NEW YORK -- Goldman Sachs, the investment bank that has emerged as a Wall Street leader and the target of public ire in the aftermath of the financial crisis, said Wednesday it did not unfairly bet against clients in the mortgage securities market and defended its relationship with American...

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has changed the definitions of the terms "foreclosed" and "abandoned" to increase the reach of its Neighborhood Stabilization ...

The 30-year fixed hit 5.31 percent last week, the highest level since the first week of last August, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. In response, mortgage applications fell 11 percent, driven entirely by a nearly 17 percent drop in refis.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the most profitable firm in Wall Street history, denied it bet against clients in the mortgage-derivatives market and said it was “grateful” for government assistance in the credit crisis.

For most commercial Realtors®, the biggest challenge remains the availability of financing to close deals.

Infographic: Jumbo vs. Conforming

The Government National Mortgage Association's president said he does not expect lenders to repurchase delinquent loans from its pools in such large chunks as they did in ...

Scott Rechler is positioning RXR Realty to start buying again, the latest sign that some investors believe prices are at or near a bottom.

It is a common belief that one has to have a lot of equity in their home in order to do a reverse mortgage. In reality a reverse mortgage can be done if there are enough proceeds from the reverse mortgage to pay off any current liens. If there aren’t enough reverse mortgage proceeds if the borrower can come up with the difference a reverse mortgage can still be done and benefit them. The Reverse Mortgage improves cash flow because one doesn’t have to make mortgage payments. Even if the reverse mortgage proceeds are used to pay off current liens the senior’s cash flow will be improved because they will have eliminated their mortgage payment. For example, Wayne was struggling to make his mortgage payments of $1,200 a month. The reverse mortgage proceeds were just enough to pay off his current liens. While he didn’t have funds available from the reverse mortgage beyond paying off the mortgage, his cash flow improved by $1,200 a month because he no longer had to make the mortgage payments. When we ran the calculations for Minnesota home owners, Jerry and Dorothy the reverse mortgage proceeds were short $3,000 to pay off their current mortgage. They chose to pull some funds from their savings so they could do the reverse mortgage and eliminate their mortgage payments – a benefit and savings in the long run. (Note that HUD, who insures the most common reverse mortgage, the Home Equity Conversion Mortgage (HECM) does not allow the difference to be from another loan or credit cards. If the funds are coming from an outside source, not from your own resources, then it must be a gift, not a loan to be repaid.) If one is having a hard time making the payments and facing foreclosure the revere mortgage may be the solution in saving their home. Because income and credit scores are not considered to qualify for a reverse mortgage, the reverse mortgage may be a solution. If reverse mortgage funds are not enough to pay off the current loan, we work with foreclosure and housing counselors...

The Federal Reserve could conceivably divest itself of mortgage securities in a matter of about half a decade with little financial or economic impact if it chooses to follow that path, a central bank official said Tuesday. Kocherlakota “It is likely that the Federal Reserve will have to sell a nontrivial amount of its [mortgage] holdings if it is to be able to normalize its balance sheet in the next two decades,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Narayana Kocherlakota said. “I am optimistic that we will be able to normalize our balance sheet by the end of the teens” by way of a combination of active selling of assets, coupled with the passive process of allowing securities to mature. Kocherlakota, who isn’t currently a voting member of the interest rate setting Federal Open Market Committee, was speaking before the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce , in Bloomington, Minn. His comments came from , and in his address he said he expects to see a modest recovery, low inflation and continued difficult circumstances for the labor market. But the meat of his remarks centered on how the Fed can return its balance sheet, which has more than doubled to just north of $2 trillion, back to levels seen before the start of the financial crisis. A major driver of the balance sheet’s expansion has been a program, ended in March, that had the Fed buy some $1.25 trillion in mortgage securities, along with considerable amounts of agency securities and long term Treasurys. The large size of the balance sheet has the potential to become an inflationary problem for the economy if not managed properly. Kocherlakota and other central bankers have been thinking about ways the Fed can start reducing the balance sheet in a way that doesn’t thwart the recovery and drive a big surge in rates. While Kocherlakota didn’t say much about the timing for starting the active sale of mortgage securities, he did say it would be an important piece of the puzzle. Allowing a passive process suggests...

Guest Author: Mark R. Linné, is Executive Vice President of AppraisalWorld, an innovative provider of advanced valuation technology for appraisers. He is a veteran appraiser who has focused on technology, data and valuation modeling and their roles in appraisal practice....

Richard Fisher , president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , built a reputation as an outspoken inflation fighter in the summer of 2008, when he lobbied the Fed to push interest rates higher to combat rising consumer prices even though the financial crisis was still raging. Bloomberg News Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher Today, inflation is low on his list of worries. In fact, he says there is small risk that deflation, or falling consumer prices, could become a bigger problem for the Fed in the months ahead than higher inflation. That puts him on the side of those who want to keep interest rates near zero for at least several more months — if not much longer — to help the recovery get on stronger footing. In a wide-ranging interview, Mr. Fisher said the global economy is burdened by such large amounts of unused industrial capacity and idle labor that consumer prices face little risk of shooting higher. “Because of the enormous slack in the system, and as you know I tend to be very vigilant about inflation, we’re just not seeing price pressures right now,” Mr. Fisher said. “If anything, the tail risks are on the deflationary side.” (“Tail risk” is market-speak for nightmare scenarios, low probability events that can be very damaging to markets and the economy.) Fed officials have been engaged in recent weeks in a deepening debate about whether inflation is slowing even as the economy recovers. Many measures of inflation are slowing, but some Fed officials dismiss these measures because they might be getting skewed by a sharp slowdown in housing costs. It is an important debate: If Fed officials come to the view that inflation is slowing a lot; it could push interest-rate increases further down the road, possibly into 2011. Though he says he’s still worried about longer-term inflation risks tied to immense U.S. budget deficits, Mr. Fisher’s current view on inflation puts him close to others, like San Francisco Fed President Janet Yellen , who say inflation is...

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 30 million people currently unemployed — that’s including those involuntarily working parttime and those who want a job, but have given up on trying to find one. In the face of the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, millions of Americans are hurting. “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,” as created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe, serves as a vivid representation of just how much. Watch the deteriorating transformation of the U.S. economy from January 2007 — approximately one year before the start of the recession — to the most recent unemployment data available today. Hat tip Michael P

We why didn’t the housing boom mess with Texas. Last week, Alyssa Katz offered an insightful and much-discussed for Slate’s The Big Money (which was also reprinted in Sunday’s Washington Post). She argues that restrictions on so-called “cash-out” refinancing transactions, which allow homeowners to tap into rising home equity to refinance into larger loans, helped Texas avoid the kind of severe home price bubble that caused so much damage in other sunbelt states: During the boom, cash-out refinancings were the unofficial currency of bubble states from Florida to California, beloved by mortgage brokers as a way to persuade existing homeowners to take out new loans repeatedly. As home values surged, the sales pitch was a slam-dunk: Borrowers could refinance their homes at extremely low interest rates, and based on newly reappraised property values get more cash in their hands than they might earn in a year…. But not in Texas. A borrower there can secure a home-equity line of credit from a bank. And she can refinance her mortgage or take out a home-equity loan. But the total amount of debt on a home cannot exceed 80 percent of its appraised value, and any proceeds cannot be used to pay off other debts. This is an example of the kind of consumer protection rule that advocates of a consumer finance protection agency if such an agency is ever established. have pointed to rules banning prepayment penalties, balloon loans or negative amortizing loans where the loan payment is less than the interest on the loan. While the inability to tap rising home equity or to invent exotic loan products likely prevented Texas from inflating a bubble, it doesn’t get to the root of the issue, per se: why was there no bubble to begin with? The Economist : [T]here is less incentive to take a cash-out home equity loan in non-bubble market, because you have a lot less equity on which to draw…. In Texas markets, where home values peaked at perhaps 130% of their 2000 level, the room to take out potentially...

The federal government has relaxed rules for cities seeking funds to buy and fix-up abandoned and foreclosed properties.

Tens of thousands of jobless Americans could lose unemployment benefits after Congress failed to enact a short-term extension, with Democratic and Republican lawmakers exchanging blame.

From Diana Olick at CNBC: I'm ... starting to hear rumblings among the number crunchers that the wave of foreclosures we keep hearing about is about to hit with a thunderous roar. Servicers are ramping up the mod process and pushing those who don't qualify out the door more quickly than ever. I don't know about a "thunderous roar", but I do think we will see more distressed sales soon. Most trustee sales seem to be "postponed" each month, and perhaps the lenders were just waiting for the HAFA short sales program to begin. That program started today and anyone considering a short sale should ask their lender if they qualify.

The more American middle class families understand personal finances, the less financially strapped they feel, a new survey shows. First Command Financial Services Inc. , an investment adviser firm, administered a financial literacy test in March to people with household incomes of $50,000 or more to gauge the financial knowledge of the middle class. Of those who answered all of the questions correct, 63% said they didn’t feel financially strapped versus 48% who said the same but had answered one or more questions incorrectly. Some 42% of people who got a perfect score on the test also said they were comfortable with their debt levels. Meanwhile, of those who answered questions wrong, 32% said they were comfortable with their debt. Overall, the survey respondents scored pretty well on the tests: They answered 7.5 out of nine questions correctly, on average. And three out of 10 respondents earned a perfect score. Despite higher levels of confidence among the most financially literate, even they didn’t feel comfortable with their savings or their ability to retire. Less than a quarter of those who answered all the questions correctly said they felt comfortable with their savings. A slightly higher 36% said they were very confident in their ability to retire comfortably. Among those who answered at least one question incorrectly, just 15% felt good about their savings and 29% said they were sure they would be able to retire comfortably. The test surveyed 659 people and has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.

From Nick Timiraos at the WSJ: Nationally, the apartment vacancy rate stayed flat at 8%, the highest level since Reis Inc., a New York research firm, began its tally in 1980.... Nationally, effective rents, which include concessions such as one month of free rent, rose 0.3% during the quarter compared with a 0.7% decline in the fourth quarter of last year and a 1.1% drop in the first quarter of 2009. ... "Rent reductions are not over yet," said Hessam Nadji, managing director at real-estate firm Marcus & Millichap. Note: the Reis numbers are for cities. The from the Census Bureau was at a near record 10.7% in Q4 2009. Rents plunged in 2009 by the most in the 30 years Reis has been tracking rents - and with vacancies at record levels, the slight increase in Q1 2010 rents doesn't mean the rent declines are over.

Today the Administration's Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternative Plan takes effect, offering incentives to borrowers, servicers, investors and second lien holders to push short sales through the system.