Progressive groups have turned their guns on Federal Housing Finance Agency acting director Ed DeMarco, arguing that he is holding back the housing recovery by refusing to allow Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to engage in principal reductions on the loans they own or guarantee. MoveOn.org sent out an email message to supporters today with [...]

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 [...]

Housing Wire reports that we’re not going to see foreclosure fraud settlement terms until the end of the month, at best: The state attorneys general and federal prosecutors will likely file the actual $25 billion foreclosure settlement documents in court by the end of the month, according to a source familiar with the deal. The [...]

Yesterday, the San Francisco Assessor-Recorder, Phil Ting, released the results of a cursory review of foreclosure documents, finding widespread irregularities in the vast majority of them. The documents included foreclosures from 2011, after the point at which the banks allegedly “fixed” their foreclosure document problems. Assessor-Recorder Phil Ting in partnership with mortgage investigation firm, Aequitas, [...]

Amid all the talk of the foreclosure fraud settlement yesterday, the most honest assessment cm from this Wells Fargo economist: But it will be months, if not years, before some of the promised relief trickles down to many families. In the meantime, some predict, the housing market may get worse before it gets better. “The [...]

The WaPo editorial board’s biggest problem with the “rough justice” foreclosure fraud settlement is that robo-signing is a “victimless crime” because all those people were behind on their payments anyway, and that lucky duckies foreclosed upon might be getting $2,000 erroneously. That’s the media we have. Put aside the looming presence of servicer-driven defaults, fee [...]

If you thought the foreclosure fraud settlement was bad, get this: the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the weakest federal regulator in the financial sphere (I’ve taken to calling them the Office of Bank Advocacy), decided to use the cover of the big settlement to announce their fines in their consent order with [...]

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor, consumer advocate and candidate for US Senate in Masachusetts, said today that the Federal Housing Finance Agence (FHFA) must increase their actions on behalf of homeowners, including principal reductions, something that the agency has resisted to this point. Warren spoke in concert with officials in Massachusetts, from Rep. Barney Frank, [...]

Well, the deadline for state Attorneys General to sign on to the foreclosure fraud settlement came and went yesterday, and the major holdouts – the Justice Democrats, the AGs from the five states who have objected to the settlement all along (Nevada, New York, California, Delaware, and Massachusetts), still aren’t signed on. Catherine Cortez Masto [...]

I want to circle back to today’s New York Times story on the looming foreclosure fraud settlement. With the return to talks of New York and California (though I don’t really think they were ever all that far away), we can infer that pretty much every other state, save perhaps Delaware and Nevada and Massachusetts, [...]

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan sought to clarify comments to reporters made over the weekend about expectations of “substantial” principal reduction payments from the foreclosure fraud settlement made out of loans owned by private-label investors in mortgage-backed securities, not the banks themselves. In fact, Donovan told FDL News, the “large majority” of principal [...]