By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is:
http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller. Cross posted from New Deal 2.0
Acting OCC head John Walsh is standing in the way of information that could help desperate homeowners.
I was rereading some testimony by Mark Kaufman, the Maryland Commissioner of Financial Regulation, on mortgage servicer behavior. He testified this month before the House Oversight Committee on something quite scandalous.
Together with banking commissioners in four other states, our Office of Financial Regulation joined twelve state Attorneys General in the State Foreclosure Prevention Working Group launched under the leadership of Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller in 2007. This group sought to work collaboratively with the mortgage servicing industry and other parties to identify solutions to the myriad of problems we were seeing in addressing the crisis. The group gathered data submitted voluntarily from the largest subprime servicers and published five reports during 2008 to 2010 providing analysis on foreclosure issues and the servicing response. Unfortunately, this data and the related dialogue fell short of its potential as the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency forbade national banks from providing loss mitigation data to the states.
Subprime servicers were willing to hand over data. But national banks were ordered not to provide data on loss mitigation to investigators. It gets worse. Kaufman notes that in Maryland, loan modifications often led to homeowners paying a higher monthly amount after getting their loan modified. When a homeowner asked for help, they got a higher bill. In essence, this is the financial equivalent of having the fire department try to put out a blazing inferno with gasoline.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency measured and publicized only redefault rates on modifications, which were predictably high, while doing nothing to capture the increased payments that our data suggested often lay beneath. It took almost a full year and requests from Congressional representatives including Congressman Cummings before the Comptroller would examine the impact of modifications on the borrower’s underlying payment obligation. Once measured, modification terms began to improve materially and redefaults began to fall.
A redefault is basically the ultimate failure and scam. It means that instead of foreclosing immediately, or modifying a loan so that it was a workable payment structure, the bank strung out the homeowner until they drained all their savings, and then foreclosed.
Well, it looks a lot like the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency knowingly prevented the release of information that would have led to lower redefault rates.
I think it’s pretty obvious that we need a lot more information on what happened before any sort of behavioral change will take place. The OCC is an institution in need of drastic change. The good news it that the Obama White House can make this happen, without Congress. Bill Black noted this last year, when he suggested Obama appoint Jamie Galbraith to head it (this would have to be a recess appointment, but so what).
It would be a positive surprise if the administration fired acting Comptroller John Walsh and brought in someone interested in doing something about the crashing housing market.
In one of today’s links, the Aussies are trying to let their housing market crash.