It's been 21 days since the government announced with great fanfare a $25 billion national foreclosure settlement with five big banks -- long enough for three generations of houseflies to live, love and die.
But the deal, which resolves claims that the banks forged or "robo-signed" signatures to speed foreclosures and committed a host of other loan servicing errors, isn't final until the government files it in federal court. Until then, the public is left to guess whether the settlement is as tough on the banks as the government claims and whether the promised enforcement mechanisms to ensure banks are playing by the rules have real teeth.
The final settlement document should spell out in exact language the rules of the deal. As of now, the government has released only a summary.
On Tuesday, Shaun Donovan, the secretary of housing and urban development, assured the Senate housing committee that finalizing the documentation was mostly a matter of "dotting i's and crossing t's." No need to worry that the parties were still dickering behind the scenes, he said.
Donovan also said at the hearing that the papers should be filed in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., this week. But sources familiar with the drafting of the documentation say the filing date has likely been postponed again. Next week is now the target. These sources chalk up the delays to simple logistics: Dozens of state and federal agencies, plus the five banks (JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial), must sign off.
Why wasn't all this done in advance of the Feb. 9 announcement? The Securities and Exchange Commission, for example, often files a court complaint against and announces a settlement with a company accused of financial misconduct on the same day.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development declined to comment through a spokesman, but a gathering flood of leaks about the status of the deal probably forced the government to announce too soon. As such, some delay is to be expected.
Still, each day that passes drives speculation about whether the deal is as set in stone as the government has led the public to believe. A recent regulatory filing by Bank of America with the SEC has added fuel to this argument.
"There can be no assurance as to when or whether binding settlement agreements will be reached, that they will be on terms consistent with the Servicing Resolution Agreements, or as to when or whether the necessary approvals will be obtained and the settlements will be finalized," reads language in the bank's annual 10-k filing.
Government officials who are collecting signatures and ironing out the details say emphatically that there are no substantive issues still to resolve. "This is not an accurate description of where we are," a senior government official told The Huffington Post after reading the Bank of America language.
Wells Fargo, in its annual 10-k filing, did not include this kind of hedging language.
Still, the continuing delay and the Bank of America language are worth at least one raised eyebrow.
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[T]he bulk of the supposed settlement would come not in actual monies paid by the banks (the cash portion has been rumored at under $5 billion) but in credits given for mortgage modifications for principal modifications. There are numerous reasons why that stinks. The biggest is that servicers will be able to count modifying first mortgages that were securitized toward the total. Since one of the cardinal rules of finance is to use other people’s money rather than your own, this provision virtually guarantees that investor-owned mortgages will be the ones to be restructured.
Why is this a bad idea?
The banks are NOT required to write down the second mortgages that they have on their books. This reverses the contractual hierarchy that junior lien-holders take losses before senior lenders. So this deal amounts to a transfer from pension funds and other fixed income investors to the banks, at the Administration’s instigation.
Another reason the modification provision is poorly structured is that the banks are given a dollar target to hit. That means they will focus on modifying the biggest mortgages. So help will go to a comparatively small number of grossly overhoused borrowers, no doubt reinforcing the “profligate borrower†meme.
But those criticisms assume two other things: that the program is actually implemented.
The experience with past consent decrees in the mortgage space is that the servicers get a legal get out of jail free card, a release, and do not hold up their end of the deal. Similarly, we’ve seen bank executives swear in front of Congress in late 2010 that they had stopped robosigning, which turned out to be a brazen lie. So here, odds favor that servicers will pretty much do nothing except perhaps be given credit for mortgage modifications they would have made anyhow.
There are two clever features of the deal, but neither look intended to benefit ordinary citizens. One is that the deal throws some funding at chronically cash stressed mortgage counselors. They are thus certain to voice approval of the pact. The other is (per the FT story) the deal’s “most favored nations clause†is designed to reduce the bargaining leverage of any AGs that go their own way. It means that any servicer will have the incentive to fight hard against giving any state a better deal because it will automagically trigger improved terms across the states that signed on to the Federal deal. But this may have interesting perverse effects, since banks that refuse to settle with breakaway AGs will ultimately have damages awarded by a court. That means longer and most costly fights by the states, but in most cases, ultimately bigger awards (frankly, the fact set is so bad that all the state AGs need to do is focus on fairly conservative legal theories to have good odds of scoring big wins).
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Posted: 03/01/12 02:12 PM ET