Homeowners facing foreclosure have always been vulnerable to scammers, conartists, and thieves. When property values were appreciating rapidly, foreclosure rescue scams primarily focused on obtaining title to the home and robbing homeowners of their equity. Today with property prices depreciating and many homes already “underwater,” equity is no longer the game.
Instead, rescuers have become high-volume, “loan modification specialists.” The pitch by this new breed of predators is that, for a fee, which can reach several thousand dollars, they will negotiate a loan modification for a financially distressed borrower. The hitch is that the “work” performed, if any, leads nowhere, with the homeowner out money and time and closer than ever to foreclosure.
In this paper, the impact of U.S. presidential elections on stock market excess returns is investigated using the variance decomposition approach developed in Campbell and Shiller (1988), Campbell (1991) and, in particular, Campbell and Ammer (1993). In this approach, a first order Taylor approximation of the relationship between the log stock return and log stock prices and dividends is used to separate unexpected stock market excess returns into constituent parts consisting of changes in rational expectations of real dividends, real interest rates, and excess returns.
This asset pricing framework is then combined with a vector autoregressive (VAR) model whose variables include excess returns, real interest rates and other financial variables that possess forecasting power for returns and real interest rates. Use of the VAR model permits the calculation of unexpected returns and revisions to forecasts of real interest rates and excess returns in all future periods. If the VAR adequately describes the information set available to and used by investors, the sum of the forecast revisions constitute estimates of changes in rational expectations.
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