Mortgage | featured news

Mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac FMCC.OB said on Monday it would ask for an additional $1.5 billion from taxpayers due to losses stemming from the weak housing market.

The insurer AIG is suing Bank of America Corp to recover more than $10 billion of losses from a "massive fraud" on mortgage debt, deepening the morass of litigation faced by the largest U.S. bank.

American International Group, the insurer that sold off several major units in its effort to repay its 2008 bailout, plans to keep its once-troubled but now rapidly growing mortgage-insurance unit.

Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae said it would ask for an additional $5.1 billion from taxpayers as it continues to suffer losses on loans made prior to 2009.

U.S. mortgage rates dropped to new lows after the latest round of gloomy economic data hurt Treasury yields, according to Freddie Mac's weekly survey of mortgage rates.

Bank of America is reportedly willing to pay its way out of future mortgage and foreclosure claims.

It is far too easy to say that minorities have only themselves to blame for their wealth decline because they bought homes they couldn’t afford. That argument would let so many off the hook. It would excuse the government for its monumental failure to tame predatory lenders. And it would absolve the lenders who came up with exotic mortgages that should never have been pitched ubiquitously, especially not to financially fragile minority borrowers. But blaming the victim is what we do so well in America.

Countrywide Home Loans agreed to pay borrowers $108 million for charging excessive fees when they fell behind on their mortgages.

Applications for home mortgages surged last week, racking up the biggest increase in four months on a flood of refinancing demand as interest rates remained low, an industry group said on Wednesday.

Mortgage industry employees are still signing documents they haven't read and using fake signatures more than eight months after big banks and mortgage companies promised to stop the illegal practices that led to a nationwide halt of home foreclosures.