I am writing today to announce the closure of the Michigan Messenger. After four years of operation in Michigan, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news into a single site, The American Independent at Americanindependent.com. This is part of a shift in strategy, towards new forms [...]
An abstinence-only presentation provided to numerous school districts in Calhoun and Eaton Counties in October of this year provided false and misleading information to students about HIV, experts allege.
Two county registers of deeds filed a class action lawsuit Monday on behalf of Michigan’s 83 counties alleging that the Mortgage Electronic Registration Services owes millions of dollars in property title transfer taxes.
Despite evidence of the impact of mercury on children and public health, Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette last month joined with 24 other state attorneys general in filing a lawsuit to scuttle new EPA regulations that would reduce mercury emissions from power plants.
When states from New Mexico to Illinois passed payday reform laws over the past few years, it seemed as if the movement to curb short-term loans with interest rates that sometimes reached 400 percent or more was gaining steam. In Ohio and Arizona, voters even took to the polls to approve the rate caps on payday lenders, regardless of threats that the industry would close its doors if it had to lend money at 36 percent interest or less.
WASHINGTON – Only a year ago, hopes were high that a big push by the government to stop foreclosures would be a great success, living up to its billing as “Help for America’s Homeowners.”
Mortgage giant Fannie Mae’s recent announcement that it will give homeowners facing foreclosure the chance to stay in their properties as renters for as long as a year is the latest aggressive move by the government to help troubled borrowers and tenants avoid being evicted. But as past efforts to stem the foreclosure crisis have already shown, even well-intentioned programs haven’t managed to reach significant numbers of people in peril – meaning any new approach faces a tough road ahead.
Pranksters with too much time on the hands are alleviating their boredom by scavaging around Detroit’s ample supply of abandoned and vacant properties, The Wall Street Journal reports. A staff videographer even documented a group of perpetrators in the act of pushing a dump truck out a fourth-floor window of an old Packard plant.
Over at WalletPop, they’ve looked closer into a big recent auction of foreclosed properties in Detroit, and it’s an even bleaker situation than first reported. The Wayne County auction of some 9,000 repossessed properties last week resulted in more than 80 percent of them failing to draw a single bid. And that’s even with the [...]
WASHINGTON — Not a single state has authorized payday lending since Michigan did so in 2005. But elsewhere in the country, states are taking decisive action to rein in the industry, which is organizing for fights in state capitals and in Washington, D.C.
This should come as no surprise: Even the mere mention of the possibility of bringing back cramdown legislation prompted the Mortgage Bankers Association to spring into action. Here’s the group’s rapid response to comments this week from several powerful Democrats, who who threatened to renew efforts to allow bankruptcy judges to change, or cramdown, mortgage [...]
WASHINGTON — As bank-owned foreclosed properties pile up across the country, from abandoned houses in hard-hit neighborhoods to empty big box retail stores in failed strip malls, the fight over holding someone responsible for the brick and mortar mess left behind by the mortgage crisis continues to heat up.
WASHINGTON — Even as the Obama administration presses the lending industry to get more mortgage loans modified, the practice of forcing borrowers to sign away their legal rights in order to get their loans reworked is a tactic that some servicers just won’t give up on.
WASHINGTON — The time may be ripe for a shift in strategy as the foreclosure machine grinds on, and new foreclosure notices reach the troubling milestone of 10,000 per day.
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