After months of painstaking talks, the nation’s biggest banks have agreed to a $25 billion settlement that could provide relief to more than two million current and former American homeowners harmed by the bursting of the housing bubble, state and federal officials said. It is part of a broad government settlement aimed at halting the housing market’s downward slide.
Despite the billions earmarked in the accord, the aid will help a relatively small portion of the millions of borrowers who are delinquent and facing foreclosure. The success could depend in part on how effectively the program is carried out because earlier efforts by Washington aimed at troubled borrowers helped far fewer than had been expected.
Still, the agreement is the broadest effort yet to help borrowers owing more than their houses are worth, with roughly one million expected to have their mortgage debt reduced by lenders. In addition, 300,000 homeowners are expected to be able to refinance their homes at lower rates, while another 750,000 people who lost their homes to foreclosure from September 2008 to the end of 2011 will receive checks for about $2,000.
The final details of the pact were still being negotiated Wednesday night, including how many states would participate and when the formal announcement would be made in Washington. The two biggest holdouts, California and New York, now plan to sign on, according to the officials with knowledge of the matter who did not want to be identified because the negotiations were not completed.
The deal grew out of an investigation into mortgage servicing by all 50 state attorneys general that was introduced in the fall of 2010 amid an uproar over revelations that banks evicted people with false or incomplete documentation.
In the 14 months since then, the scope of the accord has broadened from an examination of foreclosure abuses to a broad effort to lift the housing market out of its biggest slump since the Great Depression. Four million Americans have been foreclosed upon since the beginning of 2007, and the huge overhang of abandoned homes has swamped many regions, like California, Florida and Arizona.
In New York State, more than 46,000 borrowers will receive some form of benefit, with an estimated 21,000 expected to see what they owe reduced through a principal reduction, according to estimates by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The five banks in the settlement — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and Ally Financial — have largely set aside reserves for the expected cost of the accord and investors are likely to cheer its announcement, analysts said.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a panacea for the housing industry but it is good for the banks to get this behind them,” said Jason Goldberg, an analyst with Barclays.
As more and more states signed on this week, the negotiations with the banks became especially intense, said one participant, who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly. Two bank officials, Frank Bisignano of JPMorgan Chase and Mike Heid of Wells Fargo, played a critical role in the talks with Shaun Donovan, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development and Thomas J. Perrelli, the associate attorney general at the Justice Department. Bank of America, which will make the largest payout as the nation’s biggest mortgage servicer, moved more cautiously, the participant said.
The deal will not substantially reduce the debt left from the housing bust, nor will it help everyone who may have been hurt by foreclosure abuses. About one in five Americans with mortgages are underwater, which means they owe more than their home is worth. Collectively, their negative equity is almost $700 billion. On average, these homeowners are underwater by $50,000 each.
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All it means is some pocket change for people who were foreclosed (whether because they lost their jobs, or because they were using their house as an ATM machine were speculators in the real estate market and lost their bet on which way the market would go), and some cash for the government. The banks may be able to recover some of the money by suing their lawyers for malpractice. Since the lawyers doing the paperwork were taking oaths as to the accuracy of their work (that’s what notarizing is), they should be disbarred, but that’s not about to happen.
It will help the market bottom out since it gives a green light to start evicting people who are hopelessly behind in their mortgages (regardless of fault), and once that happens the market will bottom out and prices will stabilize.