Sheila Bair wrote an op-ed article in 2007 that made people in Treasury think, "Sheila Bair is difficult."
She was surprised to learn that mortgage servicers had pushed 99% of those surprise-reset mortgages (whose en masse defaults sparked the crisis) into foreclosure rather than modifying them. So she voiced her frustrations in an article.
According to the NYTimes:
[In an op-ed in the New York Times, she] called on mortgage servicers to reset adjustable-rate mortgages en masse. “These borrowers would still be required to make their monthly payments... Avoiding foreclosure would protect neighboring properties and hasten the recovery.”
Although she made no mention of the Treasury Department, everyone in the bureaucracy knew that it was her real target. It was now official: Sheila Bair was difficult.
That's one of two interesting things about the foreclosure process that we learned reading an interview with Bair in the NYTimes. Basically, that mortgage servicers "promised" (whatever that means, we don't find out. Obviously, it wasn't in writing.) to modify mortgages, but instead, they foreclosed on most properties and modified just 1%.
The second is that when explaining the rush-to-foreclosure process she says, “I think some of it was that they didn’t think borrowers were worth helping. There was some disdain for borrowers.”
Honest! And totally unproven because she doesn't go into detail. But it reminds us of the opposite of when Jamie Dimon said, "Giving debt relief to people who really need it. That's what foreclosure is."
It's a homeowner's worst nightmare: That banks rush to foreclose 99% of
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/sheila-bair-foreclosure-2011-7#ixzz1Rm2K1LjB
Realist - Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same -- hardihood. Give them raw truth.
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