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By Cormac McCarthy
By Gerard Prunier
$18.45
$19
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Richard Elzey (CC BY 2.0)
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Legislation passed Friday in Florida “prevents a homeowner who loses a foreclosure case from recovering the property, even if the bank’s actions are later determined to be fraudulent,” the Sarasota Herald-Tribune reports.
Posted on May 8, 2013
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Ian Muttoo (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Homeownership is at its lowest level in 18 years, but housing prices are rising. Why? Because banks are creating real estate scarcity by buying up homes and selectively stalling foreclosures.
Posted on May 3, 2013
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Andrea_44 (CC BY 2.0)
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A West Virginia man became one of the latest fatalities of the American economy when he shot and killed himself this month after authorities arrived at his home with an eviction notice.
Posted on Mar 15, 2013
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Flickr/MoneyBlogNewz
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A typo by banking giant Wells Fargo resulted in a more than two-year legal battle that came to a tragic conclusion in December when Larry Delassus’ heart stopped in a Los Angeles area courtroom, a new LA Weekly report reveals.
Posted on Mar 10, 2013
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bogieharmond (CC BY 2.0)
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Foreclosures in New York City rose 19 percent last year as filings fell nationally by 3 points, a new report says. Meanwhile, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced a meager $1.9 million settlement with a robosigning giant, reports Catherine Curan at the New York Post.
Posted on Feb 5, 2013
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hans.gerwitz (CC BY-SA 2.0)
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Companies hired to spot wrongful foreclosures made more than $1 billion in a review process that was ultimately scuttled. Meanwhile, banks prepare to divide a $3.3 billion settlement between nearly 4 million borrowers without identifying who needs the money most.
Posted on Jan 11, 2013
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Flickr / respres
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By Paul Kiel, ProPublica —
The Independent Foreclosure Review was supposed to be a full and fair investigation of the big banks’ foreclosure abuses. But Monday morning, the very regulators who launched the program 18 months ago announced that it had all been a massive mistake and shut it down.
Posted on Jan 9, 2013
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Photo by Taber Andrew Bain (CC-BY)
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Homeowner advocates and some lawmakers are upset that an $8.5 billion settlement with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other banks over improper foreclosures would let lenders off the hook both financially and legally.
Posted on Jan 7, 2013
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Flickr / respres
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Hundreds of California residents are being threatened with foreclosure by a major Canadian bank, but it has nothing to do with missing their home payments.
Posted on Oct 5, 2012
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Flickr / 7bikeframesweldedtogether
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Credit card companies are increasingly turning to the legal system in their rush to collect money that is owed to them. But, there now exists a very big problem in this litigious-happy practice—nearly all these lawsuits may be flawed.
Posted on Aug 13, 2012
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AP/Jae C. Hong
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By Bill Boyarsky — Ignored by the presidential campaigns, poverty is hitting 1960s levels, and spreading to once-prosperous areas unequipped or unwilling to serve poor residents.
Posted on Jul 26, 2012
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Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi joins “Democracy Now!” to discuss the dual history of Bank of America and the deregulation of banking ownership in the United States and to expose the holes in the $26 billion settlement deal that President Obama said would provide relief for American homeowners.
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woodleywonderworks (CC-BY)
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By Blair Hickman, ProPublica —
The U.S. housing crisis has been going on nearly five years, with still regular revelations about misdeeds by banks and others. Here’s ProPublica’s roundup of standout reporting on the crisis.
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AP / Cliff Owen
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On Thursday, state and federal government representatives announced that five major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Ally Financial, Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase—had agreed to pay their part in a settlement of more than $25 billion stemming from the mortgage market meltdown that caused millions of Americans to lose their homes.
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AP / Manuel Balce Ceneta
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By Cora Currier, ProPublica —
Fannie and Freddie are required to help homeowners while earning profits so they can pay back the taxpayers who bailed them out. Here is our guide to the little-known federal regulator, Edward DeMarco, ultimately in charge of the two companies. You may have never heard of him, but as The Washington Post put it, he’s “the most powerful man in housing policy.”
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niallkennedy (CC-BY)
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A sunken housing market has turned foreclosure auctions into feeding grounds for the vultures of American capitalism. Low prices mean plenty of available buildings to be bought, fixed up and sold at a profit. Meanwhile, suffering evictees are nowhere to be seen, except for the rare occasions when they show up to protest or bid on the homes themselves.
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AP / Erich Schlegel
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Here’s a sobering dose of reality: Poverty in America has risen to the 27 percent mark in the last half-decade and, perhaps worse, the prospects for our nation’s poorest won’t necessarily get better as the economy picks up. It’s not news many want to hear, but we’re glad a group of researchers at Indiana University were gutsy enough to release it.
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bogieharmond (CC-BY)
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There are more than five times as many vacant homes in the U.S. as there are homeless people, according to Amnesty International USA. Since 2007, banks have shuttered about 8 million American houses, almost doubling the previous number, while 3.5 million homeless shiver in the cold.
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The Occupy Our Homes campaign kicked off last Tuesday when hundreds of people, including activists, neighborhood residents and a couple of City Council members, marched through a neglected Brooklyn neighborhood to open a foreclosed house to a homeless family.
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Flickr / respres
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Those critics of Occupy Wall Street who claimed the movement lacked direction might look to foreclosed homes around the country, as well as housing auctions at select banks, where activists turned up Tuesday as part of the Occupy Our Homes initiative.
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AP / Matt Rourke
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By Robert Scheer — On this Thanksgiving we have been cheated of the bounty of the harvest as one in three Americans descends into poverty.
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WELS.net (CC-BY)
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Father Eduardo Samaniego, the Jesuit pastor of Most Holy Trinity Catholic Church in San Jose, Calif., protested foreclosures by Bank of America against those in his flock and beyond by moving $3 million of his parish’s funds to a local credit union. (more)
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Flickr / pweiskel08 (CC-BY)
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Some 100 people—around 65 men and 35 women—taking part in an Occupy Boston protest were arrested in the wee hours of Tuesday morning after they refused to leave a newly groomed section of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway near Dewey Square. (more)
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AP / Paul Sakuma
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In a startling move, the Obama administration is holding three major banks—Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase—accountable for their bad lending habits on the mortgage market, cutting off funds from the Home Affordable Modification Program until they shape up.
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Flickr / respres Some rights reserved
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Investigators at the United States Trustee Program, which oversees U.S. bankruptcy cases, are collecting mountains of evidence that show that banks industrywide are hurrying huge numbers of borrowers out of their homes prematurely, based on false loan repayment claims. (more)
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Adzookie.com
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Here’s one solution to the foreclosure crisis, albeit an ugly one. In what Gizmodo points out could very well be a publicity stunt, mobile ad company Adzookie says it will pay your mortgage if you let it turn your house into a giant billboard. Take it away, Chris Hedges.
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By Paul Kiel and Olga Pierce, ProPublica —
With millions of homeowners still struggling to stay in their homes, the Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has been weakened, perhaps fatally, by lax oversight and a posture of cooperation—rather than enforcement—with the nation’s biggest banks.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Nomi Prins — There are two potential ways to measure the economic performance of a political leader. One is by the profitability, stock prices and executive bonuses of a nation’s corporations. The other is by the financial condition of the majority of its population.
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Gary McCoy, Cagle Cartoons —
Posted on Dec 23, 2010
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Flickr / Håkan Dahlström (CC-BY)
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More than half of the state's homeowners with a mortgage—51.4 percent—spend more than 30 percent of their monthly income on housing costs, according to 2005-2009 estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. ... (more)
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Flickr / Casey Serin (CC-BY)
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At long last, a little good news from the real estate market: The National Association of Realtors reported a 10 percent rise in existing home sales in September, but buyers are still skittish about foreclosures and the country’s job problems figure into the long-term prognosis as well.
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By Eugene Robinson — The crisis over faulty or fraudulent paperwork in mortgage foreclosures—which is either a big deal or a humongous deal, depending on which experts you believe—is the fault of arrogant, greedy lenders who played fast and loose with the basic property rights of homeowners.
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By Amy Goodman — The big banks that caused the collapse of the global finance market, and received tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded bailouts, have likely been engaging in wholesale fraud against homeowners and the courts.
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Flickr / Michael Gray (CC-BY-SA)
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Bank of America said Monday it will resume foreclosures in 23 states. The country’s largest bank stopped processing foreclosures nationwide while it investigated a mess of paperwork that cast doubt on the validity of home seizures. A self-imposed ban remains in 27 states.
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Flickr / Torley(CC-BY-SA)
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In a welcome and much-needed turn of events for struggling American homeowners, all 50 state attorneys general are banding together to crack down on such sketchy foreclosure practices as “robo-signing,” as Forbes reported Wednesday.
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AP / Paul Sakuma
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By Robert Scheer — How do you foreclose on a home when you can’t figure out who owns it because the original mortgage is part of a derivatives package that has been sliced and diced so many ways that its legal ownership is often unrecognizable?
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Flickr / respres
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The Obama administration isn’t ready to help homeowners stay in their homes by imposing a moratorium on repossessions, even though some banks are stopping foreclosures and resales of foreclosed homes and concerns about mortgage fraud are growing.
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Pat Bagley, Cagle Cartoons, Salt Lake Tribune —
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Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer schools listeners about the mortgage mess and the need for a moratorium on foreclosures in the opening minutes of this week’s “Left, Right & Center.” Tony Blankley joins him for a discussion of this and other topics.
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AP / J Pat Carter
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“The large print giveth and the small print taketh away,” as one wise troubadour put it, and luckily for struggling homeowners, President Obama took a good look at a bill that had cleared Congress and flexed his executive powers to send it back Thursday.
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AP / J Pat Carter
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By Robert Scheer — This week’s proposals by the Obama administration to deal with the persistent economic crisis will be, as with previous plans that involved trillions of taxpayer dollars, little more than salt in the wounds.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama and the Democrats he led to a stunning victory two years ago are going down hard in the face of an economic crisis that he did nothing to create but which he has failed to solve.
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Flickr / James Callan
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We can all now breathe a collective sigh of relief: Bank of America has returned to quarterly profit after losing almost $200 million in the last quarter of 2009. The news comes even as home foreclosure activity hit an all-time record in March.
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Want to see how the FDIC works with banks to help them turn a nifty profit on short sales and foreclosures? Check out this video from the folks at Think Big, Work Small in which they detail how it happens.
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Flickr / respres
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Homeowners facing foreclosure could get help if Congress approves a “cram-down” measure, which would give bankruptcy judges the ability to alter mortgage terms. The House of Representatives is gearing up to vote on the amendment, but it’s not likely to be an easy victory by any stretch.
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Other market sectors are another story, and this story may also change in coming months, but let’s have some good news about the residential real estate market, shall we? Right: The Associated Press is reporting that home sales rose more than 10 percent in October from their September levels, largely due to tax incentives, and November may continue along this trend.
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