Principal Reduction

NEW YORK -- For more than a year after January 2011 when the bank foreclosed on Monique White's North Minneapolis home, she has been fighting to stay....

The IMF's public approval of mortgage reductions, as well as reform in the financial sector, is intended to provide support to the economy and reignite a healthy increase in lending, which will spur economic and job growth.

In the popular imagination, the American foreclosure crisis is a morality play in which comeuppance has landed on greedy people who had it coming. Homeowners gorged on the wealth they took out of their properties like fat people at a Vegas buffet, using exotic mortgages to fill living rooms with home theaters and garages with new cars. This view is hard to square with the facts, and now a new study offers a powerful argument that scarce incomes and rising costs for middle class life played a decisive role in putting homeowners in deep financial trouble.

Edward DeMarco isn't ready to blink yet on principal reductions, even though doing so could save Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $1.7 billion. On Tuesd...

Mira Tanna, a housing advocate in Orlando, Fla., doesn't expect everyone to know the details of the recently announced $25 billion mortgage settlement...

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- After two years of bewildering futility, John and Linda DeCaro thought they had finally found a way to hang on to their home. ...

By Jessie Eisinger, ProPublica and Chris Arnold, NPR New analyses by mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have added an explosive new dimens...

Ed DeMarco is overdue on his promise to tell whether he will reverse his stubborn opposition to principal reduction -- a practice that allows underwater homeowners to refinance their mortgages at the real value of their homes.

The single largest obstacle to meaningful economic recovery is a man who most Americans have probably never heard of, Edward J. DeMarco. From his perch as acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, DeMarco oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-owned mortgage behemoths that collectively control about half of all home loans in the land. What he does shapes both the national housing market and the ability of troubled borrowers to hang on to their homes. What he has been doing lately has been so unhelpful that Democratic lawmakers and grassroots advocacy groups are properly demanding his ouster.

There's a growing consensus among economists, investors, academics, and consumer advocates that more "principal reduction" can help avoid another wave of costly and economy-crushing foreclosures.

March 8 (Reuters) - Bank of America, one of five banks in $25 billion settlement with the U.S. government over foreclosure practices, has struck a s...

High-level efforts to convince federal housing regulator Edward DeMarco to support a foreclosure prevention technique championed by the Obama administ...

Having failed to get Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac on board helping struggling homeowners in California, Attorney General Kamala Harris is trying a new t...

After a year of arguing with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over the benefits of loan write-downs, the Obama administration is taking another approach: sh...

Top law enforcement officials in several states are signaling they will pressure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to correct what is widely seen as one of t...

The government's $25 billion settlement with five of the nation's largest banks could help up to one million homeowners. About $21.5 billion is earmar...

Fannie Mae executives are refusing to forgive part of homeowners' mortgage debt because they are "philosophically opposed" to the idea, according to a...

* Dudley: need to help "frustratingly slow" recovery * New policies needed for Fannie and Freddie, Duke says * Dudley ad...

The "moral hazard" is worse than you feared: Americans are figuring out that morality changes as society changes, and that morality no longer includes obediently paying the mortgage

The effort to spread misinformation about principal reduction being off the table is part of a coordinated effort by Wall Street banks to confuse on their fraudulent foreclosures practices.

We don't condemn bed-smokers to suffer the consequences of their risky behavior because the fire can spread. If we want to stop the spread of strategic defaults, principal writedowns are the most effective option.

With far too little is being done to help the millions of Americans who have had their homes foreclosed this year, it seems like an Ebenezer Scrooge Christmas. But it doesn't have to be this way.

This holiday season will be a thin one for tens of millions of American families. Meanwhile the same big banks that sent the economy to its knees are on track for another year of record bonuses.