Shahien Nasiripour and Arthur Delaney have done the nation a great service with their very detailed examination of the failed HAMP program, which has succeeded only in delaying foreclosures rather than stopping them, and which has led to more indebtedness for borrowers and more cash for the big banks. The $75 billion initiative — $50 [...]

Near the end of our foreclosure panel, we finally got into the meat of the situation: what it will take given a government unwilling to do more for struggling borrowers to actually reset the broken housing market. With HAMP’s complete failure – to date only $250 million of the $75 billion promised by the program [...]

We’ve been on green shoots patrol for months now, but the biggest problem in the economy continues to be the nagging issue that caused the financial meltdown – the real estate market. The foreclosures occurring today may be happening for different reasons than previously – high unemployment, crashing housing prices leading to more borrowers underwater [...]

I’m getting a bad feeling about the premature declaration of victory over the economy. It’s fine to rhetorically tout the reversal in growth, or display charts showing trends in unemployment. It’s another thing to actually exit the playing field in such programs as economic stimulus, and especially, housing. This neglects the very real fragility in [...]

In a mixed set of amendments, the House of Representatives reversed an earlier position by defeating the mortgage “cramdown” amendment to the financial reform bill, while also defeating an amendment that would have eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Cramdown passed the House back in March, but this time it lost by a count of [...]

The House’s financial reform bill will probably get a vote today, and the legislation is a mix of the good and the bad. On the good side, there are measures to audit the Federal Reserve, limit the amount of leverage that banks can have at any one time, institute the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (although [...]

Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would allow bankruptcy judges to modify the terms of loans on primary residences, the same way they can on secondary residences or yachts (no, really). The “cramdown” provision, seen by many liberal economists as the only way to deal with the foreclosure crisis, then [...]

In a couple days, the President will convene a jobs summit, amidst pervasive calls to deal with the budget deficit during a recession. Sadly, both the issue of jobs and the deficit are being dealt with in Congress through conservative frames, with policies like across-the-board, untargeted tax cuts for job creation, or “entitlement reform” commissions [...]