By VIVIAN S. TOY
With property values down by as much as 30 percent in New York City, some homeowners who bought at the height of the market are finding themselves underwater and are being forced to sell their homes in short sales.
In the months after the Lehman Brothers crash, most of the short-sale action was in the boroughs outside of Manhattan and in the suburbs. This year, however, short sales appear to be picking up in Manhattan, real estate and mortgage brokers say.
A recent search of sales listings found almost 20 advertised short sales, and that did not include short sales disguised with euphemistic terms like “owner must sell.” The advertised short sales range from a $250,000 two-bedroom on the Upper East Side to a $2 million three-bedroom designed by Philippe Starck in the financial district. They include town houses, co-ops, condops and condos.
And the number of short sales, in which a home sells for less than the amount owed on the mortgage, will most likely continue to grow. The number of lis pendens filings — a first step in the foreclosure process for houses and condos — doubled in 2009 in Manhattan, to 724 from 334 in 2008; this year, 382 had been filed by the end of June, according to the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy of New York University.
“Short sales are happening and they’re all over the map,” said Melissa Cohn, the president of the Manhattan Mortgage Company. “We’re seeing multimillion-dollar foreclosures and short sales that no one ever anticipated in New York City.”
Jonathan J. Miller, the president of the appraisal firm Miller Samuel and a market analyst, said that 2010 might well be dubbed the Year of the Short Sale nationally. “A short sale is going to be the only way for many people who bought at the peak and who are now underwater to move on with their lives if they have to relocate or downsize,” he said.
Short sales are a gentler alternative to foreclosure for both sellers and lenders. “Compared to a foreclosure, a short sale generally allows an easier transition for the borrower, less impact on their credit history, and larger net proceeds to the loan’s owner,” said Tom Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, adding that Chase encourages borrowers who are unable to keep their homes to consider short sales.
Some advertised short sales seem like bargains, but most are priced just a little under market — low enough to generate interest from buyers, but not too low to raise objections from lenders.
Short sales, however, are not for the faint-hearted. While there is a possibility for a good price, there is also a good chance that the deal will not go through. Many cooks are involved in this stew. The buyer must negotiate the price with both the seller and the seller’s lender. At the same time, the seller must negotiate with the lender on the terms for forgiving the amount still owed on the mortgage. Meanwhile the bank is negotiating fees for lawyers and brokers. The process can take six to nine months.
For Sharay Hayes, who owns a four-story town house on Strivers Row in Harlem, a short sale may be the only way to avoid bankruptcy. Mr. Hayes inherited a share of the house, where he has lived since he was 3, from his grandfather in 2001. Over the years, he took out several mortgages to buy out six relatives and to restore the house’s 19th-century grandeur while renovating it with 21st-century finishes and luxuries like a steam room and a whirlpool tub.
Until late last year, he kept up with payments on the $1.8 million he owes on the house. But his “entire portfolio of income earning was in real estate,” he said, namely rental properties in Ohio. Those investments went south when the auto plant that employed most of his tenants was shuttered about a year ago; he also is on the verge of losing these properties.
“That’s another nightmare I’m trying to wake up from,” Mr. Hayes said.
He has had his Harlem home on and off the market since 2006 for as much as $2.9 million, but with the recession, houses in the immediate area now are selling for closer to $1 million. His current broker, Gordon Sokich, the president of Luxor Homes and Investment Realty, an agency that specializes in distressed property sales, advised him to put it on the market for $850,000.
The low price prompted a bidding war and the house is now in contract for $975,000. Mr. Sokich said he expected the bank to counter with a higher price. “We don’t know what the bank’s bottom line is,” he said. He added that because Mr. Hayes has several liens on the house, the first lien is probably the only one that will be repaid in full.
“Once I conceded that I was going to lose my home,” Mr. Hayes said, “I felt like every day I was in the bedroom with my shades drawn, hoping it would go away.” But the prospect of a short sale “buys me some time.”
Because lenders can always sue after a short sale for what is still owed on a mortgage, sellers are advised to ask their lenders to waive the right to sue. But even with a waiver, lenders will often try to make up some of what is owed, either by seeking a cash payment at the closing or a promissory note. Any amount that is forgiven can be considered income by the Internal Revenue Service.
“The seller generally walks away with nothing,” said John Bradbury, a Manhattan lawyer who has taught seminars on short sales to real estate agents. “but they get out from under a mortgage they can no longer afford.”
Short sales often take months because many mortgages are owned by multiple investors, each of whom must agree to the process. Banks, too, are overwhelmed by foreclosure filings and applications for loan modifications. In addition, banks are not about to broadcast how much of a loss they’re willing to take in a short sale.
“There’s no 1-800 number that you can call to find out what a bank will take,” Mr. Bradbury said. “It’s all done on a case-by-case basis, which is what lends itself to the painfully long process.”
Phil Tesoriero, the owner of Exceptional Homes Real Estate in Farmingdale, N.Y., and the teacher of a certification course on short sales, said he had seen short sales take anywhere from 45 days to 18 months. He has handled scores of short sales in Queens and Long Island, where he estimated there are a few thousand short sale listings.
Finding the right person at a bank to approve a short sale is often the biggest problem. “That person hasn’t been born yet,” Mr. Tesoriero deadpanned. “If I get the same person on the phone twice, it’s a miracle.” The best way to deal with that, he said, “is to present a proposal that doesn’t require much conversation.” And, he added, “that means sending a proposal that makes sense for the bank.”
He urged starting with a list price not too far off the market value, providing good comparables to support the price, and not wasting the bank’s time by presenting hopelessly lowball offers.
Carol Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the American Bankers Association, said that short sales, like foreclosures and mortgage modifications, had been long processes in recent years, “because of the number of them in the pipeline and the amount of paperwork involved.” She said that although banks preferred short sales to foreclosures, “they also want to make sure that there is no other option that would allow the homeowner to repay the loan in full.”
Banks generally will not entertain a short sale until a seller has a signed contract and 10 percent down from a prospective buyer. The Obama administration started a program this spring to encourage more short sales by allowing lenders to preapprove a listing price and setting time limits for the approval process. But many people in Manhattan do not qualify for the program, because it excludes anyone who owes more than $729,750 and whose monthly payment exceeds 31 percent of gross income.
It is only when the offer is in hand that the seller submits an application to the bank. This includes a hardship letter documenting why he or she can no longer pay the mortgage — kind of like a co-op board package in reverse, this time to prove lack of resources.
For buyers, uncertainty is the main thing that sets a short sale apart from a regular sale. Because short sales can take months, a buyer seeking a mortgage may need to seek several extensions on a locked-in rate. Lawyers advise buyers to include a contract clause that allows them to pull out of the deal after a specified time period if the bank drags its heels on a decision.
Bill Dakak exercised that option earlier this year on the potential short sale of a studio in an Upper East Side co-op. He had a signed contract for $210,000 on a renovated apartment that had sold in 2005 for $399,000. His broker, Mark Baum, an agent with Prudential Douglas Elliman, said that the bank obtained and then somehow lost an appraisal and questioned the comparables provided by the seller’s broker. Weeks turned into months.
Mr. Dakak’s contract allowed him to back out after three months, and he did. “You’re asking for a response and you get nothing,” he said. “I needed to move on, and honestly I walked away from it feeling like the bank wasn’t interested in selling.”
Mr. Dakak, who works in finance in Miami and was looking for a pied-à-terre, wound up spending $160,000 in the same building, on a studio in need of updating.
Short sales tend to attract “somewhat sophisticated buyers,” said Mary Vetri, a senior vice president of Brown Harris Stevens who helped complete a short sale on a one-bedroom condo in a Midtown high-rise in December. She represented the seller, who had bought the place in 2007 for about $850,000, but then lost his job and tried selling it at $899,000. After a year at that price, it was dropped to $739,000.
It sold for $690,000, when similar apartments in the building were listed for about $20,000 more. The buyer, Ms. Vetri said, “didn’t need to move right away and he was educated on short sales and involved enough so that we were all focused on getting it accomplished.” The sale closed six months after going to contract.
Even when all the paperwork is submitted and various parties work hard to keep a short sale moving, a deal can still unwind after months of waiting.
When former clients came to Robin Lyon-Gardiner, a vice president of Brown Harris Stevens, saying they could no longer afford their two-bedroom condo with an office and a garden on the Upper West Side, she knew it would have to be a short sale. The couple owed close to $1.2 million on the place, but a similar apartment in the building had sold in a short sale for $940,000.
Ms. Lyon-Gardiner priced it at $975,000 last August, setting off two bidding wars. The first ended in a contract for $999,000, but that buyer “got cold feet and walked away,” she said. The second contract with different buyers was for $1.1 million.
The broker for the buyers, Carla de Leon, an agent at Halstead Property, had taken a class on short sales. She warned her clients that the process could drag on for months. “I also told them they had to be realistic,” she said, “because I had learned that there was only a 60 to 70 percent chance that the deal would even get done.” But her clients were game.
For months, the two brokers were in constant contact with each other, the owner’s lawyer and the bank. “I never got through to anyone who could tell me anything,” Ms. de Leon said, “but I felt it was important to keep trying. Because maybe I might get the one person who would feel sorry for me and try to move it along.”
At one point, the bank lost the file and the seller had to resubmit the application. Then, about six months after the contract was signed, the bank finally made a decision.
“After all that — it was so much heartache and so much time — they declined it,” Ms. Lyon-Gardiner said. “I never had a listing that so many people wanted and nobody ended up getting.”
Ms. de Leon said her buyers, whose deposit was returned, were stunned. “They didn’t understand how the bank could sit on it for so long or why the bank wouldn’t want the most they could get for the property,” she said.
At last word, the owners planned to declare bankruptcy.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Chapter 13 Plan contributions
In our continuing series of posts regarding Chapter 13 bankruptcy, this month's topic discusses how much money a debtor must contribute to their Chapter 13 bankruptcy Plan. More specifically, what Plan contribution is required for a debtor whose income is over the median income (in New York State, the median income is currently $46,320 for a family of one, $57,902 for a family of two, $69,174 for a family of three, and $82,164 for a family of four (add $7,500 for each additional individual in excess of four)?
Prior to 2005, a Chapter 13 debtor was required to contribute their disposable income to fund a Chapter 13 plan. The disposable income number was based on the debtor's actual expenses on Schedules I (income) and J (expenses). However, as part of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, Congress added complexity by modifying and further detailing the definition of "disposable income" (in Section 1325(b)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code) and by requiring that debtors who exceed the median household income for their state contribute their "projected disposable income" to fund a Chapter 13 Plan.
Although "disposable income" is a defined term, both Bankruptcy Courts and bankruptcy attorneys have struggled with the definition of "projected disposable income." Recently, both the Supreme Court (in Hamilton v. Lanning, 560 U.S. ___, 130 S. Ct. 487 (2010)) and the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York (in In re Almonte, 397 B.R. 659 (2008) and In re Mendelson, 412 B.R. 75 (2009), both decided by Bankruptcy Judge Grossman) have addressed this issue.
A common element in all three cases is that in the six months prior to the debtor's bankruptcy filing (which is the lookback period for "current monthly income," the starting point for determining "disposable income") they had non-recurring extraordinary incomesuch as severance pay for being terminated from a job and gifts or loans from friends or family. In these cases, the Chapter 13 Trustees said that based on their interpretation of the meaning of "projected disposable income," the debtor would have to fund a chapter 13 plan strictly based on their Chapter 13 Form 22C "means test" results. Counsel for the Chapter 13 debtors uniformly argued that the means test (in these cases) included sources of income that were extraordinary and not recurring, and this form should not be the sole basis for calculating Plan payments for the Chapter 13 debtor (which could be 36-60 months of future payments).
Judge Grossman in In re Almonte and In re Mendelson and the Supreme Court in Hamilton v. Lanning ruled for the Chapter 13 debtors, and indicated that the chapter 13 monthly payments should not include these extraordinary and non-recurring sources of income. Rather, they should use a "crystal ball" approach and look at the expected future monthly income of the debtor over the applicable commitment period of the proposed Plan.
Any individuals with questions about Chapter 13 bankruptcy should contact Jim Shenwick.
Prior to 2005, a Chapter 13 debtor was required to contribute their disposable income to fund a Chapter 13 plan. The disposable income number was based on the debtor's actual expenses on Schedules I (income) and J (expenses). However, as part of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, Congress added complexity by modifying and further detailing the definition of "disposable income" (in Section 1325(b)(2) of the Bankruptcy Code) and by requiring that debtors who exceed the median household income for their state contribute their "projected disposable income" to fund a Chapter 13 Plan.
Although "disposable income" is a defined term, both Bankruptcy Courts and bankruptcy attorneys have struggled with the definition of "projected disposable income." Recently, both the Supreme Court (in Hamilton v. Lanning, 560 U.S. ___, 130 S. Ct. 487 (2010)) and the Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York (in In re Almonte, 397 B.R. 659 (2008) and In re Mendelson, 412 B.R. 75 (2009), both decided by Bankruptcy Judge Grossman) have addressed this issue.
A common element in all three cases is that in the six months prior to the debtor's bankruptcy filing (which is the lookback period for "current monthly income," the starting point for determining "disposable income") they had non-recurring extraordinary incomesuch as severance pay for being terminated from a job and gifts or loans from friends or family. In these cases, the Chapter 13 Trustees said that based on their interpretation of the meaning of "projected disposable income," the debtor would have to fund a chapter 13 plan strictly based on their Chapter 13 Form 22C "means test" results. Counsel for the Chapter 13 debtors uniformly argued that the means test (in these cases) included sources of income that were extraordinary and not recurring, and this form should not be the sole basis for calculating Plan payments for the Chapter 13 debtor (which could be 36-60 months of future payments).
Judge Grossman in In re Almonte and In re Mendelson and the Supreme Court in Hamilton v. Lanning ruled for the Chapter 13 debtors, and indicated that the chapter 13 monthly payments should not include these extraordinary and non-recurring sources of income. Rather, they should use a "crystal ball" approach and look at the expected future monthly income of the debtor over the applicable commitment period of the proposed Plan.
Any individuals with questions about Chapter 13 bankruptcy should contact Jim Shenwick.
Monday, June 21, 2010
NYT: Peddling Relief, Firms Put Debtors in Deeper Hole
By PETER S. GOODMAN
PALM BEACH, Fla. — For the companies that promise relief to Americans confronting swelling credit card balances, these are days of lucrative opportunity.
So lucrative, that an industry trade association, the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives, recently convened here, in the oceanfront confines of the Four Seasons Resort, to forge deals and plot strategy.
At a well-lubricated evening reception, a steel drum band played Bob Marley songs as hostesses in skimpy dresses draped leis around the necks of arriving entrepreneurs, some with deep tans.
The debt settlement industry can afford some extravagance. The long recession has delivered an abundance of customers — debt-saturated Americans, suffering lost jobs and income, sliding toward bankruptcy. The settlement companies typically harvest fees reaching 15 to 20 percent of the credit card balances carried by their customers, and they tend to collect upfront, regardless of whether a customer’s debt is actually reduced.
State attorneys general from New York to California and consumer watchdogs like the Better Business Bureau say the industry’s proceeds come at the direct expense of financially troubled Americans who are being fleeced of their last dollars with dubious promises.
Consumers rarely emerge from debt settlement programs with their credit card balances eliminated, these critics say, and many wind up worse off, with severely damaged credit, ceaseless threats from collection agents and lawsuits from creditors.
In the Kansas City area, Linda Robertson, 58, rues the day she bought the pitch from a debt settlement company advertising on the radio, promising to spare her from bankruptcy and eliminate her debts. She wound up sending nearly $4,000 into a special account established under the company’s guidance before a credit card company sued her, prompting her to drop out of the program.
By then, her account had only $1,470 remaining: The debt settlement company had collected the rest in fees. She is now filing for bankruptcy.
“They take advantage of vulnerable people,” she said. “When you’re desperate and you’re trying to get out of debt, they take advantage of you.” Debt settlement has swollen to some 2,000 firms, from a niche of perhaps a dozen companies a decade ago, according to trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, which is completing new rules aimed at curbing abuses within the industry.
Last year, within the industry’s two leading trade associations — the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives and the Association of Settlement Companies — some 250 companies collectively had more than 425,000 customers, who had enrolled roughly $11.7 billion in credit card balances in their programs.
As the industry has grown, so have allegations of unfair practices. Since 2004, at least 21 states have brought at least 128 enforcement actions against debt relief companies, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. Consumer complaints received by states more than doubled between 2007 and 2009, according to comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission.
“The industry’s not legitimate,” said Norman Googel, assistant attorney general in West Virginia, which has prosecuted debt settlement companies. “They’re targeting a group of people who are already drowning in debt. We’re talking about middle-class and lower middle-class people who had incomes, but they were using credit cards to survive.”
The industry counters that a few rogue operators have unfairly tarnished the reputations of well-intentioned debt settlement companies that provide a crucial service: liberating Americans from impossible credit card burdens.
With the unemployment rate near double digits and 6.7 million people out of work for six months or longer, many have relied on credit cards. By the middle of last year, 6.5 percent of all accounts were at least 30 days past due, up from less than 4 percent in 2005, according to Moody’s Economy.com.
Yet a 2005 alteration spurred by the financial industry made it harder for Americans to discharge credit card debts through bankruptcy, generating demand for alternatives like debt settlement.
The Arrangement
The industry casts itself as a victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the giant banks that dominate the credit card trade and aim to hang on to the spoils: interest rates of 20 percent or more and exorbitant late fees.
“We’re the little guys in this,” said John Ansbach, the chief lobbyist for the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives, better known as Usoba (pronounced you-SO-buh). “We exist to advocate for consumers. Two and a half billion dollars of unsecured debt has been settled by this industry, so how can you take the position that it has no value?”
But consumer watchdogs and state authorities argue that debt settlement companies generally fail to deliver.
In the typical arrangement, the companies direct consumers to set up special accounts and stock them with monthly deposits while skipping their credit card payments. Once balances reach sufficient size, negotiators strike lump-sum settlements with credit card companies that can cut debts in half. The programs generally last two to three years.
“What they don’t tell their customers is when you stop sending the money, creditors get angry,” said Andrew G. Pizor, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center. “Collection agents call. Sometimes they sue. People think they’re settling their problems and getting some relief, and lo and behold they get slammed with a lawsuit.”
In the case of two debt settlement companies sued last year by New York State, the attorney general alleged that no more than 1 percent of customers gained the services promised by marketers. A Colorado investigation came to a similar conclusion.
The industry’s own figures show that clients typically fail to secure relief. In a survey of its members, the Association of Settlement Companies found that three years after enrolling, only 34 percent of customers had either completed programs or were still saving for settlements.
“The industry is designed almost as a Ponzi scheme,” said Scott Johnson, chief executive of US Debt Resolve, a debt settlement company based in Dallas, which he portrays as a rare island of integrity in a sea of shady competitors. “Consumers come into these programs and pay thousands of dollars and then nothing happens. What they constantly have to have is more consumers coming into the program to come up with the money for more marketing.”
The Pitch
Linda Robertson knew nothing about the industry she was about to encounter when she picked up the phone at her Missouri home in February 2009 in response to a radio ad.
What she knew was that she could no longer manage even the monthly payments on her roughly $23,000 in credit card debt.
So much had come apart so quickly.
Before the recession, Ms. Robertson had been living in Phoenix, earning as much as $8,000 a month as a real estate appraiser. In 2005, she paid $185,000 for a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool and a yard dotted with hibiscus.
When the real estate business collapsed, she gave up her house to foreclosure and moved in with her son. She got a job as a waitress, earning enough to hang on to her car. She tapped credit cards to pay for gasoline and groceries.
By late 2007, she and her son could no longer afford his apartment. She moved home to Kansas City, where an aunt offered a room. She took a job on the night shift at a factory that makes plastic lids for packaged potato chips, earning $11.15 an hour.
Still, her credit card balances swelled.
The radio ad offered the services of a company based in Dallas with a soothing name: Financial Freedom of America. It cast itself as an antidote to the breakdown of middle-class life.
“We negotiate the past while you navigate the future,” read a caption on its Web site, next to a photo of a young woman nose-kissing an adorable boy. “The American Dream. It was never about bailouts or foreclosures. It was always about American values like hard work, ingenuity and looking out for your neighbor.”
When Ms. Robertson called, a customer service representative laid out a plan. Every month, Ms. Robertson would send $427.93 into a new account. Three years later, she would be debt-free. The representative told her the company would take $100 a month as an administrative fee, she recalled. His tone was take-charge.
“You talk about a rush-through,” Ms. Robertson said. “I didn’t even get to read the contract. It was all done. I had to sign it on the computer while he was on the phone. Then he called me back in 10 minutes to say it was done. He made me feel like this was the answer to my problems and I wasn’t going to have to face bankruptcy.”
Ms. Robertson made nine payments, according to Financial Freedom. Late last year, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at her door with court papers: One of her creditors, Capital One, had filed suit to collect roughly $5,000.
Panicked, she called Financial Freedom to seek guidance. “They said, ‘Oh, we don’t have any control over that, and you don’t have enough money in your account for us to settle with them,’ ” she recalled.
Her account held only $1,470, the representative explained, though she had by then deposited more than $3,700. Financial Freedom had taken the rest for its administrative fees, the company confirmed.
Financial Freedom later negotiated for her to make $100 monthly payments toward satisfying her debt to the creditor, but Ms. Robertson rejected that arrangement, no longer trusting the company. She demanded her money back.
She also filed a report with the Better Business Bureau in Dallas, adding to a stack of more than 100 consumer complaints lodged against the company. The bureau gives the company a failing grade of F.
Ms. Robertson received $1,470 back through the closure of her account, and then $1,120 — half the fees that Financial Freedom collected. Her pending bankruptcy has cost her $1,500 in legal fees.
“I trusted them,” she said. “They sounded like they were going to help me out. It’s a rip-off.”
Financial Freedom’s chief executive, Corey Butcher, rejected that characterization.
“We talked to her multiple times and verified the full details,” he said, adding that his company puts every client through a verification process to validate that they understand the risks — from lawsuits to garnished wages.
Intense and brooding, Mr. Butcher speaks of a personal mission to extricate consumers from credit card debt. But roughly half his customers fail to complete the program, he complained, with most of the cancellations coming within the first six months. He pinned the low completion rate on the same lack of discipline that has fostered many American ailments, from obesity to the foreclosure crisis.
“It comes from a lack of commitment,” Mr. Butcher said. “It’s like going and hiring a personal trainer at a health club. Some people act like they have lost the weight already, when actually they have to go to the gym three days a week, use the treadmill, cut back on their eating. They have to stick with it. At some point, the client has to take responsibility for their circumstance.”
Consumer watchdogs point to another reason customers wind up confused and upset: bogus marketing promises.
In April, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report drawing on undercover agents who posed as prospective customers at 20 debt settlement companies. According to the report, 17 of the 20 firms advised clients to stop paying their credit card bills. Some companies marketed their programs as if they had the imprimatur of the federal government, with one advertising itself as a “national debt relief stimulus plan.” Several claimed that 85 to 100 percent of their customers completed their programs.
“The vast majority of companies provided fraudulent and deceptive information,” said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations at the G.A.O. in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee during an April hearing.
At the same hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, pressed Mr. Ansbach, the Usoba lobbyist, to explain why his organization refused to disclose its membership.
“The leadership in our trade group candidly was concerned that publishing a list of members ended up being a subpoena list,” Mr. Ansbach said.
“Probably a genuine concern,” Senator McCaskill replied.
The Coming Crackdown
On multiple fronts, state and federal authorities are now taking aim at the industry.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed banning upfront fees, bringing vociferous lobbying from industry groups. The commission is expected to issue new rules this summer. Senator McCaskill has joined with fellow Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York to sponsor a bill that would cap fees charged by debt settlement companies at 5 percent of the savings recouped by their customers. Legislation in several states, including New York, California and Illinois, would also cap fees. A new consumer protection agency created as part of the financial regulatory reform bill in Congress could further constrain the industry.
The prospect of regulation hung palpably over the trade show at this Atlantic-side resort, tempering the orchid-adorned buffet tables and poolside cocktails with a note of foreboding.
“The current debt settlement business model is going to die,” declared Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum, a lawyer in the Washington firm Venable, addressing a packed ballroom. “The only question is who the executioner is going to be.”
That warning did not dislodge the spirit of expansion. Exhibitors paid as much as $4,500 for display space to showcase their wares — software to manage accounts, marketing expertise, call centers — to attendees who came for two days of strategy sessions and networking.
Cody Krebs, a senior account executive from Southern California, manned a booth for LowerMyBills.com, whose Internet ads link customers to debt settlement companies. Like many who have entered the industry, he previously sold subprime mortgages. When that business collapsed, he found refuge selling new products to the same set of customers — people with poor credit.
“It’s been tremendous,” he said. “Business has tripled in the last year and a half.”
The threat of regulations makes securing new customers imperative now, before new rules can take effect, said Matthew G. Hearn, whose firm, Mstars of Minneapolis, trains debt settlement sales staffs. “Do what you have to do to get the deals on the board,” he said, pacing excitedly in front of a podium.
And if some debt settlement companies have gained an unsavory reputation, he added, make that a marketing opportunity.
“We aren’t like them,” Mr. Hearn said. “You need to constantly pitch that. ‘We aren’t bad actors. It’s the ones out there that are.’ ”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
PALM BEACH, Fla. — For the companies that promise relief to Americans confronting swelling credit card balances, these are days of lucrative opportunity.
So lucrative, that an industry trade association, the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives, recently convened here, in the oceanfront confines of the Four Seasons Resort, to forge deals and plot strategy.
At a well-lubricated evening reception, a steel drum band played Bob Marley songs as hostesses in skimpy dresses draped leis around the necks of arriving entrepreneurs, some with deep tans.
The debt settlement industry can afford some extravagance. The long recession has delivered an abundance of customers — debt-saturated Americans, suffering lost jobs and income, sliding toward bankruptcy. The settlement companies typically harvest fees reaching 15 to 20 percent of the credit card balances carried by their customers, and they tend to collect upfront, regardless of whether a customer’s debt is actually reduced.
State attorneys general from New York to California and consumer watchdogs like the Better Business Bureau say the industry’s proceeds come at the direct expense of financially troubled Americans who are being fleeced of their last dollars with dubious promises.
Consumers rarely emerge from debt settlement programs with their credit card balances eliminated, these critics say, and many wind up worse off, with severely damaged credit, ceaseless threats from collection agents and lawsuits from creditors.
In the Kansas City area, Linda Robertson, 58, rues the day she bought the pitch from a debt settlement company advertising on the radio, promising to spare her from bankruptcy and eliminate her debts. She wound up sending nearly $4,000 into a special account established under the company’s guidance before a credit card company sued her, prompting her to drop out of the program.
By then, her account had only $1,470 remaining: The debt settlement company had collected the rest in fees. She is now filing for bankruptcy.
“They take advantage of vulnerable people,” she said. “When you’re desperate and you’re trying to get out of debt, they take advantage of you.” Debt settlement has swollen to some 2,000 firms, from a niche of perhaps a dozen companies a decade ago, according to trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, which is completing new rules aimed at curbing abuses within the industry.
Last year, within the industry’s two leading trade associations — the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives and the Association of Settlement Companies — some 250 companies collectively had more than 425,000 customers, who had enrolled roughly $11.7 billion in credit card balances in their programs.
As the industry has grown, so have allegations of unfair practices. Since 2004, at least 21 states have brought at least 128 enforcement actions against debt relief companies, according to the National Association of Attorneys General. Consumer complaints received by states more than doubled between 2007 and 2009, according to comments filed with the Federal Trade Commission.
“The industry’s not legitimate,” said Norman Googel, assistant attorney general in West Virginia, which has prosecuted debt settlement companies. “They’re targeting a group of people who are already drowning in debt. We’re talking about middle-class and lower middle-class people who had incomes, but they were using credit cards to survive.”
The industry counters that a few rogue operators have unfairly tarnished the reputations of well-intentioned debt settlement companies that provide a crucial service: liberating Americans from impossible credit card burdens.
With the unemployment rate near double digits and 6.7 million people out of work for six months or longer, many have relied on credit cards. By the middle of last year, 6.5 percent of all accounts were at least 30 days past due, up from less than 4 percent in 2005, according to Moody’s Economy.com.
Yet a 2005 alteration spurred by the financial industry made it harder for Americans to discharge credit card debts through bankruptcy, generating demand for alternatives like debt settlement.
The Arrangement
The industry casts itself as a victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by the giant banks that dominate the credit card trade and aim to hang on to the spoils: interest rates of 20 percent or more and exorbitant late fees.
“We’re the little guys in this,” said John Ansbach, the chief lobbyist for the United States Organizations for Bankruptcy Alternatives, better known as Usoba (pronounced you-SO-buh). “We exist to advocate for consumers. Two and a half billion dollars of unsecured debt has been settled by this industry, so how can you take the position that it has no value?”
But consumer watchdogs and state authorities argue that debt settlement companies generally fail to deliver.
In the typical arrangement, the companies direct consumers to set up special accounts and stock them with monthly deposits while skipping their credit card payments. Once balances reach sufficient size, negotiators strike lump-sum settlements with credit card companies that can cut debts in half. The programs generally last two to three years.
“What they don’t tell their customers is when you stop sending the money, creditors get angry,” said Andrew G. Pizor, a staff lawyer at the National Consumer Law Center. “Collection agents call. Sometimes they sue. People think they’re settling their problems and getting some relief, and lo and behold they get slammed with a lawsuit.”
In the case of two debt settlement companies sued last year by New York State, the attorney general alleged that no more than 1 percent of customers gained the services promised by marketers. A Colorado investigation came to a similar conclusion.
The industry’s own figures show that clients typically fail to secure relief. In a survey of its members, the Association of Settlement Companies found that three years after enrolling, only 34 percent of customers had either completed programs or were still saving for settlements.
“The industry is designed almost as a Ponzi scheme,” said Scott Johnson, chief executive of US Debt Resolve, a debt settlement company based in Dallas, which he portrays as a rare island of integrity in a sea of shady competitors. “Consumers come into these programs and pay thousands of dollars and then nothing happens. What they constantly have to have is more consumers coming into the program to come up with the money for more marketing.”
The Pitch
Linda Robertson knew nothing about the industry she was about to encounter when she picked up the phone at her Missouri home in February 2009 in response to a radio ad.
What she knew was that she could no longer manage even the monthly payments on her roughly $23,000 in credit card debt.
So much had come apart so quickly.
Before the recession, Ms. Robertson had been living in Phoenix, earning as much as $8,000 a month as a real estate appraiser. In 2005, she paid $185,000 for a three-bedroom house with a swimming pool and a yard dotted with hibiscus.
When the real estate business collapsed, she gave up her house to foreclosure and moved in with her son. She got a job as a waitress, earning enough to hang on to her car. She tapped credit cards to pay for gasoline and groceries.
By late 2007, she and her son could no longer afford his apartment. She moved home to Kansas City, where an aunt offered a room. She took a job on the night shift at a factory that makes plastic lids for packaged potato chips, earning $11.15 an hour.
Still, her credit card balances swelled.
The radio ad offered the services of a company based in Dallas with a soothing name: Financial Freedom of America. It cast itself as an antidote to the breakdown of middle-class life.
“We negotiate the past while you navigate the future,” read a caption on its Web site, next to a photo of a young woman nose-kissing an adorable boy. “The American Dream. It was never about bailouts or foreclosures. It was always about American values like hard work, ingenuity and looking out for your neighbor.”
When Ms. Robertson called, a customer service representative laid out a plan. Every month, Ms. Robertson would send $427.93 into a new account. Three years later, she would be debt-free. The representative told her the company would take $100 a month as an administrative fee, she recalled. His tone was take-charge.
“You talk about a rush-through,” Ms. Robertson said. “I didn’t even get to read the contract. It was all done. I had to sign it on the computer while he was on the phone. Then he called me back in 10 minutes to say it was done. He made me feel like this was the answer to my problems and I wasn’t going to have to face bankruptcy.”
Ms. Robertson made nine payments, according to Financial Freedom. Late last year, a sheriff’s deputy arrived at her door with court papers: One of her creditors, Capital One, had filed suit to collect roughly $5,000.
Panicked, she called Financial Freedom to seek guidance. “They said, ‘Oh, we don’t have any control over that, and you don’t have enough money in your account for us to settle with them,’ ” she recalled.
Her account held only $1,470, the representative explained, though she had by then deposited more than $3,700. Financial Freedom had taken the rest for its administrative fees, the company confirmed.
Financial Freedom later negotiated for her to make $100 monthly payments toward satisfying her debt to the creditor, but Ms. Robertson rejected that arrangement, no longer trusting the company. She demanded her money back.
She also filed a report with the Better Business Bureau in Dallas, adding to a stack of more than 100 consumer complaints lodged against the company. The bureau gives the company a failing grade of F.
Ms. Robertson received $1,470 back through the closure of her account, and then $1,120 — half the fees that Financial Freedom collected. Her pending bankruptcy has cost her $1,500 in legal fees.
“I trusted them,” she said. “They sounded like they were going to help me out. It’s a rip-off.”
Financial Freedom’s chief executive, Corey Butcher, rejected that characterization.
“We talked to her multiple times and verified the full details,” he said, adding that his company puts every client through a verification process to validate that they understand the risks — from lawsuits to garnished wages.
Intense and brooding, Mr. Butcher speaks of a personal mission to extricate consumers from credit card debt. But roughly half his customers fail to complete the program, he complained, with most of the cancellations coming within the first six months. He pinned the low completion rate on the same lack of discipline that has fostered many American ailments, from obesity to the foreclosure crisis.
“It comes from a lack of commitment,” Mr. Butcher said. “It’s like going and hiring a personal trainer at a health club. Some people act like they have lost the weight already, when actually they have to go to the gym three days a week, use the treadmill, cut back on their eating. They have to stick with it. At some point, the client has to take responsibility for their circumstance.”
Consumer watchdogs point to another reason customers wind up confused and upset: bogus marketing promises.
In April, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report drawing on undercover agents who posed as prospective customers at 20 debt settlement companies. According to the report, 17 of the 20 firms advised clients to stop paying their credit card bills. Some companies marketed their programs as if they had the imprimatur of the federal government, with one advertising itself as a “national debt relief stimulus plan.” Several claimed that 85 to 100 percent of their customers completed their programs.
“The vast majority of companies provided fraudulent and deceptive information,” said Gregory D. Kutz, managing director of forensic audits and special investigations at the G.A.O. in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee during an April hearing.
At the same hearing, Senator Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat, pressed Mr. Ansbach, the Usoba lobbyist, to explain why his organization refused to disclose its membership.
“The leadership in our trade group candidly was concerned that publishing a list of members ended up being a subpoena list,” Mr. Ansbach said.
“Probably a genuine concern,” Senator McCaskill replied.
The Coming Crackdown
On multiple fronts, state and federal authorities are now taking aim at the industry.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed banning upfront fees, bringing vociferous lobbying from industry groups. The commission is expected to issue new rules this summer. Senator McCaskill has joined with fellow Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York to sponsor a bill that would cap fees charged by debt settlement companies at 5 percent of the savings recouped by their customers. Legislation in several states, including New York, California and Illinois, would also cap fees. A new consumer protection agency created as part of the financial regulatory reform bill in Congress could further constrain the industry.
The prospect of regulation hung palpably over the trade show at this Atlantic-side resort, tempering the orchid-adorned buffet tables and poolside cocktails with a note of foreboding.
“The current debt settlement business model is going to die,” declared Jeffrey S. Tenenbaum, a lawyer in the Washington firm Venable, addressing a packed ballroom. “The only question is who the executioner is going to be.”
That warning did not dislodge the spirit of expansion. Exhibitors paid as much as $4,500 for display space to showcase their wares — software to manage accounts, marketing expertise, call centers — to attendees who came for two days of strategy sessions and networking.
Cody Krebs, a senior account executive from Southern California, manned a booth for LowerMyBills.com, whose Internet ads link customers to debt settlement companies. Like many who have entered the industry, he previously sold subprime mortgages. When that business collapsed, he found refuge selling new products to the same set of customers — people with poor credit.
“It’s been tremendous,” he said. “Business has tripled in the last year and a half.”
The threat of regulations makes securing new customers imperative now, before new rules can take effect, said Matthew G. Hearn, whose firm, Mstars of Minneapolis, trains debt settlement sales staffs. “Do what you have to do to get the deals on the board,” he said, pacing excitedly in front of a podium.
And if some debt settlement companies have gained an unsavory reputation, he added, make that a marketing opportunity.
“We aren’t like them,” Mr. Hearn said. “You need to constantly pitch that. ‘We aren’t bad actors. It’s the ones out there that are.’ ”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
John Tesh: Your score? And...what's your score again?
Confused about your score? Your credit score, that is? You're not alone. Many of us are in the dark about these scores that seem to have a large impact on us- our ability to get credit, to buy a car or a house- even our jobs! Credit score
Liz Pulliam Weston, a favorite of ours who puts the common sense to our cents, is here to tell us that the end of these dark ages about our credit scores may be coming to an end.
Free access to your credit scores may be just around the corner. The financial-reform bill recently passed in the Senate passed includes an amendment that would give individuals the right to see their scores if those numbers were used against them in a financial transaction.
In other words, if you were denied a mortgage or insurance, or had to pay more for either one because of your credit, you'd get to see the score that was used to make the decision.
This is a big deal, according to Weston. We've been able to see our credit reports- a history of what we've borrowed and how well we've repaid it- for free since 2003, but the three-digit scores calculated from those reports have continued to carry a price tag.
Consumer advocates, like Weston, have been pushing Congress to give people free access to their scores. But some proposals were mushy on the issue of which scores consumers would get to see.
Knowing the scores
Not all credit scores are created equal, and the credit bureaus are famous for selling consumers "educational" scores that aren't widely used by lenders. And there are many variations of the FICO score, including versions tailored to auto, credit card, installment loan and finance companies that are rarely seen.
"There was a question whether they would wind up with a score that isn't the same one used by the lender or the insurance company," said credit expert John Ulzheimer, who writes for Credit.com and who advised Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., in drafting this amendment. Under the amendment language, "you have a right to see the report and the score that was used. It's a transactional score versus an educational score."
Weston acknowledges that this amendment falls short of the full disclosure she has long wanted to see, which would be to ensure all consumers had free access to their FICOs, the credit scores used by most lenders. (Free FICOs, by the way, is a concept supported by Fair Isaac, the company that created the FICO scoring formula, and vigorously opposed by the credit bureaus that want to sell you those other scores.)
What you could expect to see
But this financial-services amendment is a better deal in some ways. If the amendment becomes law- it still has to survive the reconciliation process, in which the Senate's reform bill is merged with the one passed by the House- it will expand dramatically the universe of relevant scores to which you'll have access if your scores cause you a problem.
"In the past, scores like the FICO auto version have been like a unicorn. People talked about it all the time, but nobody had actually ever seen it," Ulzheimer says. "Now you'll get to see the unicorn."
The world of insurance scores is even more diverse. No one formula dominates this industry, as FICO does lending, and many of the largest insurers have their own proprietary scores. Seeing these numbers could start to peel back the mystery of insurance scoring, just as access to FICO scores a decade ago started cracking open the credit-scoring vault. As more people learned their FICOs and how important they were, the pressure mounted for the score's creators to disclose more about how they worked, and today we know far more about the inner machinery.
Another point about the amendment is that it would cut out the credit bureaus, the companies that have made getting your free annual credit reports so confusing in the first place..
The bureaus that run the federally mandated site, AnnualCreditReport.com (the ONLY site giving you completely free credit reports one time per year), hammer consumers with advertisements trying to encourage the purchase of credit scores and credit monitoring, when, in fact, you're just trying to get your free reports.
And some operate look-alike sites that appear to cash in on consumer confusion about where to get free reports.
Rather than giving bureaus another opportunity to profit on your financial information and confuse you in the process, the amendment would put the responsibili Credit report ty on the insurer or lender that was evaluating you. These companies are already required to send you a notice that provides free access to the credit report used in making an "adverse action," or decision, against you. The amendment would add the requirement that you be supplied with the score used.
A little less than advertised
There's one area where the amendment's promoters have tripped a bit, and that's in touting this as helpful to people who are looking for work. The wording says people would have a right to a score if the information in their credit reports was used against them, but employers don't look at scores- they typically look only at credit reports, so no scores would be generated in those cases. Using credit to discriminate in employment is a hot issue- as Weston has written about before- but this amendment wouldn't fix that problem.
Other than that, this could be a monumentally big win for consumers, and that's always a step in the right direction!
John
Copyright 2010 Tesh Media. All rights reserved.
Liz Pulliam Weston, a favorite of ours who puts the common sense to our cents, is here to tell us that the end of these dark ages about our credit scores may be coming to an end.
Free access to your credit scores may be just around the corner. The financial-reform bill recently passed in the Senate passed includes an amendment that would give individuals the right to see their scores if those numbers were used against them in a financial transaction.
In other words, if you were denied a mortgage or insurance, or had to pay more for either one because of your credit, you'd get to see the score that was used to make the decision.
This is a big deal, according to Weston. We've been able to see our credit reports- a history of what we've borrowed and how well we've repaid it- for free since 2003, but the three-digit scores calculated from those reports have continued to carry a price tag.
Consumer advocates, like Weston, have been pushing Congress to give people free access to their scores. But some proposals were mushy on the issue of which scores consumers would get to see.
Knowing the scores
Not all credit scores are created equal, and the credit bureaus are famous for selling consumers "educational" scores that aren't widely used by lenders. And there are many variations of the FICO score, including versions tailored to auto, credit card, installment loan and finance companies that are rarely seen.
"There was a question whether they would wind up with a score that isn't the same one used by the lender or the insurance company," said credit expert John Ulzheimer, who writes for Credit.com and who advised Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., in drafting this amendment. Under the amendment language, "you have a right to see the report and the score that was used. It's a transactional score versus an educational score."
Weston acknowledges that this amendment falls short of the full disclosure she has long wanted to see, which would be to ensure all consumers had free access to their FICOs, the credit scores used by most lenders. (Free FICOs, by the way, is a concept supported by Fair Isaac, the company that created the FICO scoring formula, and vigorously opposed by the credit bureaus that want to sell you those other scores.)
What you could expect to see
But this financial-services amendment is a better deal in some ways. If the amendment becomes law- it still has to survive the reconciliation process, in which the Senate's reform bill is merged with the one passed by the House- it will expand dramatically the universe of relevant scores to which you'll have access if your scores cause you a problem.
"In the past, scores like the FICO auto version have been like a unicorn. People talked about it all the time, but nobody had actually ever seen it," Ulzheimer says. "Now you'll get to see the unicorn."
The world of insurance scores is even more diverse. No one formula dominates this industry, as FICO does lending, and many of the largest insurers have their own proprietary scores. Seeing these numbers could start to peel back the mystery of insurance scoring, just as access to FICO scores a decade ago started cracking open the credit-scoring vault. As more people learned their FICOs and how important they were, the pressure mounted for the score's creators to disclose more about how they worked, and today we know far more about the inner machinery.
Another point about the amendment is that it would cut out the credit bureaus, the companies that have made getting your free annual credit reports so confusing in the first place..
The bureaus that run the federally mandated site, AnnualCreditReport.com (the ONLY site giving you completely free credit reports one time per year), hammer consumers with advertisements trying to encourage the purchase of credit scores and credit monitoring, when, in fact, you're just trying to get your free reports.
And some operate look-alike sites that appear to cash in on consumer confusion about where to get free reports.
Rather than giving bureaus another opportunity to profit on your financial information and confuse you in the process, the amendment would put the responsibili Credit report ty on the insurer or lender that was evaluating you. These companies are already required to send you a notice that provides free access to the credit report used in making an "adverse action," or decision, against you. The amendment would add the requirement that you be supplied with the score used.
A little less than advertised
There's one area where the amendment's promoters have tripped a bit, and that's in touting this as helpful to people who are looking for work. The wording says people would have a right to a score if the information in their credit reports was used against them, but employers don't look at scores- they typically look only at credit reports, so no scores would be generated in those cases. Using credit to discriminate in employment is a hot issue- as Weston has written about before- but this amendment wouldn't fix that problem.
Other than that, this could be a monumentally big win for consumers, and that's always a step in the right direction!
John
Copyright 2010 Tesh Media. All rights reserved.
Wednesday, June 09, 2010
USA Today: Only a fraction of those in need file for bankruptcy
By Christine Dugas, USA TODAY
Bankruptcy filings are nearing the record 2 million of 2005, when a new law took effect that was aimed at curbing abuse of the system. Filings could reach 1.7 million this year, says law professor Robert Lawless, but few experts believe that debtors are now gaming the system.
Instead, concern exists about a growing number of Americans who need bankruptcy protection but cannot get any benefit from it or simply cannot afford to file. As their financial problems worsen, that hurts everyone because it can hinder the economic turnaround.
"It's shocking that we are back to the 2005 level," says Katherine Porter, associate professor of law at the University of Iowa. "And the filing rate doesn't even begin to count the depth of the financial pain."
Bankruptcy laws changed in 2005 because filings skyrocketed and credit card companies and banks wanted to weed out deadbeat borrowers. The law made it harder — more expensive and more restrictive — for individuals to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which erases most debts.
Instead of seeking protection from bankruptcy, a number of debt-laden Americans have gone into a "shadow economy," or informal bankruptcy, according to some experts.
The signs are there: Student loan defaults and home foreclosures are rising, and bank card loan defaults have increased from 7.7% in March to 9.1% in April, according to S&P/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices. But during the same two months, bankruptcy filings fell by 4%.
Bankruptcy is supposed to provide a fresh start to people who are in serious financial distress. But only a fraction are filing, Porter says.
'My future is gone'
Carmen Gardiner, 25, a 2007 graduate of Louisiana State University, is weighed down by her private student loans. Her debt is now about $80,000, and her monthly payments are more than $600. Gardiner's undergraduate degree is in psychology. She lives with her husband, who is still in college, and earns $13 an hour at a call center in Atlanta. They have a 6-month-old daughter.
She hasn't defaulted on her student loan. But she doesn't see much hope. Bankruptcy would not discharge her debt.
"I'm completely sour about the whole idea of going to college," she says. "My future is gone before I have a chance to make one. But if I could discharge this using bankruptcy, it would be better than winning the lottery."
There is little information about unregulated private student loan debt. But during an investor meeting, Sallie Mae, the USA's largest private student lender, recently projected that 40% of $6 billion in subprime private student loans will default, according to Student Lending Analytics, an independent research company. That means 360,000 to 540,000 borrowers are likely to default on their loans, SLA said.
The only way that people with private student loans can get help in bankruptcy is if they can prove undue hardship. And to do that they have to go through a separate trial, which is an extra cost, involves witnesses, legal assistance and extra expertise, says Deanne Loonin, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. It is a huge barrier.
But in April, both the Senate and House introduced legislation to allow for private student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005, only government-issued-or-guaranteed student loans were protected during bankruptcy.
"The high interest rates on private student loans have made them incredibly profitable for loan companies and saddled students with crushing debt," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who first introduced this legislation in June 2007.
Filers pay now or pay later
Only a fraction of those in serious financial distress are filing for bankruptcy, Porter says. In January, she and Ronald Mann, a professor of law at Columbia University, released a paper, "Saving up for Bankruptcy," that probed why that is happening.
For starters, it's simply expensive to file. Attorney and filing fees have risen, and under the new law additional forms, paperwork and attorney liability have added to the cost, Porter says. In the first two years after the law changed, the attorney fees for filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy rose from $712 to $1,078, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And the filing fees increased from $209 to $299.
Many debtors have no choice but to delay filing for bankruptcy. Some wait until they receive a tax refund, and others cash out their retirement savings to pay for a lawyer.
But postponing filing is not good for debtors. It's similar to delaying going to the doctor, because you'll just end up with more problems, says Lawless, professor of law at University of Illinois.
The system is not just more costly, it is more complex. It requires pre-bankruptcy credit counseling. It requires six months of income information and two years of tax returns. And if the debtor holds off filing, a lawyer has to continue to gather new information.
"The paper chase gets greater, and then the fee goes up," says William Brewer, a bankruptcy lawyer in Raleigh, N.C.
Hanging onto their homes
Another reason: Many Americans who are trying to save their homes do not file for bankruptcy. Under the bankruptcy law, filers can protect their summer home and yacht, but they can't protect their primary residence, says John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a non-profit organization.
That wasn't such a big issue when home values were rising. But during the recession, many homeowners are seeing values plummeting and their mortgage payments rising.
Home foreclosure filings have outstripped bankruptcy filings, Porter says. And foreclosure shows no sign of slowing down. In the first quarter of the year, foreclosure filings were 16% higher than the same quarter in 2009, according to RealtyTrac. And March was the highest month since RealtyTrac began issuing reports.
Cordell Brooks, 47, who lives in Temple Hills, Md., may soon lose his home to foreclosure. During the recession he was laid off from his job as a graphics designer. Since then, he has worked as a substitute teacher and now is a contractor with Prince George's County Housing.
"I've gone from earning $40 an hour to $17.50," he says.
Brooks, who has owned his home since 1989, applied for a federal program known as Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) but was turned down. He has few options. He doesn't want to file for bankruptcy. But even if he did, it wouldn't help him save his home.
"Bankruptcy is not very useful at solving this particular type of financial distress," Porter says.
Homeowners who applied for loan modifications could have been turned down if they also have filed for bankruptcy. But as of this month, a debtor who requests loan modification cannot be discriminated against because they have filed for bankruptcy, says John Rao, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, which specializes in consumer credit and bankruptcy issues. And that will help homeowners who are also overwhelmed by other debt.
Is it time for a change?
When the bankruptcy law changed in 2005, barriers were erected to prevent abuse. But it seems that many honest Americans who are in financial crisis are now running into obstacles. That raises questions about what can be done to prevent debtors from falling through the cracks.
Congress is considering legislation to help college graduates weighed down by private student loan debt. If passed, the legislation could roll back the bankruptcy law so that private student loans can be discharged.
The Treasury Department has agreed to revise the federal mortgage modification program so that people can't be turned down for HAMP just because they have filed for bankruptcy. But some say that this is just a Band-Aid. And now few homeowners are getting permanent mortgage modification.
The 2005 bankruptcy reform did not change mortgage debt. "Debt secured by a principal residence has not been dischargeable since 1978," says Philip Corwin, an outside bankruptcy counsel for the American Bankers Association.
Recent efforts to introduce legislation to allow bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages have failed. "If Congress had had the wisdom to pass that three years ago we would have forced all the parties to the table to work out reasonable solutions," Taylor says.
The financial industry says that the bankruptcy law is not causing the shadow economy. People can still file for it, and if they can't afford the fees at least the court filing fees can be waived, says Scott Talbott, senior vice president of the Financial Services Roundtable. And people with student loans who have undue hardship are able to get financial relief.
But undue hardship is extremely hard and costly to navigate, says Lauren Asher, associate director of Project on Student Debt. There is no definition in the bankruptcy code of undue hardship, and the court decisions on it have been harsh, Corwin says.
Free legal services have been cut back during the recession and are not available for many debtors. It would help to roll back some of the changes that have increased legal paperwork and risk of personal liability, Lawless says.
The bankruptcy problems are not likely to go away anytime soon. If Gardiner's career is stymied because she can't afford to go on to graduate school and is burdened with student loan debt, doors may be closed to her.
"Not going on with her career and being stuck in a low-wage job hurts everyone and drags down the economy," Porter says. "It is not surprising that the bankruptcy code is not a fit for the problems of today. The 2005 amendment was a move in the wrong direction, and I think it's time to think about redesigning bankruptcy."
Copyright 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. All rights reserved.
Bankruptcy filings are nearing the record 2 million of 2005, when a new law took effect that was aimed at curbing abuse of the system. Filings could reach 1.7 million this year, says law professor Robert Lawless, but few experts believe that debtors are now gaming the system.
Instead, concern exists about a growing number of Americans who need bankruptcy protection but cannot get any benefit from it or simply cannot afford to file. As their financial problems worsen, that hurts everyone because it can hinder the economic turnaround.
"It's shocking that we are back to the 2005 level," says Katherine Porter, associate professor of law at the University of Iowa. "And the filing rate doesn't even begin to count the depth of the financial pain."
Bankruptcy laws changed in 2005 because filings skyrocketed and credit card companies and banks wanted to weed out deadbeat borrowers. The law made it harder — more expensive and more restrictive — for individuals to file Chapter 7 bankruptcy, which erases most debts.
Instead of seeking protection from bankruptcy, a number of debt-laden Americans have gone into a "shadow economy," or informal bankruptcy, according to some experts.
The signs are there: Student loan defaults and home foreclosures are rising, and bank card loan defaults have increased from 7.7% in March to 9.1% in April, according to S&P/Experian Consumer Credit Default Indices. But during the same two months, bankruptcy filings fell by 4%.
Bankruptcy is supposed to provide a fresh start to people who are in serious financial distress. But only a fraction are filing, Porter says.
'My future is gone'
Carmen Gardiner, 25, a 2007 graduate of Louisiana State University, is weighed down by her private student loans. Her debt is now about $80,000, and her monthly payments are more than $600. Gardiner's undergraduate degree is in psychology. She lives with her husband, who is still in college, and earns $13 an hour at a call center in Atlanta. They have a 6-month-old daughter.
She hasn't defaulted on her student loan. But she doesn't see much hope. Bankruptcy would not discharge her debt.
"I'm completely sour about the whole idea of going to college," she says. "My future is gone before I have a chance to make one. But if I could discharge this using bankruptcy, it would be better than winning the lottery."
There is little information about unregulated private student loan debt. But during an investor meeting, Sallie Mae, the USA's largest private student lender, recently projected that 40% of $6 billion in subprime private student loans will default, according to Student Lending Analytics, an independent research company. That means 360,000 to 540,000 borrowers are likely to default on their loans, SLA said.
The only way that people with private student loans can get help in bankruptcy is if they can prove undue hardship. And to do that they have to go through a separate trial, which is an extra cost, involves witnesses, legal assistance and extra expertise, says Deanne Loonin, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. It is a huge barrier.
But in April, both the Senate and House introduced legislation to allow for private student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. Before the bankruptcy law changed in 2005, only government-issued-or-guaranteed student loans were protected during bankruptcy.
"The high interest rates on private student loans have made them incredibly profitable for loan companies and saddled students with crushing debt," said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who first introduced this legislation in June 2007.
Filers pay now or pay later
Only a fraction of those in serious financial distress are filing for bankruptcy, Porter says. In January, she and Ronald Mann, a professor of law at Columbia University, released a paper, "Saving up for Bankruptcy," that probed why that is happening.
For starters, it's simply expensive to file. Attorney and filing fees have risen, and under the new law additional forms, paperwork and attorney liability have added to the cost, Porter says. In the first two years after the law changed, the attorney fees for filing Chapter 7 bankruptcy rose from $712 to $1,078, according to a study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. And the filing fees increased from $209 to $299.
Many debtors have no choice but to delay filing for bankruptcy. Some wait until they receive a tax refund, and others cash out their retirement savings to pay for a lawyer.
But postponing filing is not good for debtors. It's similar to delaying going to the doctor, because you'll just end up with more problems, says Lawless, professor of law at University of Illinois.
The system is not just more costly, it is more complex. It requires pre-bankruptcy credit counseling. It requires six months of income information and two years of tax returns. And if the debtor holds off filing, a lawyer has to continue to gather new information.
"The paper chase gets greater, and then the fee goes up," says William Brewer, a bankruptcy lawyer in Raleigh, N.C.
Hanging onto their homes
Another reason: Many Americans who are trying to save their homes do not file for bankruptcy. Under the bankruptcy law, filers can protect their summer home and yacht, but they can't protect their primary residence, says John Taylor, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a non-profit organization.
That wasn't such a big issue when home values were rising. But during the recession, many homeowners are seeing values plummeting and their mortgage payments rising.
Home foreclosure filings have outstripped bankruptcy filings, Porter says. And foreclosure shows no sign of slowing down. In the first quarter of the year, foreclosure filings were 16% higher than the same quarter in 2009, according to RealtyTrac. And March was the highest month since RealtyTrac began issuing reports.
Cordell Brooks, 47, who lives in Temple Hills, Md., may soon lose his home to foreclosure. During the recession he was laid off from his job as a graphics designer. Since then, he has worked as a substitute teacher and now is a contractor with Prince George's County Housing.
"I've gone from earning $40 an hour to $17.50," he says.
Brooks, who has owned his home since 1989, applied for a federal program known as Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) but was turned down. He has few options. He doesn't want to file for bankruptcy. But even if he did, it wouldn't help him save his home.
"Bankruptcy is not very useful at solving this particular type of financial distress," Porter says.
Homeowners who applied for loan modifications could have been turned down if they also have filed for bankruptcy. But as of this month, a debtor who requests loan modification cannot be discriminated against because they have filed for bankruptcy, says John Rao, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, which specializes in consumer credit and bankruptcy issues. And that will help homeowners who are also overwhelmed by other debt.
Is it time for a change?
When the bankruptcy law changed in 2005, barriers were erected to prevent abuse. But it seems that many honest Americans who are in financial crisis are now running into obstacles. That raises questions about what can be done to prevent debtors from falling through the cracks.
Congress is considering legislation to help college graduates weighed down by private student loan debt. If passed, the legislation could roll back the bankruptcy law so that private student loans can be discharged.
The Treasury Department has agreed to revise the federal mortgage modification program so that people can't be turned down for HAMP just because they have filed for bankruptcy. But some say that this is just a Band-Aid. And now few homeowners are getting permanent mortgage modification.
The 2005 bankruptcy reform did not change mortgage debt. "Debt secured by a principal residence has not been dischargeable since 1978," says Philip Corwin, an outside bankruptcy counsel for the American Bankers Association.
Recent efforts to introduce legislation to allow bankruptcy judges to modify home mortgages have failed. "If Congress had had the wisdom to pass that three years ago we would have forced all the parties to the table to work out reasonable solutions," Taylor says.
The financial industry says that the bankruptcy law is not causing the shadow economy. People can still file for it, and if they can't afford the fees at least the court filing fees can be waived, says Scott Talbott, senior vice president of the Financial Services Roundtable. And people with student loans who have undue hardship are able to get financial relief.
But undue hardship is extremely hard and costly to navigate, says Lauren Asher, associate director of Project on Student Debt. There is no definition in the bankruptcy code of undue hardship, and the court decisions on it have been harsh, Corwin says.
Free legal services have been cut back during the recession and are not available for many debtors. It would help to roll back some of the changes that have increased legal paperwork and risk of personal liability, Lawless says.
The bankruptcy problems are not likely to go away anytime soon. If Gardiner's career is stymied because she can't afford to go on to graduate school and is burdened with student loan debt, doors may be closed to her.
"Not going on with her career and being stuck in a low-wage job hurts everyone and drags down the economy," Porter says. "It is not surprising that the bankruptcy code is not a fit for the problems of today. The 2005 amendment was a move in the wrong direction, and I think it's time to think about redesigning bankruptcy."
Copyright 2010 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc. All rights reserved.
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Means Test and college tuition
Here at Shenwick & Associates, we are getting many calls about the means test and college tuition; specifically, whether the high cost of college tuition is a deductible expense on the means test. As many of you know, in 2005, Congress radically changed the personal bankruptcy law and instituted median income and means testing to limit the number of individuals who would be able to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Chapter 7 bankruptcy is a liquidation or "fresh start," in which debtors can liquidate or discharge most of their debts. To limit the number of filers, Congress provided that if a debtor exceeded the median income in their state, then there is a presumption that they are not entitled to file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy unless they pass the means test. The median income is adjusted periodically. For bankruptcy cases filed on or after March 15, 2010, the median income in New York State is $46,320 for a family of one, $57,902 for a family of two, $69,174 for a family of three and $82,164 for a family of four (add $7,500 for each individual in excess of four),.
The means test is an extremely complicated calculation (it is a six page calculation, similar to a 1040 tax return for an individual) that is based on a debtor's income and expenses. The expenses are, in general, pegged to the allowable expenses in an offer of compromise with the IRS.
The questions that arises is whether the cost of college tuition (at a private college or a public university) is deductible for the purposes of the means test calculation. Unfortunately, the majority of cases hold that college tuition is, in fact, not deductible, because Congress failed to allow college tuition as a deduction in the means test. A number of Bankruptcy Courts have reviewed this issue, and have held that college tuition is not deductible.
For example, in In re Saffrin, 380 B.R. 191 (Bankr. N.D. Ill 2007), the Bankruptcy Court held that the debtors could not deduct their daughter's college expenses on the means test because the Bankruptcy Code only allows elementary or secondary educational expenses for dependent children under 18.
Similarly, in In re Boyd, 378 B.R. 81 (Bankr. M.D. Pa. 2007), the Bankruptcy Court found that the debtors could not deduct their adult daughter's college education on the means test because the Bankruptcy Code does not expressly provide such deduction, and college tuition does not qualify to be included on line 59 of the means test under "Other Necessary Expenses."
However, notwithstanding the fact that college tuition is not deductible for the means test, debtors may have other expenses that will be sufficient for them to pass the means test and file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Any individuals having questions about Chapter 7 bankruptcy or the means test are encouraged to contact Jim Shenwick.
The means test is an extremely complicated calculation (it is a six page calculation, similar to a 1040 tax return for an individual) that is based on a debtor's income and expenses. The expenses are, in general, pegged to the allowable expenses in an offer of compromise with the IRS.
The questions that arises is whether the cost of college tuition (at a private college or a public university) is deductible for the purposes of the means test calculation. Unfortunately, the majority of cases hold that college tuition is, in fact, not deductible, because Congress failed to allow college tuition as a deduction in the means test. A number of Bankruptcy Courts have reviewed this issue, and have held that college tuition is not deductible.
For example, in In re Saffrin, 380 B.R. 191 (Bankr. N.D. Ill 2007), the Bankruptcy Court held that the debtors could not deduct their daughter's college expenses on the means test because the Bankruptcy Code only allows elementary or secondary educational expenses for dependent children under 18.
Similarly, in In re Boyd, 378 B.R. 81 (Bankr. M.D. Pa. 2007), the Bankruptcy Court found that the debtors could not deduct their adult daughter's college education on the means test because the Bankruptcy Code does not expressly provide such deduction, and college tuition does not qualify to be included on line 59 of the means test under "Other Necessary Expenses."
However, notwithstanding the fact that college tuition is not deductible for the means test, debtors may have other expenses that will be sufficient for them to pass the means test and file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.
Any individuals having questions about Chapter 7 bankruptcy or the means test are encouraged to contact Jim Shenwick.
Friday, May 21, 2010
AP: Millions of jobs are gone forever
By CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER (AP) – May 13, 2010
WASHINGTON — Fewer construction workers will be needed. Don't expect as many interior designers or advertising copywriters, either. Retailers will get by with leaner staffs.
The economy is strengthening. But millions of jobs lost in the recession could be gone for good.
And unlike in past recessions, jobs in the beleaguered manufacturing sector aren't the only ones likely lost forever. What sets the Great Recession apart is the variety of jobs that may not return.
That helps explain why economists think it will take at least five years for the economy to regain the 8.2 million jobs wiped out by the recession — longer than in any other recovery since World War II.
It means that even as the economy strengthens, more Americans could face years out of work. Already, the percentage of the labor force unemployed for six months or longer is 4.3 percent. That's the highest rate on records dating to 1948.
Behind the trend are the cutbacks businesses made in the recession to make up for a loss of customers. To sustain earnings, they became more productive: They found ways to produce the same level of goods or services with fewer workers. Automation, global competition and technological efficiencies helped solidify the trend.
Diminished home equity and investment accounts have made shoppers more cautious, too. And their frugality could endure well into the recovery. That's why fewer retail workers, among others, will likely be needed.
Among those whose former jobs may be gone for good are:
_ Julie Weber of Milwaukee, who designed office cubicles for nearly seven years. She lost her job about a year ago. Since then, she's been able to find only part-time work outside her field. Interior design was hammered by the real estate downturn. "My hope for getting back into the industry is not very high," says Weber, 29.
_ Erik Proulx, 38, a former advertising copywriter in Boston, who finds more companies are turning to social media and viral marketing and are less drawn to agencies that focus on traditional TV and print ad campaigns. Proulx was laid off in October 2008 — the third time an employer had cut his position or had closed. He no longer wants to rejoin the industry. Proulx has started a blog to help other unemployed ad professionals network.
_ Louis DiFilippo, 30, who decided to study information technology after losing his job managing a gourmet food store in Washington, D.C. After six months of unemployment, he embraced a career with more stability. He now works on computer network security for the Navy. "I'm much happier now," he said.
More than one-third of chief financial officers at 620 big companies surveyed in March by Duke University and CFO magazine said they didn't expect to restore their payrolls to pre-recession levels for at least three years. Nearly all cited higher productivity and tepid consumer spending.
"Companies have just figured out, 'We didn't want to fire people ... but now that they're gone, we've realized that we can get by without them,'" said John Graham, a Duke finance professor who directed the survey.
Productivity grew at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the year ending in March, the Labor Department said this month. It was the largest increase in 48 years, though most economists think that pace isn't sustainable.
In the long run, more productive workers raise standards of living: Companies can pay more without inflating prices. But in the short run, high productivity delays hiring.
U.S. employers did add 290,000 jobs in April. The unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent, though, because 805,000 people without jobs poured into the labor force to seek work.
Three industries, in particular, where many jobs may not be coming back are retailing, manufacturing and advertising.
Retailers have lost 1.2 million, or 7.5 percent, of jobs that existed before the recession, according to Labor Department data. Circuit City and Linens & Things have collapsed. Starbucks closed nearly 800 U.S. stores. Robert Yerex, an economist at Kronos, a work force management company, estimates 20 percent of those jobs are never coming back.
Manufacturing has shed 2.1 million jobs, or 16 percent of its total, since the recession began. Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Boeing Co. laid off a combined 15,700 people during the recession. General Motors eliminated 65,000 through buyouts and layoffs. And as Americans buy fewer cars and homes, more than 1 million jobs in the auto, steel, furniture and other manufacturing industries won't return, according to estimates by Moody's Analytics.
Advertising and PR agencies have lost 65,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of the pre-recession total. Moody's Analytics estimates those industries will lose even more within five years.
In addition, a consolidated airline industry has shed layers of jobs that won't likely return. Delta Air Lines earlier this year spread out departure times for flights from its Cincinnati hub, rather than bunching them at peak travel times. That way, it could operate from one concourse rather than two, said Kent Landers, a spokesman. The change allowed a Delta subsidiary, Regional Elite Airline Services, to cut more than 700 baggage handling and other ground services jobs.
More than half the 15.3 million people out of work in April said they regard their layoff as permanent, the Labor Department said. That's the highest proportion on records dating to 1967. In previous recessions, workers often endured only temporary layoffs: Their employers would recall them once business picked up.
Caterpillar Inc. has resumed hiring after laying off 19,000 full-time workers during the recession, thanks to rising demand for its construction and mining equipment. But most of the new jobs will be overseas. Of the 9,000 hires CEO Jim Owens said Caterpillar plans to make this year, only 3,000 will be in the U.S.
Many economists say eventually, companies won't be able to squeeze any more work out of their employees. That would force employers to step up hiring.
But Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cautions that this won't happen anytime soon. She believes corporate America remains in the early stages of a drive for greater efficiencies.
"We may be in store for ... high productivity growth for some time," she said in a speech this year. "If so, the rate of job creation will be frustratingly slow."
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
WASHINGTON — Fewer construction workers will be needed. Don't expect as many interior designers or advertising copywriters, either. Retailers will get by with leaner staffs.
The economy is strengthening. But millions of jobs lost in the recession could be gone for good.
And unlike in past recessions, jobs in the beleaguered manufacturing sector aren't the only ones likely lost forever. What sets the Great Recession apart is the variety of jobs that may not return.
That helps explain why economists think it will take at least five years for the economy to regain the 8.2 million jobs wiped out by the recession — longer than in any other recovery since World War II.
It means that even as the economy strengthens, more Americans could face years out of work. Already, the percentage of the labor force unemployed for six months or longer is 4.3 percent. That's the highest rate on records dating to 1948.
Behind the trend are the cutbacks businesses made in the recession to make up for a loss of customers. To sustain earnings, they became more productive: They found ways to produce the same level of goods or services with fewer workers. Automation, global competition and technological efficiencies helped solidify the trend.
Diminished home equity and investment accounts have made shoppers more cautious, too. And their frugality could endure well into the recovery. That's why fewer retail workers, among others, will likely be needed.
Among those whose former jobs may be gone for good are:
_ Julie Weber of Milwaukee, who designed office cubicles for nearly seven years. She lost her job about a year ago. Since then, she's been able to find only part-time work outside her field. Interior design was hammered by the real estate downturn. "My hope for getting back into the industry is not very high," says Weber, 29.
_ Erik Proulx, 38, a former advertising copywriter in Boston, who finds more companies are turning to social media and viral marketing and are less drawn to agencies that focus on traditional TV and print ad campaigns. Proulx was laid off in October 2008 — the third time an employer had cut his position or had closed. He no longer wants to rejoin the industry. Proulx has started a blog to help other unemployed ad professionals network.
_ Louis DiFilippo, 30, who decided to study information technology after losing his job managing a gourmet food store in Washington, D.C. After six months of unemployment, he embraced a career with more stability. He now works on computer network security for the Navy. "I'm much happier now," he said.
More than one-third of chief financial officers at 620 big companies surveyed in March by Duke University and CFO magazine said they didn't expect to restore their payrolls to pre-recession levels for at least three years. Nearly all cited higher productivity and tepid consumer spending.
"Companies have just figured out, 'We didn't want to fire people ... but now that they're gone, we've realized that we can get by without them,'" said John Graham, a Duke finance professor who directed the survey.
Productivity grew at an annual rate of 6.3 percent in the year ending in March, the Labor Department said this month. It was the largest increase in 48 years, though most economists think that pace isn't sustainable.
In the long run, more productive workers raise standards of living: Companies can pay more without inflating prices. But in the short run, high productivity delays hiring.
U.S. employers did add 290,000 jobs in April. The unemployment rate rose to 9.9 percent, though, because 805,000 people without jobs poured into the labor force to seek work.
Three industries, in particular, where many jobs may not be coming back are retailing, manufacturing and advertising.
Retailers have lost 1.2 million, or 7.5 percent, of jobs that existed before the recession, according to Labor Department data. Circuit City and Linens & Things have collapsed. Starbucks closed nearly 800 U.S. stores. Robert Yerex, an economist at Kronos, a work force management company, estimates 20 percent of those jobs are never coming back.
Manufacturing has shed 2.1 million jobs, or 16 percent of its total, since the recession began. Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Boeing Co. laid off a combined 15,700 people during the recession. General Motors eliminated 65,000 through buyouts and layoffs. And as Americans buy fewer cars and homes, more than 1 million jobs in the auto, steel, furniture and other manufacturing industries won't return, according to estimates by Moody's Analytics.
Advertising and PR agencies have lost 65,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of the pre-recession total. Moody's Analytics estimates those industries will lose even more within five years.
In addition, a consolidated airline industry has shed layers of jobs that won't likely return. Delta Air Lines earlier this year spread out departure times for flights from its Cincinnati hub, rather than bunching them at peak travel times. That way, it could operate from one concourse rather than two, said Kent Landers, a spokesman. The change allowed a Delta subsidiary, Regional Elite Airline Services, to cut more than 700 baggage handling and other ground services jobs.
More than half the 15.3 million people out of work in April said they regard their layoff as permanent, the Labor Department said. That's the highest proportion on records dating to 1967. In previous recessions, workers often endured only temporary layoffs: Their employers would recall them once business picked up.
Caterpillar Inc. has resumed hiring after laying off 19,000 full-time workers during the recession, thanks to rising demand for its construction and mining equipment. But most of the new jobs will be overseas. Of the 9,000 hires CEO Jim Owens said Caterpillar plans to make this year, only 3,000 will be in the U.S.
Many economists say eventually, companies won't be able to squeeze any more work out of their employees. That would force employers to step up hiring.
But Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, cautions that this won't happen anytime soon. She believes corporate America remains in the early stages of a drive for greater efficiencies.
"We may be in store for ... high productivity growth for some time," she said in a speech this year. "If so, the rate of job creation will be frustratingly slow."
Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Monday, May 10, 2010
NYT: In New York, Some Judges Are Now Skeptical About Debt Collectors’ Claims
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
As New Yorkers have tumbled into credit card debt in large numbers during the great recession, bill collectors have inundated the courts to get what they say is due. In turn, the courts have issued hundreds of thousands of orders against residents. Some consumer groups argue that by doing so, the courts have become little more than an arm of the debt collection industry.
Now, a few judges in New York State are suggesting that they agree, at least in part, with the consumer groups. They have fumed at debt collectors and their lawyers, scolding them for interest as high as 30 percent a year and berating them for false statements and abusive practices.
Some of the rulings have even been sarcastic or incredulous. In December, a Staten Island judge said debt collectors seemed to think their lawsuits were taking place in a legal Land of Oz, where everyone was supposed to follow anticonsumer rules invented by some unseen debt-collection wizard.
Last month, a Manhattan appeals court threw out a credit card case, saying a debt collection company had sued the wrong person but pursued the case anyway.
“I think these judges are outraged at the status quo, and they’re trying to change it,” said Janet Ray Kalson, a Manhattan lawyer who is the chairwoman of a City Bar Association committee that has studied the deluge of credit card cases.
Debt-buyer businesses purchase debts — along with lists of names and amounts supposedly due — for pennies on the dollar from credit card companies and sometimes have no real evidence about whom they are suing or why. They then file tens of thousands of suits, often with little to back up their claims.
A Nassau County District Court judge said recently, for example, that one of New York City’s high-volume debt collection law firms, which has close ties to a debt-buying company, did not provide “a scintilla of evidence” that there was even a debt in a case against a Long Island woman.
The suit received an unusual amount of attention. The judge, Michael A. Ciaffa, said that it “regrettably, involves a veritable ‘perfect storm’ of mistakes, errors, misdeeds and improper litigation practices.” Judge Ciaffa said the law firm, Eltman, Eltman & Cooper, ignored court orders, made a “demonstrably false” assertion and harassed the woman for payment even after its suit was dismissed.
The case before Judge Ciaffa ended with an order that is far from typical in a credit card suit. The woman who had been sued, Patricia Bohnet, a bookkeeper and single mother, did not have to pay anything. But Eltman, Eltman & Cooper had to pay $14,800 in sanctions for violating ethical rules at least 18 times. Under the judge’s order, $4,800 is to go to Ms. Bohnet and the remainder to a state fund that works to reimburse clients for dishonest conduct by lawyers.
“They don’t care if you’re sick; they don’t care if you’re poor,” Ms. Bohnet said in an interview at her job in Woodmere. “Their only job is to collect money, and they’ll do it in any way possible.”
In response to questions, the law firm said in a written statement that Judge Ciaffa had not had all the facts but that the firm would not appeal. “As with any firm or business that handles this type of volume,” it added, “there exists a potential for errors or omissions in the normal course of business.”
Eltman, Eltman & Cooper was one of 35 law firms sued last July by the state, which claimed that they had improperly obtained more than 100,000 judgments in consumer-debt cases. Separate files in Federal District Court in Brooklyn show that without admitting fault, the Eltman law firm settled a class-action suit in 2006 that claimed it used “false, misleading and deceptive means” to collect debts.
Privately, some judges say they are embarrassed that in many New York courts, debt-collection lawyers have grown so comfortable that they give the impression they are in charge of the proceedings and do not need prove their claims with strong evidence.
In the recent pro-consumer rulings, skepticism of the debt collectors’ claims has been obvious. A Civil Court judge in Brooklyn, Noach Dear, has written decisions that come close to saying that the collection cases are sometimes based on falsehoods.
In a case in August, Judge Dear observed that there was nothing to substantiate a lawyer’s claim that she somehow remembered mailing a document to the credit card holder that was the foundation of the collection suit. The document, Judge Dear noted archly, had been mailed three and a half years earlier.
Behind the legalese of the credit card suits, some judges have suggested, there is often a disorganized jumble of documentation. A Mount Vernon City Court judge noted that one case was based on little more than “a self-serving computer printout.” A Manhattan judge said one company that bought debt claims from credit card companies had filed suit against a cardholder although it did not own that particular debt.
In the Staten Island case, the judge, Philip S. Straniere, said a credit card company was claiming interest of 28 percent on the balance due, which would be illegal as usury under New York law. The company argued that the credit card issued to a New Yorker that seemed to be from a national company had actually been issued by a one-branch bank in Utah, which had no usury law.
“Like the Land of Oz, run by a Wizard who no one has ever seen,” Judge Straniere wrote, “the Land of Credit Cards permits consumers to be bound by agreements they never sign, agreements they may never have received, subject to change without notice and the laws of a state other than those existing where they reside.”
The judge ruled that the supposed agreement allowing unlimited interest charges was not enforceable in New York.
Industry officials said that tales of abusive collection cases were misleading. “There are certainly colorful stories,” said Joann Needleman, an officer of the National Association of Retail Collection Attorneys. “People think that handful is the rule, not the exception, but it’s not.”
But Ms. Bohnet, the Long Island woman who was sued by a New York law firm, said just one case could be harrowing. When she received a call last year at the charity where she keeps the books for $39,000 a year, the voice on the other end told her the debt collectors had a five-year-old court judgment against her for a $4,861 debt. She had to pay, or they would start taking money out of her salary, she said she was told.
The address of the debt-collection firm and its lawyers at Eltman, Eltman & Cooper seemed to be the same, she noticed.
Ms. Bohnet did not know she had ever been sued. She started to cry, she said, worried that with a chunk of money taken every month, she might lose the modest apartment she needed to share custody of her teenage daughter.
“I was in all-out fear,” she said, adding, “After I got off the phone, I realized I didn’t even know what the debt was for.” She might have had an old credit card debt, but she had had some years of problems with alcohol and drugs and tangled financial problems. In recovery, she said, she had worked to clean up her financial affairs.
The next time the collectors called, she said, she told them that she was willing to pay if she owed any money but that she needed to see some proof that they had the right person. Then, without a lawyer, she went to the court, in Hempstead, to check into the order the debt collectors said they had against her.
After some digging, she found the case. The debt-buyer’s lawyers had filed a sworn statement that they said was proof she had been given notice of the suit. A process server for Eltman, Eltman & Cooper claimed she had been given a copy of the suit personally on July 30, 2004.
Judge Ciaffa doubted that. Ms. Bohnet, he wrote, “hadn’t lived at that address since 1998.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
As New Yorkers have tumbled into credit card debt in large numbers during the great recession, bill collectors have inundated the courts to get what they say is due. In turn, the courts have issued hundreds of thousands of orders against residents. Some consumer groups argue that by doing so, the courts have become little more than an arm of the debt collection industry.
Now, a few judges in New York State are suggesting that they agree, at least in part, with the consumer groups. They have fumed at debt collectors and their lawyers, scolding them for interest as high as 30 percent a year and berating them for false statements and abusive practices.
Some of the rulings have even been sarcastic or incredulous. In December, a Staten Island judge said debt collectors seemed to think their lawsuits were taking place in a legal Land of Oz, where everyone was supposed to follow anticonsumer rules invented by some unseen debt-collection wizard.
Last month, a Manhattan appeals court threw out a credit card case, saying a debt collection company had sued the wrong person but pursued the case anyway.
“I think these judges are outraged at the status quo, and they’re trying to change it,” said Janet Ray Kalson, a Manhattan lawyer who is the chairwoman of a City Bar Association committee that has studied the deluge of credit card cases.
Debt-buyer businesses purchase debts — along with lists of names and amounts supposedly due — for pennies on the dollar from credit card companies and sometimes have no real evidence about whom they are suing or why. They then file tens of thousands of suits, often with little to back up their claims.
A Nassau County District Court judge said recently, for example, that one of New York City’s high-volume debt collection law firms, which has close ties to a debt-buying company, did not provide “a scintilla of evidence” that there was even a debt in a case against a Long Island woman.
The suit received an unusual amount of attention. The judge, Michael A. Ciaffa, said that it “regrettably, involves a veritable ‘perfect storm’ of mistakes, errors, misdeeds and improper litigation practices.” Judge Ciaffa said the law firm, Eltman, Eltman & Cooper, ignored court orders, made a “demonstrably false” assertion and harassed the woman for payment even after its suit was dismissed.
The case before Judge Ciaffa ended with an order that is far from typical in a credit card suit. The woman who had been sued, Patricia Bohnet, a bookkeeper and single mother, did not have to pay anything. But Eltman, Eltman & Cooper had to pay $14,800 in sanctions for violating ethical rules at least 18 times. Under the judge’s order, $4,800 is to go to Ms. Bohnet and the remainder to a state fund that works to reimburse clients for dishonest conduct by lawyers.
“They don’t care if you’re sick; they don’t care if you’re poor,” Ms. Bohnet said in an interview at her job in Woodmere. “Their only job is to collect money, and they’ll do it in any way possible.”
In response to questions, the law firm said in a written statement that Judge Ciaffa had not had all the facts but that the firm would not appeal. “As with any firm or business that handles this type of volume,” it added, “there exists a potential for errors or omissions in the normal course of business.”
Eltman, Eltman & Cooper was one of 35 law firms sued last July by the state, which claimed that they had improperly obtained more than 100,000 judgments in consumer-debt cases. Separate files in Federal District Court in Brooklyn show that without admitting fault, the Eltman law firm settled a class-action suit in 2006 that claimed it used “false, misleading and deceptive means” to collect debts.
Privately, some judges say they are embarrassed that in many New York courts, debt-collection lawyers have grown so comfortable that they give the impression they are in charge of the proceedings and do not need prove their claims with strong evidence.
In the recent pro-consumer rulings, skepticism of the debt collectors’ claims has been obvious. A Civil Court judge in Brooklyn, Noach Dear, has written decisions that come close to saying that the collection cases are sometimes based on falsehoods.
In a case in August, Judge Dear observed that there was nothing to substantiate a lawyer’s claim that she somehow remembered mailing a document to the credit card holder that was the foundation of the collection suit. The document, Judge Dear noted archly, had been mailed three and a half years earlier.
Behind the legalese of the credit card suits, some judges have suggested, there is often a disorganized jumble of documentation. A Mount Vernon City Court judge noted that one case was based on little more than “a self-serving computer printout.” A Manhattan judge said one company that bought debt claims from credit card companies had filed suit against a cardholder although it did not own that particular debt.
In the Staten Island case, the judge, Philip S. Straniere, said a credit card company was claiming interest of 28 percent on the balance due, which would be illegal as usury under New York law. The company argued that the credit card issued to a New Yorker that seemed to be from a national company had actually been issued by a one-branch bank in Utah, which had no usury law.
“Like the Land of Oz, run by a Wizard who no one has ever seen,” Judge Straniere wrote, “the Land of Credit Cards permits consumers to be bound by agreements they never sign, agreements they may never have received, subject to change without notice and the laws of a state other than those existing where they reside.”
The judge ruled that the supposed agreement allowing unlimited interest charges was not enforceable in New York.
Industry officials said that tales of abusive collection cases were misleading. “There are certainly colorful stories,” said Joann Needleman, an officer of the National Association of Retail Collection Attorneys. “People think that handful is the rule, not the exception, but it’s not.”
But Ms. Bohnet, the Long Island woman who was sued by a New York law firm, said just one case could be harrowing. When she received a call last year at the charity where she keeps the books for $39,000 a year, the voice on the other end told her the debt collectors had a five-year-old court judgment against her for a $4,861 debt. She had to pay, or they would start taking money out of her salary, she said she was told.
The address of the debt-collection firm and its lawyers at Eltman, Eltman & Cooper seemed to be the same, she noticed.
Ms. Bohnet did not know she had ever been sued. She started to cry, she said, worried that with a chunk of money taken every month, she might lose the modest apartment she needed to share custody of her teenage daughter.
“I was in all-out fear,” she said, adding, “After I got off the phone, I realized I didn’t even know what the debt was for.” She might have had an old credit card debt, but she had had some years of problems with alcohol and drugs and tangled financial problems. In recovery, she said, she had worked to clean up her financial affairs.
The next time the collectors called, she said, she told them that she was willing to pay if she owed any money but that she needed to see some proof that they had the right person. Then, without a lawyer, she went to the court, in Hempstead, to check into the order the debt collectors said they had against her.
After some digging, she found the case. The debt-buyer’s lawyers had filed a sworn statement that they said was proof she had been given notice of the suit. A process server for Eltman, Eltman & Cooper claimed she had been given a copy of the suit personally on July 30, 2004.
Judge Ciaffa doubted that. Ms. Bohnet, he wrote, “hadn’t lived at that address since 1998.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Friday, May 07, 2010
LoHud.com: Congress may extend bankruptcy relief to private student loans
By Diana Costello.
College graduates overwhelmed by private student
loans could see bankruptcy relief if proposed
legislation makes its way through Capitol Hill.
Bills recently introduced in the Senate and House
aim to treat private student loans more like credit
card and other consumer debts — meaning they
would be discharged if a borrower meets the court's
strict bankruptcy criteria.
Since 2005, bankruptcy law has prohibited private
student loans from being shed in all but the most
extreme cases. Other types of debt in this category
include overdue taxes and criminal fines.
Those who deal with bankruptcy proceedings say
the debate can be boiled down to a simple maxim:
"Where you sit depends on where you stand," White
Plains attorney Jeffery Binder says.
"If you believe ultimately it's the consumer's
responsibility to not take on more debt than you can
handle ... then you'll come down on the side of the
lender," Binder said. "If you believe that lenders
engage in practices that were predatory or
misleading ... then you'll come down on the side of
those who feel this is no different from any other
consumer loan and should be discharged in
bankruptcy."
The discussion comes as more students are turning
to private student loans to finance their college
ambitions — which themselves are growing ever
more expensive.
A more robust economic outlook and changes to
student lending enacted as part of the health-care
reform law are also thought to be encouraging
private lenders back into the market.
The average nonfederal debt per student was
$17,000 in 2007-08, The College Board says.
The volume of private student loans rose to $22.3
billion in 2007-08 from $15.1 billion in 2004-05,
according to The College Board's Trends in Student
Aid.
The credit crunch that froze financial markets,
however, also hit private student lending — pushing
down private borrowing by half during the 2008-09
school year to $11 billion.
Still, private student loans are growing more rapidly
than federal student loans, and if trends continue,
the volume of private loans would surpass that of
federal loans by 2025, according to FinAid.org, a
comprehensive website devoted to financial aid.
Supporters of the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy
Fairness Act of 2010 argue that private borrowers
lack important consumer protections that come with
federal loans — such as deferment plans and
income-based repayment options.
Under legislation enacted in 2007, borrowers who
work in public service jobs for at least 10 years can
qualify to have the balance of their student loans
forgiven.
Also, private loans typically carry variable interest
rates that are higher for those who can least afford
them, supporters say.
"Struggling borrowers have virtually no way to make
private loan debt more manageable because lenders
can simply refuse to negotiate affordable terms,"
said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for
College Access and Success, which runs the Project
on Student Debt.
"People who borrowed for college and played by the
rules deserve basic consumer protections and fair
treatment when they hit hard times," Asher said.
Opponents, however, argue that such a change
could make it more difficult to secure private
funding for high education.
They also are concerned people would game the
system by running straight to bankruptcy court to
shed their debt obligation.
During a hearing on the plan earlier this month,
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., the House Judiciary
Committee's ranking minority member, said that
while reform is necessary, he is fearful about the
bill's potential consequences.
"If lenders are forced to scale back student lending
because private student loans are subject to
bankruptcy discharge, many students will be denied
access to higher education," Franks said.
Copyright 2010 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties in New York.
College graduates overwhelmed by private student
loans could see bankruptcy relief if proposed
legislation makes its way through Capitol Hill.
Bills recently introduced in the Senate and House
aim to treat private student loans more like credit
card and other consumer debts — meaning they
would be discharged if a borrower meets the court's
strict bankruptcy criteria.
Since 2005, bankruptcy law has prohibited private
student loans from being shed in all but the most
extreme cases. Other types of debt in this category
include overdue taxes and criminal fines.
Those who deal with bankruptcy proceedings say
the debate can be boiled down to a simple maxim:
"Where you sit depends on where you stand," White
Plains attorney Jeffery Binder says.
"If you believe ultimately it's the consumer's
responsibility to not take on more debt than you can
handle ... then you'll come down on the side of the
lender," Binder said. "If you believe that lenders
engage in practices that were predatory or
misleading ... then you'll come down on the side of
those who feel this is no different from any other
consumer loan and should be discharged in
bankruptcy."
The discussion comes as more students are turning
to private student loans to finance their college
ambitions — which themselves are growing ever
more expensive.
A more robust economic outlook and changes to
student lending enacted as part of the health-care
reform law are also thought to be encouraging
private lenders back into the market.
The average nonfederal debt per student was
$17,000 in 2007-08, The College Board says.
The volume of private student loans rose to $22.3
billion in 2007-08 from $15.1 billion in 2004-05,
according to The College Board's Trends in Student
Aid.
The credit crunch that froze financial markets,
however, also hit private student lending — pushing
down private borrowing by half during the 2008-09
school year to $11 billion.
Still, private student loans are growing more rapidly
than federal student loans, and if trends continue,
the volume of private loans would surpass that of
federal loans by 2025, according to FinAid.org, a
comprehensive website devoted to financial aid.
Supporters of the Private Student Loan Bankruptcy
Fairness Act of 2010 argue that private borrowers
lack important consumer protections that come with
federal loans — such as deferment plans and
income-based repayment options.
Under legislation enacted in 2007, borrowers who
work in public service jobs for at least 10 years can
qualify to have the balance of their student loans
forgiven.
Also, private loans typically carry variable interest
rates that are higher for those who can least afford
them, supporters say.
"Struggling borrowers have virtually no way to make
private loan debt more manageable because lenders
can simply refuse to negotiate affordable terms,"
said Lauren Asher, president of the Institute for
College Access and Success, which runs the Project
on Student Debt.
"People who borrowed for college and played by the
rules deserve basic consumer protections and fair
treatment when they hit hard times," Asher said.
Opponents, however, argue that such a change
could make it more difficult to secure private
funding for high education.
They also are concerned people would game the
system by running straight to bankruptcy court to
shed their debt obligation.
During a hearing on the plan earlier this month,
Rep. Trent Franks, R-Ariz., the House Judiciary
Committee's ranking minority member, said that
while reform is necessary, he is fearful about the
bill's potential consequences.
"If lenders are forced to scale back student lending
because private student loans are subject to
bankruptcy discharge, many students will be denied
access to higher education," Franks said.
Copyright 2010 The Journal News, a Gannett Co. Inc. newspaper serving Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties in New York.
NYT: As Homeowners’ Dreams Die, He’s the Undertaker
By DAVID STREITFELD
LAKE VILLA, Ill. — If you see Joseph Laubinger on your doorstep, start packing. His courtly presence means you have exhausted all excuses, arguments and options for keeping your house.
“It’s like I’m a doctor,” said Mr. Laubinger, an agent here for big lenders. “People ask me how much time they have left.”
Hardly any. Legally, they have already lost ownership. If they do not respond to the carrot the lenders offer — as much as $5,000 in cash in exchange for leaving the house in good order — he employs the stick: the county sheriff, who evicts them.
Mr. Laubinger is having a busy spring. Nearly four million households nationwide are severely delinquent on their mortgages, the biggest backlog since the housing crisis began. As more and more of the homes edge toward repossession — a record quarter of a million were seized by lenders in the first three months of this year — agents like Mr. Laubinger are trying to coax people out.
Sometimes, the process is briskly efficient. The occupants have either abandoned the home or are methodically planning their departure well before Mr. Laubinger arrives bearing an incentive officially known as relocation assistance but always called cash for keys.
But the end game of foreclosure is typically neither smooth nor quick. Some people have nowhere to go, and others see no reason to go. The lenders need someone on the scene who can resolve the situation without escalating it, which is why Mr. Laubinger is getting an abundance of assignments from the country’s largest lenders as well as Fannie Mae, the government’s mortgage holding company.
The agent’s garage is stacked with desks and chairs, bought recently at a county government auction. “I’m expanding,” he said, with immediate plans to hire two more agents to join his four-person shop. He makes at most a small fee for getting the people out; his reward comes with the commission in selling the house.
Mr. Laubinger is 60, a onetime graphic artist who has been buying and selling real estate for himself and others for a quarter-century. When times were good, he spent as fast as he could. “I spun my wheels like a madman,” he said.
His territory is the northern edge of Illinois and the southernmost slice of Wisconsin — a 600-square-mile expanse that encompasses middle-class suburbs built in the last 10 years, resort homes that dot the region’s many lakes and decaying cottages bought by hard-scrabble immigrants.
People in all those places are hurting, which is good for Mr. Laubinger’s bottom line. Yet he shudders if anyone calls him a “repo man,” and is actually a soft touch. He is quick to grant extensions to the people who ask, even though this pushes the sale of the property, and his payday, further into the future.
In the debate over whether the foreclosed are deadbeats or victims, co-conspirators with the avaricious banks or merely collateral damage, the agent nearly always takes the benign view. The most critical thing he will say is, “Everyone got greedy, and now everyone is passing the buck.”
On a recent Saturday he had three houses to check up on, two in foreclosure and one trembling on the verge. Fannie Mae was sending him to examine one of the properties, where the owners had lost ownership in December but declined to decamp. A bank wanted him to snap photos of a second site, a high-end house whose defaulting owners were seeking a modification.
The occupants of the third house, Israel Lopez and Blanca Sanchez, had finally agreed to move out after months of negotiating. Mr. Laubinger had a check for $1,800 waiting for them.
Expecting a bustle of activity, the agent found the place quiet. Clearly, no one was going anywhere. Only a young boy was home. Mr. Laubinger left a message for the parents.
“They basically blew me off,” he said as he drove away. It’s a common problem: “People are staying longer because they’re not afraid.”
The house he was hired to photograph was in an upscale community, but the owners, who were either not home or not answering the door, were clearly suffering. The driveway was pocked with holes and the lawn full of weeds, a sharp contrast to the well-manicured neighbors.
Perhaps a modification would save them, but as Mr. Laubinger took his pictures, he said he had a bad feeling. “I’ll be coming back here, taking this to the next level,” he predicted.
His phone rang. It was Mrs. Sanchez. “We haven’t found anywhere to go,” she said. “We were wondering if any more extensions could be given.”
Mr. Laubinger was noncommittal but said she would not be evicted that weekend. That was all Mrs. Sanchez wanted to hear.
“They’re doing the math,” he said. “More time is better than the $1,800 I was going to give them to leave.” If he has to order a formal eviction with the sheriff, the paperwork and processing might take all summer.
The last house he visited that day was the one owned by Fannie Mae. Bajrak and Beata Lukasz, a Polish couple in their mid-30s, bought it for $190,000 in 2003 and then took $50,000 in cash out through refinancing and a home equity loan. That swelled their debt and made the house impossible to sell after the crash.
On Dec. 12, when Mr. Laubinger first visited, the couple had been in default for eight months but said they were getting a modification. Since then, Mr. Lukasz had not returned messages left on his cellphone. So after five months, Fannie Mae sent Mr. Laubinger again.
Mr. Lukasz finally emerged, saying his wife was ill with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestines. Forced to choose between the mortgage and medicine, he said they had chosen the drugs. But he agreed to move out for $1,500 and provided a new cellphone number.
Back in his car, Mr. Laubinger stifled a sob. “That one hurts,” he said. “There’s an honest man, doing everything he can.”
Night fell as Mr. Laubinger pulled back into his own driveway here, about 90 minutes’ drive northwest of Chicago. He was not sure he had accomplished much. But a few days later, to his surprise, the Lopez-Sanchez family agreed to leave after all.
When the agent showed up at the appointed time with the check and a locksmith to rekey the doors, the couple was still carrying things out to their battered Ford Windstar: a big-screen TV, a huge teddy bear, a steaming pot of beef stew for the evening meal.
Mr. Lopez, 31, said he had lost his job early last year after the construction company he worked for went bankrupt. “I had been paying the mortgage every month, but I told my wife, ‘No more sense in that,’ ” he said.
The family’s fortunes may be on the mend. Mr. Lopez was hopeful that he would soon be starting work on a highway crew. Until the family can get back on its feet, their church agreed to give shelter to the couple and their four children.
Finally, the house was empty. Mr. Lopez signed the documents and then pocketed the check without looking at it. Mrs. Sanchez sniffled quietly. It was not emotion, she said, but allergies. The couple drove off in the overloaded Windstar without a backward look.
Mr. Laubinger surveyed the house. It needed paint, new carpet, repairs. He hoped to have it listed in a few weeks for $110,000.
If too many foreclosed properties hit the market at once, the housing market may take another dive. The agent said that was a necessary risk. “We have to get through this,” he said.
Easier said than done, perhaps. The Lukaszes have consulted a lawyer and intend to stay put as long as possible.
“The banks got so much from us, including a large down payment, I think it’s fair we’re not paying,” said Mr. Lukasz, who works the night shift in an envelope factory. “We’ll stay here until an hour before the sheriff.”
Mr. Laubinger will keep working on them, but he knows that they might be in their house for many months. “This crisis,” he said, “will serve me the rest of my career.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
LAKE VILLA, Ill. — If you see Joseph Laubinger on your doorstep, start packing. His courtly presence means you have exhausted all excuses, arguments and options for keeping your house.
“It’s like I’m a doctor,” said Mr. Laubinger, an agent here for big lenders. “People ask me how much time they have left.”
Hardly any. Legally, they have already lost ownership. If they do not respond to the carrot the lenders offer — as much as $5,000 in cash in exchange for leaving the house in good order — he employs the stick: the county sheriff, who evicts them.
Mr. Laubinger is having a busy spring. Nearly four million households nationwide are severely delinquent on their mortgages, the biggest backlog since the housing crisis began. As more and more of the homes edge toward repossession — a record quarter of a million were seized by lenders in the first three months of this year — agents like Mr. Laubinger are trying to coax people out.
Sometimes, the process is briskly efficient. The occupants have either abandoned the home or are methodically planning their departure well before Mr. Laubinger arrives bearing an incentive officially known as relocation assistance but always called cash for keys.
But the end game of foreclosure is typically neither smooth nor quick. Some people have nowhere to go, and others see no reason to go. The lenders need someone on the scene who can resolve the situation without escalating it, which is why Mr. Laubinger is getting an abundance of assignments from the country’s largest lenders as well as Fannie Mae, the government’s mortgage holding company.
The agent’s garage is stacked with desks and chairs, bought recently at a county government auction. “I’m expanding,” he said, with immediate plans to hire two more agents to join his four-person shop. He makes at most a small fee for getting the people out; his reward comes with the commission in selling the house.
Mr. Laubinger is 60, a onetime graphic artist who has been buying and selling real estate for himself and others for a quarter-century. When times were good, he spent as fast as he could. “I spun my wheels like a madman,” he said.
His territory is the northern edge of Illinois and the southernmost slice of Wisconsin — a 600-square-mile expanse that encompasses middle-class suburbs built in the last 10 years, resort homes that dot the region’s many lakes and decaying cottages bought by hard-scrabble immigrants.
People in all those places are hurting, which is good for Mr. Laubinger’s bottom line. Yet he shudders if anyone calls him a “repo man,” and is actually a soft touch. He is quick to grant extensions to the people who ask, even though this pushes the sale of the property, and his payday, further into the future.
In the debate over whether the foreclosed are deadbeats or victims, co-conspirators with the avaricious banks or merely collateral damage, the agent nearly always takes the benign view. The most critical thing he will say is, “Everyone got greedy, and now everyone is passing the buck.”
On a recent Saturday he had three houses to check up on, two in foreclosure and one trembling on the verge. Fannie Mae was sending him to examine one of the properties, where the owners had lost ownership in December but declined to decamp. A bank wanted him to snap photos of a second site, a high-end house whose defaulting owners were seeking a modification.
The occupants of the third house, Israel Lopez and Blanca Sanchez, had finally agreed to move out after months of negotiating. Mr. Laubinger had a check for $1,800 waiting for them.
Expecting a bustle of activity, the agent found the place quiet. Clearly, no one was going anywhere. Only a young boy was home. Mr. Laubinger left a message for the parents.
“They basically blew me off,” he said as he drove away. It’s a common problem: “People are staying longer because they’re not afraid.”
The house he was hired to photograph was in an upscale community, but the owners, who were either not home or not answering the door, were clearly suffering. The driveway was pocked with holes and the lawn full of weeds, a sharp contrast to the well-manicured neighbors.
Perhaps a modification would save them, but as Mr. Laubinger took his pictures, he said he had a bad feeling. “I’ll be coming back here, taking this to the next level,” he predicted.
His phone rang. It was Mrs. Sanchez. “We haven’t found anywhere to go,” she said. “We were wondering if any more extensions could be given.”
Mr. Laubinger was noncommittal but said she would not be evicted that weekend. That was all Mrs. Sanchez wanted to hear.
“They’re doing the math,” he said. “More time is better than the $1,800 I was going to give them to leave.” If he has to order a formal eviction with the sheriff, the paperwork and processing might take all summer.
The last house he visited that day was the one owned by Fannie Mae. Bajrak and Beata Lukasz, a Polish couple in their mid-30s, bought it for $190,000 in 2003 and then took $50,000 in cash out through refinancing and a home equity loan. That swelled their debt and made the house impossible to sell after the crash.
On Dec. 12, when Mr. Laubinger first visited, the couple had been in default for eight months but said they were getting a modification. Since then, Mr. Lukasz had not returned messages left on his cellphone. So after five months, Fannie Mae sent Mr. Laubinger again.
Mr. Lukasz finally emerged, saying his wife was ill with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the intestines. Forced to choose between the mortgage and medicine, he said they had chosen the drugs. But he agreed to move out for $1,500 and provided a new cellphone number.
Back in his car, Mr. Laubinger stifled a sob. “That one hurts,” he said. “There’s an honest man, doing everything he can.”
Night fell as Mr. Laubinger pulled back into his own driveway here, about 90 minutes’ drive northwest of Chicago. He was not sure he had accomplished much. But a few days later, to his surprise, the Lopez-Sanchez family agreed to leave after all.
When the agent showed up at the appointed time with the check and a locksmith to rekey the doors, the couple was still carrying things out to their battered Ford Windstar: a big-screen TV, a huge teddy bear, a steaming pot of beef stew for the evening meal.
Mr. Lopez, 31, said he had lost his job early last year after the construction company he worked for went bankrupt. “I had been paying the mortgage every month, but I told my wife, ‘No more sense in that,’ ” he said.
The family’s fortunes may be on the mend. Mr. Lopez was hopeful that he would soon be starting work on a highway crew. Until the family can get back on its feet, their church agreed to give shelter to the couple and their four children.
Finally, the house was empty. Mr. Lopez signed the documents and then pocketed the check without looking at it. Mrs. Sanchez sniffled quietly. It was not emotion, she said, but allergies. The couple drove off in the overloaded Windstar without a backward look.
Mr. Laubinger surveyed the house. It needed paint, new carpet, repairs. He hoped to have it listed in a few weeks for $110,000.
If too many foreclosed properties hit the market at once, the housing market may take another dive. The agent said that was a necessary risk. “We have to get through this,” he said.
Easier said than done, perhaps. The Lukaszes have consulted a lawyer and intend to stay put as long as possible.
“The banks got so much from us, including a large down payment, I think it’s fair we’re not paying,” said Mr. Lukasz, who works the night shift in an envelope factory. “We’ll stay here until an hour before the sheriff.”
Mr. Laubinger will keep working on them, but he knows that they might be in their house for many months. “This crisis,” he said, “will serve me the rest of my career.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Bankruptcy Update April 2009
Here at Shenwick & Associates, we were pretty busy last month. And we're not the only ones in the bankruptcy field with more business. According to a New York Times article earlier this month (which we previously posted here on our blog), March was the busiest month for bankruptcy filings since the enactment of BAPCPA (the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005) in October 2005.
There were 158,000 bankruptcy filings in March, or 6,900 per day, up 35% from February and up 19% from March 2009. Despite BAPCPA's goal of reducing Chapter 7 liquidation cases, Chapter 7 filings as a percentage of all bankruptcies have increased to about 73 percent in 2009 from about 62 percent in 2006-07. Last month, 75% of bankruptcy filings were Chapter 7 cases.
There were 1,473,675 bankruptcy filings in 2009, up 32% over 2008. Business filings increased 40% in 2009 to 60,387–the highest level since 1993.
Whether you're a creditor looking for defense against a fraudulent conveyance or preferential transfer adversary proceeding or a debtor seeking a simple personal Chapter 7 liquidation or a complex Chapter 11 or 13 reorganization, for all of your bankruptcy and creditor and debtor questions, please contact Jim Shenwick.
There were 158,000 bankruptcy filings in March, or 6,900 per day, up 35% from February and up 19% from March 2009. Despite BAPCPA's goal of reducing Chapter 7 liquidation cases, Chapter 7 filings as a percentage of all bankruptcies have increased to about 73 percent in 2009 from about 62 percent in 2006-07. Last month, 75% of bankruptcy filings were Chapter 7 cases.
There were 1,473,675 bankruptcy filings in 2009, up 32% over 2008. Business filings increased 40% in 2009 to 60,387–the highest level since 1993.
Whether you're a creditor looking for defense against a fraudulent conveyance or preferential transfer adversary proceeding or a debtor seeking a simple personal Chapter 7 liquidation or a complex Chapter 11 or 13 reorganization, for all of your bankruptcy and creditor and debtor questions, please contact Jim Shenwick.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
NYT: Learning How to Fight the Collector
By ANDREW MARTIN
Among debt collectors, Steven Katz is known as a “credit terrorist.” For years, he has run what he calls the Steven Katz School of Bill Collector Education, otherwise known as the “credit terrorist training camp.”
Mr. Katz, a 58-year-old accountant in suburban Tucson, spends his free time schooling debtors on the finer points of consumer protection law to help them turn the tables on debt collectors. On occasion, he thumbs his own nose at them too.
“How many times can I sue you? Let me count the ways,” he wrote under his pseudonym, Dr. Tax, in a March posting on Inside ARM, a debt collectors’ Web site.
A former bill collector himself, Mr. Katz rebelled after a debt buyer damaged his credit score with what he says was a bogus bill. Mr. Katz sued, and in 2003 he collected his first damage award, a $1,000 check that he now keeps framed behind his desk.
“The bill collectors, when they call, make you feel like the only option you have is to lay down and play dead. That’s not true,” said Mr. Katz said, who does not charge for his advice. “Nothing validates this more than getting a check.”
Call this movement revenge of the (alleged) deadbeats. Even as collectors try to recoup debts from millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, a small but growing number of lawyers and consumers are fighting back against what they describe as harassment, unscrupulous practices — and, most important to their litigiousness, violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
In fact, 8,287 federal lawsuits were filed citing violations of the act in 2009, a 60 percent rise over the previous year, according to WebRecon, a site that tracks collection-related litigation and the most litigious consumers and lawyers on behalf of debt collectors.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court made it even easier for consumers to use the courts to fight debt collectors, ruling that collectors cannot be shielded from suits by claiming they made a mistake in interpreting the law.
When a consumer stops paying a bill, creditors often try to collect on their own for a few months. In many instances, the creditor hires another company to collect the debt. In other cases, they may dispose of the debt by selling it to a debt buyer for a steep discount.
Debt collectors and debt buyers are the targets of litigious consumers, since the debt collection law primarily applies to third-party collectors.
Peter Barry, a Minneapolis trial lawyer, is so bullish on the future of debt collection litigation that he holds several “boot camps” each year to share his secrets with other lawyers who want in on the action. If the debtor wins a court case under the act, the debt collector must pay the lawyer’s fees.
The next boot camp is being held in early May in San Francisco, at a cost of $2,495 a person for two and a half days of instruction.
“I can’t sue every illegal debt collector in America, although I’d like to try,” Mr. Barry said.
Mr. Katz can also claim some credit for the increase in lawsuits. For six years, he has run a free Web site called Debtorboards.com, where people share tips on topics like keeping a paper trail and recording calls from collectors.
He said the site received two million hits in 2009, a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
“Debtorboards is geared to help people use the laws as they are on the books as both a shield and a sword,” said Mr. Katz, who says he has won $36,000 from his own litigation against collection agencies. (Since many of the settlements are confidential, it is difficult to prove the claims of Mr. Katz and others).
Of course, debt collectors are hardly pleased with the litigation trend.
Rozanne M. Andersen, chief executive of ACA International, a trade association for the debt collection industry, said she was “extremely concerned” about the increase in lawsuits, which she said cost her industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. She said much of the increase was the result of ambiguous language in the Fair Debt Collection Act.
Debt collectors are required, for example, to identify themselves on a voice message left for a consumer, she said. But they are also prohibited from telling a third party — including someone who might overhear a phone message — about a consumer’s debt.
“We are between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Andersen said.
Ms. Andersen said she had little patience for Web sites that encouraged consumers to thwart debt collectors.
“We believe those types of Web sites are encouraging people to not take responsibility for just debt,” she said.
Jack Gordon, who runs the fee-based WebRecon site, said it was no wonder lawsuits were increasing, because consumers were being bombarded with ads from lawyers when they searched online for information on debt collection. He said the proliferation of discussion sites like Mr. Katz’s had, to a lesser extent, also contributed to the trend.
On the boards, he said, “There’s a lot of hot air, a lot of people who overinflate their accomplishments.”
Regardless, Mr. Gordon’s database has become a badge of honor among the devotees of Debtorboards.com. As Brandon Scroggin, a 37-year-old from Little Rock, Ark., puts it, “That’s one list I’m a proud card-carrying member of.”
Mr. Scroggin, who provides price estimates at a body shop, said he was the type of person who refused to be taken advantage of, even for petty offenses. For instance, years ago, he said he joined in the class-action suit against the pop group Milli Vanilli, accused of lip synching, and collected a $1.25 check.
After a messy divorce, Mr. Scroggin was stuck with a $7,000 bill that he said belonged to his ex-wife. Instead of paying it, he began researching the law and stumbled on Debtorboards.com.
Armed with lessons he learned on the site, he demanded proof of the debt from the collection agency, and the calls stopped. But two and a half years later, they started up again so he sued the collection agency, National Loan Recoveries, for failing to provide proof of the debt, among other things.
The case was settled in 2008. The terms were confidential, but he says he never paid National Loan a dime. “Let’s just say I’m a very happy person,” he said. A lawyer for National Loan, Kathryn Bridges, did not return messages seeking comment.
Mr. Katz said his Web site was not intended to help people avoid paying legitimate debts. But if they do so, so be it — he feels no need to apologize.
He said Congress gave consumers certain rights, and he is simply making people aware of them, sometimes colorfully.
As Mr. Katz says at the bottom of each Dr. Tax posting, “A telephone in the hands of a collector is like a crowbar — it can be used to pry a mouth open wide enough to insert a foot.”
Barbara Thompson, 46, of Atlanta, said she challenged $11,000 in credit card debt using online research about collection laws. She does not dispute the debts but reasons that the credit card company wrote off her charges long ago. By her account, she owes the credit card company, not the debt collector.
“The credit card company, they sell it off, they charge it off, it’s just business as usual,” she said, adding, “I’m adamant about not paying a collection agency.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Among debt collectors, Steven Katz is known as a “credit terrorist.” For years, he has run what he calls the Steven Katz School of Bill Collector Education, otherwise known as the “credit terrorist training camp.”
Mr. Katz, a 58-year-old accountant in suburban Tucson, spends his free time schooling debtors on the finer points of consumer protection law to help them turn the tables on debt collectors. On occasion, he thumbs his own nose at them too.
“How many times can I sue you? Let me count the ways,” he wrote under his pseudonym, Dr. Tax, in a March posting on Inside ARM, a debt collectors’ Web site.
A former bill collector himself, Mr. Katz rebelled after a debt buyer damaged his credit score with what he says was a bogus bill. Mr. Katz sued, and in 2003 he collected his first damage award, a $1,000 check that he now keeps framed behind his desk.
“The bill collectors, when they call, make you feel like the only option you have is to lay down and play dead. That’s not true,” said Mr. Katz said, who does not charge for his advice. “Nothing validates this more than getting a check.”
Call this movement revenge of the (alleged) deadbeats. Even as collectors try to recoup debts from millions of Americans struggling to pay their bills, a small but growing number of lawyers and consumers are fighting back against what they describe as harassment, unscrupulous practices — and, most important to their litigiousness, violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
In fact, 8,287 federal lawsuits were filed citing violations of the act in 2009, a 60 percent rise over the previous year, according to WebRecon, a site that tracks collection-related litigation and the most litigious consumers and lawyers on behalf of debt collectors.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court made it even easier for consumers to use the courts to fight debt collectors, ruling that collectors cannot be shielded from suits by claiming they made a mistake in interpreting the law.
When a consumer stops paying a bill, creditors often try to collect on their own for a few months. In many instances, the creditor hires another company to collect the debt. In other cases, they may dispose of the debt by selling it to a debt buyer for a steep discount.
Debt collectors and debt buyers are the targets of litigious consumers, since the debt collection law primarily applies to third-party collectors.
Peter Barry, a Minneapolis trial lawyer, is so bullish on the future of debt collection litigation that he holds several “boot camps” each year to share his secrets with other lawyers who want in on the action. If the debtor wins a court case under the act, the debt collector must pay the lawyer’s fees.
The next boot camp is being held in early May in San Francisco, at a cost of $2,495 a person for two and a half days of instruction.
“I can’t sue every illegal debt collector in America, although I’d like to try,” Mr. Barry said.
Mr. Katz can also claim some credit for the increase in lawsuits. For six years, he has run a free Web site called Debtorboards.com, where people share tips on topics like keeping a paper trail and recording calls from collectors.
He said the site received two million hits in 2009, a 60 percent increase over the previous year.
“Debtorboards is geared to help people use the laws as they are on the books as both a shield and a sword,” said Mr. Katz, who says he has won $36,000 from his own litigation against collection agencies. (Since many of the settlements are confidential, it is difficult to prove the claims of Mr. Katz and others).
Of course, debt collectors are hardly pleased with the litigation trend.
Rozanne M. Andersen, chief executive of ACA International, a trade association for the debt collection industry, said she was “extremely concerned” about the increase in lawsuits, which she said cost her industry hundreds of millions of dollars a year. She said much of the increase was the result of ambiguous language in the Fair Debt Collection Act.
Debt collectors are required, for example, to identify themselves on a voice message left for a consumer, she said. But they are also prohibited from telling a third party — including someone who might overhear a phone message — about a consumer’s debt.
“We are between a rock and a hard place,” Ms. Andersen said.
Ms. Andersen said she had little patience for Web sites that encouraged consumers to thwart debt collectors.
“We believe those types of Web sites are encouraging people to not take responsibility for just debt,” she said.
Jack Gordon, who runs the fee-based WebRecon site, said it was no wonder lawsuits were increasing, because consumers were being bombarded with ads from lawyers when they searched online for information on debt collection. He said the proliferation of discussion sites like Mr. Katz’s had, to a lesser extent, also contributed to the trend.
On the boards, he said, “There’s a lot of hot air, a lot of people who overinflate their accomplishments.”
Regardless, Mr. Gordon’s database has become a badge of honor among the devotees of Debtorboards.com. As Brandon Scroggin, a 37-year-old from Little Rock, Ark., puts it, “That’s one list I’m a proud card-carrying member of.”
Mr. Scroggin, who provides price estimates at a body shop, said he was the type of person who refused to be taken advantage of, even for petty offenses. For instance, years ago, he said he joined in the class-action suit against the pop group Milli Vanilli, accused of lip synching, and collected a $1.25 check.
After a messy divorce, Mr. Scroggin was stuck with a $7,000 bill that he said belonged to his ex-wife. Instead of paying it, he began researching the law and stumbled on Debtorboards.com.
Armed with lessons he learned on the site, he demanded proof of the debt from the collection agency, and the calls stopped. But two and a half years later, they started up again so he sued the collection agency, National Loan Recoveries, for failing to provide proof of the debt, among other things.
The case was settled in 2008. The terms were confidential, but he says he never paid National Loan a dime. “Let’s just say I’m a very happy person,” he said. A lawyer for National Loan, Kathryn Bridges, did not return messages seeking comment.
Mr. Katz said his Web site was not intended to help people avoid paying legitimate debts. But if they do so, so be it — he feels no need to apologize.
He said Congress gave consumers certain rights, and he is simply making people aware of them, sometimes colorfully.
As Mr. Katz says at the bottom of each Dr. Tax posting, “A telephone in the hands of a collector is like a crowbar — it can be used to pry a mouth open wide enough to insert a foot.”
Barbara Thompson, 46, of Atlanta, said she challenged $11,000 in credit card debt using online research about collection laws. She does not dispute the debts but reasons that the credit card company wrote off her charges long ago. By her account, she owes the credit card company, not the debt collector.
“The credit card company, they sell it off, they charge it off, it’s just business as usual,” she said, adding, “I’m adamant about not paying a collection agency.”
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Friday, April 16, 2010
NYT: Defaults Rise in Federal Loan Modification Program
By DAVID STREITFELD
The number of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages even after securing cheaper terms through the government’s modification program nearly doubled in March, continuing a trend that could undermine the entire program.
Data released Wednesday by the Treasury Department and the Housing and Urban Development Department showed that 2,879 modified loans had been ended since the program’s inception in the fall, up from 1,499 in February and 1,005 in January.
The Treasury Department said it could not explain the growing number of what it called cancellations, almost all of which were apparently prompted by the borrower’s being unable to make the new payment. A scant number — 37 — were because the loan had been paid off, presumably because the borrower sold the house.
About seven million households are behind on their mortgage payments.
The Obama administration’s modification program has been widely criticized for doing little to help them. The program received another bad review on Wednesday with the release of a report from the Congressional Oversight Panel.
The Treasury’s stated goal is for the modification program to help as many as four million households, the oversight report said, “but only some of these offers will result in temporary modifications, and only some of those modifications will convert to final, five-year status.”
The report continued: “Even among borrowers who receive five-year modifications, some will eventually fall behind on their payments and once again face foreclosure. In the final reckoning, the goal itself seems small in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.”
The Treasury took issue with the report and said the pace of modifications was picking up. The number of active permanent modifications in March was 227,922, an increase of 35 percent from those in February. An additional 108,212 permanent modifications are awaiting borrower approval.
Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said in an interview that those were the important numbers to focus on.
“One percent of these loans defaulting is a tiny fraction,” Mr. Donovan said. “Given how stressed these borrowers are, even in the best situation, there will be redefaults. But I don’t think there is any evidence that would cause us to worry at this point.”
Julia R. Gordon, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending in Washington, said she expected the number of post-modification defaults to continue to rise.
“It’s definitely alarming to look at those statistics,” she said. “The current model for modifications doesn’t necessarily produce sustainable results.”
While the program is too new to predict its long-term success, the data on previous modification efforts is not encouraging.
Sixty percent of modifications undertaken by banks in late 2008 were in default a year later, according to the latest Mortgage Metrics Report compiled by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the comptroller of the currency.
Many of these private plans either kept the payments the same or increased them. Inevitably, those mortgages suffered the highest failure rate: about two-thirds of the borrowers defaulted again.
Loans for which the payments were decreased by at least 20 percent failed at a slower but still significant rate of about 40 percent.
The government program takes a more aggressive approach, lowering the interest rates for all loans. On many loans, terms are also extended or principal payments put off for years. Treasury data shows that the median savings for borrowers receiving permanent modifications is $512 a month.
Many borrowers remain deeply indebted, however. They owe not only on the house, but on homeowner association fees, home equity loans, car loans, alimony and credit card interest.
Even after modification, $61 out of every $100 earned by the borrower goes to servicing debt, government figures show. For increasing numbers of modification recipients, mortgage relief is apparently not enough to stave off financial collapse.
“If you can help 60 percent, and 40 percent have to fall back, is that worthwhile?” asked John Courson, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Clearly for the 60 percent it was, and the 40 percent weren’t going to make it anyway.”
The Treasury said on Wednesday that it had always anticipated that some homeowners would not sustain a modification, which was one reason the program had been greatly expanded. New elements focus on allowing distressed homeowners to sell their properties for less than they owe and on shaving the principal owed by borrowers.
The notion of cutting principal, however, has already run into some resistance from the big banks, which do not want borrowers to get the idea that their mortgage can be chopped on a whim.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
The number of homeowners who defaulted on their mortgages even after securing cheaper terms through the government’s modification program nearly doubled in March, continuing a trend that could undermine the entire program.
Data released Wednesday by the Treasury Department and the Housing and Urban Development Department showed that 2,879 modified loans had been ended since the program’s inception in the fall, up from 1,499 in February and 1,005 in January.
The Treasury Department said it could not explain the growing number of what it called cancellations, almost all of which were apparently prompted by the borrower’s being unable to make the new payment. A scant number — 37 — were because the loan had been paid off, presumably because the borrower sold the house.
About seven million households are behind on their mortgage payments.
The Obama administration’s modification program has been widely criticized for doing little to help them. The program received another bad review on Wednesday with the release of a report from the Congressional Oversight Panel.
The Treasury’s stated goal is for the modification program to help as many as four million households, the oversight report said, “but only some of these offers will result in temporary modifications, and only some of those modifications will convert to final, five-year status.”
The report continued: “Even among borrowers who receive five-year modifications, some will eventually fall behind on their payments and once again face foreclosure. In the final reckoning, the goal itself seems small in comparison to the magnitude of the problem.”
The Treasury took issue with the report and said the pace of modifications was picking up. The number of active permanent modifications in March was 227,922, an increase of 35 percent from those in February. An additional 108,212 permanent modifications are awaiting borrower approval.
Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said in an interview that those were the important numbers to focus on.
“One percent of these loans defaulting is a tiny fraction,” Mr. Donovan said. “Given how stressed these borrowers are, even in the best situation, there will be redefaults. But I don’t think there is any evidence that would cause us to worry at this point.”
Julia R. Gordon, senior policy counsel for the Center for Responsible Lending in Washington, said she expected the number of post-modification defaults to continue to rise.
“It’s definitely alarming to look at those statistics,” she said. “The current model for modifications doesn’t necessarily produce sustainable results.”
While the program is too new to predict its long-term success, the data on previous modification efforts is not encouraging.
Sixty percent of modifications undertaken by banks in late 2008 were in default a year later, according to the latest Mortgage Metrics Report compiled by the Office of Thrift Supervision and the comptroller of the currency.
Many of these private plans either kept the payments the same or increased them. Inevitably, those mortgages suffered the highest failure rate: about two-thirds of the borrowers defaulted again.
Loans for which the payments were decreased by at least 20 percent failed at a slower but still significant rate of about 40 percent.
The government program takes a more aggressive approach, lowering the interest rates for all loans. On many loans, terms are also extended or principal payments put off for years. Treasury data shows that the median savings for borrowers receiving permanent modifications is $512 a month.
Many borrowers remain deeply indebted, however. They owe not only on the house, but on homeowner association fees, home equity loans, car loans, alimony and credit card interest.
Even after modification, $61 out of every $100 earned by the borrower goes to servicing debt, government figures show. For increasing numbers of modification recipients, mortgage relief is apparently not enough to stave off financial collapse.
“If you can help 60 percent, and 40 percent have to fall back, is that worthwhile?” asked John Courson, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association. “Clearly for the 60 percent it was, and the 40 percent weren’t going to make it anyway.”
The Treasury said on Wednesday that it had always anticipated that some homeowners would not sustain a modification, which was one reason the program had been greatly expanded. New elements focus on allowing distressed homeowners to sell their properties for less than they owe and on shaving the principal owed by borrowers.
The notion of cutting principal, however, has already run into some resistance from the big banks, which do not want borrowers to get the idea that their mortgage can be chopped on a whim.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Monday, April 12, 2010
NYT: Don't the Farm on the Housing Recovery
By ROBERT J. SHILLER
MUCH hope has been pinned on the recovery in home prices that began about a year ago. A long-lasting housing recovery might provide a balm to households, mortgage lenders and the entire United States economy. But will the recovery be sustained?
Alas, the evidence is equivocal at best.
The most obvious reason for hope is that, unlike stock prices, home prices tend to show a great deal of momentum. Correcting for seasonal effects, home prices as measured by the S.&P./Case-Shiller 10-City Home Price Index increased each month from June 1995 to April 2006, then decreased almost every month to May 2009. Since then, they have risen through January, the latest month for which data is available.
So, because home prices have been climbing of late, isn’t it plausible that they’ll keep doing so?
If only it were that simple.
Home price booms and busts do end, sometimes quite suddenly, as was the case for the boom of 1995 to 2006 and the bust of 2006 to 2009. Today, we need to worry about strong headwinds, as the government begins to withdraw its support of a still-troubled lending industry and as foreclosures are dumping millions of homes onto the market.
Consider some leading indicators. The National Association of Home Builders index of traffic of prospective home buyers measures the number of people who are just starting to think about buying. In the past, it has predicted market turning points: the index peaked in June 2005, 10 months before the 2006 peak in home prices, and bottomed in November 2008, six months before the 2009 bottom in prices.
The index’s current signals are negative. After peaking again in September 2009, it has been falling steadily, suggesting that home prices may have reached another downward turning point.
But why? Unfortunately, it is hard to pinpoint causes for a change in demand for housing. The factors clearly include government economic policy, like interest-rate changes and tax credits. But these moves don’t line up neatly with major turning points in the market.
Sociological processes may be driving these changes. Trends in news media coverage, for example, generate conversations in barbershops and hotel lobbies, which in turn alter the conventional wisdom about investing.
Consider how that process might have worked during the run-up to the 2006 turning point in home prices. In May 2005, two months before the peak in the N.A.H.B. traffic index, Consumer Reports magazine had a cover article, “Your Home: How to Protect Your Biggest Investment,” that conveyed a very bullish sentiment.
“Despite years of dire warnings from some economists that the housing boom is about to end, it hasn’t,” the magazine said. “Indeed, last year prices rose even more — about 11 percent nationally.”
The article went on to give advice: “You can no more time the real estate market than you can the stock market,” it said. “If you need a house, and can afford one, go ahead and buy.”
The article extended to the housing market the conventional wisdom that then prevailed about the stock market — namely, that it was quite efficient, without identifiable bubbles and bursts. According to this theory, there was an identifiable profit opportunity: buy and hold stocks, and by extension, housing, and watch your wealth grow.
But as 2005 continued, the conventional wisdom began to change.
Some people in the United States were by then aware of the 2004-5 home price decline in Britain. Some were learning a new lexicon: “housing bubble,” “housing crash” and “subprime mortgage.” Newspapers and magazines began to include some derisive reviews of a March 2005 book by David Lereah, “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?” And accounts began to appear of the risky behavior of an army of real estate flippers.
In May 2005, I included in the second edition of my book, “Irrational Exuberance,” a new data series of real United States home prices that I constructed, going back to 1890. I was amazed to discover that no one had published such a long-term series before.
This data revealed that the home price boom was anomalous, by historical standards. It looked very much like a bubble, and a big one. The chart was reproduced many times in newspapers and magazines, starting with an article by David Leonhardt in The New York Times in August 2005.
In short, a public case began to be built that we really were experiencing a housing bubble. By 2006 a variety of narratives, taken together, appear to have produced a different mind-set for many people — creating a tipping point that stopped the growth in demand for homes in its tracks.
THE question now is whether a strong case has been built for a new bull market since the home-price turning point in May 2009. Though there is no way to be precise, I don’t believe it has.
Since that turning point, most public discourse on housing has not been about a new long-term view of the market. Instead, it focused initially on whether the recession was over and on the extraordinary measures the government was taking to support the housing market.
Now we’re shifting into a new phase. The recession is generally viewed as being over, and those extraordinary measures are being lifted.
On March 31, the Federal Reserve ended its program of buying more than $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities, and the homebuyer tax credit expires on April 30.
Recent polls show that economic forecasters are largely bullish about the housing market for the next year or two. But one wonders about the basis for such a positive forecast.
Momentum may be on the forecasts’ side. But until there is evidence that the fundamental thinking about housing has shifted in an optimistic direction, we cannot trust that momentum to continue.
Robert J. Shiller is professor of economics and finance at Yale and co-founder and chief economist of MacroMarkets LLC.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
MUCH hope has been pinned on the recovery in home prices that began about a year ago. A long-lasting housing recovery might provide a balm to households, mortgage lenders and the entire United States economy. But will the recovery be sustained?
Alas, the evidence is equivocal at best.
The most obvious reason for hope is that, unlike stock prices, home prices tend to show a great deal of momentum. Correcting for seasonal effects, home prices as measured by the S.&P./Case-Shiller 10-City Home Price Index increased each month from June 1995 to April 2006, then decreased almost every month to May 2009. Since then, they have risen through January, the latest month for which data is available.
So, because home prices have been climbing of late, isn’t it plausible that they’ll keep doing so?
If only it were that simple.
Home price booms and busts do end, sometimes quite suddenly, as was the case for the boom of 1995 to 2006 and the bust of 2006 to 2009. Today, we need to worry about strong headwinds, as the government begins to withdraw its support of a still-troubled lending industry and as foreclosures are dumping millions of homes onto the market.
Consider some leading indicators. The National Association of Home Builders index of traffic of prospective home buyers measures the number of people who are just starting to think about buying. In the past, it has predicted market turning points: the index peaked in June 2005, 10 months before the 2006 peak in home prices, and bottomed in November 2008, six months before the 2009 bottom in prices.
The index’s current signals are negative. After peaking again in September 2009, it has been falling steadily, suggesting that home prices may have reached another downward turning point.
But why? Unfortunately, it is hard to pinpoint causes for a change in demand for housing. The factors clearly include government economic policy, like interest-rate changes and tax credits. But these moves don’t line up neatly with major turning points in the market.
Sociological processes may be driving these changes. Trends in news media coverage, for example, generate conversations in barbershops and hotel lobbies, which in turn alter the conventional wisdom about investing.
Consider how that process might have worked during the run-up to the 2006 turning point in home prices. In May 2005, two months before the peak in the N.A.H.B. traffic index, Consumer Reports magazine had a cover article, “Your Home: How to Protect Your Biggest Investment,” that conveyed a very bullish sentiment.
“Despite years of dire warnings from some economists that the housing boom is about to end, it hasn’t,” the magazine said. “Indeed, last year prices rose even more — about 11 percent nationally.”
The article went on to give advice: “You can no more time the real estate market than you can the stock market,” it said. “If you need a house, and can afford one, go ahead and buy.”
The article extended to the housing market the conventional wisdom that then prevailed about the stock market — namely, that it was quite efficient, without identifiable bubbles and bursts. According to this theory, there was an identifiable profit opportunity: buy and hold stocks, and by extension, housing, and watch your wealth grow.
But as 2005 continued, the conventional wisdom began to change.
Some people in the United States were by then aware of the 2004-5 home price decline in Britain. Some were learning a new lexicon: “housing bubble,” “housing crash” and “subprime mortgage.” Newspapers and magazines began to include some derisive reviews of a March 2005 book by David Lereah, “Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?” And accounts began to appear of the risky behavior of an army of real estate flippers.
In May 2005, I included in the second edition of my book, “Irrational Exuberance,” a new data series of real United States home prices that I constructed, going back to 1890. I was amazed to discover that no one had published such a long-term series before.
This data revealed that the home price boom was anomalous, by historical standards. It looked very much like a bubble, and a big one. The chart was reproduced many times in newspapers and magazines, starting with an article by David Leonhardt in The New York Times in August 2005.
In short, a public case began to be built that we really were experiencing a housing bubble. By 2006 a variety of narratives, taken together, appear to have produced a different mind-set for many people — creating a tipping point that stopped the growth in demand for homes in its tracks.
THE question now is whether a strong case has been built for a new bull market since the home-price turning point in May 2009. Though there is no way to be precise, I don’t believe it has.
Since that turning point, most public discourse on housing has not been about a new long-term view of the market. Instead, it focused initially on whether the recession was over and on the extraordinary measures the government was taking to support the housing market.
Now we’re shifting into a new phase. The recession is generally viewed as being over, and those extraordinary measures are being lifted.
On March 31, the Federal Reserve ended its program of buying more than $1 trillion of mortgage-backed securities, and the homebuyer tax credit expires on April 30.
Recent polls show that economic forecasters are largely bullish about the housing market for the next year or two. But one wonders about the basis for such a positive forecast.
Momentum may be on the forecasts’ side. But until there is evidence that the fundamental thinking about housing has shifted in an optimistic direction, we cannot trust that momentum to continue.
Robert J. Shiller is professor of economics and finance at Yale and co-founder and chief economist of MacroMarkets LLC.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
NYT: Americans Face Tighter Credit
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates.
That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.
The shift is sure to come as a shock to consumers whose spending habits were shaped by a historic 30-year decline in the cost of borrowing.
“Americans have assumed the roller coaster goes one way,” said Bill Gross, whose investment firm, Pimco, has taken part in a broad sell-off of government debt, which has pushed up interest rates. “It’s been a great thrill as rates descended, but now we face an extended climb.”
The impact of higher rates is likely to be felt first in the housing market, which has only recently begun to rebound from a deep slump. The rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage has risen half a point since December, hitting 5.31 last week, the highest level since last summer.
Along with the sell-off in bonds, the Federal Reserve has halted its emergency $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage debt, placing even more upward pressure on rates.
“Mortgage rates are unlikely to go lower than they are now, and if they go higher, we’re likely to see a reversal of the gains in the housing market,” said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. “It’s a really big risk.”
Each increase of 1 percentage point in rates adds as much as 19 percent to the total cost of a home, according to Mr. Mayer.
The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the rise to continue, with the 30-year mortgage rate going to 5.5 percent by late summer and as high as 6 percent by the end of the year.
Another area in which higher rates are likely to affect consumers is credit card use. And last week, the Federal Reserve reported that the average interest rate on credit cards reached 14.26 percent in February, the highest since 2001. That is up from 12.03 percent when rates bottomed in the fourth quarter of 2008 — a jump that amounts to about $200 a year in additional interest payments for the typical American household.
With losses from credit card defaults rising and with capital to back credit cards harder to come by, issuers are likely to increase rates to 16 or 17 percent by the fall, according to Dennis Moroney, a research director at the TowerGroup, a financial research company.
“The banks don’t have a lot of pricing options,” Mr. Moroney said. “They’re targeting people who carry a balance from month to month.”
Similarly, many car loans have already become significantly more expensive, with rates at auto finance companies rising to 4.72 percent in February from 3.26 percent in December, according to the Federal Reserve.
Washington, too, is expecting to have to pay more to borrow the money it needs for programs. The Office of Management and Budget expects the rate on the benchmark 10-year United States Treasury note to remain close to 3.9 percent for the rest of the year, but then rise to 4.5 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2012.
The run-up in rates is quickening as investors steer more of their money away from bonds and as Washington unplugs the economic life support programs that kept rates low through the financial crisis. Mortgage rates and car loans are linked to the yield on long-term bonds.
Besides the inflation fears set off by the strengthening economy, Mr. Gross said he was also wary of Treasury bonds because he feared the burgeoning supply of new debt issued to finance the government’s huge budget deficits would overwhelm demand, driving interest rates higher.
Nine months ago, United States government debt accounted for half of the assets in Mr. Gross’s flagship fund, Pimco Total Return. That has shrunk to 30 percent now — the lowest ever in the fund’s 23-year history — as Mr. Gross has sold American bonds in favor of debt from Europe, particularly Germany, as well as from developing countries like Brazil.
Last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note briefly crossed the psychologically important threshold of 4 percent, as the Treasury auctioned off $82 billion in new debt. That is nearly twice as much as the government paid in the fall of 2008, when investors sought out ultrasafe assets like Treasury securities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the credit crisis.
Though still very low by historical standards, the rise of bond yields since then is reversing a decline that began in 1981, when 10-year note yields reached nearly 16 percent.
From that peak, steadily dropping interest rates have fed a three-decade lending boom, during which American consumers borrowed more and more but managed to hold down the portion of their income devoted to paying off loans.
Indeed, total household debt is now nine times what it was in 1981 — rising twice as fast as disposable income over the same period — yet the portion of disposable income that goes toward covering that debt has budged only slightly, increasing to 12.6 percent from 10.7 percent.
Household debt has been dropping for the last two years as recession-battered consumers cut back on borrowing, but at $13.5 trillion, it still exceeds disposable income by $2.5 trillion.
The long decline in rates also helped prop up the stock market; lower rates for investments like bonds make stocks more attractive.
That tailwind, which prevented even worse economic pain during the recession, has ceased, according to interviews with economists, analysts and money managers.
“We’ve had almost a 30-year rally,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s. “That’s come to an end.”
Just as significant as the bottom-line impact will be the psychological fallout from not being able to buy more while paying less — an unusual state of affairs that made consumer spending the most important measure of economic health.
“We’ve gotten spoiled by the idea that interest rates will stay in the low single-digits forever,” said Jim Caron, an interest rate strategist with Morgan Stanley. “We’ve also had a generation of consumers and investors get used to low rates.”
For young home buyers today considering 30-year mortgages with a rate of just over 5 percent, it might be hard to conceive of a time like October 1981, when mortgage rates peaked at 18.2 percent. That meant monthly payments of $1,523 then compared with $556 now for a $100,000 loan.
No one expects rates to return to anything resembling 1981 levels. Still, for much of Wall Street, the question is not whether rates will go up, but rather by how much.
Some firms, like Morgan Stanley, are predicting that rates could rise by a percentage point and a half by the end of the year. Others, like JPMorgan Chase are forecasting a more modest half-point jump.
But the consensus is clear, according to Terrence M. Belton, global head of fixed-income strategy for J. P. Morgan Securities. “Everyone knows that rates will eventually go higher,” he said.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Even as prospects for the American economy brighten, consumers are about to face a new financial burden: a sustained period of rising interest rates.
That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.
The shift is sure to come as a shock to consumers whose spending habits were shaped by a historic 30-year decline in the cost of borrowing.
“Americans have assumed the roller coaster goes one way,” said Bill Gross, whose investment firm, Pimco, has taken part in a broad sell-off of government debt, which has pushed up interest rates. “It’s been a great thrill as rates descended, but now we face an extended climb.”
The impact of higher rates is likely to be felt first in the housing market, which has only recently begun to rebound from a deep slump. The rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage has risen half a point since December, hitting 5.31 last week, the highest level since last summer.
Along with the sell-off in bonds, the Federal Reserve has halted its emergency $1.25 trillion program to buy mortgage debt, placing even more upward pressure on rates.
“Mortgage rates are unlikely to go lower than they are now, and if they go higher, we’re likely to see a reversal of the gains in the housing market,” said Christopher J. Mayer, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School. “It’s a really big risk.”
Each increase of 1 percentage point in rates adds as much as 19 percent to the total cost of a home, according to Mr. Mayer.
The Mortgage Bankers Association expects the rise to continue, with the 30-year mortgage rate going to 5.5 percent by late summer and as high as 6 percent by the end of the year.
Another area in which higher rates are likely to affect consumers is credit card use. And last week, the Federal Reserve reported that the average interest rate on credit cards reached 14.26 percent in February, the highest since 2001. That is up from 12.03 percent when rates bottomed in the fourth quarter of 2008 — a jump that amounts to about $200 a year in additional interest payments for the typical American household.
With losses from credit card defaults rising and with capital to back credit cards harder to come by, issuers are likely to increase rates to 16 or 17 percent by the fall, according to Dennis Moroney, a research director at the TowerGroup, a financial research company.
“The banks don’t have a lot of pricing options,” Mr. Moroney said. “They’re targeting people who carry a balance from month to month.”
Similarly, many car loans have already become significantly more expensive, with rates at auto finance companies rising to 4.72 percent in February from 3.26 percent in December, according to the Federal Reserve.
Washington, too, is expecting to have to pay more to borrow the money it needs for programs. The Office of Management and Budget expects the rate on the benchmark 10-year United States Treasury note to remain close to 3.9 percent for the rest of the year, but then rise to 4.5 percent in 2011 and 5 percent in 2012.
The run-up in rates is quickening as investors steer more of their money away from bonds and as Washington unplugs the economic life support programs that kept rates low through the financial crisis. Mortgage rates and car loans are linked to the yield on long-term bonds.
Besides the inflation fears set off by the strengthening economy, Mr. Gross said he was also wary of Treasury bonds because he feared the burgeoning supply of new debt issued to finance the government’s huge budget deficits would overwhelm demand, driving interest rates higher.
Nine months ago, United States government debt accounted for half of the assets in Mr. Gross’s flagship fund, Pimco Total Return. That has shrunk to 30 percent now — the lowest ever in the fund’s 23-year history — as Mr. Gross has sold American bonds in favor of debt from Europe, particularly Germany, as well as from developing countries like Brazil.
Last week, the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note briefly crossed the psychologically important threshold of 4 percent, as the Treasury auctioned off $82 billion in new debt. That is nearly twice as much as the government paid in the fall of 2008, when investors sought out ultrasafe assets like Treasury securities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the beginning of the credit crisis.
Though still very low by historical standards, the rise of bond yields since then is reversing a decline that began in 1981, when 10-year note yields reached nearly 16 percent.
From that peak, steadily dropping interest rates have fed a three-decade lending boom, during which American consumers borrowed more and more but managed to hold down the portion of their income devoted to paying off loans.
Indeed, total household debt is now nine times what it was in 1981 — rising twice as fast as disposable income over the same period — yet the portion of disposable income that goes toward covering that debt has budged only slightly, increasing to 12.6 percent from 10.7 percent.
Household debt has been dropping for the last two years as recession-battered consumers cut back on borrowing, but at $13.5 trillion, it still exceeds disposable income by $2.5 trillion.
The long decline in rates also helped prop up the stock market; lower rates for investments like bonds make stocks more attractive.
That tailwind, which prevented even worse economic pain during the recession, has ceased, according to interviews with economists, analysts and money managers.
“We’ve had almost a 30-year rally,” said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard & Poor’s. “That’s come to an end.”
Just as significant as the bottom-line impact will be the psychological fallout from not being able to buy more while paying less — an unusual state of affairs that made consumer spending the most important measure of economic health.
“We’ve gotten spoiled by the idea that interest rates will stay in the low single-digits forever,” said Jim Caron, an interest rate strategist with Morgan Stanley. “We’ve also had a generation of consumers and investors get used to low rates.”
For young home buyers today considering 30-year mortgages with a rate of just over 5 percent, it might be hard to conceive of a time like October 1981, when mortgage rates peaked at 18.2 percent. That meant monthly payments of $1,523 then compared with $556 now for a $100,000 loan.
No one expects rates to return to anything resembling 1981 levels. Still, for much of Wall Street, the question is not whether rates will go up, but rather by how much.
Some firms, like Morgan Stanley, are predicting that rates could rise by a percentage point and a half by the end of the year. Others, like JPMorgan Chase are forecasting a more modest half-point jump.
But the consensus is clear, according to Terrence M. Belton, global head of fixed-income strategy for J. P. Morgan Securities. “Everyone knows that rates will eventually go higher,” he said.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
