Why Mortgage Modifications Aren’t Working

As covered in both today's Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, the Obama administration has called 25 of the largest mortgage servicing companies to Washington to try to figure out why the Obama efforts to stem foreclosures has been a failure.

The reason such efforts, as well as those of the Bush Administration and the FDIC, have been a failure is that such efforts have grossly misdiagnosed the causes of mortgage defaults.  An implicit assumption behind former Treasury Secretary Paulson's HOPE NOW, FDIC Chair Sheila Bair's IndyMac model, and the Obama Administration's current foreclosure efforts is that the current wave of foreclosures is almost exclusively the result of predatory lending practices and "exploding" adjustable rate mortgages, where large payment shocks upon the rate re-set cause mortgage payment to become "unaffordable."

The simple truth is that the vast majority of mortgage defaults are being driven by the same factors that have always driven mortgage defaults:  generally a negative equity position on the part of the homeowner coupled with a life event that results in a substantial shock to their income, most often a job loss or reduction in earnings. Until both of these components, negative equity and a negative income shock are addressed, foreclosures will remain at highly elevated levels.

Sadly the Obama Administration is likely to use today's meeting as simply an excuse to deflect blame from themselves onto "greedy" lenders.  Instead the Administration should be focusing on avenues for increasing employment and getting our economy growing again.  Then of course, this Administration has from the start been more focused on re-distributing wealth rather than creating it, which explains why it views mortgage modifications as simply a game of taking from lenders (in reality investors - like pension funds) and giving to delinquent homeowners.