Fresh off his Daily Show appearance, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced that Bank of America will provide additional assistance to homeowners under the as-yet undisclosed foreclosure fraud settlement. BofA will write down to market value, according to Donovan, over 200,000 loans that correspond to certain criteria: if the homeowners are underwater, delinquent by more than [...]

You would think that the Administration would try to master how to deliver relief to struggling borrowers who need the help before moving on to another sector of the housing industry. But you would be wrong. Instead, Bloomberg reports that the Administration will open up the failed HAMP program to real estate speculators who got [...]

One of the responses you often get from official sources about the failed HAMP program is that it was but one of a string of programs implemented using TARP funds to help homeowners. So just because HAMP has used barely $3 billion of the $50 billion in available funds, that’s not a full picture, because [...]

The Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, is now three years old. In that time, not one sanction has been placed on servicers for noncompliance with program guidelines, despite multitudes of documented evidence of abuse. I don’t think I have to go into all the different cases; just Google “Portrait of HAMP Failure. The Treasury [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s fairly impossible to follow Administration math on the HAMP program, which is part of the TARP authorization. I’ve seen HAMP alternately described as a $75 billion, $50 billion, $45.6 billion and $29 billion program. And the White House has carved money out of HAMP for other housing programs like the Hardest Hit Fund. So [...]

If Pimco, the giant bond fund, actually believes this, they can sue to block the foreclosure fraud settlement. But of course, nobody has seen terms, which would be kind of crucial to that circumstance: The government’s deal with banks over their foreclosure practices after 16 months of investigations is cheap for the loan servicers while [...]

Because there’s no actual term sheet for the foreclosure fraud deal it’s virtually impossible to assess it, and every group who released a press statement calling it “a drop in the bucket” or a “down payment” or a “first step” should withdraw before the facts are known. But we should be talking about how the [...]

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, [...]