner walked away. Then, the mortgage company went bust. After months of research, Mr Robinson used the obscure law 'adverse...

Housing prices are due to slide another 20 percent nationwide and will throw the U.S. economy into a fresh recession probably sometime next year, says economist Gary Shilling. "The problem is there are too many excess inventories. We estimate that there are 2 (million) to 2.5 million excess housing unit inventories over and above the normal working levels," Shilling tells Yahoo's Daily Ticker. The United States normally builds about 1.5 million houses a year, so with such excess inventory lagging on the market, it's going to take around four to five years for normalcy to return. "Excess inventories are the...

Sales of existing homes fell in May, as severe weather and high gas prices weighed on the shaky housing market. Home sales fell 3.8% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.81 million, down from a revised rate of 5 million in April, the National Association of Realtors said Tuesday. Sales were more than 15% lower than in May 2010. Economists had expected a May sales rate of 4.79 million existing homes, according to consensus estimates from Briefing.com. "Spiking gasoline prices along with widespread severe weather hurt house shopping in April, leading to soft figures for actual closings in May,"...

~ By: Larry Walker, Jr. ~ My previous advice proffered the simple concept of a Mortgage in-Kind Exchange. If you didn’t like that notion, perhaps you will like this one. An Adjustable Principal Mortgage is a solution that would allow a mortgage company to temporarily write down the principal amount of a mortgage to an amount comparable to the contracts original debt ratio, and subsequently make adjustments every third year as home prices fluctuate. Once the value of the home equals or exceeds its original cost, no further adjustments are required. Neither the length of the loan or its...

By: Larry Walker, Jr.The first step in any recovery is acknowledging the problem. The second step is having faith that a power greater than oneself can restore sanity. Joe purchased his home four years ago for $300,000. He currently has an outstanding mortgage balance of $270,000. The appraised value of his home has fallen to $150,000. If he sells it for $150,000 today, he will eat a loss of $150,000 which is not deductible for tax purposes. Joe can afford his mortgage payments and has not missed any. Since he doesn’t qualify for a loan modification, what options does he have?For...

MODERATOR, I OPENED THIS UNDER CHIT CHAT AND WANT MY TITLE, THIS IS NOT A NEWS STORY POSTING Charles and Jill Segal have not made a mortgage payment in nearly five years -- but they continue to live in their five-bedroom West Palm Beach, Fla. home. Lynn, from St. Petersburg, Fla., has been living without paying for three years. In Thousand Oaks, Calif., an actor has missed 30 payments, and still, he has not lost his home. They're not alone. Some 4.2 million mortgage borrowers are either seriously delinquent or have had their cases referred to lawyers to pursue foreclosure...

The subprime crisis has spread well beyond the victims of those loans. The residue of the crisis spread to the economy and began to affect those who had lost their jobs, their equity and finally their homes. All of us have been touched by friends and loved ones who had to leave their homes. The subprime crisis was caused primarily by the crash of real estate values and not by risky loans. Since then, several variables have contributed to the rise of record foreclosures. Loan modifications were widely marketed as easy solutions to homeowners facing payment default. As most discovered,...

Two unrelated news stories on the same day show the contrast between government decisions and private decisions. Under the headline, “Foreclosed Homes Sell at Big Discounts,” USA Today reported that banks were selling the homes that they foreclosed on at discounts of 38 percent in Tennessee to 41 percent in Illinois and Ohio. Banks in general try to get rid of the homes that they acquire by foreclosure by selling them quickly for whatever they can get. Why? Because banks are forced by economic realities to realize that they are not real-estate companies. No matter how much expertise bank officials...

southern Florida couple got sweet revenge when they foreclosed on Bank of America, instead of the other way around. The unusual turn of events started in Collier County months ago, when the mega-bank notified Maurenn Nyergers and her husband that their comfortable, relatively new home had gone into foreclosure. Trouble is, the Nyergers say they they never owed the bank a cent, swearing instead that they had paid cash for their dwelling. A Collier County judge agreed with the couple, and ordered Bank of America to pay their legal expenses. But then, the Nyergers say they waited more than five...

The rise and fall of the housing market was one of the more spectacular bubbles of recent memory. And the bursting of that bubble is still having a profound impact on the economy, even though we're now several years past the peak. Yet, it doesn't look like housing prices will be bouncing back anytime soon. Last week, I examined the perfect storm of factors that led to the incredible inflation of housing prices and some of the reasons housing prices have fallen back to earth. Although I do believe that prices have stabilized, there are many headwinds that will make...

A bank foreclosure story you've got to see to believe. A Collier County couple turns the tables on Bank of America, the bank that tried to foreclose on their home. Now, the family is foreclosing on the bank! Even bringing trucks and deputies ready to seize property. The foreclosure nightmare started when Warren and Maureen Nyerges paid cash for a home owned by Bank of American in the Golden Gate Estates. They never had a mortgage whatsoever. But, the bank fouled it up and wound up issuing a foreclosure through their attorney.

Reporting from North Las Vegas, Nev.— Charles Mills can barely afford to stay here. But he also can't afford to move. That's why the 44-year-old heavy-equipment operator was preparing to leave his wife and young daughter here and go where he could find work — the Oklahoma oil fields. Mills has a mortgage to pay, even if its size pains him. He purchased his house in 2006 for $308,500. Current value: $105,797. "We talked about it: What can we do with the house?" Mills said. "Nobody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to rent it. If we walk away, my...

Sales of previously owned U.S. homes fell in April, a trade group said on Thursday, in a sign that the country's housing market is struggling to recover from the recent financial crisis. Economists polled by Reuters ahead of the report were expecting home resales to rise to 5.2 million from the previously reported 5.1 million. "The recovery is very sluggish," said the group's senior economist, Lawrence Yun, adding that unnecessarily tight credit is continuing to restrain the market. About 37 percent of the market consisted of distressed sales, which include both foreclosures and sales of homes where the bank agrees...

Groves requested relief under the Declaratory Judgment Act, as well as “other and further relief to which [she] may be justly entitled.” The trial court’s judgment does not indicate that it granted her request to “quiet title” exclusively under the Declaratory Judgment Act. Accordingly, no error appears on the face of this record. See Tex. R. App. P. 26.1(c), 30; Alexander, 134 S.W.3d at 848. We overrule MERS’s first issue. ..... Groves alleged in her petition that MERS’s deed of trust “purported to create a lien for security purposes on Plaintiff’s property as described.” This alleged lien constitutes an adverse...

On March 30, an Alabama judge issued a short, conclusory order that stopped foreclosure on the home of a beleaguered family, and also prevents the same bank in the case from trying to foreclose against that couple, ever again. This may not seem like big news -- but upon review of the underlying documents, the extraordinarily important nature of the decision and the case becomes obvious. No Securitization, No Foreclosure The couple involved, the Horaces, took out a predatory mortgage with Encore Credit Corp in November, 2005. Apparently Encore sold their loan to EMC Mortgage Corp, who then tried to...

NEW YORK (AP) - Damage from the housing bust is spreading to areas once thought to be immune. In at least 14 major U.S. metro areas, prices are now at 2003 levels—when the housing bubble was just starting to inflate. Prices will likely fall further this year, making many people reluctant to buy or sell. That would push down sales and prices more. The depressed housing industry is slowing an economy that has shown strength elsewhere. And it's starting to hurt those who bought years before the housing boom began. In some cities, people who have paid their mortgages for...

Reverse mortgages, which pay older homeowners a regular sum against the equity in their house, are supposed to shield borrowers from economic upheaval. But the popular loans have become tangled up in the real estate collapse. AARP, the seniors’ organization, filed suit Tuesday against the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which regulates reverse mortgages. The suit asserts that policy changes by HUD are pushing older homeowners into foreclosure. The case was filed in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia by the AARP Foundation, the organization’s charitable arm, and the law firm of Mehri & Skalet on behalf...

Join us Sunday March 6th at 12pm est as we go live on the air with Joann M. Hennessey, Property Law Today… Last weeks show was so popular they invited us back. Be sure to call in early and keep trying if lines are busy. The switchboard almost overloaded last week with all the calls so we couldn’t get to everyone. Let’s get our message out on the airwaves! Look forward to taking your calls. RADIO SHOW Joann is the Host on Property Law Today, which airs every Sunday from 12-1pm on WDJA 1420 in the Palm Beaches. Listen on...

Well-known economist Roubini announced Wednesday that there may be $100 billion of municipal-bond defaults over the next five years. His comments echo analyst Meredith Whitney's claim that there will be an enormous wave of defaults. "Roubini seems to use more of a doomsday production," said Matt Fabian, managing director of Municipal Market Advisors at The Bloomberg Insurance Portfolio Strategies Conference. "If you are going to make a prediction, be conservative. In terms of defaults, we have seen very few in the market and these have been smaller transactions." Terry Goode, head of tax-exempt research and municipal fixed income at Wells...

Inquiring minds are watching the loses pile up for the beleaguered MERS Corp. We at SurvivingCalifornia.com have been writing on this for quite some time now and people are beginning to believe that this is an incredible problem. Now a U.S. Bankruptcy Judge in New York has stated that MERS has no right to transfer mortgages: U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert E. Grossman in Central Islip, New York, in a decision he said he knew would have a “significant impact,” wrote that the membership rules of the company’s Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, or MERS, don’t make it an agent of the...

A company that tracks roughly half of all U.S. home loans has no right to transfer mortgages, a ruling that could significantly affect the foreclosure process nationwide, a federal bankruptcy judge concluded. Merscorp Inc, a private company known as MERS and owned by large banks and mortgage processors, cannot act as an agent of the banks that own mortgages, wrote Judge Robert Grossman of the U.S. bankruptcy court in Central Islip, New York, located on Long Island. MERS, which stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, tracks more than 60 million mortgages, and has filed thousands of foreclosure actions on behalf...

A recent ruling by a California appeals court clears the way for fraud charges against a lender that promised a loan modification but then foreclosed on the borrower. The ruling throws into question the legality of hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. Not only was the ruling a frontal assault on the empty promises made by servicers and banks, the case highlighted some despicable tactics often employed to force foreclosures.

At Calculated Risk, Tom Lawler, a real estate economist and former risk policy veep at Fannie Mae, tries to figure out how many people have actually lost their homes to foreclosure, short sales or deed-in-lieu desertions. The answer: Not enough. Lawler (who is now living the life of Riley on a Virginia farm) says the number of foreclosures that have been completed so far is a drop in the bucket compared to the number of loans that have gone bad: On the other hand, the above numbers could well OVERSTATE significantly the number of homeowners who lost their primary...

David J. Stern may be the best-known beneficiary of the foreclosure boom, having made millions in recent years from evictions processed by his law firm, the largest of its kind in Florida. But when he took part of his firm public early last year, he had plenty of help from a constellation of investors also looking to cash in on people losing their homes. Early in 2010, the back-office processing operations of Mr. Stern’s law firm were converted into a publicly traded company called DJSP Enterprises. Mr. Stern pocketed nearly $60 million from that transaction, public filings show.Behind that big-money...

I usually find the quarterly homeowner vacancy and homeownership report from Census pretty lackluster, but the latest one released this morning was anything but. Strawberry Mill Valley America's home ownership rate, after holding steady for a while, took a pretty big plunge in Q4, from 66.9 percent to 66.5 percent. That's down from the 2004 peak of 69.2 percent and the lowest level since 1998

Among the many legal problems now being discovered with the foreclosure documents that banks have been using are false notarizations. The most typical variety of this problem occurs when a notary certifies that the person whose signature appears on a document really did sign it, even though the notary didn't witness the signing. While such false notarizing is criminal, I've not yet heard of any notaries being charged. However, in Maryland, Steve Lash of The Daily Record reports that 18 current and former notaries have invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in a foreclosure case.

MERS has screwed up the records so badly that in many or most cases no one knows who holds the notes, who is entitled to receive mortgage payments, and who has got the deed. What we used to call “mortgage backed securities” are probably mostly unsecured. It is not clear that any of the securitizations of home mortgages were done properly. In that case, the securities are not mortgage backed. Mortgage servicers do not have the right to foreclose, and neither do the securities holders. Homeowners can follow the example in Utah because, apparently, all states have a similar provision...

More than 70,000 Minnesota homeowners were behind on their mortgages and received pre-foreclosure notices last year, a warning that the housing market still faces serious hurdles in 2011. About 71,665 struggling homeowners got the notices in 2010, up 8 percent from 2009, according to the Minnesota Home Ownership Center, which released the numbers Thursday. The number of notices rose 3 percent in the Twin Cities metro area, but 15 percent elsewhere in Minnesota. The numbers suggest that despite glimmers of hope in the job market, the state could see more people lose homes this year than they did last year,...

Fred Buzzeo writes: These days everyone is sitting at the edge of their seats waiting for a real-estate recovery. Indeed, during the past ten years, everyone has become a real-estate addict. It is hard for me to walk down the street without someone telling me that the market has "hit bottom" or that the market is on the "rebound." Do I know anyone interested in this piece of property, they ask? Is the timing right? Can I put together a deal? These are the questions that I am constantly bombarded with by the real-estate "junkies" that I encounter while making...