WASHINGTON – While credit unions have expressed strong support for President Trump’s new executive order that is supposed to boost homeownership rates in the United States, one consumer group is saying the proposal will re-ignite the market conditions that led to the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession.
“The order would return mortgage markets to an era when borrowers were routinely upsold more expensive mortgages than they qualified for, and default rates reached historic double-digit levels., according to the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC).
“President Trump’s order would turn the clock back to 2006, when the foreclosure crisis and Great Recession were just beginning to take their toxic toll,” Diane Thompson, deputy director and chief advocacy officer at the NCLC, said in a statement. “Millions of foreclosures and trillions of dollars in lost home equity are not the future we deserve.”
The NCLC said the order seeks to upend mortgage regulation – “instructing regulators to gut statutes passed in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s requiring disclosure and transparency in home mortgage lending, as well as more recent legislation aimed at making sure banks don’t make loans they know borrowers can’t repay and borrowers aren’t tricked into deals they don’t understand with no chance to read and keep the disclosures.
“Taken together, these changes would create a riskier mortgage market and increase the likelihood of public bailouts of big banks,” the organization added.
No More Standards
The NCLC further alleged that financial institutions would no longer be held to strict standards of accuracy in mortgage disclosures, and homeowners would lose remedies to correct mistakes made by their lenders and potentially save their homes.
“More banks would be excused from publicly reporting their home mortgage lending, making it easier to conceal disparities in home lending, including disparities between rural and non-rural areas as well as disparities by race,” the NCLC stated. “Standards for appraisers and mortgage brokers would be lowered, creating the risk of inflated home estimates that contributed to the foreclosure crisis two decades ago and the savings and loan crisis two decades before that.”
Rampant Racial Discrimination
“For decades, we have worked to ensure that all borrowers, including Black, Latino and Native American borrowers who have historically been discriminated against, get the credit they have earned,” Odette Williamson, director of racial justice advocacy at NCLC, said in a statement. “This order reverses those efforts and opens the door to rampant racial discrimination in mortgage lending.”
The consumer group further stated the executive order, if implemented, would allow lenders to disclose the terms of the mortgage loan only at closing without advance notice, putting borrowers at risk of being unfairly surprised while they are under pressure to complete the transaction.
“It also would make it harder for borrowers to see and understand what they are signing when electronic forms or procedures are used,” the group said.
