May 27, 2020

Foreclosure lessons from past recessions

7 minutes

In today’s Daily Download episode, HW+ Managing Editor Brena Nath discusses how the mortgage industry should be thinking about foreclosures during the nation’s economic downturn.

For some background on the story, here’s a brief summary of the article:

The current economic collapse raises pressing questions about what lessons we learned from the last one. No two crises are ever the same. Although they have many common elements, which flow directly from an extended plunge in economic activity, they have distinct causes and hence different trajectories. At a minimum, the reform measures that were put in place to address aspects of the prior crisis will alter the course of the next one.

The Great Recession, which lasted from December of 2007 to June of 2009, is of special interest here because it was an economic collapse brought about specifically by failures in the housing and mortgage markets. Some blame government policy for those failures, and it bears some share of the responsibility. Yet the greater weight of the evidence has shown that rampant Wall Street financial speculation was the core of the problem. The traditional approach to housing and mortgage financing became distorted by new mortgage-based investment instruments, leveraged lending, and lax underwriting, all of which turned out to be grounded in ill-founded assumptions.

Following the main story, HousingWire Digital Producer Alcynna Lloyd covers a forbearance report from the Mortgage Bankers Association, data from Zillow that shows a rebound in April’s pending home sales and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new online resources for consumers.

The Daily Download examines the most captivating articles reported from the HousingWire newsroom. HousingWire newsroom. Each afternoon, HousingWire provides its readers with a deeper look into the stories that are not only chronicling the biggest announcements within the housing finance industry but are also helping Move Markets Forward. Hosted by the HW team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd.

HousingWire articles covered in this episode:

[PULSE] How should we think about foreclosures?

Mortgages in forbearance rise to 4.2 million, MBA says

More good news for May: newly pending sales up almost 50% from same period in April

Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac launch online resources for consumers

...more

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By HousingWire

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