During 2010, mortgage lenders discharged more than $70 billion of mortgage debt through home retention actions.
Because the home retention actions are necessary primarily when homes are worth less than the mortgages they secure, the amount discharged by home retention actions is much less in 2006 and 2007 when residential property values were still high.
The combination of discharges of other consumer loans and discharges of home mortgages by home retention actions was almost $150 billion in 2010, which exceeds the peak spending for entire unemployment insurance system.
To quantify the size of the loan modification safety net and its changes over time, I estimate the amounts that "home retention actions" (as the federal government calls these mortgage modifications that allows people to stay in their homes) actually changed mortgage payments from the original mortgage contract, which specified only payment in full or foreclosure.
I do not have data on the number of home retention actions for the years 2006 and 2007, but I assume the dollar value of discharges those years were, as a proportion to discharges in 2008, the same as total mortgage loan discharges by commercial banks.
When the resume tsunami hits, much of what will separate the talent winners from the talent losers are the retention actions they take today.
During the last three months of 2012, with the attorneys general settlement by then in full force, mortgage companies initiated 383,000 "home retention actions," which include modifications, according to the OCC.
In the first quarter of 2012, for example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance behemoths, completed just 30,601 short sales versus some 112,000 home-retention actions.
Social games are all about retention loops, action games are all about action/reaction loops, and board games are all about turns and other more obvious loops.
A complex of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex of the brain, an area involved in many aspects of executive behavioral control, including selective attention, strategic behavioral planning, short-term information retention and action selection.
