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A long-delayed federal program aimed at helping hundreds of unemployed Massachusetts homeowners pay their mortgages is finally being launched today, with $61 million earmarked for the state. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the nonprofit NeighborWorks America said the program will provide hundreds of local borrowers with interest-free loans of up to $50,000 over a two-year period. In some cases, the money will not have to be paid back. The $1 billion national program is expected to benefit 30,000 unemployed homeowners in 27 states and Puerto Rico with financial assistance. Homeowners must file loan applications by 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...

Subprime Scandal: The left is unhappy that no high-profile bankers have gone to jail in the financial crisis. But the real culprits were - and still are - in Washington. They've gotten off scot-free. A growing chorus is complaining that federal prosecutors have dragged their feet in the aftermath of the mortgage mess. Despite a raft of referrals against financial giants alleging securities fraud and "predatory lending," no senior bank executives have been charged or imprisoned. The media elite demand to know why it is that almost three years after the meltdown, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, ex-AIG CEO Hank...

RUSH: Now, I have a story here that's simply unreal, and it's from last week. I purposely sat on this story to see if I would see it anywhere else. I've had it in the stack since May the 5th, almost a week. It's from Business Week magazine, a story by Clea Benson, headline: "A Renewed Crackdown on Redlining -- In the wake of the subprime implosion, the Obama Administration has stepped up its scrutiny of disadvantaged neighborhoods' credit access. Community activists in St. Louis became concerned a couple of years ago that local banks weren't offering credit to the...

Abstract. We estimate a mortgage default model with national data on conventional mortgages that were current from 1986 to 1992. Our analysis confirms the results of previous analyses of Federal Housing Authority mortgages: Black households have higher marginal default rates, controlling for differences in borrower and property characteristics. Further, we do not find that Black borrowers have significantly more home equity. These results do not provide evidence of racial discrimination in mortgage lending and suggest that differences in default costs or transaction costs may explain differences in default rates. Introduction This article presents evidence that Black borrowers have higher default...

Community activists in St. Louis became concerned a couple of years ago that local banks weren't offering credit to the city's poor and African American residents. So they formed a group called the St. Louis Equal Housing and Community Reinvestment Alliance and began writing complaint letters to federal regulators. Apparently, someone in Washington took notice. The Federal Reserve has cited one of the group's targets, Midwest BankCentre, a small bank that has been operating in St. Louis's predominantly white, middle-class suburbs for over a century, for failing to issue home mortgages or open branches in disadvantaged areas. Although executives at...

wo lawsuits accusing Wells Fargo of discriminatory lending practices have been allowed to move forward, a victory for plaintiffs that have accused the bank of steering African-Americans toward predatory loans. In one lawsuit, brought by the city of Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn., Judge S. Thomas Anderson of Federal District Court for the Western District of Tennessee on Wednesday denied a motion from Wells Fargo to dismiss, partly on the grounds that the suit was too broadly drawn. Both jurisdictions accused the lender of improperly steering African-Americans toward loan products that ultimately led to foreclosures, vacancies and increased government costs....

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The Senate will soon issue findings of a probe of the US mortgage meltdown that fueled the global financial crisis, with Goldman Sachs likely to face fresh embarrassment over its role, the Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, whose high-profile inquiry commission subpoenaed Goldman's and other executives last year, is due to release its report on the subprime implosion of 2007 and 2008. The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said the report was expected to release emails from securities firms that developed or sold subprime mortgages and financial vehicles including...

Litigation and regulatory actions tied to Goldman Sach's selling of mortgage-backed securities could cost the investment bank an additional $3.4 billion in legal expenses, Goldman's said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing this week. The $3.4 billion is a "worst-case scenario" projection and does not reflect the true risk Goldman faces, but rather what could happen if the firm lands on the losing end of all litigation, a spokesman for the firm said. The company's projection of greater-than-budgeted for legal expenses puts it in company with Bank of America, Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan & Co., all of...

'Not a single financial executive has gone to jail, and that's wrong," bellowed Charles Ferguson at Sunday night's Academy Awards. Is it really? Consider the source: "Inside Job," Ferguson's Oscar-winning documentary on the financial collapse of 2008, proudly features Eliot Spitzer -- who, as New York's attorney general, went on a tear against the big brokerages and their executives over various alleged crimes. In the film, Spitzer discusses how he uncovered various misdeeds, and claims the feds could have used their investigative powers to bring the bad guys to justice before it all blew up. But why didn't Spitzer do...

The Securites Exchange Commission (SEC) formally charged former Countrywide Financial CEO Angelo Mozilo and two other company executives with civil fraud. The SEC also charged Mozilo with illegal insider trading, an agency spokesman said Thursday. Civil fraud charges also were filed against Countrywide's former Chief Operating Officer David Sambol and ex-Chief Financial Officer Eric Sieracki. Countrywide Financial, the California-based mortgage lender, was a key component to the subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, which was the beginning of the financial decline and current recession in the U.S. Mozilo is the most high-profile individual to face formal charges from the federal government...

Insiders at Freddie Mac are downplaying the memo revealed by Bloomberg yesterday. The memo revealed that a survey of mortgages Freddie bought from Citigroup [C 4.765 -0.035 (-0.73%) ] in late 2009 and early 2010 uncovered shockingly high rates of defects. In late 2009, for example, more than 30 percent of the mortgages in the review had flaws. These weren't old, housing-bubble-era mortgages. They were loans made in 2009. Among the defects Freddie Mac detected were a missing appraisal, missing documentation, loans exceeding the maximum amount permitted, and a construction loan described as a refinancing. In short, a mess of...

It is not difficult to deprive the vast majority of independent thought.[i] Does anyone remember what happened on Christmas Eve last year? In one of the most expensive Christmas presents ever, the government removed the $400 billion limit on their Fannie and Freddie guaranty. This act increased taxpayer liabilities by six trillion dollars; however, the news was lost in the holiday cheer. This is one instance in a broader campaign to manipulate the public perception, gradually depriving us of independent thought. Consider another example: what news story broke on April 16, 2010? Most of us would say the SEC's lawsuit...

NEW YORK -- Home prices took a shockingly steep plunge on a monthly basis, an indication that the housing market could be on the verge of -- if it's not already in -- a double-dip slump, according to an industry report released Tuesday. Prices in 20 key cities fell 1.3% in October from a month earlier, an annualized decline of 15%, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. Prices were down 0.8% from 12 months earlier. Month-over-month prices dropped in all 20 metro areas covered by the index. Six markets -- Atlanta; Charlotte, N.C.; Miami; Portland, Ore.; Seattle and Tampa, Fla. --...

As detailed in this previous clip, co-authors Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera say there's plenty of blame to go around, from Alan Greenspan .....

Was the great financial crisis caused by greedy and reckless bankers and Wall Street players or by a broad range of individuals, financial institutions and governments who became less risk-averse and prudent or by government housing policies that brought on the housing bubble and mismanaged the risks? The lame-duck Congress now in session is about to make some major decisions on spending and taxes - when all too many members still are operating on the idea that greedy bankers and Wall Street players, rather than government housing policies, are the problem. Without waiting for the evidence, many in the political...

Benjamin Franklin is credited with defining insanity as the action of constantly doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results.  Well with that understanding, it is my opinion that both California and New York voters are suffering from an extreme case of insanity.  In California, Democrat Jerry Brown is holding a slight edge over Republican Meg Whitman 48% to 42%.  Now I do believe that both Whitman and Paladino can win, if Republicans vote with the same enthusiasm they had during the primaries.  However, if these numbers hold then it looks as if Jerry Brown...

Would it be queer to vote for the man who created the housing bubble and hence buggered the U.S. economy? ... Before it all erupted, Fannie and Freddie held or backed half of all American mortgages and a full 20% of their portfolio was subprime. ... Congress allowed them to leverage their assets more highly than any bank (Freddie was in hock for $70 for every $1 in cash it held – banks run at about 30:1 – and some think Mae and Mac’s numbers are low due to the mortgage-back securities for which they were on the hook). ......

The foreclosure crisis has hit blacks harder than any other group in America and it will be tough for them to regain their footing in the housing market. Blacks' homeownership rate has plummeted nearly 6 percent to 46.2 percent since its peak in 2004. That's more than twice that of any other racial or ethnic group, as well as the nation's rate as a whole, which fell only 2.3 percent, according to U.S. Census data. Also, among recent borrowers, nearly 8 percent of blacks have lost their homes to foreclosure, compared to 4.5 percent of whites, according to the Center...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is part of a group of investors pressuring Bank of America Corp. to repurchase billions of dollars in home loans. The investor group owns more than 25% of the voting rights in over $47 billion of residential mortgage-backed securities issued by Countrywide Financial, the home loan giant that Bank of America /quotes/comstock/13*!bac/quotes/nls/bac (BAC 11.75, -0.60, -4.82%)  acquired in 2008. On Monday, the group wrote to Countrywide Home Loan Servicing and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. /quotes/comstock/13*!bk/quotes/nls/bk (BK 26.11, -0.51, -1.92%)  , the trustee of the mortgage securities, saying...