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Yesterday NBC's Kevin Tibbles checked on the impact of foreclosures in the housing market. Now Betsy Stark joins in for ABC's Mortgage Mess series and Anthony Mason contributes for CBS. Mason followed housing activists from ACORN--although he was remiss in not identifying the group nor characterizing its ideology--as they picketed the Greenwich Ct offices of Carrington Mortgage Services. "The Federal Reserve has taken the extraordinary step of urging lenders to cut or postpone payments for cash-strapped borrowers," Mason pointed out, yet CMS was refusing to renegotiate with the foreclosure-bound. "The worst is yet to come," warned Mason, as over the next year 4.5m homeowners with adjustable rate mortgages nationwide "will see their payments skyrocket."
Stark profiled Michael de los Santos, a reformed mortgage broker, now volunteering with the Center for Responsible Lending, trying to make up for "a dark time in his life." He was only 20 years old when he was hired to make loans to would-be homebuyers with poor credit in Virginia. The abuses de los Santos recounted included exaggerating incomes and pushing deals with higher interest rates. "If you are in this adjustable rate it is going to adjust in two years. Do not worry about it. You can come back to me in two years and we will refinance before it adjusts," he recalled himself promising.
Tibbles' In Depth profile was of Brian Jervis of Detroit, who worked for a year for Countrywide Financial, the nation's largest mortgage lender. "Jervis learned he had lost his job as a sub-prime mortgage broker last month when someone called to arrange to pick up the office equipment." Now he "needs to find a new way to pay his own mortgage." Tibbles' report included this soundbite that Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, which originated $500bn in loans in the last year, gave to CNBC: "The rapid increase in value was the problem--and with that same some lending practices that certainly, in retrospect, were not acceptable."
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