A day after announcing himself evolved on marriage equality, President Obama heads to Hollywood for a fundraising dinner at George Clooney’s house that promises to raise a whopping $15 million. The campaign turned the event into a raffle, where a small donor could win “dinner with Barack and George,” and that raffle took in $9 [...]

The Florida Supreme Court heard oral arguments in an important case that could have wide-ranging implications for foreclosures in that state. The case, Roman Pino v. Bank of New York Mellon, could invalidate the ability of banks to refile documents in situations where the initial documents they filed to foreclose on homeowners were fraudulent. Pino [...]

One of the items Eric Schneiderman has been using to push back on claims that the Residential Mortage Backed Securities (RMBS) working group is being slow-walked and made ineffectual is that they have a funding stream earmarked for it that testifies to the seriousness of effort with respect to resources. In an op-ed two weeks [...]

The Sun-Sentinel in Palm Beach, Florida has been running an excellent series on so-called bad-neighbor banks. They detailed over ten thousand bank-owned properties in ten South Florida cities, most of them acquired in foreclosure proceedings, with major property code violations. Their reporting uncovered that 40% of the bank-owned homes in this area had been cited [...]

Bank of America says they have begun mailing notices to their borrowers about principal reduction opportunities under the foreclosure fraud settlement. You may recall that BofA inked a side deal on the settlement that would allow them to extinguish an additional $850 million of the cash penalties by reducing loan balances more deeply than called [...]

Still playing catch-up here, so bear with me. But of the many articles on the subject of housing that bubbled up to my attention while I was away – and thanks to all who filled in, particularly Abigail Field, who had some emergency issues during the two weeks and still performed admirably – I wanted [...]

The Congressional Progressive Caucus met with New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman today for a hearing on how to prevent a million foreclosures.  Not much happened at the hearing.  More interesting was a letter sent by members of the CPC authored by Maxine Waters to Eric Schneiderman asking him to hire Rep. Brad Miller to [...]

Let’s get something straight: we did not have a housing “bubble”, in the usual sense of the word. The mainstream narrative of crazed, greedy, irresponsible homeowner-wannabes driving prices unsustainably high, causing the still ongoing crash is wrong. Yes, we had a housing “bubble” in one sense; prices soared way beyond reality because excess demand fueled irrational [...]

One way to see the double standard at the heart of the foreclosure fraud—one set of laws for the bailed out banks, one for the rest of us—is to focus on the role of notaries public, and then consider that role in light of what our Supreme Court said about notaries in 1984, in a [...]

So I’m going to be stepping away from the blog for a couple weeks as I take a long-delayed vacation. But as I’ve said, I won’t be leaving you empty-handed. I have assembled a diverse group of writers to hold down the fort over the next two weeks. Kathleen Geier: You may remember her from [...]

George Zornick carries a rebuttal from Eric Schneiderman’s team on yesterday’s damaging expose of the securitization fraud working group. Here’s what it has to say: • There are 50 staffers “across the country” working on the RMBS working group (the official title). • DoJ has asked for $55 million for additional staffing. • The five [...]