From the category archives:

Banks and Banking

So, You Want to Go Back to Having Banks Hold All Mortgages?

by Alex Stenback 06.30.2011

Today’s WSJ daggers the popular mythology that the we’d all be better off if we had never let Fannie/Freddie come to dominate the mortgage market, and that a safer real estate finance system involves going back to the days of yore when banks made the rules, held their own loans to maturity, and all was [...]

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Risk-Free Homeownership, Zero Foreclosures, and Housing Market Myopia

by Alex Stenback 04.19.2011

Over the next few years, the housing market that emerges from the bubble will look significantly different than your father’s oldsmobile. That’s because it is being erected on a framework of new regulations and structural reforms that will significantly alter the reality of the real estate and home finance markets. Understandably, much of the re-regulation efforts involve an attempt [...]

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78% of The Time, It’s Not Your Lender Who’s Making the Rules

by Alex Stenback 02.18.2010

Graphic Above from Today’s American Banker. American Banker sketches out the changing landscape at Fannie and Freddie under government control.  Subscription required but the article is free today: “Eighteen months after the government seized them, the secondary-market giants no longer focus on gaining market share or cultivating partnerships with originators. Their main priorities today are preventing foreclosures and [...]

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Will Uncle Sam Soon be the Biggest Landlord?

by Alex Stenback 11.05.2009

About a year ago, we had a running semi-serious joke around the office that the government should just buy up every foreclosure for the value of the loan and rent the home back to the owners – back of the napkin math suggested it would just be cheaper in the long run than all of the banking bailouts and [...]

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Trouble in Loan Modifcation Paradise

by Alex Stenback 07.28.2009

The Wall Street Journal Today reports that the much ballyhooed loan modification program announced in February has had dissapointing results – with only 200,000 of the then-advertised 3 -4 million homeowners getting loan modifications, most of which are so new that the long term success cannot be estimated: Some homeowners are being told they must [...]

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Enron Redux? Will the Plan to Purge “legacy” Assets from the Banks Get Gamed

by Alex Stenback 04.07.2009

The economy and real estate market does not recover in any meaningful, lasting, way until the banking and financial system gets fixed.  That is a given.  Less certain is whether the latest plan for dealing with bad assets will be the thing that does it. One potential problem is that The Plan, now dubbed PPIP (for public private [...]

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What’s the Bailout Going to Cost You?

by Alex Stenback 01.22.2009

Just so you know: Duke University finance professor Campbell Harvey estimates that every $150 billion government grant is equivalent to a $1000 contribution from every working or employable American taxpayer. Given the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program alone, every working American is providing $4000 to the bailout from his or her own bank account. [...]

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MN Attorney General Proposes Foreclosure Relief, Fannie/Freddie to Suspend Foreclosures

by Alex Stenback 11.21.2008

MN Attorney general Lori Swanson proposed mandatory mediation for foreclosures at a press conference yesterday.  Strib reports: The Homeowner Lender Mediation Act, patterned after a program from the mid-1980s that helped about 14,000 Minnesota farmers stay on their land, would put a foreclosure on hold for three months if a borrower asks to renegotiate mortgage [...]

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Why a Foreclosure Rescue Plan May not Work as Intended

by Alex Stenback 11.18.2008

Deborah Solomon, writing over at the WSJ blog Real Time Economics, teases out an interesting angle on just why Treasury is reluctant to use Federal rescue funds to support a loan modification/foreclosure prevention plan in the manner being advanced by Sheila Bair at FDIC and congressional Democrats, where the government covers 50% of losses on modified loans that re-default: Mr. Paulson and [...]

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