Foreclosures: Help for Homeowners Means Hurt for Banks
The foreclosure crisis is morphing into a full-blown political crisis -- and it's about time. In Washington, lawmakers are urging the Obama administration to investigate whether financial institutions have broken the law in dealing with borrowers at risk of losing their homes. At the local level, legal officials are pressing lenders to cease foreclosures.
SPECIAL REPORT: Foreclosure Fiasco |
We have heard numerous stories of financial institutions being uncooperative at best or misleading and acting in bad faith at worst. These heartbreaking stories are commonplace, persisting across the state and across lenders and servicers.... [I]t it appears that banks have repeatedly misled and obstructed homeowners from receiving the help Congress and the Administration have sought to provide.Several things are happening here. First, the foreclosure epidemic, until recently mostly a subplot in the national economic drama, is now front-page news. Revelations that some of the nation's biggest financial firms, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Bank of America (BAC) and Ally Financial, have "robo-signed" people's homes away have seen to that. With midterms elections only weeks away, Congress has no choice but to sit up and take notice, if only to cover their backs.The excuses we have heard from financial institutions are simply not credible three years into this crisis.
Second, more and more homeowners face eviction. One in seven people with a mortgage is past due or in foreclosure, according to the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy group. That's up from one in eight in 2009 and one in 11 the previous year.
Third, fundamental flaws in the White House's main anti-foreclosure program, HAMP, are finally blowing up in the government's face. From the outset, the initiative has exerted too little pressure on lenders to work with borrowers in earnest to avoid foreclosure. A telling fact -- more people have been ejected from the program than have successfully completed a mortgage modification.
Fourth, and in a related factor, borrowers aren't getting enough help. Despite claims by large mortgage servicers that they're reaching out to homeowners, data suggests that more than 60 percent of seriously delinquent borrowers aren't getting any assistance from their lenders. That led state banking regulators to raise the alarm in an August report:
[U]nnecessary foreclosures will occur without further efforts and resources of servicers to reach homeowners, and, where appropriate, to offer loan modifications with significant principal reduction.Fifth -- and most important in assessing the health of the financial industry -- lenders remain plagued with bad mortgages. That bodes ill for banks and investors, and possibly the nation's economic recovery. As horrendous as foreclosures are for homeowners, their implications are even graver for the broader housing market. Notes bank analyst Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics:
Focusing on the foreclosure mess at the expense of paying attention to the larger, secular threat from the deflation of the mortgage sector could be a fatal choice for American consumers, banks and the nation as a whole.For financial firms, the most immediate threats are higher
borrowing costs, loss of servicing revenue and legal headaches. Credit rating agencies Moody's (MCO) and Fitch are already examining the foreclosure documentation practices of major mortgage issuers and warning of possible credit downgrades. Meanwhile, legal officials in at least seven states are looking into whether lenders faked documents in the course of processing foreclosures. As Ohio's attorney general told Bloomberg:You're going to see a tremendous amount of activity with all the AGs in the U.S. We have a high degree of skepticism that the corners that were cut are truly legal.Thousands of borrowers facing foreclosure are sure to mount their own legal challenges, while pressure will mount on courts to take such complaints seriously. What a mess.
Table courtesy of National Mortgage News; image from Flickr user Casey Serrin
Related:
- Time for Obama to Admit We Need New Ideas for Halting Foreclosures
- How Racial Segregation Worsened the Financial Crisis
- How Ally Financial "Robo-Signed" People's Homes Away
- How to Spin a Failing Program as a Success: The Treasury and HAMP
- What Farmers Can Teach Homeowners About Avoiding Foreclosure
- L.A. Lawmaker Threatens Banks Over Foreclosures (Huzzah!)
- Why Banks Won't Modify Your Mortgage: It Doesn't Pay