During the summer of 2010, the Obama administration unveiled a $1 billion program to offer loans to help the jobless pay their mortgages until they could find work again. Even as it was to take effect before the end of that year, by April of the next year the program had yet to accept one application. The New York Times avers that this “could be an epitaph for the administration’s broader foreclosure prevention effort, as tens of billions of dollars remain unspent and hundreds of thousands of homeowners have been rejected.” By April of 2011, the existence of the main program, the Home Assistance Modification Program, had become a target of the Republican-controlled U.S. House. On March 29th, the House voted to end the foreclosure relief program. Even though the Democratic-controlled U.S. Senate vowed to pursue a rescue, even the Democrats there considered the program to be badly flawed. To be sure, the administration had failed to stem the wave of foreclosures.
The full essay is at "Essays on the Financial Crisis," available at Amazon.
See related essay: "Institutional Conflicts of Interest"