Congress passed the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) in 1974 based upon documented instances of kickbacks between settlement service providers, unearned fees, and expensive and unnecessary closing costs paid by buyers and sellers of residential real estate. It opted for a disclosure...

We are now facing the fifth year of the fallout from the subprime mortgage meltdown. The economic crisis gripping the United States began when large numbers of homeowners defaulted on poorly underwritten subprime mortgage loans. Through securitization, the process of utilizing mortgage loans to...

The economic crisis gripping the United States began when large numbers of homeowners defaulted on poorly underwritten subprime mortgage loans. Demand from Wall Street seduced mortgage lenders, brokers, and other players to churn out mortgage loans in extraordinary numbers. Securitization, the...

Evaluating the cost of credit and comparison shopping in the modern credit environment can be a daunting task, even for the most sophisticated shoppers. Lenders increasingly unbundle the costs of their loans from the interest rate into an array of fees, outsource their overhead to third parties...

This paper provides a critical analysis of the legal landscape of residential mortgage lending and explains how federal law abdicated regulation of the subprime market. First, the paper presents the historical backdrop to government oversight of mortgage lending and identifies the changes to and...

The budgets of a growing number of older Americans are stressed by mounting debt loads as elders struggle to pay for necessities such as groceries, prescription drugs, and urgent home repairs. Debts levels of the elderly have taken a sharp turn for the worse since the early 1990s. Older persons...

Congress passed the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA) in 1974 based upon documented instances of kickbacks between settlement service providers, unearned fees, and expensive and unnecessary closing costs paid by buyers and sellers of residential real estate. It opted for a disclosure...