Hold Fast

Former TARP Special Inspector General Neil Barofsky and Matt Stoller talk about the mortgage on the settlement with Bloomberg TV. It’s a very top-level look at the flawed deal, but is highly worth watching.

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One of the few upsides of the mortgage settlement is that foreclosure fraud whistleblower Lynn Szymoniak will receive a large settlement for a suit she filed being rolled into this deal. Lynn is an amazing person – easily one of the individuals most responsible for making robosigning a national issue. Unfortunately her knowledge came through [...]

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Abigail C. Field has a very important post, looking at the mortgage settlement and how the deal and changes to mortgage servicing will be monitored by regulators and law enforcement. Field identifies a series of thresholds and tolerance levels the federal government and state law enforcement set for how the well the servicers have to [...]

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The national mortgage settlement finally happened yesterday, over a month after it was triumphantly announced by the Obama administration. The documentation for the deal is long and confusing, so analysis is coming out slowly, but early indications are that the deal is just as bad as it looked like it would be and potentially quite [...]

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It’s being reported that the SEC and the mortgage fraud task force co-chaired by Eric Schneiderman that “[f]urther legal action is likely before the end of the year against firms involved in the origins of the housing bubble.” Obviously seeing criminal prosecutions of banksters would be a good outcome, as would much larger civil suits [...]

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It continues to be hard to provide a full and thorough accounting for a national mortgage settlement where the terms are neither final nor public. This secret deal was agreed to, it seems, without state attorneys general having a full view of what they were signing onto. The fallout from that is likely on just [...]

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Gretchen Morgenson has a report on San Francisco City Assessor Phil Ting’s analysis of 400 recent foreclosure filings. The investigation revealed that fraud was near-universal: An audit by San Francisco county officials of about 400 recent foreclosures there determined that almost all involved either legal violations or suspicious documentation, according to a report released Wednesday…. [...]

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No one could have predicted: The government’s deal with banks over their foreclosure practices after 16 months of investigations is cheap for the loan servicers while costly for bond investors including pension funds, according to Pacific Investment Management Co.’s Scott Simon. … “This was a relatively cheap resolution for the banks,” said Simon, the mortgage [...]

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This thing hasn’t improved with age, but there is some more detailed and thoughtful commentary that I think is worth highlighting. The first is by Professor Adam Levitin, who scores it as a victory for the banks. He cites the small size as a major part of the settlement’s weakness: The formal price tag for [...]

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At this writing, the federal government and forty-nine state attorneys general (all minus Oklahoma) have agreed to a settlement with the nation’s five largest banks for their fraudulent robosigning practices. The banks will pay $5 billion penalty as part of this deal and also provide a vary range of credits which could account for another [...]

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