A Lot More
Observations on housing's wreckage and recovery
Is it just me?
I’m starting to get paranoid. First Lexis got rid of full-text searching on its property records, so it’s now impossible to search for all the loans originated by a particular mortgage lender — one has to fill out a form and search by borrower/property owner, one at a time. Now I discover, logging in to Thomson Financial’s SEC database, that it, too, has eliminated full-text searching. So instead of being able to type in the name of a lender and get gobs of documents from all the mortgage-backed securities its crap (sorry, mortgages) ended up in, one can only search by the name or number of a publicly traded company.
Ugh. The upshot is that tools that made it possible for any student, investigative journalist, lawyer, whoever (okay, me) to track the transactions of mortgage lenders are being disappeared. Perhaps there’s some fancy-schmantzy version of databases like these that still allow full-text searching for those who can pay for it, but one way or another this vital information is out of reach.
How the homes we live in turned into the monsters that ate our economy and the United States became a nation obsessed with real estate.
The Latest
Organizations that matter
- Affordable Housing Centers of America
- Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute
- Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
- Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
- Center for Responsible Lending
- Demos
- Drum Major Institute
- Joint Center for Housing Studies
- Lincoln Institute of Land Policy
- National Consumer Law Center
- National Housing Institute
- National Housing Trust
- National Low Income Housing Coalition
- National Training and Information Center
- Natn’l Community Reinvestment Coalition
- NEDAP
- New America Foundation
- PolicyLink
- Pratt Center for Community Development
- Revson Fellowship
- Smart Growth America
What Alyssa reads
- Baseline Scenario
- Ben Smith
- Bloomberg News
- Calculated Risk
- City Limits
- Consumer Law and Policy Blog
- Doug Henwood
- Felix Salmon
- Galleycat
- Housing Wire
- Mother Jones
- Next American City
- Paul Krugman
- PolicyCents
- Ryan Avent
- Shelterforce
- Street Level
- Talking Points Memo
- The Audit
- The Balance Sheet
- The Big Picture
Tags
American Prospect Ameriquest Andrew Cuomo Atlanta Barney Frank Bloomberg News Bloomsbury Bush Business Week California Clinton Community Reinvestment Act Consumer Financial Protection Agency Dean Baker Elizabeth Warren Fannie Mae Felix Salmon FHA financial stability foreclosures Freddie Mac Gretchen Morgenson Home Mortgage Disclosure Act homeownership Larry Summers loan modifications media mortgage-backed securities Mortgage Bankers Association mortgage brokers mortgage fraud mortgage suicides New York Times Obama Paul Krugman publishing Rick Santelli Salon securitization subprime tenants Texas The Big Money Timothy Geithner Wall Street Journal