Mortgage Lenders

Hope For Homeowners Looks Hopeless - Remember how the housing bailout plan was supposed to help 400,000 homeowners? Now it looks like they overestimated [or overstated] the number of homeowners who could avail themselves of the program and underestimated the number of homeowners who would: [Thanks L!] WASHINGTON ? The government expects that only 20,000 troubled borrowers will be able to refinance into more affordable home loans by next fall under a new mortgage aid program passed by lawmakers over the summer. The $300 billio [Read More...]

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Gordon Brown snubbed over rate cuts as EU warns slump will hit UK hardest - Gordon Brown's attempts to promote himself as the man to lead Britain through the economic crisis suffered a double setback yesterday as banks warned they would not pass interest rate cuts on to customers and the EU said the recession would hit the UK harder than any other country in Europe. The prime minister had hoped to use the keynote speech of his trip to the Gulf states to restate calls on banks to ease lending conditions for families and businesses after the government intervened to save [Read More...]

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More from the Front Lines of the Financial Crisis by Stephen Lendman - Posted by dandelionsalad on November 3, 2008 Dandelion Salad by Stephen Lendman Global Research, November 3, 2008 In its latest economic outlook, Merrill Lynch economists ?worry about inflation, or more precisely,? a lack of it. From crashing global equity markets, falling commodity prices, rising unemployment, stagnant wages, over-indebted households, declining production, the continuing housing crisis, and more. All pointing to several future quarters of negative growth. Showing that Fed chai [Read More...]

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VA Loans Have Become The Magic Bullet - Quite a while ago, when loan standards were other than they have become, I wrote an article with the title Is a VA Loan a Good Deal? Back then, if you could qualify for a loan that was both A paper and full documentation, I could get you a better loan as measured by cost of interest for the same closing cost, maybe even if you didn't have a down payment. Lenders were eager to make loans at 100% loan to value ratio, and since conventional conforming rates have always been the lowest for a given c [Read More...]

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?We may look back and see these as the good old days.? - From the Record: No place to hide from foreclosures Foreclosures continue to rise in North Jersey, with thousands of homeowners in Bergen and Passaic counties in danger of losing their homes. There were 2,422 foreclosure filings in Bergen County and 3,883 in Passaic from January through August of this year, according to RealtyTrac, which tracks foreclosures nationwide. By contrast, in the same period last year, Bergen County saw 571 filings and Passaic, 2,594. Those numbers include all for [Read More...]

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Nightmares, Norms and Negative Equity - Thanks, Sarah, Dan, and everyone at Concurring Opinions for inviting me to guest blog. For a Property professor, these are riveting times. The mortgage nightmare continues. As in much of the country, here in Minnesota, thousands of houses stand vacant and decaying. Parts of Minneapolis have been devastated. But the problem may have crested in the cities. Not so in the suburbs. Five-year subprime ARM loans that were originated in 2004 and 2005, when McMansions were popping up in suburbs like [Read More...]

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