Mortgage | featured news

A decrease in the amount owed on mortgages helped drive overall U.S. consumer debt lower in the second quarter, even as Americans kept piling up student loan debt, data showed on Wednesday. Total consumer debt fell 0.5 percent to $11.38 trillion compared to the first three months of the year, the New York Fed said in its quarterly household debt and credit report.

The Treasury said on Friday it is changing the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will repay taxpayers in a move the Obama administration said would accelerate the winding down of the government-owned mortgage financiers.

U.S. homeowners are getting better about keeping up with their mortgage payments, driving the percentage of borrowers who have fallen behind to a three-year low, according to a new report.

It is an open secret in the banking world: the interest rates for many mortgages and loans are based on a benchmark that is largely guesswork. The flaws in the rate-setting process, which is used to determine the pricing for trillions of dollars of financial products, have been exposed by the latest banking scandal. Regulators around the world are investigating whether big banks gamed the rates for their own benefit before and after the financial crisis.

San Bernardino County, with some of the nation’s highest foreclosure rates, may use eminent domain to buy up mortgages and cut them to the current value of the homes.

The nation's largest mortgage lender said revenue from mortgage banking jumped almost 80% and consumers borrowed more on their credit cards. But it called the economic recovery uneven.

Wells Fargo Bank will pay at least $175 million to settle accusations that it discriminated against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in violation of fair-lending laws, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

A Massachusetts man who pledged to make the last mortgage payment on his home with pennies has fulfilled that promise. After warning his bank, Thomas Daigle dropped off about 62,000 pennies weighing 800 pounds in two boxes for the final payment on the Milford home he and his wife, Sandra, bought in 1977.

Mortgage rates continued their decline this week, with the 30-year fixed-rate average having met or matched a record low in 10 of the past 11 weeks, according to the latest data released Thursday by Freddie Mac. The 30-year fixed-rate average fell to 3.62 percent, down from 3.66 percent last week and 4.60 percent a year ago.

The new center of U.S. mortgage lending is a nondescript office building in the American heartland, far from the California subprime lenders and the New York investment banks that drove the housing market into a bust.