Takes a skeptical look at a leading argument about what is causing the foreclosure crisis and what should be done to stop it. The authors focus on two key decisions: the borrower's choice to default on a mortgage and the lender's subsequent choice whether to renegotiate or modify the loan. Unaffordable loans, defined as those with high mortgage payments relative to income at origination, are unlikely to be the main reason that borrowers decide to default. The efficiency of foreclosure for investors is a more plausible explanation for the low number of modifications to date. Policies designed to reduce foreclosures should focus on ameliorating the effects of job loss rather than modifying loans to make them more affordable on a long-term basis. Illustrations.

Provides an overview of the subprime mortgage securitization process and the seven key informational frictions that arise. Discusses the ways that market participants work to minimize these frictions and speculate on how this process broke down. Continues with a complete picture of the subprime borrower and the subprime loan, discussing both predatory borrowing and predatory lending. Presents the key structural features of a typical subprime securitization, documents how rating agencies assign credit ratings to mortgage-backed securities, and outlines how these agencies monitor the performance of mortgage pools over time. The authors draw upon the example of a mortgage pool securitized by New Century Financial during 2006. Illustrations.

In The End of Negotiable Instruments: Bringing Payments Systems Law Out of the Past, author James Rogers challenges the basic assumptions of the law of checks and notes and its history, and provides a well-reasoned account of how the law could be changed to better suit the evolution of new payment technologies. The modern American law of payment systems is in disarray. Efforts to create a unified body of law for payment systems have so far been unsuccessful. Part of the reason for that failure is the assumption that the existing law works well for the traditional paper-based check system, and that problems have been created only by the evolution of new technologies. The End of Negotiable Instruments argues that this assumption is unfounded. The basic law of checks is itself anachronistic. There are no other books that undertake a similar analysis—there are legal treatises on the law of checks and notes, but all of them take for granted the basic assumptions challenged in this book. Several articles were published in the late twentieth century concerning the dispute over the application of certain doctrines of traditional negotiable instruments law to modern consumer finance transactions, but none of this literature went on to consider the broader question of whether there is anything worthwhile left in negotiable instruments law.