Fannie Mae not doing enough to help with mortgages during coronavirus crisis

As I mentioned a few columns back, people are going to have trouble paying their mortgages under “forbearance” plans. They won’t be able to come up with, say, three months’ worth of delayed mortgage payments all at once when this crisis is over. Fannie Mae, which owns most of the mortgages in this country, put …

As I mentioned a few columns back, people are going to have trouble paying their mortgages under “forbearance” plans. They won’t be able to come up with, say, three months’ worth of delayed mortgage payments all at once when this crisis is over.

Fannie Mae, which owns most of the mortgages in this country, put out this statement Monday: “Under a forbearance plan, a homeowner may be able to temporarily reduce or suspend their mortgage payment while they regain their financial footing.”

“At the end of the forbearance plan, the homeowner will be provided with several options from their mortgage servicer for making up the missed payments and will not be required to pay everything back all at once,” Fannie Mae said.

Not good enough! If Fannie Mae really wants to end homeowner anxiety and keep people from losing their houses to foreclosure, it needs to give everyone the option of putting the payments missed during forbearance at the end of the loans.

Just try to follow me: The May futures contracts expired in late April.

Because of the glut of oil already on the market, and the fact that storage facilities are scarce, the price of those May futures contracts fell below zero. That meant holders of those futures contracts would actually have to pay someone to take that investment off their hands.

Now that we will soon be getting into May oil, traders are getting nervous again, with the price in those contracts down more than 25 percent.

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