Word: mae
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What if people who lost their homes to foreclosure could rent them back from the lenders that repossessed them? That idea, which has lingered on the outskirts of the housing-crisis debate, got a boost last week when the federal housing agency Fannie Mae said it would start offering leases of up to 12 months when other avenues to keeping families in their homes, like loan modification, dead-end. "It's a big step forward," says Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a longtime proponent of rent-back programs...
...Fannie Mae has brought in a property-management company to run its rental program, but even with that imported expertise, the number of people who wind up as tenants probably won't be large. There are many alternatives that must be pursued first, including loan modification and trying to sell the house for less than it's worth. Only people who exhaust other options and are eligible for a deed in lieu of foreclosure - a process of handing over the deed in exchange for loan forgiveness - will have the option to rent. In the first nine months of 2009, Fannie...
...jobless rate has surged to 10.2%, the highest since 1983. Raising interest rates runs the risk of worsening unemployment. For the same reason, the U.S. cannot withdraw stimulus spending either, even though the U.S. budget deficit has topped a record $1.7 trillion. Last week, mortgage lender Fannie Mae reported $18.9 billion in third-quarter losses and said it needs another $15 billion in taxpayer money to survive...
...subsidize homeownership? Let me count the ways. First, more than 80% of the mortgage loans made in the U.S. so far this year have been bought by the government-sponsored entities (GSEs) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. That keeps the interest rates on those GSE-backed mortgages substantially lower than on mortgages that can be sold only on private markets, because taxpayers are on the hook for defaults on the former. That risk, long hypothetical, became reality as we got stuck with a $291 billion rescue bill for Fannie and Freddie in the fiscal year that ended...
...officials have since argued that the law gave them no choice. But it's also clear that the authorities--then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in particular--didn't want to intervene. The Fed and Treasury had taken a lot of flak for their earlier bailouts of Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It was time to let the market work...