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Archive for the ‘HAMP’ Category

How better to corral restive underwater debt-serfs than to herd them into accepting a new, “better” set of lifelong servitude shackles?

President Obama is taking credit for a new government plan to “save homeowners.” That is of course pure propaganda to mask the plan’s true goal: the perfection of debt-serfdom.  The basic thrust of the plan is straightforward: encourage “underwater” homeowners whose mortgages exceed the value of their homes to re-finance at lower rates.

The stated incentive (i.e. the PR pitch) is to lower homeowners’ monthly payments via lower interest rates.

This is the Federal Reserve’s entire game plan in a nutshell:don’t write off any debt, as that would reveal the banking sector’s insolvency, but play extend-and-pretend with crushing debtloads by lowering the cost of servicing the debt.

The key purpose of this “plan” is to leave the principle owed to banks on their books at full value while ensnaring the hapless debt-serf (the “homeowner”) into permanent servitude to the banks.

If the net worth of your home is a negative number, then what exactly do you own? You have the right to occupy the shelter, and you own the debt. So how is this any different from a lease? There is no equity, and no equity being built: there is a monthly payment in return for the right to occupy the dwelling.

The difference is the leaseholder can move at the end of the lease with no debt obligations.The underwater “homeowner” debt-serf is trapped by his/her mortgage into what amounts to lifetime servitude to the holders of the mortgage.

All the plan does is perfect this debt-serfdom.In a truly capitalist, transparent, free-market economy in which assets were always marked to market, then mortgages that are grossly misaligned with the market value of the house would be written down and the mortgage holders forced to book the loss.

Over-leveraged lenders, i.e. the “too big to fail” banks which dominate the U.S. mortgage market, would see their capital reduced to zero by the writedowns. They would be declared insolvent and liquidated. Their shareholders and bondholders would book losses.

But these losses are unacceptable in our crony-capitalist/cartel-capitalist Status Quo,so the “solution” to systemic insolvency is to manipulate the debt-serfs to keep paying, and thus keep the unicorn-and-pixies valuations of  real estate on the banks’ books at full value.

This is the same game that Japan’s lenders and Central State have played for two decades,and it remains the heart of their failed policies and decaying economy.  In Japan, lenders papered over their bad debts with all sorts of back-door machinations: they extended new loans to debtors so the debtors could continue to make interest payments, they created zombie accounts  filled with delinquent loans that were still kept on the books at full value, they wrote new loans at near-zero rates so interest payments were lowered, and so on–the same ploys and games being played by the Federal Reserve, the Federal government’s housing lenders (Fannie and Freddie) and the banks.

The propaganda machine is running at full throttle, of course, with the usual parade of toadies and lackeys trotted out to say what a great and wonderful thing this plan is for poor homeowners.  But industry analyst Ken Rosen inadvertently revealed the real motivation for the plan: to keep underwater homeowners from “walking away” in so-called “strategic defaults.”underwater homeowners thrown lifeline by Obama(Mercury News).

Why is strategic default anathema to the Status Quo? Because the abandoned house will eventually have to be sold on the market, and at that point its true value revealed. The mortgage holder will then be forced to book a stupendous loss, and the inflated-paper “asset” on the books vanishes.

The Big Lie here is implicit: “your house will someday come back in value, so hang in there, debt-serf.” No, it won’t.  The bubble has popped, and the mania has left town. Housing will retrace to pre-bubble valuations circa 1996-98.

As usual, the Plan is all about managing perceptions and political theater:we’re here to help the little guy, the struggling homeowner; we are in charge, we have a plan, we’re competent, this will fix the housing market.

Too bad they’re all lies.Perception management is not the same as actually solving the underlying problem, yet perception management is the Status Quo’s response to every problem.

The perfection of debt-serfdom is now complete. First, make student loans “necessary” for the “good life” and then make that debt permanent and unbreakable. In other words, institutionalize debt-serfdom and lifelong servitude to the financial sector.

The re-fi “plan” herds potentially rebellious mortgage debt-serfs into new corrals, with the incentive of slightly lower interest rates. The lifetime of servitude to financial Overlords remains firmly in place. That’s the “plan.”

The Plan has other flaws as well:

Got A Hundred Bucks? Buy A Home (Or Virtually Anything Else) Using 2,000x Non Recourse Leverage(Zero Hedge)

On the Administration’s Latest Potemkin Help Struggling Homeowners Plan (Naked Capitalism)

Charles Hugh Smith – Of Two Minds

Obama and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan See Eye To Eye

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is introducing a new program on Monday designed to lower monthly mortgage payments for more troubled homeowners.

But a key new condition in the plan would shift the financial liability for refinanced loans from Wall Street banks to the American taxpayer. And by focusing on lower payments, the program does not confront what housing experts view as the core problem in the foreclosure crisis — borrower debt that exceeds the value of one’s home.

Faced with the weak response to the Home Affordable Refinance Program, the Obama administration is planning to open up the program to all borrowers who owe more on their mortgage than their homes’ worth, commonly dubbed being underwater, and have not missed a mortgage payment. HARP had been limited to borrowers who owed up to 25 percent more than their home is worth. More than 22 percent of all home mortgages — or 10.9 million homes — are currently underwater, according to CoreLogic data. Fewer than 900,000 borrowers have elected to go through HARP to date.

The revised program also eliminates several fees associated with refinancing that can make the decision to refinance uneconomical for borrowers. But the potential benefit of the eliminated fees could be relatively small: If a few thousand dollars worth of fees made refinancing a bad deal for underwater borrowers, the ultimate benefits that refinancing can pose would remain limited.

On a conference call with reporters, White House National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling referred to the HARP expansion as “a win-win policy” that will result in “less defaults” and “fewer foreclosures.” But one of the program’s new terms will benefit private-sector Wall Street banks, potentially at the expense of taxpayers.

The newly expanded program would expunge legal liabilities associated with mortgages refinanced through the program for the original lenders of the mortgages. Each time a bank sent a loan to Fannie and Freddie, it certified that the loan met Fannie and Freddie’s safe lending criteria. But many loans sent to the mortgage giants did not, in fact, meet those criteria. Currently, when borrowers default on those ineligible loans, the mortgage giants can “put back” the resulting losses onto the banks that pushed the loans.

Under the modified plan, “put back” liability at banks will be erased for any underwater mortgage that is refinanced through HARP, eliminating Fannie and Freddie’s ability to sack lenders with losses in the event that the mortgage does not pan out.

If borrowers go through HARP, but decide after several months that the modest monthly savings do not outweigh owing tens of thousands of dollars more than their home is worth, taxpayer-owned Fannie and Freddie will have to take the full loss. Even if the original loan was sent to Fannie and Freddie with false or fraudulent guarantees from the bank — promises that may directly be tied to the borrower’s current financial problems — banks will be immune from liability. Fannie and Freddie plan to charge banks “a modest fee” to extinguish this liability, but the administration has yet to determine what that fee will be.

While the revised program seeks to lower mortgage payments for underwater homeowners, the program does nothing to address the core problem — owing more than the home is worth. Though borrowers may save hundreds of dollars a month in lower payments by refinancing, they routinely owe tens of thousands of dollars more than their homes are worth, even after receiving aid.

“In most cases people would probably be better off walking,” said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research.

During a conference call with reporters, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan acknowledged that negative equity is a problem, and said the administration hopes to address the issue on other fronts. Donovan cited settlement negotiations with big banks over widespread allegations of foreclosure fraud and initiatives under the Home Affordable Modification Program, a separate Obama foreclosure-relief plan administered by banks, as key initiatives.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden have both objected to the foreclosure fraud settlement talks on the grounds that they give away too much to banks without investigating the scope of fraud problems in the system. The Home Affordable Modification Program has been a hotbed for the kind of borrower abuses that the administration is pressuring lenders to settle over.

Zach Carter – Huff Po

American leadership is reliable in one respect: it consistently undershoots my already low expectations.

Or maybe I have it backwards because I keep forgetting who the authorities are really serving, and it clearly isn’t you and me. As we will discuss below, the latest scam is that the banking regulators are finalizing a mortgage “breakdown” settlement, and they’ve evidently decided to let the industry off the hook for a mere $20 billion.

In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has just offered $36 billion worth of concessions in an effort to placate an increasingly unruly public (this appears to be in addition to pledges to spend $400 billion on education, health care, and infrastructure by 2014). This is in a country with a population just under 26 million, including over 5 million non-nationals who presumably aren’t eligible.

Now you can easily pooh pooh this comparison, since Saudi Arabia is an autocratic country desperately throwing around money to buy off dissidents, right? But this is the kind of money a leadership group will shell out when pressed to defend an existing order. And the US was very quick to hand out funds right, left, and center during the financial crisis. It’s continuing to do so now in less obvious ways, by continued life support for the mortgage market through Fannie and Freddie, the Fed’s super low interest rates and QE2, and non-monetary measures, most important its refusal to make any sort of serious investigation into what happened in the crisis and prosecute key actors.

Most observers, yours truly included, had expected very little from the multi-regulator “foreclosure task force” announced last year. It was clearly designed to be an even more cosmetic exercise than the stress test charade, which does take a certain amount of brazenness (or more likely, confidence in the public’s inability to follow the three card monte). But a bad situation devolved; the Treasury had appeared to be in charge, and that department at least tries to put a minimum level of professional spit and polish into its charades. When OCC acting chair and chief bank enabler John Walsh got up to speak in an official capacity about the process in last week’s Senate Banking Committee hearings, it was evident there was not even going to be an effort to pretend that this was a serious undertaking.

Even so, the mortgage “settlement” trial balloon floated in the Wall Street Journal this evening is an offense to common sense and decency. Notice how the word “fraud” is pretty much verboten in the MSM; the latest code word for what went awry is “breakdown”. This implies a benign sort of neglect, simply of not doing sufficient maintenance which led fussy machinery to quit working. It is mean to avoid contemplating, let along uncovering, Pinto-type decisions of weighing the costs of making the vehicle safer versus the litigation losses resulting from incineration by exploding gas tanks.

The magic number across the industry is a mere $20 billion in civil fines or payments to fund loan mods. We know from BP not to have a great deal of confidence in settlement funds. It is not yet clear what scope of activities get a free pass (fraudulent servicer charges and impermissible compounding fees? failure to convey notes to mortgage trusts as stipulated in the PSA? foreclosing on home where HAMP mods had been promised?) but the industry will want any waiver to be as broad as possible. But in any kind of settlement of fraud, like securities fraud charges, various responsible parties are also barred from working in the industry, sometimes for life. None of that is on the table.

The plan involves having servicers give borrowers principal mods, but obviously only to the extent of the fund amount. The WSJ story announces that mortgage investors will suffer no losses. This shows how backwards the logic here is. Investors would LOVE principal mods to qualified borrowers; it’s far better than taking 70%+ losses on foreclosures. So saving RMBS investors any pain should never have been a feature of the plan design. And that means it is really a fig leaf for avoiding writedowns on second liens, which are heavily concentrated in the four biggest TBTF banks.

The officialdom is taking the stance that only a small number of borrowers suffered wrongful foreclosures. The HAMP fiasco alone makes that patently untrue. And the regulators’ failure to compare servicer records with borrower records (the short time frame of the task force effort guarantees that did not take place) makes this a garbage in, garbage out exercise. And that’s before you get to the question of fraudulent servicer charges, which foreclosure defense lawyers say represent 50% to 70% of the cases they handle (it’s easier to win based on standing so court records do not reflect the borrower reason for choosing to fight the foreclosure). Without an audit of servicer software, this regulatory assessment was a simple “see no evil” exercise.

Nor do I see any mention of imposing new servicing standards on banks, another massive oversight.

The servicers, as well as Fannie and Freddie, would be required to provide principal mods. But given the meager settlement amount, this is a complete and utter joke. The mods will be too shallow and too few in number to help either borrowers or the housing market. Both J.C. Flowers and Wilbur Ross, both very tough minded investors, have found deep principal mods work, and research supports their views. Why are borrowers going to struggle to make home payments when they still face a loss and/or a big tax bill when they try to sell the home?

If you assume a combined first and second mortgage balance of $200,000 and a mod of 10%, or $20,000, which is too low to make much difference to borrowers and well short of what investors would accept (given 70%+ expected losses on a foreclosure, 25% to even 50% is a no brainer), you only get 100,000 mods.

And as Marcy Wheeler correctly points out, this program is really HAMP 2.0. When a small group of bloggers visited the Treasury last August, HAMP was such an obvious failure that the staff didn’t even try hard to defend it. One of the excuses offered by Geither was that Treasury lacked authority over servicers (a point I disputed, since Treasury has plenty of leverage at its disposal). So there isn’t even any reason to believe the banks (ex perhaps the Fannie and Freddie loans) will live up to their commitment do a paltry number of mods. As Marcy noted:

…basically, it sounds like HAMP II–a “plan” that still lets banks decide how to implement that “plan”–with the sole improvement on HAMP I that it requires 2nd Liens to be “reduced” (but not eliminated) in the process of modifying the first liens.

The deal wouldn’t create any new government programs to reduce principal. Instead, it would allow banks to devise their own modifications or use existing government programs, people familiar with the matter said. Banks would also have to reduce second-lien mortgages when first mortgages are modified.

The good new is it does not sound like there is a deal agreed. The powers that be have yet to corral the state AGs (since when were they going to be part of this scheme?) and the servicers themselves.

So readers can help create heat on the officialdom. It would be very useful to come up with estimates of various types of damages (and it needs to be bottoms up, not “the global financial crisis cost X trillion and at least 25% is the fault of these clowns). First would be a list of types of damage done, and it should be mutually exclusive, and ideally collectively exhaustive. Next are any factoids that would help dimension the level of overall damage per category. For instance, some readers yesterday started using the Massachusetts lost recording fee estimate to try to ballpark the recording fees lost to MERS on a national basis.

Having the level of damages (which would certainly wipe out the banks, but we want everyone reminded of that fact, that any “settlement” is yet another gimmie) then serves as a basis for talking about monetary settlements and other required behavioral changes. The adverse reaction to the Center for American Progress’ Fannie and Freddie “reform” trial ballon apparently did put the powers that be on the back foot; reader information gathering and ideas here would be of great value in putting forward an even more forceful rebuttal to this disgraceful proposal.

Yves Smith – Naked Capitalism