From The Times' Floyd Norris:

Here’s a milestone: There are now more foreclosures on prime mortgages than on subprime ones.

The Hope Now alliance — the lenders’ group put together at the urging of Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr — estimates the number of foreclosure proceedings that begin nationally in each month.

The latest figures, for July, put the number at 197,000, the highest for any month since they started keeping track in July 2007.

Of those, 105,000 were prime mortgages, and 92,000 subprime. The June numbers also showed more prime foreclosures initiated.

"Well, there's bankers and more brokers/ What do they know know know?/ Go to work in some high-rise/ And vacation out at the Hamptons, oh no!" ["Andrew Cuomo Birthed Subprime Crisis--Or Maybe Not"]

The Village Voice's cover story this week slams Andrew Cuomo as a sort of bumbling godfather of the current subprime mortgage crisis that has done so much to damage the American economy and to ruin lives.

A summarizing paragraph from the long story by legendary investigative reporter Wayne Barrett:

Andrew Cuomo, the youngest Housing and Urban Development secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the country's current crisis. He took actions that—in combination with many other factors—helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.

 read more »

From the front page of today's New York Times:

The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.

Dozens of families who risk losing their homes to foreclosure are expected to tell their stories at a Tuesday rally in Albany organized by ACORN.

On May 7, the New York State Assembly overwhelmingly passed legislation to institute a year moratorium on home foreclosure--during which a court would determine an appropriate minimun payment for the owner--and provide additional protections for families with subprime loans. The State Senate has yet to move forward on the issue. Meanwhile, federal legislation to address the subprime crisis is stalled in Washington.

In 2007, there were over 51,000 foreclosure filings in New York State according to RealtyTrac. During the first quarter of this year, 14,000 homeowners in New York began foreclosure proceedings, nearly 50 percent of which occurred in Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island.  read more »

One of the big reasons that real estate is where it's at now is because subprime mortgage-backed securities got such fabulous ratings from credit-rating firms when, in fact, greater scrutiny was in order.

State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Thursday announced a deal with the nation's major credit-rating agencies aimed at ensuring such scrutiny. The reforms would require greater disclosure and would change how the agencies are paid by the investment banks that seek their ratings.

Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings agreed to five reforms expected to be implemented over the next six months:  read more »

"Put an end to the Americanization of the Swiss economy!"

So screamed a UBS shareholder at a February meeting of the Swiss banking giant's top executives and shareholders, according to an excellent report in the Sunday New York Times by Nelson D. Schwartz. The report catalogued the far-reaching effects of the American subprime mortgage crisis; one of those effects has been to fuel an anti-American bias in even the more traditionally serene parts of Europe.

Case in point: UBS at one point controlled $80 billion in subprime mortgage-backed securities. It's been forced to write down about $37 billion because of that gamble. It wasn't so much the financial loss that angered UBS shareholders (though that surely stung) but that the loss came because of what some Swiss saw as old-fashioned American over-consumption.  read more »

"There’s a cast of characters and their interests are not necessarily aligned. It is a really big mess.”

That's New York Times business columnist Gretchen Morgenson at a forum last night on the subprime mortgage crisis held at the Museum of the City of New York. City Room has more on it.

Add another victim to the subprime mortgage crisis: holiday shopping.

Higher monthly mortgage payments and tougher lending standards when borrowing against a home's value will likely prevent many homeowners from buying holiday presents like they used to, the Wall Street Journal reports this morning.  read more »

New data from NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy shows (PDF) that the rate of new subprime mortgages in New York City declined from 2005 through 2006. The rate of subprime lending in the five boroughs dropped from 22.9 percent of conventional mortgages issued by subprime lenders to 19.8 percent in 2006.

But here's the bad news in two parts:

First, this annual decline wasn't as sharp as in other big cities, like Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago. (Washington, D.C., saw an increase.)

Second, the highest rates of subprime lending in the city are in poorer neighborhoods like East Flatbush, Brownsville, East New York and Bedford-Stuyvesant.

In fact, Manhattan continued to have virtually no subprime mortgages in 2006. The Observer earlier this year explained why the borough usually doesn't.