From <;a href="http://www.tnr.com/article/unhampered">The New Republic.
It’s not so much that HAMP, the home foreclosure rescue plan let loose by Obama, is a failure but more that to get serious about fixing the foreclosure problem, this is what you do:
What can the Obama administration do to alleviate this suffering? Turns out, it doesn’t need a new plan to modify mortgages, since there’s a very good old plan on the shelf.
The Great Depression did not begin with predatory mortgage lending, but economic conditions predictably led to a foreclosure crisis. More than 250,000 families lost their homes to foreclosure in 1932. And every day brought a thousand new foreclosures in the early months of 1933.
As part of its initial legislative barrage on the economic crisis, the Roosevelt administration created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (“HOLC”) in June of 1933, just three months after entering office. The HOLC purchased distressed mortgages from banks, and then negotiated new, more affordable mortgages with the homeowner. Before it ran out of capital in 1935, the HOLC purchased a little more than one million mortgages, or about one in six of the urban home mortgages. (There was a similar program for farm mortgages).
Homeowners applied to the HOLC to buy their mortgage, so the HOLC was able to pick and choose salvageable mortgages. HOLC mortgages required less equity than banks required (20 percent instead of 35 percent) and had lower interest rates (five percent instead of eight percent). The HOLC was indulgent of late or missed payments, and patiently worked with struggling borrowers to prevent default. Still, times were hard and almost 20 percent of HOLC’s mortgages ended in foreclosure.
When the last mortgage was paid off in 1951, the HOLC had turned a slight profit. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., wrote that the HOLC “averted the threatened collapse of the real estate market and enabled financial institutions to return to the mortgage-lending business. … Most important of all, by enabling thousands of Americans to save their homes, it strengthened their stake both in the existing order and in the New Deal. Probably no single measure consolidated so much middle-class support for the Administration.”
Instead of dealing directly with foreclosures, government is helping to do what Matt Taibbi explains below. The banks look good on paper, but jumpstarting the stock market in this way is not as effective as taking on the middle class and poor economy directly.
The research report published by Goldman Sachs on January 15th underlines this sort of thinking. Goldman issued a strong recommendation to buy exactly the sort of high-yield toxic crap our hedge-fund guy was, by then, driving rapidly toward the cliff. “Summarizing our views,” the bank wrote, “we expect robust flows . . . to dominate fundamentals.” In other words: This stuff is crap, but everyone’s buying it in an awfully robust way, so you should too. Just like tech stocks in 1999, and mortgage-backed securities in 2006.
To sum up, this is what Lloyd Blankfein meant by “performance”: Take massive sums of money from the government, sit on it until the government starts printing trillions of dollars in a desperate attempt to restart the economy, buy even more toxic assets to sell back to the government at inflated prices – and then, when all else fails, start driving us all toward the cliff again with a frank and open endorsement of bubble economics. I mean, shit – who wouldn’t deserve billions in bonuses for doing all that?
Archein