Housing Market, Banks | featured news

Finally moving beyond a trading debacle that has stained his once-stellar reputation, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, on Friday trumpeted a strong quarter of earnings stemming from a surge in mortgage lending.

As the government expands its support of the housing market, analysts expect that mortgage profits at banks will rise in third-quarter earnings reports and will continue well into next year.

Citigroup said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $590 million to settle a class action lawsuit brought by shareholders who contended that they had been misled about the bank’s exposure to subprime mortgage debt on the eve of the financial crisis.

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.

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.

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.

Bank of America is testing a mortgage-to-lease program in four states. The idea: Instead of evicting homeowners who face foreclosure, it lets them stay as tenants and sells the homes to investors.

Banks have become so restrictive in making mortgages that many worthy homebuyers are being frozen out of the U.S. housing market, and lending practices are not likely to loosen any time soon, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday.

Bank of America said Friday it would reduce by about $100,000 the amount owed by as many as 200,000 underwater homeowners as part of the recently announced government foreclosure settlement with top mortgage servicers.

Banks are foreclosing on America's churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data.