This Edition Of The ForeclosureGate Gazette Contains Active Links

WEEKEND DIGEST JUNE 4 JUNE 8, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

MONDAY JUNE 4
Bank oversight office failed to spot foreclosure fraud, Treasury inspector general says The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency failed to spot widespread problems in the foreclosure practices of major banks between 2008 and 2010 because the agencys examiners underestimated the mounting risks and were given outdated guidance that did not address how the industry had changed, according to a the Treasury report issued Friday by Departments inspector general. Despite rules, many overcharged at closing home buyers still

2012

Lenders are required by law to give borrowers a good faith estimate of closing costs that is supposed to be within 10% of the final figures. But lenders often find ways to skirt the rules. There's little more irritating for a home buyer than to be told during escrow that he needs more cash sometimes a lot more cash than he thought to close the deal. The good faith estimate of closing costs that lenders are required by law to give borrowers within three days.

Foreclosures: Better but still not great Minnesota is starting to recover from the mortgage crisis -- foreclosures are down, as are the number of homes getting pre-foreclosure notices and the number of sheriffs sales, 2011 data released this afternoon by the Minnesota Home Ownership Center show. That's good news, although it's still a fact that foreclosure numbers have not.

FED Released Action Plans for Citigroup, HSBC and Engagement Letter For Ally The Federal Reserve Board on Thursday released action plans for Citigroup and HSBC Finance Corporation to correct deficiencies in residential mortgage loan servicing and foreclosure processing. It also released the engagement letter between Ally Financial Inc. and the independent consultant retained by Ally.

Home prices are down to 1895 levels The lates S&P/Case-Shiller numbrs, reported last week, show that prices in 20 major markets declined 3.5% over the year through February. Theyre now back to 2002 levels. If we subtract for inflation, theyre back to 1998 levels. But consider: After subtracting for inflation, prices are also back to 1986 levels. And 1955 levels. And 1895 levels.

Lobbying Top Spenders, So Far In 2012

FED Policy Statement: Rental of Residential Properties In light of the large volume of distressed residential properties and the indications of higher demand for rental housing in many markets, some banking organizations may choose to make greater use of rental activities in their disposition strategies than in the past.

In many cases, these deliberately fraudulent

securities

were

At the start of the financial crisis in 2007, the top four retail banks Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo were printing money by turning residential mortgages into securities of various toxic flavors and selling them to investors.

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This Edition Of The ForeclosureGate Gazette Contains Active Links

WEEKEND DIGEST JUNE 4 JUNE 8, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

TUESDAY JUNE 5
5.2 Million Americans Facing Foreclosure Unite To Form Outspoken Lobby Group Homeowners facing foreclosures in key swing states are mobilizing together in an attempt to create a lobby group too loud for President Barack Obama and Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney to ignore, touting a message of responsibility for banks and legislation that would reset mortgages to current market values. Supreme Court decision could increase fees in real estate deals In a decision that could have a significant effect on the fees that consumers pay in real estate transactions, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that "unearned" fees charged by lenders and other service providers do not violate federal law as long as they are not split with anyone else.

2012

Clock running on foreclosure reviews If you lost your house to foreclosure, the last thing you might want to do is relive the pain. But if you suspect that something was wrong during the foreclosure process, you need to take advantage of an independent review mandated by federal banking regulators. Last year, 14 large residential mortgage servicers were required by the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision to retain independent consultants to review their foreclosure actions.

Bank Of America Returns Foreclosed Home To Dirma Rodriguez And Disabled Daughter There's finally some good news for Dirma Rodriguez and her three children. The family was evicted from the Los Angeles home they'd lived in for over 25 years after they fell behind on a loan. Rodriguez's daughter, Ingrid Ortiz, is a 27-year-old with cerebral palsy, and Rodriguez took out the loan to remodel the house so it would better accommodate her and her wheelchair.

Ability-to-Repay Rule for Mortgages Nears CFPB Approval The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is aiming to discourage lenders from making home loans with risky features and outlining steps they must take to verify borrowersfinances, as part of the qualified mortgage or QM regulation. Banks that follow the guidelines will gain legal protection against borrower defaults.

Whistleblower: 'Essentially Suicide' To Stand Up To Bank When Linda Almonte alerted her boss at JPMorgan Chase about potential fraud in a major deal she was helping to close, she expected him to applaud her great catch. Instead, he fired her. "We went down fast," said Almonte, 41, about her family. She had been making $100,000 a year as a division vice president at Chase, enough to support her stay-at-home husband, their.

The reporter who saw it coming Mike Hudson began reporting on the subprime mortgage business in the early 1990s when it was still a marginal, if ethically challenged, business. His work on the poverty industry (pawnshops, rent-to-own operators, checkcashing operations) led him to what were then known as second-lien mortgages.

Why American house prices have corrected more than those in Europe ANDREW MELLON, Herbert Hoovers treasury secretary, advised the president to liquidate real estate as part of a plan to purge the rottenness out of the system. Eighty years later, America has pretty much followed his advice. House prices have lost nearly all the real gains they notched up in the bubble period (see chart).

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This Edition Of The ForeclosureGate Gazette Contains Active Links

WEEKEND DIGEST JUNE 4 JUNE 8, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

WEDNESDAY JUNE 6
Foreclosure Notices Intended to Inform the Public May Go Unseen The process of publishing notices about foreclosure cases differs from county to county in Colorado, with few rules defining how the lucrative business gets divided. As a result, there are no guarantees that the notices intended to disclose foreclosures to interested parties including property owners and creditors will reach a broad readership. Speaking Of Bank-Owned Judges... A May 11 ruling from U.S. District Court Judge J. Leon Holmes is expected to unplug a bottleneck of foreclosure filings that began in the fall of 2011 when a bankruptcy court ruling essentially halted the sale of foreclosed homes. In a Sept. 29 decision involving a Chapter 13 bankruptcy case in the Eastern District of Arkansas, Jonesboro Division, the court held that a lender not authorized to do business in the state of Arkansas was not in compliance with the states non-judicial foreclosure laws.

2012

Gov. Brown gets backing to use settlement funds for budget gap Some of California's share of the money from a national legal settlement with big mortgage lenders can be used to help fill a hole in the governor's proposed budget, the Legislature's nonpartisan policy advisor recommended. The legislative analyst's office reported Tuesday that $411 million should be used for a variety of purposes.

Average CEO pay $9.6M in 2011 Profits at big U.S. companies broke records last year, and so did pay for CEOs. The head of a typical public company made $9.6 million in 2011, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using data from Equilar, an executive pay research firm. That was up more than 6 percent from the previous year. The figure is also the highest since the AP began tracking executive compensation in 2006.

Tumbling Homeownership Marks a Return to Normal For anyone who owns a home, the past six years have seemed anything but normal. Nationally, home prices are down some 35 percent in that time, and in some cities the drop was almost double that figure. Even with some recent signs of improvement, the housing market is likely to bounce along the bottom for a long time.

Renting Prosperity "The Great Gatsby," the pre-eminent American novel of financial ambition, overextension and downfall, offers a revealing vignette about the great American obsession: real estate. The narrator, Nick Carraway, can't afford to buy in the rarefied Long Island world inhabited by Gatsby, and by Tom and Daisy Buchanan. But he can afford to rent.

Why do home appraisers not use regression statistics to determine home values? With todays technology and a simple knowledge of a statistical package, anyone can compare 15 or 20 variables to get a more scientific measurement of local home values. It is very easy, once the program is set up; all the appraiser would need to do is input the homes specifications into the program to get a more objective home estimate.

Las Vegas home prices expected to fall through 2013 The local market in March continued to be affected by distressed sales. Distressed sales include short sales in which the bank allows a sale for less than what is owed on the mortgage and homes that have been foreclosed on. Excluding distressed sales, prices locally fell 2.3 percent in March vs. March 2011, CoreLogic said.

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This Edition Of The ForeclosureGate Gazette Contains Active Links

WEEKEND DIGEST JUNE 4 JUNE 8, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

THURSDAY JUNE 7
Activists Call for Firing on Federal Housing Finance Agency Head Over Role in Foreclosure Crisis During the week of May 20, 1,000 families facing foreclosure, clergy and community leaders from across the country did what President Obama should have done months ago: deliver a pink slip to Ed DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA). Negative equity remains a drag on housing market Nearly 1 in 3 homeowners with a mortgage in Los Angeles County owes more on the loan than the property is worth, according to fresh data from real estate website Zillow. In the hard-hit Inland Empire, that climbs to more than half of borrowers. In roughly 10% of Southern California cities, 1 of every 5 homeowners with a mortgage owes double the value of the house.

2012

Huge Foreclosure Flood Feared A new survey by Realtor.com found that the 55.7 percent of consumers fear that the backlogged foreclosure inventory that built up during the two year period following the Robo-signing scandal when lenders slowed down processing, especially in the 26 judicial states where a court order is required to foreclose. Homeowners and non-homeowners are equally concerned.

Spotting the Bankers Latest Propaganda Campaign Perhaps youve heard the line about not wasting a crisis. It means seize the opportunity to make big changes. Well, the banks are doing just that: they are using their self-created foreclosure crisis to build pressure to dismantle judicial foreclosures. The bankers want it to be much cheaper and easier to take collateral with fraudulent documents.

Richard Mathews Vs. PHH Mortgage Corp In this appeal, we consider whether a landowner who has breached a deed of trust by failing to make payments as required under the associated note may nevertheless enforce its conditions precedent. We also consider the prerequisites to foreclosure set forth in 24 C.F.R. 203.604 and whether they are incorporated as conditions precedent in a deed of trust..

Report: Long Island foreclosure rates rise in March Long Island foreclosure rates rose in March compared to the same period last year, according to a report released Tuesday. In Nassau and Suffolk counties, nearly 6.7 percent of homes with outstanding mortgage loans were in foreclosure, an increase of almost 1 percentage point compared with March 2011, data provider CoreLogic reported.

Financial Innovation Made the World Riskier In August 2005, Raghuram Rajan, an economist at the University of Chicagos Booth School of Business, predicted the financial crisis. And he did it at possibly the least friendly of venues: a conference of high-powered economists who had convened in part to honor Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

FHA New Foreclosures Jump as Modified Loans Default The number of Federal Housing Administrationinsured home loans entering foreclosure jumped in March after half the mortgages it modified to ease repayment terms were in default again a year or more later. The FHAs role in lending to first-time buyers with poor credit and limited cash expanded after the 2008 collapse of the mortgage market put it at the center of government efforts to revive housing.

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This Edition Of The ForeclosureGate Gazette Contains Active Links

WEEKEND DIGEST JUNE 4 JUNE 8, 2012

ACADEMIA ADVERSARIES ADVOCATES BLOGOSPHERE LEGAL LEGISLATE OP-ED HOMEOWNERS NEWS ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

FRIDAY JUNE 8
Guiding You Through the Govts Foreclosure Compensation Maze If you're a victim of banking abuses during the foreclosure crisis, the government says it'll make sure you receive compensation from your bank. It's a simple idea. But for victims, determining who's eligible, how to apply, and when you might get a check in the mail isn't simple at all. California homeowners and advocates ask state legislators "Whose Side Are You On" Over 70 California community groups, labor unions, and advocates have sent a letter to California's Assembly members and Senators asking them "Whose Side Are You On: Banks or Homeowners?". This week, members of the Joint Legislative Conference Committee on Foreclosure Issues will be voting on important legislation.

2012

June's 185 foreclosures highest in 2012 The Fischer Crossing foreclosure is one of 185 foreclosure notices in todays Times-Herald legals. That number is down from 214 foreclosure-related advertisements in May, but its still the second highest monthly number for 2012. The majority of properties listed this month are single-family residences.

NY AG Schneiderman Has Independence on Working Investigation

Little Group

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has hired former federal prosecutor Virginia Romano to work on the series of investigations around the RMBS working group he co-chairs. The interesting part of this to me is that Schneiderman did the hiring, rather than the Department of Justice.

Occupy London Tour Profiting Amid Poverty

Shows

Bankers

Putting the 'Service' Back into Mortgage Servicing At the start of this year, nearly one in four mortgages was underwater and 4.5 million mortgages were seriously delinquent. And today, some studies estimate that as many as 10 million borrowers are at risk of defaulting on their mortgages in the coming years. One of the problems that has made things even harder for struggling homeowners is the state of the mortgage servicing industry.

Bank security guards in London lock the doors when they see Liam Taylor coming. At a time of protests in March 2011, the secondary school teacher and a dozen others pushed through the revolving doors of Barclays Plc (BARC)s headquarters in the Canary Wharf financial district of London. He led placard-waving chants to protest bonuses and tax avoidance.

VA RE Project Manager Pleads guilty to Bank Fraud Recardo S. Lewis, 61, of Norfolk, Va., pled guilty late yesterday in Norfolk federal court to conspiring with others to defraud the Bank of the Commonwealth by submitting fraudulent draws on a multi-million dollar construction project in Virginia Beach, Va.

Dane County foreclosure filings in April more than quadrupled They said it wouldnt last, and it didnt. After a welcome year-over-year drop in foreclosure filings in Dane County in March, new cases in April increased to a near-record level. There were 155 filings in April, compared with 106 in April 2011, for a 46.2 percent increase, according to court records analyzed at DaneCountyMarket.com.

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