MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
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OBAMA, THE BANKSTER OWNED PRESIDENT:
“I’m not here to punish banks!” Barack Obama from floor of Senate to the American people (his bankster donors knew this already!)
BANKSTER BONUSES SOARING! BANKSTERS ARE WRITING THEIR OWN NO REAL REGULATIONS! BANKSTERS WELFARE FLOWING THE LIKE DRUGS FROM THE MEX DRUG CARTELS OVER OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS FOR DEPRESSED WAGES!
A third of mortgaged Seattle-area homes worth less than what's owed
The owners of one-third of the houses with mortgages in the Seattle metro area now owe more than their homes are worth, Zillow.com estimates estimates. That's up...
By Eric Pryne
Seattle Times business reporter
The owners of one-third of the houses with mortgages in the Seattle metro area now owe more than their homes are worth, Zillow.com estimates.
That's up from less than 23 percent a year ago, the online real-estate database and marketplace said in an analysis released Wednesday.
At the end of 2010, 34.3 percent of all single-family homeowners with mortgages in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties were "underwater" on their homes, Seattle-based Zillow said. That was higher than the national figure, 27 percent.
This region's rate of increase over the past year — and especially over the last quarter — also topped the national increase.
"Negative equity" is rising faster now in the Seattle area largely "because of where we are in the housing cycle," said Stan Humphries, Zillow's chief economist.
Home values in this market kept rising for a year after values began falling in most of the rest of the country, Humphries said. Now Seattle is seeing steeper drops — leaving more homeowners upside down — as price declines in many other metropolitan areas are moderating.
"We're kind of where L.A. was in early 2009," Humphries said.
Negative equity can have a significant impact on both the housing market and the broader economy, especially if the gap between the home's value and the loan balance is large, said Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.
It increases the likelihood that owners will default — even if they still can manage the payments, he said.
After that, they probably wouldn't be able to buy another house anytime soon, he added, "and that would hold the housing market back."
A "strategic default" — choosing to default on a mortgage — also damages owners' ability to obtain credit for other purchases, further curtailing economic activity, Crellin said.
Underwater homeowners who don't default also may behave in ways that harm the economy, some researchers suggest. They may be less likely to move — even for a better job — and less inclined to spend money on home improvements.
Zillow determines whether a house is underwater by comparing publicly available loan information with the company's proprietary estimate of the home's value. Those estimates, too, are extrapolated from public records.
While the percentage of houses with negative equity in the Seattle area is climbing, it still doesn't compare with Sun Belt markets that have become poster children for the housing bust.
About 82 percent of all houses in Las Vegas, 70 percent in Phoenix and 62 percent in Orlando, Fla., are underwater, Zillow estimates.
Using public records, Zillow also estimates that more than 28 percent of all houses and condos that sold in the Seattle metropolitan area in December sold for a loss. That's up from 20 percent in December 2009.
Snohomish County was hardest hit.
The sellers of nearly 42 percent of all homes sold in that county in December got less than what they had paid.
The number of sales at a loss will continue to increase as long as prices keep dropping, Humphries said.
By Zillow's calculation, homes in King, Snohomish and Pierce counties now are worth about the same on average as in summer 2004.
"Anyone who's bought their home since then probably paid a higher price than they could get now," Humphries said.
“Records show that four out of Obama's top five contributors are employees of financial industry giants - Goldman Sachs ($571,330), UBS AG ($364,806), JPMorgan Chase ($362,207) and Citigroup ($358,054).”
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FROM CREOLE FOLKS
Obama Seeks Brother of "Chicago Mob Boss" for Top White House Post
The roaches and con-artist, fake journalist on cable news are all lying about William Daley being all this and all that, this man is an open borders, down with America, free trade globalist. MSNBC and Gretta "the Scientology" Van Susteren from Fox News are knowingly deceiving the public about D. Issa & his letter to "business owners"=which they made into such a BIG DAM DEAL, but no one says anything whenBarrack Hussein Obama, comes around with all of these shady bankers, hedge fund managers and Wall St. Tycoons, which he puts in his cabinet. All of Obama's meeting with Wall Street asking, "What can I do for you?" is never something covered by Keith Oberman or Rachel Maddow.
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(Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama is considering naming William Daley, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. executive and former U.S. Commerce secretary, to a high-level administration post, possibly White House chief of staff, people familiar with the matter said.
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Wall Street, White House blame homeowners in foreclosure crisis
By Tom Eley
16 October 2010
Wall Street has raised its voice against any government moratorium on foreclosures, even as evidence mounts that banks systematically and illegally falsified documents in order to expedite hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of foreclosures.
Documented examples of abuse include banks hiring contractors and what one Goldman Sachs executive referred to as “Burger King kids” to process thousands of foreclosure documents per week, all the while declaring to courts they were familiar with the cases. Lenders also falsified signatures, notary stamps, and tossed legal documents into the garbage. Every major bank is implicated in the widening scandal.
Yet to the barons of Wall Street these examples of law breaking—what a number of state attorneys general have called a “fraud on the court”—are immaterial, and those who were evicted deserved their fate.
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, whose bank is implicated in the scandal, said this week in a conference call that there have been no accidental evictions. “We’re not evicting people who deserve to stay in their house,” the multimillionaire banker declared.
“If you didn’t pay your mortgage, you shouldn’t be in your house. Period,” Walter Todd of the investment advisory firm Greenwood Capital Associates, told Reuters.
“Everyone’s responsible for following the law. If we all don’t have to pay our mortgage, should we just stop paying taxes, too?” said Anton Schutz, president of Mendon Capital Advisers. Everyone has to follow the law except the banks, that is. Schutz added, “Your mortgage didn’t get to a robo-signer by accident, it’s because you’re not paying.”
As Paul Krugman of the New York Times notes, “In effect, they’re saying that if a bank says it owns your house, we should just take its word. To me, this evokes the days when noblemen felt free to take whatever they wanted, knowing that peasants had no standing in the courts. But then, I suspect that some people regard those as the good old days.”
Krugman attempts to distinguish these claims by Wall Street with the position of the Obama administration, whose opposition to a moratorium on foreclosures the Times columnist suggests is a policy mistake. In fact, the White House is of one mind with the banks.
In spite of mounting popular anger toward Wall Street—and the upcoming off-year elections—the Obama administration this week categorically ruled out any national moratorium on foreclosures, instead encouraging banks to review their own practices and carry through with foreclosures “as quickly as possible,” according to the Washington Post.
According to Fox News reporter Charlie Gasparino, an administration official “bragged” to him that Obama “could have publicly supported the foreclosure moratorium, and unleashed Attorney General Eric Holder to join state attorney generals, investigating the alleged fraud in the foreclosure process—but Obama didn’t after hearing from banks that the vast majority of people being foreclosed upon aren’t the victims of fraud and have defaulted on their mortgages.”
The banks’ policy was also spelled out by Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs this week. “If there’s an empty house in the neighborhood that somebody has a contract on and their closing date is next week and there is a moratorium, that closing doesn’t happen, right?”, Gibbs asked. “That sale doesn’t happen. That recovery doesn’t take place.”
Meanwhile, it is now clear that the voluntary moratoriums on foreclosures put in place by Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Ally Financial apply only to sales and evictions, and not to other parts of the foreclosure process, which continue unabated. However, the three banks are reportedly continuing foreclosure sales at a number of locations, including Jacksonville, Florida.
“It’s a farce,” said April Charney, a Jacksonville-area legal aid attorney and an expert on the foreclosure crisis. “We’re all being played.”
The mortgage foreclosure scandal continues to deepen and spread, implicating the government as well as the banks.
Federal agencies tasked with monitoring the bank mortgage industry, including the Federal Reserve, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Office of Thrift Supervision, did nothing to stop the abuses, even though these were clearly not isolated, but systemic problems.
“[T]here’s no sign these agencies did anything to stop any of these institutions from treating the country’s courts so contemptuously,” notes Bloomberg’s Jonathan Weil. “Perhaps the regulators were clueless. Or maybe they knew there was a problem and decided to let the banks run wild in the interest of keeping their foreclosure mills humming.”
Weil notes that Indy Mac Bank was actually controlled by a federal agency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), while it engaged in the illegal processing of foreclosure documents.
Courts are also implicated. Florida’s legislature last year allocated $9.6 million to create special foreclosure courts in which judges play the role of “robo-signer.” One of these judges is Victor Tobin of Broward County. The Washington Post this week found Tobin “signing off on uncontested foreclosure cases as fast as a clerk could keep them coming, only a few seconds per file. ‘Batter up,’ he said as he finished one stack and eyed the next.”
The rampant falsification of loan documents has now raised doubts over the solvency of the entire mortgage security industry. The “robo-signers” basic task was to supply affidavits to courts in lieu of the actual documents related to ownership. In many cases, this paperwork may not exist or may be lost.
During the housing bubble, when the finance industry relentlessly promoted home refinancing and teaser-rate mortgages, the resulting loans were packaged and sold in complex chains of transactions that spanned the globe, building up enormous personal fortunes in the process.
When this Ponzi scheme inevitably collapsed, the legal paperwork to lay claim to properties was not there. “Now an awful truth is becoming apparent: In many cases, the documentation doesn’t exist,” Krugman notes. “The trusts were legally required to obtain and hold the mortgage notes that specified the borrowers’ obligations. But it’s now apparent that such niceties were frequently neglected. And this means that many of the foreclosures now taking place are, in fact, illegal.”
According to analysts, it is likely that lenders will face a tidal wave of lawsuits, not only from defrauded homeowners, but also from powerful investors who purchased mortgage-backed securities from them.
On Thursday, the stocks of major US banks suffered sharp losses as result of renewed concerns over their solvency stemming from the mortgage foreclosure crisis. Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup finished the day down more than 4 percent. The fall continued on Friday, with BOA and JPMorgan Chase shares falling more than 3 percent.
Spreads on bank credit-default swaps also grew sharply, with BOA’s reaching levels not seen since July 2009. The cost of insuring bank debt increased by over 6 percent during the week.
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Wsws.org… get on their free no ads E-NEWS!
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“Wells Fargo, for instance, which has leeched $25 billion in bailout money, bought an inadvertently hilarious full-page ad in The Times to whine about the junkets to Las Vegas and elsewhere it was forced to cancel because of public outrage.” --- Maureen Dowd, NYTimes
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Lou Dobbs Tonight
Monday, November 12, 2007
Mortgage giants Wells Fargo and Bank of America are accused of slapping dubious fees on homeowners struggling to save their homes. With fewer new mortgages being written, these
companies appear to be leaning on these lucrative fees to stay profitable—with devastating consequences for homeowners. We’ll have that report.
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