Great point, Jane, but maybe this kicks out the people who bought 10 homes to flip for a profit and focuses more on those who got caught up in the subprime market for lower rates and then found their interest rate tripling to the point they couldn’t afford the mortgage? Could be. I don’t know. Where’s Ian!!!! LOL

excuse me, my head just exploded.

Doesn’t the stimulus bill’s mortgage loan modification supersede what the bankers want?

Maybe Pach so go do another Durbin interview? And Dick is supposed to be a solid Liberal.

Thanks, Jane.

Perhaps old Dick needs to be reminded why there would need to be a revision to the bankrupcy code. Oh yeah, because they passed a piece of shit of a bill just a few years ago. As I recall that was the handiwork of the “financial services industries” also. Learning impaired much Dick?

Money talks as they say. Durbin could plug his ears, not difficult to do.

Speaking from the “loser’s” perspective, the banks are in denial — and the congress is in denial but with the hordes knocking on the door of their perception.

House prices have been artificially raised. Those rises were the result of banks flooding the housing market with money, money, money.

A lot of people bought a lot of houses that were priced too high — not because we were buying “more house than we could afford,” (as if anyone had a choice) but because the prices had been driven beyond supportable by the banks’ easy money.

Finally, the USofA has realized the emperor wears no clothes: The buy side doesn’t have a job.

House prices are falling. House prices are going to fall a whole lot more.

The banks are already dead.

The only question is: who knows it but is pretending not to know it, and who just doesn’t know it?

Now I’m torn as to which crooked Illinois Senator I’d rather see resign.

At least Burris isn’t in a position to cause any real trouble….

Okay, I just sent an email.
Foreclosure relief has got to be for all homeowners.

So the creators of the mess have a say in what’s suppose tot help the victims?

I asked the Senator to reflect on that.

It’s supposed to, but helping Americans with their mortgages (lowering the rate so they can afford the loan) is really helping the banks in the end, because none of us own our homes when we still have an outstanding balance on it.

The banks don’t want to refinance at a lower rate. They’d rather foreclose and be stuck with a home that will lose value like a helo without blades loses altitude. They’re still stuck on collecting the interest on the original loan. D-U-M-B.

Guess how much I care about what the bankers want.

I think most of us in Illinois keep our expectations for Dickie Durbin very low but somehow he always manages to disappoint.

I just don’t understand the big push back by the banking industry. The question to me seems to be get some money or none. Wouldn’t they rather get some money refinancing or nothing at all? Nevermind, I forgot these are the folks that got us into this mess, I guess at the end of the day they are just expecting more free money coming their way while everyone else is screwed.

durbin makes burris look like a dream senator.
burris should call for his resignation and so should we.

The banks don’t want to refinance at a lower rate. They’d rather foreclose and be stuck with a home that will lose value like a helo without blades loses altitude. They’re still stuck on collecting the interest on the original loan. D-U-M-B.

think they’re stuck on getting a taxpayer bailout. last thing they want to do is be forced to write down their debt.

and that’s my generous interpretation.

more realistic/cynical is that they want to stay away from any actual oversight, especially judicial. they might, you know, be asked to produce the loan docs. which would lead to questions if they didn’t have them or if they did and the docs proved to be evidence of fraud.

Let’s give the crack addicts a chance to share their crack.

I just don’t understand the big push back by the banking industry. The question to me seems to be get some money or none.

but it’s not none. it’s hundreds of billions that geithner and bernanke (and paulson previously) were throwing at them – with no oversight or accountability.

Someone help me, ’cause I’m not understanding why we would want “legislation that would allow judges to rework mortgages in the bankruptcy process“.
I think some specialized lawyers should take a look at the loan documents, as Selise suggested. But, judges?

What I haven’t seen discussed much is the people who bought a home to live in under reasonable circumstances and a rising market, and who have suffered a number of losses since then, e.g.
* Loss of a spouse
* Loss of a job
* crash of the real estate market, lowering the value of their home
* increasing mortgage payments due to an ARM

So what once was reasonable is no longer reasonable, but the homeowner is trapped: Formerly, the solution to the above was to sell the house, and buy or rent something cheaper. But what if you can’t do that because your house is now worth less than its market value?

Now, you can blame the homeowner here
* for not selling their home when they should have
* for committing to an ARM, which is about the worst idea of the 20th century
* for believing what everyone was telling them, that the housing market had nowhere to go but up

What I’m afraid is that these homeowners will be branded as “bad”, and locked out of Obama’s foreclosure relief package.

Why not allow such homeowners to sell their home at market value and forgiving the balance due to the lender, which was due to an inflated value? I know lenders aren’t gonna like that, but right now the viable alternative for homeowners in this situation is to allow their house to foreclose and seek affordable housing elsewhere (which they will have trouble getting because now they’re a credit risk.)

Bob in LA-LA land

No bankruptcy protection for all is like legalizing debtors prison without the bars.

I believe the banks are gonna be asking for forclosure relief soon

as soon as even the prime borrowers start walking away from their recent loans since loan is now higher then the price of their loan

if that happens and even the well off start allowing forclosure, this banking system symply collapses with nothing to do about it at all

It is EXTREMELY dumb! The credit card companies are the same way. For some reason they think if people can’t afford their monthly payment (using their credit cards to survive without a job!), they decide to increase the percentage rate, rather than lower it and take a “loss” to keep SOME money coming in!

It’s outrageous. I know. What do about it? I don’t know, but I’m in the mood for making pinatas at the moment!

i really don’t understand why we want to put money into helping people with foreclosures instead of helping people with jobs. if the stimulus money went for jobs that provided infrastructure, we’d have the infrastructure and people would have money to pay their mortgages.

What they’ll be looking for is a paper trail of the homeowner, if I’m not mistaken. They will have to show hardship (job loss, healthcare costs, subprime mortgage rate tripling in 3 months or whatever) to be able to qualify. Those that bought 3 homes, 10 homes to flip to make a profit had better not get a single dime!

One thing the banks do not like is owning foreclosed homes. It would be in their best interest to work with the homeowner in any way they can. Of course, this is how rational people think and as we’ve witnessed of the CEO’s of these banks, we’re not dealing with people who live in reality!

Looks like “Lawyers/Law Firms” and “Securities/Investments” have their hooks pretty deep into him. Here’s a snapshot of the greasing:

http://www.opensecrets.org/pol…..=N00004981

Fuckin’ Gangsters.

Delay on tweety lauding “David” Jindal for ethics reform!

Fu** it.. I don’t want to be citizen anymore, I just want to be an corporation in and of myself.

Why should banks be able to go bankrupt for robbing everyone?

Must do all sorts of stuff simultaneously because the problem has metasticized.

The mortgage cramdown part is to try to stem the flood of forced home sales to try to retard or reverse the decline in home prices. If they can do that, the toxic assets are less poisonous and the banking problem diminishes.

Citizen greenwarrior:

Citizen greenwarrior, the forecluse and jobs crisis are all of a piece, they are part of the cascade of deflation and depression that begins and ends with common folks havin’ neither shelter nor money. You can’t solve either of these problems one at a time unless you want millions of folks to starve, create more social upheaval and tear up what remains of the social fabric of the country.

Why isn’t he in jail anyway?

What the hell is Tom Delay doing on my telly? Doesn’t he belong in prison?

They won’t take him.

Not just any corporation – you need to be a bank,
Everybody else just gets pissed on.

You don’t think it has a chance of working, do you?

It’s a question of holding onto the home until the job comes back. And keeping people from walking and decreasing everyone’s value because of being so underwater.

Current plans are too small, but I expect to see more stim.

Geithner is talking to Lehrer like Geithner is trying to explain algebra to a 4th grader. This is one case where Geithner might be right.

More stim in the form of what and when?

All, I repeat all, mortgages are probably invalid under one of four reasons:
1. Truth in lending violations
2. Real Estate Settlement Procedures violations
3. Inaccurately transferred mortgages, notes and deeds of trust.
4. Unconscionable advantage.

The last is interesting. Here in CA, loan docs run 80-100 pages, are delivered at the end of the home buying process, and generally are signed in from of a notary or escrow officer. Neither of these people is licensed or qualified to give advice to the borrower on the loan documents.

The borrower is just told, sign her, sign her, sign here…and this when they are tired of the whole process and just want to get into the home.

Bwahahahahahaha. Geithner sez govt typically do too little to late in responsse to financial crises, and they’re trying to do the opposite. The guy’s delusional.

More “spending” bills. It’s the only option.

My note at Dick Durbin’s site:

I don’t think you should let banks write the “cram-down” legislation to limit it to people with subprime loans. The banks need to take responsibility for their errors here — they wrote bad loans for lots of people, not just subprime.

Be fair, don’t let bankers sway you.

Oh, and Bowers says we need to contact Tauscher too!

Tomorrow, the House will vote on Representative Conyer’s bankruptcy cram down. The whip count is unclear right now, but some Blue Dogs and New Democrats, including Melissa Bean (D-IL), Dennis Moore (D-KS), and New Democratic chair Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), are working on behalf of the financial services industry to water down the legislation. Tauscher in particular is problematic, both because of her leadership role in one of the ideological caucuses, and also because rumors are that she has organized up to two dozen members thus far. It is about time that Tauscher, and the Representatives she is organizing, stop listening to industry lobbyists who do not have the public interest in mind.
So, let’s make Representative Tauscher listen to someone else right now. Contact Ellen Tauscher, and urge her to stop organizing other Democrats to water down HR 200. She needs to listen to honewoners, not to the financial industry that got us into this economic disaster:
Email form (California residents only)
D.C. office: 202.225.1880

Maybe this time they go Big and Bold, and to hell with the opposition? No more playing nice. And watch McConnell, Boehner and Cantor vapor lock in the process. It would be worth it just for that…

This is why I voted for his Green Party opponent in the last election. Look up the word weak in the dictionary and behold the visage of Durbin!

new post from black:

The FBI correctly identified the epidemic of mortgage control fraud at such an early point that the financial crisis could have been averted had the Bush administration acted with even minimal competence. To understand the crisis we have to focus on how the mortgage fraud epidemic produced widespread accounting fraud.

Don’t ask; don’t tell: book profits, “earn” bonuses and closet your losses

The first document everyone should read is by S&P, the largest of the rating agencies. The context of the document is that a professional credit rater has told his superiors that he needs to examine the mortgage loan files to evaluate the risk of a complex financial derivative whose risk and market value depend on the credit quality of the nonprime mortgages “underlying” the derivative. A senior manager sends a blistering reply with this forceful punctuation:

Any request for loan level tapes is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!! Most investors don’t have it and can’t provide it. [W]e MUST produce a credit estimate. It is your responsibility to provide those credit estimates and your responsibility to devise some method for doing so.

Fraud is the principal credit risk of nonprime mortgage lending. It is impossible to detect fraud without reviewing a sample of the loan files. Paper loan files are bulky, so they are photographed and the images are stored on computer tapes. Unfortunately, “most investors” (the large commercial and investment banks that purchased nonprime loans and pooled them to create financial derivatives) did not review the loan files before purchasing nonprime loans and did not even require the lender to provide loan tapes.

Yes. And then the monthly payment increases by $300-$500 per month after the dust settles in a few months.

I agree Geithner is a delusional idiot. He just said that giving all this money to banks is not to help banks but ordinary Americans. Can I not be helped too then?

And we act like the class war wasn’t lost long ago

ABC News tonight carried a long feature on Nigel Haskett, unable to get workers comp insurance coverage for gunshot wound injuries suffered when he went to the defense of a woman being assaulted in a Little Rock McDonald’s restaurant where he worked.

I rent and have never applied for a credit card. I imagine that if I lost my job Sallie Mae would still be on me like white on rice for money.

I want the last check I write to bounce.

It really is a very stupid way to operate from just about every imaginable business (to say nothing of human) perspective. I’ve long maintained that these “Captains of Industry” are essentially pretty dim bulbs, not exactly the greatest minds of our time. I only grow more resolute in that observation.

That’s F-ed up. What insurance company?

Fraud is the 800 lb gorilla lurking over the mortgage question. It’s like nationalization, one of those words that only DFHs can use.

When does say the FBI became involved? In my own timeline on this, I look to the attempt in 2003 of state attorney generals to go after predatory mortgage lenders and being prohibited from doing so by Bush’s Comptroller of the Currency.

LOL. May it be for a large sum…

Not this kid. I’m still fightin’ it. Haven’t said it in a while but

No war but class war. Now!

That was for Raven at 52.

You know, I don’t really swear very often, but that link makes me want to borrow from Southern Dragon, may I?, and say JHFC!
I never really believed in the existence of Evil until George W. Bush was elected became president. How crazy is it that a man of God made be such a believer of evil?

I want to be a professional student until I drop dead in some class. Go to my grave owing the banks that finance Sallie Mae a ton of money.

Don’t know.. whoever McDonalds pays.

Because he’s so sleazy that even the worst of the worst won’t take him as their bitch.

Aloha, Strangers! ;-0

Stirling’s upstairs with a new post…!

Now, now, a nice lady like you doesn’t want to go and pick up my habits. If Shrub was ever a man of God I’ll kiss yer ass in the county square at high noon.

Thanks for the link. He does good work. Can’t say I’m surprised though.

Working on a doc until I was 50 allowed me to pile up quite a bit in student loans.

Oh, you should hear what I say out loud in the privacy of my home. I say the f-word a lot.
And, I have no doubt about who’s work GW did. Not the light side of the force.

Thanks for this info. My wife and I are meeting with a lawyer tomorrow evening about foreclosure on my wife’s former home in So. CA. Oddly, in our case, foreclosure might be our best option (for idiosyncratic reasons). She bought the house 10 years ago, should have sold it after her husband died but didn’t, when she retired to HI wanted to give it to her deadbeat daughter, who can’t afford it now after a divorce, etc etc. What a mess.

Bob in HI

i’m epu’d but if anyone checks back, thanks eCAHN, Norske and Loo Hoo for answers to my question, i was away doing the dishes.

Cheney let the oil companies write their legislation and the big noise eventually died down and we invaded Iraq to get at the oilfields.

Bush allowed industry to self-police itself in Texas and when he was president with the result that environmental spills and leakages and emissions were reported in a “timely” manner and so no one was fined.

The Democrats have always been in the pocket of banking interests going back to Reconstruction. The greed that northern financiers had to get into the southern markets was one of the reasons no one pushed very hard to punish the south.

Why is everyone surprised that Durbin is venal? He’s from Illinois, nu?

Such a move could make the legislation more acceptable to the financial services industry,

How embarrassing – Durbin forgets who he represents. The financial services “industry” leaders should have more skin in the game.

That’s wrong. The cramdown is only available on your principal residence.

Judges don’t look at anything without input from counsel. The cramdown happens when a lawyer files a motion to do it. Looking at these documents doesn’t require any specialized lawyering. It is simple UCC law: has the note been properly endorsed, is the deed recorded, and a few other points.

One thing the banks do not like is owning foreclosed homes. It would be in their best interest to work with the homeowner in any way they can. Of course, this is how rational people think and as we’ve witnessed of the CEO’s of these banks, we’re not dealing with people who live in reality!

You might be thinking in a pre-Credit-Default-Swap mode and overlooking that the firms which are “insured” do well if everything stays great or if there is total collapse, but lousy everywhere in between. If the housing market comes back they’re great. Ain’t gonna happen. If everybody defaults and the mortgages goes to zero, then the bank collects on their ‘insurance’, but everybody gets screwed. That’s the scenario which we need to avoid for homeowners, but where bankers don’t like government intervening.

So, every time the government lets people bail out before hitting bottom it also hurts the banks. Help the banks or help the home-owners…no in between way of compromising.

The Dodd-Frank bill from last summer (HOPE) offered a compromise option and banks turned it down. They still crazily believed they could keep everything. Now they’re getting a worse deal and they hate it. They should’ve taken the shorter haircut, but their corporate rules and greed wouldn’t allow it. Now it’s likely they’re gonna have to take a big haircut and they’re going to really really be pissed. Some may even disappear like the Wicked Witch of the West.

Durbin has been in favor of letting bankruptcy judges this flexibility and I haven’t been particularly in favor until other softer approaches failed. They’ve failed, so now I favor letting the judges have a lot of leeway to help home owners.

It might also be good to revise HOPE to increase the haircut banks have to take to get it’s softer compromise. This way they’ll see that waiting is only going to cost them more. I think the FDIC plan of Bair’s is somewhat like that too.

Of course, as time goes on everybody is losing as housing prices drop. It only makes sense that anyone who goes through this (bank or home owner) should suffer more. They should’ve taken the shorter haircut, but nooooooo. They’ve held on and dragged this out, sinking the economy and home owners and everybody. Now they have to pay for this intransigence.

Help home owners first and foremost and let the Devil take the hindmost.

They [jails] won’t take him [Tom Delay].

What(?), too many guys nicknamed “The Hammer” already?

When does say the FBI became involved? In my own timeline on this, I look to the attempt in 2003 of state attorney generals to go after predatory mortgage lenders and being prohibited from doing so by Bush’s Comptroller of the Currency.

I think the federal law was changed back when Bushies controlled things, so that state law couldn’t be used, only federal. Now might be a good time to change the law, but that wouldn’t help with actions from the past.

Changing the law (to allow enforcement of state regulatory law) now would be part of a new federal regulations bill.