Kate Berry has covered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for American Banker since 2016. She joined the publication in 2006 covering mortgage lending and the financial crisis. Berry also has covered big banks including Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo. She has won five awards from the Society of American Business Writers and Editors, and has worked at several news organizations including the Orange County Register, the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Associated Press. Berry began her career as a clerk at the New York Times.
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It used to be common for children to piggyback on their parents' credit to buy a car. Now, according to an auto leasing company, the opposite is happening.
May 6 -
Man locks self in house, demanding a county foreclosure freeze; parents use grown children's higher credit scores to lease cars; and more.
May 5 -
Two years after founding the company known as PennyMac to scoop up distressed mortgages, Stanford Kurland has rejoined a business he knows well from his years at Countrywide Financial Corp.: buying and securitizing newly originated prime loans.
May 4 -
GMAC Inc. posted its first quarterly profit in nearly three years and said it is contemplating an initial public offering to help the car and home lender repay some of its $17.3 billion of federal bailout funds.
May 3 -
A month or two before Fannie Mae's new quality-control requirements take effect, lenders are grumbling that the changes will delay closings and reduce originations without much improving loan quality.
April 29 -
Lenders contesting loan-buyback requests find themselves in the doghouse when selling new loans to the same investors; and more.
April 28 -
The Treasury Department is threatening to deny or even claw back incentive payments to mortgage servicers that are not modifying loans according to the administration's guidelines.
April 22 -
U.S. short-sale program called prone to type of fraud called "flopping"; SEC v. Goldman pays Wells Fargo a compliment; and more.
April 21 -
Fannie Mae has decided that certain distressed borrowers who agree to give up their homes as an alternative to foreclosure should get a second chance at homeownership sooner.
April 15 -
Steps that correspondent loan buyers have taken to avoid flipping schemes could be hurting the recovery in home prices; and more.
April 14 -
GMAC wanted to cut the costs of having processors and underwriters work on loans that don't get funded. So it gave the loan officers an incentive to do better up-front screening.
April 13 -
Matchmaking service created for troubled borrowers and journalists; GMAC ties loan officer compensation to loan performance; and more.
April 7 -
The Securities and Exchange Commission joined the chorus of policymakers calling for institutions to retain "skin in the game" in securitizations — raising the odds such a requirement will become reality.
April 7 -
The three latest government programs to cure the foreclosure crisis have at least one thing in common: none will likely be fully operational until this fall, which will push the politically potent issue beyond the midterm elections.
April 6 -
Despite falling behind on mortgages, borrowers continue to make payments on home equity loans.
April 1 -
Merscorp's electronic mortgage system will not be plaintiff on foreclosure actions after May 1; group pushing regulators for "transparency" in securitization market; and more.
March 31 -
Several key details are different, but the latest attempt to help underwater borrowers could run into some of the same fundamental problems that scuttled earlier efforts.
March 30 -
Buyers are finally taking a shine to "scratch-and-dent" loans and other nonperforming residential real estate assets, with sellers at long last happy to accommodate them.
March 28 -
The top four holders of second mortgages are now on board, but a government program to modify such loans in tandem with first liens will not be up and running for five months.
March 25 -
For more than a year, the mortgage industry has resisted calls to reduce principal for troubled homeowners en masse. Bank of America Corp.'s agreement to do so for 45,000 borrowers shows that in certain cases, there is now little left to lose, and perhaps something to gain, from such actions.
March 24
