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, [...]

As I mentioned in last night’s roundup, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman abruptly cancelled a conference call yesterday 10 minutes before it was to begin. The subject was supposed to be the foreclosure fraud settlement, and there was idle speculation that Schneiderman would announce that he would join the settlement. This would spur other [...]

JPMorgan Chase estimates that 500,000 new loan modifications will result from the Administration’s changes to the embattled HAMP program. I’m skeptical of this projection, but let’s hear it out: JPMorgan Chase [[JPM]] analysts said in a report Monday they expect 1.7 million additional borrowers could qualify for the program under the more lenient DTI requirements [...]

The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch [...]

Yesterday I looked at the Administration’s new housing policies, particularly the mass refi plan they sent to Congress. Now, maybe that’s not something to focus on specifically, because John Boehner sealed the deal on that yesterday by saying that he has no interest in the government helping homeowners: “One more time? We’ve done this. We’ve [...]

I didn’t think much of the HAMP changes announced last Friday, but my pessimism mainly came from the fact that HAMP itself is an irreparably damaged program that nobody wants to use. There’s also the point that the GSEs are generally uninterested in a principal reduction program, and that has not changed. Ed DeMarco’s statement [...]

Brian Beutler writes that President Obama will likely have to make more recess appointments if he wants to staff key positions, including the newly-created vacancy at the Office of Management and Budget, as Jack Lew has become White House Chief of Staff. The assumption here is that Republicans will react to recess appointments at the [...]

Ezra Klein writes this morning that mass refinancing is the “biggest thing” President Obama can do to aid the economy without the input of Congress. That’s not actually true, even in the context of housing. He could direct Treasury to use the unused $42 billion of HAMP money to provide mass principal write-downs. He could [...]

Bloomberg News, quickly becoming the leading muckraker of the financial markets, has another blockbuster story today, on the heels of its release of information about Federal Reserve bailouts. Here they have former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson essentially aiding and abetting an insider trading scheme while in office, as far as I can tell: Treasury Secretary [...]

Here’s a neat little exchange between Rep. John Tierney (D-MA) and Ed DeMarco, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, that took place this morning at a House Oversight Committee hearing. Tierney asks DeMarco why FHFA, the overseer for Fannie and Freddie, has been so resistant to principal reductions. Tierney cites a few experts [...]

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has been awfully quiet amid pressure from the Obama Administration to agree to a settlement with the big banks over foreclosure fraud. So it’s interesting that she popped up this week to call for the resignation of Ed DeMarco, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. California Attorney General [...]