Posts Tagged ‘loans’

Big surprise: greedy subprime security buyers didn’t listen to their own consultants


Tracy Warren was a quality-control consultant for Bear Stearns and other mortgage security purchasers on Wall Street. Her job was to review mortgage loans to determine whether they had merit for investment purposes. (She saw the loans after they were made, but before they were sold to investors and led to the national economy’s crash-and-burn [...]

More on the HELOC freeze from SmartMoney.com


More on the HELOC freeze from SmartMoney.com (with a shout out to yours truly).

The housing market mess; connecting some dots


It is getting time for a complete overhaul of the whole housing market in the US, rather than just messing with edges. Two different stories in the Minneapolis StarTribune this morning illustrate why.
First is the story about all the people applying for Section 8 assistance. Recently about 3,700 people took applications, for one of [...]

Preying on the elderly, payday lenders’ newest victims


How much worse can things get?
According to a new article in the WSJ, those wonderful community financial services people, more commonly know as Payday lenders are increasingly targeting recipients of Social Security and other government benefits, including disability and veteran’s benefits.

But it isn’t just the Payday lenders who are involved in this abuse of our [...]

Payday loans the not so cheap alternative


Apparently, all those happy payday loan customers who quickly repaid their loans, avoided disaster and extra costs doesn’t included a lot of people in Utah.
In a really great article full of all kinds of interesting facts by the Desert Morning News, their research found that payday lenders have sued nearly 27,000 Utahns for nonpayment since [...]

Mortgage securitizers fiddle as Rome burns


The NYTimes has a piece on the 5th Annual Conference of the American Securitization Forum held in Las Vegas. These are the guys who played a major role in bring us the current foreclosure mess. Well while the rest of the country and the world for that matter mucks its way out of the mess [...]

Alternatives to payday loans: small dollar loans


In what is hopefully the start of something, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) announced the selection of 30 banks to participate in a two-year pilot project to help identify best practices in affordable small-dollar loan programs that can be replicated by financial institutions.
“Our goal is to identify small-dollar loan programs that are profitable for [...]

Payday loans: countering the spin


Elizabeth Warren at Credit Slips (a great blog I just now learned of on credit and bankruptcy by six academics) has a great post touching on some of the payday loan research including the the Center for Responsible Lending (PDF link), the Center for Community Capital (PDF link) and the the bad numbers in the [...]

Payday loans only delay trouble


In all the back and forth on payday loans in the press and blogosphere, a study titled NC Consumers after Payday Lending by the Center for Community Capital at Univ. of North Carolina does seem to be getting as much play as it should. Though the Community Financial Services Association of America (CFSA), the trade [...]

36% interest rate cap


Over at Consumer Rights Watch, Mark Ireland has stated two truths about Payday lending:
1. Payday lending is a business that simply keeps people in debt, rather than provide them with an emergency safety net, and
2. Only enforcement of a comprehensive interest rate cap at or around 36 percent for small loans will solve the debt [...]