Countrywide: Too little, too late?

It’s been a rough few months for Countrywide Financial Corp., one of the nation’s largest home lenders. The mortgage crisis has hit Countrywide especially hard, and the lender has reported huge financial losses during it. The company, in fact, has been weakened enough that it earlier this month agreed to be acquired by Bank of America.

Critics have said that Countrywide, like many mortgage lenders, got too greedy during the housing boom. The company, these critics say, approved far too many borrowers for home loans that they couldn’t afford. Many of these borrowers took out adjustable rate mortgages with initial interest rates that were artificially low. When the loans adjusted to a higher rate, these borrowers could no longer afford their monthly mortgage payments.

Countrywide is now trying to fix some of the problems it created. A Jan. 16 story by Reuters reported that Countrywide has helped 1 percent of its borrowers avoid foreclosure. Countrywide officials said that they have helped 81,000 of their borrowers avoid foreclosure by either modifying or restructuring their loans.

The big question of course is this: Are Countrywide’s efforts too little too late? The sad answer is, unfortunately, probably “yes.”