This Weekend’s Hot Story While it’s still free, check out this article in The New York Times: ‘In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan.’ It recounts the utterly fantastic tale of a how a small-time Countrywide borrower came to serve a 21 month sentence for mortgage fraud, while the bank’s senior executives literally walked away with...Read More
Reverse Mortgages Gain in Popularity So, after all the fiascoes with subprime mortgages and lax underwriting standards (if you can call them that), “no doc” loans are a thing of the past, right? For the most part. However, there’s still a niche of the market where lenders are approving borrowers with virtually no paperwork: reverse...Read More
Crash Victim: The Mortgage “Honor System” I thought I knew a lot about go-go mortgages. I had already written several articles about the explosive growth of liar’s loans, no-money-down loans, interest-only loans and other even more exotic mortgages. I had interviewed people with very modest incomes who had taken out big loans. Yet for all...Read More
(More) Market Manipulation?In my last post, “Banks Price Low to Elicit Multiple Offers,” I discussed the increasingly popular tactic of foreclosure Sellers pricing low to precipitate bidding wars. What I left out was the identity of the banks who appear to be behind many of them: notorious, sub-prime lenders such as Countrywide and Indymac. Just...Read More
