国际英语新闻：Fed: Projections remain grim for future U.S. home foreclosures

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Federal Reserve's projections remain very grim for the foreseeable future, as it expected about 2.25 million foreclosure filings this year and again next year, and about 2 million more in 2012, Fed Governor Sarah Raskin said on Friday.

"While these numbers are down from their peak in 2009, they remain extremely high by historical standards and represent a trauma in the lives of millions of people affected," she said, adding that many families had suffered significant declines in their net worth over the past several years.

"Millions of homeowners have gone through foreclosure in recent years; many more will go through it in the near future; and countless others are struggling to keep their payments current even as the housing market and the overall economy make it hard to do so," Raskin said in her first public speech since joining the U.S. central bank's Board of Governors last month.

Fed figures showed that the number of foreclosures initiated on residential properties had soared from about one million in 2006, the year that house prices peaked, to 2.8 million last year.

There were 1.2 million foreclosure filings in just the first half of this year. In addition, right now nearly 5 million loans were somewhere in the foreclosure process, or were 90 days or more past due and hence at serious risk for a foreclosure filing, she said at the National Consumer Law Center's Consumer Rights Litigation Conference held in Boston, Massachusetts.

The most recent alarming development in the foreclosure process that had caught public attention involves improper activities by mortgage servicers, Raskin noted, adding that it also shined a harsh spotlight on other long-standing procedural flaws in U.S. mortgage servicing.

She contended that the Federal Reserve and other federal banking agencies initiated an in-depth review of practices at the largest mortgage servicing operations, and solicited information and input from other knowledgeable sources to better direct the Fed actions to detect possible systematic problems at specific servicers or within the industry at large.