Interesting admission from Countrywide regarding those claims of working to modify loans for homeowners. From MSNBC:
In marketing, advertising and testimony before Congress, Countrywide Home Loans has said repeatedly that it is working hard to modify the mortgages of financially strapped borrowers caught up in the subprime meltdown. But in a New Hampshire court, attorneys for [...]

Now that the NEW AZ Mortgage Guru has arrived, I am taking matters into my hands. I have decided that one person can only handle so much. Two is always better! So…in light of this revelation – well…and also being 9 months pregnant and about to go on maternity leave — I have decided to [...]

Aimee received a phone call this morning from a real estate agent who told her with a degree of frustration that all her lending contacts and title contacts had left the business. This agent has buyers who need a good lender referral and was eagerly trying to build some new relationships. She was glad to [...]

I saw a news flash on Drudge yesterday afternoon saying banking regulators and the Federal Reserve had issued some loan guidelines. There was no meat in the story. It was a breaking story at the time. This morning I found that various regulatory bodies as well as the Federal Reserve are asking lenders and loan servicers [...]

I just finished reading “Truth-in-Lending Disclosure Failure Leads to Mortgage becoming “UnSecured”” at The Big Picture. This article sent chills down my spine. The main reason being that if borrowers are successful in detaching the collateral from their mortgages then we are indeed headed for some really bad economic times.
The premise of the post is [...]

Between First Magnus (Great Southwest Mortgage) closing shop and Countrywide going through some serious turbulencethings are very unpredictable right now. To calm markets the Federal Reserve just lowered the discount rate by 0.5% to 5.75%. The discount rate is what the Fed charges banks for short term loans.
What is a consumer to do? If you have any [...]

Mortgage brokers are easy targets these days.  Everyone blames us for the mortgage mess. With the political season heating up all the major (and minor) presidential candidates piled on us last week. Below is a sampling (from CNNMoney).
Last week, Sen. Hillary Clinton came out with a plan to address lending abuses. One of its main policy [...]

House Bill 2040 is headed to the Governers desk. This bill makes mortgage fraud a felony. According to Inman News:
House Bill 2040 would make deliberate misrepresentations to lenders — such as inflated appraisals or falsified borrower incomes used to obtain loans that exceed a home’s true worth — class four felonies, punishable by up to [...]

Japan’s GDP grew at a 3.3% annualized rate, which is much stronger than expected. As the Financial Times is reporting today there is a high probability that the Japanese Central Bank will raise interest rates in August to cool the hot economy.
Why the panic here in the US? Well, the Japanese are the most enthusiastic [...]

Mortgage Backed Securities are taking a beating this morning. As of this writing they were down 78 basis points from when the markets opened. That is a huge fall. Lenders usually raise rates after a 16-19 basis point change for the worse. It’s only mid-day in the East Coast and we have a very steep [...]