The Bay Citizen
By Aaron Glantz

Attorney general says she will seek a better deal on foreclosures

Frustrated with rising foreclosure rates and convinced that she can do more for Californians who have lost their homes, Kamala Harris, the state’s attorney general, walked away from settlement talks with the nation’s largest banks on Friday.

Harris is the first state attorney general to pull out of the negotiations.

The talks began in 2010, after the U.S. Department of Justice and the attorneys general of all 50 states sued the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers for illegally foreclosing on tens of thousands of borrowers across the country. As part of any settlement, the banks would likely have to pay billions of dollars in compensation, while states would agree to limit future legal actions against them.
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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

There may be no subject that has generated more nonsense from politicians and pundits than the subprime mortgage crisis and housing market collapse. Recently, a new book landed on my desk that cuts through the bull and obliterates a pile of widely-propagated falsehoods.
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Asian Journal
By Joseph Pimentel

LOS ANGELES – Several experts recently urged the ethnic community to know about the importance of a new government agency that will help consumers make a sound financial decision and penalize large banks and credit companies for unfair or predatory practices.
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Housing Wire
by Liz Enochs

Any national plan to facilitate mass sales of foreclosed homes should require the investors purchasing those properties to partner with local nonprofit groups, according to the Greenlining Institute.
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Northwest Asian Weekly
By Stacy Nguyen

New 2010 Census data show that the housing bust has hit some communities of color the hardest.

Blacks, Latinos, and Asian immigrants were more likely to take out subprime loans during the housing boom. Subprime loans generally featured low initial interest rates that skyrocketed some years later. Some borrowers are unable to keep up with the payments and face losing their homes due to foreclosure.
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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

Anyone wondering why Congress has approval ratings that hover somewhere between cockroaches and the bubonic plague might want to check out the Sept. 6 Senate Banking Committee hearing on the nomination of former Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

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Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

Goldman Sachs has made a lot of bets that paid off handsomely over the years — for example, its bet against the subprime housing market that gained the Wall Street giant $4 billion as the housing bubble imploded in 2007. One of the firm’s biggest bets has been on Barack Obama, and that bet seems to be paying off too.

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USA Today
By Christine Dugas

Older Americans of color are being financially squeezed as their earnings and savings drop and costs continue to rise, according to a report released today.

In California, where more than 60% of the senior population is expected to be non-white by 2050, older minorities particularly face more financial risk than whites, according to the report by The Greenlining Institute in Berkeley, Calif., a research and advocacy center. (more…)

Huffington Post
By Preeti Vissa

My head is spinning from the news in recent days. We’ve had glowing reports that “it’s a new day in California” because new foreclosures are declining, even as Reuters reports that “robo-signing” — firms cranking out thousands of foreclosure documents signed by people who never read them, certifying “facts” that may well be untrue — is back.

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