[Senate Hearing 110-906] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 110-906 PRESERVING THE AMERICAN DREAM: PREDATORY LENDING PRACTICES AND HOME FORECLOSURES ======================================================================= HEARING before the COMMITTEE ON BANKING,HOUSING,AND URBAN AFFAIRS UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION ON THE IMPACT OF EXOTIC MORTGAGE PRODUCTS ON HOMEBUYERS AND HOMEOWNERS __________ WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2007 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Available at: http: //www.access.gpo.gov /congress /senate / senate05sh.html ---------- U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 50-309 PDF WASHINGTON : 2009 For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402-0001 COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING, AND URBAN AFFAIRS CHRISTOPHER J. DODD, Connecticut, Chairman TIM JOHNSON, South Dakota RICHARD C. SHELBY, Alabama JACK REED, Rhode Island ROBERT F. BENNETT, Utah CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York WAYNE ALLARD, Colorado EVAN BAYH, Indiana MICHAEL B. ENZI, Wyoming THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey JIM BUNNING, Kentucky DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii MIKE CRAPO, Idaho SHERROD BROWN, Ohio JOHN E. SUNUNU, New Hampshire ROBERT P. CASEY, Pennsylvania ELIZABETH DOLE, North Carolina JON TESTER, Montana MEL MARTINEZ, Florida Shawn Maher, Staff Director William D. Duhnke, Republican Staff Director and Counsel Johnathan Miller, Professional Staff Mark A. Calabria, Republican Senior Professional Staff Member Joseph R. Kolinski, Chief Clerk and Computer Systems Administrator George Whittle, Editor C O N T E N T S ---------- WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2007 Page Opening statement of Chairman Dodd............................... 1 Opening statements, comments, or prepared statements of: Senator Shelby............................................... 5 Senator Reed................................................. 6 Senator Tester............................................... 6 Senator Carper............................................... 7 Senator Casey................................................ 8 Senator Brown................................................ 9 WITNESSES Reverend Jesse Jackson, President and Founder, Rainbow/Push Coalition...................................................... 10 Prepared Statement........................................... 48 Delores King, Consumer, Chicago, Illinois........................ 14 Prepared Statement........................................... 52 Amy Womble, Consumer, Pittsboro, North Carolina.................. 15 Prepared Statement........................................... 56 Harry H. Dinham, President, National Association of Mortgage Brokers........................................................ 17 Prepared Statement........................................... 60 Jean Constantine-Davis, Senior Attorney, American Association of Retired Persons (AARP)......................................... 18 Prepared Statement........................................... 90 Hilary Shelton, Executive Director, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.................................. 20 Prepared Statement........................................... 100 Douglas G. Duncan, Senior Vice President of Research and Business Development, and Chief Economist, Mortgage Bankers Association. 23 Prepared Statement........................................... 117 Martin Eakes, Chief Executive Officer, Self-Help Credit Union and the Center for Responsible Lending............................. 25 Prepared Statement........................................... 181 Additional Material Supplied for the Record * Statement from the National Association of REALTORS............. 219 Statement from the Center for Responsible Lending................ 227 Statement from the Consumer Mortgage Coalition................... 232 Statement from the American Financial Services Association....... 255 Statement from Lenders One/National Alliance of Independent Mortgage Bankers............................................... 260 * Mortgage Broker and Loan Originator Licensing material submitted by the National Association of Mortgage Brokers has been retained in Committee files. PRESERVING THE AMERICAN DREAM: PREDATORY LENDING PRACTICES AND HOME FORECLOSURES ---------- WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2007 U.S. Senate, Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, Washington, DC. The Committee met at 10:03 a.m., in room SH-216, Hart Senate Office Building, Senator Christopher J. Dodd (Chairman of the Committee) presiding. OPENING STATEMENT OF CHAIRMAN CHRISTOPHER J. DODD Chairman Dodd. The Committee will come to order. We welcome all of you this morning. Let me just announced for purposes of how we will proceed here, we will begin the hearing this morning, and at the point we arrive and have a quorum here, I will interrupt the hearing, hopefully for a very brief amount of time, for us to consider the markup of the Public Transportation Terrorism Prevention Act, which is a matter this Committee had dealt with in the past in the previous Congress under the leadership of Senator Shelby. Basically it is the same bill that we passed out of this Committee in the previous Congress, but there is an effort to have this bill become part of a larger bill dealing with homeland security issues, and so we need to get it done in a timely fashion. So as soon as we have a working quorum here, I will interrupt, go into executive session, and then we will deal with that matter. And I will apologize in advance to the witnesses that if you are in the middle of your testimony here, we will take a break and move to that item and then come right back to the subject matter of today's hearing. I have some opening comments I want to make. I am going to turn then to my colleague and friend, Senator Shelby, for any opening comments he may have. I will ask other colleagues who are here if they have some short opening comments, and then we will turn to our witnesses. Let me welcome all of you here today for the hearing entitled ``Preserving the American Dream: Predatory Lending Practices and Home Foreclosures.'' This hearing is particularly timely in light of the news that has been coming out in recent days about the wave of delinquencies and foreclosures facing American homeowners. Let me start by recognizing the work of Senators Allard, Bunning, Reed, Schumer, Senator Shelby as well, who held joint Subcommittee hearings last year to examine the impact of exotic mortgages on homebuyers and homeowners. They deserve a great deal of credit, in my view, for raising the awareness of many of us to the risks of these products. I consider today's hearing a continuation of the work that these members started in the previous Congress. Today, the Committee will focus its attention more specifically on predatory lending practices that are found primarily in the subprime market and how these practices may be eroding the foundations of homeownership for millions of American families. Let me make myself very clear at the outset on one important point. I do not believe that all subprime or exotic lending is a predatory or abusive practice. To the contrary, subprime credit can be and many times is a valuable tool in helping people become homeowners and in unlocking the equity in their homes. For many years, the battle so many of us have fought was to make credit available to neighborhoods that had been redlined, or to people, particularly minorities, who felt the sting of rejection, regardless of their creditworthiness. In response to this injustice and after years of hard work by people like Reverend Jackson, Hilary Shelton, and many others, we passed the Community Reinvestment Act and the Fair Housing Act so that credit to buy a home or build a business would be available to all Americans. As a result, we have seen homeownership grow. Every one of us has spoken about homeownership, how it provides stability and a chance to build wealth for the vast majority of Americans. It is the most valuable asset that most of us will ever own. Our homes provide us with a financial cushion on which we can draw to send our children to college, pay for unexpected health expenses, or finance a secure retirement. To the extent that the creation of the subprime market has added to this flow of credit in a positive and constructive way, in a way that helps build wealth, I welcome that development, and I encourage it. However, it is not enough to simply create homeownership. We must sustain, preserve, and protect it as well. Yet today we are seeing increasing evidence that this important source of wealth for so many of our fellow citizens is under grave threat from predatory, abusive, and irresponsible lending practices undertaken by too many subprime lenders. The borrowers who are too frequently targeted for these loans are minorities, immigrants, the elderly, and the totally unsophisticated. For these families, failure means the loss of a home, the loss of wealth, the loss of middle-class status, and the loss of the opportunity for financial security. The growth of the subprime market has been incredible. The amount of subprime lending more than tripled from the year 2000 to the end of 2005, from $150 billion to nearly $650 billion. It is now over 20 percent of the entire market. But this incredible growth has come at what the FHA Commissioner Brian Montgomery has called, and I quote him, ``a tremendous cost, a cost that often outweighs the benefits of homeownership.'' Today, there are too many incentives in the subprime market to make loans that put borrowers at too great a risk of failure. For example, over half of subprime mortgages are stated income loans--loans which the industry often refers to as ``liar's loans.'' The question is: Who is lying? According to a survey of over 2,000 mortgage brokers, 43 percent of the brokers who make these loans do so because they know that their borrowers do not have the income to qualify for the loan in the first place. Why do they make these loans? Because they are paid more to do so. Brokers up-sell borrowers; that is, they put borrowers in loans with higher interest rates than they would otherwise qualify for because the brokers make greater commissions, called ``yield spread premiums.'' By so doing, these yield spread premiums are a perfectly legitimate tool to provide borrowers with no-closing-cost loans. But HUD has told us that half of these loans paid, about $7.5 billion, do not go to closing costs but go simply to increase broker profits. Minority borrowers are being targeted for higher-cost, subprime mortgages, regardless of their financial health. The 2005 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data show that over half of African American borrowers and 46 percent of Hispanic borrowers were given high-cost, subprime loans. By comparison, only 17 percent of whites took out such loans. Yet, according to the Federal Reserve, borrower-related characteristics such as income could explain only about 20 percent of this disturbing difference. That is from the Federal Reserve, by the way. About 70 percent of subprime loans have costly prepayment penalties that trap borrowers in high-cost mortgages, mortgages that strip wealth rather than build it, and these penalties keep borrowers from shopping for a better deal. Unfortunately, living in a minority neighborhood puts a homeowner at significantly higher risk of having a prepayment penalty. Approximately eight in ten subprime loans today are 2/ 28 adjustable rate mortgages--mortgages whose monthly payments will spike up by as much as 30 to 50 percent or more. Many of the borrowers who take these loans, unaware of the payment shocks that await them, have no prospects of being able to make the higher payments and are forced to refinance the loan if they have sufficient equity to do so. Each refinance generates new fees for the lenders and brokers and strips more equity from the homeowner. One lender in a discussion with my office called subprime 2/28 loans ``foreclosure loans.'' Those were his words, not mine. Late in 2006, Federal financial regulators issued guidance to require the lenders to underwrite borrowers for certain non- traditional mortgages so that even after the payment shock hits, the lender can be reasonably certain that the borrowers will be able to continue to make the mortgage payments. Last year, I wrote, along with five of my colleagues on this Committee--Senators Allard, Bunning, Reed, Schumer, and former Senator Sarbanes--asking the regulators to extend these same protections to borrowers who were given these subprime 2/ 28 ARMs, borrowers that are disproportionately black and Hispanic. That was over 2 months ago we wrote the letter. We have not received an answer yet. My hope is today that as a result of this hearing and referencing to it here this morning, we will get a response from the various Federal agencies that we have written to asking them to respond to our concerns about these practices. I believe these borrowers deserve every bit as much protection as the homeowners who take out interest-only and option ARM loans. And I want to urge the regulators to more expeditiously provide the same protections to these particularly vulnerable borrowers. The results of these aggressive and abusive practices are becoming clear. The Center for Responsible Lending, whose CEO, Martin Eakes, will testify this morning, released a study saying that nearly one in five subprime loans made in 2005 and 2006 will end in foreclosure, in large part because of the abusive loan terms with which many low-income borrowers are saddled. According to this study, up to 2.2 million families will lose their homes at a cost of $164 billion in lost home equity. Other reports confirm the trend. RealtyTrac announced that there were more than 1.2 million foreclosure filings in 2006, up 42 percent from 2005, blaming the increase on higher payments generated by the resets on option and subprime ARMs. Today's edition of the American Banker has a story entitled ``Subprime Defaults at Recession Level.'' The article focuses on a study conducted by Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, an investment banking firm specializing in mortgages, which says that over 10 percent of securitized subprime loans are seriously delinquent, over 90 days late, in foreclosure, or already turned into seized properties. This is nearly double the rate from May of 2005 and higher than at any time since the recession of 2001. I understand that many argue that the impact of the economy and other life events, as they are called, such as illness, job loss, divorce, and the like, are key variables in determining mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures. No doubt this is true. I do not question that. But these economic and personal factors do not fully explain, in my view, the precipitous rise in defaults and foreclosures. It is time for Congress, the administration, and the lending industry to face up to the fact that predatory and irresponsible lending practices are creating a crisis for millions of American homeowners at a time when general economic trends are good. Indeed, Mark Zandi, chief economist at moodysconomist.com, notes that, ``The current high delinquency rates are unusual because the economy is relatively strong.'' I am quoting him there. Zandi attributes the increasing delinquencies in part to the resetting of subprime and other ARMs at higher rates. This is particularly worrisome given the fact about $600 billion in ARMs were reset this year. The problem is most of these loans are perfectly legal, even as they do real harm to borrowers and neighborhoods. In short, the system is out of balance. There is a chain of responsibility that makes these abusive loans possible. I look forward to working with each link in that chain--the brokers, the bankers, Wall Street, the regulators, my colleagues on this Committee, and the Congress and the administration--to help restore this balance for the sake of the safety and soundness of the banking system, for the sake of homeowners who are being victimized, and to make sure that subprime credit can once again play a very constructive role in the marketplace and make homeownership the dream that it ought to be. At any rate, here now this morning let me, if I can, note that Reverend Jackson is here and will be our lead-off witnesses, but before I turn to him, I want to turn to Senator Shelby for some opening comments and then any other Members of the Committee for any opening comments they may have, and then we will turn to our witnesses. Senator Shelby. STATEMENT OF SENATOR RICHARD C. SHELBY Senator Shelby. Thank you, Chairman Dodd. The last 10 years have witnessed a dramatic increase in homeownership, particularly among low-income and minority families. One of the primary reasons for this increase has been the advent of risk-based pricing in the mortgage market. The resulting expansion of mortgage credit has opened the dream of homeownership to millions of Americans who previously would not have qualified. We in the Congress have a responsibility to ensure that this upward trend continues. The market now provides a wide array of mortgage products to meet the needs of a diverse consumer base. Unfortunately, more choices mean greater complexity, which can put some borrowers at a disadvantage. Therefore, it is incumbent upon consumers not only to educate themselves, but to shop around before they sign on the dotted line. Due diligence alone, however, Mr. Chairman, cannot protect the consumer from fraud and other unscrupulous practices. The financial regulators possess a number of tools to eliminate discriminatory, unfair, fraudulent, and deceptive practices. In fact, the bank regulators recently issued final guidance on non-traditional mortgage products. I believe this guidance will help further reduce abusive and irresponsible lending. We also have a responsibility, Chairman Dodd, to ensure that this downward trend also continues. This Committee has highlighted and will continue to highlight both the good and the bad in the mortgage marketplace in hopes of facilitating the former and eliminating the latter. I look forward to working with Chairman Dodd as we monitor the performance of the regulators and determine what, if anything, Congress can do to further reduce abuse and fraud while ensuring the continued expansion of homeownership. While we seek to protect the few who have fallen prey to either bad actors or their own choices, we must be careful not to inadvertently harm the many who have benefited or will benefit from expanding homeownership. As Reverend Jackson has observed in the Chicago area, it is possible to throw the baby out with the bath water when we seek to legislate in this area. We have got to strike a balance to get it right. Mr. Chairman, I want to commend you for your efforts and the efforts of our former Chairman, Senator Sarbanes, in making financial literacy a top priority of this Committee. An informed consumer is a powerful deterrent to those who seek to defraud or deceive potential borrowers. More importantly, an informed consumer is in a much better position to choose the most appropriate loan for their specific economic circumstances. Mr. Chairman, I also want to thank today's witnesses for their willingness to appear before this Committee, and I look forward to hearing from them. Thank you. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Senator Shelby. Let me turn to my colleagues for any opening statements. Senator Reed, any opening comments? STATEMENT OF SENATOR JACK REED Senator Reed. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you and Senator Shelby for this hearing on the important topic of ipredatory lending. In the third quarter of 2006, in Rhode Island more than 5,600 home loans were delinquent, and for a small State like Rhode Island, that is a significant number. More than 600 mortgages fell into foreclosure proceedings. That is up 41 percent since 2005. Those are startling numbers. But what is happening, obviously, is that increased housing prices and flat wages have put a lot of families in a very difficult predicament. And according to statistics, in 2006 nearly 16 percent of the loans in Rhode Island were interest-only. Those are just the type of loans that could lead to the situation we talked about today. As interest rates accelerate, families find themselves caught between stagnant wages and family crises like health care and other problems, and that is where we have to, I think, do something much more. I am interested particularly today in what the Federal Government might be able to do to provide some type of relief for homeowners, provide them a lifeline. One of the greatest challenges facing policymakers, nonprofit housing support entities, and responsible lenders appears to be reaching borrowers in trouble. As a result, I have been working on legislation which I plan to introduce soon that would improve and expand upon existing Federal efforts to reach borrowers in trouble. Federal sponsorship of post-purchase assistance activities would help ensure that Federal dollars invested in homeownership programs, including purchase assistance programs and the FHA, are not wasted, while also providing benefits to buyers and lenders. I think we can do much more to help those people facing foreclosure, and we should do it. I look forward to the hearing to learn more about this particular issue, and I thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much. Senator Tester, any comments? STATEMENT OF SENATOR JON TESTER Senator Tester. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Ranking Member Shelby. Thanks for holding this hearing on an issue that has adversely affecting more and more Americans every day: predatory lending. Hard-working Americans think they are finally achieving part of the American dream--homeownership--and they find themselves in a financial tailspin because they were loaned more than they could afford, with hidden fees and interest rates that explode after a few years. Now, Mr. Chairman, you remember a couple weeks ago we had a hearing here on credit cards. This type of lending where we have exploding fees--I mean hidden fees and exploding interest rates is becoming far, far, far too common. You spoke of one in five subprime borrowers that could lose their homes. These are statistics that, quite frankly, are very troubling because behind these statistics are young families, minorities, people that are going to suffer greatly. Clearly, more needs to be done to protect consumers from these predatory lending practices, and I look forward to hearing the testimony and the panel on this subject. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Dodd. Thank you, Senator. Senator Carper. STATEMENT OF SENATOR THOMAS R. CARPER Senator Carper. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. To Reverend Jackson and other witnesses, welcome. We are delighted that you have joined us today. Long before I came to the Senate, homeownership was a top priority for me. As Governor of Delaware, we sought to make--we literally took our Housing Authority Director and put her on our Cabinet. Then we worked hard to raise our homeownership rate. Our homeownership rate in Delaware is about 75 percent, among the highest in the country. I think all kinds of good things flow out of homeownership in terms of a source of savings for us to send our kids to school, start small businesses, live on at the end of our lives with reverse mortgages. We know kids do better in school when they live in a home that their family owns. People take ownership of their community. Just all kinds of good things flow from homeownership. So I have been anxious to and still do a lot in my little State to promote homeownership. And while I am encouraged by increased homeownership rates, I want to ensure that financing options that get people into a home are not subsequently counterproductive. And I want to see more Americans own their own homes, but I also want to make sure that they can actually stay in their homes and realize the American dream, not just for a couple of months or a couple of years, but for the rest of their lives. However, the process of buying a home can be daunting, as we know. Obtaining a loan can be an intimidating and confusing process for the vast majority of people who participate in it. Today there are many financing options for potential homebuyers as we know. I would just ask a rhetorical question: What makes a loan predatory? And, unfortunately, we have no clear definition. We have lists of examples, but does one practice in isolation by default become predatory? Or do there have to be two or three practices in one transaction in order for it to be predatory? How we craft a definition of ``predatory'' and define restrictions will have important consequences for the future of homeownership in America. For some, the subprime market is appropriate. You have spoken to that, Mr. Chairman, just as long as it is fair and clear. Because of the subprime market, we actually have the opportunity for a lot of people to have access to credit who would not otherwise have it. But if restrictions on such practices go too far, there is a risk that subprime lending will be too high for lenders and they will not make loans to people who need it and who have earned it. On the other hand, if the restrictions are too loose, then many Americans may lose the equity they have built up in their homes, they may lose their life savings, they may lose their family's home. An important component of increased American homeownership is financial literacy. We have had hearings on that, as you will recall, and we must do our best to impart consumers with the knowledge that they need to successfully purchase a home. The state of financial literacy in our country, despite our efforts, is abysmally low, and we need to educate our children and continue to educate our children, our young adults, and, frankly, our older adults on the basic skills such as personal budgeting, balancing a checkbook, checking their credit scores, and so forth. Increasing financial literacy will go a long way to protecting Americans from finding themselves in financial situations they cannot afford. In closing, Mr. Chairman and colleagues, obviously I greatly appreciate that we are holding this hearing today. I hope that our Committee will continue to examine this and other homeownership issues to find ways to address these issues, not only these issues but financial literacy as well, and my old favorite, a strong, independent regulator for those Government- sponsored enterprises. Thank you. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Senator Carper. Senator Casey. STATEMENT OF SENATOR ROBERT P. CASEY Senator Casey. Mr. Chairman, thank you for bringing us together for this important hearing, and I want to thank all the witnesses who will appear, and especially Reverend Jackson for your testimony that we will hear today and your leadership. This is an issue much like the minimum wage. We debated that recently, and it was 10 years long overdue before we acted in the Senate to raise the minimum wage. At the time I said that that was an issue of economic justice, and I believe this issue as well is an issue of basic economic justice, because I believe when you go down--and I am glad that Chairman Dodd went through the practices, whether they are financing high points and fees or whether it is loan flipping or aggressive marketing and all of that, all of those pernicious and offensive practices constitute an effort to not only deceive and not only rob people of their financial resources and make it harder for them to make ends meet, it robs them of their dignity, and that is especially offensive when people are in many cases working, they are low-income workers, and they are struggling every day just to bring the ends of their family budget together and all of the pressures that others have mentioned today--health care and education, all the other financial pressures. But this is something that robs people of their basic dignity, and it is particularly offensive. And I think that one of the results of this hearing has to be--maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon--to develop a set of changes and practices, policy changes really, that will help to restore some of that dignity that has been lost and prevent others from being the victims of that kind of outrageous conduct. So, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate your work and your leadership on this, and Senator Shelby and Members of this Committee who have been working on these issues for many years, and we are grateful for this opportunity. Chairman Dodd. Thanks very much. Senator Brown. STATEMENT OF SENATOR SHERROD BROWN Senator Brown. Thank you, Chairman Dodd, and thank you for conducting this hearing. Just last week, Secretary Paulson testified to this Committee and repeatedly told us that in the last quarter we saw 3.5 percent economic growth in this country as if that were the whole story. But my State and Pennsylvania and so many other States are faced with some of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. Cities like Cleveland are being particularly hit hard. There is no question that some of this problem stems from the loss of jobs or other reasons external to the home lending industry, but in far too many cases homeowners have been lured into loans they had no business taking out. Over the past decade, foreclosure filings have increased fourfold in Ohio. In one Ohio survey, two-thirds of county sheriffs' departments cited predatory lending as a top contributor to foreclosures. The result is that in 2005 there was one foreclosure filing for every 71 households in Ohio. It is not hard to see how this happens. A homeowner might take out only one or two mortgages in her whole life or in his whole life. Doing so is unfamiliar. It is daunting, as Senator Carper said. It is only natural to rely on somebody who deals with mortgage products every day and seems to have the borrowers' interests at heart. But unscrupulous actors have their own interests at heart. We need to provide greater protections for consumers who may not be sophisticated about the proliferation of mortgage products and the many tricks that can be used to disguise the true cost of a mortgage. We need to act to ensure not just full disclosure but ethical behavior on the part of all the participants in the lending process. I would close, Mr. Chairman, by asking unanimous consent to enter into the record a statement from the National Association of Realtors, who have, obviously, interest in this, not a direct stake, perhaps, in the hearing today. Chairman Dodd. Without objection, so ordered. With that, let's turn to our first witness. Reverend Jackson, we thank you immensely for being here, if you would please join us at the table. As I think most of the audience is aware, Reverend Jackson is the founder and President of Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, one of America's foremost civil rights, religious, and political figures. Over the past 40 years, Reverend Jackson has played a major role in every movement of empowerment, peace, civil rights, gender equity, and economic and social justice, also broke new ground in U.S. politics with his two runs for the Presidency back in the 1980's. Reverend Jackson has received numerous honors for his work in human and civil rights, nonviolent social change, and he has received the prestigious NAACP Spingarn Award in recognition of his honors from hundreds of grass-roots civic and community organizations from coast to coast. On August 9, 2000, President Bill Clinton awarded Reverend Jackson the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Nation's highest civilian honor. Reverend Jackson, it is a pleasure and honor to have you before this Committee. We thank you for being with us. STATEMENT OF REVEREND JESSE JACKSON, PRESIDENT AND FOUNDER, RAINBOW/PUSH COALITION Reverend Jackson. Thank you, Senator Dodd. Mr. Chairman, Senator Shelby, other distinguished Members who are here today, I want to thank you for your vision in calling today's hearing as well as your insightful comments at the tenth anniversary of the Rainbow/PUSH-Wall Street Economic Project Summit, established to democratize capital in the financial services industry and remove the walls on Wall Street for people of color and women and seniors. We look forward to joining with you in a working group on the issue of predatory lending and other issues which will form the basis of a new national urban policy for America. On Thursday, January 25th, this same Committee held hearings on the practice of the credit card industry. What we will see here today is that several of the issues prevalent in the credit card industry apply to the issue of predatory lending as well. I would like to thank Senators Allard and Bunning, who held hearings last year on interest-only mortgages. After all, in a true democracy, money is not red or blue or white. It should be green for all citizens. As we gather for this hearing in the month of the year designated for the commemoration of Black History, we do so through two lenses of history: triumph and tragedy. NFL coaches who are black are recent triumphs in breaking down walls of exclusion in athletics, and that is a triumph, and the tragedy of the financial services industry's targeting of people of color for high-rate mortgage continues. What is the American creed? The American creed promises equal opportunity, equal access, equal protection under the law, and a fair share for all. Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, we must level the playing field for all citizens, identify incentives for our financial institutions to invest, not exploit and oppress, hard-working Americans. Far beyond our idea of freedom is the reality of equity and parity. We must break the syndrome where the poor pay more for automobiles and housing financing to insurance. Today's terms of credit for African American and Latino borrowers and seniors are un-American. The cost of money for black and brown people is not based on equal opportunity, equal access, or equal protection under the law. In the home mortgage industry, like other industries, people of color are economically exploited, resulting in a home-owning rate of fewer than 50 percent. For example, in 2005, 52 percent of mortgage loans to blacks were high rate, 40 percent of mortgage loans to Latinos were high rate. By contrast, in the same year, only 19 percent of mortgage loans to whites were high rate. In Chicago alone, foreclosures for black and brown borrowers exceed $598 million annually. In Boston, 70 percent of middle-class--not the poor--home loans were high rate. Nevada has the second highest foreclosure rate in the Nation. When the Ford Motor Company dismisses 55,000 workers, and Honda and Toyota can build plants here and Ford cannot build a plant there, we also need not only literacy but a fair trade policy. Or if you have another hearing in the field, please have it just outside of a military base where underpaid soldiers are just victimized by vultures of whatever race all over our Nation. So when you lose 3 million manufacturing jobs, you don't just need literacy. You need a job that can pay your mortgage. The ghetto barrio established as an enclave or institution built on race, exclusion and exploitation. It required open housing laws to relieve pressure on the overcrowding and create housing options. There remains a zone of high taxes and low services, second-class schools and first-class jails, zip codes that are unprotected by law. It is a fertile land for predators, financed by banks. Banks lock you out based on credit score and zip code, and market exploiters, payday lenders, swoop in like vultures. We need Federal protection. The help of CRA on the front side is a good thing. But then when banks finance predators on the back side, they offset CRA. Many players in the home mortgage industry are given a green light to engage in predatory schemes to redline against the poor and people of color. Predatory lending practices such as subprime loans are the largest threat to wealth accumulation. Practices include steering, placing borrowers into higher-priced loans than those for which they qualify; steering of prime, placing black and brown borrowers into high- cost subprime loans; prepayment penalties, fees incurred by borrowers for paying a loan off early; yield spread premium, broker kickbacks for steering borrowers into high-priced loans; no-fault repayment ability, failure to escrow for property taxes, low documentation loans. Today, I pray the Senate Banking Committee does not, A, blame the victims who work harder and make less, pay more for less, live under stress, and don't live as long, or suggest a mere increase in disclosure forms. I respectfully suggest, one, the industry is not functioning properly nor fairly. Lenders and brokers have financial incentives to place borrowers in more expensive loans. It puts responsible lenders at a competitive disadvantage with the irresponsible lenders, allowing unscrupulous predatory lenders to control the market. Currently, brokers get paid more by putting borrowers in more expensive loans for which they qualify, and lenders have incentives to place borrowers in loans that are unsustainable for more than a year or two. This must change. The GSEs, the Government-sponsored enterprises, lenders worked with these organizations in Fannie Mae to develop predatory lending practice guidelines which have been adopted. What we find these basic banking services for whites, full- service bank branches. For Blacks and Latinos, pawnshops, check-cashers, and payday lenders. Current evidence reveals that Fannie Mae is purchasing securities that include the very loans that are stripping working-class people of their precious home equity. The Federal Government subsidizes Fannie Mae to increase homeownership, opportunities for working people. In purchasing such securities and profiting from predatory loans, Fannie Mae is violating its public mission and the ability-to-repay standard. I have also learned that Fannie Mae has received HUD Goals Credit for investing in high-rate loans that produce massive foreclosures. In short, Fannie Mae and other GSEs are doing through the back door what the law prohibits through the front door. This must change. Last, borrower should not shoulder the blame. I am very discouraged by the industry response to necessary change when I heard from industry, ``Educate the borrower and increase disclosure.'' I would rather be an ignorant borrower with a job than an enlightened one without a job. The loss of jobs is a big factor in inability to pay. Rainbow/PUSH, through our Thousand Churches Program, teaches financial literacy through member churches across the Nation, and there are other organizations doing the same to provide borrowers with information to make good financial choices. To think that more forums and more 1-800 numbers is the remedy is to view the issue through a keyhole and not the entire. Duty-to-Read standards for the public must be matched by a duty to behave for predatory lenders. In closing, Federal law requires banking regulators to protect citizens regardless of race. We need a domestic OPIC-- long-term, low-interest, flexible loans. We need a development bank, as we build for allies, as we seek to be sensitive and helpful, expand markets abroad, the ghetto, the barrio is likened unto a Third World country except it is closer, more secure, and more lucrative. The ghetto is an underserved market, underutilized talent, untapped capital, and thus, growth potential. We must enforce laws against racial discrimination. We must greenline the redline zones and zip coded zones and use Government-private partnerships to break this pattern. We must see the underserved markets as an opportunity for growth and development rather than exploitation and unscrupulous profiteering. What we fight for is one set of rules, evenly applied to all Americans, whether Native Americans, African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian, or European. Last, we just saw the Super Bowl game this past Sunday. The reason why so many people could see it and accept the victory with grace and the loss with some degree of sorrow, but say next year, and no uproar--why have we done so well on the athletic field? Why do we accept black coaches and blacks and whites in combat, and at the end of the day leave with a sense of everybody won? Because whenever the playing field is even and the rules are public and the goals are clear, we can all play--win, lose--and have our dignity. In this industry, the playing field is not even, the rules are not public, the goals are not clear, and exploiters abound. Thank you very much. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Reverend Jackson. We appreciate your testimony. What I am going to ask if we can make a little room for other witnesses coming up with your aides there. Let me introduce our other witnesses, and then they will make some opening statements. I want to ask our witnesses to try and keep their remarks to about 5 minutes so we can get to the Q&A period, if we can. Let me welcome Ms. Delores King of Chicago, Illinois, and Ms. Amy Womble, if I have pronounced that correctly, and you correct me if I am wrong in that pronunciation--Womble, I guess it is. Let me just say to both of our witnesses here, these are not witnesses that normally appear before congressional hearings, and we are very honored that both of you are here and are willing to share your stories with us. You put a face on all of this. We talk in these details and numbers, about the impact of these decisions, and yet sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there are very real people who are affected by these decisions. So we are very grateful to you, Ms. King, for being here this morning to join us, and you, Ms. Womble--did I pronounce that correctly? How do you pronounce your---- Ms. Womble. Womble. Chairman Dodd. Womble. We thank you as well for coming here this morning. Our next witness will be Harry Dinham, who has worked in the mortgage industry for 38 years. Harry, we thank you for joining us here this morning. Join us at the table. Mr. Dinham is President and owner of the Dinham Companies, including the Dinham Mortgage Company in Plano, Texas. He is here in his capacity as President of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. He has been a long-time and very active member of that association. He has served as the Treasurer, the Vice President, and President-Elect before taking the office of the President on June 25th. And, Mr. Dinham, we thank you for joining us here as well and for your testimony this morning. Jean Constantine-Davis is an attorney with AARP since 1985, currently working in the Foundation Litigation Group on issues involving fraudulent and predatory mortgage lending practices targeted at elderly homeowners. She was awarded the Jerrold Scoutt Prize for her work on behalf of low-income, vulnerable elderly here in the District of Columbia. We thank you for joining us, Ms. Davis. Mr. Hilary Shelton is the Director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau, the Federal legislative and national public policy division of the over 500,000-member, 2,200-membership unit, national civil rights organization. He is responsible for advocating the Federal public policy issue agenda for the oldest, largest, and most widely recognized civil rights organization in the United States. Hilary, thank you for joining us here this morning as well. Following Hilary Shelton, we will hear from Dr. Douglas Duncan, who is the Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the Mortgage Bankers Association. As leader of MBA's Research and Business Development Group, Mr. Duncan is responsible for providing economic and policy analysis services in the areas of real estate, finance, legislative, and regulatory proposals, and industry trends for MBA and its members. Mr. Duncan, thank you very, very much for joining us this morning. And, last, we will hear from Martin--and I am going to mispronounce this. Mr. Eakes. Eakes. Chairman Dodd. Eakes. Martin Eakes, who is the Chief Executive Officer of the Center for Responsible Lending and the Center for Community Self-Help, which is a community development leader that has provided over $4.5 billion in financing to more than 50,000 homebuyers, small businesses, and nonprofits nationwide. Self-Help reaches persons who are underserved by conventional lenders, particularly minorities, women, rural residents, and low-wealth families. Mr. Eakes has been a leading voice nationwide in the fight to end predatory lending. I have already quoted you this morning in my opening statement, and we thank you as well. We have got a very distinguished group of panelists here, very knowledgeable people. We are going to begin in the order that I have introduced you. Again, if you would try to limit your comments to about 5 or 6 minutes, I am not going to hold you to that rigidly, but it would help us get to the question- and-answer period. Ms. King, thank you. And if you want to pull that microphone up close so you can be heard, and again, I am very grateful to you for coming this morning. It means a lot to have you here. We thank you. STATEMENT OF DELORES KING, CONSUMER, CHICAGO, ILLINOIS Ms. King. Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today about my mortgage. My name is Delores King, and I live on the South Side of Chicago in a home I have owned for 36 years. It will be 36 years in August. I am a retired office administrator after 28 years on the job in the offices of the Illinois College of Optometry. Over the years, I have refinanced several mortgages on my property in order to make repairs and various improvements. In 2004, my mortgage balance was $140,000, and I was paying $798 per month on my mortgage. In 2004, unfortunately, I was a victim of identity theft, a phony check scam that cost me about $3,000. I decided to refinance my mortgage in order to borrow the money I owed as a result of the scam. What happened next is that I was defrauded into a horrible mortgage that is so bad, I could lose my home. Around February 2005, I received a telemarketing call from Chad, a mortgage broker with a company called Advantage Mortgage Consulting. Chad told me that he could get a loan for me approved fast. He said he would get me a good loan for my situation. So I applied for the loan with Chad. I told Chad that my monthly income was about $950 per month from Social Security. My only other income is a one-time-a-year retirement payment from the Teachers Pension from the Optometry School in the amount $2,657 once a year. This pension will actually stop in a few more years. Currently, I have a part-time job as a foster grandparent at a grade school, where I make $2.65 an hour. Chad took my copies of my Social Security card and pension benefit statements, and a few weeks later he told me I was approved. He brought the loan papers to my house, and he asked me to sign many, many pages of documents. He rushed me through the signing and did not really explain anything. He certainly did not say this was an exotic loan or unusual in any way. He did not even give me a copy of the papers I signed. I had to call and get them from the title company much later. When I agreed to the loan, Chad said it was adjustable rate, but the starting interest rate was only 1.45 percent. He said the regular rate would be around 6 percent and the payments would be around $800 per month. I believed that the starting rate would last at least 6 months or a year before adjusting. I have heard about mortgages that adjust once a year. I knew that the payment could go up little by little, but I had no idea it would explode the way it has in just 2 years. I also did not know that $800 per month was less than all of the interest due and that my balance would go up and up with unpaid interest. So now I have a mortgage that is thousands of dollars more than I started with, and my payments have nearly doubled in 2 years. I have refined before, but I have never seen anything like this. The payments started with $832 a month, including taxes and insurance. The monthly payment as of now is $1,488 per month. This is more than my entire monthly income. I have to scrape by with the help of my family members and friends to get my mortgage paid every month, but now I am at the point where it is just impossible to continue. Last month, I could only send $1,200. I will end up on the street if something doesn't change soon. I had never heard of a no-doc loan or an option loan before all this happened. I never knew you could get a mortgage and pay interest only or even less than all the interest owed each month. I surely did not know that a bank would make a loan to someone without checking to see if the person could afford the loan. This loan is just not right for somebody like me. If the bank had looked at my information, my income, they knew I could never afford this loan. The bank knew, but I did not know that the monthly payments could go higher than my entire monthly income, my fixed income. It should be against the law for a bank to make a loan knowing that it will be impossible for people to pay it back and they will lose their home. Chairman Dodd. Ms. King, thank you very, very much. There is someone sitting down a couple of seats away from you who lives around Chicago. Maybe you can talk to him before we leave here. Reverend Jackson. To be sure. Chairman Dodd. Ms. Womble, thank you for coming. Pull that microphone down so we can hear you, too. STATEMENT OF AMY WOMBLE, CONSUMER, PITTSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA Ms. Womble. Thank you for inviting me today. Chairman Dodd. You have got to pull it even closer. I am sorry. Get right up close to it. Ms. Womble. Thank you for inviting me today. My name is Amy Womble, and I live in Pittsboro, North Carolina. I have two sons. Joshua is 18 and Jeremy is 16. My husband, Dale, died unexpectedly in October of 2000 at the age of 37. At that time I had excellent credit, as he did. We built a house on five acres. We had a mortgage we could afford. We ran a small construction company together. And after Dale died, I struggled with my boys alone without the business income. I was still personally liable for a lot of the company debt. Even though we were a S Corporation, the company debts that I could not pay were tacked on to my credit report. And then I found out last year a $10,000 judgment had been filed against me personally for an old business debt. And at the time I was worried about how I would repay it. And then one evening while I was on the computer, a pop-up ad came up on the screen that caught my attention: bad credit, no credit, you know, we will refinance you. So it was for debt consolidation with low interest rates, so I contacted--I sent an e-mail, and then right away they contacted me back, and it was a mortgage broker from California. So he arranged to refinance my home with a mortgage company, Saxon Mortgage. He sent me a good-faith estimate showing the new monthly payment would be $927; my closing costs would be about $8,000; and at closing, I would receive about $26,000 in cash to consolidate the other bills. All this sounded great to me, so I said let's go ahead and do it. Well, my closing, for one reason after another, kept getting delayed. The loan officer told me not to make my mortgage payment that month because we were going to close any day and I did not need to make that payment. So when the mortgage finally took place--I had spent the mortgage money on medical bills that I needed to pay because I did not have medical insurance. And at that time I felt pressure that I had to close the loan, there was no choice, because I had not made the payment. Then when I saw the new good-faith estimate at the closing table last June, the monthly payment had jumped from $927 with escrow for taxes and insurance to over $2,100 a month without escrow. The closing costs had jumped from $8,000 to over $12,000. I did not want to sign the papers, but at the time it was the end of the month, and I had no choice. But the broker told me that I would only have to make one payment at that higher level. He had a credit specialist who he was setting me up with who was going to help get all the negative things removed from my credit report and get my credit score cleaned up so that he could then turn around and refinance me and get me the $927 monthly payment. He promised that that would take place within just a couple of months. He was very nice, very concerned. I felt he was sincere. And then since I got closed, we got the loan closed, I started calling him. He never returned my calls. He would not answer the phone. I left messages for over 5 months. So I did not get the credit repaired that he had promised or help with the low monthly payment that he had promised. I was truthful in everything I told him, but he doubled my household income on the loan application from documented Social Security income of $2,751 a month to over $5,000. I did not know that he had misrepresented my income until well after the closing. Now I know the worst of it all involves the terms of the loan itself. My loan is an adjustable rate mortgage with a current interest rate of 10.4 percent with an APR of 12.5, and the interest rate can go as high as 16.4 percent. Then after 30 years, I still owe a final balloon payment of $176,000. I had no idea this loan even had a balloon payment until last week. I thought I was getting a fixed payment of $927 with taxes and insurance, and I got a starting payment of $2,147, and it only goes up from there and does not include my taxes and insurance. I thought I would pay this loan off in 30 years. Instead, I have a huge balloon. I gave up a fixed-rate note with a lower monthly payment for this adjustable rate balloon note with a higher payment--a payment that takes up 78 percent of my monthly income. And when you add taxes and insurance, I am paying 86 percent of my monthly income. This leaves $388 a month for my family to live on. Since I took this loan out, I have had to access equity in my home to meet the monthly payment and to pay other bills. At times there is barely enough money to buy groceries. I cannot afford this loan, and I am very worried that I am going to lose this home, the home that my children have lived in almost half their lives, and the only constant that has been in their lives for the past 6 years since the death of their father. I thought I was making a smart decision, but this loan has turned into a nightmare. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Ms. Womble. Ms. Womble. Thank you. Chairman Dodd. Mr. Dinham. STATEMENT OF HARRY H. DINHAM, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF MORTGAGE BROKERS Mr. Dinham. Good morning, Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, and Members of the Committee. I am Harry Dinham, President of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. NAMB is committed to preserving the American dream of homeownership. Chairman Dodd. Mr. Dinham, can I tell you, and I want to--I have read your testimony. It is long testimony. We are going to include all of it in the record. I want you to know that. Mr. Dinham. This is just 5 minutes. Chairman Dodd. Oh, there is an abbreviated one? Thank you very much. I wanted you to know I had read it. It took me a lot longer than 5 minutes to read it. [Laughter.] Mr. Dinham. I will not read the whole thing. Chairman Dodd. I apologize. But I wanted you to know all of it will be in the record. Mr. Dinham. I understand. NAMB is the only trade association devoted to representing the mortgage broker industry. We speak on behalf of more than 25,000 members in all 50 States and the District of Columbia. Mortgage brokers must comply with a number of State and Federal laws and regulations. We are subject to the oversight of not only State agencies but also HUD, the FTC, and to a certain extent the Federal Reserve Board. I have this chart with me today which outlines State regulations for all mortgage brokers. First let me say that it is a tragedy for any consumer to lose their home to foreclosure. No one disputes this. At the same time, today America enjoys an all-time record rate of homeownership, almost 70 percent. The challenge we face now is how do we help people avoid foreclosure while at the same time ensure they have continued access to credit. A number of recent reports have focused on the rise in home foreclosures. Some claim foreclosure rates are approaching 20 percent. Based on their definitions and sampling, NAMB questions the accuracy and narrow focus of these reports. The truth is we can only speculate on the causes responsible for any rise in home foreclosures. There are a number of possible factors: bankruptcy reform, minimal wage gains, credit card debt, decreased savings rate, decreasing home values, second homes, fraud, illness, and other life events, to name just a few. Do not rush to judgment before we have all the facts. We urge this Committee to request a study of the reasons for foreclosure. It should take into account a number of possible and non-economic factors. The study should account for product, pricing, seasonal, and market changes. We should examine the conclusion before implementing any policy decisions that could unfairly curtail access to credit. In the mid-1980's, Congress asked this industry why there was a credit crunch. Many underserved communities had no access to credit. Over the years, industry has increased access to credit with the help of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the secondary market. In 2002, our President challenged industry to increase minority homeownership by 5.5 million families by 2010. Mortgage originators, realtors, lenders, underwriters, and the mortgage securitizers and investors on Wall Street responded. We have helped families by expanding access to credit, lowering downpayment requirements, and reducing cash needed at closing. The market is robust--more products, more choices, and more consumer shopping than ever before. More people own their homes. With this said, all of us--industry, Government, and consumers--have a role to play in preventing foreclosures and predatory practices. Here is some of what NAMB is doing: We have pushed for education and criminal background checks for all mortgage originators since 2002. We have prepared and submitted to HUD a revised good-faith estimate to help improve comparison shopping. We have amended our Code of Ethics and best business practices to prohibit placing pressure on or being pressured by other professionals. We have educated and urged both HUD and the FTC to take action against abusive use of affiliated business arrangements that trap consumers into high-cost mortgage contracts. And we support FHA mortgage reform and authorizing VA to provide reverse mortgages to further expand access to credit. Today, NAMB is proposing the development of a loan-specific payment disclosure to be given to consumers at the shopping stage and again at funding. This will help consumers avoid payment shock. Thank you for the opportunity to appear here before you today. I am happy to answer any questions. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Mr. Dinham, and, again, thank you for your full testimony, and we look forward to your responses to questions. Ms. Davis, thank you for being here. STATEMENT OF JEAN CONSTANTINE-DAVIS, SENIOR ATTORNEY, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF RETIRED PERSONS (AARP) Ms. Constantine-Davis. Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, Members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to share our experiences and concerns about the problem of mortgage foreclosure in this country. AARP attorneys have represented older homeowners in foreclosures on abusive mortgages for over 15 years. The accumulated home equity and limited incomes of older homeowners have made them a primary target for these abuses. We are very concerned now that the current combination of minimal underwriting standards and exotic mortgage products has created a perfect storm that is driving homeowners into foreclosure. Allow me to give you three examples. In 1992, we represented Paul Pitman, an 82-year-old retiree whose incompetence in later years made him easy prey. His home was debt free when he was manipulated into a $60,000 refinancing with 16 points at a 17-percent interest rate. His mortgage payment was $800 a month. So was his income. The mortgage was starkly unaffordable and was typical of the subprime mortgages at that time. After 1994, HOEPA had its intended effect and drove these products out of the market. But HOEPA did not end predatory lending. In 1999, we represented ten elderly and unsophisticated homeowners in a case against a single lender. While a few had HOEPA loans, most squeaked just under HOEPA thresholds. All had one thing in common: None could afford their mortgages. They had worked all their lives--in the kitchen at NIH, in the Library of Congress as a housekeeper. Each had struggled to buy a house. Most had raised children in them and were now retired on Social Security and small pensions. So you can imagine our surprise when we discovered tax returns in their files that identified them as self- employed bookkeepers, accountants, seamstresses, and in the case of an 84-year-old stroke victim in a wheelchair, a computer programmer earning $30,000 a year. We discovered evidence that the broker and lender fabricated these tax returns. We wrestled with these practices, thinking that if the large banks that bought the mortgages had followed their underwriting guidelines, these loans would never have happened. Recent developments, unfortunately, have forced us to revisit that conclusion. Historically, mortgage applicants have been required to verify ability to repay. I have vivid memories myself of our first mortgage and worrying about whether we would qualify to meet the 28-percent mortgage debt-to-income ratio that was the industry standard at that time. I am dating myself. All of that has changed dramatically. The secondary market, which now controls mortgage products offered and underwriting standards applicable, has made stated income and low- or no-doc mortgages widely available. The most recent innovation is the no-income, no-asset loan, where the income and the asset sections of the loan application are simply left blank. NINAs may be useful to sophisticated investors, but are costly and inappropriate for most borrowers. Research conducted for the Mortgage Bankers Association described stated-income loans as open invitations to fraudsters. These loans simply cannot be used for a homeowner on Social Security or for salaried workers whose income is readily established. They are directly contributing to foreclosures, as my last example shows. We have a case in Brooklyn, New York, which alleges a property flipping conspiracy of real estate speculators, lenders, and appraisers and attorneys who sold our clients, all first-time homebuyers, damaged homes they had bought cheaply, cosmetically repaired, and rapidly resold at inflated prices. Our clients' six homes were overappraised by a total of $825,000. How could low- to moderate-income homebuyers qualify for homes costing $300,000 to $400,000? Two were qualified using the NINA guidelines and a third using stated income that was inflated by the lender. As salaried employees and Social Security retirees, all had verifiable income, but the income was too modest to afford these loans. The homes would not have been sold nor would the mortgage origination and other fees have been generated if the verifiable income had been considered. Piling on the risks, the lender put these folks into not one but two mortgages, which is commonly called ``piggyback lending.'' The first mortgage provided 80 percent of the purchase price, and the second, a very high-rate mortgage, made up the balance. Again, while piggyback lending may make sense for some up-and-coming young lawyer, for our clients these piggyback NINA mortgages were a recipe for disaster. Inability to repay is the hallmark of predatory lending. New and complex adjustable rate mortgages--the 2/28s, the 3/ 27s, the interest-only, option ARMs--all present their own affordability issues. Borrowers just do not understand them. They do not understand that they adjust up and never down, that if the borrower pays diligently each month, the mortgage balance will still go up because the payment is not even covering the accrued interest. Prepayment penalties of up to 5 years are the norm. Option ARMs are often promoted with 1- percent teaser rates that only apply to the first month of the loan. If lenders consider income at all, they typically underwrite at the initial teaser rate, not on the payments that will be charged once the loan fully amortizes, and certainly not on the maximum payment that might be charged. These loans are a trap from which many homeowners never escape. Prepayment penalties make it impossible to refinance to avoid the payment shocks that are built into these loans. The trap has been fortified lately by the downturn in the housing prices. Homeowners who escaped foreclosure up to this point by refinancing will have no further recourse. When the equity is gone, the foreclosures will be inevitable. While HOEPA drove out certain market abuses, others emerged. Our goal is to get ahead of this curve. Homeowners should not be caught in an endless game of Whack-A-Mole with the law constantly lagging behind the next wave of abuses. Our challenge is to address not only today's abuses, but to think comprehensively about how to make home mortgages safe and homeownership sustainable for decades to come. AARP appreciates the Committee's work on this issue and looks forward to working with you. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Ms. Davis. Mr. Shelton. STATEMENT OF HILARY SHELTON, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE Mr. Shelton. Thank you very much and good morning. I should mention my name is Hilary Shelton. I am Director of the NAACP's Washington Bureau. The Washington Bureau is the Federal legislative and national public policy arm of the Nation's oldest and largest grass-roots-based civil rights organization. I would like to begin by first thanking my good friend, Chairman Dodd, and Ranking Member Shelby and the other Members of the Committee for holding this very crucial hearing. By holding the predatory lending subject as one of the first hearings held by this Committee in the 110th Congress, you are giving the attention to where it is well deserved. We look forward to working diligently with you until this issue is clearly addressed fully. I am here today because predatory lending is unequivocally a major civil rights issue. As study after study have conclusively shown, predatory lenders target African Americans, Latinos, Asian and Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, the elderly, and women at such a disproportionate rate that the effects are devastating to not only individuals and families but whole communities as well. Predatory lending stymies families' attempts at wealth building, ruins people's lives, and given the disproportionate number of minority homeowners who are targeted by predatory lenders, decimates whole communities. Traditional credit, high concentrations of subprime lending in predominantly racial and ethnic minority neighborhoods, and racial disparities in subprime lending exist in all regions of the Nation. And while not all subprime loans are predatory--indeed, the NAACP recognizes the benefits of the subprime market to a constituency which includes many without a strong traditional credit history--it is estimated that the vast majority of predatory loans are those with onerous fees and/or conditions exist in a subprime market. A study put out last year by the Center for Responsible Lending demonstrated that for most types of subprime home loans, African Americans and Latino borrowers are more than 30 percent more likely to have higher-rate loans than Caucasian borrowers, even after accounting for differences in risk. Moreover, a study released just last month showed that high- income African American and Latino borrowers in the Boston area were 6 to 7 times more likely to have an expensive mortgage that Caucasians in the same income bracket in 2005. Given that Boston is most likely indicative of the rest of the Nation, this study clearly refutes arguments that subprime lending and predatory features are introduced solely across economic lines to mitigate risk. It is important to recognize that almost 7 years ago, a study by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development clearly demonstrated that many people of color could qualify for more affordable loans than they were receiving, which in turn would enable them to maintain and build additional wealth. In 1996, a study by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac reported that as many as a third of the families who received subprime loans actually qualify for prime loans. Unfortunately, prime lending institutions continue to underserve people of color and whole communities occupied predominantly by racial and ethnic minorities. Perhaps even more problematic is that, despite the fact that blatant racial bias and its debilitating effects have been clearly demonstrated and well documented, little has been done. The disparities continue. In fact, according to the most recent data available, in 2005 African Americans were 3.2 times more likely to receive a higher-cost subprime loan than our Caucasian counterparts, and Latinos were 2.7 times more likely to receive a higher-rate loan than white borrowers. The bottom line is that predatory lending is making homeownership more costly for African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities, as well as women and seniors, than whites and middle-class families. Given that homeownership is one of the most reliable ways for economically disadvantaged populations to close the wealth gap, one direct result of this unfair and immoral discriminatory practice is that it is harder for African Americans and other racial and ethnic minorities to build wealth or pass any material possessions on to their heirs. Predatory lending is a direct attack on our financial security and economic future--an attack that is targeted at individuals and communities because of the color of our skin. I would like to take a moment to discuss with the Committee one type of predatory loan that has become increasingly worrisome as of late. Specifically, over 80 percent of the home loans made in subprime markets today are adjustable rate mortgages, ARMs loans, and the so-called 2/28s or 3/27 mortgages are the dominant product. This is important since over half the loans made by African Americans in 2005 and four out of ten made by Latino homeowners were subprime loans. Geographic concentrations of 2/28s in certain neighborhoods and communities of color have led to a spike in foreclosure and attendant community disinvestment. Unlike most ARMs in the prime market, the short-term fixed rate on 2/28s and other similar loans is typically artificially low. When the loan adjusts after the initial 2-year period, subprime borrowers face enormous payment shock. Mortgage payment increases in typical 2/28 loans are up to over 50 percent monthly. Combined with other features of typical 2/28s such as prepayment penalties and the lack of escrows, 2/28S have the very real potential to place home borrowers in financial peril. Over the next 2 years, an estimated $600 billion in subprime mortgages will reset from the 2-year teaser rate. Too many borrowers, including an overrepresentation of African Americans and Latinos, will face a significant increase in their monthly payments. The impact this will have on whole neighborhoods and communities predominantly populated by African Americans, Latinos, and other racial and ethnic minority Americans will be nothing short of devastating. A report issued last year by the Center for Responsible Lending estimated that one out of every five mortgages that originated during the last 2 years will end in foreclosure. To date, the Federal Government has been largely unattentive to the problems surrounding predatory lending, and, in fact, some of the rules and proposals we have seen in the last few years appear to go backward and take away some of the few protections we have gotten at the State level. This flies in the face of the NAACP's belief that the primary responsibility of Government, to protect its citizens, all of its citizens, not to exploit them or allow them to be exploited at the gains of just a few. As our elected representatives, the NAACP calls on Congress to enact an aggressive and effective Federal law and to soundly reject attempts at addressing predatory lending that will not resolve the underlying problem and will, in fact, roll back the few protections that a few States have put in place. Because I have been asked to speak today on behalf of the national civil rights community, I would like permission to include in the record three documents which are attached to my written testimony. The first two are both prepared by the Fair Housing Subcommittee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, of which the NAACP is a proud member and a founder. The first article outlines our position on Federal predatory lending legislation and outlines some elements that we consider to be essential in any effective proposal. The second paper expands on our concerns about 2/28s and other exploding ARMs. The last attachment is a letter that was sent just this morning to Chairman Dodd and Ranking Member Shelby, as well as the Chairman and Ranking Member of the House Banking Committee. This letter was signed by approximately 200 national, State, civil rights, and consumer and housing rights groups, including the NAACP, and it lays out some of our primary goals in any anti-predatory lending legislation. I want to thank you again, Chairman Dodd and Members of the Committee, for holding this hearing and taking the time today to take a serious look at a very real problem associated with predatory lending. As I mentioned earlier, the NAACP stands ready to work with you on aggressive, comprehensive legislation to address this very real civil rights scourge in our Nation. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very, very much, and those documents will be included in the record. Mr. Duncan, thank you for being here. Doctor, we appreciate your presence. STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS G. DUNCAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF RESEARCH AND BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT, AND CHIEF ECONOMIST, MORTGAGE BANKERS ASSOCIATION Mr. Duncan. Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, and Members of the Committee, my name is Doug Duncan. I am the Mortgage Bankers Association's chief economist and Senior Vice President of Research and Business Development. Thank you for the opportunity to testify here today as you review and consider the issues of predatory lending and foreclosure. The real estate finance industry is proud of its record of providing homeownership opportunities. MBA's members have been a driving force in establishing communities, creating financial stability and wealth for consumers, and fueling the overall economy. Our industry has played a major role in facilitating a near-70-percent homeownership rate, a benefit to all of us. However, we understand some are concerned about several of the newer mortgage products, and recent increases in delinquency and foreclosure rates. MBA believes that there are three things the Government can do to help protect consumers: First, make financial education a priority, empowering consumers with knowledge and giving them the tools they need to make good decisions and protect themselves. Second, simplify and make more transparent the mortgage process so consumers may better understand the details of what can be a complicated transaction and facilitate shopping more efficiently from lender to lender. Third, enact a strong and balanced uniform national standard for mortgage lending within increased consumer protections. The mortgage industry has been extremely innovative in developing products and financing tools to create homeownership opportunities, expand affordability, and facilitate greater consumer choice. These have been especially important as housing costs have risen over the past several years. The industry's record over the last decade is one of particular pride. We have helped bring enormous financial sums to bear to expand liquidity and invest in communities. Recently, however, there have been claims that these very products and financing tools are themselves bad for consumers and have driven foreclosure rates to a state of crisis. MBA does not accept the suggestion that foreclosure rates are at crisis levels or that lenders or loan products are driving foreclosures. To the contrary, MBA's well-respected data on foreclosure rates show that they are well below the levels of their post-recession peaks. Further, we believe that these very products and financing tools have helped our neediest borrowers. If policies were adopted to limit or eliminate these financing tools, it could be detrimental to those underserved borrowers who now have access to affordable mortgage credit. Research from MBA and others consistently finds that foreclosures today occur for the same reasons that they have always occurred, namely, unexpected shocks to a family's finances: job loss, divorce, and illness, which continue to be the main reasons for defaults and foreclosures. The data do not support assertions that products have created a foreclosure crisis. In order to address the problem that some families may not completely understand all the details of the mortgage products they receive, some seek new rigid underwriting standards and the imposition of suitability requirements. MBA strongly believes these approaches, which may look reasonable at first, will simply stifle innovation and rob consumers of affordable financing options, thereby severely limiting consumer choice. Proposals that would reinject subjectivity into an objective underwriting process we have worked so hard to develop risk turning back the clock on impressive homeownership and fair lending gains. Before we pursue any of these proposals, we must be sure that they do not undermine our mutual goal of putting Americans in homes and keeping them there. We do not agree with those who would stem innovation by removing products from the market because they do not think they are good for borrowers. The plain facts are that these products have brought homeownership to many borrowers who probably could not have achieved it otherwise. And as a corollary, we wholeheartedly reject the notion that some borrowers should not have these affordability options to become homeowners and build the wealth that homeownership brings. Instead of limiting choices, I repeat what I said earlier. MBA believes efforts should be directed toward new and increased efforts to provide national financial literacy training, make the process more transparent, and establish a uniform national standard to protect consumers and provide certainty to financial institutions. It is too easy to blame lenders or loan products. The harder work is to solve these complex issue. MBA is committed to working together with you and other organizations in this important effort. Thank you, and we look forward to your questions. Chairman Dodd. Thank you, Doctor. Mr. Eakes, thank you for being here. STATEMENT OF MARTIN EAKES, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, SELF-HELP CREDIT UNION AND THE CENTER FOR RESPONSIBLE LENDING Mr. Eakes. Good morning. Chairman Dodd, Ranking Member Shelby, and Members of the Committee, thank you for holding this hearing. I really appreciate it. I head an organization called Self-Help that is a community development lender based in North Carolina. I also head the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization dedicated to protecting homeownership. Self-Help, with about $1 billion in assets, is one of the largest nonprofit homeownership lenders in the Nation, which makes us about the size of one Bank of America branch, to give you some perspective. We are a lender. We have been a subprime lender since 1984, over 20 years. In the beginning, we made thousands of loans to mostly African American, single mothers. In our first 10 years, we had not one single foreclosure or loss. In the last 20 years, we have provided close to $4.5 billion to 45,000 homeowners across the country in 48 States. We have had very few foreclosures and losses during that time. I can say as a matter of experience that if a lender has very high foreclosures and loss, they are doing something wrong. The lender is doing something wrong. It is not the borrower to blame. Home lending, however, has changed a lot in the last 20 years since I have been active. It used to be that a local bank or savings and loan would make a home loan to a borrower, and they would hold that loan on their books until it was paid off. If the lender made a bad loan, the loss would be suffered by both the lender and by the borrower. In essence, they were both in the same boat together. Today, 70 percent of subprime loans are made by mortgage brokers who never own the loan and who place the loan with a lender who holds it for 1 to 2 months before it is then transferred to a securitization vehicle, and then sold to investors worldwide. So long as the loans do not default immediately, within the first 3 months, the broker and the lender do not have any financial responsibility for the loan if it goes bad down the road. Brokers and subprime lenders are not bad people, but their financial incentives are different than what we saw just 20 years ago. Now their financial incentives are to close as many loans as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of risk. Whether the borrower can repay the loan, so long as it lasts for at least 3 months, is really not of their financial concern. We really do have a foreclosure crisis in the subprime mortgage marketplace today. I will not repeat the studies that were cited earlier by Friedman Billings, USB, Bloomberg, Moody's, everyone who says that the subprime loans made in 2006 will have a foreclosure rate higher than any other mortgage cohort of loans in history. In December of 2006, my organization, the Center for Responsible Lending, issued one of the most comprehensive foreclosure studies ever. We looked at 6 million subprime loans at the loan level where we had fees and data--foreclosure, FICO scores, all of the data around 6 million subprime loans made between 1998 and 2004. The conclusion that one out of five loans made in the subprime marketplace in 2005 and 2006 will end in foreclosure or the loss of a home has generated a lot of controversy, but I will tell you I am 100 percent certain that that number is understated for the following reasons: No. 1, it does not include the loans that have what I call a distressed prepayment, loans that were already delinquent by 30 days or more that then paid off. They did not go to a prime mortgage if they were already delinquent. That is another 11 percent of this group, so it goes from 20 to 30. The second thing it does not do is we looked solely at a cohort of loans in a given year, and most of the borrowers in the subprime arena get refinanced. unnecessarily in many cases, every 18 months. So that if you look at this from a borrower's point of view, they had a one in five chance of being foreclosed in their original loan. They have a one in five chance of being foreclosed in the second loan that they got into 18 months later. And it ends up, if you carry that cycle of repeated refinancings, that the foreclosure rate of borrowers, not of the loans in a particular year, can be as much as 30 or 40 percent of the total. I will not repeat all the same numbers, but let me give you a new one. The subprime outstanding mortgage loans today represent about 13 percent of total outstanding mortgage loans in the United States. That 13 percent represent, as of the end of 2006, 60 percent of all foreclosures started in this Nation. So think about that: 13 percent of the loans represent 60 percent, and the remaining 87 percent of prime loans represent the remaining 40 percent. So this small segment--it is not that those families have more death, divorce, illness, and job loss. That is just not the factor. The factor is that the product itself is dangerous. I did not choose to get into this work. I am a lender. I would like to be helping people own homes. That is what I do best. But I grew up in an all-black community as a child. My friends were destroyed growing up. My best friend was killed on a playground behind my house. And I pretty much promised at that time that I would do in the future what my young friend did at that time. And I feel like right now the crisis that we face, particularly in African American communities, is unbelievable. You may not know this fact, but the 50 percent of families, African American families that do not own homes, do not have any net positive wealth at all. Their wealth in the household is either zero or negative. So the wealth that black families have is in the 49 percent that own their homes. Fifty-two percent of all African American mortgage loans in the last year--in the last 2 years were subprime mortgages that are, by structure, impossible to succeed in. So I look at it and I say the families--the African American families that have the wealth in this country, half of them are in danger of losing their homes. Subprime foreclosures threaten to displace more African American families than did Katrina. But it will be a silent and invisible storm that hits this time--one family at a time, one neighborhood after another, all across America. We have the greatest threat to minority wealth, family wealth that we have ever had in the history of the Nation. The citation comes up of saying, well, if one in five foreclose, that means the other 80 percent succeeded, right? Aren't we really helping through this product more families, particularly families distressed and of color, become homeowners? And, sadly, the answer is no to that. The first fact, which, again, is not always featured. Eleven percent of the subprime loans are to first-time homeowners. Eleven percent. This is in Mr. Duncan's testimony. What that means is the remaining 89 percent already have a home that they are either refinancing or they are moving and by getting a subprime loan are putting that home in danger. So just do the numbers a little bit. If we say for 11 percent--let's be generous and say 9 percent of those got home loans that they could not have gotten anywhere else and that they will succeed with them, what that means is then the foreclosures that happen on the remaining 87 percent, 20 percent of them will far outweigh the potential gain from the small number that get their first-time home there. So let me be clear. I am not seeking to abolish the subprime mortgage market. I am part of it, have been for 20 years. What I am requesting is that this Committee take five steps. First, impose an ability-to-repay standard for all subprime loans. The trap that people are caught in now where they have a loan--and 70 percent of subprime loans are 2/28s. You have a 2- year fixed-rate period. The remaining 28 years are adjustable rate every 6 months. A typical loan will have a very high margin so that the adjustment will jump to as high as 11 or 12 percent during the third year of the loan. So here is the dilemma that a borrower faces. Either they pay off the loan before the 2 years--in which case they pay a prepayment penalty in virtually every case which is equal to 3 percent of the loan amount; 3 percent of a $200,000 average subprime loan would be $6,000. That is more than the average African American wealth in the last census period. So either you pay off early and you lose your downpayment and the equity that you have built up, or you wait until the 25th month, and all of a sudden your payment has jumped by 30 to 50 percent, and you cannot make the payment, you are foreclosed, or you are refinanced into another loan with another set of fees. It is a devil's choice, and it is one that is set up that will create foreclosure. The second thing is require mortgage brokers to have a fiduciary duty to the borrower they represent, just like doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and realtors have a fiduciary duty of loyalty and care to their customers. It is just early in the process. Third, require the regulators to clean up these abuses, and particularly I want to focus on the Federal Reserve for a moment. In my testimony, I cite on page 19 a section of HOEPA in 1994, which reads as follows--I am going to read it because it is that important. It says, ``The Board, by regulation or order, shall prohibit acts or practices in connection with mortgage loans that the Board finds to be unfair, deceptive, or designed to evade the provisions of this Section.'' It does not say just high-cost loans. It says any practice in the mortgage marketplace that the Board finds to be unfair or deceptive, that the Federal Reserve Board shall prohibit acts or practices. Since 1994, the Federal Reserve Board has not used this authority a single time, even though we have had rampant abuses during this time period. As Chairman Leach said in a 2001 hearing, we wouldn't have these problems if the Federal Reserve had simply done its job. But it has not done its duty under this statute. There are actions that can be taken. No. 4, as mentioned before, we should prohibit Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from getting homeownership goals credit for buying securities that have loans that do not meet an ability- to-repay standard. They should not be getting credit for loans that come through the back door where they did not do any of the work to produce the loans. They take no risk in them because these are AAA securities. And it is furthering and financing the sector that is causing such distress in African American and Latino neighborhoods. Finally, No. 5, please pass a strong national anti- predatory lending law that establishes a minimum floor for what it means to have responsible lending. Thank you very much. Chairman Dodd. Thank you, Mr. Eakes, very, very much. Very compelling testimony, and we thank you for your work. And I think all of us here agree with the underlying point. There is a danger in conversations like this that people will use the word ``subprime'' and ``predatory'' as synonyms, interchangeable words, and they are not at all. And I hope it is clear to everyone here. Certainly those who are knowledgeable about this understand this already, but for those who are hearing about these issues for the first time, there is a danger that those of us who are interested in the subject matter would confuse the word ``predatory'' with ``subprime.'' And you have made it very clear, Mr. Eakes, and certainly Reverend Jackson has and others. And I believe that very strongly as well. This has been a tremendously valuable vehicle, the subprime process for people who want to have homeownership, want to own their own home. I want to begin my questions by emphasizing that point and the value of homeownership and what it means for our economy. So we begin the discussion there. We have been joined by our colleague from Florida, Senator Martinez, and you were not here earlier, but, in fact, Hilary Shelton mentioned 7 years ago something that HUD did, and I know that the person who was responsible for taking a hard look at this issue was the Secretary of HUD at the time, our colleague from Florida, Mel Martinez, who deserves a great deal of credit as HUD Secretary for looking at these issues. And he brings real knowledge to these issues given his previous life at the Housing and Urban Development agency. So we are pleased to have you with us this morning, Mel. Senator Martinez. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Sorry I could not be here at the beginning of the hearing, but I appreciate the mention. I have developed a great interest in this topic when I was at HUD. Anyway, I will wait my turn, but I appreciate your mention. Chairman Dodd. Let me begin with you, Reverend Jackson, and thank you immensely again for joining us here today. You have traveled throughout the country. You have seen the results of where discrimination can occur. You have listened to the testimony here this morning. Give us a sense of what it means in a community when you have long-time homeowners who are forced into foreclosure. I tried to say it, but I am not sure I did it very eloquently, the idea of this ripple effect. Just as homeownership in a neighborhood and community has the positive effect of creating stability, increasing home values, all of the proper things we like to see associated with homeownership, when that begins to collapse, what are the effects as well? I wonder if you might speak to that. Reverend Jackson. Well, first, this is targeted economic exploitation. This is not accidental nor incidental. This is targeted. And it is not only racial targeting, though that is very well documented. In the end, the vultures go after whoever is the most vulnerable, and it may be a black person or a brown person or a senior or a soldier. Ultimately, they do not stop unless protected by law. One place I find to be a painful sight to see, the lenders, the cashiers, lining up outside the military bases. The soldiers that have to go to war and leave their families in a financial trap, and some of the most exploited people in the whole process are the spouses of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or take a trip down to Appalachia, if you will. And so while there is this racial disparity dimension, the greedy ultimately go blind in their pursuit of exploiting whoever is vulnerable. Second is that the bank is the first line of defense, and if the bank drops their line of defense, the quarterback then cannot function. And when the banks finance the predators, you go to the front door of the bank, and they say you are not eligible because your record has not been expunged, you are not eligible because you have a low credit score, and so you cannot get 7 percent, they go to the predator, who we finance at 25 percent. So the bank is making money off of both ends, and whatever they do on the good side, on the CRA, they more than offset it with their back-door bank, which is, in fact, the predator. And to me, nothing short of the Senate passing strong laws to protect the vulnerable. And I have people say you learn how to read--you cannot learn how to read these slick people. I do not care how literate you are. You cannot think through this. My grandmother used to borrow $11 and pay back $33. She could not read. She was not expert in them. She could not read. She could not write. She was not very smart. She was trying to take care of her children. She was taken advantage of by pawnshops and by these lenders. And so without the protection of law, the people cannot protect themselves. And right now I am not convinced that that law is there. And I would like to make the last point that at some point the Department of Justice has a role in this. People's basic civil rights--I was in Louisiana and watched them sell a blind woman a bigger TV screen. I mean, they are ruthless in the exploitation, and since this document, the question after we testify today then for Mrs. King, what can happen to her in Chicago when they can profit $600 million off of home foreclosures. I guess the point that strikes me the most, Mr. Martinez, is that I was in Detroit about 2 months ago, and Ford announced they were laying off or dismissing 55,000 workers. And for Detroit and Dearborn, what does that mean? It is going to be a payout, they called it, or a put-out. When Honda and Toyota can build in our country and Ford cannot build in Japan and South Korea, what does the unfair trade deal mean: Fifty-five thousand people whose homes are going to go up for grabs, who cannot pay their house note, whose children will come out of college, who cannot pay the drycleaners, who cannot pay the local hotels built around the Ford plant. The spinning impact of--I mean, you talk about a tsunami, a bomb dropping on Dearborn, Detroit, and Youngstown, you lose 55,000 jobs in the industry and the spinoffs, and it seemed to me to be, Senator Shelby, no safety net for those workers who, through no fault of their own, lost their jobs to trade policies far beyond them. There must be some--and for our allies abroad, we have safety nets. That is what OPIC--Overseas Private Investment Corporation, Government-private partnerships. Or we have for them a Marshall Plan with long-term, low-interest loans on behalf of the soldier after World War II, some call it GI Bill. They get some differential and, you know, $51 billion will be spent. The biggest boost to homeownership was the GI Bill, which, by the way, was an affirmative action program for soldiers. But it seems I am asking you to think of something outside of the present box, the OPIC, the GI Bill differential. Something outside of the present box must be devised because the conventional lender will not loan, the predator will cost too much, and there must be something in the middle, some kind of development bank that takes into account these new realities. We are going to have the reality of exporting jobs and importing product. We were exporting product and importing job. That dynamic shift has left a whole lot of American people of whatever race trapped in the cross fire. Chairman Dodd. Well, thank you very much, Reverend, for that. Let me ask one more question, if I may, and I would like to raise this with Mr. Dinham, if I can, and Mr. Duncan. Mr. Dinham, I was struck that in your testimony, Appendix A, you talk about an issue that was raised by Mr. Eakes, and that is the relationship between the mortgage broker and the borrower and that this is an independent contractor with really no fiduciary responsibility to the borrower. In fact, you speak about it here, the language in your testimony here. You make exactly that point, that they are independent contractors not responsible to the borrower. Yet in advertising materials and reports that we get from consumers, news reports, brokers often seem to market themselves to borrowers on the basis that they will shop for the borrower in many ways, and that is, the broker leads the client to believe that he or she acts on behalf of the borrower. You heard that, I think, in the testimony both of Ms. King and Ms. Womble, that that person on the other end of the phone you were dealing with here was really your advisor in a sense, and certainly creating that sense that I am in this with you, I am here to help you to work through your difficulties. And, again, I am not suggesting that anyone there is not going to necessarily be so objective that they would not try to appeal to someone they are trying to do business with, but that clear impression, particularly for people--and I listened to two people here who are rather sophisticated--homeowners, in business. We are not talking about people here who were not knowledgeable about finance and so forth being victimized by this. So we have a tendency to talk about the unsophisticated. These were fairly sophisticated people, I might add, who have been pretty careful about their lives, have been productive citizens, contributed significantly to their communities, and yet were dealing on the phone with someone who made them feel clearly that they were acting in an advisory capacity. In fact, observers credit the success of the mortgage brokers industry to the ability to convince people. I was looking--let me quote from a newsletter called Inside B&C Lending, and hardly a liberal mouthpiece here. But in an article from June 9th of last year called ``Brokers''--and I am quoting, ``Brokers still the main engine for origination of subprime loans.'' The author writes, and I quote him, ``Brokers have proven adept at marketing their services to borrowers, often playing the role of trusted advisor.'' So even if not the intent, the clear marketing, at least in that publication, suggests that, in fact, that is how the broker ought to hold themselves out, as the trusted advisor. So my question is: Do you believe that brokers either are or market themselves as trusted advisors of the borrower in your experience? Mr. Dinham. In my experience, no, we actually don't as a trusted advisor. What we do is we have a--the thing we offer is the consumer choice along with several different types of products, and the normal procedure would be that we would come up with like three products and saying this product is good for this, this product is good for that, this policy is good for that. So what we are is a funnel which we are able to offer the consumer a lot of choices as to which way he wants to go at that point. And we are real big on trying to help him pick the loan that he thinks is best for him. Chairman Dodd. But not as the trusted advisor? Mr. Dinham. No, sir, not in a fiduciary capacity because we do not have every product that is in the marketplace. So we could not absolutely offer him the best deal that was in the market at that point. We can offer him the products that we have, but not the best deal in the market. Chairman Dodd. Let me ask you, because I appreciate your answer to that, but we went and looked on the website of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers under the ``Frequently Asked Questions'' section of the website. The very first question is: ``Why choose a mortgage broker?'' The answer given on the website is as follows, and let me quote it to you: ``The consumer receives an expert mentor through the complex mortgage lending process.'' Now, if you look up the word ``mentor,'' and anyplace I looked it up before, a mentor is oftentimes described as a ``wise and trusted counselor or teacher.'' So even on the website of the National Association in the most frequently asked questions, the advice to the mortgage broker is hold yourself out as a mentor in a sense. So you are holding yourself out--how can you be a mentor, an advisor, and at the same time be that independent contractor? It seems to me you have got a conflict here in promoting this. Mr. Dinham. Well, I think that maybe we do have a conflict there ta this point, but I think what we are trying to say there is that we offer a lot of--we offer the consumer a lot of choice at that point, and that is what we are doing. We can put a deal together for him that he cannot get normally somewhere else at some other point. Chairman Dodd. How do you answer the question here? What happened in the case of these two women? What would your response be if they were to ask you, how did it end up that someone could give loans under these circumstances to these two women? You have heard their testimony, what circumstances they are in, the incomes that were coming in. How could that possibly happen that someone would extend the kind of loans to these two individuals given their fixed income in the case of Ms. King and the circumstance that Ms. Womble was under? How does that happen? Mr. Dinham. Well, in listening to Mrs. King's story, I got the impression that she wasn't fully disclosed on the front end of the loan, what the loan would do in the beginning at that point. Chairman Dodd. She should have been, shouldn't she? Mr. Dinham. She should have been. And, you know, we are trying to get to that point. You know, one of the biggest problems we have today is the truth in lending process and the good-faith estimate process, because there is no correlation or no required correlation between the good-faith estimate that you give at application and what you get at closing. It has been a big problem for a long time. It needs to be fixed. We would also like to see that on these types of loans--and on every type of loan--that we get to a disclosure on the truth in lending. The truth in lending is woefully inadequate also because it only goes to the first 3 years of an adjustable rate mortgage. So from my perspective, we need to fix the truth in lending process so that the consumer has a full understanding in the beginning of the loan they are getting. Chairman Dodd. Senator Shelby. Senator Shelby. Thank you. Ms. King, Ms. Womble, Ms. Davis, you have given us examples of some tough, disastrous situations, and I believe you are only touching the tip of the iceberg here. In our marketplace, there should not be any place for fraud and exploitation. It sounds to me like some of your situations with the facts you have told are probably fraud, civil and perhaps criminal. Risk-based pricing has, as we all know, brought a lot of good things to the marketplace. It has brought credit, but it has also brought problems. We need to eradicate that the best we can. Mr. Chairman, I hope that under your leadership we can get the regulators up here following this hearing today. Chairman Dodd. We will. Senator Shelby. And see what the Federal Reserve and others are doing in this area, because I think it is very, very important, whether it is in Illinois, North Carolina, my State of Alabama, Oregon, or wherever. These kinds of situations will destroy our risk-based credit system, and we do not want to do that. Reverend Jackson and Ms. Davis, I want to get into a question. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac remain the largest purchasers of subprime, private-label, mortgage-backed securities. A lot of these securities are AAA grade, yet the foreclosures are there, the risk is there. And we know that. We have dealt with the GSEs up here before, and I am sure, Mr. Chairman, we will deal with them again. What extent do you believe, Reverend Jackson, that the secondary market, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are providing funding for some like the subprime and predatory mortgage lending, what is their role here? It seems to me like that is not always a good role. Reverend Jackson. Well, for the most part it is, except---- Senator Shelby. I know it is, but not always. Reverend Jackson. Of course, not always. I think they must be challenged to honor the ability-to-repay standard. Maybe second only to banks is that they are under a kind of oversight, unlike the other predators--other predators, should I say, maybe the subprimes are under less oversight. What protects the people ultimately is enforced law, adequate and enforced law. And much of what is happening to Ms. Womble and Ms. King is unenforced law. And, again, the point I made was that for many whites, for example, they have banks and they have access to neighborhood banks or branch banks. We are almost sent off immediately to the wolves, the unprotected. The big finance, you know, they get CRA, so that can be some better lending. But we are quick to be turned down at the front door, from expunging of records to credit score, and then sent to the economic wolves. Our appeal to you is I think Ms. Womble and Ms. King give you examples, and Ms. Davis, of what is happening in the marketplace. What can we get from you to protect us from this kind of exploitation? Senator Shelby. Ms. Davis, the ability to pay seems just to make a lot of sense on any loan anybody makes. And like Ms. King was talking about, and Ms. Womble, it was taking just about every cent they had to make a payment. Now, one loan characteristic that has been talked about that is described as predatory is the practice of making a loan without regard, it seems, to the borrower's ability to repay the loan. That has not always been the case. Ms. Constantine-Davis. No. That is right. Senator Shelby. Now, do you want to comment on that? Is that troubling to you? Ms. Constantine-Davis. Frankly, in the course of preparing to be here today and in conversations with other consumer advocates, I could not help but, you know, think to myself how far we have come if we are talking about passing a law that says that lenders cannot make loans to people that they cannot afford. This used to be second nature. It was something we all took for granted, that this was the only responsible way for both parties to proceed. And at this point that is just not the case. Reverend Jackson. Mr. Shelby, what I was also trying to say is that when you go to the bank, the bank is held to a higher standard to do what Ms. Davis is saying. When the bank immediately kicks us out the back door to the wolves, it is the unprotected area that runs amok. Senator Shelby. Sure. Reverend Jackson. And where the banks cannot get off is that they finance the wolves. They are partners in the process. The banker still maintains his blue-striped suit up front, but he is financing the wolves that live back here and has dirty clothes. But the dirty-clothes guy is funded by, you know, the striped-suit guy. And, therefore, the oversight protection cannot stop just at the bank and CRA and the securitizer. Senator Shelby. Well, if the wolves originate, for example, some of these predatory loans, some of the loans that are fraught with fraud or close to it, if not that, exploitation, and they dress them up and they put a little coat on them, and then they---- Reverend Jackson. A wolf in sheep's clothing. Senator Shelby [continuing]. Sell it in the secondary market and so forth, and they say, by gosh, this is a triple-A grade security. Is that right, Mr. Eakes? Mr. Eakes. Right. Senator Shelby. Is that what happens? Mr. Eakes. Yes. I mean, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2001 were enormously helpful to all of us on some of the--on first wave of predatory lending standards, like prepayment penalties, limiting, getting rid of single-premium credit insurance. And now really what I feel like is a failure of moral leadership, that they need to be stepping out in this area that is causing so much danger. The truth is that if they stop investing, the 25 percent of subprime securities that Fannie and Freddie buy, perhaps $150 billion a year, that is a big number. But the marketplace would step in for them. The problem from my viewpoint is that if they would step out and help--you know, just implement the ability-to-repay standards, the limits on prepayment penalties, the limits that they have in the normal course of business-- Senator Shelby. They could do a lot more than they are doing, couldn't they? Mr. Eakes. They could. They should. Senator Shelby. And at the end of the day we all know they are a Government-sponsored enterprise, GSE, with the implicit guarantee of the taxpayer when they sell those securities. Is that correct? Mr. Eakes. Yes. Reverend Jackson. Senator, our interest is not in trying to destroy Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae or the banks. Senator Shelby. Me either. Reverend Jackson. But maybe all the forces involved should be around a common table. Let Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae make their best case and the bank make their best case and the mortgage lenders. It seems that when they resolve this in sessions where each group is arguing ``it ain't me, it's them,'' arguing for advantage, because on the best day the banks and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae work. But in the last several years, it is beginning to unravel, and there needs to be some mediation or some reconciliation. I don't think--some of this is intentional, but I think some of this broker business is just absolutely exploiting the gap. Senator Shelby. I agree with you. We have a good financial availability of credit system in the U.S., but it is kind of like a hamper of beautiful apples that comes in, and there is a rotten one there, and it will contaminate the whole bucket or bushel of apples if we do not do something about it. Don't you agree? Reverend Jackson. Yes, I agree, except it is more than one apple. [Laughter.] Senator Shelby. Well, it is already spreading. More than one rotten apple, but the idea of at least one, maybe more rotten apples in the bushel is there. But a lot of good stuff is there, you point out, too. Reverend Jackson. In our neighborhood, when the banks come with the branch banking and do their job, people are protected. And Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae do theirs. But now what we see coming, as the jobs leave, taxes go up, services go down, and in come payday lenders and cashiers. It is like they sense that, they smell blood. And as the taxes go up and the jobs leave and the foreclosure comes in, they seize the market. And we need you to help take away the incentive for the banks to leave and for the predators to come. Chairman Dodd. It is a lack of balance, is what you are talking about here. Reverend Jackson. No balance. Senator Shelby. We do not need the wolves running in our neighborhood, do we? Reverend Jackson. Right. Chairman Dodd. We could probably pick out another fruit at some point, too. [Laughter.] Senator Shelby. No, I think the apple---- Chairman Dodd. The apple industry is---- Senator Shelby. I said one apple, and he says more than one, and we do not have a big disagreement there. Chairman Dodd. Senator Crapo. Senator Crapo. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Dinham, I want to direct my first question to you. I do not think anybody can disagree with the fact that, as we listen to the stories that people like Ms. King and Ms. Womble bring to us, we ask ourselves: How could that happen? How could we have a system of credit in this country in which this kind of abuse occurs legally? The question I have for you is: What kind of market discipline is there in the subprime lending market today? We are talking here, I assume, in this hearing and in further deliberations about what we may need to do to add some market discipline. What do we have today? And how do these kinds of things happen? Mr. Dinham. All I can do, I can relate back to in the middle 1980's in Houston, Texas, when they had the oil bust down there. During that period of time, there had been a lot of 95-percent loans made in certain subdivisions down there. These were not subprime loans, but this was--the market had just gone sour. What happened was that they came back--the MI companies that were insuring their proportion of those loans came back and told them that they were not going to make any more 95- percent loans and they probably would not make any more 90's in those areas until the market straightened out. So, you know, I have always been a market philosopher type at that point, and I really believe that if these loans continue to create too many foreclosures or defaults, they will go away. Since 1980, we have had all sorts of products come through, adjustable rates. We had no adjustable rates before 1980. But ever since then, they have come through, and they have come and gone, depending on whether they were not liked, whether they cost too much for the lender, because every time that we--not we, but the lenders foreclosed on a loan, it is going to cost them some money at that point. So they do not want them either at that point. They do not want the loans back. So to me, the market will correct in the end. Senator Crapo. You have raised a very interesting point here. Let's take the case of a circumstance like Ms. King described to us. If her loan goes into default, has the mortgage broker profited regardless? Or has the lender profited regardless of what happens to her? Mr. Dinham. Not in all cases, because it depends on how your contract reads with whoever the lender is in that particular case. If there was a profit involved in that particular thing, they would probably charge you back that profit if it was in a certain period of time. It just depends. Different lenders have different requirements on what they will do at this point. Mr. Eakes. But 99 percent of the loans, the broker or the originator who did not hold the loan have gotten their profit and do not get put back. So only if it defaults within the first 3 to 6 months is there, by the investors, a liability put back on the lender. And after that time, it is very, very rare for any kind of liability to be put back on---- Senator Crapo. So if I understand you correctly, there is a profit incentive to make a bad loan like this if the loan can survive for a period of months. Mr. Eakes. Three months. Senator Crapo. Mr. Duncan, do you want to comment on that? Mr. Duncan. Yes, I would. I would like to differentiate a little bit between terms and then describe recent events which give evidence of the disciplines that are in the marketplace. First of all, the lender is the company that comes to the table with funding. Typically, large lenders will have several different channels of production, one of those being through brokers who bring them loan applications, which they can either agree or not agree to fund. To the extent that those loans are securitized, they are packaged, held for a period, and then sold into the secondary market. And the investors to whom they sell them establish a contractual agreement with them about the period of time in which early payment defaults, which, if they occur outside of the investor's tolerance, will be put back for purchase. That is typically longer than 3 months. It is more in the 6- to 12- month timeframe, so that you can see that the borrower has established the repayment capability that was anticipated in the application. Recently, you have seen three or four subprime lenders who put loans to Wall Street which did not meet those criteria have to buy back sufficient loans that they were put out of business. So the market does have a mechanism for disciplining lenders who make loans that are not sustainable by borrowers. In fact, it puts them out of business. Ownit, Mortgage Lenders Network, Sebring Capital--these are all firms that have failed in the last 6 months because of required buybacks. In addition, you recently saw Frema Mortgage terminate relationships with over 8,000 brokers who they believed to be delivering to them loans which did not meet the criteria that they would have to continue to support to provide collateral for asset-backed securities. Typically, what lenders do is they will run a scorecard on each broker, and that scorecard contains a series of measures about the quality of loans that are brought in for ultimate delivery to investors. If they do not meet the scorecard minimums, they are terminated from the system One of the problems is when you identify bad actors, there is not a national registry that allows for cataloguing of bad actors, no matter who they are, that you can prevent them from going from one market to another, and that---- Senator Crapo. When you say one market to another, you mean one lender to another? Mr. Duncan. Certainly, they can do that, too. They can move it--they may be headquartered in Phoenix and move to Arkansas, and you would not know that because there is not a registry that would identify them. Reverend Jackson. We chase down sex predators. Sex predators, we chase them State to State. Can I just add one thing? When Ms. Womble and Ms. King go home today, they are facing foreclosure. Is the problem that there is something wrong with them or did somebody violate a law? Did somebody break the law on them? Mr. Duncan. We would be happy to--particularly in Ms. Womble's case, it sounds to use, from what we have heard here this morning, that fraud has been committed both against her and against the lender, and laws exist to prosecute that fraud. And we would fully support funding to enable the appropriate regulators to prosecute that. Mr. Eakes. The problem with waiting for the market to correct--and it is correcting right now. There is no question that the investors are now on guard, having the same interest that borrowers now have, saying we do not want to take losses in this environment where property prices are not appreciating. The problem with that is that the market correction has a lag of several years, and so when Ownit, the company just mentioned, went out of business, it was in no way able to reimburse the tens of thousands of borrowers who go into loans that were foreclosed. It just went out of existence. And so, yes, the business is gone, but the 2 million families that are in loans that will be foreclosed upon get no relief from that market correction. And that is the severe danger of thinking that the market by itself will be sufficient. Senator Crapo. Mr. Chairman, if I could just follow this up with one more question. Chairman Dodd. Sure. Senator Crapo. It seems to me from what we are hearing in this line of questioning is that there is a market discipline in place, it is working, but there is a question raised as to whether it works fast enough to not leave too much damage in its wake. Chairman Dodd. People like these two women here. Senator Crapo. As the market operates, and we have examples here of Ms. King and Ms. Womble. I guess I would just like to ask you, Mr. Duncan, if you could comment on that point that was made by Mr. Eakes, that the market corrections--or the market discipline that we already have in place is not working fast enough. Chairman Dodd. Can I add on to the question as well? These numbers we have been talking about, I mentioned them in the opening statement, 1.2 million, 2.2 million foreclosures in the next year or so here. I would like to give you a chance to comment on those numbers as well. Mr. Duncan. Certainly. Chairman Dodd. That is the number that is estimated. Mr. Duncan. Certainly. We have a broadly available public data set on delinquencies, which we have--delinquencies and foreclosures, which we have published since 1972 on a quarterly basis. It contains about 43 million loans out of the estimated 50 million loans that are outstanding in the U.S., of which within those 42 or 43 million loans are about 6 million subprime loans. At present, the foreclosure percentage--that is, the percent of all those loans that are somewhere in the process of foreclosure--is 1.05 percent. So that means if you extrapolate to 50 million loans, that would be about 500,000 borrowers who are in the process of foreclosure today. Now, of those, three and four will not go to sale at the sheriff's steps or the courthouse steps. They may be solved by a restructuring of the loan; they may be solved in a deed-in- lieu transfer; there are about five or six loss mitigation processes that are undertaken. So there is a significant difference between the projections of foreclosures and the actual magnitude of foreclosures in process today. I can talk about that as a separate issue. To address your question on the timing, it is certainly not several years ago that the loans that brought down the recent subprime companies were made. That was--and I would agree with Mr. Eakes that the 2006 book of subprime loans, which is the smallest of the recent cohorts of subprime loans, has performed at a worse delinquency and foreclosure pace than previous loans early in their life. And that was, by and large, the loans that were the difficulty for those firms that closed. Mr. Eakes. Ten percent of the loans made in 2006 were already in foreclosure in the first--already in foreclosure, 10 percent. Mr. Duncan. To the point of Ms. Womble where there was fraud committed, one of the big things that has been going on in the mortgage industry is the representation of loans in that foreclosure category which were fraudulent loans to begin with. Mr. Eakes. One of the problems---- Chairman Dodd. You don't disagree with Mr. Eakes on his number there, do you? Mr. Duncan. I am sorry? Chairman Dodd. You do not disagree with Mr. Eakes on that number, do you? Mr. Duncan. On which number? Chairman Dodd. On the 10 percent. Mr. Duncan. I am sorry. Could you restate the---- Mr. Eakes. Ten percent of the 2006 book of business, according to Friedman, Billings, and Ramsey, is already in default. Mr. Duncan. Is delinquent, yes. I believe those are publicly---- Mr. Eakes. Ninety days or more. Mr. Duncan. On the securitized portion of those loans. Mind you that much of this data is only representing the securitized market---- Senator Shelby. And are those securities still rated triple-A grade, or whatever? Mr. Eakes. Moody's and others are starting to evaluate whether to downgrade. Senator Shelby. That is right. Mr. Eakes. But here is the problem. What I think is very confusing, when you say, for instance, in the fourth quarter of 2006 that 1.8 percent of subprime loans went into foreclosure, what it is saying is they are looking at a snapshot in time. If you look at what are the loans that are currently right at this moment in time in foreclosure, and you say it is 1 percent or 1.8 percent, the problem is that every quarter you get new loans. There are new loans that go into foreclosure, that get sold off, the people have lost their homes. And if you just took that 1.8 percent and multiplied it times 12 quarters, which is the number--average life of 3 years for subprime loans, you would get back to this 20-percent foreclosure rate. So there is a lot of gnashing of teeth about can it really be 20 percent, but if you track the borrowers, it will be substantially higher than 20 percent in this 2005-2006. And we are talking about millions of families who will not ever get compensated. They may not ever get a chance to own a home again. Chairman Dodd. Senator Crapo, one more question, and then Senator Martinez. Senator Crapo. Mr. Chairman, thank you. Just one more question. Just to help me understand the entire picture here, Mr. Duncan or Mr. Eakes, could you give us a comparison between the serious delinquency rates on subprime loans that we are talking about in comparison with, say, FHA loans or other prime loan markets? Do we a very significant differential there? Mr. Duncan. In our data base, the delinquency rate for subprime loans is roughly 12 percent--that is almost the same as FHA--and prime loans are about 4.7 percent. In terms of foreclosure, the prime loans are at about one-half of 1 percent, and the subprime loans are at about 4.5 percent. The exact numbers I believe are in our testimony. Mr. Eakes. But even that number tells you that the subprime ARMs are 9 times more likely to foreclose than an ARM loan in the prime sector, so that you get this huge impact--the amount of foreclosures in subprime as a whole compared to FHA is double. So it is similar customers, but with a product that does not have layering of all of these risk factors--the prepayment penalties, the failure to escrow for taxes and insurance, which is an amazing thing. By not having escrows, when the good lenders, the responsible lenders try to compete against a 2/28 mortgage, they start out with a loan payment per month that is 20 percent higher than what their competitor has. Guess how many loans they will get in a marketplace that is dominated by borrowers who are cash-strapped trying to look solely at the monthly payment? They will not get any loans. So the general rule, of which that is an example, is that if you do not require escrow for high-risk loans, the good lenders, the good money loses out to the bad money. Ms. Constantine-Davis. Could I just jump in here real briefly? Chairman Dodd. Ms. Davis, you wanted to comment on this. Ms. Constantine-Davis. The word ``fraud'' has been used several times, and I guess being the lawyer geek on the panel here, I just want--we use ``fraud,'' you know, in a colloquial way that says it is deception, it is a very broad range of things. But when you get down to trying to do a case and having to prove fraud, you have elements in the law that are very difficult. You have to have a higher standard of proof. You have to prove a material misrepresentation to the borrower. If you think about the inflated income cases, it is not a misrepresentation to the borrower. And you have to prove reliance, that the borrower relied on this. The borrower is not relying on it. They had no idea it happened. So in many ways, while in common parlance these are fraudulent transactions, they are not ones that you can necessarily prove as fraud cases in court. Chairman Dodd. Very good point. Very good point. Senator Martinez, welcome. Senator Martinez. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much, and what an important hearing you have brought before us. I appreciate the panel and all the members being here. I would not know how to begin because there are so many of these issues that I have dealt with and feel quite strongly about many of them. I believe that credit counseling is so very important, so important that consumers be better informed, and we need to continue to do what we can to encourage credit counseling, to encourage people to be informed and become better consumers themselves. But at the same time, there are market forces that absolutely, without a doubt, in my view, prey upon the innocent and unsuspecting. One of the issues that I attempted to tackle was RESPA reform, and I know it did not always make me popular with some of the people in the room. But I must say I thought it was a good thing. And one of the issues that I was trying to tackle in that is what I saw in Mrs. Womble's testimony where she said, ``The closing costs had jumped from $8,000 to over $12,000. I did not want to sign the papers, but I felt I had to.'' At that point it is too late to help the consumer. They have really got to have a good-faith estimate that is going to be in good faith within a very small digression from that, the same good-faith estimate that they are going to see at the closing statement. There ought to be room for there to be change, but it cannot be dramatic change. And there ought to be change in some areas but not in others. I believe that the fiduciary duty of brokers is also very important. Yield spread premium--and I guess I am not just on a diatribe here. I need to ask a question or two. But yield spread premium, I mean, how do you have a broker who is, in fact, arguably in a fiduciary relationship, although I know they would say not, but who is, in fact, attempting to get the borrower into a higher interest rate so they get a larger commission? In other words, they are working at counter purposes to the borrower. And obviously the issue of loan flipping also creates a lot of problems. But I think yield spread premium, I think that the good-faith estimate, I think these are things that we can do through regulatory reform and whatever statutory changes are necessary to protect the vulnerable borrowers that are so unsuspecting in the marketplace. And I would say while there are small percentages of people who get hurt, for Ms. King or Ms. Womble it is 100 percent. And so we have got to really look out for the most vulnerable. I am not sure I have too many questions. I know the subject, and I appreciate the testimony of so many of you here today. I just believe that it is time that we try to do something to tackle some of these practices. And, you know, I believe there needs to be subprime lending. There needs to be a mortgage market available to those who do not have perfect credit so they can, too, get into homeownership. I believe homeownership is a way to open the future to so many financially by building equity, but with a fair loan. There are some of these lending practices that do not give people a chance, and then the most tragic of all is to already see someone that is in a home and then end up losing the home. I am concerned about reverse mortgages for the elderly as well. That is another area where I think there could be an awful lot of abuse. So, anyway, thank you all for coming, and I do not have a question. I am just with you. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Senator Martinez. Reverend Jackson. Senator Dodd, could I add one more point? Chairman Dodd. Certainly. Reverend Jackson. You know, when we were fighting for voting rights, we were told that our problem was lack of literacy. You know, how many bubbles in a bar of soap and all kind of stuff, literacy, literacy. The problem was we did not have a law to protect us. So even the illiterate can be protected from bad law. And so when I hear literacy, we should teach that through churches and our homes and the YMCA and all that. But these persons needed protection from bad law. We need law protection from you. We can work on financial literacy, and we do, in schools, in churches, and all of that. But somehow somebody violated these two women, and they are not going to face the weight of law. They need legal protection. Chairman Dodd. I do not disagree with that, and, in fact, Senator Martinez, could be a tremendous help to us here as someone who in his private life was in this business and in his public life. He was in the housing business in Florida, I know, from my conversations with him over the years, and, of course, at HUD, and did some great work back 7 years ago, as Hilary Shelton pointed out. So I think the point that Reverend Jackson makes is a very strong one. Senator Reed. Senator Reed. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank all the panelists, and I particularly want to thank Reverend Jackson for being here and being active in many quarters over many years that have made the country a better place. I know you responded to the Chairman, Reverend Jackson, with respect to community impacts of these types of practices, but I wonder if you might have additional thoughts, having listened to the other panelists, about the impact on communities, not just individuals. Reverend Jackson. A study came out of Harvard not long ago. Usually when one house goes down, the houses next door are affected, and then the riot sets in. So in some sense, using the rotten apple situation, it is that when one house goes down, the very neighborhood starts dropping, unless there is something to offset that drop. And, again, we often think of just the poor or the black. I am very concerned about its impact upon black and brown people, the racial exploitation. But Appalachia--the same law must protect--a safety net must protect all of us from violation, the black, the brown. Yes, we are targeted. No question about that. The military bases, they know those are basically young people who got sent to war, who are over their head in debt. They had a job and now the military pays less than the job. So they go to the military. They are sitting outside the gates. Every time I go to a military base to speak to soldiers' spouses, you have got to go through a long line of predators to get into the gate. And so it seems to me that we need to have a broader safety net, whether it is the military base people or whether it is when Ford takes away 55,000 jobs, what it does to Detroit and Dearborn and Youngstown or Akron, Ohio, what it does. The issue, it seems to me, there must be a safety net to protect people and a law to protect us from unscrupulous crooks. Both the law and the safety net. Senator Reed. Thank you. Mr. Eakes. Senator Reed, there was a study in Chicago in 2004 that said that for every foreclosure within a one-eighth mile radius, it would reduce the value of every home by $2,800 to $3,000, for every foreclosure. So if you are in a neighborhood that is getting ten foreclosures, you could literally have the value of all the surrounding housing-- because who wants to move into a neighborhood that has boarded- up houses. You could get to a point where the families that are there no longer have enough value in their home to even met the level of their debt and they are trapped. So there is very significant spillover effects from foreclosure. Senator Reed. Thank you very much. Mr. Duncan. The mortgage lenders would agree with that, Senator. If you look for the alignment of interests between the borrower, the investor, and the mortgage lender, that clustering of foreclosures goes right to the heart of one of the products that the mortgage industry believes will be a valuable product for households where the bulk of their wealth is tied up in their house, and that will provide for them some assistance in retirement. What I am speaking of is reverse mortgages. To the extent that you see the decline in the value of collateral, that is going to affect the economics of that household being able to access that. Senator Reed. Let me ask a question, D. Duncan. Is it your view that a lender should approve a person on a fixed income with a very modest savings for a mortgage policy like a subprime, 2/28 ARM, with the potential of very serious spikes in monthly payments? If that potential is real, it would seem that the person starts out already behind the eight ball? Mr. Duncan. Well, it is our belief that the consumer should be informed about the performance of that mortgage should they choose that mortgage product or investigate that as one of their options. They should have full and clear information about the terms of the mortgage, how it functions in from economic environments, as opposed to other mortgage options. And if the consumer chooses that option, it should be with that full information. That is one of the reasons one of our principles is clear financial education and another one is clear information. Senator Reed. You know, I had the privilege of going off to a good law school and doing a lot of other things, and I was closing on my---- Chairman Dodd. Harvard, I want to say. A good law school he is talking about here. Senator Reed. Couldn't get into UConn. [Laughter.] Chairman Dodd. He was too short. He couldn't play basketball. Senator Reed. No athletic scholarship. And, you know, I was at the closing, and I was signing papers, like I think Ms. King and Ms. Womble, signing papers and signing papers. I am sure there was a disclosure. I could not really--that is our problem. We have to work on something that is vivid, and, you know, I am thinking maybe you would have to have a chart that shows the interest rate spiking in a year from now, and someone looks at it and says, ``Oh, my God, next year I will be paying twice as much as I am paying now.'' These calculations of, well, if this happens, it is now plus 25 basis points--frankly, you know, I did not know what a basis point was until I was about 30 years old and I was practicing law. Oh, that is a tenth of a percent. I think. Mr. Duncan. We absolutely agree. [Laughter.] Mr. Duncan. First, I am sorry for your law school situation. I have the liability of being an economist. We absolutely agree with you that consumers need some straightforward, clear tool to help them judge the relative risks of different loan products, and we have put together a task force of members under a title called ``Project Clarity'' to see if there is a way that the industry can offer up with consultation from the regulators and community groups something that paints the relative risk of different loan products, accounting for the potential changes. Before I forget, if I may, we wanted to introduce into the record, given that there was some discussion about the differences in number, a critique that we have done of some of the CRL studies, if we can introduce that, without objection. Senator Reed. You have been a very good panel. It has been a long morning. I am concerned, Ms. King and Ms. Womble, who is helping you now? I mean, you are in a difficult situation. Is there anyone---- Chairman Dodd. Reverend Jackson is going to help the one-- -- Senator Reed. Well, good. Is there anyone--I mean, you are in a difficult position with your mortgage. How are you going to find your way out of it? Not just you in particular, but other people like yourselves, what should be done to help you? Better coordination with the lenders? Better community support in terms of helping, counseling? What do you think? You are the experts. Unfortunately, you have had a tough education, but you are the experts. Ms. Womble? Ms. Womble. At this point I am just sort of in limbo. I do not know what my next steps are. I know that one thing I would like to see is that consumers--that lenders do not just look at a number when it comes to the decision whether or not they want to make you a loan. Do not look at that number and judge you by that and say, well, you are subprime lending, you are not prime lending. Look at the whole situation, what happened. You know, when I went from a 780 credit score 6 years ago to a 549 now, it is not that I just chose not to pay my bills. Senator Reed. Right. Ms. Womble. You know, it was circumstances. After 21 years of mortgage payments, I had never been late, never missed a mortgage payment. So it was just the circumstances that surrounded that. You know, I am a good credit risk. If you give me a mortgage payment I can afford, you are not going to lose money on me. Don't punish me for what happened in my credit situation when, you know, I am a good risk. You know, you give me that $900-a-month payment and I will not be here having to sit through these things and worry where my kids are going to get their next meal from, you know, if they have to go to the doctor. I have got, you know, coming up to go to college. How am I going to do that? So that is what I would like to see, that they do not just look at that one number and say, well, you are below a 680 so we are going to send you down there. Senator Reed. Thank you. Ms. King, any comments? Ms. King. Right now I am in a quandary---- Chairman Dodd. A little closer, Ms. King, to that microphone. I am sorry. Ms. King. I am in a quandary because I am retired, and I never anticipated me being in a situation like this. What I would like to see is more clarity. If we are going to have brokers, be honest and aboveboard about it. If you can handle it, tell me now. I don't want like later I am sitting here testifying, not just for myself, for others that it concerns. And I really would like to see the law--because it seems like they are just getting away with murder. I really do feel that way. Senator Reed. Well, thank you both for your testimony, but also I think it underscores a point that several have made, and Reverend Jackson and others, that this is an issue that affects a wide range of Americans, people who have worked for years, have run their small businesses successfully, and then have a life-changing event. It does not affect their character or their diligence, their ability to work hard, but it makes it difficult for them to keep up, at least temporarily. And we have to be responsive to that in a decent way. And I hope we can work--I know the Chairman is very committed to this work to make things a little better. Thank you. Reverend Jackson. Mr. Chairman, John Taylor from NCRSC wants to help Ms. Womble and Ms. King through some kind of consumer rescuethon. So when I said safety net, people who are seniors must know that safety net is not a predator, where they are being led to the slaughter. We just formed a village in Illinois called 40-50, where they decided to fight predators and took 10 zip codes, majority black and brown, a lot of predatory practices going on. You pay $300 for a counselor who helps talk you through your situation. Ms. King cannot be talked through. She needs some money. She needs to be offset from having--she has been violated. And so our legislature voted for 40-50, but the counselors are working for the bank. The counselors are working for the subprimers and working for the bank. It is like a whole conspiracy, because we knew that in those zones where you have the most industrial jobs leaving and the highest taxes, and you just have block after block of foreclosures. And there needs to be some kind of money--I am back to if we can spend $9 billion a month on that situation in Iraq, we need some money. When people lose their jobs at Ford, when people lose--and seniors are trapped on fixed incomes, they need some bail-out, not just some counseling and some literacy. Chairman Dodd. Thank you very much, Reverend. It has been a long morning for all of you, but tremendously valuable, and I just was looking over the numbers here again on this. You have Mrs. King who went from an $832-a-month mortgage to $1,500 a month, as I see it, roughly $1,500. That is an 80- percent increase. A woman on a fixed income. I think you said to me in your testimony you had an income of around $950 a month, you got another couple grand you got once a year, but that was going to terminate pretty quick as a pension. It came out of being a teacher over the years. And in the case of Ms. Womble, you went from $927 to $2,000. That is over a 100-percent increase, and you had your insurance and other issues, taxes, that were now outside of that, no longer in escrow. I think people need to remember this well. Ms. King was acting responsibly. She had a $3,000 debt she thought she owed, and she wanted to take care of her debts. You had a $10,000 judgment that you felt you had to meet an obligation. These are two citizens acting very responsibly -in fact, arguably, maybe too responsibly, to go through and refinance your home for $3,000 and $10,000. Someone should have given you some advice along the way that you did not need to do this, there was a way of dealing with those debts short of the avenue you chose. But here are two very responsible citizens doing exactly what responsibility requires. Where is the responsibility, Mr. Dinham, I would say. Mr. Duncan, on the other side of the equation here, in the industry you are representing that would take advantage of two people who spent all their lives doing everything they should have been doing, hard-working, raising families, building private companies, a small business in this case, and then find themselves being victimized by a system here. That has just got to stop. Now, you know, we can talk about the regulators, and we are going to bring them in here, because, frankly, I am annoyed that 2 months have gone by and no answer from these Federal agencies that can respond to this. So if you are listening to me, plan on being at this table in the next few weeks to respond to some questions. Second, the industry had got to respond. Look, I am not crazy about writing laws here. I want to be careful that we do not do damage to the very industry that is critical for wealth creation. And I realize that by writing laws, you can unintentionally do some of this. So the industry has got to step up. That website, yes, change that, or step up to the plate and admit that you do have a fiduciary responsibility to these people. But you cannot have it both ways. You cannot advertise as being a mentor and advisor, and then turn around and watch these people get into the kind of holes they have gotten into. That is just outrageous, to put it mildly. Also to my colleagues here, we need to look at the laws themselves, the statutory underpinnings of all of this. So I am very grateful to all of you, and I am grateful to the industry, too. I appreciate, Mr. Duncan, you are very knowledgeable about this. I am very impressed how much you know. And, Mr. Dinham, your honest answer, I appreciate that. We do not always get honest answers, and I confronted you with the website. You said, ``Yes, that is wrong.'' And I want you to know I appreciate that kind of answer. We do not always get those kinds of answers from people here. So I am grateful to you. And, Hilary and Ms. Davis, your work, and Reverend Jackson, for your work here. But we are going to follow up on this. This is not just a one-time event here today to gather some information, but now to step up and see if we cannot stop this. Homeownership is really important. Subprime lending is a critical component for making people have an advantage of getting into the business of owning their own home. And I want to make sure it is going to work right and they can stay in that home for as long as they possibly can. So we will be back at this, and I am very grateful to all of you for your testimony today. The Committee stands adjourned. Thank you all. [Whereupon, at 12:31 p.m., the hearing was adjourned.] [Prepared statements and additional material supplied for the record follow:] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]