Bank of America CEO Comments on Moratorium 1:16 Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan comments on when the foreclosure moratorium might be lifted and what impact it could have on the housing market, MarketWatch's Val Brickates Kennedy reports from Boston. He estimated that each month’s delay cost the banks $1,000 per home loan, so if there was a three-month delay on the roughly two million homes currently in foreclosure, that translated into a $6 billion hit.
– Investors sent bank stocks plunging yesterday, as they finally started to worry about the mortgage robo-signing scandal. Up until now, investors have mostly assumed the crisis would blow over. But on Wednesday, 50 states announced investigations into mortgage servicing practices, and yesterday a San Francisco hedge fund circulated a report predicting that the crisis would wind up costing Bank of America a whopping $70 billion, the New York Times reports. As a result, Bank of America fell 5.2%, its biggest drop since mid-July, Wells Fargo fell 4% and JP Morgan fell 2.8%, despite a relatively flat stock market, according to the Wall Street Journal. “I don’t see how it can be cleared up in a short period of time,” said one analyst. “The moratorium won’t last that long, but the problem will last four or five years, maybe a decade.”