U.S. housing policy: “Absolutely insane”

How far have we gone in fixing the mortgage crisis? We have no idea, because no one’s counting foreclosures

If you were to read the headlines on the ongoing foreclosure crisis, you’d get very confused. Are “Foreclosure Filings Increasing in 60% of Large U.S. Cities,” as Bloomberg reports? Are “Foreclosure Machines Still Running on ‘Low,’” as the Wall Street Journal says? Or are we in the midst of a “Foreclosure Surge,” as CBS News would have us believe? The answer, unfortunately, is that we don’t really know.

Six years after the foreclosure crisis began in earnest, as former Congressional Oversight Panel vice chair and current AFL-CIO general counsel Damon Silvers put it, “it’s impossible to get reliable, comprehensive information on foreclosures.” The government is still not effectively measuring the single biggest weight on the American economy, the foreclosure epidemic that has claimed millions of homes.

There are four separate widely followed private foreclosure tracking services — Corelogic, LPS, RealtyTrac, and the Mortgage Banker’s Association National Delinquency Survey. Each has problems, and none is comprehensive. There are also government sources for foreclosures. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, has a widely cited Mortgage Metric Report. The data for that report comes from the big mortgage services, and it is “rigorously reviewed”, according to Bryan Hubbard, spokesman for the OCC. It’s considered good data, but it covers only 50 to 60 percent of the market, the part controlled by services regulated by the OCC. The FHFA tracks some limited data around Fannie and Freddie loans, and the VA and FHA track some data around loans guaranteed by those agencies. But like the private data services, none of these foreclosure sources are comprehensive.

Rest here…

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4closureFraud.org