Crise financeira

Banks make progress on mortgage settlement

Published in Wednesday February 27th, 2013 In In the media

A year has passed since state and federal authorities reached a $25 billion settlement with five of the nation’s largest banks over fraudulent foreclosure practices that were commonplace after the housing bust.
On Thursday, the court-appointed monitor of the settlement issued a report showing that more than half a million homeowners have received about $46 billion worth of loan modifications, short sales, refinancings and forbearance. The activity spans from March through December and was self-reported by the banks involved in the agreement: Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Ally Financial and Citigroup.

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What Mortgage Relief?

Published in Monday February 25th, 2013 In Opinion

A year ago, when the nation’s biggest banks settled with state and federal officials over claims of foreclosure abuses, the public was led to believe that the deal would allow millions of hard-pressed borrowers to escape the threat of foreclosure. It still hasn’t happened.

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Despite Aid, Borrowers Still Face Foreclosure in the US

Published in Friday February 22nd, 2013 In In the media

A year after five of the nation’s biggest banks reached a pact with state and federal officials over claims of vast foreclosure abuses, the banks are taking credit for giving more than half a million struggling homeowners roughly $45.8 billion in relief.
But despite the banner numbers released on Thursday in a report by Joseph A. Smith, the independent overseer of the settlement, thousands of homeowners are still not getting the help they need to save their homes from foreclosure, according to interviews with housing advocates and homeowners facing foreclosure.

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Austerity may be hitting many in the UK, but it’s the homeless suffering most acutely

Published in Monday January 28th, 2013 In Opinion

From the mid-90s until 2010, following a concerted effort from national government, the numbers of people sleeping rough steadily declined. Thousands of men and women were helped to find social housing or private rented accommodation, often subsidised by housing benefit. But from 2010 onwards the effects of the economic downturn has slammed all this progress into a dramatic reverse.

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A Time to Fight

Published in Wednesday January 23rd, 2013

Faced with the foreclosure of her home, Detroit resident LaKeisha Tuggle devised creative solutions to weather economic hardship. Click here to watch.

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Stopping Evictions in Spain

Published in Monday January 21st, 2013 In Social movement news

As Spain’s unemployment rate climbs above 25 percent and its social welfare system is meticulously dismantled, around 500 eviction orders are issued each day. Banks are repossessing the homes of those who can’t meet their mortgage payments. This trend is sadly not new. There were more than 325,000 foreclosures between 2007 and 2011, according to Spain’s justice department. A fellow Polis blogger explored who is to blame for evictions in Spain early last year. In this post, I look at how advocacy and grassroots groups, including Platform of People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and the housing groups from 15M assemblies, are working to stop and transform this process.

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In Wyoming, US, Many Jobs but No Place to Call Home

Published in Tuesday January 15th, 2013 In In the media

As in any other place in the country, many homeless people in Wyoming have lived on the streets for years or suffer from mental illness or drug and alcohol addictions. But social service workers say they have seen a growing number of economic migrants from Florida and Michigan, Wisconsin and California, with nowhere to settle.

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The Foreclosure Fiasco

Published in Tuesday January 15th, 2013 In Opinion

It’s been five days since Jessica Silver-Greenberg’s article on the latest bank settlement was posted on The New York Times’s Web site. I’m still shaking my head. Her “story behind the story” of the $8.5 billion settlement between federal bank regulators and 10 banks over their foreclosure misdeeds illustrates just about everything that is wrong with the way the government has handled the Great Foreclosure Crisis. Shall we count the ways?

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Life in the Red

Published in Tuesday January 15th, 2013 In In the media

The usual explanations for reckless borrowing focus on people’s character, or social norms that promote free spending and instant gratification. But recent research has shown that scarcity by itself is enough to cause this kind of financial self-sabotage.
“When we put people in situations of scarcity in experiments, they get into poverty traps,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton. “They borrow at high interest rates that hurt them, in ways they knew to avoid when there was less scarcity.”

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Progress on Mortgage Regulations

Published in Friday January 11th, 2013 In Opinion

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued long-awaited rules on mortgage lending that should help protect home buyers and the global financial system from a repeat of the subprime disaster. But the rules, which were announced on Thursday and go into effect next year, include some features that could hurt lower-income borrowers.
Predatory lending was a leading cause of the housing bubble, the spike in foreclosures and the failure of large financial institutions. It saddled borrowers with too much debt and left investors with big losses. Congress created the consumer bureau in large part to make sure all that never happened again.

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