Trump’s new book[Updated 11:55 a.m. on Dec. 6, 2011] The Donald has a lot to say in his latest book, out today. In between moderating debates for Fox News, taking gold bars as a deposit at 40 Wall Street, mulling a run for office and meeting with Republican presidential nominee hopefuls (as he did today with Newt Gingrich), Trump penned another political book: “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again.”

In the latest advice volume, the developer of real estate from Israel to Florida, suggests that America’s problems are the result of President Barack Obama not loving America enough, that the only way to fix the deficit is to take Iraqi oil by force, and that Trump himself is worth a total of $7 billion, a disputed figure. [more]

The Congressional Budget office has thrown cold water on a U.S. initiative to refinance loans held by millions of homeowners, and stated its support for Edward DeMarco, the Federal Housing Finance Agency acting chief, who has drawn criticism for his skepticism of the plan, the Financial Times reported.

The initiative would effectively leave private investors with double in losses what borrowers would get in payment relief, researchers at the CBO found in a recent study.

“The study recognises the enormous losses private investors would suffer in a transfer of wealth to borrowers,” said Joshua Rosner, a housing finance expert and managing director at independent research firm Graham Fisher & Co. [more]

The Obama administration is giving unemployed homeowners in 27 states extra time to apply for a new $1 billion foreclosure-prevention program, due to a lack of qualified applicants, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Homeowners have until Sept. 15 to apply for the new Emergency Homeowners’ Loan Program, and must be approved by Sept. 30, when the government’s authority to make new loans expires.
The program, designed to help up to 30,000 unemployed homeowners continue making their mortgage payments, has run into various issues, including delays in launching for several months due to difficulties in coming to agreements with state agencies.
So far, out of 80,000 people who have applied, only about 10,000 have met requirements. When the program finally launched in June, David Berenbaum, chief program officer of the Washington-based National Community Reinvestment Coalition, which is helping out with the program, admitted it would be challenging to enroll borrowers within such a short time. [WSJ]

The CEO of U.S. real estate company Realogy Corporation, owner of major brokerages the Corcoran Group, Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, is calling on the White House to hold a “housing summit,” the Wall Street Journal reported, an event that would address hurdles facing the housing market.
Such an event would give “the benefit of unfiltered, real-time market feedback,” Richard Smith wrote in a letter sent this past Friday to President Barack Obama. “Now that the debt ceiling is behind the administration, behind Congress, they need to be focused on housing,” he said.
It is not immediately clear what ideas such a summit might produce, the Journal said. While some policymakers have campaigned for aggressive loan modifications, others say the government should back out of real estate markets. [more]

From the March issue: Fixed 30-year mortgage rates in the 5 percent range? Minimum down payments below 5 percent? Jumbo-size home loans for high-cost markets at regular interest rates? Kiss them good-bye — possibly sooner than you might guess. Take a snapshot of today’s mortgage market conditions and frame it. It’s highly likely you’ll never see anything like these favorable combinations of rates and terms again. That’s the inescapable conclusion emerging from the Obama administration’s “white paper” on optional remedies for the two ailing giants of housing finance — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — along with events already under way in the national economy. [more]

President Barack Obama is pushing Congress to rework an existing tax deduction for landlords who retrofit their commercial properties to create better incentives for promoting energy efficiency, NBC News reported. The plan, revealed today during a speech at Pennsylvania State University, is part of Obama’s post-State of the Union address tour, piggybacking on his call during the Jan. 25 speech to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil. Today, Obama set a goal of reducing energy use in U.S. commercial properties by 20 percent by the year 2020. “Making our buildings more energy efficient is one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest ways to save money and combat pollution and create jobs right here in the United States of America. And that’s what we’re going to do,” Obama said. The proposed tax incentive would be paid for by eliminating subsidies for oil companies; more details are expected in the administration’s budget, when it’s released Feb. 14. [Bloomberg] 
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The Obama administration has just released new data on its much-criticized foreclosure prevention program, along with its monthly housing scorecard, in which it reports a new tally of 1.4 million mortgage modification trials begun under the Home Affordable Mortgage Program between April 2009 and December 2010. According to the administration’s preliminary analysis of the figures, participants in HAMP are mostly middle-income homeowners with underwater mortgages. These homeowners — 18 percent of whom are African American and 26 percent of whom are Hispanic — have a median income of $46,000 and a median credit score of 570. TRD [more]

The Obama administration’s $75 billion foreclosure prevention program has been widely criticized for its failure to, well, prevent very many foreclosures, and ProPublica has been investigating why the program has come up short. According to the publication, one major factor has been a possible “fatal” lack of oversight by the Treasury Department, which said this week that it doesn’t have the power under the Home Affordable Mortgage Program, known as HAMP, to punish mortgage servicers for denying loan modifications without cause. When the program was launched in 2009, the Treasury had promised to hit lenders with “monetary penalties and sanctions” if they didn’t make moves to clear their foreclosure backlogs. Since then, some officials have admitted that it was essentially all talk. “By every metric, the failure of the largest servicers to carry out the program is obvious,” said Alan White, a law professor at Valparaiso University. But they’re not being punished, he said, because “Treasury staff are preoccupied with friendly relations with the banks. Sometimes it seems the banks own Treasury.” [ProPublica]

Record-low mortgage interest rates helped to further stabilize the housing market over the past month, according to the latest “Housing Scorecard” released by the Obama Administration yesterday. While new and existing home sales stuck at lower levels than those seen prior to the expiration of the homebuyer tax credit, prices have stopped slipping after 33 consecutive months of declines, the report says, and in the second quarter of 2010, U.S. homeowners gained $95 billion worth of home equity. TRD [more]

It’s official: the homebuyer tax credit closing deadline has been extended. President Obama signed into law today HR 5623, which gives homebuyers who were under contract by April 30 until Sept. 30 to close their purchases and claim their federal tax credit. The bill passed in the House Tuesday and in the Senate Wednesday. The original closing deadline was June 30. [Inman News]

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