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In the news: Annandale man sentenced for mortgage fraud
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Northern Virginia Weekend Bits Bucket 1/3-1/4 2009
Posted by Harriet at 10:47 AM
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10 comments:
Mr Mirza is a little fish. They need to start going after big fish, like the Wall Street banks. The big banks are the ones who enabled the mortgage brokers to lower lending standards to zero by telling them they'll buy any mortgage. They're the ones who packaged these mortgages into MBS knowing they were crap and fraudulently sold them as A+ rated securities all over the world. Not to mention the rating agencies that fraudulently rated this crap A+. How will any investor in the world, including Americans, believe that the system isn't gamed if they keep bailing out the big banks without sending their executives to prison for fraud? Oh, that's right. Because the regulatory organizations have been complicit in the fraud. Start with Cox and go from there. There's no shortage of greedy liars out there.
A TH on Lee Hwy near Harris Teeter had a sign of Public Auction by the Treasury. Is this the foreclosure auctions by the court or is it different?
Below is from the webpage:
US Dept of the Treasury Seized Real Property Auctions - Upcoming Auctions:
TOWNHOME: 2301 N. Greenbrier Court, Arlington, Virginia 22207
AUCTION DATE: Coming Soon
1,646 ± sq. ft. brick end townhouse unit with 3 levels plus loft. 3 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, rear
attached 2-car garage, and deck. Located in Greenbrier Court in Arlington County.
more details later the page says...
MM:
That property was likely seized to pay off a debt to the federal government, perhaps an unpaid income tax liability. The IRS is part of the Treasury Department.
MM, a person by the same name as the prior owner of that townhouse was named in this article as convicted of "money laundering and hiring and harboring illegal immigrants." I am not sure if they are the same person, but the timing of the conviction and that of the transfer of the house to the ownership of the feds makes sense.
http://www.gazette.net/stories/061808/germnew200535_32362.shtml
From the article:
"Consuelo Solano will also forfeit $2.1 million cash seized in a search of her home in July 2007. Rosenstein said it was one of the largest seizures his office has ever conducted."
Here's a DOJ press release that says the convicted person was from Arlington:
http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/md/Public-Affairs/press_releases/press08/ElPolloRicoRestaurantOwnersPleadGuiltytoMoneyLaunderingandHarboringIllegalAliens.html
On "experts" and their predictions.
This also applies to the case of using the futures market to "predict" home prices.
Nice detective work there Ace! Maybe the townhouse will come with a 'seller subsidy' of $100,000 in cash hidden in one of the walls.
It'll be interesting to see how much it goes for at auction.
Jeff B, HAHAHA!
TedK, interesting article. I wonder if Harriet will want to start a new thread with it.
Jeff B. LOL! nice find Ace.
Today's was a particularly good installment of the Irvine Housing Blog, Debt to Income Ratios
It incldues useful factoids, like that an increase of 3% in DTI allows for a 10% increase in sales price (30 year amoritizing loan with 20% down). But my favorite paragraph was:
"Changes in debt-to-income ratios are not a passive phenomenon only responding to changes in price. The psychology of buyers reflected in debt-to-income ratio is the facilitator of price action. In market rallies people put larger and larger percentages of their income toward purchasing houses because they are appreciating assets. People are not passively responding to market prices, they are actively choosing to bid prices higher out of greed and the desire to capture the appreciation their buying activity is creating. This will go on as long as there are sufficient buyers to push prices higher. The Great Housing Bubble proved that as long as credit is available there is no rational price level where people choose not to buy due to prices that are perceived to be expensive. No price is too high as long as they are ever increasing."
While there are individual exceptions to this statement, I think on the whole it's true, that prices only stopped increasing when lenders refused to give out larger amounts of money to people with the same income levels as before. Individuals, (other than the cautious folks here) were never going to stop laying out larger and larger portions of their income to housing payments as long as they saw their "investment" going up.
Sticking with the post-facto explanations rather than Irvine Renter's prediction, in deference to Ted K. :)
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