Hope Now and the MBA asked, “So, how many loan modifications did you do Litton?”
“3,235,” the Litton rep said.
The boys at the “round table” pick up the phone and call Angelo, “How many did you do Countrywide?”
“We did 7,978 guys. Never mind that!” Mr. Mozilo said,”We’re going to have martinis later on the golf course!”
Listen here America, lenders and servicers are helping Americans avoid foreclosure with affordable solutions because they say they are and when they say they are, we have to take them for their word because well, we have no choice.
Yes, no choice!
Banks and mortgage firms are providing questionable information about the number of subprime mortgage borrowers they are helping and the rate at which homeowners are falling into foreclosure, according to the top regulator for the nation’s largest banks.
Those details are crucial for regulators to gauge the severity of the housing crisis and evaluate the effectiveness of the steps lenders are taking to address the problems.
John C. Dugan, the comptroller of the currency, which oversees national banks, said his agency found “significant limitations with the mortgage performance data reported by other organizations and trade associations.”
Dugan said in an interview that he was referring to information provided by groups such as the Mortgage Bankers Association, which reports a foreclosure rate widely cited by regulators and the media. A report by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency calculated that the rate was higher based on raw data it collected from nine of the country’s largest banks.
“Virtually none of the data had been subjected to a rigorous process to check for consistency and completeness — they were typically responses to surveys that produced aggregate, unverified results from individual firms,” Dugan said in a speech in New York on Wednesday. “That lack of loan-level validation raised real questions about the precision of the data, at least for our supervisory purposes.”
The problem that we have, Mr. Dugan, is that this data is coming from the people who want to make this data look as good as possible. In fact, they will do whatever it takes to have this data portray them in the best possible light because they need all the PR help they can get, buy or fudge.
They control the data and its integrity. Not you, not I, not the people whom it affects, but them sir. Business as usual in the lending industry, right? Of course I’m right.
And so is Ben Franklin:
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.”
Fudging numbers are a given, especially when there is no way to 100% verify this “hear say data” based on puffed up numbers and people who control, and have a vested interest in what the numbers say.
More from the Washington Post:
Dugan’s comments also raised questions about the accuracy of the reporting from Hope Now, an alliance of mortgage firms and banks that was formed to help financially troubled subprime mortgage holders. Leaders of the coalition, which was put together by the Bush administration, contend they have aided more than 1 million homeowners. Those figures were self-reported by lenders in response to the kind of surveys Dugan has faulted.
Faith Schwartz, executive director of Hope Now, acknowledged the need for uniform reporting standards. But in a statement, she said her coalition’s information was more complete than that collected by the OCC. She noted that the OCC data reflect mortgage loans from a limited number of banks, “while Hope Now statistics encompass more member data and provide a broader view of the range of solutions delivered by a larger number of mortgage servicers.”
Jay Brinkmann, vice president of research for the MBA, also defended his organization’s reporting. His group’s information, he said, “gives the most comprehensive look at the performance of mortgage loans from a wide variety of different types of lending institutions in order to give a consistent year-in-and-year-out picture of the landscape.”
In an interview yesterday, Dugan tempered the strong language he used in his speech. “It was not intended to be a criticism of what they are doing,” he said of MBA and other industry associations. Their figures, he added, “get you in the ballpark . . . but we wanted to have a much more specific level of detail.”
Banks and mortgage firms have widely varying definitions for what constitutes a loan modification for a struggling borrower and even define subprime mortgages differently. The lack of standards leave the data open for interpretation or even manipulation.
The OCC collected its own data from nine large national banks including Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and J.P. Morgan Chase. The agency then did its own evaluation of whether the measures taken by the firms qualified as loan modifications, OCC officials said. For instance, it excluded those agreed to over the phone. These efforts are often included by banks in their loan-modification figures.
Barney Frank:
Rep. (D-Mass.) said the OCC’s findings demonstrated that the Hope Now initiative was not enough to solve the housing crisis.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Washigton Post, Wall Street journal;
I try very hard to do a loan modification with Washigton Mutual/now Deutche Bank National Trust Co as trustee for Long Beach. They send me the loan modification loan docs finaly after 7 months in which I have to declared in bankrupcy due to my husband illness and unable to work. At the documents they reduce the rate from 9.25% to 7.66% and they put all the months with intereses behind increasing the loan by $ $80,913.37 and said…
“Borrower des not have any defenses, offsets or counterclaims to the modified principal balance now $ 711,206.93″ Also the monthly payments stay the same as when we first started $ 4773.81.
Another is I am in a declining market in Stanislaus County (Oakdale CA) so the value is not even $ 500K…but we love to farm and this is my husband life….sould we deed to the bank after we fough for it?? I am not a quiter!! I am giving $ 10K to Washighton Mutual now for this modification. Is any body who had been sucess in this loan modification cases?
Last point is why lenders are taking some many properties not allowing borrowers to be at home and after that sell the house sliding by 50-67% from the amount owned originally. Are the banks silly or they are so smart to have all of us paid for the big deficiss later? This resession is getting not were-now human depression started. Because a foreclosure not only afect a person but the whole family members as well the community.
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Maria De Prieto