A Lot More
Observations on housing's wreckage and recovery
Loan modifications, nerd edition
If my article on loan modifications for The Big Money left you wanting more, Business Week has done a detailed, revealing and readable (considering the subject matter) look at what it will really take to modify mortgages to make them affordable. Between preemptive lawsuits from major investors and accounting standards designed to prevent monkey business in the management of mortgage pools, the technical obstacles to even the not-especially-helpful kinds of loan mods we’ve seen so far remain depressingly formidable.
On the bright side, those challenges may ultimately (this is my opinion now, not Business Week’s) doom the trend of tinkering with bad mortgages to nudge them to perform and leave across-the-board writedowns, through a formidable exercise of government power, as a necessary action if things get much worse. And given all current foreclosure and related economic trends it’s hard to see how they won’t.
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.
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- Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program
- Center for Budget and Policy Priorities
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- 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
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- PolicyLink
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- Bloomberg News
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- Consumer Law and Policy Blog
- Doug Henwood
- Felix Salmon
- Galleycat
- Housing Wire
- Mother Jones
- Next American City
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- Ryan Avent
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- Talking Points Memo
- The Audit
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- The Big Picture
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