New Jersey warns foreclosure fiends

Wells Fargo agrees to modify California ARM loans
Wells Fargo Bank has agreed to make $2 billion in loan modifications for California Homeowners with risky pay-option, adjustable-rate Mortgages that Wells purchased from other banks, and to pay $32 million to 15,000 borrowers who had similar loans and lost their homes to Foreclosure, according to an agreement with the California Attorney General's office. "Customers were offered adjustable-rate loans with payments that mushroomed to amounts that ultimately thousands of borrowers could not aff...

Will The Housing Market Continue To Decline?
. The quick answer to the headline of this article seems to be yes. The volume of housing that is in Mortgage trouble is rising as prices drop in vulnerable markets around the country. There isn't a sufficient floor of buyers in those markets to stop further declines and Foreclosure sales that appear to be on the horizon. It depends on the market. For example, the recent Case-Shiller 20 cities report shows that coastal California has had a positive trend: Los Angeles +4.4%; San Diego +5.0%, and ...

Banks Accused Of Breaking Into Homes
Arriving at her home in Truckee, Calif., Mimi Ash found it had been cleared of her possessions New York Times: TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend Ski Trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks. When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the word...

What Will It Take?
By John Ballard When I saw a Tweet linking this story my first response, of course, was RT. But then it hit me: This is obscene. Stories such as this are proliferating like rats in a landfill. This is not one of those local stories that clutter the news -- Drug Busts, apartment fires, C-store robberies, police chases, Traffic Jams... This is a national plague that has been unfolding over what will soon become three years. Have we have become so deaf and blind to the wholesale ugliness of it al...

Bank Break Ins Leading to Litigation
Even though banks piously insist that every one of their Foreclosure actions is fully justified, evidence in the court system continues to prove that claim to be false. We pointed out this sorry development in October, that of banks entering and changing the locks on homes they had not foreclosed upon. Per a report from the Sarasota Herald Tribune: The process of banks hiring people to break into homes, even when occupied, is just the latest oddity of the messy Foreclosure crisis in Florida. S...

Banks Break Into Homes, Not Always Legally
Banks have made the occasional huge mistake in the massive home Foreclosure crisis of the last decade, including illegally ordering home break-ins once in a while. When Homeowners are behind on their Mortgage payments, or attempting to modify their home loan, or even on occasion fully paid up but lost in the bureaucratic shuffle, they are in danger of having their home broken into and their possessions removed by the banks. A New York Times report details the occasional terrible mistakes banks h...

Banks to Homeowners: Were In Ur Houses, Changin Ur Lockz
Photo: iStockPhoto Bank of America might be on edge about what would happen if BrianMoynihanSucks.com gets into the wrong hands, but they're not afraid to look like the bad guy. According to a federal Lawsuit, Bank of America not only wrongfully foreclosed on Mimi Ash's ski home, but they also broke in, changed the locks, and threw out all her possessions, including a wooden box inscribed with the words Together Forever that held the ashes of her late husband, Robert. Alan Jaffa, chief executi...

U.S. expects foreclosure probe results next month
WASHINGTON | Mon Dec 20, 2010 5:12pm EST WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Obama administration Task Force examining allegations of Fraud in the Mortgage Foreclosure process will deliver its findings next month, two Top Officials said on Monday. "We expect the results of the investigations will be presented to us next month," Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan said in a joint statement after meeting with the task force. "The Task Force will t...

Bank Of America Lawsuits Highlight Broken, Ineffective Mortgage Modification Programs
Bank of America Lawsuits Highlight Broken, Ineffective Mortgage Modification Programs The Attorneys General of Nevada and Arizona last week slapped Bank of America with lawsuits alleging widespread Fraud occurrs in the bank’s mortgage modification programs. BofA, the nation’s biggest bank, has consistently lagged behind the other big mortgage servicers in successfully modifying mortgages for troubled borrowers. Andrew Jakabovics and I also caught the bank violating the contract it...

Crony journalism at the NewsHour
JIM LEHRER: In the worst-case scenario, the panel says courts could block Foreclosures. Banks would be left holding bad Mortgage loans that cost them billions of dollars. That in turn would deepen disruption in the Housing Market. But, in the best case, the Oversight Panel acknowledges, concerns about Mortgage documents may prove to be overblown, a view embraced by the financial industry. This afternoon, executives from two major lenders, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America, appeared before t...

Home loan demand drops, lowest in nearly 1 year
By Julie Haviv NEW YORK | Wed Dec 22, 2010 7:01am EST NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mortgage applications tumbled to their Lowest Level in nearly a year as a six-week-long rise in Interest Rates took a significant toll on demand, an industry group said on Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association on Wednesday said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage applications, which includes both purchase and refinance loans, for the week ended December 17 decreased 18.6 percent, reaching its Lowest Level s...

Home loan demand drops, lowest in nearly 1 year
By Julie Haviv NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mortgage applications tumbled to their Lowest Level in nearly a year as a six-week-long rise in Interest Rates took a significant toll on demand, an industry group said on Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers... Has QE2 worked? NEW YORK (Reuters) - Mortgage applications tumbled to their Lowest Level in nearly a year as a six-week-long rise in Interest Rates took a significant toll on demand, an industry group said on Wednesday. The Mortgage Bankers Association on...

Banks Accused of Illegally Breaking Into Homes
TRUCKEE, Calif. — When Mimi Ash arrived at her mountain chalet here for a weekend Ski Trip, she discovered that someone had broken into the home and changed the locks. Arriving at her home in Truckee, Calif., Mimi Ash found it had been cleared of her possessions. When she finally got into the house, it was empty. All of her possessions were gone: furniture, her son’s ski medals, winter clothes and family photos. Also missing was a wooden box, its top inscribed with the words &ldquo...;

Checkmate | BofA, GMAC, Chase, Wells, Citi, Onewest Face N.J. Foreclosure Freeze
KABOOM! BofA, GMAC, Chase, Wells, Citi, Onewest Face N.J. Foreclosure Freeze This is coming in from multiple fronts... Chink in the Armor The State Supreme Court of NJ has ordered a halt to all foreclosure in the state of NJ. This is most excellent news for the reason you may not realize: NJ is owned by the Wall St. Bankers. Remember the movie Copland about a town in NJ owned and run by a bunch of NYC cops? Guess who used to be Governor of NJ? Corzine. Guess what his job was before he became G...

NJ to Suspend Tens of Thousands of Foreclosures
Six of the biggest banks in the nation have been told by New Jersey's Supreme Court Chief Justice that unless they can prove otherwise, they will have to stop tens of thousands of Foreclosures in the Garden State. "This is something we have focused on for a number of months," Chief Justice Stuart Rabner told NBCNewYork in a Conference Call with reporters Monday afternooon. New Jersey's action follows similar moves in other states where lawyers for Homeowners have found Bankers using so...

Bank of America, JPMorgan and Citi face a possible foreclosure freeze in New Jersey. Other mortgage lenders and serv...
To embed this post, copy the code below and paste into your website or blog....

WHO IS ALICIA MUNNELL? AND WHY IS SHE DRAWING FIRE?
Presidential nominations to the Federal Reserve Board are normally humdrum affairs. In fact, Congress hasn't rejected a central-bank nominee in more than eight decades. But this is the Clinton White House, which seems unable to fill any job easily. And that creates uncertainty for the Clintonites' expected choice for a Fed opening: Alicia H. Munnell. Munnell, Assistant Treasury Secretary for Economic Policy, hasn't yet been formally nominated to replace Governor John P. LaWare. But Senate Republ...

Home sales rise 5.6% in November
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Existing Home Sales picked up steam in November, though they are still down nearly 30% from this time last year. Sales of previously-owned homes jumped 5.6% in November to an annual rate of 4.68 million, the National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday. The rate was down 27.9% from 12 months earlier, when a homebuyer Tax Credit helped lift sales to a two-year high of 6.49 million. Email Print Comment The report came in slightly better than expected. A consensu...

Business Bankruptcies: 2011 Will Likely Follow 2010 Lower
In another bit of good news for the domestic economy, the list of U.S. business bankruptcies will likely get shorter, and probably less distinguished, in 2011 just as it did this year. While companies such as movie-rental chain Blockbuster and grocery institution A&P (GAP) reflected the struggling economy by declaring Bankruptcy during the past few months, U.S. business bankruptcies through the Third Quarter fell 5.5% from a year earlier, while third-quarter bankruptcies alone were down ab...

5 Ways to Prepare for Rising Interest Rates
With the Fed keeping Interest Rates at zero, Interest Rates have nowhere to go but up in the future. Here are five investment moves you should consider before the rates change. [See 10 Key Retirement Ages to Plan For.] Examine all your investments in closed-end funds . While they have probably done great lately, many closed-end funds use leverage to increase their returns, making them more sensitive to interest rate changes. A fund might be able to make money borrowing at 2 percent and getting...

Mortgage applications fell last week
NEW YORK (AP) — The number of people applying for a Mortgage fell last week as higher rates discouraged borrowing. The Mortgage Bankers Association says its overall Mortgage application index decreased 18.6 percent from the previous week. The refinance index dropped 24.6 percent, marking the sixth decline in a row. The purchase index slipped 2.5 percent last week. Rates on fixed mortgages continued to edge up last week, remaining at the highest levels in six months. They are rising because...

More Illegal Foreclosure Bank Break-Ins
I wonder if you could go to a Bank CEO’s home, break into his house, and throw out all of his personal possessions — family heirlooms, photos, awards — then claim a paperwork error. That is the excuse they have been using: “In an era when millions of homes have received Foreclosure notices nationwide, Lawsuits detailing bank break-ins like the one at Ms. Ash’s house keep surfacing. And in the wake of the Scandal involving shoddy, sometimes illegal paperwork that has b...

Open Letter to Geithner & Co: Fix the Foreclosure Fiasco
Open Letter to Geithner & Co: Fix the Foreclosure Fiasco Tuesday, 12/21/2010 - 11:53 am by Bryce Covert | One Comment You may have heard that America has a little problem with widespread Fraud on the part of Mortgage servicers. So what are our Regulators doing to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future? Not much.  So Christopher Whalen called upon a group of 52 Economists, academics, and others, including Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellows Marshall Auerback, Tom Ferguson and R...

City nets $46M on Google buy
Lois Weiss - Between the Bricks By the end of business today, Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be richer by a Chelsea block filled with bricks. That's when the $1.77 billion cash deal for 111 Eighth Ave. will officially close after the building's previous, $500 million Mortgage is canceled. As negotiated, sources said, Google's final costs, along with transfer taxes, a defeasance cost close to $75 million and other fees, will make the all-in purchase price reach $1.9 billion. The ta...

Banks Now Recapturing Sentimental Value in Foreclosures
As the Foreclosure crisis grinds on, home-repossession horror stories continue to multiply and in some cases sharpen to a fine point. For example, it's may prove pretty tough for Bank of America to shake off a little anecdote from today's New York Times. It starts with Mimi Ash, a woman who says BofA wrongly foreclosed on her. The usual tropes of Foreclosure horror come into play: a return home, changed locks, missing possessions. But then there's a unique little twist: When she finally got in...