Free Republic

Attorney John Thaler joined Brannon Howse with former Arizona State Representative Mark Finchem Friday night on Lindell TV to explain the alleged phony mortgage and real estate transaction scam used by the Sinaloa Cartel to bribe elected officials and control the state of Arizona. The Sinaloa Cartels and the treasonous Americans who work with them are destroying our country by flooding Arizona with dangerous drugs and crime. The Gateway Pundit reported that Tempe Police seized over 30 million lethal doses of fentanyl. In 2022, the DEA nationwide seized over 50.6 million deadly fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills and over 10,000 pounds...

President Joe Biden has fired the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency after the Supreme Court handed him the power to do so on Wednesday. Director Mark Calabria's firing will be effective at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, the Washington Examiner has learned. Calabria, a staunch free-market advocate, was appointed by President Donald Trump to lead the FHFA in 2019. The FHFA is the federal agency responsible for managing the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, also known as Freddie Mac, and the Federal National Mortgage Association, also known as Fannie Mae — meaning it has far-reaching power over mortgage markets....

Washington • Sen. Bob Bennett said Thursday he was unaware that anyone on his staff got special home loans through CountryWide Finance Corp. as alleged in a congressional letter delivered to the Senate Ethics Committee. But the Utah Republican said he would cooperate fully with any ethics investigation that takes place. “I do not have a loan with CountryWide and I do not inquire as to where my staffers go to get their mortgages,” Bennett said in an interview with The Tribune. “I have full faith in the integrity of the staff and the matter is going to be in...

In front of a ballroom full of N.C. bankers in January 2006, Wachovia chief executive Ken Thompson warned of the dangers of “toxic” home loans. A problem with so-called option adjustable-rate mortgages, he told the group, was that homeowners can end up owing more at the end of the month than the beginning, which can be a “tough situation” for customers and lenders. “I have literally been amazed at the terms offered by some mortgage lenders, thankfully not at Wachovia and thankfully not so much in North Carolina,” he said. Four months later in May 2006, Thompson took a $24...

<p>The Obama administration is engaged in a broad push to make more home loans available to people with weaker credit, an effort that officials say will help power the economic recovery but that skeptics say could open the door to the risky lending that caused the housing crash in the first place.</p>

Policy-wise, this is an oldie but a goodie, I guess, even though we’re still spending tons of money on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae more than four years after the crash. Wells Fargo CEO Robert Kovacevich can't believe that we haven't learned the lesson from 2008 and gotten the government out of the home mortgage industry, and tells CNBC's Squawk Box that the two organizations made that crash exponentially worse than it needed to be: CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE VIDEO Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac exacerbated the 2008 mortgage crisis, and that’s why the U.S. government should get out...

A top housing regulator on Tuesday spurned a proposal from President Obama and Democrats to let homeowners write down the principal on their mortgages. Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the federal agency that oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, said the risk to taxpayers from the mortgage aid would far outweigh the benefits. “We concluded the potential benefit was too small and uncertain relative to unknown costs and risks,” DeMarco, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), said in a letter to Congress. DeMarco's move drew a swift rebuke from the Treasury Department, which had pushed FHFA...

If you think there is chaos in the housing market now, just wait. ...Retirees tomorrow will officially get the bad news: no cost of living adjustment from Social Security again this year. ...THIS YEARS CONSUMER`S PRICES ARE BEING COMPARED WITH `08s. ...Even as the Fed is rumored to be thisclose to flooding the economy with more money, it suddenly did something called a "re verse repo." ... JPMorgan Chase managed to produce excellent earnings through accounting trickery

  Call it a paradox. The U.S. economy officially has been out of recession for 15 months. The stock market enjoyed a record-high September; durable goods orders are up; and consumer spending is growing. Yet homeowners continue to lose their properties at a frequency not seen since the Great Depression. And this is despite - and possibly to some extent, because of - an emergency federal program in place for the past year and a half designed to stave off foreclosures. Call it a consumer bailout. And don't expect it to end soon. Business journalists have an old shibboleth: Housing...

Madness of HELOC Lending During the Bubble Years Aided by the seemingly limitless desire of banks to lend money, homeowners opened an incredible number of HELOCs during the bubble years of 2004-2006. Nowhere was the madness of HELOC borrowing more astounding than in California. During the two key years of 2004 and 2005, a total of 1.43 million HELOCs were originated in California just for the purchase of homes according to figures received from CoreLogic. Wait a minute, you say. That's more than the total number of homes sold in California during these years. Correct. A total of 1.25 million...

May 29, 2008 By Andrew Walden (Hawai'i Free Press) Nadhmi Auchi, seen here with the Governor of Illinois, Rob Blagojevich (middle) at a 2004 Chicago dinner in Auchi's honor arranged by Antonin Rezko (potentially, right)[1]. All three men have been convicted of corruption related charges (Auchi 2003, Rezko 2008, Blagojevich 2009).[2] “A British-Iraqi billionaire lent millions of dollars to Barack Obama's fundraiser (dual US-Syrian citizen Tony Rezko) just weeks before an imprudent land deal that has returned to haunt the presidential contender, an investigation by The Times discloses. The money transfer raises the question of whether funds from Nadhmi Auchi,...

Rural Home Loans For People With Bad Credit And Single Mothers __ The USDA Farm Home Loans program provides low interest fixed monthly mortgage payment terms to help low and moderate income households afford a house of their own to keep the family together. In such difficult economic conditions, such rural home loans from the United States Department of Agriculture, Rural Development Branch, can offer better credit flexibility compared to traditional lenders in the troubled and sluggish housing and lending market. Do not be too put off by the "rural home loans" name of this program since many semi-rural properties...

King County prosecutors have filed theft charges against six members of a Bellevue mortgage company accused of helping illegal immigrants obtain home loans. In charging documents, prosecutors claim the bulk of Casalinda Mortgage's business came from illegal immigrants to whom firm employees had given false Social Security numbers. State regulators and the Secret Service launched an investigation into the business in July 2007 following an anonymous tip to the Department of Financial Institutions. Six people -- all related by blood or marriage -- have now been charged with felony theft. "The evidence showed that Casalinda employees knew that many of...

Current mortgage rates should be the answer to everyone's prayers--the chance to refinance at articificially low rates and enjoy artificially low payments into the hereafter. But, as David Streitfeld explains in the NYT, banks aren't refinancing all that many loans. Why not? They've raised lending standards to where they should have been on the first go-round, which makes many homeowners ineligible Many loans are underwater, and banks won't lend more than the house is worth (shocking, we know). Many loans have been securitized, so your current bank can't just modify them on its own. Some key stats: An estimated six...

Acorn has been helping illegal aliens receive home loans for years. Finally the media is catching on that the government is complicit in helping the loans to go through. Fox report- video at link

The Subprime home mortgage collapse...a Primer. It's ALL about the CRA of 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 - This required banks to offer credit throughout their entire market area for “underserved” populations and small businesses. The CRA gave incentives to help low income borrowers become “home owners”. Liberals call this group “low income borrowers”. Conservatives call them a RISK!The CRA was passed by the Carter administration. In 1995 the Clinton administration authorized subprime loans under the CRA. Democrats added these provisions for the securitization of subprime loans and then ENFORCED the lending to high risk individuals. By 2000,...

Posit: Underwater mortgages hurt home sales and increase delinquencies and foreclosures. People who have to pay their mortgage holder to sell their homes are less likely to be sellers. A home sold for $200,000 when it has a $250,000 mortgage is a home that the owner may not be able to afford to sell.People living in homes with monthly mortgage payment that stretch their abilities to cover their living costs may stay in homes that they believe have a lot of equity and where a sale will eventually bring them a profit. That hope for a bonanza may encourage them to go through the agony of making large payments....

After virtually every disaster created by Beltway politicians you can hear the sound of feet scurrying for cover in Washington, see fingers pointing in every direction away from Washington, and watch all sorts of scapegoats hauled up before Congressional committees to be denounced on television for the disasters created by members of the committee who are lecturing them. The word repeated endlessly in these political charades is "deregulation." The idea is that it was a lack of government supervision which allowed "greed" in the private sector to lead the nation into crises that only our Beltway saviors can solve. What...

In the spirit of bipartisanship, my newest book— "The Housing Boom and Bust"— shows how both Democrats and Republicans ruined both the housing markets and the financial markets. Like so many disasters, the current economic crisis grew out of policies based on good intentions and mushy thinking. For far too long, too many people have regarded home ownership as "a good thing." It is certainly true that home ownership has its benefits. But, like everything else, it also has its costs and its risks. Weighing such trade-offs is something that each individual and each family can do for themselves. It...