Two billionaire brothers from Texas recently bought an additional 177,000-acres of Montana ranch land, bringing their total holdings to 431 square miles of the state. As large as that sounds, their purchases still don't rank them in the top 30 landowners in America.

Qualified mortgages will be protected from litigation and exempt from risk-retention rules. Regulators say these are the safest mortgages around. But what if the regulators are wrong?

S&P Dow Jones Indices released the latest results for the S&P/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices. Data is through November 2012. S&P/Experian Press Release November 2012

Banks are about to get protection against homeowner lawsuits.

The 5th NMLS Annual Conference & Training will be held February 26 - March 1, 2013 in San Antonio, Texas. The Conference is geared to companies, banks, and credit unions that manage a financial services license or registration on NMLS. Attendees will hear directly from state and federal policy makers and industry experts on a wide range of system and regulatory issues. For complete details, go to www.nmlsconference.org .

Obama Rejects Boehner's Backup Budget Plan, Carney Says Bloomberg President Barack Obama is rejecting an alternative budget plan proposed by House Speaker John Boehner, White House spokesman Jay Carney said in a statement. Boehner's plan "can't pass the Senate and therefore will not protect middle class families, ... and more »

by Blake Warenik, National Housing Conference and Center for Housing Policy The good news: the rate of homes headed toward foreclosure continues to fall. The bad news: the foreclosure rate is near its all-time high. The rub: the percentage of homes in (or about to be in) the foreclosure process has not budged for the last two years. The Foreclosure-Response.org team-my colleagues at the Center for Housing Policy alongside our partners at the Urban Institute and Local Initiatives Support Corporation-released the latest foreclosure and delinquency data for all 366 U.S. metro areas last week, including analysis for the 100 largest metro areas and maps for visual learners (a.k.a. humanities majors) like myself. The story seems to be that there is no story: despite signs of a real housing recovery, including the biggest year-over-year jump in home prices since before the bubble burst and a bounceback in housing starts , the foreclosure crisis continues to drag on so long it's hard to continue calling it a crisis. Digging into the data for the 100 largest metro areas, the rate of serious delinquency (combining the foreclosure rate with the rate of mortgages that are 90 or more days delinquent) stands at 9.53 percent, hovering between nine and ten percent as it has for the last eight quarters. But the makeup of the number has changed. While the percentage of homes headed toward foreclosure has fallen to 3.53 percent down from the December 2009 high of 5.48 percent, the share of homes in foreclosure has risen from around five percent in December 2009 to around six percent (where it sits for the third consecutive quarter). The data can tell us a few things about why the foreclosure recovery has stalled out, plus a few details about the most affected areas: The foreclosure inventory is growing. The data indicate that foreclosure starts have outpaced completions since March 2008, when Foreclosure-Response.org began tracking foreclosures. Unemployment and delinquency are a circular...

Press Release

Since 1962, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has been selling the American dream of homeownership, but delivering despair. For 50 years, commentators have pointed out how FHA’s poorly designed underwriting policies result in financing failure for working-class families and a plague of foreclosures for working-class communities.

President Obama's latest "fiscal cliff" offer moves further from compromise, Lawrence Lindsey told CNBC.

TARP's bank investment programs played a critical role in stabilizing the economy during the 2008-09 financial crisis. And - though cost isn't our ultimate measure of success - those programs have also earned a significant profit for taxpayers. Treasury invested a total of $245 billion and has already recovered $268 billion through repayments, dividends, and other income - representing a $23 billion positive return for taxpayers to date. Of course, TARP was always meant to be a temporary, emergency program. The government shouldn't be in the business of owning stakes in private companies for an indefinite period of time. That's why, after we extinguished the immediate financial fire, we began moving to exit our investments and replace temporary government support with private capital. Earlier this year, Treasury outlined its strategy for winding down its remaining TARP bank investments through the Capital Purchase Program (CPP). [1] Today, we wanted to provide you with an update on that process and our plans for the year ahead. Our Progress to Date When we first outlined our wind down approach, we said that Treasury had three basic options: (1) We can wait for banks to repay; (2) We can sell our investments; or (3) We can restructure our investments in order to facilitate a repayment or sale. We also noted that community banks typically face greater difficulty than larger banks raising private capital to repay taxpayers. And that banks cannot be compelled to repay under the terms of the program, which was necessary for our investments to be considered high-quality capital. Therefore, in order to wind down the program, we said that we'd employ each one of those three strategies, including conducting auctions for our investments in banks that we do not expect to repay us in the near term. And that's exactly what we've done. Since March 2012, when we conducted our first preferred stock and subordinated debt auction, Treasury has auctioned its...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - With two short sentences, the head of the European Central Bank took the heat out of the euro zone crisis this year. In 2013 Mario Draghi has to live up to even bigger expectations.

Moynihan Joins Montag in BofA Stock Sale as Shares Almost Double Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian T. Moynihan and co-Chief Operating Officer Thomas K. Montag are among senior managers who sold shares in the lender after the stock almost doubled this year. Moynihan sold 19,025 shares at $10.58 ...

JPMorgan, Goldman Ask Judge to Dismiss Mortgage Lawsuit Bloomberg JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and other banks asked a New York state judge to dismiss a $1.8 billion lawsuit brought by residential mortgage- backed securities investors. The investors, which included Phoenix Light SF Ltd., ...