All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

[Editor's note: This post was written by CBS News producer Paul Facey, who worked on the latest installment of "Where They Stand" with correspondent Ben Tracy. Check out Ben's blog below, if you want more.]

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If you really want to see the effects of the foreclosure crisis, take a tour of Las Vegas. I'm not talking about the Strip, but rather, the city's once-promising residential neighborhoods. That's what Ben Tracy and I did for our report on housing for the series "Where They Stand."

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Ben Tracy is a CBS News correspondent based in Los Angeles.

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If you don’t believe the housing market is as bad as the media makes it out to be, just head to Las Vegas. It’s ground zero in the mortgage mess. In fact, one in every 35 household in the metro area received a foreclosure notice this year. That’s amazing when you think about it! Vegas is our backdrop for tonight’s “Where They Stand” piece that will explain the presidential candidate’s positions on the housing crisis – and how they propose to fix it.

As you know, when it comes to any home improvement, there is no easy fix. One of the people we met in Las Vegas was Adriana Camejo. She’s a young mother who bought her house in a Las Vegas suburb two years ago. She had a great job and even better credit. Unfortunately, she signed on for a risky adjustable-rate mortgage. She says her lender told her that her interest rate was 6 percent, but after signing her loan documents she realized it was 11 percent. When her husband lost his job, she fell behind on her payments, and is now facing foreclosure. Her credit is ruined.

So, would the housing plans of Sens. McCain and Obama help her stay in her home? I was pretty surprised by what the candidate’s agree on and how their political philosophies inform their plans. Tune in tonight at 6:30 p.m. EST and see which ideas you find most compelling. And you can click here to see our past installments of "Where They Stand."

It's an unusual move, but the government's getting into the mortgage business. It will pump as much as $100 billion into each Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, companies that together own or guarantee half the nation's mortgage balance.

It should be good news for the economy. It will likely force down mortgage rates over the next few weeks. That could bring out more home buyers and help prop up sagging prices.

But while it may keep things from getting worse, it does not solve the foreclosure mess – doing nothing for people who have already missed payments. Their credit is shot, and getting a new loan won't be any easier.

This is a tough economic cycle for many of us and the housing crisis is just part of it. We're also struggling with inflation, rising unemployment and weak consumer confidence. This is a good step, but it will be a while before our economy is back on both feet.

The names sound like two of your neighbors, old Fannie and Freddie sitting on their porch swing.

But Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are actually the two biggest mortgage finance companies in America. They handle half of all home loans and are the foundation of the housing market.

That foundation has begun to crack. For more, just click the monitor.

Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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The crash of the real estate market is a true national crisis. But if the right people had looked hard enough, they might have seen it coming a mile away. A lot of home appraisers did. They knew the whole market was being built on a house of cards. And they've been raising red flags for years but nobody seemed to be listening.

According to regulators, appraisers are designed to be the linchpin in the home sales process – the only ones in the chain that don't have a financial incentive to inflate the value of a home. They're paid a flat fee rather than a commission on the sale.

But the whole works got messed up when, appraisers say, lenders and realtors started telling them what value to hit ahead of time. If appraisers wanted an appraisal job, they'd have to guarantee the appraisal in advance ... often sight unseen.

That's against the law in almost every state, according to appraisers, but nobody was cracking down on it. Many appraisers found that when they wouldn't agree to an inflated appraisal, they wouldn't get work. Some went along with it. Others didn't and went out of business. And the value of real estate kept going up and up and up.

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Correspondent Wyatt Andrews gives a peek at his tonight's Evening News, about the administration's agressive moves to try to stop the losses from the sub-prime mortgage and housing market.

Click the video link for more.

Correspondent Wyatt Andrews gives an early peek at his piece for tonight's Evening News. It's about the administration's agressive moves to try to stop the losses from the sub-prime mortgage and housing market.

Click the video link for more.

Cynthia Bowers is a CBS News correspondent based in Chicago.

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For months now financial experts have been warning us that the hot housing market was a critical component of the American economy, and we’re finding out the hard way they were right.

A little over a year ago I was living in the house of my dreams. We borrowed 90% of the money needed to buy the house; 80% was a 10-year adjustable rate (ARM), and the remaining 10% was an adjustable rate that could go up at any time. For a while we were okay.

Then that Fed rate started going up, and so did our ARM. Over a five-month period it increased the cost of our monthly mortgage by nearly 40%! In retrospect we were lucky that we got in trouble making a monthly note back then and were able to get out without any permanent damage.

We rented a house while we sorted out our finances, and found a smaller house a bit further away from Lake Michigan, and we will try again. We still believe in the American dream -- but we realized that scaling back our dream makes it much easier to sleep at night.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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There are lots of reasons that get people into financial trouble, which forces them to miss a mortgage payment, then two, then maybe three- before they get that letter in the mail from their mortgage lender turning their American dream of home ownership into a nightmare. There are expected to be more than a million foreclosures this year.

There are those Adjustable Rate Mortgages out there which, as their name implies, are adjusting. A lot of people took the up front savings, lured by the lower monthly payments, and ignored budgeting for the planned increase. Some people, who shouldn't have qualified for loans in the first place, were lured into bad deals by predatory lenders; others have just had unexpected financial hardships from medical expenses to divorce and death.

(If you are on the brink of foreclosures, check out these tips from the U.S. dept. of Housing and Urban Development .

To find a legitimate counseling service near you, that will likely work with you for free or a small administrative fee check out HUD or just call 1888-995-HOPE. Or check out NeighborWorks Center for Foreclosure Solutions

The thing I was most surprised by when doing the piece was a statistic from Freddie Mac which said that half the people that go into foreclosures don't ever have a single conversation with their lender. As we noted in the story, there is an active campaign, designed by Ad Council (the same people who helped with the “Just Say No “to drugs campaign) that reminds people that nothing is worse than doing nothing.

There also seems to be this underlying feeling that banks are interested in taking over your home. I don't know too much about real estate or banking, but I don't think banks want to get into the home ownership business. I think a bank would much rather have you make payments on time and make their money from the interest.

But as we mentioned in the piece, and as the ad campaign is trying to stress, there is help out there -- and it starts with a phone call. These agencies can help present a case to the lender which may qualify the homeowner for a repayment plan, or having past due amounts tacked onto a longer mortgage term. These are of course just a few of the ways that you might be able to keep the roof over your head. There are more drastic measures but it is a case specific set of recommendations. But the homeowner has to take the first step.

Armen Keteyian is the chief investigative correspondent for CBS News.

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They could have been your brother or sister, aunt or uncle. Instead they saw themselves as victims. Ordinary folks who found themselves under extraordinary financial pressure, so desperate they made their way to the Metropolitan Money Store (MMS) in Maryland. Only to be scammed, they said, by the very people who promised to help.

In a suburban Maryland hotel I sat around a banquet table with Karen, David, George, Angel and Maureen and listened to their tales of financial woe. How in their time of need they turned to a fellow African-American from the community, Joy Jackson, and the people at the MMS to solve their credit problems and save their homes from foreclosure, only to see Jackson, they charge, steal their homes and bury them deeper into debt.

You wanted to cry. Some did. I wondered how Jackson could sleep at night knowing full well the number of lives she had ruined. I was looking at five.

Unfortunately, they’re hardly alone...

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