Known both for his being one of the ‘Watergate Seven’ and his subsequent 2nd life as a born-again evangelist, I can only wonder what he thought of of our current foreclosure crisis.
I don’t know if he ever gave it much thought, but I suspect there would be a level of amazement.
Watergate, which started over a single break-in, landed almost 50 men in jail, including many top Nixon aides like Coulson.
The banks have broken intothousands of homesin their efforts to secure ‘abandoned properties’. Except you and I both know that most of these homes were anything but abandoned.
Sometimes they weren’t even in foreclosure. I’ve hadabout a dozen clientswho’ve had their locks changed or had their homes ransacked by repo agents who were hired by the banks.
The banks, playing the role of Nixon and his cronies, have used aggressive tactics that Coulson, in his days as Nixon’s legal counsel, might have employed.
Coulson allegedly said he wouldwalk over his own grandmotherto get the president re-elected, which sounds appropriate because banks have done almost everything else in order to foreclose on homeowners who often didn’t deserve it.
Yet for crimes that would seem to fit in any file on Watergate, there is not a single banking executive who has been arrested.
I’ll bet good money Coulson would wonder why.
Coulson was convicted for his efforts in trying to discredit the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, but what would he have said about the ‘hatchet job’ banks have done on homeowners? (more…)
Could Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac finally be willing to sign off on principal reduction as a way to keep homeowners out of foreclosure and in their homes?
Edward DeMarco, the acting head of theFederal Housing Finance Agency and de facto leader of the two GSEs has been steadfast in his opposition.
President Obama has made principal reduction priority one. It was one of the highlights of the mortgage settlement and many economists point to it as the way out of this housing mess.
But DeMarco still hasn’t budged, because he says principal reduction will cost the taxpayer money and isn’t good for Fannie and Freddie’s bottom line.
Except maybe it is.
According to NPR and ProPublica,executives at both Fannie Mae and Freddie Machave concluded that principal reduction would prevent larger losses and in fact, save the two companies money.
Their report claims that in part because of new Obama incentives, which would reimburse lenders half of what they write off, that Fannie and Freddie would benefit from principal reduction
Look I’m not saying that principal reduction comes without risk. Could everyone decide to stop paying their mortgages in order to get a write-down? Sure.
But just because you might get hit by a car doesn’t mean you don’t cross the street. The housing market will NEVER rebound if people keep getting kicked to the curb.
And I don’t care what Edward DeMarco has said, the bottom line shouldn’t be his bottom line. It shouldn’t be about what is cost effective, it should be about what keeps borrowers in their homes. Last time I checked, they are taxpayers too. (more…)
But after a moment of reflection and enlightenment, I have this to say to my friends in Tallahassee.
Bring it On!
That’s right! Pass the Bill.
My phoneshave not stopped ringing these days, as more and more clients are getting ready to lawyer up.
That’s right this bill will only increase the value I bring to my clients each and every day for without an attorney the Legislature will make sure that the “Florida Fair Foreclosure Act” is fair… for the banks … but not for you.
They will make sure that without counsel that you will be stripped of your right to defend your home. Without counsel the new law will ensure that you will go through a legal system that will resemble a steam roller.
It makes me laugh that the Legislature is entrusting the banks to not commit fraud once again. Because the honor system worked so well the last time.
But its sad that the Legislature is interfering with the independence of the judiciary by telling the courts what to do and how to do it.
Please, please try your best to pass the Florida Fair Foreclosure Act, because all you’ll be doing is making sure I’ll have a new stream of clients to defend, and more importantly be able to help the economy by hiring more people. (more…)
Banks need to get their massiveforeclosure backlog off the books. There are over 368,000 cases in Florida. I get that.
Getting these properties into the hands of families who can afford them, that is what I want to see. It’s needed to jump start the economy, and no one wants to see the banks out of the neighborhoods more than me.
But it can’t be allowed to happen on the backs of other homeowners plain and simple. Lenders have tried to thrust these homes back onto the market before, and that’s why they just shelled out $25 billion.
Yeta series of proposed billsnow making their way through theFlorida HouseandSenateoffer banks unjust control over the foreclosure process, all in the name of getting abandoned homes back on the market.
The Senate version,which would create the “Florida Fair Foreclosure Act”, was passed by a judiciary committee earlier this week by a 5-2 vote. There is a similar bill making their way through the House.
But are they really ‘fair’ to homeowners? Absolutely not.
Have the politicians in Tallahassee learned nothing from the settlement? The $25 billion isn’t even in the mail, yet some are back to their old tricks, turning a blind eye to the plights of their constituents and denying them due process. (more…)
If there was anything positive that came out of the prolonged discussions between the states and the banks on the mortgage servicing settlement,it was that banks were reluctant to go full steam ahead in the foreclosure process while talks were ongoing.
But even before the settlement was announced, we saw signs that pointed to more foreclosures in 2012.
Now that the settlement has been agreed to, the training wheels are off.
It’s petal to the metal folks. One thing that the settlement does for the banks is provide them a blueprint for how to proceed in the foreclosure process without getting their fingers stuck in the cookie jar.
Which means borrowers will once again have to defend themselves just as rigorously as they did pre-robosigning.
I’ve been asked if the settlement changes my advice to homeowners, to which I reply, ABSOLUTELY NOT!
You must continue to stand your ground. If you are in foreclosure or about to enter foreclosure, I will say what I have always said, you must fight the banks and force them to kick you out of your home.
The settlement may have changed the rules for the banks, but it shouldn’t change the rules for you, the homeowner. The banks will not transform into wonderful and charitable companies just because the settlement might penalize them.
Make no mistake about it, they will continue to come at you and come at your hard. (more…)
Just like Old Yeller, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae need to be put down
There were two players conspicuously absent when last week’s $25 Billion settlement was unveiled; two players that absolutely should have been front and center.
What are their names? If you’ve followed the housing crisis as closely as we have, then you probably know.
There are millions upon millions of homeowners with mortgages controlled by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, yet they aren’t getting a single penny.
We’ve been advocating principal reduction as one of the best ways to help beleaguered borrowers, and we’re not alone in that assessment. That’s why it was at the center of the settlement.
Yet Edward DeMarco, the man behind both companies, still clings to the outdated notion that principal reduction would lead to a moral contagion among homeowners otherwise known as a “moral hazard”.
He’s forbidden Fannie and Freddie to even entertain the idea.
While President Obama and others, such as Massachusetts AG Martha Coakley have turned up the heat on DeMarco, he hasn’t budged.
DeMarco is more concerned about his political ideology than helping the American homeowners, who are in essence, is his clients.
He’s like that annoying relative that no one invited, yet keeps showing up every Thanksgiving. But DeMarco is far from the only problem.
When you have Freddie Mac trying to profit from securities that paid more if homeowners couldn’t refinance, that is proof that we are just too far down the rabbit hole. (more…)
If Edward DeMarco is puzzled by the outrage over the revelation that Freddie Mac was investing in securities that paid off if homeowners couldn’t refinance, then call us puzzled by his puzzlement. Either he’s a bold-faced liar or he is just plain dense. Does he really not get it?
DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, had the gall to tell National Public Radio this morning that one of his major responsibilities was to make sure that Freddie Mac didn’t lose money. NPR, by the way, was one of the agencies that broke the story in the first place.
Eddie, you’re a now a government-run company. You were semi-private at one point, but now you are an arm of the government. You should be looking out for the homeowner, and that’s it. You can claim that these investments, which for all intensive purposes were betting against homeowners, were just routine financial transactions.
We ain’t buying it.
Freddie Mac was created solely to help ease up the mortgage market and make it easier for people to get into homes. Anything counter to that, which clearly these investments were, goes against your mission statement. We’re not interested in profit, we want to see more people in homes.
