Florida Title Insurance Continuing Education

Once again, the responsible borrowers who didn’t gamble on real estate values, who acted responsibly, who didn’t speculate get the shaft, and the irresponsible, the speculators and the greedy get rewarded (“Md. joins national mortgage settlement,” Feb. 9).

And how are the banks going to recover this money? They will pass the cost onto the responsible customers and borrowers. The furor about robo-signing is a joke. Has anyone said that the “victims” did not owe the money? How is it that someone who owes money all of a sudden doesn’t owe it because of paperwork irregularities?

Every individual and every family that has lived within its means, honored its debts and lived within its budget should be infuriated by what is nothing more than transfer payments to the irresponsible, the ignorant and the greedy.

Thomas F. McDonough, Towson

I agree with this guy.

Saying he is “completely puzzled by the notion that there was something immoral that went on here,” the man at the top of the agency that regulates Freddie Mac has explained why he believes the taxpayer-owned mortgage company did nothing wrong when one of its arms, as NPR and ProPublica have reported, “placed multibillion-dollar bets against American homeowners being able to refinance to cheaper mortgages.”

Edward DeMarco told Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep in an interview broadcast on today’s show that Freddie Mac’s actions were “in the class of ordinary business transactions.” The “reverse floaters” in Freddie Mac’s investment portfolio, which as NPR has reported “brought in more money for Freddie Mac when homeowners in higher interest-rate loans were unable to qualify for a refinancing,” did not affect the agency’s efforts to stabilize the mortgage market, DeMarco said.

Instead, DeMarco characterized the investments as part of Freddie Mac’s effort to make sure it doesn’t lose money. And he said one of his major responsibilities, is to “make sure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac undertake activities that don’t cause further losses to the American taxpayer.”

DeMarco is acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) — the agency that regulates Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

As we reported Thursday, two key senators “who have taken the lead on legislation aimed to help homeowners refinance at historically low interest rates,” are critical of FHFA’s oversight of Freddie Mac. One of them, Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, laid much of the blame on DeMarco and accused him of not looking out for American homeowners who want to refinance at today’s historically low interest rates.

DeMarco told Steve, though, that “not only I, but my staff think of the average homeowner on a daily basis” and believe that their efforts to stabilize the mortgage market and prevent losses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are good for all Americans in the long run.

Americans will have to wait a few more years for the housing market to return to “normal,” an industry expert said Thursday.

“We’re five years through a 10-year adjustment cycle,” said Doug Duncan, vice president and chief economist at government mortgage giant Fannie Mae, who expects the housing market to stabilize sometime around 2015.

The path to stabilization, however, will be fragmented regionally, Duncan said, primarily along foreclosure and delinquency fault lines. “Two-thirds of households underwater are in 5 states,” Duncan said, states which likely face more pain before any gains. “It’s a very regional issue going forward.”

As the impact of the housing crisis continues to reverberate through the country, the picture has changed. Where local and national housing markets were once virtually identical, they’ve now begun to diverge as employment prospects have changed in certain parts of the country.

While an oversupply of housing remains an obstacle for a housing market recovery, the lack of demand will be the more immediate issue going forward, Duncan says.

“There’s been a focus on the supply side, but no one wants to buy. The level of application activity has been flat,” he said. “From our perspective, it’s really a demand problem going forward.”

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The incremental improvement the market has seen is largely thanks to investors, Duncan said, who can circumvent the mortgage minefield and pay for properties in cash.

Only a significant improvement in the jobs picture—to the tune of 300,000 jobs a month—will help drive lagging household formation, which has been on the decline for decades now, and drum up demand for housing. “We’re expecting 150,000 [jobs added] tomorrow,” Duncan said of the Labor Department’s jobs report. “That’s not robust enough to dramatically improve the employment picture.”

How will we know we have a “normal” housing market again?

“I define it when construction returns to the level that would see additions to the housing stock to accommodate [demographic] growth,” Duncan said.

Until then, the United States will likely remain plagued by too much supply and too little demand for housing.

“The headline on housing is [there will be] a little bit of improvement, but this is not the year in which housing is going to break out,” Duncan added.