Mortgage Debt Consolidation

Mortgage debt in Wigan has more than doubled within the space of a year. (21/03/2008 09:01:26)

Grim and Bear It, Cont’d.
Ezra with the nutshell: The banks that held the mortgages had begun letting other groups — hedge funds investors, etc — invest in the payback of mortgage debt. When consumers stopped being able to pay back mortgage debt, it wasn’t only the banks who got hit, but the investors who were essentially insuring the banks. And because no one really knows who holds what debt, no one’s really sure how far this thing will spread, or who will collapse. The fall of Bear Stearns was all the more unsettlin

Old Vet looks ahead for more action
Trying to get beyond today s headlines, and the moves and countermoves in today s markets, is difficult. However the future beckons, and it s looking a lot more deflationary than inflationary which is the exact reason the Fed is throwing around the power of the lender of last resort. Don t want a Depression, do we? The great de-leveraging of 2008 continues, in which credit market expansion reverses due to excessive credit extended to a myriad of parties who now have trouble paying. One

Tax break given for debt relief (Long Beach Press-Telegram)
Homeowners who went through a foreclosure or got a deal for working out their mortgage debt should pay attention to a new tax break for debt forgiveness.

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Two mortgage-elimination scam artists were sentenced this week for their roles in tricking clients into believing that the scammers could rid them of their homeowners’ mortgage debt.

Grim and Bear It, Cont’d.
Ezra with the nutshell: The banks that held the mortgages had begun letting other groups — hedge funds investors, etc — invest in the payback of mortgage debt. When consumers stopped being able to pay back mortgage debt, it wasn’t only the banks who got hit, but the investors who were essentially insuring the banks. And because no one really knows who holds what debt, no one’s really sure how far this thing will spread, or who will collapse. The fall of Bear Stearns was all the more unsettlin

‘Mortgage elimination’ schemers get prison time
‘Mortgage elimination’ schemers get prison time An elaborate and bizarre financial fraud scheme that seeded online message boards and Web sites with information about a program that could purportedly erase home owners’ mortgage debt has resulted in the setencing of its two founders. The Associated Press reported

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac unshackled
With all of the turmoil over mortgage debt, it has been a complete shame that the two entities in the world best suited for lending a hand, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have been virtually sidelined from helping out. They were originally sidelined because Wall Street wanted the mortgage market to itself, but we all know how that movie ended. Even after Wall Street “screwed the pooch”, they still continued to lobby against Fannie and Freddie being allowed to step in and help clean up the mess. Th

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So you understand how homeowners took out risky mortgages and such, but what about C.D.O’s, liquidity puts, and how they all play into the global credit crunch? If you’re still scratching your head, this article breaks it all down and puts it into perspective.But it turned out that many banks had also sold complex insurance policies on the mortgage debt. That left them on the hook when homeowners who had taken out a wishful-thinking mortgage could no longer get out of it by flipping their house

Couldn t Help But Notice (031908)
More Kelo calamity: You can t make this stuff up, as they say. This is from the New London Day last Friday (link probably requires registration, and would require a paid subscription after this coming Friday; HT Liberty Conspiracy): Fort Trumbull Developer Asks FHA To Back $11.5M Loan Faced with a tight lending climate, the Corcoran Jennison company has asked the Federal Housing Authority to back an $11.5 million loan to fund the long-delayed construction of housing on the Fort Trumbull penin

And Still I Persist Blog Archive Charting The Banking Crisis - A Boomerang Demo
Permalink 0 comments, add yours Charting The Banking Crisis - A Boomerang Demo is a Gapminder-like animated bubble chart of banking exposure to mortgage debt over the last year. I’m not sure it actually provides the same level of comparative insight as Gapminder - more a flow of a few variables that I already associate (size and frequency), than the unexpected insights Gapminder provides by comparing seemingly unrelated data (like ‘defence’ spending vs. child mortality). Interesting, noneth

Old Vet looks ahead for more action
Trying to get beyond today s headlines, and the moves and countermoves in today s markets, is difficult. However the future beckons, and it s looking a lot more deflationary than inflationary which is the exact reason the Fed is throwing around the power of the lender of last resort. Don t want a Depression, do we? The great de-leveraging of 2008 continues, in which credit market expansion reverses due to excessive credit extended to a myriad of parties who now have trouble paying. One

Click Here for another interesting article you can’t resist

An elaborate and bizarre financial fraud scheme that seeded online message boards and Web sites with information about a program that could purportedly erase home owners’ mortgage debt has resulted in the setencing of its two founders. The Associated Press reported today that Kurt Johnson, 45, of Sunnyvale, Calif., was sentenced to 25 years in prison and Dale Heineman, 48, of Union City, Calif., was sentenced to about 22 years in prison on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud

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From StatsCan: Debt load, measured by the ratio of total debt to disposable income was almost the same for Canadians and Americans at the beginning of the 1980s. After that, they parted ways: Americans had the greater debt load between 1983 and 1991 and Canadians between 1992 and 2000. From 2001, debt grew steadily in both countries and by 2002 had surpassed disposable income. By 2005, for each dollar of disposable income, Canadians owed $1.16 and Americans $1.24. … The increase in mortgag

Bear Stearns in Bankruptcy: Can You Feel Their Pain?
By Dean Baker Truthout 3/17/08 According to the current plans being crafted in Washington, you will. Bear Stearns, one of the longstanding giants of Wall Street investment banking, is now on life support, the victim of its own excessive greed and bad judgment. Apparently, the wizards who run the show at Bear Stearns (I will resist the temptation to use initials) somehow couldn t see an $8 trillion housing bubble in the US economy. They made highly leveraged bets on assets backed by mortgages

Click Here for another interesting article you can’t resist

By Dean Baker Truthout 3/17/08 According to the current plans being crafted in Washington, you will. Bear Stearns, one of the longstanding giants of Wall Street investment banking, is now on life support, the victim of its own excessive greed and bad judgment. Apparently, the wizards who run the show at Bear Stearns (I will resist the temptation to use initials) somehow couldn t see an $8 trillion housing bubble in the US economy. They made highly leveraged bets on assets backed by mortgages

Old Vet looks ahead for more action
Trying to get beyond today s headlines, and the moves and countermoves in today s markets, is difficult. However the future beckons, and it s looking a lot more deflationary than inflationary which is the exact reason the Fed is throwing around the power of the lender of last resort. Don t want a Depression, do we? The great de-leveraging of 2008 continues, in which credit market expansion reverses due to excessive credit extended to a myriad of parties who now have trouble paying. One

Click Here for another interesting article you can’t resist

Sorry, no items are currently available. Homeowners who went through a foreclosure or got a deal for working out their mortgage debt should pay attention to a new tax break for debt forgiveness.

Thoughts on saving homeowners who are upside-down/underwater
So there are people who signed up for mortgages they can t afford to pay, for houses that are worth less than they paid for. These people are upside down/underwater. There are plans afoot to use taxpayer dollars (meaning, your money and my money) to make sure these people can stay in their homes. This one quote does a pretty good job of summarizing my thoughts on these plans: UPDATE: Consumer Groups Decry Bear Stearns Bailout As Homeowners Suffer Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for E

Bear Stearns in Bankruptcy: Can You Feel Their Pain?
By Dean Baker Truthout 3/17/08 According to the current plans being crafted in Washington, you will. Bear Stearns, one of the longstanding giants of Wall Street investment banking, is now on life support, the victim of its own excessive greed and bad judgment. Apparently, the wizards who run the show at Bear Stearns (I will resist the temptation to use initials) somehow couldn t see an $8 trillion housing bubble in the US economy. They made highly leveraged bets on assets backed by mortgages

Click Here for another interesting article you can’t resist

So there are people who signed up for mortgages they can t afford to pay, for houses that are worth less than they paid for. These people are upside down/underwater. There are plans afoot to use taxpayer dollars (meaning, your money and my money) to make sure these people can stay in their homes. This one quote does a pretty good job of summarizing my thoughts on these plans: UPDATE: Consumer Groups Decry Bear Stearns Bailout As Homeowners Suffer Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for E

Click Here for another interesting article you can’t resist

The Fed’s agreement to buy up to $30 billion in troubled Bear Stearns mortgage bonds may have saved JPMorgan Chase from a big writedown, according to senior executives involved in the transaction. Ultimately, it enabled a deal to be done even as alternatives rapidly dried up.

Fresh banking fears knock shares (BBC News)
US shares fall sharply on renewed fears about the impact of bad mortgage debt and the wider credit squeeze.

JPMorgan to acquire Bear Stearns
BBC Business - The bank has been at the centre of the US mortgage debt crisis. Its shares fell 46% to $30 after emergency funding for it was announced on Friday. The news comes as the Federal Reserve cut its lending rate to banks to 3.25% from 3.50%, and created a …

On Native Ground
American Reporter - According recent figures from Moody’s, the bond rating firm, nearly 20 percent of all mortgage debt is at risk, or about $2.5 trillion of subprime mortgages.

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Bailouts and False Hopes One of the more interesting phenomenon observed during the bubble was the perpetuation of denial with rumors of homeowner bailouts. Many homeowners held out hope that if they could just keep current on their mortgage long enough, the government would come to their rescue in the form of a mandated bailout program. Part of this fantasy was not just that people could keep their homes, but that they could keep living their lifestyle as they did during the bubble. What fe

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