Foreclosure lessons from past recessions
May 27, 2020
In today’s Daily Download episode, HW+ Managing Editor Brena Nath discusses how the mortgage industry should be thinking about foreclosures during the nation’s economic downturn.
For some background on the story, here’s a brief summary of the article:
The current economic collapse raises pressing questions about what lessons we learned from the last one. No two crises are ever the same. Although they have many common elements, which flow directly from an extended plunge in economic activity, they have distinct causes and hence different trajectories. At a minimum, the reform measures that were put in place to address aspects of the prior crisis will alter the course of the next one.
The Great Recession, which lasted from December of 2007 to June of 2009, is of special interest here because it was an economic collapse brought about specifically by failures in the housing and mortgage markets. Some blame government policy for those failures, and it bears some share of the responsibility. Yet the greater weight of the evidence has shown that rampant Wall Street financial speculation was the core of the problem. The traditional approach to housing and mortgage financing became distorted by new mortgage-based investment instruments, leveraged lending, and lax underwriting, all of which turned out to be grounded in ill-founded assumptions.
Following the main story, HousingWire Digital Producer Alcynna Lloyd covers a forbearance report from the Mortgage Bankers Association, data from Zillow that shows a rebound in April’s pending home sales and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s new online resources for consumers.
Each afternoon, The Daily Download provides its listeners with a deeper look into the stories that are helping Move Markets Forward. The Daily Download is hosted by the HousingWire team and produced by Alcynna Lloyd.
HousingWire articles covered in this episode:
