BluZink-

Five years after the near complete financial meltdown of the economy in this country, resulting in millions of people losing their homes nothing has really changed. Despite the billions of dollars in settlement fees the banks have shelled out, bad press, and loss of trust, it’s pretty much business as usual. Actually it’s more blatant and brazen than ever.

Remember HAMP? What about HAMP 2.0? The mortgage modification programs the administration paraded out as a way to save millions of homeowners from foreclosure? The same program that Tim Geithner, during a congressional hearing, flippantly admitted in 2009 was never meant to help homeowners, but more a way to alleviate the stress of too many foreclosures coming in at once.

“We estimate that they can handle ten million foreclosures, over time… this program will help foam the runway for them,” Geithner said during the hearing, according to Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General of TARP (SIGTARP). In his book, Bailout, Barofsky shows how HAMP’s faulty design led to a myriad of problems: trapped borrowers, extended trial payments, no-doc modifications, and eventually unnecessary foreclosures. Barofsky opines in the book that Treasury didn’t care about the suffering of borrowers under HAMP and that Geithner’s goal was to space out the foreclosures and give the banks time to earn their way back to health — through the other parts of the bailout, that were more profitable.

[BluZINK]

Comments

comments