Liar, Liar, Foreclosure is Dire

One of the strangest parts of the Great Housing Bubble was the reliance on the credit score. If you had a good credit score you could get any mortgage you wanted and buy any house you desired. People could take no doc loans that did not require proof of income or assets. In fact with the higher interest rates and fees many mortgage professionals preferred giving these loans. It is no surprise when when we come across this article from MSNBC titled 'Liar Loans' threaten to prolong mortgage mess.

The nation's struggling housing market, already awash in subprime foreclosures, is now getting hit with a second wave of losses as homeowners with liar loans default in record numbers. In some parts of the country, the loans are threatening to drag out the mortgage crisis for another two years.

"Those loans are going to perform very badly," said Thomas Lawler, a Virginia housing economist. "They're heavily concentrated in states where home prices are plummeting" such as California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona.

Many homeowners with liar loans are stuck. They can't refinance because housing prices in those markets have nose-dived, and lenders are now demanding full documentation of income and assets.

Losses on liar loans could total $100 billion, according to Moody's Economy.com. That's on top of the $400 billion in expected losses from subprime loans.

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The loans were also immensely profitable for the mortgage industry because they carried higher fees and higher interest rates. A broker who signed up a borrower for a liar loan could reap as much as $15,000 in fees for a $300,000 loan. Traditional lending is far less lucrative, netting brokers around $2,000 to $4,000 in fees for a fixed-rate loan.

Although the idea of these loans were incredibly illogical especially on such a large scale, they allowed unlimited amounts of greed. Greed of homeowners to purchase any house they wanted. Greed of mortgage investors to get significantly higher commissions and greed of investors to buy and sell more profitable products. Now we, collectively, will be paying for that greed.