DecisionEver thought your lender had made an error, say failing to properly credit a payment, or levied an inappropriate charge? What can you do, and how long will it take to resolve?  For the last several years, I have seen clients seeking error resolution undergo a Kafkaesque experience where their questions were either ignored, or met with a circular response that resolved nothing. ~PCQ

Effective on January 10, 2014, the CFPB has established some new ground rules that might [we can only hope and pray] help borrowers caught up in the endless loop of questions and non-answers. Summarized below are the new rules.  Direct quotes are from the excellent summary provided by PolicyWorks. Continue reading “CFPB – Error Resolution Rules (2014)”

Crying BabyOn January 28, 2014, Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS AG, was fed up.  While visiting swanky Davos Switzerland [referred to in a New York Magazine article as “…the annual self-congratulatory kaffeeklatsch known as the World Economic Forum”] he vented. Like Howard Bealle in Network, he was ‘mad as hell and not going to take this anymore!’

What was the object of his angst?  He felt that his company was being unfairly picked on.  According to the article: Continue reading “Big Bank Bashing – Waahhh!”

dracula-gogos“Ocwen, Ocwen, Ocwen.” What a peculiar sounding name for a large company!  Does it have some noble Greek meaning? Or perhaps a venerated Roman god high on the Pantheon of deities? Surely, a quick Google search will provide an etymology, and the mystery will be solved. Right?  No, Nada, Nyet!  There is nothing; just a name with no provenance.  But wait!  One genealogy site shows there to be a single birth record of someone with the name of “Ocwen.” However, that’s it. The trail abruptly ends. No other births, no family records, no divorces, no death notices.  Just an odd name, a cipher, existing in a peculiar jumble of discordant letters.  Hmmm.  Sounds slightly demonic, like something from a Dracula script; the undead – existing to suck the life from its victims.  Given the Ocwen we see today, perhaps that isn’t too far from the truth….[Continue here.]

JumboAs the name implies, a “jumbo” loan is big one; it exceeds $417,000 in most parts of the country except Alaska and Hawaii. In Alaska and other federally designated high priced markets, it is $625,000.  In Hawaii it is $721,050.  These limits – known as “conforming loan limits” – are set by Fannie and Freddie, the large government-owned purchasers of conventional loans in the secondary mortgage market.  Historically, jumbos, being non-conforming loans, carried higher interest rates and stricter underwriting standards.  However, interest rates on jumbos have been going down, and in some instances, have reached near parity with conforming loans. [See my article here.] Continue reading “The Lending Landscape in 2014: Jumbo Loans”

New YearIt’s a New Year! Time to look back from whence we came, and look forward to 2014. ~PCQ 

From Infant to Toddler. The Q-Law website site is now four years old.  While still a toddler, it now has developed the features and personality of its father – satirical, acerbic, outspoken, contentious, caustic, etc., etc. I couldn’t be a prouder parent! Continue reading “Q-Law Mission Statement: 2014”

dog_frisbeeA recent editorial in the Wall Street Journal (Andrew Haldane: The Banker Who Cried ‘Simplicity’) bears reading – and re-reading, and re-reading. It goes directly to the point of my recent rant post titled ‘The Volcker Rule: How Complexity Kills Good Ideas’.  Mr. Haldane is the Bank of England’s executive director for financial stability, and a master of the metaphor.  As the title of the article implies and the text confirms, Mr. Haldane believes that when it comes to the hopelessly complex rules designed to prevent bank failure and ultimately taxpayer bailouts, such as Basel III[1]  and the Volcker Rule[2], less is more. Continue reading “The Dog and the Frisbee: A New Approach To Federal Regulation”

housingThe RMLS™ Market Action Report was just released for the month of November, 2013. In almost every metric, the trend lines look good. However, Inventory in Months remains stubbornly low. [Per RMLS™ “Inventory in Months is calculated by dividing the Active Listings at the end of the month in question by the number of closed sales for that month. This includes proposed and under construction homes.”] For November 2013 inventory was just 3.7 months.  A “healthy market” is considered 6 to 8 months. Continue reading “Portland-Metro RMLS™ Stats for November 2013”

paulvolckertotherescue_300“We supported former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker’s simple idea: Don’t let federally insured banks gamble in the securities markets. Taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to stand behind Wall Street trading desks. What we can’t support is the “Volcker Rule” that was first distorted in the 2010 Dodd-Frank law and has now been grinded and twisted into 71 pages of text plus 882 more pages of explanation after three years of agency sausage-making.” ~ December 11, 2013 Wall Street Journal Opinion: ‘The Volcker Ambiguity’ Continue reading “The Volcker Rule: How Complexity Kills Good Ideas”

LaughterThis story is just too funny to ignore.  The PR department of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), one of the Big Banks in perennial trouble with the Justice Department [eight current investigations – but who‘s counting?], came up with what they believed to be a whiz-bang idea to shine their tarnished image: Set up a Twitter account that permits followers to ask questions of a senior executive.  The hashtag was #AskJPM. According to the article, one observer dubbed it “Snarkpocalypse.”  Read the comments here. Continue reading “Death By A Thousand Tweets: J.P. Morgan’s Excellent Adventure In Social Media”