American Home Mortgage Bouncing Property Tax Payment Checks
September 17th, 2007Via: Baltimore Sun:
Checks sent out by the troubled American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. to pay the property taxes of more than 70 homeowners in the Baltimore metropolitan area have bounced, local officials said yesterday.
Baltimore City received bad checks for 53 properties – a total of about $63,500. Baltimore County said American Home Mortgage checks bounced for 21 properties, totaling $41,000. Taxes are due at the end of the month.
Finance officials in the rest of the region – Anne Arundel, Carroll, Harford and Howard counties – reported no similar problems.
“This is just another chapter in what is a very difficult time for the mortgage industry,” said Donald I. Mohler III, a spokesman for Baltimore County, which no longer accepts checks from American Home Mortgage.
“It’s an unfortunate situation and we certainly hope these individuals will be able to work out some kind of agreement with their mortgage company,” Mohler said.
Anthony McCarthy, a spokesman for Mayor Sheila Dixon, said the city does not plan to notify the affected homeowners. They will get a notice in November along with all other delinquent taxpayers if the problem isn’t resolved by then.
Baltimore County said it has sent bills directly to the property owners to alert them.
But the problem might not be limited to bounced checks.
“What I’d heard is the checks weren’t being sent,” said Greg McBride, senior financial analyst at Bankrate.com.
Homeowners often make monthly payments for property taxes, insurance and other fees to their mortgage companies to be set aside in escrow funds until the money is due.
It’s unclear why American Home Mortgage, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Aug. 6, did not have the money to cover the checks or what it intends to do about it.
This article and the succeeding one really suggest to me that we are all fucked.
It seems to me that the best-case scenario is runaway inflation, followed eventually by dollar collapse, followed by an economic “structure” resembling what they have going in Zimbabwe.
The other possibilities are actually worse.