Follow us on Twitter. I’ve been invited as a guest on the Stand Up With Pete Dominick radio show today at 3: 10 p.m. Eastern time [twist had EST but I'm guessing EDT was meant - jm].  The show airs on Sirius 110 or XM 130.

So you’re in foreclosure and trying to decide if the whole “robo-signing” scandal will mean that the courts will give you the house?  Don’t count on it. For all the grandstanding by politicians and accusations of “greedy, sleazeball lenders”, at the end of the day, the moratoriums are unlikely to do much for borrowers except get them a few more months in their house. The question here is not, after all, whether money was lent to a borrower or whether the borrower is responsible for paying the mortgage.  The question is, who is the owner of the mortgage?  Who gets…
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Oh dear.  Looks like it’s time for my semi-annual retirement post Obviously the complexity of this new phase of the crisis (Robosigner?) has advanced beyond my capacity to add much to the discussion.  While I’ll be maintaining a presence behind the “Relevant Articles” list on the sidebar and the NY Fed Update posts most Fridays, you’ll probably see less of my by-line on Doom’s front page for a while provided nothing really outrageous sets off a hasty rant. Like the man says, You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em.  And even with a vertical…
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The National  Association of Realtors (NAR) yesterday released their Pending Sales Report with the “happy news” that pending home sales were up 4.3%.  This was of course the month-to-month number.  The more significant number- year-over-year was down 19%- but hey, who’s counting? The NAR also reports that 34% of sales were “distressed sales”.  They only count REOs however (bank owned) as distressed.  M sends us these interesting figures from Phoenix however, that show that the REO count doesn’t paint a full picture of the situation.

Yesterday Diana Olick reported on a call by some for a 90 national moratorium on foreclosures. Texas isn’t waiting: Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott called for a halt on foreclosures Monday amid nationwide scrutiny over the way they are processed. Notices to suspend foreclosures were sent to 27 loan servicers doing business in Texas, including Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, the Attorney General’s Office said. It did not have the full list of companies available late Monday. The state office also called for a halt on the sales of properties previously foreclosed upon — possibly affecting auctions scheduled Tuesday…
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Five years ago if you had asked the average American what “subprime” was, no doubt you’d have been given some answer about a cut of meat that was past date. Now the word has entered the mainstream vernacular. Other housing terms like “short sale” and “underwater” have also entered the American vocabulary. Now we have a new term – “robo-signing”. In a world where foreclosures have become rampant, lenders have focused on volume rather than accuracy. Executives responsible for processing thousands of documents a month have signed off on documents without more than a cursory glance- they are “robo-signers”. Now…
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I hate to keep picking on FHFA Acting Director DeMarco, but I was thinking over the weekend about his Friday statement on the mortgage default servicing robo-signer affair: WSJ (10/1 ’10): “US Housing Regulator Calls For Fix To Mortgage Processing” WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)–A U.S. housing regulator on Friday called for the development of a consistent approach to deal with deficiencies in the mortgage foreclosure process.

This week the Fed’s own holdings of MBS went down a biggish $13.334 billion and for a change the foreign central bank holdings of both Agency and Treasury debt grew at a modest and sustainable rate. This week’s Reuters report1 was, as usual, based on the weekly update from the NY Fed’s H.4.1 table site.2 Here is Doom’s updated CSV version3 of the agencies and treasuries foreign central bank holdings data set. The yellow line moon-shot moderated to a far slower pace this week. Treasury Debt holdings grew $5.823 billion, a respectable number but nowhere close to the last couple…
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The GMAC/Ally/JPMorgan “Mortgage-gate” problems seem to keep on growing.  One small sentence reported by Market Ticker could spell big problems for the housing market: [Hat tip Freedom's Phoenix] I am in receipt of a copy of a bulletin from Old Republic Title in which it states: The Company will not insure title to any property which has been foreclosed by Ally Financial, Ally Bank or GMAC until      further notice. Oops. I suspect this is going to spread fast, given that this “wee problem” is NOT specific to GMAC and Ally.  In fact, JP Morgan/Chase has reported “similar discrepancies”, and then…
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With the $8,000 home buyer stimulus gone, it should not come as a surprise that things are looking tough for the Phoenix market again.  As Jay Butler of ASU Realty studies explains, most of the action is with foreclosures: “Foreclosures accounted for 45 percent of the existing-home market activity in August,” says Associate Professor of Real Estate Jay Butler, who authored the report. “When you add in resales of previously foreclosed-on homes, all of this foreclosure-related activity represents a full two-thirds of the market’s transactions in August.” About 4,000 foreclosures were recorded in Maricopa County in August. That’s slightly up…
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