From the ConstitutionalConcepts People
Click on title above to read more....
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Daily v. 1st National Bank of Montgomery
Click on title above
Affidavit; http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/CreditRiver/1969-12-01affidavitofTheoRMellby.pdf
Affidavit; http://www.lawlibrary.state.mn.us/CreditRiver/1969-12-01affidavitofTheoRMellby.pdf
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The New Mortgage Revolution: Walk Away
By Alyssa Katz
Jan 25th 2010 @ 5:00PM
Filed Under: News
Big real estate developers do it all the time - like yesterday, when the owner of New York City's Stuyvesant Town complex decided to stop paying its $3 billion mortgage. So why are you still writing a check every month on that mortgage that's much bigger than your home is actually worth?
Good question, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler says. Thaler tells New York Times readers that it's not just alright to walk away from one's over-sized mortgage -- it may actually be a moral imperative. (An earlier Times article, by Roger Lowenstein, said much the same thing.) After all, lenders had no second thoughts about lending more than many borrowers could afford or than the homes might actually be worth. It's just not fair to expect borrowers to follow rules that the lenders don't.
But why stop there? Some commentators are now calling on borrowers to start a mass mortgage strike.
"Remember burning draft cards? Burn your mortgage," the blog DailyKos told readers recently:
"The real risk to the banks and investors is that the people in those homes might just decide to walk away. And that's what we must do. Doesn't have to be everybody, of course; but anyone who finds themselves seriously underwater with no hope of ever recouping their investment....just walk away Renee. Morality has nothing to do with it. You are a cog in the wheel of a machine that is killing this country and if you remain a cog you enable it. Remove your cog and the machine will not keep running. Remove millions of cogs and the machine gets replaced."
Now the call for a borrowers' revolt is being joined by folks who know an opportunity when they see it: real estate agents. Over the past month, agents have been rushing to declare 2010 "the year of the strategic default." Here's Connecticut Realtor Minna Reid:
Loan modifications do not address the real problem of heavy negative equity and are sure to fail most of the time. Even if the homeowner lowers their current payment they are left more trapped than ever. There will be no quick recovery this time. Years later when there is a need to HAVE TO move, the original problem of being upside down remains and the modified homeowner is left to short sell or foreclose once again.
Isn't it better to just cut the losses upfront ?
I know many will consider strategic default wrong or immoral, but as for me, I stopped passing judgment long ago.
Reid is far from the only real estate agent using mass revolt against the banks as a sales strategy. San Diego broker Bob Schwartz asks, "How many homeowners will suddenly wake up to the fact that their home is now worth tens of thousands of dollars less than their mortgage balance? Only the naive will believe that their San Diego home's value will bounce back anytime soon.... Defaulting "strategically" can entice more walk-aways by buying all the major items they may need in the near future, such as a car or even a house, right before they take a hike. As long as you stay current with other mortgage lenders, one could potentially have a good credit standing in 2 years after the walk-away."
And Phoenix agent Bob Stahl joins the chorus, assuring borrowers that a strategic default followed by a short sale won't hurt their ability to get a mortgage in the future.
Many of the agents calling for a mass movement of strategic defaulters specialize in short sales -- selling a home for less than the mortgage on it – something that mortgage servicers will often only consider once a borrower has begun to miss payments. It's ironic that after years of helping push prices up to maximize commissions, real estate agents are now pushing borrowers to dump their properties in short sales, so they can jump in and close a deal.
Still, they may be on to something.
Calling for mass strategic defaults is the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, prompting a stampede to the exits, and stampedes can leave a lot of people hurt – in this case, all the homeowners who live next door to the borrowers who stop paying, and suddenly see their property values plummet.
But there's also potential for millions of borrowers to gain if strategic defaults occur on a large scale. Nearly one in four borrowers nationally owes at least 20 percent more on mortgages than their home is actually worth, and in Nevada and Arionza it's more than half. The Wall Street Journal reports that about 1 million borrowers deliberately decided to stop paying their mortgages in 2009, or one in four of all mortgage defaults. When a critical mass of borrowers stops paying, it makes lenders – really, we're talking about the investors in mortgage-backed securities -- a whole lot more receptive to the idea of lowering the principal borrowers owe on their mortgages to persuade them that it's worth continuing to pay.
"People are spending far more on mortgage and ownership costs than they would to rent the same unit and there is almost no realistic prospect that there will ever get equity in many of these homes," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy. "Walking away will save them money and also free up money for consumption, thereby providing a boost to the economy. Banks will likely be far more forgiving of people who default in this crisis than they would ordinarily be. This isn't altruism -- they want to be able to make loans."
Tags: mortgage strike, Richard Thaler, Roger Lowenstein, strategic default, underwater mortgage
http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/01/25/the-new-mortgage-revolution-walk-away/?icid=main|hp-desktop|dl3|link1|http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/01/25/the-new-mortgage-revolution-walk-away/
Jan 25th 2010 @ 5:00PM
Filed Under: News
Big real estate developers do it all the time - like yesterday, when the owner of New York City's Stuyvesant Town complex decided to stop paying its $3 billion mortgage. So why are you still writing a check every month on that mortgage that's much bigger than your home is actually worth?
Good question, University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler says. Thaler tells New York Times readers that it's not just alright to walk away from one's over-sized mortgage -- it may actually be a moral imperative. (An earlier Times article, by Roger Lowenstein, said much the same thing.) After all, lenders had no second thoughts about lending more than many borrowers could afford or than the homes might actually be worth. It's just not fair to expect borrowers to follow rules that the lenders don't.
But why stop there? Some commentators are now calling on borrowers to start a mass mortgage strike.
"Remember burning draft cards? Burn your mortgage," the blog DailyKos told readers recently:
"The real risk to the banks and investors is that the people in those homes might just decide to walk away. And that's what we must do. Doesn't have to be everybody, of course; but anyone who finds themselves seriously underwater with no hope of ever recouping their investment....just walk away Renee. Morality has nothing to do with it. You are a cog in the wheel of a machine that is killing this country and if you remain a cog you enable it. Remove your cog and the machine will not keep running. Remove millions of cogs and the machine gets replaced."
Now the call for a borrowers' revolt is being joined by folks who know an opportunity when they see it: real estate agents. Over the past month, agents have been rushing to declare 2010 "the year of the strategic default." Here's Connecticut Realtor Minna Reid:
Loan modifications do not address the real problem of heavy negative equity and are sure to fail most of the time. Even if the homeowner lowers their current payment they are left more trapped than ever. There will be no quick recovery this time. Years later when there is a need to HAVE TO move, the original problem of being upside down remains and the modified homeowner is left to short sell or foreclose once again.
Isn't it better to just cut the losses upfront ?
I know many will consider strategic default wrong or immoral, but as for me, I stopped passing judgment long ago.
Reid is far from the only real estate agent using mass revolt against the banks as a sales strategy. San Diego broker Bob Schwartz asks, "How many homeowners will suddenly wake up to the fact that their home is now worth tens of thousands of dollars less than their mortgage balance? Only the naive will believe that their San Diego home's value will bounce back anytime soon.... Defaulting "strategically" can entice more walk-aways by buying all the major items they may need in the near future, such as a car or even a house, right before they take a hike. As long as you stay current with other mortgage lenders, one could potentially have a good credit standing in 2 years after the walk-away."
And Phoenix agent Bob Stahl joins the chorus, assuring borrowers that a strategic default followed by a short sale won't hurt their ability to get a mortgage in the future.
Many of the agents calling for a mass movement of strategic defaulters specialize in short sales -- selling a home for less than the mortgage on it – something that mortgage servicers will often only consider once a borrower has begun to miss payments. It's ironic that after years of helping push prices up to maximize commissions, real estate agents are now pushing borrowers to dump their properties in short sales, so they can jump in and close a deal.
Still, they may be on to something.
Calling for mass strategic defaults is the equivalent of shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, prompting a stampede to the exits, and stampedes can leave a lot of people hurt – in this case, all the homeowners who live next door to the borrowers who stop paying, and suddenly see their property values plummet.
But there's also potential for millions of borrowers to gain if strategic defaults occur on a large scale. Nearly one in four borrowers nationally owes at least 20 percent more on mortgages than their home is actually worth, and in Nevada and Arionza it's more than half. The Wall Street Journal reports that about 1 million borrowers deliberately decided to stop paying their mortgages in 2009, or one in four of all mortgage defaults. When a critical mass of borrowers stops paying, it makes lenders – really, we're talking about the investors in mortgage-backed securities -- a whole lot more receptive to the idea of lowering the principal borrowers owe on their mortgages to persuade them that it's worth continuing to pay.
"People are spending far more on mortgage and ownership costs than they would to rent the same unit and there is almost no realistic prospect that there will ever get equity in many of these homes," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book False Profits: Recovering From the Bubble Economy. "Walking away will save them money and also free up money for consumption, thereby providing a boost to the economy. Banks will likely be far more forgiving of people who default in this crisis than they would ordinarily be. This isn't altruism -- they want to be able to make loans."
Tags: mortgage strike, Richard Thaler, Roger Lowenstein, strategic default, underwater mortgage
http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/01/25/the-new-mortgage-revolution-walk-away/?icid=main|hp-desktop|dl3|link1|http://www.housingwatch.com/2010/01/25/the-new-mortgage-revolution-walk-away/
Friday, January 22, 2010
Bundled Mortgages Pose Problems for Housing Program
by Karen Weise, ProPublica - August 6, 2009 4:18 pm EST
This story was co-produced [1] with Marketplace.
Seventy-year-old Barbara Harris can’t help crying when she walks around her neighborhood. She says she hates seeing possessions piled up on front lawns — the remnants of foreclosure. Three times, the Harrises received foreclosure notices and thought they’d be next.
For two years, the Harrises have been trying to get Wells Fargo to modify their mortgage to something they can afford. But they face one big catch: Though Wells Fargo services their mortgage and is participating in the federal modification program, it doesn’t actually own their loan. And the investors that do own the loan, Wells Fargo told the Harrises, won’t allow the modification.
Like one in eight homeowners, the Harrises’ loan is part of a mortgage-backed security, a bundle of loans packaged together and sold off to investors. Ambiguous rules and the dispersed web of interests involved in securitized mortgages have created little accountability, leaving homeowners trapped. For homeowners with securitized mortgages, once they’re told an investor says no, there is little recourse.
A Problem for the Federal Program
Homeowners with securitized mortgages could be disproportionately denied modifications under the federal Making Home Affordable program. Under the program, participating mortgage companies must modify loans [2] (PDF) for all qualified [3] borrowers; the only exception is when a contract with investors prohibits the modification.
As ProPublica and other news outlets have reported [4], the program is off to a slow start. Even Treasury Department officials say the servicers are lagging. In written testimony to Congress on June 3, James Lockhart, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, singled out securitized mortgages as "especially challenging" hurdles for the program.
Homeowners, housing counselors and legal aid attorneys say that servicers have pointed to agreements with investors as preventing loan modifications. Because the Treasury Department has not released information about the reasons why modifications are being denied, it is impossible to know the full extent of the problem.
This conundrum hits those most in need; homeowners whose loans were securitized by banks are five times more likely to be severely delinquent [5] (PDF) on payments than other homeowners.
The Harrises provide a good example of how a loan is packaged and resold to investors, and how that makes it difficult to modify their mortgage.
A Bad Loan from the Beginning
After carpenter bees damaged the Harrises’ siding and roof in 2004, they decided to refinance their mortgage so they could cash in on some of their home’s equity to cover the repairs. Barbara Harris saw an ad for a mortgage broker in the Georgia Bulletin, the weekly paper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta. "I specialize in helping people. Good, bad, no credit … FHA, VA, St. Benedict’s Parishioner … Si Habla Espanol," the ad read.
Harris called the broker, Shawna Sullivan of White Star Mortgage. "She sounded very nice," Harris says. "We even discussed what parish she was in. And she said she could get a loan for us."
Harris was no longer working, and her husband was about to retire after a career of civil and military service. The Harrises say Sullivan told them not to mention that they would soon be relying solely on fixed income. She steered them away from a Veterans Affairs loan and eventually returned with an offer from Wells Fargo for a $234,600 loan with a 7.625 percent interest rate. That would give them $21,000 in cash.
Sullivan never told the Harrises that they had an adjustable-rate mortgage and their interest rate could rise to 13.625 percent, they say.
"Why would we agree to that?" Harris says. She admits that they didn’t read the fine print on the mortgage papers. "We really trusted her," she says.
Sullivan did not return our calls. Mark Collins, the CEO of America’s Mortgage Broker LLC, which owns White Star Mortgage, confirmed that the Harrises would have qualified for a VA loan. Collins said he could only speculate as to why Sullivan, who no longer works at the firm, steered the Harrises to a subprime loan.
Click to see full graphic[6]In 2004, around half of subprime borrowers actually qualified for prime loans [7], according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal.
Collins says it was reasonable for the Harrises to assume that their rate of 7.625 percent could be fixed, and that homeowners do not always understand that their loans will adjust. "You get so bombarded with so many papers and numbers, it’s really a shame," he says.
Stephen Krumm, the Harrises pro bono attorney from Atlanta Legal Aid, says, "An adjustable-rate loan is never appropriate for anybody who has a fixed income."
The Harrises’ monthly payment eventually jumped from $1,600 to $2,500.
From a Suburban Home to GSAMP Trust 2004-WF
The Harrises also didn’t know that in the months after they refinanced, Wells Fargo sold their mortgage to Goldman Sachs, which in turn bundled the loan and 2,827 others into a $435 million mortgage-backed security called "GSAMP Trust 2004-WF."
Goldman Sachs sold pieces of that security to outside investors. Now, Deutsche Bank is the trustee responsible for administering the security on behalf of investors, and Wells Fargo is the servicer on the loans, which means it collects the monthly payments and decides when to foreclose.
Click to see full graphic[6]The names of investors who actually buy mortgage-backed securities aren’t publicly available, but typically they can be foreign governments, 401(k)s, college endowments and pension funds. In any given security, "there could be literally anywhere from one to commonly several dozen institutional investors, and those institutional investors will be representing literally thousands of pensioners and individual investors," says Bill Frey, head of Greenwich Financial Services.
‘The investors need their money’
Harris says she always heard a similar refrain when she called Wells Fargo: "They said the investors need their money, and how do we expect them to get their money if we don’t pay."
Spokesman Kevin Waetke says Wells Fargo is working with "the investor" to come up with a solution for the Harrises, but both Goldman Sachs (the issuer) and Deutsche Bank (the trustee) told ProPublica that they were not involved. Deutsche Bank spokesman John Gallagher said servicers are "solely responsible" for deciding all modifications.
Wells Fargo refused to provide additional information about the investor or how it works with investors. Experts say investors rarely are involved in an individual loan modification decision. "The investors are a convenient scapegoat," says Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "There's no way for investors to veto a loan mod."
Wells Fargo says "the investor" won’t waive past-due debt, which in the Harrises' case, adds up to over $80,000 in accrued interest, overdue debt and various fees. Krumm, the Harrises’ attorney, said Wells Fargo has proposed adding all this to the loan; the modified principal balance would be $314,000. Comparable homes in the Harrises’ subdivision have sold for between $86,000 and $140,000 this year, according to the real estate Web site Zillow.com.
Wells Fargo’s proposal offers monthly payments of $2,041 — $300 more than the Harrises would pay under a Making Home Affordable modification.
Latitude to Negotiate
Servicers like Wells Fargo rely on agreements with investors for guidance on when modifications are allowed. These pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) are regularly cited as the reason a servicer can’t change a loan.
In reality, however, the contracts themselves generally don’t limit modifications. In a study due out this month, researchers at UC Berkeley’s law school [8] looked at the contracts covering three-quarters of the subprime loans that were securitized in 2006. The researchers found that only 8 percent prohibited modifications outright. About a third of the loans were in contracts that said nothing about modification, and the rest set some limits but generally gave the servicers a lot to leeway to modify, particularly for homeowners that had defaulted or would likely default soon.
That’s the case in the contract [9] (section 4.01) that covers the Harrises’ loan. Under the agreement, Wells Fargo has the authority to "waive, modify or vary any term" of a loan if the servicer makes a "reasonable and prudent determination" that the modification is in the investor’s best interest. It states that Wells Fargo must ask permission to modify only if the mortgage is not currently in default or in imminent danger of it.
"There typically is a fair amount of latitude to work with borrowers, which raises the question: Are servicers exercising their latitude?" says Pat McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.
The Threat of Lawsuits
Even though the PSAs generally are not very limiting, servicers still fear getting sued by investors. It has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting modifications, says a Treasury Department spokesperson.
"Servicers have indicated that they … are very concerned that if they do overmodifications of mortgage loans, that they would be subject to lawsuits," Tom Deutsch, the deputy executive director of the American Securitization Forum, said in a congressional hearing in November.
The contracts can be vague, and different investors often have different interests in the securities. "It causes the servicer to want to watch their back more," says Kurt Eggert, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Doing little or nothing can be safest.
"It is not the job of the person running the investment to worry about whether the homeowners or the bank that created the loan is happy with the transaction," says Greenwich Financial’s Frey, who sued Countrywide in the only major lawsuit over modification. Frey says investment managers have a legal, fiduciary obligation to do what will make investors the most money.
He knows it sounds harsh, but he points out that the ultimate investors are generally ordinary people, through retirement plans and pension funds.
Questionable ‘Safe Harbor’
Click to see full graphic[6]The government has attempted to address some of the legal barriers to modifications, but challenges in modifying securitized loans persist.
In late May, President Barack Obama signed a bill that included a "safe harbor" provision designed to protect servicers from being sued by investors. The original draft [10] of the legislation included a clause that provided protection "notwithstanding any investment contract between a servicer and a securitization vehicle or investor," but after lobbying efforts [11] by Frey and other investors, Congress removed that clause from the final version [12] of the law.
"It may not be as safe a harbor as they think," Frey says. "If they were to modify these loans en masse, and the safe harbor was not sufficient to protect them, the financial solvency of the firms would be called into question."
A Treasury Department spokeswoman said the administration believes it can reduce the fear of litigation by standardizing the requirements for modification and including a calculation to determine if investors make more money by modifying through the federal program than by foreclosing.
But now, five months into the program and two months after the new laws, homeowners still say servicers point to investors when denying Making Home Affordable modifications.
Holding Out Hope
"I do believe that the president has made it possible that someone in the situation like my husband and I to be reprieved and helped," Harris says. But with so many players, when people like the Harrises are told the investor won’t allow a modification, there’s little recourse.
ProPublica will continue our reporting [13] on the Making Home Affordable program. If you plan to apply for a modification, or already have, please tell us your story [14].
Write to Karen Weise at Karen.Weise@propublica.org [15] .
Want to know more? Follow ProPublica on Facebook [16] and Twitter [17], and get ProPublica headlines delivered by e-mail every day [18].
Tags: Bailout, Loan Modification, Loan Originators, Loan Servicers, Loan Servicing, Making Home Affordable, Wells Fargo
http://www.propublica.org/ion/bailout/item/making-home-affordable-loan-modifications-denied-806
This story was co-produced [1] with Marketplace.
Seventy-year-old Barbara Harris can’t help crying when she walks around her neighborhood. She says she hates seeing possessions piled up on front lawns — the remnants of foreclosure. Three times, the Harrises received foreclosure notices and thought they’d be next.
For two years, the Harrises have been trying to get Wells Fargo to modify their mortgage to something they can afford. But they face one big catch: Though Wells Fargo services their mortgage and is participating in the federal modification program, it doesn’t actually own their loan. And the investors that do own the loan, Wells Fargo told the Harrises, won’t allow the modification.
Like one in eight homeowners, the Harrises’ loan is part of a mortgage-backed security, a bundle of loans packaged together and sold off to investors. Ambiguous rules and the dispersed web of interests involved in securitized mortgages have created little accountability, leaving homeowners trapped. For homeowners with securitized mortgages, once they’re told an investor says no, there is little recourse.
A Problem for the Federal Program
Homeowners with securitized mortgages could be disproportionately denied modifications under the federal Making Home Affordable program. Under the program, participating mortgage companies must modify loans [2] (PDF) for all qualified [3] borrowers; the only exception is when a contract with investors prohibits the modification.
As ProPublica and other news outlets have reported [4], the program is off to a slow start. Even Treasury Department officials say the servicers are lagging. In written testimony to Congress on June 3, James Lockhart, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director, singled out securitized mortgages as "especially challenging" hurdles for the program.
Homeowners, housing counselors and legal aid attorneys say that servicers have pointed to agreements with investors as preventing loan modifications. Because the Treasury Department has not released information about the reasons why modifications are being denied, it is impossible to know the full extent of the problem.
This conundrum hits those most in need; homeowners whose loans were securitized by banks are five times more likely to be severely delinquent [5] (PDF) on payments than other homeowners.
The Harrises provide a good example of how a loan is packaged and resold to investors, and how that makes it difficult to modify their mortgage.
A Bad Loan from the Beginning
After carpenter bees damaged the Harrises’ siding and roof in 2004, they decided to refinance their mortgage so they could cash in on some of their home’s equity to cover the repairs. Barbara Harris saw an ad for a mortgage broker in the Georgia Bulletin, the weekly paper of the Catholic Archdiocese of Atlanta. "I specialize in helping people. Good, bad, no credit … FHA, VA, St. Benedict’s Parishioner … Si Habla Espanol," the ad read.
Harris called the broker, Shawna Sullivan of White Star Mortgage. "She sounded very nice," Harris says. "We even discussed what parish she was in. And she said she could get a loan for us."
Harris was no longer working, and her husband was about to retire after a career of civil and military service. The Harrises say Sullivan told them not to mention that they would soon be relying solely on fixed income. She steered them away from a Veterans Affairs loan and eventually returned with an offer from Wells Fargo for a $234,600 loan with a 7.625 percent interest rate. That would give them $21,000 in cash.
Sullivan never told the Harrises that they had an adjustable-rate mortgage and their interest rate could rise to 13.625 percent, they say.
"Why would we agree to that?" Harris says. She admits that they didn’t read the fine print on the mortgage papers. "We really trusted her," she says.
Sullivan did not return our calls. Mark Collins, the CEO of America’s Mortgage Broker LLC, which owns White Star Mortgage, confirmed that the Harrises would have qualified for a VA loan. Collins said he could only speculate as to why Sullivan, who no longer works at the firm, steered the Harrises to a subprime loan.
Click to see full graphic[6]In 2004, around half of subprime borrowers actually qualified for prime loans [7], according to an analysis by the Wall Street Journal.
Collins says it was reasonable for the Harrises to assume that their rate of 7.625 percent could be fixed, and that homeowners do not always understand that their loans will adjust. "You get so bombarded with so many papers and numbers, it’s really a shame," he says.
Stephen Krumm, the Harrises pro bono attorney from Atlanta Legal Aid, says, "An adjustable-rate loan is never appropriate for anybody who has a fixed income."
The Harrises’ monthly payment eventually jumped from $1,600 to $2,500.
From a Suburban Home to GSAMP Trust 2004-WF
The Harrises also didn’t know that in the months after they refinanced, Wells Fargo sold their mortgage to Goldman Sachs, which in turn bundled the loan and 2,827 others into a $435 million mortgage-backed security called "GSAMP Trust 2004-WF."
Goldman Sachs sold pieces of that security to outside investors. Now, Deutsche Bank is the trustee responsible for administering the security on behalf of investors, and Wells Fargo is the servicer on the loans, which means it collects the monthly payments and decides when to foreclose.
Click to see full graphic[6]The names of investors who actually buy mortgage-backed securities aren’t publicly available, but typically they can be foreign governments, 401(k)s, college endowments and pension funds. In any given security, "there could be literally anywhere from one to commonly several dozen institutional investors, and those institutional investors will be representing literally thousands of pensioners and individual investors," says Bill Frey, head of Greenwich Financial Services.
‘The investors need their money’
Harris says she always heard a similar refrain when she called Wells Fargo: "They said the investors need their money, and how do we expect them to get their money if we don’t pay."
Spokesman Kevin Waetke says Wells Fargo is working with "the investor" to come up with a solution for the Harrises, but both Goldman Sachs (the issuer) and Deutsche Bank (the trustee) told ProPublica that they were not involved. Deutsche Bank spokesman John Gallagher said servicers are "solely responsible" for deciding all modifications.
Wells Fargo refused to provide additional information about the investor or how it works with investors. Experts say investors rarely are involved in an individual loan modification decision. "The investors are a convenient scapegoat," says Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "There's no way for investors to veto a loan mod."
Wells Fargo says "the investor" won’t waive past-due debt, which in the Harrises' case, adds up to over $80,000 in accrued interest, overdue debt and various fees. Krumm, the Harrises’ attorney, said Wells Fargo has proposed adding all this to the loan; the modified principal balance would be $314,000. Comparable homes in the Harrises’ subdivision have sold for between $86,000 and $140,000 this year, according to the real estate Web site Zillow.com.
Wells Fargo’s proposal offers monthly payments of $2,041 — $300 more than the Harrises would pay under a Making Home Affordable modification.
Latitude to Negotiate
Servicers like Wells Fargo rely on agreements with investors for guidance on when modifications are allowed. These pooling and servicing agreements (PSAs) are regularly cited as the reason a servicer can’t change a loan.
In reality, however, the contracts themselves generally don’t limit modifications. In a study due out this month, researchers at UC Berkeley’s law school [8] looked at the contracts covering three-quarters of the subprime loans that were securitized in 2006. The researchers found that only 8 percent prohibited modifications outright. About a third of the loans were in contracts that said nothing about modification, and the rest set some limits but generally gave the servicers a lot to leeway to modify, particularly for homeowners that had defaulted or would likely default soon.
That’s the case in the contract [9] (section 4.01) that covers the Harrises’ loan. Under the agreement, Wells Fargo has the authority to "waive, modify or vary any term" of a loan if the servicer makes a "reasonable and prudent determination" that the modification is in the investor’s best interest. It states that Wells Fargo must ask permission to modify only if the mortgage is not currently in default or in imminent danger of it.
"There typically is a fair amount of latitude to work with borrowers, which raises the question: Are servicers exercising their latitude?" says Pat McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut.
The Threat of Lawsuits
Even though the PSAs generally are not very limiting, servicers still fear getting sued by investors. It has been one of the biggest obstacles to getting modifications, says a Treasury Department spokesperson.
"Servicers have indicated that they … are very concerned that if they do overmodifications of mortgage loans, that they would be subject to lawsuits," Tom Deutsch, the deputy executive director of the American Securitization Forum, said in a congressional hearing in November.
The contracts can be vague, and different investors often have different interests in the securities. "It causes the servicer to want to watch their back more," says Kurt Eggert, a law professor at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. Doing little or nothing can be safest.
"It is not the job of the person running the investment to worry about whether the homeowners or the bank that created the loan is happy with the transaction," says Greenwich Financial’s Frey, who sued Countrywide in the only major lawsuit over modification. Frey says investment managers have a legal, fiduciary obligation to do what will make investors the most money.
He knows it sounds harsh, but he points out that the ultimate investors are generally ordinary people, through retirement plans and pension funds.
Questionable ‘Safe Harbor’
Click to see full graphic[6]The government has attempted to address some of the legal barriers to modifications, but challenges in modifying securitized loans persist.
In late May, President Barack Obama signed a bill that included a "safe harbor" provision designed to protect servicers from being sued by investors. The original draft [10] of the legislation included a clause that provided protection "notwithstanding any investment contract between a servicer and a securitization vehicle or investor," but after lobbying efforts [11] by Frey and other investors, Congress removed that clause from the final version [12] of the law.
"It may not be as safe a harbor as they think," Frey says. "If they were to modify these loans en masse, and the safe harbor was not sufficient to protect them, the financial solvency of the firms would be called into question."
A Treasury Department spokeswoman said the administration believes it can reduce the fear of litigation by standardizing the requirements for modification and including a calculation to determine if investors make more money by modifying through the federal program than by foreclosing.
But now, five months into the program and two months after the new laws, homeowners still say servicers point to investors when denying Making Home Affordable modifications.
Holding Out Hope
"I do believe that the president has made it possible that someone in the situation like my husband and I to be reprieved and helped," Harris says. But with so many players, when people like the Harrises are told the investor won’t allow a modification, there’s little recourse.
ProPublica will continue our reporting [13] on the Making Home Affordable program. If you plan to apply for a modification, or already have, please tell us your story [14].
Write to Karen Weise at Karen.Weise@propublica.org [15] .
Want to know more? Follow ProPublica on Facebook [16] and Twitter [17], and get ProPublica headlines delivered by e-mail every day [18].
Tags: Bailout, Loan Modification, Loan Originators, Loan Servicers, Loan Servicing, Making Home Affordable, Wells Fargo
http://www.propublica.org/ion/bailout/item/making-home-affordable-loan-modifications-denied-806
The Collapse of the Housing Pyramid Scheme
By Cedric Muhammad
-Guest Columnist-
Updated Jan 9, 2008 - 6:23:00 PM
The Truth About Mortgage Bundling, SIVs, SPEs, and Sovereign Wealth Funds
“In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then, he can rob his house.”
Mark 3: 27 (NIV Translation, Hebrew-Greek Key Word Study Bible)
“Those before them plotted, so Allah demolished their building from the foundations, so the roof fell down on them from above them, and the chastisement came to them from whence they perceived not.”
Surah 16:26 (Maulana Muhammad Ali translation, Holy Qur’an)
President George W. Bush, on December 17, 2007, gave one of the most succinct and clear depictions of the scope of the housing and mortgage crisis, pointing to the underreported role of some of the wealthiest players involved in the schemes. In a speech at Fredericksburg, Va., according to the official White House transcript of his remarks, President Bush said, “And the issue—the housing issue has changed. I can remember the first home I bought in Midland, Texas. I remember going down to the savings and loan and sitting down with the savings and loan officer and negotiating with the savings and loan officer. Well, this day and age you’re going to use mortgages that have been bundled, so the savings and loan doesn’t own the mortgage anymore, or the bank doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore, the local lending institute doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore: it’s owned by some international group, perhaps, or it’s been bundled into an asset. And so there’s hardly anybody to negotiate with.”
Here is the key section that caught my attention in what the President said, “...mortgages have been bundled, so the savings and loan doesn’t own the mortgage anymore, or the bank doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore, the local lending institute doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore: it’s owned by some international group...”
On the December 19, 2007 edition of my talk show, I said, “President Bush pointed the finger at the international bankers, did you all catch that? Excellent explanation by the President of why the hustling, pyramid scheme of the year is now coming down on us. Again, we got those mortgages so easily, not so that the bank could make money directly from us. No, we got that mortgage so easily so that the bank, the savings and loan, the lending institution, could then go to Wall Street and sell that loan and bundle it if you will.”
What President Bush and I, in different ways, were describing is the little known reason why it was so easy for so many of us to qualify for the purchase of a home, over the last 5 to 10 years. Many people have been puzzled as to why a lending institution would be so willing to give a mortgage to individuals with poor credit, little income, few assets, and bad payment histories.
The answer lies in following the money trail after we qualify to receive the mortgage.
After we get the mortgage, the lender sells that mortgage, along with others, to a larger international, investment or commercial bank, or, to a hedge fund or private equity fund, who then takes these separate mortgages—and the expected payments on them coming from us—and combines them into a bundle, and then uses the promise of the future income stream (the monthly mortgage payments from us) as collateral to take out a large loan (from another institution) of their own to finance something like a corporate merger or the restructuring of a major business.
I am aware of the amount of mortgages bundled together in one asset reaching as high as 4,000. I would not be surprised to learn of even greater amounts. This bundling process is known as securitization.
How does securitization work, again?
In a December 10, 2007 article in CFO magazine entitled, “Saving Banks: How the Mortgage Bailout Strains Accounting Efforts” we read, “In a securitization, a bank or other mortgage lender sells the future proceeds of a mortgage loan to a trust, or special purpose entity (SPE). The trust then pools them with other loans and issues bonds backed by the loan payments.”
This article makes clear that the current effort to contain damage from the subprime mortgage meltdown is stretching accounting safeguards that were put in place after the Enron scandal.
The mortgage crisis became publicly visible through the financial media in 2007 when it was learned that major banks like Bear Stearns, Bank Of America, Citibank and Morgan Stanley owned a dangerously large amount of these SPEs, some of which are also known as Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs), and that they could no longer find a market to sell them to others. The reason there were no additional buyers for the SIVs/SPEs was because those who had previously been interested in them—including many hedge funds and private equity firms—began to see that the mortgage payments that supported them were not being made on time or at all.
Providing a clear and lucid description of the problem, The Los Angeles Times’ Tom Petruno wrote in the Dec. 21 edition of the newspaper:
* Enron revisited. At the heart of the massive accounting scandal at Enron Corp. in 2001-02 was the energy company’s use of so-called special purpose entities—enterprises that were effectively controlled by Enron but weren’t consolidated on its balance sheet.
The SPEs allowed the company’s executives to hide debt and losses and thereby distort the firm’s true earnings picture. Until it all blew up.
SPE, meet SIV—the structured investment vehicle. SIVs were created by major banks including Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings Inc. to hold assets off their balance sheets. The basic idea was to borrow with short-term funds to buy long-term assets, such as sub-prime mortgage-backed bonds. If all went well, the profit was the difference between the cost of short-term money and the returns earned on the long-term assets.
What happened beginning in August, as the credit crunch deepened, was that lenders and investors began to balk at providing the short-term money that funded the SIVs. Bank shareholders had a rude awakening: It became clear that the banks managing the SIVs were on the hook to ride to the cash-strapped funds’ rescue—even though, technically, SIV assets weren’t the banks’ responsibility.
With the SIVs, nobody is alleging the kind of blatant fraud that went on with Enron’s SPEs. But SIVs smack of the same kind of obfuscation of liability.
Deception drains investor confidence, and confidence ultimately is the only thing that holds a banking system together. Why did the world’s financial geniuses need a refresher course on this point?
No one who understands the debt pyramid scheme we have all been participating in or observing in the last decade’s housing market can deny that the sub-prime mortgage-SPE-SIV crisis represents the kind of deception that “drains investor confidence,” and threatens the entire banking system.
The United States Treasury Department, The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have all taken unusual, unprecedented, and emergency steps to attempt to provide money and credit-liquidity to the banks holding the most SPEs/SIVs.
So far, those efforts have not produced the desired results and the holders of SIVs and SPEs are turning toward foreign countries and investors—primarily in Asia and the Middle East—to provide emergency capital and liquidity. The results have been staggering:
• Citibank has received a cash infusion of $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
• China’s sovereign wealth fund has invested $5 billion for a piece of Morgan Stanley.
• Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund is poised to make a $4.4 billion investment in Merrill Lynch.
• Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund also has invested $9.72 billion into UBS, the large Swiss Bank.
There may be more such investments made by sovereign wealth funds in struggling American and European-based international banks, on the way. China’s wealth fund has an estimated $1.2 trillion at its disposal. Abu Dhabi is sitting on $875 billion. And Russia has $300 billion ready to buy up shares in these increasingly desperate banks.
In all, there are almost 40 sovereign-wealth funds, with approximately $2 trillion in assets. That amount is expected to rise to $13 trillion next decade.
So far, the foreign sovereign wealth funds have taken only minority stakes in these banks, stating that they wouldn’t be active in making management decisions.
But of course that might all change—remember, beggars can’t be choosers, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Never forget, this all has everything to do with your mortgage payment.
(Cedric Muhammad is a business and political economist who advises entrepreneurs and small businesses through his company, CM Cap (http://www.cmcap.com/). He can be reached via e-mail at cedric@cmcap.com. His weekly “Cedric Muhammad and Black Coffee Program” can be viewed every Wednesday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST at The Black Coffee Channel by visiting http://www.blackcoffeechannel.com/.)
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_4275.shtml
-Guest Columnist-
Updated Jan 9, 2008 - 6:23:00 PM
The Truth About Mortgage Bundling, SIVs, SPEs, and Sovereign Wealth Funds
“In fact, no one can enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man. Then, he can rob his house.”
Mark 3: 27 (NIV Translation, Hebrew-Greek Key Word Study Bible)
“Those before them plotted, so Allah demolished their building from the foundations, so the roof fell down on them from above them, and the chastisement came to them from whence they perceived not.”
Surah 16:26 (Maulana Muhammad Ali translation, Holy Qur’an)
President George W. Bush, on December 17, 2007, gave one of the most succinct and clear depictions of the scope of the housing and mortgage crisis, pointing to the underreported role of some of the wealthiest players involved in the schemes. In a speech at Fredericksburg, Va., according to the official White House transcript of his remarks, President Bush said, “And the issue—the housing issue has changed. I can remember the first home I bought in Midland, Texas. I remember going down to the savings and loan and sitting down with the savings and loan officer and negotiating with the savings and loan officer. Well, this day and age you’re going to use mortgages that have been bundled, so the savings and loan doesn’t own the mortgage anymore, or the bank doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore, the local lending institute doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore: it’s owned by some international group, perhaps, or it’s been bundled into an asset. And so there’s hardly anybody to negotiate with.”
Here is the key section that caught my attention in what the President said, “...mortgages have been bundled, so the savings and loan doesn’t own the mortgage anymore, or the bank doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore, the local lending institute doesn’t loan [sic] the mortgage anymore: it’s owned by some international group...”
On the December 19, 2007 edition of my talk show, I said, “President Bush pointed the finger at the international bankers, did you all catch that? Excellent explanation by the President of why the hustling, pyramid scheme of the year is now coming down on us. Again, we got those mortgages so easily, not so that the bank could make money directly from us. No, we got that mortgage so easily so that the bank, the savings and loan, the lending institution, could then go to Wall Street and sell that loan and bundle it if you will.”
What President Bush and I, in different ways, were describing is the little known reason why it was so easy for so many of us to qualify for the purchase of a home, over the last 5 to 10 years. Many people have been puzzled as to why a lending institution would be so willing to give a mortgage to individuals with poor credit, little income, few assets, and bad payment histories.
The answer lies in following the money trail after we qualify to receive the mortgage.
After we get the mortgage, the lender sells that mortgage, along with others, to a larger international, investment or commercial bank, or, to a hedge fund or private equity fund, who then takes these separate mortgages—and the expected payments on them coming from us—and combines them into a bundle, and then uses the promise of the future income stream (the monthly mortgage payments from us) as collateral to take out a large loan (from another institution) of their own to finance something like a corporate merger or the restructuring of a major business.
I am aware of the amount of mortgages bundled together in one asset reaching as high as 4,000. I would not be surprised to learn of even greater amounts. This bundling process is known as securitization.
How does securitization work, again?
In a December 10, 2007 article in CFO magazine entitled, “Saving Banks: How the Mortgage Bailout Strains Accounting Efforts” we read, “In a securitization, a bank or other mortgage lender sells the future proceeds of a mortgage loan to a trust, or special purpose entity (SPE). The trust then pools them with other loans and issues bonds backed by the loan payments.”
This article makes clear that the current effort to contain damage from the subprime mortgage meltdown is stretching accounting safeguards that were put in place after the Enron scandal.
The mortgage crisis became publicly visible through the financial media in 2007 when it was learned that major banks like Bear Stearns, Bank Of America, Citibank and Morgan Stanley owned a dangerously large amount of these SPEs, some of which are also known as Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs), and that they could no longer find a market to sell them to others. The reason there were no additional buyers for the SIVs/SPEs was because those who had previously been interested in them—including many hedge funds and private equity firms—began to see that the mortgage payments that supported them were not being made on time or at all.
Providing a clear and lucid description of the problem, The Los Angeles Times’ Tom Petruno wrote in the Dec. 21 edition of the newspaper:
* Enron revisited. At the heart of the massive accounting scandal at Enron Corp. in 2001-02 was the energy company’s use of so-called special purpose entities—enterprises that were effectively controlled by Enron but weren’t consolidated on its balance sheet.
The SPEs allowed the company’s executives to hide debt and losses and thereby distort the firm’s true earnings picture. Until it all blew up.
SPE, meet SIV—the structured investment vehicle. SIVs were created by major banks including Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings Inc. to hold assets off their balance sheets. The basic idea was to borrow with short-term funds to buy long-term assets, such as sub-prime mortgage-backed bonds. If all went well, the profit was the difference between the cost of short-term money and the returns earned on the long-term assets.
What happened beginning in August, as the credit crunch deepened, was that lenders and investors began to balk at providing the short-term money that funded the SIVs. Bank shareholders had a rude awakening: It became clear that the banks managing the SIVs were on the hook to ride to the cash-strapped funds’ rescue—even though, technically, SIV assets weren’t the banks’ responsibility.
With the SIVs, nobody is alleging the kind of blatant fraud that went on with Enron’s SPEs. But SIVs smack of the same kind of obfuscation of liability.
Deception drains investor confidence, and confidence ultimately is the only thing that holds a banking system together. Why did the world’s financial geniuses need a refresher course on this point?
No one who understands the debt pyramid scheme we have all been participating in or observing in the last decade’s housing market can deny that the sub-prime mortgage-SPE-SIV crisis represents the kind of deception that “drains investor confidence,” and threatens the entire banking system.
The United States Treasury Department, The Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have all taken unusual, unprecedented, and emergency steps to attempt to provide money and credit-liquidity to the banks holding the most SPEs/SIVs.
So far, those efforts have not produced the desired results and the holders of SIVs and SPEs are turning toward foreign countries and investors—primarily in Asia and the Middle East—to provide emergency capital and liquidity. The results have been staggering:
• Citibank has received a cash infusion of $7.5 billion from Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund.
• China’s sovereign wealth fund has invested $5 billion for a piece of Morgan Stanley.
• Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund is poised to make a $4.4 billion investment in Merrill Lynch.
• Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund also has invested $9.72 billion into UBS, the large Swiss Bank.
There may be more such investments made by sovereign wealth funds in struggling American and European-based international banks, on the way. China’s wealth fund has an estimated $1.2 trillion at its disposal. Abu Dhabi is sitting on $875 billion. And Russia has $300 billion ready to buy up shares in these increasingly desperate banks.
In all, there are almost 40 sovereign-wealth funds, with approximately $2 trillion in assets. That amount is expected to rise to $13 trillion next decade.
So far, the foreign sovereign wealth funds have taken only minority stakes in these banks, stating that they wouldn’t be active in making management decisions.
But of course that might all change—remember, beggars can’t be choosers, and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
Never forget, this all has everything to do with your mortgage payment.
(Cedric Muhammad is a business and political economist who advises entrepreneurs and small businesses through his company, CM Cap (http://www.cmcap.com/). He can be reached via e-mail at cedric@cmcap.com. His weekly “Cedric Muhammad and Black Coffee Program” can be viewed every Wednesday from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. EST at The Black Coffee Channel by visiting http://www.blackcoffeechannel.com/.)
http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_4275.shtml
Sunday, January 10, 2010
The Loan Modification Process: Winning the Trial, Losing Your House
Winning the trial, losing your house
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) รข€” Question: I have also made trial payments under the Making Home Affordable program. But my house truly was in foreclosure and I spoke with an attorney. Your advice in your column is wrong. They can foreclose, they will foreclose, and they are foreclosing on thousands of people who have made their trial [...]
Click on title above to read how the Bank$ters are stalling on implementing the Loan Modification Process and why.....
http://loanmodificationexplosion.com/2010/01/winning-the-trial-losing-your-house/
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
HomeOwnership: American Dream or Nightmare?
From Property Professor Blog; Adams on Homeownership
Kristen Adams (Stetson) has posted Homeownership: American Dream or Illusion of Empowerment? on SSRN. Here's the abstract:
In this Article, I endeavor to show that because Americans value homeownership so much — in fact, more than we should — we have placed ourselves in an untenable position as a country and now find ourselves in the midst of a well-documented housing crisis. In addition, we have used the primacy of homeownership as an excuse not to fulfill our country’s commitment to provide housing assistance to those persons who need it most. We have done this in part by undervaluing quality, affordable rental property (and quality renters) just as we have overvalued homeownership (and homeowners). Some have used the word “myth” in talking about the American view of homeownership; however, the word I prefer is “illusion,” which I intend to be less pejorative while still acknowledging that homeownership does not always deliver the benefits it promises, particularly for lower income homeowners. This Article is not particularly concerned with the question of who is to blame for the current housing crisis, because I believe fault in this context is too complicated to be laid at the feet of just one party or another. Part II of this Article examines the median American household, mortgage, and house, concluding that many Americans cannot afford the homes they have purchased. Next, Part III addresses the question of why our country overvalues homeownership to such an extent that it now finds itself in this position. In doing so, Part III examines the many benefits that homeownership supposedly provides to both individuals and society. Part IV contrasts society’s customary treatment of homeownership as a virtue with its stigmatization of renters, concluding that the latter is unfounded. Part IV also explores how the very interests that have promoted homeownership have also benefited most from its growth. Part V considers several factors that contributed to the real estate boom that culminated in the mid-2000s, including homeowners’ treatment of mortgage debt as wealth, financing options such as no-down-payment and interest-only loans, increased utilization of home equity loans, and certain features of subprime lending. Part VI concludes by suggesting that universal homeownership does not provide the benefits Americans have come to expect from it and proposing four steps policymakers should follow in creating healthier, more sustainable housing policy.
Ben Barros
Kristen Adams (Stetson) has posted Homeownership: American Dream or Illusion of Empowerment? on SSRN. Here's the abstract:
In this Article, I endeavor to show that because Americans value homeownership so much — in fact, more than we should — we have placed ourselves in an untenable position as a country and now find ourselves in the midst of a well-documented housing crisis. In addition, we have used the primacy of homeownership as an excuse not to fulfill our country’s commitment to provide housing assistance to those persons who need it most. We have done this in part by undervaluing quality, affordable rental property (and quality renters) just as we have overvalued homeownership (and homeowners). Some have used the word “myth” in talking about the American view of homeownership; however, the word I prefer is “illusion,” which I intend to be less pejorative while still acknowledging that homeownership does not always deliver the benefits it promises, particularly for lower income homeowners. This Article is not particularly concerned with the question of who is to blame for the current housing crisis, because I believe fault in this context is too complicated to be laid at the feet of just one party or another. Part II of this Article examines the median American household, mortgage, and house, concluding that many Americans cannot afford the homes they have purchased. Next, Part III addresses the question of why our country overvalues homeownership to such an extent that it now finds itself in this position. In doing so, Part III examines the many benefits that homeownership supposedly provides to both individuals and society. Part IV contrasts society’s customary treatment of homeownership as a virtue with its stigmatization of renters, concluding that the latter is unfounded. Part IV also explores how the very interests that have promoted homeownership have also benefited most from its growth. Part V considers several factors that contributed to the real estate boom that culminated in the mid-2000s, including homeowners’ treatment of mortgage debt as wealth, financing options such as no-down-payment and interest-only loans, increased utilization of home equity loans, and certain features of subprime lending. Part VI concludes by suggesting that universal homeownership does not provide the benefits Americans have come to expect from it and proposing four steps policymakers should follow in creating healthier, more sustainable housing policy.
Ben Barros
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Cease & Desist Orders on 6 Loan Modification Companies
Posted: Jan 05, 2010 5:47 PM EST
Updated: Jan 05, 2010 5:47 PM EST
More Las Vegas News More>>BREAKING NEWS: Car Smashes Through Business WindowLas Vegas Gunman had 'Lengthy' Criminal HistoryMurdered Court Officer Remembered for DedicationMan Shot and Killed in Northwest Las VegasCease & Desist Orders on 6 Loan Modification CompaniesPet Owners Required to Spay and NeuterLas Vegas Courthouse Shooting Raises Security ConcernsRegional Justice Center Lock Down LiftedLas Vegas Federal Building Shooting Leaves 2 Dead, 1 InjuredWEB EXTRA: Police Agencies Address Fatal Courthouse ShootingLAS VEGAS -- The State of Nevada has issued Cease & Desist orders against six companies offering to do loan modifications.
The Division of Business & Industry requires that companies offering mortgage broker services post a bond. The following six companies have failed to do so:
AA Capital Investments
Amwest Capital Mortgage
The Loan Center
Pacific Bay Financial Corportion
Rockwell Financial Institution
WJ Capital Corporation
The state does post the names of companies that have posted the surety bond. Click here for that list.
Updated: Jan 05, 2010 5:47 PM EST
More Las Vegas News More>>BREAKING NEWS: Car Smashes Through Business WindowLas Vegas Gunman had 'Lengthy' Criminal HistoryMurdered Court Officer Remembered for DedicationMan Shot and Killed in Northwest Las VegasCease & Desist Orders on 6 Loan Modification CompaniesPet Owners Required to Spay and NeuterLas Vegas Courthouse Shooting Raises Security ConcernsRegional Justice Center Lock Down LiftedLas Vegas Federal Building Shooting Leaves 2 Dead, 1 InjuredWEB EXTRA: Police Agencies Address Fatal Courthouse ShootingLAS VEGAS -- The State of Nevada has issued Cease & Desist orders against six companies offering to do loan modifications.
The Division of Business & Industry requires that companies offering mortgage broker services post a bond. The following six companies have failed to do so:
AA Capital Investments
Amwest Capital Mortgage
The Loan Center
Pacific Bay Financial Corportion
Rockwell Financial Institution
WJ Capital Corporation
The state does post the names of companies that have posted the surety bond. Click here for that list.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
