mortgage defaults

Fewer Americans are having trouble paying their mortgages now compared to a year ago, according to a new survey. The bad news? Fewer Americans have mortgages. Some of those who were struggling last year have since sold or foreclosed.

HSBC got plenty of attention when it disclosed that it had suspended foreclosures in its annual report Monday. But its not the only bank whose annual report made for interesting reading. The risk disclosures in banks' annual reports shed some light on their attitudes toward the mortgage mess.

A U.S. bankruptcy court judge in New York wants officials from HSBC and Litton Loan Servicing to appear in her courtroom next month -- to explain their failure to provide adequate documentation concerning how HSBC wound up claiming to hold a mortgage that's involved in a bankruptcy case.

After an exhaustive examination, DailyFinance's legal reporter comes to a clear verdict. Banks have done three things to create the massive glut of foreclosures choking America's legal systems and laying waste to its real estate markets.

Peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com has stopped letting high-risk borrowers use its site because too many of them failed to repay their loans. The site's problem, says columnist and one-time lender Alex Salkever, is that Prosper got in the way of letting a social bond form between microborrower and microlender.

Allstate is suing Bank of America and its Countrywide Financial division over Countrywide's sale of $700 million in mortgage-backed securities to the insurance giant, alleging that Countrywide knew in advance that the assets would drop in value because of a high percentage of defaults.

Judges in several states are emerging as defenders of due process and the rule of law when confronted with the banks' rampant use of false foreclosure paperwork. Alas, that's not so true in Florida, where a foreclosure can be heard in seconds.

On Oct. 20, the state's chief judge ended robo-signing by requiring a special affirmation from the banks' attorneys. They now must swear that they know the banks' documents are true because they checked the paperwork. The result: nearly empty courtrooms statewide.

Las Vegas has always been a place of dreams, promising that pennies can turn into fortunes, cities can rise from the desert, and property values can rise without limit. But you can also lose your shirt there, and the real estate crash has hit Sin City harder than any other place in the country.

The mortgage industry has created a system meant to simplify the handling of loan documents. Instead, it's legally shaky, makes tracking mortgage-note ownership extremely hard and may wind up throwing into doubt who actually controls the title of properties throughout the country.