The Housing Bubble

Good morning, you angry renters.

Savings Saturday: Conditions favor buying a home now
http://host.madison.com/wsj/special-section/saving_money/article_b1dcfb6a-af94-11de-bcc2-001cc4c03286.html?mode=story

Duh…of course uhs are going to say you should buy now because it’s a great time to buy.

Just like it was a great idea to only require $1,000 down to move into a $300K condo.

I’m wagering the Letterman scandal has a housing component. You know the Halderman guy HAS to be upside down on a house. At least he has the pride of ownership, lol.

Any delusional fool can speculate but it takes a well coordinated pillage to enslave or bankrupt a nation.

Why is Obama getting involved in Olympics for Chicago, the beer summit etc. Shouldn’t the president of US during these times be involved in more important stuff? I think Americans pay too much emphasis on sports and not enough on books.

Rio Throws Chicago for a Loop
Rising Brazil’s Win of 2016 Olympics Is Blow to Obama, Boon for Developing World

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125446379425258861.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop

Jobs report hints at more hard times
Unemployment hits 9.8 percent in September

By Peter S. Goodman
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
2:00 a.m. October 3, 2009

After several months in which the U.S. economy flashed tentative signs of improvement, a sobering report on the national job market released yesterday amplified worries that a lengthy period of lean times lies ahead.

The economy shed 263,000 jobs in September, and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.8 percent from 9.7 percent in August, according to the Labor Department’s monthly snapshot of the employment picture.

The job losses have continued for 21 consecutive months, the longest such stretch in 70 years of records, analysts said.

Although the job market worsened, the pace of deterioration remained markedly slower than during the early months of the year, when about 700,000 jobs a month were disappearing. That improvement seems consistent with the widespread belief that the recession has given way to economic growth.

Yet the report also buttressed fears that economic expansion will be weak and hesitant, with scarce paychecks and economic anxiety remaining prominent features of U.S. life well into next year.

“This is a weak report,” said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at the PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “The rate of job loss has tapered off, but we still haven’t reached the point where businesses are willing to hire.”
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U.S. EMPLOYMENT BY THE NUMBERS

9.8 percent: Unemployment rate

263,000: September job losses

64,000: Construction job losses

53,000: Government job losses

19,000: Health job gains

June 1983: Last time U.S. unemployment was in double digits
…

* The Wall Street Journal
* OCTOBER 3, 2009

FDIC Seizes Three Banks, Taking Tally For Year to 98

By DAN FITZPATRICK and DAVID ENRICH

Banking regulators seized small banks in Michigan, Minnesota and Colorado, bringing to 98 the number of U.S. banks that have failed so far this year.

The family-owned Jennings State Bank of Spring Grove, Minn., had assets of $56.3 million and deposits of $52.4 million as of July 31, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. The agency entered into a purchase and assumption agreement with Central Bank, in Stillwater, Minn., which got the failed bank’s deposits, essentially all of its assets and two branches. Central and the FDIC also agreed to share losses on $37.7 million in assets.

Warren, Mich.-based Warren Bank had assets of $538 million and deposits of about $501 million as of July 31, according to the FDIC. A unit of Huntington Bancshares Inc., in Columbus, Ohio, got the failed bank’s deposits and six branches. Huntington also bought $83 million of Warren’s assets.
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Here is some hard evidence of a FUBAR legislative process:

* The Wall Street Journal
* OCTOBER 3, 2009

Sleeping on Job Is Political Rite in Sacramento
All-Night Sessions Mean Legislators Pack Toothbrushes, Cologne

By STU WOO

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — After 11 years as an elected California official, Abel Maldonado says he has finally figured out how to survive legislative sessions in Sacramento. His secret: Visine and Lil’ Wayne.

California state Sen. Abel Maldonado (R., Santa Maria) tried to stay awake during a late-night budget debate at the state’s capital last month.

That is because many of the most important sessions at the statehouse turn into grueling all-nighters. “You don’t sleep,” says the Republican state senator from near Santa Barbara, Calif. “You lay back there in the chambers, you doze off, and you have important pieces of legislation that come up that spend billions of dollars. And you’re like, ‘OK, what do I do here?’”
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I keep seeing hopeful signs that the tide is turning in the War on Banksters. But I am not sure merely taxing members of the Megabank, Inc cartel to pay for too-big-to-fail insurance would be enough, if scope remained for cartel members to financially engineer future crises, in order to recapture their insurance premium payments. I am thinking some kind of international law to establish, monitor and enforce punitive measures against bad banks would also be needed to stem the incentives to play “heads we win, tails you lose” financial disaster capitalism.

* The Wall Street Journal
* OCTOBER 3, 2009

IMF Mulls a Global Bank Tax

By BOB DAVIS

ISTANBUL — The International Monetary Fund, acting at the behest of leaders of the Group of 20 nations, is examining how a tax on financial institutions could be applied globally.

Neither the size nor use of revenue from such a tax has been decided. Brazil’s finance minister, Guido Mantega, said when ministers met in Pittsburgh recently they discussed using proceeds to help finance developing countries during crises. Another possibility, discussed in a recent IMF report, would be to “pre-finance a bailout fund” to handle financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

IMF Deputy Managing Director John Lipsky compared a prospective tax to deposit insurance systems in which banks pay into a kitty that is tapped to pay off depositors when a bank fails. “Now we can see we need to look more broadly across the financial system, think more broadly than deposit insurance, and ask the question, ‘How should these potential mitigation costs be borne?’” he said. He said the IMF needs to consider whether financial companies should be singled out for a tax.

The IMF assignment from the G-20 has been widely overlooked. According to the G-20’s Pittsburgh communiqué, the IMF is supposed to report by the spring to see how the financial sector “could make a fair and substantial contribution toward paying for any burdens associated with government interventions to repair the banking system.”
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How much is a Trillion?

Some examples…

The number of lost cells in my fossilized Fred Flintstone liver.

I’m off to the Division Champs St. Louis Cardinals Baseball dead baseball game with a bunch of friends to look at the future. Have a good day all!!!

A box that holds a case of copier paper will hold about $72,000 one-dollar bills. It would take 1.4 billion boxes to hold a trillion dollars.

It would take 1.8 trillion pennies to fill the Empire State Building.

If you spent $1 million an hour, non-stop for 24 hours a day, you wouldn’t run out of money for 411 years.

If you took 3.6 trillion one-dollar bills, and placed them end-to-end, that line of bills would reach from Capitol Hill to the sun and then back to Capitol Hill and then back to the sun – and then almost all the way back to Capitol Hill again.

The country has not existed for a trillion seconds.
Western civilization has not been around a trillion seconds.

One trillion seconds ago – 31,688 years – Neanderthals stalked the plains of Europe.

If you have one dollar bills stacked face to back and laid them on there side, it would circle the globe at the equator 10 times.
It’s a $1 million a day since the birth of Christ or the year Zero plus another 737 years to go.

A tightly-packed stack of new $100 bills totaling $1 million would be about 4 feet high. A billion dollars, 4,000 feet high or equivalent to about three Sears Towers stacked on top of one another. That means a stack of $100 bills totaling $1 trillion would be 789 miles or 144 Mt. Everests stacked on top of one another.

To put things in perspective, current estimates put the number of stars in the Milky Way at somewhere between 100 and 400 billion. The U.S. population is slightly over 303 million, and the world population is around 6.6 billion.

US Senators Introduce Foreclosure Rescue Legislation

By Jessica Holzer
Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–Four U.S. senators introduced legislation Wednesday to require lenders to offer loan modifications to qualified borrowers before seizing their homes.

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., would also set aside nearly $6.4 billion of federal funds so states can offer mortgage assistance to homeowners who’ve lost their jobs or otherwise experienced a sharp loss of income. The states would use the funds to offer grants or subsidized loans to borrowers.

The legislation comes amid growing frustration with the pace of lender and government efforts to help people avoid foreclosure. Job losses have also taken their toll on household incomes, making it even more difficult to help borrowers.

The legislation would penalize lenders who initiate foreclosures on homeowners deemed qualified for a loan modification and cap foreclosure fees. It would also funnel $80 million in federal funds to states and towns to establish mandatory foreclosure mediation programs.

Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore. offered the legislation along with Reed. Whitehouse, Merkley and Reed all sit on the Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over housing issues.

Man Shot by Cops After House Auctioned Off

PHOENIX (CBS/KPHO) So many these days can relate to the distress of losing a home, but neighbors in one north Phoenix neighborhood are struggling to understand why one man’s struggle had to end the way it did.

Police said the problems started Tuesday when two men drove to a house near 31st Avenue and Sandra Terrace and told the man there that they’d just purchased the home at auction.

“He obviously became upset, made some comments, and went inside and came back out with a gun,” said Detective James Holmes of the Phoenix Police Department.

Investigators said the man fired at the new owners’ cars. The new owners ran and were not hurt. Officers arriving on scene reported the man at the house had a gun in one hand and a beer in the other. Police say negotiators tried talking him down, but at some point in the negotiations, the man pointed his gun at a police vehicle.

“At that point, (the SWAT team) fired two sage bullets, which are rubber bullets, at the gentleman. At that point, he raised his weapon and officers returned fire,” said Det. Holmes.
Neighbors heard several gunshots.

“It breaks my heart,” said Jim Ledune, a neighbor.

Another neighbor, who sells foreclosures for a living, said losing a house isn’t worth losing your life, but he does understand how tough it is.

“You’ve lost more than your home. You’ve lost something that you stand for, worked hard for and it didn’t work,” said Charlie Sykes, a neighbor.

As of Wednesday morning, police had not released the name of the man who was shot and killed by officers or the names of the officers involved in the shooting.

It’s very hard to fathom San Diego home prices rising off a base in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, against the backdrop of 850,000 people living in poverty. Where is the end-user demand coming from?

S.D. Poverty Rate Reaches Highest Level In A Decade
By Hank Crook, Gloria Penner
Editors Roundtable | Friday, October 2, 2009

With unemployment and poverty on the rise, San Diego has become one of the hardest hit cities in the nation.

Above: With unemployment and poverty on the rise, San Diego has become one of the hardest hit cities in the nation.
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We drove up to Utahrrr last night from Socal. Traffic was super light toward Vegas. No getaway weekend evident. I even let my 17 YO drive for a couple of hours.

Why is everyone obsessing about the city where the Olympics will not be held? Wouldn’t it make more sense to just think about the city where the Olympics will be held? And since when is this decision somehow reflective of the President? Since never, that’s when. So it’s in Rio. That’s nice.

So I’m listening to NPR, and some knucklehead comes on (an expert I suppose) and starts telling me all about how the internet has made me more free to choose what information I want to absorb, but that FREEDOM ISN’T ALWAYS GOOD FOR DEMOCRACY.

Hey, dude from NPR whose name I didn’t bother to catch, I gotta message for you: Pho Queue.

Is it any different over here?

The pain in Spain is mainly due to hiding losses, again…

Pain in Spain May Linger as Banks Seek to Avoid Property Losses

By Charles Penty and Sharon Smyth

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) — Maria Jose Lozano, a civil servant from Madrid, left a recent property fair empty-handed after discovering that home prices were still out of reach in a market where sales have dropped 50 percent from their 2006 peak.

“We came here expecting to find a bargain, or at the very least some reduced-price homes, but we’ve seen nothing,” said Lozano, 49, after browsing through the offerings, including properties that lenders such as Banco Santander SA and Caja Madrid acquired in exchange for canceling developers’ debts.

Banks bought about 110,000 homes to keep losses off their books as Spain’s property bubble burst, according to real estate researcher RR de Acuna & Asociados in Madrid. Now they’re using strategies reminiscent of the boom times — 100 percent mortgages, low interest rates and free cars — to sell homes, potentially slowing a drop in prices that’s needed to spur recovery from Spain’s worst recession in 60 years.

“Maybe you can create some accounting value with all these tricks, but in the end it doesn’t make the situation any better and in the long term makes it worse,” said Luis Garicano, a professor of economics and strategy at the London School of Economics, in a phone interview.

Spanish lenders acquired at least 20 billion euros ($29 billion) of real estate in the past 18 months, according to data compiled by analysts at Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG. There are as many as 1.6 million empty homes in Spain, an overhang that may take seven years to clear with annual demand running at about 218,500 units, Acuna & Asociados estimates.

Instead of cutting prices, banks are offering more generous financing terms for their own properties than those being sold by third parties, said Fernando Rodriguez de Acuna, president of Acuna & Asociados.

“The banks are reducing financing costs to get rid of their housing stock, but this solution has its limits,” he said in an interview. “The only way banks will be able to sell homes they haven’t sold in the mid-term will be to do so at a loss.”

Santander, Spain’s biggest lender, has acquired more than 4 billion euros of real estate and is selling homes through Altamira Santander Real Estate, its property arm.

Altamira offers clients variable-rate mortgages at the one- year euro interbank offered rate plus 0.4 percent, according to its Web site. That’s 1.64 percent at current rates. Santander offers a variable rate mortgage at Euribor plus 1 percent, according to data published by El Pais newspaper.

The bank also offers 100 percent financing, mortgage insurance and aid to buyers of holiday homes, according to the Web site. Altamira said in August that it had sold at least 1,100 of the 2,550 newly built properties it had on sale.

A spokeswoman for Madrid-based Santander declined to comment on whether the bank’s policies were slowing a recovery. The spokeswoman, who asked not to be identified because of company policy, said Santander’s booth at the property fair was informational, and it didn’t try to sell homes at the event because it believes prices have adjusted to the market.

Banco Popular Espanol SA, Spain’s third-biggest commercial bank, bought 2.3 billion euros of property and is selling homes through its Aliseda Gestion Inmobiliaria unit. La Caixa, Spain’s biggest savings bank, throws in a free car for anyone under 35 who buys an apartment through its property company.

Banco Popular has no intention of selling homes for less than the bank thinks they’re worth because low interest rates mean the cost of holding them is comparatively cheap, Chief Financial Officer Jacobo Gonzalez-Robatto said in July.

CMO’s

Anybody here buying CMO’s? If so what type and why?

Polly, can you offer any commentary on CMO investing?

Is all real estate still local these days?

And why is The Economist cheerleading for higher home prices? Haven’t they heard that affordable housing is a laudable policy objective?

Finance and Economics

Property prices
House proud?

Oct 3rd 2009
From Economist.com
Property prices are still crumbling in most countries, but there are some reasons for cheer

THE global economic crisis was accompanied by a collapse in house prices in most rich (and some not-so-rich) countries around the world. The IMF has compared house prices in the first quarter of this year with their level a year ago in 52 rich and emerging housing markets. It found a median house-price decline of 7%. The figures drive home just how savage the falls in house prices have been in many countries.

America’s housing bust may be close to the global average but the declines in some countries are mind-boggling. Latvia, with a wrecked economy propped up by emergency IMF funding, saw an annual decline in house prices of nearly 60% to the end of the first quarter. During that period Estonia and the United Arab Emirates also saw collapses of nearly 40%. In Britain they fell around 20%.
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Optimists will also find some solace in the IMF’s comparative analysis. In a fifth of the 52 markets studied by the IMF, prices were higher than a year earlier. Some of these are big emerging markets which are still growing relatively fast, such as China and India. But prices are also higher in Argentina, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Israel, Austria and Switzerland. The property market in India looks positively frothy: prices there were, at the end of the first quarter, about 17% higher than a year before. Indian property prices have risen much faster than China’s, despite the latter’s faster growth. But the growing band of property pessimists will doubtless insist that the froth is merely the early warning sign of yet another bubble.

The average bear is a lot smarter than the average bovine. I’d personally rather be financially savvy than house proud.

And look what a hash the central bankers have made of the global economy by persistently overfeeding the greedy bovine herd! There truly has never been a better time to be a bear.

Leaders

Markets
Please do feed the bears

Oct 1st 2009
From The Economist print edition
The financial world needs its pessimists

NOBODY loves a party-pooper. When asset prices are going up, most people are inclined to celebrate. The bears who argue that asset prices are about to fall tend to get dismissed as out of touch (dotcom sceptics supposedly “just didn’t get it”) or are likened to stopped clocks: occasionally right, but mostly wrong. If they dare to make money out of their beliefs by selling short (betting on falling prices) when a crisis hits, bears are decried as economic vandals and politicians call for their activities to be banned.

The word “bear” brings to mind an irrational, angry creature that lashes out at anything in its path. Of course, like their animal counterparts, some bears can be very wild indeed. The most excitable bears are not so much polar as bipolar. They dabble in conspiracy theories and talk of the collapse of civilisation and the need for investors to sell all paper assets, buy gold and retreat to Idaho. But bulls can be overenthusiastic too, talking of new eras in which asset prices will reach undreamed-of heights (remember the book “Dow 36,000”?). Over the past 20 years it has been the repeated interventions of central banks to rescue bulls, not bears, that have contributed to the current mess by encouraging too much risk-taking.
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I know the Merrill Lynch acquisition was a losing bet, but how did Megabank of America do on its Countryslide acquisition? Does anyone know the outcome of that seemingly-foolish decision executed on Lewis’s watch?

BANK CHIEF RESIGNS

The News The chief executive of Bank of America announced that he would resign, less than a year after his star-crossed takeover of Merrill Lynch.

Behind the News The executive, Kenneth D. Lewis, designed the takeover as a crowning triumph. But even as the ink was drying, Merrill lost $15.3 billion and paid billions in bonuses that bank shareholders knew nothing about when they approved the deal. Now New York’s attorney general is investigating. Mr. Lewis says the merger was strategically important and is paying off.

It looks to me like Ken Lewis and Angelo Mozilo might have very busy retirements ahead of them. Go Darrell!

Countrywide Bribed Public Officials, Congressman Claims
Calif. Lawmaker Presses for Information Related to Countrywide’s Phone Recordings
By MATTHEW JAFFE
Sept. 30, 2009

The controversy surrounding collapsed mortgage lender Countrywide took another turn Wednesday when the ranking Republican on a key House committee openly confronted the panel’s chairman demanding he subpoena Bank of America for information about a murky program that involved public officials.

The challenge from Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., comes in the wake of the recent revelation that Countrywide recorded phone calls with borrowers as part of the program and then those recordings were destroyed. The program, Issa has said, was used by the lender to provide sweetheart deals to federal government officials and members of Congress who worked on housing policy in an attempt to gain their support.

In a heated exchange at a hearing Wednesday morning, Issa told House Oversight and Government Reform committee chairman Edolphus Towns, D-Md., that Bank of America, which bought Countrywide last year, should be subpoenaed for all information related to the program.

“Mr. Chairman, I call on you today to issue that subpoena,” Issa said to Towns. “It is that important that I bring it up at this hearing and I call for you if you cannot do it to step aside and allow this committee to have a vote.”

Issa has requested before that Towns issue a subpoena, but elected to make his protests public at the televised Congressional hearing.

“What we do know is that there is a level of intended corruption by Countrywide that clearly had an effect on government’s decisions for years and we are ignoring it,” the California lawmaker said in his opening statement. “We cannot really understand the failure of government if we do not understand the failure of government officials led by, in fact, an attempt to bribe them.”
…
Related
The Note: Ethics Committee Probes Countrywide Loans for Senators
SEC Charging Ex-Countrywide CEO Mozilo
BofA Chief Lewis in for Congressional Grilling
…

US secretly tried to make deal with Goldman Sachs in wake of financial crisis

By John Byrne
Wednesday, September 30th, 2009 — 9:11 am

Warren Buffett balked at conflict of interest

BREAKING 10:08 AM ET:Vanity Fair will report in the next issue of the magazine that US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — a former head of the investment bank Goldman Sachs — tried to orchestrate secretive deals in the midst of the financial crisis but got blowback from prominent investor Warren Buffett. The following press release was obtained by Raw Story; the magazine appears today on newsstands in New York and Los Angeles.

NEW YORK, N.Y.—The government secretly tried to orchestrate a deal involving Goldman Sachs in the week following Lehman Brothers’ collapse and considered using the Federal Reserve to help support such a transaction, Andrew Ross Sorkin reports in the new issue of Vanity Fair.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, Too Big To Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves, Sorkin reports that the deal, which was nearly consummated, would have merged Goldman Sachs and Wachovia. Henry M. Paulson, the Treasury secretary and former C.E.O. of Goldman, was deeply involved in the process, contacting both Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman’s current C.E.O., and a Wachovia board member, and strongly urged both to consider it. Wachovia’s C.E.O., Robert Steel, was a former vice-chairman at Goldman Sachs and Paulson’s former number two at the Treasury Department.

Sorkin reports that Warren Buffett was also contacted about investing in the merged company, but told a banker at Goldman that it would never happen. “By tonight the government will realize they can’t provide capital to a deal that’s being done by the former firm of the Treasury secretary with the company of a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs and former deputy Treasury secretary,” Buffett said. “There is no way. They’ll all wake up and realize, even if it was the best deal in the world, they can’t do it.”
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Here is some uplifting news for the anti-government zealots to cheer about:

Union-Tribune Editorial
Crisis and opportunity
Both are found in San Diego’s $179 million black hole

2:00 a.m. October 4, 2009

If it is true that every crisis poses not just trouble but opportunity too, then San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders and the City Council are up to their necks in both as they face a gargantuan $179 million deficit in next year’s budget.
…
Sanders was commendably blunt about what it all means. “Make no mistake about it,” he said, “there will be cuts and the public will feel them.” So will city employees. “There will be layoffs,” he said, including in the police and fire departments.
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The FHA is now tightening its lending standards on reverse mortgages. Could FHA tightening be a death knell for the vestigial bubble?

Nation’s Housing
FHA puts limits on reverse mortgages

Kenneth R. Harney

2:00 a.m. October 4, 2009

WASHINGTON — Declining home values have put a serious squeeze on one of the mortgage market’s most popular and fastest-growing financing concepts: the Federal Housing Administration’s reverse mortgage program for seniors 62 and older.

In a letter to reverse mortgage lenders Sept. 23, FHA Commissioner David Stevens said his agency must reduce the maximum amounts seniors can receive on reverse mortgages because of a $798 million estimated budgetary shortfall for the program in the coming fiscal year.

Mortgage industry sources said the move amounts to a 10 percent cutback for all new FHA reverse mortgage applicants starting Oct. 1. Borrowers who already have FHA reverse loans will not be affected.

Peter Bell, president of the National Reverse Mortgage Lenders Association, says the policy change could prevent more than one out of five applicants from paying off their existing home mortgage debt with the proceeds of a new reverse loan. That, in turn, could leave some senior homeowners in danger of falling into serious delinquency on their current loans, even ending up in foreclosure. The total number of seniors affected could be in the tens of thousands, Bell said, since roughly 130,000 new loans are projected for fiscal 2010.

Dennis Ceizyk Sr., vice president of Heartland Mortgage in Tucson, Ariz., says the FHA’s move immediately affects two of his company’s clients — a Phoenix couple in their late 70s who no longer can afford the monthly payments on their existing mortgage. They had planned to take out a reverse mortgage yielding them $92,500 in cash on a house valued at $125,000. The $92,500 lump sum would pay off their $75,000 home mortgage balance, plus closing and other transaction costs, leaving them approximately $6,000.

“They’d be able to get out from under their mortgage payments and have a little money in their pockets” while still remaining in their house, Ceizyk said in an interview. But under the FHA’s new rule, the $92,500 in initial proceeds would be reduced by $9,250 to $83,250 — not enough to pay off their loan and handle the combined closing expenses.
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Posted on Sun, Oct. 04, 2009 03:00 AM
Several mortgage firms getting federal funds have spotty records
By CHRIS ADAMS
McClatchy Newspapers

* Firms are getting billions, yet aren’t averting foreclosures

Several firms now participating in the Treasury’s program to modify troubled mortgages have run into problems with federal or state regulators for their treatment of their customers over the years. Included are:

-Select Portfolio Servicing Inc., a Utah-based company formerly known as Fairbanks Capital Corp. In 2003, Fairbanks agreed to pay $40 million because of mortgage servicing practices that included “force-placed insurance” - or sticking customers with unnecessary insurance costs - and failing to properly credit payments that came in on time. The company promised to improve its business practices - then it changed its name.
…
Select didn’t respond to requests for comment.

-Countrywide Home Loans Inc., part of Countrywide Financial, the company that was one of the major forces behind the rash of risky mortgages and which Bank of America Corp. purchased in July 2008.

According to a 2008 lawsuit by the Illinois attorney general and other states, consumers who fell behind on their mortgages and then called Countrywide were “shuffled from person to person and even department to department before reaching someone who can actually address their concerns.” Even then, the lawsuit said, Countrywide demanded an upfront payment before working on a modification - and often, consumers paid up front even though there was no chance their loan could be reworked.
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-Carrington Mortgage Services LLC, based in California, was sued in July by the Ohio attorney general for “providing incompetent, inadequate and inefficient customer service” for homeowners seeking modifications. The state said Carrington imposed unjustified fees and pressured borrowers into loan modifications that are “unconscionably one-sided” in Carrington’s favor.

A Carrington spokesman said the company has modified loans for approximately half its customers and that company officials are “proud of our track record.” He called the Ohio lawsuit “meritless.”

-Saxon Mortgage Services Inc., a unit of Morgan Stanley, was sued in 2008 by the attorney general of Missouri. According to the lawsuit, Saxon failed to properly credit loan payments even after customers had proved the payments had cleared their bank accounts. Saxon then charged late fees to those customers, who couldn’t get anybody on the phone when they called in for an explanation. While not admitting wrongdoing, Saxon settled the case and agreed to a voluntary compliance agreement.
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-EMC Mortgage Corp. in 2008 settled with the Federal Trade Commission over its practices. According to the FTC, the firm charged homeowners unauthorized property inspection fees, unfair late fees, and “engaged in unlawful and abusive collection practices.” It charged borrowers for “property inspection fees” even when the purpose of the inspector’s visit was to attempt to collect on the loan. It masked its caller identification information to trick people into answering its multiple phone calls, the FTC said. EMC agreed to pay $28 million to settle the charges.

(The firm is now a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co., although it wasn’t at the time of the infractions the FTC cited; Chase had no comment on the settlement.)

-Green Tree Servicing, a Minnesota company, agreed to a settlement with the Texas attorney general in 2006 over its handling of mobile home mortgages. According to Texas officials, Green Tree repossessed mobile homes and then sold them to unlicensed dealers. Those dealers, in turn, sold the homes to unwitting customers; some were uninhabitable, with overdue taxes and unpaid lot rents assessed against them. Green Tree agreed to stop working with unlicensed dealers and help homeowners who had been issued invalid titles.

Green Tree had no comment on the settlement.

Warnings of Takeovers:

Many remember Dwight Eisenhowers warnigs of Military takeovers and the famous movie “Seven Days in May “,and Nikita Khrushchev with his famous warning that America will be defeated from within and Communist will prevail . But I think that there has been little defense against Wall Street
and Big Business Industrial Complex and their Global outreach takeover .

To sum up Kudlow on the business channel on Friday, he said in essence that
business profits had gained 20% the first 6 months of the year,all this in
a American environment of massive layoffs and tent cities cropping up
because of long term unemployment . Banks and Investment houses being bailed out by the trillions ,yet no talk about the cause of lack of jobs for Americans .

Could it be true that Native born American Politicians could sell out their Country for money so certain elite business and left-wing power groups could advance their agenda ? Could elected official be so near-sighted and self -serving that
they didn’t see the advancement of Big Business interest and communist agendas would undermine the American system and America itself . Could it also be that the politicians were blind to the advances of associations like Acorn
that seem to be pushing a communist agenda of re-distribution of the wealth at any cost by questionable means .

Third World Countries seem to always have a weak middle class and in
the last 15 years the power brokers having a voice in America have been the rich and the poor with the great middle class being undermined day by day, in spite of the Great Middle Class being the rock that made America strong,that came about because of strong Constitutional principals being the guiding light .

Now we are engaged in a great power struggle ,playing out on the World stage no less . Does the middle class even have a voice anymore ,or is the Communist and Corporation takeover a given ?