We’re at a point in US history, brought there by Occupy Wall Street, where even Republican Presidential candidates needing a boost in the polls will vow to throw bankers in jail. I don’t expect that they’d actually do it, but this is what they feel they have to say to get elected. And that makes [...]

Way back in September, I wrote the narrative of how the banks successfully staved off cramdown, with big assist from the Barack Obama, who even as a candidate for President told the political leadership to keep it out of TARP, when the banks were at their most vulnerable. Now Paul Kiel and Olga Pierce tell [...]

Mike Konczal writes about lifeline bankruptcy reform, the easiest and most efficient way to solve the crisis in the housing market: We could easily pass a streamlined, modified version of bankruptcy just for this crisis. Adam Levitin has proposed this with his Chapter M for Mortgage bankruptcy. It would remove foreclosure actions from state court [...]

At a press event in North Portland in front of the home of a family struggling to avoid foreclosure, Senator Jeff Merkley unveiled a six-part plan to fix the housing market and rebalance the relationship between borrower and lender. The plan includes what Merkley calls “lifeline bankruptcy,” which is basically the cramdown proposal to allow [...]

Larry Summers made his swan song yesterday, and he didn’t give an inch. Speaking at the Economic Policy Institute, where he didn’t have a very favorable audience, Summers insisted that the actions of the Obama Administration were necessary and positive, and that the country was spared the worst expected effects of the Great Recession. Summers [...]

One of the more amusing moments of yesterday’s House Financial Services Committee hearings on foreclosure fraud was when the representatives for the loan servicers were asked why they were subsidiaries of the large financial institutions. The link between the servicers and the big banks, mainly caused by a series of mergers, leads to all kinds [...]

We now know that HAMP was designed to fail from the start, and that the solutions which would have given it a chance, like teaming it with cramdown, ended up going nowhere. We also know that foreclosures continue to rise for beyond the rate of modifications, and that the implications for the greater economy are [...]

What the HAMP series shows in excruciating detail is that the current set of procedures to reduce foreclosures and keep people in homes just haven’t worked for the vast majority of borrowers at risk. But what can be done to reverse this trend and achieve the following goals: 1) help borrowers, 2) clear the market [...]

This chart showing US home vacancies tells you everything you need to know about the near-term future of the economy. The United States has twice as many vacant homes as the entire housing stock of Canada. The US has ten times more people than Canada, too, but that doesn’t exactly help us think about the [...]

OK, the jury orientation is over, and I’m sitting in the sparkling jury assembly room with excellent working WiFi. Big ups for public services! If I’m just hanging out all day, this should proceed normally. I wanted to hit this background meeting that Treasury had with a group of bloggers and reporters this week. That [...]

David Streitfeld wrote the previous story about all these strategic defaults and how un-American they are. The next in his series of shaming people who can’t afford things is this beaut, where he equates bankruptcy to stealing, sort of: The delinquency rate on home equity loans is higher than all other types of consumer loans, [...]