NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Mortgage lenders helped save a record 225,000 at-risk mortgage borrowers from losing their homes during October, according to a report issued Tuesday by a coalition of lenders, mortgage servicers, investors and counselors assembled to fight the foreclosure plague.
The coalition, Hope Now, said the number was up from 212,000 in September.
Ohio has settled its lawsuit against bankrupt subprime lender New Century Financial Corp., more than a year after going to court to block the company from foreclosing on homes, evicting homeowners or making further loans.
The agreement Ohio negotiated with the company permanently extends those protections to consumers, state Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers said in announcing the deal Wednesday, Nov. 26. The company also promised not to violate Ohio’s consumer protection and mortgage laws, Rogers said.
TAMPA — Thousands of miles from the trading floors of global stock markets, an abandoned house in one of Tampa’s poorest neighborhoods is an improbable place to learn about why the world’s financial system is collapsing.
But if you want to understand how we got into this mess, the stucco house at 4809 N 17th St. isn’t a bad place to start.
Beer bottles and shards of glass litter the yard. A blue tarp covers much of the rotting roof. Boards shutter the windows.
The demise of the subprime mortgage industry has been hard on predatory brokers, too. They feasted for years on bad loans until reality crashed down and the money ran out, and there they were: sharks without a frenzy.
Now they are circling again. Predators of every sort have regrouped and returned to their old ways, this time as loan-modification companies, inserting themselves between hard-strapped homeowners and banks, offering to work deals — for cash up front.
It’s a high-pressure, high-volume business, advertising in the usual low-rent ways: talk-radio ads, Web come-ons, fliers on car windshields. The ads are full of glossy promises, like this one for a Long Island outfit: “Reduce your mortgage rate to as low as 4%. No refinancing — no closing costs. Reduce your monthly payment. Foreclosures, late pays/bad credit okay.”
The Bush administration and the Federal Reserve announced on November 25 almost $800 billion dollars in additional funds to help, bail out, or otherwise prop up the financial sector, bringing to nearly $7 trillion the total sum that the federal government has thus far spent or pledged to spend in its feckless efforts to spare America’s largest corporations from insolvency. Included in the latest package is $200 billion for the purchase of securities backed by many different kinds of loans, including student, credit card, auto, and small business. Such loans have become much harder to obtain in recent months, and the Fed’s action is intended to get credit in these areas moving again.
