Archive for the ‘Wall Street’ Category

« Older Entries

The State of the Union Speech You Should Have Heard

Tuesday, February 19th, 2013
President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy at Shaker Heights High School,Shaker Heights, Ohio, Jan. 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

President Barack Obama delivers remarks on the economy at Shaker Heights High School,Shaker Heights, Ohio, Jan. 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

If you watched President Obama give the State of the Union , you might be scratching your head over his failure to speak, except for a brief mention, about what will one day fill at least a chapter in history books as one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression.

Instead, the president appeared to be taking his cue from the story The Emperor’s New Clothes. Much like the emperor, the American public has fallen victim to swindlers – in this case the banks – with everyone believing that the nation’s economy is as splendid as the emperor believed was his fine clothing.

If I were King For a Day, my State of the Union address would have gone a little differently:

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, fellow Americans:
Let me start by saying I know it appears on the surface that the economy is improving, but look around you. Who among your family, friends, co-workers or acquaintances hasn’t suffered at the hands of the banking industry?

Those with any savings to speak of continue to get a pittance worth of interest. Those who purchased homes at the height of the economic crisis remain underwater and continue to face the prospect of losing their home. Our housing market is not healing at the pace it should and homeowners do not enjoy the protections they were promised.
(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Big Banks, President Barack Obama, Wall Street | No Comments »

Where Have All The Foreclosures Gone? (Long Time Passing)

Friday, February 15th, 2013

An edited version of this post by Roy Oppenheim was first published in US News and World Report’s Home Front Blog and is being redistributed on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

Pete_SeegerNot long after the national mortgage settlement was announced, I warned clients that the training wheels would come off and foreclosures would ramp up again.

Now foreclosure information firm RealtyTrac has confirmed that fact in its latest report, which shows that in 2012, foreclosure filings rose in more than half of the metropolitan areas they track.

Florida, where a massive foreclosure backlog is still clogging up the courts, is leading the pack. Tampa and Miami saw the biggest increases in foreclosure activity last year, and eight of the top 20 foreclosure rates in the nation belonged to Florida towns.

But despite hard data showing that foreclosure activity is picking up again, experts have blamed a tight supply of homes for sale—including foreclosures—for sharp year-over-year increases in home prices and disappointing monthly home sales numbers.

So to paraphrase the 1960s folk singer Pete Seeger, “Where have all the foreclosures gone?”

While it has decreased, the shadow inventory–the backlog of bank-owned homes that remain off the market–is still lurking just out of our reach.

Banks never had much to lose by allowing these distressed homes to languish, and that remains true. In fact, they have a lot to lose if they put them on the market too fast. If these foreclosures were allowed to pour down instead of trickle out as they are now, banks would have to write off their losses en masse, and that simply would not benefit their balance sheets. Their capital reserves would plummet and we all know what happened the last time banks’ capital reserve took a dive.
(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Foreclosure Fraud, Shadow Inventory, Wall Street | 1 Comment »

The Hazard of Moral Hazard

Tuesday, January 15th, 2013

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo Homes! and is being redistributed on South Florida Law Blog with their permission

Businessman walking tightropeThose who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

We already know that the banks haven’t learned from their mistakes. They can and often will engage in risky behavior given the opportunity.

So why do regulators and those who have the chance to do something about it continue to give banks the wiggle room? Wall Street’s business model is inherently flawed, which is why banks are continually getting hit with hefty fines.

Yet banking lobbyists continue to hold immense clout in shaping regulation that will have a lasting impact on housing for years to come.

The business pages have been littered with headlines lately suggesting that governments still treat the banks like E.F. Hutton. When they talk, regulators still listen; case in point, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision easing up on certain liquidity requirements in the Basel III rule. There is a great deal of dense technical jargon that will quite frankly bore most of you but the takeaway is this — banks still get their way and will still be able to take as many risks as they want.

Back here in the States, new mortgage lending rules trotted out by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are supposed to curtail so-called “liar loans” by requiring a more vigorous income verification process.

Except that those new tougher standards will be eased in over the next few years rather implemented immediately, so for the meanwhile it is business as usual.
(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Mortgage Settlement, Wall Street | No Comments »

Why The Housing Bubble Burst: Explaining Economic Homicide

Thursday, December 13th, 2012

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

Housing BubbleIt is easy to call Wall Street a villain and lay the blame for the housing collapse at their doorstep, and I did just that in one of my recent blogs, where I likened the banks’ conduct during the housing collapse to “economic homicide.”

My Rabbi asked me to further explain the concept of foreseeability, a notion I touched on in the blog, as it relates back to the banks and the real estate bubble.

So allow me to explain, but first, please grant me a few more hyperboles.

If you pour gasoline on a fire, then you’d have to know that fire would accelerate. Otherwise people would think you are a fool.

Likewise as people often refer to the real estate market as a bubble, I like to think of the banks and their agents as people who filled that bubble with helium.

At some point they’d have to know it would burst. It was absolutely foreseeable. So how did they “fill the bubble?”

First, they completely disregarded underwriting guidelines. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and most of the big banks took shortcuts, playing fast and loose with guidelines they once held sacred.

They signed off on these loans without considering their underwriting obligations, without checking whether the borrower was creditworthy, or even checking tax returns. More loans went out, and into the securitization machine, but of course the quality of those securitized trusts ended up resembling something your dog might leave behind on the sidewalk.
(more…)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Housing Market, Wall Street | 2 Comments »

Page 1 of 3123
PHP/MySQL Components, WordPress Plugins, and Technology Opinions at TravisWeston.com

Bad Behavior has blocked 3089 access attempts in the last 7 days.