Archive for September, 2011
HousingWire: Michael, you have this large balancing act. You have investors who play a large portion in your operations, and you are also supposed to support national housing policy. There must be conflicts, especially when it comes to decreasing delinquencies and increasing cure rates. What is your strategy?
Michael Williams: Great question. We want to try to avoid foreclosure because ultimately that’s in the best interest of the family, the homeowner, the community, and the taxpayer, who is our bottom line. With that in mind, we’ve done a significant number of things both in partnership with the government as well as on our own.
Gordon, Ga., doesn’t have a red light, but it has a failed bank.
Dennis Smith and his wife Tina run the only dentistry practice in the county about 100 miles south of Atlanta down Interstate 75. The whole town isn’t six miles wide. Everyone knows everyone. There isn’t a lot of crime, but there’s a Piggly Wiggly.
When Victor Avramenko drives through the sunbaked rows of stucco houses in the western suburbs of Phoenix — where he bought his first American property two years ago — he doesn’t see the job cuts, slashed incomes and foreclosures that have devastated neighborhood after neighborhood in this city, which was once a real estate speculator’s dream.
He sees profit potential.
The economic recovery is continuing despite clear efforts to try to kill it.
Even after one of the most painful quarters in history, the nation is still technically not in a double-dip recession, and few expect such an event to happen.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris is rejecting a proposed settlement with U.S. banks over their foreclosure practices, saying she will instead pursue her own mortgage investigation.
The proposed agreement is “inadequate” and would allow too few California homeowners to stay in their homes, Harris said in a letter today obtained by Bloomberg News.
When New York attorney general Eric Schneiderman sued Bank of New York Mellon in August, the AG asserted that the Countrywide mortgage-backed securitization trustee had breached its duty to MBS investors. "As trustee, BNYM owed and owes a fiduciary duty of undivided loyalty," said the AG's suit, which was filed as a counterclaim in BNY Mellon's case seeking approval of the proposed $8.5 billion Bank of America settlement with MBS investors. "[BNYM] breached that duty to [investors'] detriment and disadvantage, by failing to notify them of issues regarding the quality of loans underlying their securities."
But according to BNY Mellon, it had no such duty.
The bank's lawyers at Mayer Brown and Dechert filed a 14-page brief this week outlining its interpretation of the responsibilities of an MBS securitization trustee. The filing came at the direction of Manhattan federal Judge William Pauley, who's deciding whether the BofA MBS settlement should be heard in state court, where BNY Mellon filed it, or in federal court, where key objectors to the proposed settlement want it to proceed.
The Occupy Wall Street protestors finally released a manifesto this week.
According to their own mission statement, the Occupy Wall Street crowd blames the street for everything plaguing the universe: from foreclosures to job losses. Not to mention, unspecified abuses against "non-human animals."
Essentially, their manifesto is short on specifics and fails to grasp the basic irony of their situation. That irony being the fact that while the protestors play the role of average man on the street — other, real Americans are in those buildings earning salaries to feed themselves and their families.
Those buildings are filled with countless mid-level managers, secretaries, clerks, mail room personnel, receptionists and other private-sector workers who show up everyday, maneuvering through the angry protest tribe to earn a paycheck.
While railing against the Wall Street boogie man may be fun for naïfs who abhor capitalism whilst it suffers and revel when it soars, anyone who has studied the financial crisis knows today's struggles are a complex paradigm that is hardly summed up by picking the target of your choosing.
Was it the policymakers in the 1990s who insisted, accounting fundamentals aside, that everyone should have a home? Was it the financial institutions that in response continued to graduate to riskier financial products to meet that mandate? Or was it those who bought too much too soon before the bubble exploded?
For the record, not everyone was irresponsible. There are many Americans facing job and home losses for no fault of their own. But railing against fat cat capitalists is not going to bring their jobs back anytime soon.
To be clear, there are many issues Wall Street and Americans need to address to ensure the country remains a free-market society. But railing against the entire corporate infrastructure is a "throw the baby out with the bath water" type of solution that will only push the realization of a recovery way back.
These Wall Street protests are an unfortunate distraction to public discussions about how to clear the housing market and bring back capital. Albeit, it's not wrong to hope for a return to an honest, ethical free-market.
But the protestors here want something else. And whatever it is; it's hardly constructive. It's also not reflective of the real average person — most of whom are sitting inside those buildings a few floors down from the executive suite — trying to make a living.
Write to Kerri Panchuk.
Tags: capitalism, Occupy Wall Street, PETA, Wall Street
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