Lowell Deeds

This morning I attended a seminar sponsored by the Warren Group on the current foreclosure crisis. Attorney General Martha Coakley was the featured speaker and she certainly is pessimistic about the foreclosure crisis which, as she put it, “is a big mess that will get messier before it gets better.” Coakley did an excellent job describing how we reached this point and laid significant blame at the feet of the federal government which used its powers of pre-emption to keep the states from regulating lenders but then did nothing to curtail even the most egregious practices by the mortgage industry. She said great care must be taken in crafting an appropriate response. It is not enough to protect against the problems that caused our current situation, because the financial industry is “nimble and agile” and constantly inventing new techniques to lend and make money, so any regulations must have the flexibility to adapt to changing practices that haven’t even been considered yet.