Foreclosure

Of all the interesting tidbits in Brett Arends’ article in The Wall Street Journal about how to decide whether to walk away from your mortgage, his admission that the middle class is the only part of America adhering to standards of personal financial responsibility might be the most shocking.

WASHINGTON– One year after the Obama administration launched its $75 billion anti-foreclosure program, the housing market remains volatile, loan modifications have been scant, foreclosures are still sky-high — and more and more lawmakers are wondering why the White House hasn’t been more aggressive in tackling the crisis.

Perhaps the biggest event of next month’s Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver, British Columbia, won’t be the downhill, or the women’s figure skating finals, or even a USA-Canada gold medal hockey game.
According to Canadian media reports, the biggest event of the Games may be the auction of Whistler Blackcomb ski area, where all the alpine [...]

There’s more proof out today that the foreclosure crisis is only getting worse, despite everything that’s been thrown at it so far: Foreclosure notices reached a new record high during the first half of this year, Bloomberg reports.
Citing data from RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure database, Bloomberg said the rising number of notices shows how [...]

President Barack Obama rolled out his plan to overhaul financial regulation last week. While much of the Obama plan relies on the same regulators and structures that led to the current meltdown, there is one key exception.

The establishment of an independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency would give ordinary citizens a seat at the financial policy table for the first time and prevent the abuses in credit card and mortgage lending that have wreaked havoc on households all over the country.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to unveil his agenda for revamping financial regulation later this week. As the economy struggles though a recession created by the banking industry, it’s crucial that Obama and his advisers craft a set of rules ensuring that the financial sector strengthens our economy instead of destroying it.

Just as a voluntary ban on foreclosures ended, a record jump in foreclosure activity in March is raising troubling questions about whether lenders and servicers are genuinely willing and able to do loan modifications on a large scale. And it poses an even more worrisome possibility: That many borrowers can’t be helped at all.

With its stimulus spending, the Obama administration is looking to do two main things: put people to work immediately and create jobs for the future. The best stimulus projects do both.

A proposal being floated in Colorado Springs by a nonprofit counseling group called Pike’s Peak Behavioral Health puts its increasing population of military veteran clients and patients to work now with plans for work in the future, and has the added benefit of making something useful of foreclosed apartment projects around the state.

A ban on foreclosure sales and evictions from houses owned by mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which began as a high-profile effort just before the holidays to keep people in their homes as the government tried to come up with homeowner rescue plans, is over.

Spokesmen for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac confirmed the ban ended March 31, in a response to an inquiry from our sister site, The Washington Independent. But its expiration didn’t seem to merit the same level of fanfare, with some housing advocates caught by surprise, scrambling for information today and Wednesday on listservs and in phone calls.

For more on what went wrong with the economy and why it will be so difficult to fix, there’s good material of every length on the web these days — and most of it lands on one answer.