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The periods between 2005-2007 were especially booming periods for commercial mortgages. This is important to understand because commercial mortgages are overwhelmingly done as balloon loans. What this means is that borrowers pay a monthly payment for a set period of time, usually from 5-7 years, and then the balance is due, the balloon. So, what this means is that the years from 2010-2013 will see an explosion of balloons coming due on commercial mortgages. In fact, about $1.4 trillion will come due in those three years.

GWB 2002 Speech :�More and more people own their homes in America today. Yet we have a problem here in America because fewer than half the Hispanics and African Americans own their own homes. That’s a home ownership gap; a gap that we got to work together to close. And by the end of this decade we’ll increase the number of minority homeowners (future Obama voters ) by 5.5 million families. “ “One of the major obstacles to minority home-ownership is financing. Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac (who I will bail out in 2008) have committed to provide more money...

The Obama administration unveiled an expansion of its $75 billion foreclosure prevention plan yesterday, providing new subsidies to mortgage lenders and investors. Under the expanded plan, some homeowners could see their payments fall significantly and the interest rate on their second mortgage pushed down to 1 percent. The announcement comes nearly two months after the administration launched the housing program, called Making Home Affordable. While officials said some borrowers have already received help, the foreclosure rate is rising and it could be months before the program begins to have an impact. The new efforts address, in part, criticisms from consumer...

Legislation would hike resources to DOJ, FBI, set up outside commission. BY RONALD D. OROL WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- The Senate voted Tuesday to give federal investigators more tools to combat mortgage fraud and other scams.The bipartisan legislation would authorize $490 million over two years to hire fraud prosecutors, increase enforcement actions and add funds to the Secret Service and Housing and Urban Development Inspector General. It also allocates funds to the Postal Inspection Service. It also sets up a commission of outside experts with subpoena power to examine the financial crisis and make recommendations.

As part of its Islamic-based business model, Guidance Residential featured a recitation from the Quran by Noorulhuda Khalid, 10, during a recent gathering for prospective borrowers at the Mezban Curry and Grill restaurant in Houston. Share Print Email Del.icio.usDiggTwitterYahoo! BuzzFacebookStumbleUponFor five years after moving to Houston, Pakistani immigrant Abdul-Jabbar Khan rented an apartment even though he had saved enough money to make a down payment on a house.

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The number of American households threatened with losing their homes grew 24 percent in the first three months of this year and is poised to rise further as major lenders restart foreclosures after a temporary break, according to data released Thursday. The big unknown for the coming months, however, is President Barack Obama's plan to help up to 9 million borrowers avoid foreclosure through refinanced mortgages or modified loans. The Obama administration expects its plans to make a big dent in the foreclosure crisis. But it remains to be seen whether the lending industry will fully embrace it, despite $75...

Jerry and Carol Ptacek bounced from one cramped apartment to another most of their adult lives, so they could hardly believe their luck when they were able to buy a San Bernardino house for the bargain price of $63,000. Nine years later, they are renters again -- a testament to the failure of the federal government's Dollar Homes program. Congress launched the program in 1998 to clear the Department of Housing and Urban Development's books of foreclosures and provide affordable housing. Local governments would buy the homes for $1, fix them up and resell them at a discount to poor...

WILLIAM K. BLACK: Geithner is charging, is covering up. Just like Paulson did before him. Geithner is publicly saying that it’s going to take $2 trillion — a trillion is a thousand billion — $2 trillion taxpayer dollars to deal with this problem. But they’re allowing all the banks to report that they’re not only solvent, but fully capitalized. Both statements can’t be true. It can’t be that they need $2 trillion, because they have masses losses, and that they’re fine. These are all people who have failed. Paulson failed, Geithner failed. They were all promoted because they failed, not...

OAKLAND, CA - More senior citizens are looking into reverse mortgage loans as a way to offset the income that has vanished as the result of losses in their investments. This is from data gleaned by Golden Gateway Financial here from usage data for its online reverse mortgage calculator. However, on the other side of the equation, the company said, homeowners are seeing their home values drop, as evidenced by changes in the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices. "For many older Americans, the time to act to stave off continuing losses is now," said Eric Bachman, founder and chief executive of...

Like all good members of the Liberal MSM the Virginian Pilot is outraged, OUTRAGED by the financial shenanigans of those greedy Wall Street bankers who got poor, unsuspecting home buyers to get in way over their heads. How dare they! Off with their heads – or perhaps strangulation with piano wire. It seems that those greedy Wall Street types were aided and abetted by the good folks at the Virginian Pilot. “How?” you say? Well, how did those poor innocents find out about those 100% financing, no-doc, no-money down mortgages with the low, low teaser rates that were never designed...

The FDIC has given a negative review to a Massachusetts community bank with no delinquent loans or foreclosures on its books and no anticipated losses. The "needs to improve" rating is a result of the bank being picky about lending, according to the FDIC's interest in the Community Reivestment Act. Joseph Petrucelli, chief executive of East Bridgewater Savings since 1992, told the Boston Business Journal that his bank is "paranoid about credit quality." Apparently that will get you a poor rating in the eyes of the FDIC. The agency also faulted Petrucelli for not promoting the bank's loan products enough....

Companies that specialize in church mortgages report that foreclosures and delinquencies for congregations are on the rise as the tough economic times start to make their impact at the offering plate. Metropolitan Baptist Church was bursting out of its home. From a group of freed slaves in Civil War-era Washington, Metropolitan Baptist had grown into a modern-day megachurch and community service powerhouse. In 2006, construction began on the congregation's dream complex in Largo, Md. - a $30 million campus with a 3,000-seat church, an education center and an 1,100-car parking lot.

EXCEPRT: Barney Frank is a lying sack of excrement. Oh, we beg your pardon. Did we say that? It just slipped out by accident. Here’s a Bloomberg News story from March 5, 2009:

House prices could slump by another 55 per cent, a respected City forecaster warns. It also predicts a deep recession lasting throughout next year and a 'very real probability' that Britain will go bankrupt. The report leaked yesterday from financial analysts Numis Securities says that the collapse in house prices is not 'anywhere near over'. They have already fallen 21 per cent from their peak, but the report says they will slump further by up to 55 per cent if the over-correction in prices is as bad as in the early 1990s. That would leave many millions of Britons in...

We have been accused of beating a dead horse when it comes to our support for either suspension of, or targeted relief from, market-to-market accounting. And we suppose after writing thousands of words, producing videos and giving speeches about the issue, some might be tempted to let it go. But we can't do that, especially when the government continues to spend trillions of dollars and is coming very close to bank nationalization. Article Controls email print reprint newsletter comments (59) share del.icio.us Digg It! yahoo Facebook rss Yahoo! BuzzThis is a real shame. Suspending mark-to-market accounting could fix major problems...

THE federal government's decision to bail out homeowners in trouble, with mortgage loans up to $729,000, raises some questions. Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand - for the good reason that he couldn't afford it - why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn't afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway? Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they didn't feel they could afford to buy a house, have to subsidize other people who couldn't afford a...

There was a newsflash this morning on Reuters that "Mark to Market is NOT going to be suspended", allegedly sourced from someone at the SEC. MTM was put into place after ENRON due to the amazing abuses on their balance sheet with asset "valuations" in an attempt to prevent re-runs of that debacle. It has been circumvented to a large part by "Level 3" assets, which are in fact marked to model (same thing as non-MTM eh?) So why the furor? Let's say you are a bank and have $1 billion of some bond issue that was stuffed to the...

Now that the federal government has decided to bail out homeowners in trouble, with mortgage loans up to $729,000, that raises some questions that ought to be asked, but are seldom being asked. Since the average American never took out a mortgage loan as big as seven hundred grand-- for the very good reason that he could not afford it-- why should he be forced as a taxpayer to subsidize someone else who apparently couldn't afford it either, but who got in over his head anyway? Why should taxpayers who live in apartments, perhaps because they did not feel that...

It's New York City's own version of a mortgage bailout - a massive auction today at the Javits Center where banks hope to unload scores of foreclosed homes, some for 60 percent discounts or more. The bidding for one five-bedroom, $550,000 Queens home starts at a mere $69,000.

NEW YORK (AP) — A stunning 48 percent of the nation's homeowners who have a subprime, adjustable-rate mortgage are behind on their payments or in foreclosure, and the rate for homeowners with all mortgage types hit a new record, new data Thursday showed. But that's not the worst of it.

Former Countrywide execs back in the game CALABASAS, Calif., March 4 (UPI) -- The irony of former Countrywide Financial executives reaping huge profits buying distressed U.S. mortgages hasn't been lost on consumer groups. Countrywide's former President Stanford Kurland now heads the Private National Mortgage Acceptance Co., known as PennyMac, which is buying distressed loans from the government and banks at fire-sale prices, then offering new mortgage terms to homeowners or pushing homeowners out the door with foreclosures if necessary, The New York Times (NYSE:NYT) reported Wednesday.Business, Kurland said, "is off-the-charts good."But, the business is also "sort of like the arsonist...

More than 1.5 million homes are seriously delinquent and close to foreclosure More than 11% of all mortgages are either delinquent or in foreclosure,according to an industry report released Thursday. The percentage of borrowers at least one month behind in their mortgage payments - but not in foreclosure-rose to nearly 8% during the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the National Delinquency Report from the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA). This is the highest rate of delinquency ever recorded by the survey, which began in 1972, and reflects a record 13% jump compared to the third quarter. "Subprime ARM loans and...

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S mortgage "rescue" initiative gets only four things wrong. But those flaws are so major, they negate any good that the plan would do. Here's what's wrong: * The plan requires homeowners who have scrimped and sacrificed to pay their mortgages to bail out their less responsible neighbors. * It sends the wrong message to children about dealing with the consequences of decisions. * It does little to keep a major portion of the refinanced loans from going back into default. * It addresses only a fairly small part of the housing crisis that has so damaged our economy....

Fairly or not, Countrywide Financial and its top executives would be on most lists of those who share blame for the nation’s economic crisis. After all, the banking behemoth made risky loans to tens of thousands of Americans, helping set off a chain of events that has the economy staggering. So it may come as a surprise that a dozen former top Countrywide executives now stand to make millions from the home mortgage mess. Stanford L. Kurland, Countrywide’s former president, and his team have been buying up delinquent home mortgages that the government took over from other failed banks, sometimes...

For many Minnesota Muslims, it's been virtually impossible to buy a home, because Islamic law forbids the paying or charging of interest. The African Development Center, with support from the state's housing agency, is now offering Islamic mortgages as a way to help close the home ownership gap among Muslim immigrants. Minneapolis, Minn. — Islamic law does make exceptions to the ban on interest, if one's family is at stake. But the exceptions are open to interpretation and for many observant Muslims, conventional mortgages are strictly taboo. Nawawi Sheikh is one of them. The Somali-American says he and his wife...

NEW YORK (AP) -- Citigroup Inc. said Tuesday that it will lower mortgage payments for some homeowners to an average of $500 a month for three months as part of a new program to help the unemployed. ... qualify for assistance from Citigroup under the Homeowner Unemployment Assist program include those that are 60 days or more past due on their mortgages or in foreclosure and can pay the reduced amount. Customers must also have a first mortgage loan that is owned and serviced by CitiMortgage Inc. and conforms to government sponsored enterprise limits. The house must also be the...

As destructive as socialism is, it would be powerless without “pragmatic conservatives.” Socialism, like such explosions, is destructive in our society. Voters don't like destruction of our society, our wealth, or our institutions. So why do socialists keep winning elections? Because pragmatic conservatives, like President Bush and the Hastert/McConnell-era Republican Congress, witness socialists playing with dangerous reactants and try to make them safe. In doing so, they create bombs. CDOs proved to be the ultimate bomb. Here's how they were created: Democrats were frustrated that banks didn't grant as many loans to black people as they did to white people....

For those who want us to believe the world is in a credit crunch, where no one is lending, and no one can qualify for a mortgage------ For the first two months of this year, an un-named credit union is closing approximately 213 first mortgages (not home equity loans or home equity lines of credit) to the tune of $49.35 million dollars. Now, truth be told, only 18 of those 213 loans, or less than nine percent were purchase money loans; the rest were refinances. But, if you have good credit and you have equity, you can still get credit....

by David C. John WebMemo #2310 Bad policy is not improved by limiting it to certain situations. The Helping Families Save Their Homes Act (H.R. 1106) would allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the principal owed on a mortgage, a practice often referred to as a "cramdown." Judges would also be able to reduce interest rates or lengthen the term of the mortgage. This is a huge policy mistake that will help only a few people while raising the cost of borrowing for thousands of moderate-income and first-time homebuyers. Although supporters claim that this is a limited provision that applies only...

CONFIDENCE IS KING THE SAVAGE TRUTH | Best stimulus for America isn't a government program, but giving the people a chance February 23, 2009 BY TERRY SAVAGE Sun-Times Columnist The foreclosure plan carries many of the same drawbacks as the stimulus bill. Both are full of good intentions and comforting provisions for those who find themselves in financial trouble. Both pay lip service to words like "stimulus" and "incentives." But in the end, both of these headline programs rely on government to make the decisions, to pick the winners and losers, and to subsidize those solutions with money taken from...

A reader reminds us of this remarkable article from the New York Times in 1999 (before Bush 43 took office), headlined, "Fannie Mae Eases Credit To Aid Mortgage Lending." Some excerpts (emphases mine): ...Fannie Mae Corporation is easing the credit requirements on loans that it will purchase from banks and other lenders. The action, which will begin as a pilot program involving 24 banks in 15 markets -- including the New York metropolitan region -- will encourage those banks to extend home mortgages to individuals whose credit is generally not good enough to qualify for conventional loans. Fannie Mae officials...

Here are the cities in which tea parties are occurring. I got this information in an email from the #don'tgo Movement. -WASHINGTON DC Tea Party -CHICAGO Tea Party -ATLANTA Tea Party -ORLANDO Tea Party -FORT WORTH Tea Party -PITTSBURGH Tea Party -SAN DIEGO Tea Party -TULSA Tea Party -NASHVILLE Tea Party -ST. LOUIS Tea Party -HOUSTON Tea Party -PORTLAND Tea Party -KANSAS CITY Tea Party -CLEVELAND Tea Party The "Big Finale" is still being planned for July of 2009, but the Tea Parties being planned for this Friday are vital and we need every single one of you, who can...

One of the fixes that Democrats are insisting upon to save people's homes is the idea of the "modified mortgage." A modified loan is an offer to homeowners that have either become delinquent in payments or have become overwhelmed in interest to have their loans reinstated with certain modifications that are expected to make payments lower to the borrower. The idea is that the troubled homeowner can forestall foreclosure and stay in their home. Sounds like a great program. The bank or mortgage holder can continue getting paid without all the hassle or foreclosing and taking possession of the house,...

George Soros finally gets it February 21, 2009 – 1:56 pm Three weeks ago, the positively schizophrenic Op-Ed page for the WSJ published yet another piece by a big financial brain proposing a “solution” to the financial crisis. While the editorial page itself is so rigidly ideological as to be useless, the op-ed page publishes stuff all over the map. The only common attribute seems to be a big-name byline. Once in a while you’ll get a thoughtful, nuanced and hard-hitting piece by Shelby Steele or Judy Shelton, for instance; occasionally, one of the big names will actually say something...

While some, notably Jim Geraghty over at National Review Online, have access to political insiders with code names such as Obi Wan Kenobi, my circle of sources is considerably less exotic. That said, on the great questions of the day concerning the economy, I did run into a very wise man last week. He sat under a palm tree, his old longboard laying in the sand beside him, and surveyed the global economy. Here is my interview with him on how to free up millions of credit-worthy, mortgage-paying consumers so that they can begin rebuilding the real economy: [snip] Takeaways:...

Santelli Launches ChicagoTeaParty.com This is more video of Rick Santelli and Steve Liesman from yesterday. Things get heated and Liesman tells Santelli to shut up as they shout over each other. The debate is simple: bailout thy asshat neighbor or not? How accidents can chage the course of history. I'm sure we will hear the details in the fullness of time, but $20 bucks says Rick Santelli had no intention whatsoever of disclosing his private idea for a Chicago Tea Party on the air yesterday. I've watched the video several times and it is certain that his emotion got the...

of course the video title says its a rant, because its done by the liberal media (either that or a liberal blog), but he's right on! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYmdipEcXYA watch!

Fresh off the trillion-dollar porkulus bill signing in Denver, President Obama immediately launched into his next New Raw Deal expansion: a massive mortgage entitlement program forcing lenders to refinance at an initial cost of $50 billion to $100 billion. That's in addition to the bipartisan-supported $50 billion in the "stimulus" bill to bail out homeowners underwater on their mortgages and the $2 billion in "neighborhood stabilization" funds to alleviate the foreclosure crisis. In tandem with the White House Bad Borrowers Bailout, Obama's old friends at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) are launching a new campaign of...

Foreclosures have spiked in the Portland area and central Oregon's Deschutes County just as President Barack Obama launches his plan to help Americans stay in their homes. The number of new mortgage defaults in the four-county Portland area and Deschutes County -- some of the areas hit hardest by foreclosures -- is on pace to exceed 4,500 in the first three months of 2009 * * * If that holds, the increase would be more than 20 percent from the last quarter of 2008 and four times more than the glory days of the housing boom three years ago. *...

President Obama’s massive mortgage-bailout plan is nothing more than a thinly disguised entitlement program that redistributes income from the responsible 92 percent of home-owning mortgage holders who pay their bills on time to the irresponsible defaulters who bought more than they could ever afford. This is Obama’s spread-the-wealth program in action. Team Obama is rewarding bad behavior. It is enlarging moral hazard. It is expanding its welfarist approach to economic policy. And with a huge expansion of government-owned zombie lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Team Obama is taking a giant step toward nationalizing the mortgage market.

Well, what do you think? Should we rattle their cages? What's a good way to approach a "No" response, especially from a Tax Cheat Party representative? Am I just a sucker for paying my mortgage on time?

Ever since the credit crisis began, a lot of blame has been heaped on adjustable-rate mortgages, home loans that recalibrate according to market fluctuations. One brand of these innovative mortgages that have come under special criticism has been so-called "exploding A.R.M.’s" that lured borrowers with unusually low teaser rates that then reset skyward a few years later. These have often been derided as predatory, and lenders who offered them accused of luring homeowners into buying homes they couldn't afford for the long-term. Critics of these might want to check out the Homeowner Stabilization Plan put forward by the Obama administration...

President Barack Obama's new foreclosure-prevention plan is already sparking outrage from some Americans who won't qualify for federal aid -- and from those who resent having to foot the bill for those who do. "What do you expect from the government?" said David Newton, 46 years old, proprietor of DJN Management LLC, which owns 232 rental apartments in the Atlanta area. "The government isn't out there to help people who obey the law and follow the rules." Mr. Obama "told everybody, 'I'm going to spread wealth around,' and that's what he's going to do," Mr. Newton said.

THE Obama administration yesterday delivered on its promise of a detailed and comprehensive plan to minimize foreclosures and stabilize housing prices. But the plan has some problems. For starters, it doesn't cover a large class of ailing mortgages - ones that aren't federally backed, nor serviced by a federally regulated entity. So, many subprime borrowers - the most disadvantaged class - won't be eligible, leaving whole neighborhoods still deteriorating in value. Similarly, much of the privately securitized mortgage debt will be unaffected. One result is that government-sponsored lenders - Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, etc., agencies already responsible for...

(CNSNews.com) - House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank (D.-Mass.) said yesterday that an unregulated “private market” in the financial industry caused a lot of problems that the Democratic Congress now needs to fix. Frank also suggested that Americans now “hate” banks and that helping people stave off foreclosure on their mortgages, government scrutiny of executive compensation, higher taxes, and prodding banks to lend more money may all be part of the solution to what ails the U.S. economy. “Well, there is no very good approach because, frankly, a philosophy of let the private market do whatever it wants, don’t regulate...

. . . Today, the Senate Republicans bear the heavy burden of providing the primary check on one-party rule in America. For that reason, it is particularly disappointing to see Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell embrace "providing government-backed, 4% fixed mortgages to any credit-worthy borrower" as his alternative to the Barack Obama/Nancy Pelosi stimulus package. Our nation needs Mr. McConnell's leadership, but this idea is bad economics and not a real alternative to the vision of America offered by Democrats. It also stands at odds with all that is good in Republicanism.

SEN. Chris Dodd is hoping to make his sweetheart deals with Country wide Mortgage - which saved him tens of thousands of dollars on two mortgages - disappear. Dodd, the chairman of the Banking Committee, announced this week that he'll have the mortgages refinanced and managed by a third party to protect against allegations of influence peddling. Problem is, this doesn't negate any prior influence peddling. It's akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, torn down the fences and set the farm on fire.

A couple of years ago, when Nouriel Roubini predicted that U.S. financial-system losses would total $1 trillion, everyone thought he was insane. He has since revised his estimate. Now he's looking for $3.6 trillion: “I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.” Losses and writedowns at financial companies worldwide...

Mortgage volume may have fallen last year, but not incidences of fraud. In fact, according to a recent report from the Mortgage Asset Research Institute in Reston, Va., occurrences of fraud among loan officers, brokers and other industry professionals actually outpaced 2007 levels by 45 percent in the second quarter of 2008, the most recent reporting period. The Research Institute, a consulting firm, does not release specific figures, which it compiles from surveys of lenders that make most of the nation’s mortgages each year. The report, released in early December, found that 36 percent of the fraudulent mortgage activity involved...