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Loan Modification

White House Says Bush Will Veto Senate Housing Bill

Posted by Moe Bedard On June - 24 - 2008

It looks like our president is more worried about saving his boys on Wall Street, like the $35 million dollar bail out of Bear Stearns , then helping millions of suffering homeowners who are losing their homes.

AP:

The White House says President Bush would veto a foreclosure rescue the Senate began debating Thursday.

Administration officials object to the federal government helping states buy foreclosed property and don’t like having Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pay for the rescue.

Two GOP senators said they’ll try to block the broad housing package until a committee can investigate how much Countrywide Financial Corp. stands to gain from it.

Attention Washington: Countrywide is a sinking ship that has really already sunk. It is just really a mirage in the foreclosure desert held up by propaganda, and funny accounting allowed by the SEC. It’s just buying time until the glorious US government comes in with a US citizen tax based bill to bail them out, and Bank of America can take over their massive portfolio and rule the world!

My best advice is to examine their books, demand accurate and real time accounting on their “actual losses,” and do not let the B of A deal proceed until this mortgage and housing crisis is over.

I think you will find that Countrywide was made the #1 lender by selling snake oil, and all the other lenders just jumped in line. The ever creative boys on Wall Street sweetened the selling power of this oil by dilluting it in CDO’s and SIV’s. They fill their snake oil coolers to get in on the action, and sell these toxic invetments across the world.

By the time this is all said and done, special mortgage deals for our senators will be the least of our worries.

Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., and Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D., were part of a Countrywide program that gave cut-rate mortgages to influential people.

The move, if successful, would send the housing package back to Dodd’s panel, essentially killing it.

Business as usual in Washington.

I have been ranting on this blog for almost a  year now on why our government needs to step in and demand action from lenders and servicers to do more to help clean up the toxic mortgages that are eating up our country one home, one family and one city at a time. 

Barney Frank had this to say to the Mortgage Bankers Association:

“If this program, this set of inducements, for people to avoid foreclosure doesn’t make much difference, what you will face next year … will be much tougher rules about the home mortgage industry in general,” he said at a Mortgage Bankers Association meeting in Boston.

The bill that Frank is pushing would expand refinancings of risky mortgages by requiring voluntary lender write-downs. This would enable the government to finance $300 billion in distressed mortgages into FHA loans to help two million homeowners avoid foreclosure.

Reuters:

According to Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, the new FHA program could cost the government up to $6 billion. Analysts at Citigroup calculated the Frank proposal could cost the government as much as $20 billion, but profits may reach $31 billion if homeowners do not re-default past expectations.

It looks like President Bush and his glorious administration are adamantly against the bill and plan to veto it.

New York Times:

On Wednesday morning, President Bush, speaking after a meeting with House Republican leaders, said the bill was too costly.

“We are committed to a good housing bill that will help folks stay in their house, as opposed to a housing bill that will reward speculators and lenders,” the president said.

The administration, in a statement Tuesday evening, called the bill “overly burdensome and prescriptive” and said it would “force” the Federal Housing Administration and taxpayers “to take on excessive risk.”

The MBA had this to say:

I think lenders are going to (participate) but with what’s consistent with their fiduciary obligations,” Steve O’Connor, the MBA’s senior vice president of government affairs, told reporters after Frank’s address.

In other words, they are going to keep playing their game because they make the rules and will do it according to the contracts that they made. So, in other words, it looks like we are still in the same sinking boat that we were in before.

Grab your foreclosure life jackets, because it looks like were still in for a wild ride that isn’t going to end anytime soon.