Infinite Unknown

- Metro Atlanta foreclosures set new monthly record (Atlanta Journal Constitution):

Metro Atlanta’s foreclosure problem keeps getting worse.

The number of foreclosure notices this month — 12,568 — set a new record for metro Atlanta, according to data just released by Equity Depot.

Foreclosure notices in the 13-county metro area jumped 22 percent when compared with February and 24 percent compared with March of last year, Alpharetta-based Equity Depot said.

This month’s number also is greater than the previous monthly record of 12,318 notices, set in September of last year.

- Foreclosures are still on the Rise in Illinois (The Chicago 77):

Foreclosures in Illinois increased 22% in February, 2010. The high foreclosure rate can be attributed to the high unemployment rate and declining home prices. With the declining market many people are finding themselves underwater in their homes. Meaning . . . they owe more on their home than their home is worth.
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Lucky for those that live in Illinois, the state had the lovely distinction of having 17,312 properties in foreclosure, which is the fourth-highest state nationwide. California ranked number one

- Foreclosures: February ties November for highest number of foreclosure filings (Daily Press):

Foreclosure filings were reported on 134 properties in Hampton last month.

That’s roughly one for every 449 housing units, ranking it 12th highest among Virginia cities and counties for its foreclosure rate, according to RealtyTrac’s latest foreclosure report.

Across the Peninsula, foreclosure filings were reported on 361 properties. That’s ties November for the highest monthly number recorded.

February’s 361 filings are up 18 percent from January and up 57 percent from February 2009.

-  Connecticut Foreclosures Up 3 Percent in February (New York Times):

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — A new report says the number of foreclosures in Connecticut increased 3.4 percent from January to February, despite a national decline.

Foreclosure tracking firm RealtyTrac Inc. released its monthly report Thursday. It says there were nearly 2,300 foreclosure filings in the state last month, compared with about 2,200 in January.

Total foreclosures nationwide decreased 2 percent from January to February, raising hopes that the housing crisis may be ending. RealtyTrac says more than 308,000 households nationwide, or one in every 418 homes, received a foreclosure-related notice in February.

- Md. foreclosure filings skyrocket in February (Washington Examiner):

Prince George’s County saw nearly 1,800 foreclosure filings last month — about one-third of Maryland’s total — as state and federal officials scramble to find a solution to the unrelenting mortgage crisis.

Nine of the 10 Washington-area ZIP codes with the most foreclosure filings in February were in Prince George’s. The county’s filings increased 71 percent from last February, pushing Maryland to the 10th-worst rate in the country, according to the online foreclosure tracking company RealtyTrac.

Just a few years ago, Northern Virginia was ground zero for the foreclosure crisis; Prince William County had more than 6,500 actual foreclosures in 2008, according to data from the county’s assessments office. Over the past 16 months, though, the crisis has shifted from the Virginia suburbs to Maryland.

- Foreclosure starts up nearly 20 percent in California (Central Valley Business Times):

After reaching the lowest level in a year in January, Notice of Defaults, the start of the foreclosure process, increased by 19.7 percent in February, according to a report Monday from ForeclosureRadar Inc., a Discovery Bay-based foreclosure information company that says it tracks every California foreclosure.

- More than half of mortgaged homes in St. Lucie, Martin are ‘under water’ (Vero Beach Press-Journal):

More than half of mortgaged residential properties in St. Lucie and Martin counties are “under water,” a recent report by a company that tracks home sales, price trends and foreclosures shows.

The report by California-based First American CoreLogic found that 56 percent, or 62,696, of all residential properties with a mortgage in the Port St. Lucie Metropolitan Statistical Area were in a negative equity position for the fourth quarter of 2009. That’s more than double the national rate of 24 percent.

The Port St. Lucie Metropolitan Statistical Area encompasses St. Lucie and Martin counties. First American did not report similar data for Indian River County.

Another 3 percent, or 3,345, in the two-county area had equity of less than 5 percent.

- Jacksonville mortgage delinquencies rise above 10% (Florida Times-Union):

The number of Jacksonville homeowners who have fallen behind on mortgage payments rose steadily over the past three years and today stands at more than 10 percent, according to a national credit monitoring company.

Mortgage delinquencies of 60 days or more were 2.2 percent at the end of 2006 - a figure that grew to 10.3 percent by the close of 2009, according to TransUnion LLC, a company that maintains credit histories on about 500 million people internationally.

Tags: Economy, Foreclosures, U.S.

In an effort to end the foreclosure crisis, the Obama administration has been trying to keep defaulting owners in their homes. Now it will take a new approach: paying some of them to leave.

This latest program, which will allow owners to sell for less than they owe and will give them a little cash to speed them on their way, is one of the administration’s most aggressive attempts to grapple with a problem that has defied solutions.

More than five million households are behind on their mortgages and risk foreclosure. The government’s $75 billion mortgage modification plan has helped only a small slice of them. Consumer advocates, economists and even some banking industry representatives say much more needs to be done.

For the administration, there is also the concern that millions of foreclosures could delay or even reverse the economy’s tentative recovery — the last thing it wants in an election year. Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Economy, Foreclosures, Obama administration, Politics, U.S.

Green shoots!

- Rep. Alan Grayson: ‘20 Percent Of Our Accumulated Wealth Over The Course Of 2 Centuries Gone in 18 months!’

Foreclosures Across The Country Rose To A New High In December

NEW YORK - One of every five U.S. homeowners owed more on their mortgage than their home was worth in the fourth quarter, a trend that poses a serious threat to the U.S. housing market’s recovery, real estate Web site Zillow.com said on Wednesday.

Homeowners with “underwater” mortgages are more prone to defaults and foreclosures. They typically do not qualify for refinancings and are unable to sell their homes because they would need to cough up cash at closing time to pay off their mortgage.

The percentage of American single-family homes with mortgages in negative equity rose to 21.4 percent in the fourth quarter from 21 percent in the third quarter, according to the Zillow Real Estate Market Reports.

U.S. home values declined again in the fourth quarter, as the Zillow Home Value Index fell 5 percent year-over-year and down 0.5 percent quarter-over-quarter, to $186,200. It was the 12th consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines, the reports showed.

“The prevalence of markets in or near a double-dip situation shows that we are not yet at the bottom, in terms of home values,” Stan Humphries, Zillow chief economist, said in an interview. Continue reading »

Tags: Economy, Foreclosures, Global News, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Real Estate, U.S.

December was the worst month for US unemployment since the Great Recession began.

History repeating itself? President Obama has been accused by some economists of making the same mistakes policymakers in the US made in the Great Depression, which followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, pictured Photo: AP

The labour force contracted by 661,000. This did not show up in the headline jobless rate because so many Americans dropped out of the system. The broad U6 category of unemployment rose to 17.3pc. That is the one that matters.

Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.

The home foreclosure guillotine usually drops a year or so after people lose their job, and exhaust their savings. The local sheriff will escort them out of the door, often with some sympathy — just like the police in 1932, mostly Irish Catholics who tithed 1pc of their pay for soup kitchens.

Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody’s Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.

Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor “harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive”. We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.

This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or “Farm Holidays”. Such flexibility innoculated America’s democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process. Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, Depression, Economy, Fed, Federal Reserve, Foreclosures, Global News, Government, Great Depression, Obama administration, Real Estate, Recession, Stock Market, U.S., Unemployment, Wall Street

Listen AMERICA! Listen WORLD! Listen!!!

Stop listening to elite puppets like Obama, Bernanke and Geithner or you are doomed!!!

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Tags: Barack Obama, Ben Bernanke, China, Civil Unrest, Crash, Debt, Dollar, Dubai, Economy, false flag, Food, Foreclosures, Gerald Celente, Global News, Hyperinflation, Hyperinflationary Depression, Inflation, Meltdown, Obama administration, Politics, Real Estate, Riots, Society, Terrorism, Timothy Geithner, U.S., Unemployment, Unrest

Listen America! Listen!

On Sat., Dec. 12, 2009, Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) was one of the featured speakers at the emergency End-the-U.S.-Wars rally.

The event was held in Lafayette Park, opposite the White House. Rep. Kucinich has acted as the conscience of the House of Representatives in opposing U.S. wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Continue reading »

Tags: Afghanistan, Bailout, Congress, Constitution, Economy, Education, Foreclosures, Global News, Government, Healthcare, Iraq, Military, New World Order, Obama administration, Pakistan, Politics, Society, U.S., Unemployment, War

A foreclosure sign stands outside a home in Winchester, Virginia (Bloomberg)

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) — Foreclosure filings in the U.S. will reach a record for the second consecutive year with 3.9 million notices sent to homeowners in default, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

This year’s filings will surpass 2008’s total of 3.2 million as record unemployment and price erosion batter the housing market, the Irvine, California-based company said.

“We are a long way from a recovery,” John Quigley, economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview. “You can’t start to see improvement in the housing market until after unemployment peaks.”

Foreclosure filings exceeded 300,000 for the ninth straight month in November, RealtyTrac said today. A weak labor market and tight credit are “formidable headwinds” for the economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said in a Dec. 7 speech in Washington. The 7.2 million jobs lost since the recession began in December 2007 are the most of any postwar economic slump, Labor Department data show. Unemployment, at 10 percent last month, won’t peak until the first quarter, Quigley said.

Continue reading »

Tags: Economy, Foreclosures, U.S.

SAN JOSE, Calif. — When California wildfires ruined their jewelry business, Tony Becker and his wife fell months behind on their mortgage payments and experienced firsthand the perils of subprime mortgages.

The couple wound up in a desperate, six-year fight to keep their modest, 1,500-square-foot San Jose home, a struggle that pushed them into bankruptcy.

The lender with whom they sparred, however, wasn’t the one that had written their loans. It was an obscure subsidiary of Wall Street colossus Goldman Sachs Group.

Goldman spent years buying hundreds of thousands of subprime mortgages, many of them from some of the more unsavory lenders in the business, and packaging them into high-yield bonds. Now that the bottom has fallen out of that market, Goldman finds itself in a different role: as the big banker that takes homes away from folks such as the Beckers.

The couple alleges that Goldman declined for three years to confirm their suspicions that it had bought their mortgages from a subprime lender, even after they wrote to Goldman’s then-Chief Executive Henry Paulson — later U.S. Treasury secretary — in 2003.

Continue reading »

Tags: Banks, Economy, Foreclosures, Goldman Sachs, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, U.S.

Recovery!

Plywood covers the windows of a vacant home in Denver on Oct. 27, 2009. (Bloomberg)

Oct. 29 (Bloomberg) — About 18.8 million homes stood empty in the U.S. during the third quarter as banks seized properties from delinquent borrowers and new home sales fell in September.

The number of vacant properties, including foreclosures, residences for sale and vacation homes, rose from 18.4 million a year earlier and 18.7 million in the second quarter, the U.S. Census Bureau said in a report today. The record high was in the first quarter, when 18.95 million homes were vacant. The homeownership rate, meaning households that own their own residence, stood at 67.6 percent.

The worst U.S. housing crash since the Great Depression has led to a record number of foreclosures and shaved almost a third off property values. The S&P/Case-Shiller Index of 20 cities in August was 29 percent below its 2006 high, after rising for four consecutive months.

“We are bumping along the bottom of the housing market,” said James Lockhart, vice chairman of WL Ross & Co. and the former director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. “There is the potential for another swing down.”

Sales of new U.S. homes fell 3.6 percent in September to an annual pace of 402,000, the Commerce Department said yesterday. That was lower than the 440,000 median forecast of 75 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Continue reading »

Tags: Economy, Foreclosures, Real Estate, U.S.

Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur has become something of a crusader for homeowners’ rights in the wake of the housing crisis, as well as a major critic of US banks. Moyers played a clip of her giving a speech this past January in which she urged homeowners to ignore eviction notices and become “squatters in [their] own homes” if they need to:

“So why should any American citizen be kicked out of their homes in this cold weather? … Don’t leave your home. Because you know what? When those companies say they have your mortgage, unless you have a lawyer that can put his or her finger on that mortgage, you don’t have that mortgage, and you are going to find they can’t find the paper up there on Wall Street. So I say to the American people, you be squatters in your own homes. Don’t you leave. In Ohio and Michigan and Indiana and Illinois and all these other places our people are being treated like chattel, and this Congress is stymied.”

Source: Top economist: President Obama ‘missed opportunity’ to reform financial system

See also: Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur: There Has Been a Financial Coup D’Etat

FOR decades, when troubled homeowners and banks battled over delinquent mortgages, it wasn’t a contest. Homes went into foreclosure, and lenders took control of the property.

On top of that, courts rubber-stamped the array of foreclosure charges that lenders heaped onto borrowers and took banks at their word when the lenders said they owned the mortgage notes underlying troubled properties.

In other words, with lenders in the driver’s seat, borrowers were run over, more often than not. Of course, errant borrowers hardly deserve sympathy from bankers or anyone else, and banks are well within their rights to try to protect their financial interests.

But if our current financial crisis has taught us anything, it is that many borrowers entered into mortgage agreements without a clear understanding of the debt they were incurring. And banks often lacked a clear understanding of whether all those borrowers could really repay their loans.

Even so, banks and borrowers still do battle over foreclosures on an unlevel playing field that exists in far too many courtrooms. But some judges are starting to scrutinize the rules-don’t-matter methods used by lenders and their lawyers in the recent foreclosure wave. On occasion, lenders are even getting slapped around a bit.

One surprising smackdown occurred on Oct. 9 in federal bankruptcy court in the Southern District of New York. Ruling that a lender, PHH Mortgage, hadn’t proved its claim to a delinquent borrower’s home in White Plains, Judge Robert D. Drain wiped out a $461,263 mortgage debt on the property. That’s right: the mortgage debt disappeared, via a court order.

So the ruling may put a new dynamic in play in the foreclosure mess: If the lender can’t come forward with proof of ownership, and judges don’t look kindly on that, then borrowers may have a stronger hand to play in court and, apparently, may even be able to stay in their homes mortgage-free.

The reason that notes have gone missing is the huge mass of mortgage securitizations that occurred during the housing boom. Securitizations allowed for large pools of bank loans to be bundled and sold to legions of investors, but some of the nuts and bolts of the mortgage game — notes, for example — were never adequately tracked or recorded during the boom. In some (many) cases, that means nobody truly knows who owns what.

Continue reading »

Tags: Bankruptcy, Banks, Economy, Foreclosures, Marcy Kaptur, Mortgage crisis, Mortgages, Real Estate, U.S.