News Channel Mortgage

A clear plastic plaque on William Komperda’s desk memorializes a 1990 deal that helped launch the made-in-Orange County subprime lending bonanza. Komperda, a former investment banker now living in Connecticut, calls the plaque a "tombstone," financial speak for a securities offering notice. But the "tombstone" symbolizes an industry that rocked financial markets around the world in [...]

The mortgage and real estate industry has resembled a battlefield marred with carnage and destruction with what appears to have no end in sight. 210 imploded lenders and thousands of mortgage, real estate professionals and anything related to these professions in one way, shape or form, litter the path of no jobs and no hope. Read [...]

WHILE critics of today’s mortgage crisis call for government intervention to suppress subprime lending, few are aware that government intervention created subprime mortgages in the first place. The National Housing Act of 1968, part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, provided government-subsidized loans to expand home ownership for poor Americans. Liberal policymakers hoped that these [...]

The number of mortgage fraud cases has grown so fast that government agencies that investigate and prosecute them cannot keep up, lenders and law enforcement officials have said. Reports of suspected mortgage fraud have doubled since 2005 and increased eightfold since 2002. Banks filed 47,717 reports this year, up from 21,994 two years ago, according to [...]

THE Dow soared 200 points in a Christmas rush on Friday that belied emerging details that US banking, mortgage companies and credit rating faced collapse while the nation’s mortgage insurance industry plunged into chaos. Nearly 180,000 US local councils were placed on credit watch, with the credit agency Fitch releasing another $US5.3 billion in credit downgrades [...]

WASHINGTON, Dec 17 (Reuters) - A program unveiled by U.S. President George W. Bush in August that is trying to save tens of thousands of homeowners from foreclosure has aided just 266 borrowers so far, according to government data released on Monday. The initiative, which helps high-risk or low-income borrowers win better loan terms by insuring [...]

So it was that Henry Paulson came up with an idea… the ‘teaser freezer‘ plan. The ARM teaser freezer is being sold to the public as a way to protect homeowners. But it has another purpose, says a reporter from the San Francisco Gate, to help save the banks from their own bad judgment. Read more…

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — Securitization, hailed as the greatest financial innovation of the 20th century, isn’t getting such rave reviews anymore after this summer’s subprime mortgage crisis exposed some weaknesses. With global credit markets still in crisis, experts have already begun debating the benefits and the drawbacks of the process. Read more…

Herb Greenberg Even before this mortgage mess started, one person who kept emailing me over and over saying that this is going to get real bad. He kept saying this was beyond sub-prime, beyond low FICO scores, beyond Alt-A and beyond the imagination of most pundits, politicians and the press. When I asked him why somebody [...]

It was Charles Mackay, the 19th-century Scottish journalist, who observed that men go mad in herds but only come to their senses one by one. We are only at the beginning of the financial world coming to its senses after the bursting of the biggest credit bubble the world has seen. Everyone seems to acknowledge [...]