Published: October 18, 2009

CLEVELAND — The first night after she surrendered her house to foreclosure, Sheri West endured the darkness in her Hyundai sedan. She parked in her old driveway, with her flower-print dresses and hats piled in boxes on the back seat, and three cherished houseplants on the floor. She used her backyard as a restroom.

The second night, she stayed with a friend, and so it continued for more than a year: Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

09-09

More evidence that the foreclosure pain that began in overbuilt middle-class communities is moving higher up the real-estate food chain: The share of foreclosures in the most expensive third of housing markets is on the upswing.

Around 30% of foreclosures are coming from homes in the top tier of the housing market, up from 16% when the foreclosure crisis began three years ago, according to new research from real-estate Web site Zillow.com. Meanwhile, the bottom one-third of the market now accounts for just 35% of foreclosures, down from 55% in 2006.

A court decision expected as soon as today could negate the validity of sales of thousands of foreclosed homes in Massachusetts, causing havoc for buyers and sellers and further stalling the housing market’s recovery in hard-hit areas.

At issue is proof of ownership at the time of a foreclosure sale. During the housing boom, millions of mortgages were bundled into bonds and sold to investors, a process that resulted in lengthy and twisted paper trails that can obscure ownership. Many lenders believed they could complete foreclosure transactions and later produce formal proof they held the mortgage.

BLADE BUSINESS WRITER

SANDUSKY — Andrea Schwarzentraub is no muscle-bound warrior, but the slight 32-year-old from Erie County has dented the nation's massive debt-collection dragon.

U.S. District Court Judge David Katz ruled that the commonly used affidavit submitted by one of the nation's biggest debt collectors to collect $4,100 from Mrs. Schwarzentraub — and the debts of many others — was not legal.

Banks and loan investors are starting to bite the bullet and lower the principal due on home mortgages for some struggling borrowers, a new report from bank regulators shows.

That's good news for some homeowners, but may portend more write-offs over the next few years for banks and other lenders now wading through hundreds of thousands of applications for loan modifications. The tradeoff for banks is that by taking the hit now they can boost their chances of being repaid.

28 September, 2009

Like Humpty-Dumpty, mortgage securitization has taken a big fall. There is a widespread presumption that government policy, if not all the king's horses and all the king's men, should be aimed at putting securitization together again. The purpose of this essay is to question that presumption.

The first section of this paper will describe how securitization worked at Freddie Mac in the late 1980s, when I worked there. This will allow me to introduce and explain the concepts of interest rate risk and credit risk in mortgage finance.

Modern-day home mortgages have been so sliced and diced by rapacious financiers that some homeowners are successfully delaying -- or even blocking -- foreclosures through the simple tactic of demanding that banks produce the original mortgage note, which amazingly enough is often not so easy for them to do.

As the foreclosure rate continues to set new highs, a little-noticed legal provision that requires bankers, if challenged, to prove they hold the original mortgage documents before getting possession has spawned a minor homeowner rebellion, alternately called "produce the note " or "show me the note". For homeowners trying desperately to keep their homes, the tactic is one way to buy some time -- and maybe even get the upper hand on the lender.

There is more to MERS than meets the eyes..

The financial tsunami unleashed by Wall Street’s esurient alchemy of spinning toxic home mortgages into triple-A bonds, a process known as securitization, has set off its second round of financial tremors.

After leaving mortgage investors, bank shareholders, and pension fiduciaries awash in losses and a large chunk of Wall Street feeding at the public trough, the full threat of this vast securitization machine and its unseen masters who push the levers behind a tightly drawn curtain is playing out in courtrooms across America.

New Fraud Scams

Addicted To the Bubble

Make no mistake; as bad as the housing market gets, it will eventually stabilize and resume its upward trudge.

And when that happens, probably a few years from now, we'll see a truly once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity. Perhaps the best housing deals this country's seen in over a century.