Fannie Mae Asleep as Reports of Mortgage Crisis Mounted (For 2/5/12)

Nye Lavalle was a successful sports advertising executive who had a family home foreclosed on in 1995 and started investigating the home mortgage industry. He went all over the nation and discovered forged documents. He unsuccessfully showed his findings Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial, JP Morgan, other Big Banks, and mortgage lenders. By 2003, when the housing market was hot, he had documented an extensive pattern of corruption at mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Taxpayers have lost $150 billion to the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both of which drove this industry's culture of outsourcing its work to other firms. Fannie Mae helped create an electronic registry firm for mortgages that it did not diligently oversee to ensure that it complied with state laws. These failures contributed heavily to hundreds of thousands of fraudulent foreclosures. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/05/business/mortgage-tornado-warning-unheeded.html?_r=1&hp

Salesman Pressured to Sell Predatory Mortgages (for 12/22/11)

Greg Saffer started working in Los Angeles for Washington Mutual (WaMu) Bank selling mortgages for them in 2007. He left in January 2008 after refusing to sell predatory mortgages to homebuyers and then filed a lawsuit in 2009 against JP Morgan, which bought WaMu in September 2008 after it became the largest U.S. bank failure ever. Half of all of WaMu's mortgages included borrowers of good credit. The bank tricked them with minimum payments below the interest charged to their loans, adjustable-rate mortgages which increased their balances and prevented homeowners from paying them off. These products were five times more profitable than regular mortgages. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/the-mortgage-salesman-who_b_1164703.html?ref=business