Banks, Mortgage | featured news

The Treasury said on Friday it is changing the way Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will repay taxpayers in a move the Obama administration said would accelerate the winding down of the government-owned mortgage financiers.

It is an open secret in the banking world: the interest rates for many mortgages and loans are based on a benchmark that is largely guesswork. The flaws in the rate-setting process, which is used to determine the pricing for trillions of dollars of financial products, have been exposed by the latest banking scandal. Regulators around the world are investigating whether big banks gamed the rates for their own benefit before and after the financial crisis.

The nation's largest mortgage lender said revenue from mortgage banking jumped almost 80% and consumers borrowed more on their credit cards. But it called the economic recovery uneven.

Wells Fargo Bank will pay at least $175 million to settle accusations that it discriminated against African-American and Hispanic borrowers in violation of fair-lending laws, the Justice Department announced Thursday.

The new center of U.S. mortgage lending is a nondescript office building in the American heartland, far from the California subprime lenders and the New York investment banks that drove the housing market into a bust.

Banks have become so restrictive in making mortgages that many worthy homebuyers are being frozen out of the U.S. housing market, and lending practices are not likely to loosen any time soon, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said on Thursday.

Wells Fargo's profit jumped 13 percent in the first three months of the year, thanks to strong mortgage lending and a drop in delinquent loans, the bank said Friday.

Bank of America said Friday it would reduce by about $100,000 the amount owed by as many as 200,000 underwater homeowners as part of the recently announced government foreclosure settlement with top mortgage servicers.

Banks are foreclosing on America's churches in record numbers as lenders increasingly lose patience with religious facilities that have defaulted on their mortgages, according to new data.

As the nation's five largest mortgage lenders edge close to a $25 billion settlement over foreclosure abuses, it's becoming clear that the deal will have little or no impact on their future bottom lines.