Free Republic

Over the past three years the Obama administration has been secretly planning the largest redistribution of wealth in history. When President Obama took office, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac held a staggering $6.1 trillion in subprime mortgages. If you’ll remember just prior to the 2008 election, President Bush signed the $300 billion Toxic Asset Relief Program better known as TARP. Two of the largest beneficiaries of this were the mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The two companies received a combined $169 billion in taxpayer funds. Upon taking office, the Obama administration gave instructions to the two...

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- An index of pending home sales fell 1.3% in July, the National Association of Realtors reported Monday.

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.

The critical issue the candidates avoid: the voters are deep in debt. Going into next year’s election, President Obama is in a heap of trouble over the economy. Some evidence: in June, only 29 percent of the people who participated in a Wall Street Journal / NBC News poll thought the country was “headed in the right direction.” A full 62 percent, by contrast, thought America was “on the wrong track.” A clear majority, too — 41 to 54 percent — disapproved of the president’s economic performance. The numbers aren’t moving in Obama’s favor, either. Another problem for the White...

If “public-private partnerships” sound wonderful to you, please consider that the housing meltdown and the Great Recession we’re still struggling to escape were largely produced by a public-private partnership. ...the story’s essentials: oceans of tax dollars flowing to private groups – for-profit and nonprofit – that are praised by politicians who want credit for the subsidized housing boom, with the whole party lubricated by the dissolving of traditional lending practices, which in turn is justified by claims that unfettered lending will remedy racial disparities in housing. Those disparities, of course, are Exhibit A for advocates of “structural racism” theory, who...

Well, what about housing? It’s been dead for so many years that its blood long ago stopped flowing. Surely this famous piece of advice from Nathan Rothschild doesn’t apply to that sector? Don’t be too quick to dismiss the possibility. Consider the iShares Dow Jones U.S. Real Estate Index fund, an ETF that is designed to represent the real-estate sector. Just one week ago, it traded at a 52-week high. The same goes for the iShares Cohen & Steers Realty Majors. What does the market know that the rest of us don’t? For answers, I turned to an investment service...

PANAMA CITY BEACH — Lindsay Hall took out a $200,000 loan in 2005 on her paid-off beach house with the understanding that her $600 monthly Social Security check would cover the mortgage payments. When her interest rate jumped more than a year ago, it raised her mortgage payments to $1,500. At that point, Hall started the fight to save her home. “I want to say I did my best to fight for the American dream,” said Hall, 70. Hall has negotiated with her loan servicer, IndyMac Mortgage Services, to modify her loan payments multiple times. Each time she negotiates payments...

Yesterday we reported that Sarah Palin has just purchased a new property in North Scottsdale, AZ for $1.75 million. We further speculated that there may have been some fishyness with regard to the terms of the purchase of the JPM short sale which was an over 100% flip in about a year. So far so good. Where this story takes yet another detour into the macabre, is a cursory analysis of the release deed of the prior mortgage holder of the property, one Steven Soraya, who had a loan amounting to $980,500.00 with Wells Fargo, which was released on July...

I believe that the sine qua non of the financial crisis was U.S. government housing policy, which led to the creation of 27 million subprime and other risky loans -- half of all mortgages in the United States -- which were ready to default as soon as the massive 1997-2007 housing bubble began to deflate. If the U.S. government had not chosen this policy path -- fostering the growth of a bubble of unprecedented size and an equally unprecedented number of weak and high-risk residential mortgages -- the great financial crisis of 2008 would never have occurred...

In my analyses of the homebuyer tax credits issued, renewed, and expanded by Democrats in response to the housing market collapse, I called it a waste of taxpayer money that only incentivized those already inclined and qualified to buy, skewed demand, and put off a much-needed correction in pricing. I left out something that the Wall Street Journal’s Smart Money noticed in Monday’s Zillow report, which is that it turned out to be a pretty bad deal for those who used the credit as well as taxpayers. Thanks to the artificially higher home prices that the tax credits provided, buyers...

Short-term terrible housing news is no surprise right now, but the long-term thesis that residential real estate is a good investment is starting to crumble too. Recent research from Wenli Li and Fang Yang (via Harvard Business Review) shows that the real rate of return on housing from 1975-2009 was actually negative.From Li and Yang:Assuming an annual depreciation rate of 2.5 percent, a property tax rate of 1.5 percent, a mortgage interest rate of 7 percent, and a marginal income tax rate of 25 percent for a typical taxpayer, the adjusted real rate of return on housing actually falls below...

If you thought the housing crisis was bad, think again. It’s worse. New data just out from Zillow, the real-estate information company, show house prices are falling at their fastest rate since the Lehman collapse. Average home prices are down 8% from a year ago, 3% over the quarter, and are falling at about 1% every month, according to Zillow. And the percentage of homeowners in negative-equity positions — with a home worth less than its mortgage — has rocketed to 28%, a new crisis high.

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...

Cover-Up: Acorn clones using the Community Reinvestment Act to shake down banks aren't happy with our campaign to expose the truth about the CRA's central role in the financial crisis. The Greenlining Institute is typical. The Berkeley, Calif.-based community organizer fired off a letter to us complaining about our March 21 editorial "WaMu: Guilty Only Of CRA Compliance." In it, we argued that Washington Mutual, a CRA poster boy in the run-up to the crisis, is now a convenient whipping boy for the same regulators who pressured the bank into making the "reckless" multicultural loans they're suing it over today....

How might home buying change if the federal government shuts down the housing finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage loan, the steady favorite of American borrowers since the 1950s, could become a luxury product, housing experts on both sides of the political aisle say. Interest rates would rise for most borrowers, but urban and rural residents could see sharper increases than the coveted customers in the suburbs. Lenders could charge fees for popular features now taken for granted, like the ability to "lock in" an interest rate weeks or months before taking out a loan....

TRULY startling revelations were few in the voluminous report, published last Thursday by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the origins of the financial panic. This is hardly a shock, given the flood-the-zone coverage and analysis of the crisis since it erupted four years ago. Yet the report still makes... --snip-- For those of you who’ve wondered why there have been so few prosecutions of mortgage fraud during this epidemic, your answer is on Page 164. “The terrible thing that happened,” said William K. Black, a former fraud investigator in the savings-and-loan crisis who is a professor at the University...

The housing crisis wasn't caused by much-maligned exotic loans so much as lending huge sums of money to unworthy borrowers, a report released Monday suggested. The misdiagnosis of the housing bubble, whose implosion in 2007 knocked out the broader economy, drove Congress to overreact and ban useful tools, according to a report from the Corky McMillin Center for Real Estate at San Diego State University. The study examined lending practices in 12 countries and found that many make extensive use of loans in which the borrower avoids paying down principal for a fixed period. With the exception of the United...

New RealtyTrac numbers show that in April there were well over 300,000 foreclosures and the figure in on track to be higher in 2010 than in 2009. Several research firms say that underwater mortgages have moved above 11 million. The National Association of Realtors found that “in the first quarter, 91 out of 152 metropolitan statistical areas showed higher median existing single-family home prices in comparison with the first quarter of 2009.” But some cities posted double-digit drops for the period. 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the NAR data for the first quarter along with Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment levels...

MOKENA -- The foreclosure crisis has hit home for the Triezenbergs of Manhattan Township. Mark and Tia Triezenberg and their five young children, including one with severe disabilities due to autism, must leave their home by Aug. 29. The foreclosure, one of many nationwide and locally (see sidebar), caps a troubled couple of years for a family that saw its income soar with the home-building boom and plummet with the recession. "This is like Pearl Harbor," Mark said during an interview at a Mokena restaurant. "Only a few people saw this coming." The Triezenbergs still don't know where they will...

A survey of seven major housing markets found that less than half of all attempts to sell a home in 2009 had, as of last Wednesday, resulted in a sale. The analysis, conducted by Redfin Corp., a Seattle-based brokerage that operates in nine states, shows just how tough the housing market has become–and just how many sellers are unwilling to lower their prices. The survey looked at how the 500,000 homes that were listed for sale last year in seven of the nation’s biggest counties had fared. Around 47% of those listings had sold by last week, while just 4%...