Loan Think

Right after I graduated college I read an existential novel called 'The Woman in the Dunes' by Japanese writer Kobo Abe. The story is a bit fuzzy in my mind now, but it centers around an entomologist name Niki who gets stuck in a sandy quarry with a widow who is employed by local villagers to dig sand for sale. Niki tries to escape the sand quarry but can't and faces an eternity of digging sand.

While MERS QA is neither unreasonable nor unexpected, the challenges uncovered in the race to comply are significant. Never before has the industry asked servicers to ensure the data of originators.

Whether you like it are not, you are a manager. The only question: Are you a good manager?

"Out of the river there came up seven cows, sleek and fat, and they grazed among the reeds. After them, seven other cows, ugly and gaunt, came up out of the Nile...And the cows that were ugly and gaunt ate up the seven sleek, fat cows." - Genesis 41

We keep hearing the same chorus week after week from politicians and regulators: we want private capital to return to the mortgage business. In a nutshell, they want private investors to play the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - that of buying and guaranteeing loans.

The great Charlie "Tremendous Jones is very well known for this quote: "You will be the same person in five years as you are today except for the people you meet and the books you read."

The Servicemembers Civil Relief Act was introduced in 2003 as a way to protect active military personnel from certain civil actions. To comply with SCRA, servicers rely on field service companies to provide additional assistance through borrower outreach.

The general media – TV especially – sometimes avoids letting the facts get in the way of a good story. Indeed, crimes of greed and stupidity were committed on Wall Street and by dozens of nonprime retail loan officers and brokers who upstreamed billions of dollars in questionable loans to Wall Street for securitization.

The deadline is this Friday, March 2, for entering your data into Origination News' annual survey of top loan producers, the results of which are scheduled to appear in the April issue.

Mortgage loan rates continue to hit record lows not seen for nearly 60 years, but tight credit has made obtaining a home loan more difficult than ever. Meanwhile, gas prices now average nearly $4.00 per gallon, and industry experts predict $5.00 per gallon gas by Memorial Day. All this against a backdrop of the Dow Industrial Average, which is flirting with the 'magic' 13,000 number.