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ForeclosureGate.org Is A Public Service Homeowner Coalition and Cooperative, Created To Exchange News And Information And To Advance Justice For American Homeowners

Thomas Cox, Lawyer Who Exposed Robo-Signing, Gets $100,000 Prize This great statement on housing from Econ4 hits all the right notes, particularly the line We oppose treating the nations housing as a bundle of assets to be sliced, diced, flipped, and bailed out in pursuit of inflated profits and bonuses. This is really the original sin that caused the crisis. As a result of all that money to be made in securitization, banks enthusiastically wrote more and more loans to feed the machine. They realized at some point that the intensity of transfers would leave them exposed to local county recording costs, so they created MERS to save on those costs and put the transfer system outside oversight.

California State Bar Leaves Homeowners to Fend for Themselves In an unprecedented move that can only be described as stunning ignorance, the California State Bar recently released a legal opinion that will effectively deny legal representation to millions of homeowners faced with foreclosure. The controversy is around SB 94, a law put into effect in 2009 that was meant to protect homeowners from predatory loan modification companies. BofA v. MBIA and the Future of Private Label Securitization There's been some good media coverage of how a litigation fight over MBS fraud has spilled over into a really nasty corporate finance battle. I think it shows yet another danger of too-big-to-fail firms: they can adopt litigation tactics that others simply can't in order to avoid liability. Put another way, the lesson I take from this fight is that if you get into bed with a too-big-to-fail firm on a business deal, don't expect the law to protect you if things go badly.

FL: Foreclosure cases moving like mud Floridas foreclosure courts have made almost no progress in clearing an overwhelming backlog of cases from their dockets despite a $4 million stipend awarded by lawmakers this year. As of Oct. 31, there were 377,272 pending foreclosures in Floridas 20 circuit courts, a net reduction of just 435 cases since the money became available in July, according to the state courts administrator. Judges say new foreclosure filings have nearly

Protecting homeowners in court keeps State's foreclosure rate high Connecticut ranked seventh in the percentage of loans in foreclosure nationally and 10th in the number of new foreclosure actions begun in the third quarter, according to the MBAs report on delinquencies. The report found that nationally, mortgage payment delinquencies and the percentage of loans in foreclosure both fell from a year ago, but states are seeing a mix of results in the distressed home market, especially among states that require a judicial process.

The Selective Memory of the Feds Stress Tests The Federal Reserve seems to be hoping that an ugly chapter in Americas economic history wont repeat itself. As part of the regulatory overhaul that took place after the financial crisis, the Fed now has to conduct annual stress tests of the banking system. In these tests, the central bank tries to assess whether the banks have the financial strength to get through some pretty dire conditions.

Foreclosures in Spain spark suicides, fury Amid 25% unemployment, hundreds of thousands of Spanish families are struggling to pay their mortgages. Hundreds of thousands more have lost their homes to foreclosure. The Spanish public is seething in response to foreclosures, especially after pending evictions were blamed for two suicides. One was this week, when a woman jumped four floors to her death moments before she was to have been evicted.

There's a home price recovery... but it's really, really slow Nearly two-thirds of the nation's housing markets will see price declines for the year through next June, according to analytics firm Fiserv. Overall, the gains will be just 0.3%. One big factor that could weigh on prices: The fiscal cliff. If Congress can't agree on a deal to halt a series of tax increases and spending cuts, a recession is likely, and that would hit the housing recovery hard. In addition, if the Bush-era tax cut on capital gains is allowed to expire -- allowing the rate to increase to 20% from 15% on Jan. 1 --