Posted on 02/06/2008 7:22:03 PM PST by shrinkermd
...The group of lenders, investors and nonprofit groups, dubbed Hope Now, was created by the Bush administration in October in response to soaring mortgage defaults and home foreclosures that have caused multibilion dollar losses on Wall Street and sent stock markets plummeting.
The Hope Now group said Wednesday it helped 545,000 subprime borrowers with shaky credit in the second half of last year, compared with its January estimate of 370,000. That works out to 7.7 percent of 7.1 million subprime loans outstanding in September 2007.
The mortgage industry is "working hard to help more and more homeowners who are in difficulty, but we know there is much more to be done," Faith Schwartz, the coalition's executive director, said in a statement. The group attributed the increase to having 14 loan-servicing companies on board, up from nine in the earlier study.
Among the subprime borrowers aided, 150,000 were helped through permanent-loan modifications, such as lower interest rates, while 395,000 negotiated repayment plans, which often involve a borrower getting back on track even though a few payments were missed
(Excerpt) Read more at biz.yahoo.com ...
And how many of the borrowers were “flippers”?
Yes, it is good news.
as reported in the WSJ...
1 in 4 mortgage defaulters were speculators who lied on their mortgage app’s and had no intention of living in thier 2nd, 3rd & 4th mortgaged properties - the others were creations of Congress’s feel-good-hopes of ‘helping’ everyone live the American Dream of homeownership, even if they could not afford to pay the monthly mortgage...
None of that evil “Redlining” or deciding a particular part of a town or county was so badly deteriorated that a property wasn’t worth the paper it was written on.
I believe the idea behind this program was to help people who are living in their homes, so they don’t lose those homes. Those are the ones about whom the President was most concerned.
That ticks me off. This program, whatever you might think of it, is to help families who need their home and who, through their own fault, that of predatory lenders, or a combination of the two, are having a tough time. Everyone gets some blame (borrowers and lenders), now we just have to work through it from the here and now.
because boy oh boy, do we feel foolish out here, paying our bills on time and all....we could have been speculators, liars, cheats, and frauds as well as deadbeats, all along....
The President is trying to help those who got the mortgages, and who actually LIVE in their homes, keep those homes, and try to make the payments on them, as opposed to helping those who were looking for a quick buck, but got caught in the downturn of the real estate market. Many of these new homeowners were led down the garden path by Realtors looking to make money off the sale, and Mortgage brokers, also looking to make a quick buck selling the loan on the Secondary Market. Neither of these groups of 'professionals' seemed to be concerned with whether or not the borrower could actually make the payments over the long term, or if in fact, these folks SHOULD have purchased real estate in the first place.
The homeowner/borrower in the subprime market was ill-served by those who should have given him the straight dope, but didn't, because it served their purposes not to do so.
How about the other end of this problem? The investors that bought securities backed by these flaky mortgages will not get the yield they were promised.
In particular, this action undermines a basic premise of contract law. If a contract is not illegal, it is enforcable. This is a much more insidious effect of this program - one party does not need to be held to their end of a legal contract that they entered into freely.
They don’t deserve any help for their stupidity.
If they don’t live up to the contract throw them out on the street!
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