I’m trying to keep a running tally of the direct funds to states from the foreclosure fraud settlement that will get diverted to General Funds to fill budget holes. When we last left this story, Maine had decided to send $5.7 million to the general fund, joining Missouri’s $40 million and Wisconsin’s $26 million. So [...]

There’s nobody who hates navel-gazing more than I, so I will try to dispense with this quickly. Glenn Thrush thinks I’m wrong to attribute the same perspective on Eric Schneiderman to Tom Miller, who dissed him on the record, and Shaun Donovan. Miller, who has clashed with Schneiderman over the terms of the releases with [...]

Well, here’s an interesting report that might have been good to have in hand a few weeks ago. The National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys and the National Consumer Law Center have released the results of a survey showing that “mortgage servicers continue to initiate foreclosure proceedings improperly, either [...]

The pushback from the Administration on one particular story arising from the foreclosure fraud settlement has been pretty intense. You cannot say that Shahien Nasiripour doesn’t have the attention of HUD. Today, they devoted an entire blog post (unsigned, from “HUD Public Affairs”) to refuting Nasiripour’s story in the Financial Times (which they don’t link, [...]

Whether you believe in Eric Schneiderman’s ability to deliver a legitimate investigation on mortgage securitization fraud or not, you have to admit that the united front on opposition to a settlement on foreclosure fraud collapsed the moment that he agreed to helm that federal investigatory task force. He immediately separated “pre-bubble” and “post-bubble” conduct, allowing [...]

Just because state and federal regulators reached a settlement with banks over foreclosure fraud – we think – doesn’t mean that the banks have rid themselves of their liabilities, even on these foreclosure fraud-related issues. A settlement cannot stop court rulings, to use one example. In Massachusetts, a new ruling by the state Supreme Court [...]

Before the foreclosure fraud settlement was inked, at least half a dozen Republican Attorneys General said publicly that they were philosophically opposed to principal reductions of any kind. Then, in December of last year, the committee that helps elect Republican AGs received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Citi, Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase. All [...]

The New York Post correctly calls the foreclosure fraud settlement something analagous to the robo-signing scandal the settlement releases from liability. Yes, it’s the Post, but this is absolutely spot-on: More than a year after the scandal broke over the rapid signing of thousands of foreclosure documents without reviewing their accuracy, New York Attorney General [...]

Here’s an update to last week’s revelation from San Francisco Recorder-Assessor Phil Ting, that an overwhelming percentage of foreclosure documents he reviewed were found to be at least partially flawed. The two members of Congress who represent San Francisco want Attorney General Eric Holder to convene an investigation. That consists of Jackie Speier and the [...]

Shahien Nasiripour has posted two stories for the Financial Times about the intersection of the foreclosure fraud settlement and HAMP. I wrote previously about how HAMP modifications could count toward the settlement, meaning that banks would get partially paid out. Shahien confirms this. The agreement in principle between state prosecutors, federal agencies and five leading [...]

Tom Lawler is a housing consultant and former chief economist for Fannie Mae who is often quoted on the site Calculated Risk. But he appears to have lent his credibility to a really bad article at Bloomberg that tries to extrapolate data from Virginia and Maryland to make the argument that foreclosure laws in certain [...]