HousingWire Propaganda Not To Be Believed, Part 1: Re-Analyzing the Data

Friday HousingWire ran a six-and-a-half page big bank/mortgage servicer propaganda piece called “Living Large“, by Tom Showalter. The article, subtitled “A person’s lifestyle plays into whether they will pay their mortgage after a loan modification”, purports to explain why people default on loan modifications. Instead, it spins a bank-exonerating morality play not justified by the data supposedly being interpreted.

I’ll get to the morality play and the “irresponsible borrower” propaganda it represents in my next post to keep this one to readable length. First, to clearly show the wrongness of the bank-serving mythology being sold as its interpretation, I’m going recap the data the ‘article’ presents to answer the questions the underlying study apparently aimed at: why did so many people with mortgage mods made in 2009 default on those mods by 2011? And what needs to be done to make mods more successful going forward?

Note: I can’t assess the data quality because I don’t have access to the underlying tables and sourcing info; I am working off HousingWire’s/Showalter’s analysis of it. I just take his numbers at face value, though as I discuss below, however, something is screwy either in the some of the data or Showalter’s reporting of it.

Be sure to check out the rest here…

~

4closureFraud.org