Comments on: Marketplace: Failing Mortgage Mods and Foreclosures

By: jc

jc — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:16:07 +0000

RE update from Mark Hanson “Mr Mortgage” – great insights in detail focused on CA
http://mhanson.com/archives/274

By: Barry Ritholtz

Barry Ritholtz — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:01:05 +0000

heh heh

As long as you have some equity and put some money down !

By: SINGER

SINGER — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 02:21:28 +0000

I just became a home-ower….

By: super_trooper

super_trooper — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 22:13:44 +0000

BR, you’re an expert on house mortgages and house prices?

~~~

BR: Not sure what you mean by expert, but I have been studying real estate and mortgages and writing about its impact on the economy for a long time. I guess you must have missed the 4000 real estate related posts ove rthe past 7 years.

And, I have been a whole lot more right than most in all of them.

See this from 2006:

Real Estate and the Post-Crash Economy
http://www.2000wave.com/article.asp?id=mwo122906

By: M

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:51:37 +0000

Certainly governments can’t buoy the real estate market forever. But, slowing the deflation and deleveraging processes down some might soften the landing. I wonder if it is a bad thing if government action has indeed added 5% to market prices (http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2009/10/24/uncle-sam-adds-5-to-prices-of-homes-goldman-says/) even in a purely economic sense. And, the social issues are non-trivial. Too, removing the government damper on this might be less akin to “pulling the band-aid off” and more like letting the whole powder keg burn at once.

By: nertopia

nertopia — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 20:20:14 +0000

I think it’s important to note what really drove the economic meltdown and the sub-prime mortgage mess. The media and conservative pundits like to point the finger of blame at the many people who should not have been given loans, sub-prime, ARMs or whatever exotic flavor of mortgage was put together by the mortgage lenders.

However the key point is this:

It was not the poor shiftless borrowers that bought us the economic mess. It was Wall Street pushing the lenders to sell as many mortgages as possible so they could sell securitized packages of these loans. These packages were then sold and leveraged as high as 30-1. It is estimated that there were approx 1.4 trillion dollars worth of these mortgages out there but they were leveraged to the tune of (est. approx. 140 trillion dollars)… by Wall Street and the banks.

The bailout money from all the different branches of the Government (est. approx. 14 trillion dollars) was never intended to save main street, loosen the credit, modify mortgages but to save Wall Street and the Banks a**es.

They made a bet and lost and we the people are on the hook to bail them out… If the money had gone directly to mod all the loans that were made to main street EVERY SINGLE loan could of been modded and the foreclosure rate would have been kept very low. The money left over would also have paid for health care of every single American as well. We have been ripped off. The money was given to the banks to sustain the status quo of wealth distribution in America. Everyone else is just left to swing in the wind… Which is why I have to disagree with the data. Yes modded loans do not have the retention rate under the current rules and regs. BUT if they had drafted rules to deal with the mess at the beginning pre-bailout we could of saved millions of people from losing their homes. Instead we gave money to the guys that leveraged these mortgages beyond the hilt…

When is there going to be some legal action taken against the very people who put millions of people out on the street because of their greed and avarice? Never my friends… because the horse is out of the barn… and the people who watch over the barn are in the pocket of Wall Street and the Banks…