You can love or you can hate the recent $25-billion federal-state mortgage foreclosure settlement, but there's no getting around one simple fact: There's a huge, gaping hole right in the middle of it.
The hole is that if your home loan has been bought from your lender by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, you're not eligible for the mortgage relief encompassed by the deal.
Since Fannie and Freddie control well more than half of all outstanding mortgages, this shortcoming looks to be what engineers would call "non-trivial."
This is curious, because the settlement, announced last week, had a sizable head of steam behind it. It was endorsed by the Obama administration, including the departments of Justice and Housing and Urban Development, and 49 of the 50 state attorneys general. By my count, the latter group breaks down as 24 Republicans and 25 Democrats; you can't get more bipartisan than that, unless you cut one Democrat in half and cede a piece to Team GOP.
The answer is that the participation of Fannie and Freddie has been blocked by a career civil servant named Edward J. DeMarco.
As acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, DeMarco is the chief regulator and conservator of Fannie and Freddie, which were chartered by the federal government to buy up mortgages, thus encouraging lenders to make home loans.
Read the rest of the article at The Los Angeles Times
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