Archive for the ‘mortgage defaults’ Category
Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal

A power play is underway in the foreclosure arena, according to the New York Times.
On the one side is Eric Schneiderman, the New York Attorney General, who is conducting his own investigation into the era of securitizations – the practice of chopping up assets like mortgages and converting them into saleable securities – that led up to the financial crisis of 2007-2008.
On the other side is the Obama administration, the banks, and all the other state attorneys general.
This second camp has cooked up a deal that would allow the banks to walk away with just a seriously discounted fine from a generation of fraud that led to millions of people losing their homes.
The idea behind this federally-guided “settlement” is to concentrate and centralize all the legal exposure accrued by this generation of grotesque banker corruption in one place, put one single price tag on it that everyone can live with, and then stuff the details into a titanium canister before shooting it into deep space.
This is all about protecting the banks from future enforcement actions on both the civil and criminal sides. The plan is to provide year-after-year, repeat-offending banks like Bank of America with cost certainty, so that they know exactly how much they’ll have to pay in fines (trust me, it will end up being a tiny fraction of what they made off the fraudulent practices) and will also get to know for sure that there are no more criminal investigations in the pipeline.
This deal will also submarine efforts by both defrauded investors in MBS and unfairly foreclosed-upon homeowners and borrowers to obtain any kind of relief in the civil court system. The AGs initially talked about $20 billion as a settlement number, money that would “toward loan modifications and possibly counseling for homeowners,” as Gretchen Morgenson reported the other day.
The banks, however, apparently “balked” at paying that sum, and no doubt it will end up being a lesser amount when the deal is finally done.
To give you an indication of how absurdly small a number even $20 billion is relative to the sums of money the banks made unloading worthless crap subprime assets on foreigners, pension funds and other unsuspecting suckers around the world, consider this: in 2008 alone, the state pension fund of Florida, all by itself, lost more than three times that amount ($62 billion) thanks in significant part to investments in these deadly MBS.
So this deal being cooked up is the ultimate Papal indulgence. By the time that $20 billion (if it even ends up being that high) gets divvied up between all the major players, the broadest and most destructive fraud scheme in American history, one that makes the S&L crisis look like a cheap liquor store holdup, will be safely reduced to a single painful but eminently survivable one-time line item for all the major perpetrators.
But Schneiderman, who earlier this year launched an investigation into the securitization practices of Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and other companies, is screwing up this whole arrangement. Until he lies down, the banks don’t have a deal. They need the certainty of having all 50 states and the federal government on board, or else it’s not worth paying anybody off. To quote the immortal Tony Montana, “How do I know you’re the last cop I’m gonna have to grease?” They need all the dirty cops on board, or else the whole enterprise is FUBAR.
In addition to the global settlement, Schneiderman is also blocking an individual $8.5 billion settlement for Countrywide investors. He has sued to stop that deal, claiming it could “compromise investors’ claims in exchange for a payment representing a fraction of the losses.”
If Schneiderman thinks $8.5 billion is an insufficient, fractional payoff just for defrauded Countrywide investors, then you can imagine how bad a $20 billion settlement for the entire industry would be for the victims.
In that particular Countrywide settlement deal, it looks like Bank of New York Mellon, the New York Fed, Pimco and other players negotiated on behalf of defrauded investors. They told the Times they were happy with the deal, but investors outside the talks told Gretchen they weren’t happy with the settlement.
Schneiderman apparently listened to those voices instead of the Mellon-Fed-BofA crowd, which infuriated the insiders who struck the actual deal. In a remarkable quote given to the Times, Kathryn Wylde, the Fed board member who ostensibly represents the public, said the following about Schneiderman:
It is of concern to the industry that instead of trying to facilitate resolving these issues, you seem to be throwing a wrench into it. Wall Street is our Main Street — love ’em or hate ’em. They are important and we have to make sure we are doing everything we can to support them unless they are doing something indefensible.
This, again, is coming not from a Bank of America attorney, but from the person on the Fed board who is supposedly representing the public!
This quote leads one to wonder just what Wylde would consider “indefensible,” given that stealing is pretty much the worst thing that a bank can do — and these banks just finished the longest and most orgiastic campaign of stealing in the history of money. Is Wylde waiting for Goldman and Citi to blow up a skyscraper? Dump dioxin into an orphanage? It’s really an incredible quote.
The banks are going to claim that all they’re guilty of is bad paperwork. But while the banks are indeed being investigated for “paperwork” offenses like mass tax evasion (by failing to pay fees associated with mortgage registrations and deed transfers) and mass perjury (a la the “robo-signing” practices), their real crime, the one Schneiderman is interested in, is even more serious.
The issue goes beyond fraudulent paperwork to an intentional, far-reaching theft scheme designed to take junk subprime loans and disguise them as AAA-rated investments. The banks lent money to corrupt companies like Countrywide, who made masses of bad loans and immediately sold them back to the banks.
The banks in turn hid the crappiness of these loans via certain poorly-understood nuances in the securitization process – this is almost certainly where Scheniderman’s investigators are doing their digging – before hawking the resultant securities as AAA-rated gold to fools in places like the Florida state pension fund.
They did this for years, systematically, working hand in hand in a wink-nudge arrangement with clearly criminal enterprises like Countrywide and New Century. The victims were millions of investors worldwide (like the pensioners who saw their funds drop in value) and hundreds of thousands of individual homeowners, who were often sold trick loans and hustled into foreclosure when unexpected rate hikes kicked in.
In a larger sense, even the (often irresponsible) people who simply bought more house than they could afford were victims of this scam. That’s because in many of these cases, credit simply would not have been available to those people had the banks not first discovered a way to raise vast sums of money dumping crap loans on an unsuspecting market.
In other words: if Bank of America hadn’t found a way to sell worthless subprime loans as AAA paper to the Chinese and the Scandavians in May, you can be sure that it wouldn’t be going back to Countrywide in June to lend out more money for more subprime loans.
And Countrywide, in turn, wouldn’t then have been sending masses of reps out into the ghettoes to offer juicy home loans to undocumented immigrants and refis to confused old ladies on social security.
This is as bad as white-collar crime gets. But to Wylde, it doesn’t rise to the level of being “indefensible.” Until they do something worse than this, we apparently should support the banks, and make sure they don’t have to pay more than a fraction of what they made off of this kind of crime.
What is most amazing about Wylde’s quote is the clear implication that even a law enforcement official like Schneiderman should view it as his job to “do everything we can to support” Wall Street. That would be astonishing interpretation of what a prosecutor’s duties are, were it not for the fact that 49 other Attorneys General apparently agree with her.
In Schneiderman we have at least one honest investigator who doesn’t agree, which is to his great credit. But everyone else is on Wylde’s side now. The Times story claims that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and various Justice Department officials have been leaning on the New York AG to cave, which tells you that reining in this last rogue cop is now an urgent priority for Barack Obama.
Why? My theory is that the Obama administration is trying to secure its 2012 campaign war chest with this settlement deal. If Barry can make this foreclosure thing go away for the banks, you can bet he’ll win the contributions battle against the Republicans next summer.
Which is good for him, I guess. But it seems to me that it might be time to wonder if is this the most disappointing president we’ve ever had.
Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone Magazine
JPMorgan Said to Be Subpoenaed by SEC Over Failed Mortgages
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) was subpoenaed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over failed mortgages, a person familiar with the investigation said, as the agency probes banks sued for allegedly boosting their profits by failing to share refunds from sellers of faulty debt.
Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) also received a subpoena from the SEC last week, bond insurer MBIA Insurance Corp. said in a filing today in a lawsuit against three of that Zurich-based bank’s units. The agency asked New York-based JPMorgan for information after a court in January unsealed allegations made about Bear Stearns Cos.’ practices in another suit, said the person, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public.
U.S. investigators have been scrutinizing companies involved in the mortgage business after the worst collapse in home prices since the Great Depression. Bond insurers MBIA and Ambac Assurance Corp. have said Credit Suisse and Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan bought in 2008, demanded refunds from originators that sold the banks the loans that they packaged into bonds, and then failed to use those settlement amounts to fulfill their own contractual promises on the debt.
“We’re really starting to finally get into evidence that suggests blatant fraud,” said Isaac Gradman, a San Francisco- based litigation consultant and formerly a lawyer at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin.
Jennifer R. Zuccarelli, a spokeswoman for New York-based JPMorgan, declined to comment. Steven Vames, a Credit Suisse spokesman in New York, declined to comment on MBIA’s statement about an SEC investigation. John Nester, an SEC spokesman, declined to comment.
Law Firm Subpoenaed
Kevin Brown, a spokesman for MBIA, said that Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP as counsel for the bond insurer was also subpoenaed by the SEC, seeking documents related to the Credit Suisse matter.
U.S. agencies have been seeking evidence of wrongdoing across the mortgage industry from before the market collapsed in 2007.
The Justice Department sued Deutsche Bank AG this week for more than $1 billion, saying the firm lied about its process for checking the quality of loans granted federal insurance.
Credit Suisse knowingly packaged bad loans into bonds, MBIA said in a court filing. The insurer included an exhibit in its suit composed of e-mails related to a “stated income” loan sought by a stripper in Charlotte, North Carolina, whose reported monthly pay of $12,000 was questioned by some bank employees.
MBIA Insurance Corp., the bond insurance unit of Armonk, New York-based MBIA Inc. (MBI), disclosed Credit Suisse’s SEC subpoena and the exhibit in a filing in New York State Supreme Court. The document, dated April 29, was filed yesterday.
“Credit Suisse is now the subject of an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which issued a subpoena this week seeking the same types of documents as MBIA seeks,” the insurer said.
MBIA alleges in its lawsuit that Credit Suisse failed to repurchase soured mortgages out of a 2007 securitization as it was contractually obligated to do. Earlier, the bank made demands similar to MBIA’s to recover funds from the originators of the loans — money it didn’t share with the securities’ buyers, MBIA said.
Ambac Suit
The allegations echo claims made in January in a suit brought by Ambac Assurance against the defunct investment bank Bear Stearns and JPMorgan. Ambac first sued in 2008 in federal court in Manhattan. The insurer filed a separate lawsuit over the issues in New York State Supreme court in February.
“Ambac is a large, sophisticated insurance company that is trying to blame others for risks it knowingly took and was paid for taking,” Zuccarelli said earlier this year. “We do not believe Ambac’s claims are meritorious and intend to defend Bear vigorously.”
Credit Suisse, in a filing in MBIA’s case on April 29, said contracts for its mortgage-bond transaction didn’t call for the bank to repurchase loans simply because they became delinquent within a few months or involved borrower fraud. That differed from contracts between mortgage originators and Credit Suisse, the bank said.
Originators’ Commitments
Credit Suisse cited e-mails between its employees and MBIA officials before the deal closed, which the bank argued had stated explicitly that those so-called representations and warranties wouldn’t be made. Representations and warranties are contractual promises that loans meet certain characteristics or will perform in certain ways.
The loan originators’ commitments to Credit Suisse “are different from — and materially broader than — Credit Suisse’s representations and warranties” tied to the securitization transaction, the bank said in court filings.
“MBIA is entitled to what its contracts with CS provide, and not more,” Vames, the Credit Suisse spokesman, said today in an e-mail.
MBIA said in today’s court filing that Credit Suisse in some cases cited the same issues as it later did to reach settlements with lenders, and that any early loan defaults should have been seen as “red flags” for further reviews of its obligations.
Read the rest at Bloomberg
Banks to AGs on Servicing Fraud: Drop Dead
Here’s the banks’ counterproposal for a servicing fraud settlement. I can sum it up in two words: drop dead. Or two letters: F.U. This proposals is so pathetically thin that it’s not a good faith counterproposal. This document only deals with servicing standards–nothing in it whatsoever about penalties, modification quotas, etc. But even on servicing standards it is a bunch of empty promises to have internal controls and try harder.
The first point about this counterproposal is simply to note what’s absent from it:
(1) nothing about principal reductions
(2) nothing about second liens and conflicts of interest
(3) nothing about MERS (reserved for later)
(4) nothing about in-sourced vendor fees or force-placed insurance to affiliates. This makes the fees and force-place insurance sections pretty meaningless.
(5) nothing about pyramiding of fees.
I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of important points that aren’t addressed, but these seemed to be the most obvious ones.
Next, it’s worth noting just how little it actually promises and how cagey the promises are. For many points it does not promise results. Instead, it promises “processes reasonably designed” or “procedures reasonably designed” to do something or another. Basically a lot of it boils down to promises to implement internal controls, reviews, and procedures to make sure things don’t happen again.
Put differently, this is the servicers’ saying “trust us.” Ummm, that’s the whole problem. No one trusts the servicers–not investors, not homeowners.
Let’s look at some specific terms. Orwell couldn’t have drafted these any better:
(1) Loan Modifications. What do the banks propose to do in the section entitled “loan modifications”? Principal reductions? Interest rate reductions? Forbearance? Nah. None of that stuff. Instead they says no fees for modifications and we’ll toss in a free overnight envelope. So the counterproposal to principal reduction mods is a free Fed-Ex mailer.
(2) “Independent Review.” Part of the document has a heading of “independent review.” One might have thought that was from a disinterested outside reviewer. Nope. It just means that there is an internal review by another reporting chain within the bank. This is a worthless promise.
(3) Single point of contact.
Servicer will provide a single point of contact (“SPOC”), which may be more than one person, to any first lien, owner occupied, borrower suffering a hardship through the loss mitigation processes…
Wait a sec. What the hell is single-point of contact if it can be multiple people? A single phone number? A 1-800 number plus a loan ID accomplishes that. I get that SPOC is hard to do, but this sort of empty promise is insulting. It’s already the situation. Also notice how this is contingent on the “borrower suffering a hardship through the loss mitigation processes”–what does that mean? Is that all borrowers or just ones with some unspecified special circumstances in the bank’s discretion?
(4) End of Dual Track Process. A major complaint has been that banks simultaneously proceed with foreclosure while negotiating loan mods. So what do the banks propose to do about that here? They are offering that a loan will not be ”referred” to foreclosure if (a) all documentation necessary for a mod review is submitted and (b) a mod decision has not been made. That’s a really small concession. Notice what it doesn’t cover. It doesn’t mean that foreclosures in process will be halted, only that the process won’t be started. There’s also the question of whether the referral will have magically “happened” before the documentation is received. Oh wait, that document is an certified original, not an original certified copy, so your documentation isn’t complete. Sorry….
(5) Borrower portal for electronic document submission. I actually like this idea and had this is something that the Congressional Oversight Panel had suggested in a foreclosure report. But there’s absolutely nothing that prevents servicers from doing this right now. This is hardly some big concession. In fact, they’ve had just such a portal sitting in the garage for months via Hope Now.
(6) Forgiveness of short sale deficiencies. The banks are promising to try to forgive deficiencies associated with short sales. Uh, isn’t that what a short sale is–the bank agrees to take the sale price in satisfaction of the debt? So what does is actually being promised here?
(7) Affidavits. The banks are promising that affidavits will be sworn out by affiants with knowledge of the facts and in compliance with applicable state law, etc. In other words, that they’ll comply with the law. Note how that differs from the AG proposal, which would have required various affidavits not only when required by law (as in judicial foreclosures), but also in nonjudicial foreclosures. A lto of commentators wrongly criticized the AG proposal for simply requiring compliance with the law without recognizing that it was expanding the affidavit requirement. The AGs were requiring something more; the banks are just saying that they’ll follow the law. Once again, “trust us.”
(8) Chain of Title. I’ve saved my favorite for last. Here’s what the proposal says:
Servicer shall implement processes reasonably designed to ensure that Servicer has properly documented an enforceable interest in the promissory note and mortgage (or deed of trust) under applicable state law, or is otherwise a proper party to the foreclosure action (as a result of agency or other similar status), including appropriate transfer and delivery of endorsed notes (which may be endorsed in blank) and assigned moretgages or deeds of trust at the formation of a residential mortgage-backed security, and lawful endorsement and assignment of the note and mortgage or deed of trust to reflect changes of ownership, all in accordance with applicable state law.
My initial read was, wow, they’re saying that their going to make sure that chain of title is proper. But then I started to wonder about this. So it would require a process to document an enforceable interest. What does that mean? Does it mean that the servicer will provide the court with a statement of chain of title? That’s not what’s required, here, though. This seems to be an internal control process.
Then I read further. This would seem to giving a blessing to endorsement of notes in blank. As a generic matter, as I’ve said before, that’s fine. But if the PSA calls for something different, that’s a problem. So it looks as if the servicers are trying to use the settlement as a way to change the legal requirements regarding the transfers of mortgages. Neither the Feds nor the AGs have the power to grant that, however.
There is this interesting language about “appropriate transfer and delivery of endorsed notes and assigned mortgages…at the formation of a residential mortgage-backed security.” Is that a concession that transfers that occur after the closing date are invalid? I can’t imagine so, so I’m puzzled by this.
And then there’s the “all in accordance with applicable state law.” I might be seeing a problem where there isn’t one, but I worry that this is an attempt to change the applicable law in foreclosure litigation. The “applicable state law” phrase is used twice in this paragraph. First it is used in reference to the promissory note and mortgage. That would be the state law of the state where the property is located. But the state law governing the “appropriate transfer and delivery” of the notes and mortgages is not the state law of the property situs. It’s the state law of the state governing the PSA (most likely New York). The way this paragraph is phrased, however, one would think that “applicable state law” would refer to the same state both times its used, and by using it first in reference to the situs state for the property, it would prime a reader to think that the situs law governs the transfers.
There are lots of other points to criticize with this counterproposal, but it’s hardly worthwhile doing so–it’s such an obvious in-your-face document that it’s really not worthwhile engaging with serious. This isn’t the basis for a good faith discussion of mortgage servicing reform. It’s simply another part of the banks’ strategy to run the clock and thereby avoid doing principal reductions–that’s what will cost them the big bucks, not a $20B fine.
Adam Levitin – CreditSlips
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Adam, this is a great analysis of what the banks have counter-offered to the 50 State Attorneys General; however, I wish you would have realized this was what would happen when the offer extended by the AG’s in the first place had absolutely no substance. If you deal from a position of weakness, you will get hammered.
So What's With The Bank Dividends?
Oh, so “some” banks can increase dividends or buy back shares?
“Overall, both the quantity and quality of capital at many large bank holding companies have improved since the financial crisis,” the Fed said. “The return of capital to shareholders under appropriate conditions is a step in the process of improvement in the financial sector and will help to promote banks’ long-term access to capital.”
Really? Is there actual coverage of bank “assets” by actual capital? How about second lines on homes, for instance?
There are a few people who I converse with on the forum and elsewhere who have been looking through some offerings of these loans, and also tracking their performance. I’ve long argued that one of the big scams with bank balance sheets is that these loans are, as second lines, worthless if there is a mortgage default and the home is worth less than the first. We’re now seeing this with losses on these loans in he 70-100% range. Yet nearly all of these second lines are being carried at ridiculously rich “valuations” compared to reality by the banks – and most of these loans are not securitized.
There is a “quiet” proposal in the alleged 50-state Foreclosure settlement that speaks of second lines being written down on modifications ratably with the first, if principal reductions are required. This is simply another device to allow banks to change – on a retroactive basis – the contractual terms that were originally contemplated by both the lender and borrower. Should this stand the first-line investors, who had every reason to believe their note had priority, will (once again) get screwed.
I have no problem with banks being “able” to pay dividends and buy back shares – as soon as all the actual losses are out in the open and recognized and nobody is or will attempt to change contractual terms retroactively to screw someone else (and maintain their own solvency.)
Until that happens there is no defensible position in allowing the “return of (non-existent) capital to shareholders.” The Fed seems hellbent and determined to destroy what little credibility it has left; if we get another one of those “nobody could see it coming” incidents in the coming months it will look mighty foolish as the latent bad debts are forced into the open once again the pigs cry at the trough for more public money (and this time, likely, obtain a “No!” in response.)
Bank of America Divides Itself Into 'Good Bank/Bad Bank'
Should I get the “told ya so” sign out yet? 
Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the biggest U.S. lender by assets, is segregating almost half its 13.9 million mortgages into a “bad” bank comprised of its riskiest and worst-performing “legacy” loans, said Terry Laughlin, who is running the new unit.
So half of what they have is trash? Looks that way.
Oh, and it’s about a trillion in assets too.
The obvious question is “how much are they worth?” Looks like roughly $300 billion of it is on the bank’s balance sheet, and the rest serviced for someone else. These are loans that are either delinquent or likely to become delinquent.
What’s recovery on that portfolio? We have no idea, really. But it’s important, because while the bank has $148 billion in market capitalization it is (like most banks) negative on cash-to-debt, which means the hit on that passel of “assets” is rather critical to forward valuations.
The stock is up big today, almost 4.5%. On this announcement? Well, not entirely. The CEO thinks they’ll have a “normalized” earnings rate that is in the nosebleed territory, but of course “normalized” earnings may be more of a dream than a reality. First, you have to get rid of all those bad loans, and someone has to eat that loss.
For the securitized stuff that they service, they’re not likely to lose much – the servicing contracts pretty much guarantee it. But when it comes to the loans on their actual balance sheet the questions are far more complex. There, it all comes down to recovery value, and if that $300 billion is only worth half that, well……
(Incidentally, didn’t we hear that there were no material impairments remaining on these things to be reserved against, and haven’t all these banks taken down reserves of late as a consequence? I seem to remember that……. but I might be mistaken….)
Just wait, somehow, this new ‘Bad Bank’ will become the taxpayer’s burden. Just wait for the bailout. It’s coming.
Mortgage Fraud Whitewash: $20 Billion “Get Out of Jail Free” Settlement Floated
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.







