Anonymous blogger Lexington wants tomorrow to be the last shot.  Somewhere, Parker is starting to wonder why he even bothered.

Sometimes the camera doesn’t lie (Onion-ready pic from the article, I’m so tempted to make it my desktop background): NYT (1/27 ’12): “New Fraud Investigation Group Issues Subpoenas to Financial Companies” Mr. Donovan said that a separate settlement being worked out between state attorneys general and mortgage servicing companies would not thwart the new group’s investigations, even if the settlement released companies from further law enforcement efforts related to mortgage servicing. // “We would not be standing here today if we were not absolutely confident,” Mr. Donovan said, adding that any releases being contemplated “are narrow enough to allow us…
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Sometimes these guys are way too smart for their own good … Economist (1/19 ’12): “Perry exits” … You have to wonder why a man of such towering ignorance ever thought he had the right to aspire to the White House.   Meanwhile, Igor credits WaPo with the most dangerous 51 seconds of MSM coverage yet in the present primary cycle. Plus 10 for [candidate's name redacted] if SC ever sees that one

I’m not a US person, or at least not anymore, so Housing Doom’s pet dragon Igor had to clue me in about this plant that’s been in the news so much recently. It grows in South Carolina, and Igor also tells me that it’s there, over the next six days, that most of the juice of this year’s presidential election will be squeezed.  Pollsters predict primary election or caucus outcomes by measuring the intentions of likely participants / voters, but this week’s Republican party aspirants are depending so heavily on un-likely supporters that the statisticians are severely off-balance.  So some…
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A headline worthy of the Halifax Chronicle-Herald’s Bill Smith, circa 1975 … CBC News (1/12 ’12): “Same-sex divorce options explored by Harper government” The mind boggles.  Meanwhile, the foreign central banks continue to steadily reduce their holdings of US obligations … more on this in due course

I couldn’t help but be struck by the similarity of these two articles this past week.  It appears that on both the federal and state (AZ) level, foreclosure assistance is going begging. First this federal program for the unemployed: The federal government can’t even give money away to help the unemployed pay their mortgage. A $1 billion program to assist the jobless will likely end up spending only half the funds, at most, because so few people met the strict criteria. The Housing Department, which had to approve the applications for the Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program by Friday, expects that…
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The MSM is now trumpeting the news that a bipartisan accord has been reached on the debt ceiling.  Well maybe, but the devil is in the details.  There’s been worries that if an accord isn’t reached, interest rates will go up and housing will be hurt.  Debt ceiling or no, housing is going to be hurting for a while.  We need a recovery in the broader economy before anything can “save” housing.

During the housing boom, the mortgage mantra seemed to be “No income, no credit, no problem!”  Today however, in the interest of reducing risk, there is a push for tougher requirements and a 20% down payment requirement. As one might imagine, the housing industry is not embracing the pendulum swinging back so far: [Thanks M.R.!] Among the most hotly contested ideas bank regulators have proposed to reduce the risk of another financial crisis is rule making a 20 percent down payment mandatory on some new home loans. Consumer advocates, civil rights groups and lending industry groups alike have said the…
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Uh, how many flights to go in the Space Shuttle program? Wall Street Journal (4/29 ’11): “We Have Liftoff: No Money Down Is Back” The NASA Federal Credit Union earlier this month launched a special promotion that allows borrowers to make no down payment for a primary home purchase of up to $650,000, or just 5% down on a loan up to $850,000. // The deal applies only in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. Borrowers can also do refinance loans up to $650,000 with just 5% down and up to $850,000 with 10% down. The credit union will offer adjustable…
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Like all Arizona eighth graders, I took Arizona government. [We won't go into how long ago that was.]  I remember having to learn how a bill progressed through the legislature.  I don’t, however, remember that a bill could proceed like SB 1259 has.  SB 1259′s proposed effect: Provides a chain of ownership during foreclosure proceedings and allows reimbursement of lawyer fees for injunctions or court cases that fail to prove ownership. In other words, lenders would have to be able to actually prove that they owned a mortgage before they could foreclose on a property: You see, the Arizona State…
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Earlier this week the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research [AEI] released an article outlining their Principles for reforming the housing market. So many of the solutions we see for “fixing” housing and rather ridiculous, so it was refreshing to see some ideas that make sense.  Here’s the short version of their list: 1. The housing finance market-like other U.S. industries and housing finance systems in most other developed countries-can and should principally function without any direct government financial support. 2. Ensuring mortgage quality, and fostering the accumulation of adequate capital behind housing risk, can create a robust housing…
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Naked Capitalism had a great post yesterday drawing attention to this paper. [Hat tip Freedom's Phoenix.]  We know that the loan mod program in general has been a failure.  Most borrowers haven’t qualified, and the ones that have, have had a high redefault rate.  Mark Kaufman, of the Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation, provides some insights as to why. The first problem is a general inefficiency on the part of the servicer: We see and hear from distressed borrowers who report all too frequently that they are forced to resubmit paperwork because it has been lost by the servicer.  Loss…
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I think we can now say with some authority that The ODA Loop has been well and truly closed.  Don’t miss the embedded video in the following, it’s priceless. CTV (3/18): Oda apologizes to committee for ‘confusion’ on funding Number of people who will change their mind on Kenney because of this: 0 About time I found a few housing stories before another politician bursts through the pain threshold

Junior Canadian cabinet minister Bev Oda (the US equivalent would be a Secretary of State dealing with international cooperation) has been under scrutiny for her testimony going back to late 2009 on a decision that it in due course turned out was documented on a robo-signed form with an undated alteration that reversed the sense of the decision. Bureaucracies live and die by the paper trail.  Last time Doom visited this story we made fun of the minister’s inscrutable handling of a staff recommendation.  An office just can’t go altering an official document after the fact.  That way lies madness,…
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Are you in The Loop?1 Available only in Canada. … By now the outline of the saga is widely known. In 2009, [Canadia's International Co-operation Minister Bev] Oda rejected a church-based aid group called Kairos for renewal of its long-standing Canadian International Development Agency grant. She called the rejection a “CIDA decision,” but it turned out top CIDA officials had signed a note recommending approval of Kairos’s funding. That memo was later altered when the word “not” was penned in before “approve.” / Oda told a House committee she didn’t know who inserted the “not,” only to admit later that…
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