A massive foreclosure fraud scandal is rocking the U.S. mortgage market. Wall Street banks and their lawyers are fabricating documents, forging signatures and lying to judges-all to exploit troubled borrowers with enormous, illegal fees, and in some cases, improperly foreclose on borrowers who haven't missed any payments.
The fraud is so widespread that it could put some big banks out of business and even spark another financial collapse. Fortunately, things haven't fallen apart just yet. With strong leadership from President Barack Obama and Congress, the government can help keep troubled borrowers in their homes and prevent another meltdown.
One fraud begets another
As Danny Schecter emphasizes in an interview with GRITtv's Laura Flanders, this mess is just one element of a broader, criminal fraud at the heart of the foreclosure fiasco and resulting financial crisis. Banks pushed fraudulent loans onto borrowers during the housing bubble because the loans could be packaged into mortgage-backed securitizations and pawned off on hedge funds and other banks. Banks made a lot of money from this process, until the mortgages went bad and the fraud-packed securities plummeted in value.
Document drama
At the heart of any mortgage is a document called "The Note", which lays out the terms of the mortgage and the kinds of fees that banks can levy against borrowers if they fall behind on their payments. Owning the note also gives banks the right to foreclose when a borrower stops paying.
The trouble is, in an effort to cut costs and boost bonuses, banks haven't kept actually kept track of the note-in fact, they've actively destroyed the document so they don't have to deal with filing it. Now that mortgages are going bad, banks are taking advantage of the documentation vacuum they created to levy massive, illegal fees on borrowers both before and during the foreclosure process. They do this by manufacturing fake documents, forging signatures, and getting bogus signatures from notaries to approve sham documents.
This is all terribly unfair to borrowers. In some cases, illegal fees push borrowers over the edge into foreclosure, while in others, borrowers get saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in illegal fees after getting kicked out of their home. The situation is a national disgrace.
Failure to produce
But the situation also creates legal liabilities that can push banks into failure. If banks can't pony up the note, they don't have the right to foreclose-not without some serious, expensive legal maneuvering. And what's more, if the banks who created these shoddy securities can't supply notes, investors who bought the securities can force losses back on the banks that created them. Given that there are $2.6 trillion in mortgage-backed securities out there, banks are very worried that losses and lawsuits stemming from shoddy documentation could spark another round of major financial turmoil.
The sheer lack of documentation makes it very difficult for investors to decipher which banks are exposed to loads of red ink, and which banks are not. That's a recipe for financial panic.
Silencing whistleblowers
The banks know they're in serious trouble. That's why, as Andy Kroll notes for Mother Jones, mortgage servicers like GMAC are trying to silence whistleblowers who can explain the extent of these frauds. GMAC employee Jeffrey Stephan confessed to robo-signing 10,000 foreclosure documents every month without actually examining them. His acknowledgment sparked the current public scrutiny of foreclosure fraud, which has expanded to banks including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America.
Kroll was one of the first to report on these fraudulent foreclosure mills and their illegal fees, and his coverage of the issue is essential reading for anybody following the unfolding crisis. Kroll also highlights the wave of new investigations and inquiries being launched by attorneys general in eight states, a phenomenon that is likely to expand as the crisis widens.
As Annie Lowrey details for The Washington Independent, one of those states is Ohio, where Attorney General Richard Cordray is suing GMAC, seeking $25,000 in damages for every fraudulent document the company has filed. In Ohio alone, there have been 190,000 foreclosures over the past two years. Cordray hasn't won his suit, and not every foreclosure will include fraud, but that's a potential loss of over $7 billion to GMAC from foreclosures in Ohio alone over the past two years. And that doesn't include what would be much higher losses to banks who packaged the mortgage securities, who are forced to repurchase them by burned investors.
Banks are doing their best to minimize the appearance of scandal, but the scope of potential losses from outright fraud is quite clearly a threat to the viability of the financial system. It's easy to imagine a disaster scenario in which the government has no choice but to take major action to prevent the economy from imploding (yes, it can actually get worse).
Obama needs to pick up the slack
So far, President Obama is sending mixed signals about his intentions. As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, Obama vetoed a bill that would have made it harder for borrowers to show that banks were engaging in fraud during the foreclosure process. That was on Friday-but by Sunday, top Obama adviser David Axelrod was telling the press that the administration was not ready to support a foreclosure moratorium, dismissing the fraud crisis as a set of "mistakes" with lender "paperwork."
As I note for AlterNet, Axelrod's comments are a complete mischaracterization of what's going on in the foreclosure process, and of what can be done. The housing market is a mess because banks have been systematically committing fraud. We cannot rely on such fraudsters to fix the mess-- some kind of government action is going to be necessary. Whatever the solution, the administration cannot stand with big Wall Street banks against the borrowers and investors that are being defrauded. Any solution must take the interest of troubled borrowers as paramount. We've already tried saving the banks without saving homeowners, and as the unfolding foreclosure fraud crisis illustrates, it didn't work.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
The June labor market report announced that the unemployment rate is down from 9.7 to 9.5 percent and 83,000 private-sector jobs were created in June. Unfortunately, the situation isn't quite so rosy. As Annie Lowrey reports in The Washington Independent, the real cause of the drop in unemployment was not more jobs, but fewer workers. Hundreds of thousands of unemployed Americans have now been reclassified as "discouraged" workers who have not actively searched for work for four weeks. As such, they are no longer part of the system.
More than two years after the collapse of Bear Stearns, the House and Senate finally ironed out their differences on Wall Street reform in the wee, small hours of Friday morning. The bill now goes back to both the House and Senate for final approval, but it's fate in the Senate is uncertain following the defection of Tea Party Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA).
Last week, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and underscored what most Americans have believed for some time: Wall Street has rigged the economy in its own favor, and will stop at nothing-not even outright theft-to boost its profits. What's worse, Goldman's scam could have been completely prevented by better regulations and law enforcement.
Goldman's heist
Let's be clear. "Financial fraud" means "theft." Goldman Sachs sold investors securities that were stocked with subprime mortgages and had been cherry-picked by a hedge fund manager named John Paulson. Paulson believed these mortgages were about to go bust, so he helped Goldman Sachs concoct the securities so that he could bet against them himself.
Goldman Sachs, like Paulson, also bet against the securities. But when Goldman sold the securities to investors, it didn't tell them that Paulson had devised the securities, or that he was betting on their failure. By withholding crucial information from investors, Goldman directly profited from the scam at the expense of its own clients. If ordinary citizens did what the SEC's alleges Goldman did, we'd call it stealing.
As Nick Baumann emphasizes for Mother Jones, the SEC's suit against Goldman is just the tip of the iceberg. During the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s, literally thousands of bankers were jailed for financial fraud. Today's crisis was much larger in scope, yet the Goldman allegations are among the first serious charges of legal wrongdoing to emerge (other complaints have been filed against Regions Bank and former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo). If the SEC or the FBI are doing their jobs, we should see many more of these cases.
Bust 'em up.
How do banks get away with these kinds of shenanigans and still secure epic taxpayer bailouts? It's all about their political clout, as Robert Reich notes for The American Prospect. So long as banks are so enormous that they can ruin the economy with their collapse, the institutions will always carry tremendous political clout.
Even in the case of Goldman Sachs, which is too-big-to-fail by any reasonable standard, the SEC's fraud case is being filed three years after the company's alleged offense. That's well after the company rode to safety on the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the AIG bailout and billions more in other indirect assistance-and only after multiple journalists made Goldman's offensive transactions general public knowledge.
If we don't break up the big banks, politically connected Wall Street titans will make sure they get bailed out when the next crisis hits, regardless of whatever laws we have on the books.
Fix the derivatives casino
If Congress doesn't soon pass a bill to break up behemoth banks, it will be neglecting the gravest problem in our financial system today. But several other reforms are needed if Wall Street is ever going to serve a useful economic function again.
As Nomi Prins emphasizes for AlterNet, much of the Wall Street profit machine has been divorced from the economy that the rest of us live in. These days, banks make most of their money from securities trades and derivatives deals. Their actual lending business is taking a beating. That means big banks have very little incentive to promote economic well-being for every day citizens. We need to create these incentives by banning economically essential banks from engaging in securities trades, and make sure all derivatives transactions are conducted on open, transparent exchanges, just like ordinary stocks and bonds.
Better derivatives regulations could help protect against fraud. If Goldman Sachs' sketchy subprime deal had been subject to market scrutiny on an exchange, it's very unlikely that any investor would have bought into it. Goldman Sachs almost got away with it because the deal was secretive and beyond the scope of most regulatory oversight.
Protect whistleblowers
The Goldman case also raises significant questions about the government's enforcement of existing financial fraud laws. Bradley Birkenfeld, a banker for Swiss financial giant UBS, helped the Department of Justice bring the largest tax fraud case in history against his company, which was helping rich Americans hide money from the IRS in offshore bank accounts.
For his cooperation, Birkenfeld was rewarded with a four-year prison sentence, even though nobody else at UBS-nobody-has been sentenced to prison over the scam. As Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman emphasize for Democracy Now!, Birkenfeld's imprisonment could have something to with who exactly is hiding money with UBS.
Gonzalez discusses an interview with Birkenfeld, in which the former banker notes that the bank had a special office to handle the accounts of "politically exposed persons"- American politicians. Moreover, the top brass at UBS includes key advisors to top politicians in both parties. This is exactly the kind of influence smuggling that breaking up the banks would help fix. UBS is a multi-trillion-dollar institution with no less than 27 U.S. subsidiaries.
But protecting Birkenfeld would accomplish still more-by jailing him, the Justice Department is actively discouraging others from coming forward, and making it more difficult for regulators to enforce the law.
Greenspan's failure
It's abundantly clear that almost every major regulatory agency charged with curtailing financial excess failed to prevent the Crash of 2008. But that failure doesn't mean that effective regulation is impossible-it only shows that the regulators in power failed. The top bank regulator in the U.S., John Dugan, was a former bank lobbyist.
As Christopher Hayes demonstrates for The Nation, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has never had any interest in regulation whatsoever. After the crash, Greenspan insisted that nobody could have seen it coming. But as Hayes notes, many people did-Greenspan simply didn't listen to them. These days, Greenspan is revising his story, claiming that he did in fact see the crisis coming, but that nobody could have prevented it. That is simply not credible.
Hayes draws a useful parallel Hurricane Katrina, a problem sparked by a natural event that became a catastrophe when regulators failed to take the necessary precautions. The lesson from both Katrina and the financial crash is not that government always screws up-we have plenty of examples of government preventing floods and economic calamity. The lesson we should learn is that people who don't believe in government will never do a good job governing. As Hayes notes:
If Greenspan couldn't figure things out, that doesn't mean others can't. In fact, developing systems for doing just that is called-quite simply-progress, and Alan Greenspan continues to be one of its enemies.
That is exactly the task that now presents itself before Congress: Developing a system to prevent and constrain economic destruction wielded by Wall Street. The U.S. had a system that did exactly this for more than fifty years. For the last thrity years, it has been systematically dismantled. How well Congress lives up to that challenge will define much of our economic future for decades to come.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
One year after President Barack Obama secured passage of his critical economic stimulus package, the U.S. Senate is finally taking anther look at how to create jobs and repair the economy. These issues are more important than ever, but absurd Republican obstructionism and timid Democratic negotiation are once again threatening good public policy.
Not really bipartisan, is it?
As Steve Benen notes for The Washington Monthly, the Senate Finance Committee reached a "bipartisan" agreement to supposedly spur job creation last week. Republicans demanded billions in tax cuts for wealthy people, but kept on caterwauling about the federal budget deficit. In exchange for $80 billion to dedicate to jobs-an extremely modest figure given the state of the labor market-Republicans asked for hundreds of billions in giveaways for the rich. And that's just to get the bill through the Finance Committee, much less the full Senate.
In a piece for Working In These Times, Michelle Chen notes that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the plug on the Finance Committee "compromise," but stripped out a critical extension of unemployment benefits for laid-off workers in the process.
The Republican uproar over such modest job figures is an economically preposterous political ploy, and Democratic cave-ins to their demands are both bad politics and bad economics. Chen notes that 70% of Americans support a $100 billion jobs bill. And we know what kinds of programs help spur employment-many of them were passed in the stimulus bill last year and have saved millions of jobs.
Stopping the Bleeding
In an interview with Christopher Hayes of The Nation, Economic Policy Institute Fellow Josh Bivens explains that Obama's economic stimulus package has worked well, effectively stopping the job hemorrhaging that the economy was experiencing immediately before Obama took office. Here's Bivens:
"We haven't returned to growth on employment ... but the rate of contraction has slowed radically. Immediately before the Recovery Act is passed, we're losing on the order of 700,000 jobs per month ... In the past three months, we're now down to something like between 50 and 75,000 jobs lost per month, on average ... it really is a stark before and after."
Racial inequality and the recession
The trouble is, the stimulus was only big enough to prevent the economy from getting much worse. It was not large enough to return the economy to serious job growth. And the brutal effects of the recession are not being shouldered equally. As LinkTV's collaboration with ColorLines illustrates (video below), the Great Recession is hitting people of color much harder, but the story of racial inequality is being lost in stories about statistical economic recovery in the financial sector. The special profiles several families of color struggling to make ends meet in the worst recession since the Great Depression, which features Depression-era unemployment rates for African Americans.
"What we don't see on TV are the [people] who never had a home or a good job to lose in the first place. These are the millions of poor people whose chance to cross the line into middle class has always been cut short by another kind of line, the color line," says host Chris Rabb, founder of Afro-Netizen.
Rabb, ColorLines and LinkTV describe a social safety net that has been shredded by opportunistic politicians. Instead of focusing on ways to guarantee good jobs, politicians since the Reagan era have demonized black single mothers by exploiting racist stereotypes in an effort to justify slashing federal supports for the poor and unemployed. The result is a fundamentally unstable economy. Our society has weak demand for goods and services in good times, and that demand completely falls apart when economic conditions deteriorate. And while these socially destructive initiatives have been described as "pro-business," the truth is, businesses don't like societies where millions of people are impoverished. They don't have any customers.
Predatory lending strikes again
The recession hasn't exactly been a picnic for the middle class, either. In an article for Mother Jones, Andy Kroll profiles the mortgage mess that Ocwen Loan Servicing created for borrower Deanna Walters. Unlike millions of other borrowers dealing with mortgage headaches, Walters wasn't actually behind on her payments. She was making payments regularly, but Ocwen was misplacing them, and charging her thousands of dollars in improper fees. Walters even paid the fees, but Ocwen eventually foreclosed on her home and sold it in an auction without even informing Walters.
As Kroll emphasizes, Ocwen's antics aren't unique. There is an entire class of companies known as mortgage servicers that specialize in deceiving and bullying borrowers out of their money. They often use illegal tactics, and as I note for AlterNet, have been systematically exploiting a badly designed foreclosure relief program from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Funding projects that will put people to work
As prominent economist Dean Baker argues for The American Prospect, there are dozens of productive programs that would put millions of people back to work-if they could just get the funding. The government could quickly and easily provide money to improve public transportation, develop open-source software, fund objective clinical drug trials and (my favorite) support writers and artists, whose work would subsequently be available for the public to enjoy for free.
Taxing financial speculation
The federal government can afford these programs right now, especially without any additional tax revenue. But if we're really worried about the budget deficit, we can always turn to reasonable new sources for taxes. As Sarah Anderson details for Yes!, an obvious place to look is financial speculation. Since excessive and risky trading helped bring down the economy in 2008, a tax discouraging this behavior could make the economy stronger and reap as much as $175 billion a year for the public.
Our economy wouldn't face troubles of the same order as those it must overcome today if so-called conservatives had not spend decades pursuing a radical agenda to shred the social safety net. The stimulus package has not spurred job growth to date because of cuts demanded by Congressional Republicans, nearly all of whom refused to vote for the bill anyway. Our economy needs a jobs bill now. It'd be nice if Republicans would show some interest in governing, but if they continue to refuse, Democrats must act on their own.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Bailout pay czar Ken Feinberg raised a ruckus last week when he announced plans to slash cash payouts to executives at seven companies that have received massive levels of taxpayer support. While better oversight of the bailout barons is helpful, the best way to change Wall Street pay practices is to adopt a set of tough, comprehensive regulations that cover everything from the executive suite to the loan department. As is, many of the executives Feinberg cracked down on will still make millions this year from stocks and other perks, while the very banks that depend the most on bailout money are spending like mad to lobby against reform.
Feinberg's new salary limits only apply to executives at Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, GM, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial. But while these new rules are an effort to reduce the incentive for executives to take big risks for short-term gains, the rules of the game for non-bailout barons haven't changed at all. Risky securities trading and unenforced consumer protection regulations still allow financiers to make a killing by gambling on mortgages and credit cards.
As Greg Kaufmann explains for The Nation, Feinberg has been barred from altering some of the most egregious bonus arrangements at even the biggest fund recipients, as the employment contracts were signed prior to the government's bailout. AIG plans to pay out $198 million in bonuses in March 2010, and none of Feinberg's recent rulings will change that. As Kaufmann also notes, back in March, AIG agreed to pay pack $45 million of the bonuses it shelled out early this year. After over seven months, just $19 million has been repaid.
The government's hands-off approach to AIG employment contracts is a rather flagrant display of deference to executives. Nothing stopped the government from renegotiating contracts for union laborers when it bailed out Chrysler and GM, as Dean Baker notes for The American Prospect.
Lest we forget, the government literally owns AIG, and would own both Citigroup and Bank of America had it demanded a market rate of return for its investment. Taxpayers injected several times the stock market values of both Citi and BofA into the troubled banks, but settled for a 36% stake in Citi and preferred stock in BofA. As Mike Madden emphasizes for Salon, Feinberg is still letting executives make several times the median household income in cash alone-nevermind stock-and it's unlikely that his move will spark changes among bankers outside the handful of companies ordered to make changes.
"Executives are still taking home paychecks that dwarf what the average American earns. And it's not clear whether any other companies will get on board with the Treasury plan unless they're forced to," Madden writes.
Congress hasn't taken any significant steps to curb Wall Street paydays since the crisis broke, but lawmakers did take two other important steps toward banking reform this week. Two different House committees passed bills to rein in the wild world of derivatives trading and establish a new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA). In a video piece for the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, Amanda Zamora and Lagan Sebert detail the legislative battle to create a CFPA, which has faced an enormous lobbying push from both banks and the top lobby group for the corporate executive class, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Zamora and Sebert note that top bank lobbyist Ed Yingling is arguing that if regulators simply enforced the existing consumer protection laws, all of the major abuses in mortgage lending and credit cards would have been prevented. Even for a corporate lobbyist, Yingling's disingenuousness is absolutely breathtaking. He acknowledges that existing regulators are not enforcing consumer protection laws, says he wants the laws enforced, and then says it would be a bad idea to create a new agency to enforce those laws.
The CFPA won't have any mysterious new powers. It will have the same authorities on credit cards and mortgages that existing federal regulators have. But the current regulators are focused primarily on bank profits, which often run directly contrary to fair play with consumers. Yingling and Wall Street are really afraid of a serious regulator who will stand up for consumers. They're terrified that the CFPA will actually enforce consumer protection rules against powerful banks-but are talking as if all they want is effective enforcement. It's a lie, pure and simple.
On Monday and Tuesday, thousands took to the streets in Chicago to protest a meeting of Yingling's lobby group, the American Bankers Association (ABA). Esther Kaplan details the protests in a piece for The Nation, complete with video footage. The ABA retaliated against Kaplan's reporting by revoking her press credentials, but it appears to have been worth it, as her piece describes everything from citizen outrage to police intimidation and awkward banker solidarity. As Democracy Now! explains, the ABA has spent decades lobbying against rules to strengthen the economy and prevent banker abuses, and is now at the heart of an effort to use taxpayer bailout money to lobby Congress against financial reforms.
So far, their efforts seem to be paying off. Last week, one of the CFPA's chief advocates, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC), co-authored an amendment significantly restricting the agency's enforcement powers. As Sebert and Zamora note, Miller agreed to exempt banks with $10 billion or less in assets from regulatory examinations by the CFPA-roughly 98% of all banks. The existing, corrupted regulators who didn't lift a finger to prevent the subprime mortgage crisis will be the people actually going to the banks and reviewing their books. While the CFPA could send along one of its own regulators to participate in the exam, the new agency can't tax the bank to pay for it, which would make it very difficult for the CFPA to keep an eye on smaller banks.
Even worse, there is nothing to prevent a giant bank like Bank of America from moving all of its most egregiously predatory activities into a series of small corporate subsidiaries. By exploiting this loophole, 100% of U.S. banks could be exempt from CFPA enforcement, including the giant banks most heavily involved in subprime mortgage abuses.
The other big piece of Obama-backed financial legislation to make its way through Committee last week had to do with derivatives, also known as the wild Wall Street securities that brought down AIG. The best way to fix the derivatives mess is to require that derivatives be traded on an exchange the same way stocks are, so that companies can't make crazy bets without regulatory and market scrutiny. But Obama only wants "standardized" derivatives to be processed through a central clearinghouse-like an exchange, except without any public pricing information. And so long as a derivative contract can be deemed "customized," it would be totally exempt from even this limited reform.
But as Art Levine notes for AlterNet, the derivatives bill actually got worse in committee. Plenty of non-financial businesses use derivatives to legitimately hedge real risks: Airlines try to insure themselves against swings in oil prices, for instance. Lawmakers agreed to exempt any contract with these companies, termed "end-users" in the financial jargon, from central clearing requirements. The trouble is, big Wall Street hedge funds and private equity firms can be classified as "end-users," opening a fatal loophole in the legislation. The five banks who control 95% of the derivatives market will just conduct all of their most reckless trades with hedge funds and avoid oversight entirely.
A modest reform on paychecks for bailout recipients is nowhere near sufficient to protect our economy from banker excess. If Wall Street is going to serve any productive economic function, it has to be subject to serious consumer protection rules, and its derivatives casino has to be dismantled.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Audit for a complete list of articles on economic issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Mulch, The Pulse and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
As housing prices rose earlier this decade, mortgage originators, brokers, servicers, and investors created and promoted ever more deceptive products to extract further profits from current and aspiring middle-class families. Distorted incentives throughout the industry made it profitable to market loans aggressively to families who never had a prayer of paying back. Prepayment penalties imposed fees on homeowners for paying mortgage debt early; adjustable rate mortgages resulted in payment shock when low teaser rates skyrocketed to exorbitant levels; borrowers with interest-only loans found that their loan principal increased as they paid back their mortgage; and "no-doc" loans locked unsuspecting borrowers into mortgages they could not afford.
Lenders often used mortgage refinancing to strip middle-class homeowners of the equity they relied on to obtain loans to help make ends meet. Negligent underwriting and plain fraud, spurred by the promise of easy profit, allowed such abusive products to proliferate from 19 percent of the mortgage market in 2005 to 31 percent in 2007. People of color were steered into high-cost mortgages even when they qualified for better products: one study finds that 54.5 percent of all conventional loans made to African Americans in 2005 were high-cost, compared to 23.3 percent made to whites.
High-risk subprime mortgages made to less creditworthy borrowers are a primary cause of the current foreclosure crisis: 1.5 million homes have been lost through subprime foreclosure and 2 million subprime mortgage holders are currently delinquent. However, risky prime mortgages - such as payment option adjustable-rate mortgages - are now just as likely to result in default as subprime mortgages. Poor and fraudulent underwriting, not irresponsible borrowers, are the primary cause of the foreclosure crisis.
As the economy and the housing and job markets worsen, middle-class households continue to lose equity in their homes and are less able to afford their mortgage payments. The difficulty is compounded for those locked into predatory mortgages with high interest rates. The federal government and the mortgage industry's continued failure to address the foreclosure crisis adequately could result in as many as 8.1 million foreclosures by 2012. Despite widespread calls for action to confront the crisis, foreclosures increased 81% in 2008. Voluntary mortgage modifications by lenders and banks, encouraged by policymakers in place of comprehensive federal action, have failed to make mortgages more affordable and prevent widespread foreclosures.
The Senate had an opportunity to address the foreclosure crisis yesterday by adopting the Helping Families Save Their Homes in Bankruptcy Amendment, which authorizes federal bankruptcy courts to modify the terms of mortgages on certain primary residences. Influenced heavily by the banking industry, they balked.
It is good to be back here at OpenLeft. Thanks to the site's editors, I will be posting from time to time on ACORN's major campaigns and the work being done by progressives to push for the kind of policies we need to get America back on its feet and back to work. I'm starting with the work we are doing to address the foreclosure crisis at the heart of the economic meltdown. -- Bertha
Yesterday President Obama signed into law the economic recovery package that is a firm first step forward in getting America back on its feet in the midst of the economic devastation we are experiencing.
Today, President Obama announced his Administration's $75 billion plan for addressing the foreclosure crisis engulfing the country. This is a welcome initiative, especially in the wake of the 2 years of inactivity and neglect from the Bush Administration.
I would argue that in terms of addressing the specific genesis of our present crisis - the toxic assets crippling the financial sector - the announcement today is of greater magnitude. For without a plan to address the predicted 8-9 million foreclosures over the next 4 years, that's in addition to the 2.3 million that occurred in 2008 with a total estimated cost to the economy of over $850 billion, attempts to spur an economic recovery will fail. There can be no long-term solution without addressing the immediate foreclosure crisis.
I talk about the problem and what we can do about it in the extended entry.
Senator Barabara Mikulski of Maryland was back at her old tricks this week in the Senate (where, to be sure, terrible legislation was in no short supply). Back in November when Congress was considering the auto bailout, the Senator proposed making the interest on auto loans, along with sales taxes, deductible from a household's federal income tax. The legislation is designed to save jobs at car dealerships, save consumers money, and boost sales tax revenues. The Senate voted to include the tax break in the stimulus package. In November, I pointed out:
But people aren't buying [cars] and most of them probably shouldn't be.
Certainly, they should not be buying a car if $1,500 (at the end of the year) is all that is separating them from a new Dodge Minivan. Not only does the tax break encourage early replacement of perfectly good cars (the break expires at the end of 2009), but it encourages already debt-ridden Americans to assume more debt. And it is not even clear that stoking demand for cars will be sufficient, even if higher interest rate loans appear more affordable to purchasers. Secretary Paulson has emphasized, along with the WSJ, that loan availability depends on the securitization market, which has "for all practical purposes ground to a halt."
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