There has been some talk about a ‘Cash for Caulkers’ program that would refund homeowners 50% of their costs to renovate their properties in order to make them more energy efficient.  The program,officially called Home Star,  is unofficially being dubbed ‘Cash for Caulkers,’ and represents another effort in getting us out of the recession.

The program is obviously trying to emulate the Cash for Clunkers program, which helped stimulate the auto industry.  While I agree that Cash for Clunkers was a great idea, it was not without its faults.  Most notably, though it put people into new cars, it did nothing at all to make America more competitive on the global market.  What Cash for Clunkers did, essentially, was to tell the American people, “don’t worry about the recession; buy a new car!”  The day after buying their new car, however, Americans saw more unemployment, more banks failing, and more homes going into foreclosure.  It didn’t solve the real problem.  The money set aside for the Cash for Caulkers program will likely have the same effect:  it will make Americans spend money, but it won’t do anything to really end the recession we’re in.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle offered an interesting opinion by Brent T. White, a law professor at the University of Arizona.  He advises homeowners to allow their home’s to go into foreclosure when they find that their home is worth less than what they owe on their home loan.  His argument is that foreclosure is a smarter economic decision and that it is only the social stigma of losing one’s home that is keeping homeowner’s paying their bills when it would be in their best interest to cut their losses and run.

I agree with White that there are times when it is in a homeowner’s best interest to simply walk away from their loan.  However, I also feel that he grossly misrepresents the repercussions of a foreclosure. White’s suggestion completely downplays that, in most cases, creditors can still legally pursue you.  He also suggests that one’s credit score after going into foreclosure is likely to recover in two years.  The truth, however, is that you will have bad credit for the next 5 to 7 years, which means limited access to credit and increased costs on anything that relies on your credit history (e.g. renting an apartment).  Finally, White’s suggestions ignores the human cost of this stressful process.  Going through foreclosure creates a great deal of anxiety.  It is not something you can simply do without feeling the effect on your own well being.

Our government suffers from a naivete with some of its plans to resuscitate the economy which consumers simply cannot afford.  To be more specific, the current administration needs to come to terms with the fact that business practices are dictated by laws and potential for profit.  Businesses cannot, and should not, be counted on to change their policies out of the goodness of their hearts.

Last March, the Obama administration put into place its Mortgage Relief Plan to help homeowners stay out of foreclosure by urging banks to institute loan modifications for borrowers.  Renegotiation of their loans would allow borrowers to make payments on a more affordable rate, allowing them, in theory, to keep homes that would otherwise go into foreclosure.  Since its launch last March, the plan has provided permanent loan modifications to only 4% of those who have attempted to sign up.  Lenders like Bank of America have helped only .06% of the people who’ve requested a modification.

Citibank is suspending foreclosures and evictions for the holiday season.  For 30 days, from December 18th through January 17th, Citibank is offering a reprieve to borrowers whose loans are owned by Citibank Corporation.  The company reports that it will help about 4,000 borrowers who are either scheduled to be evicted, or scheduled to receive notice of eviction during this period.

Citibank deserves to be commended for this act.  In the general state of the American economy as it stands right now, lending institutions are placed in a precarious position where they have to implement tough policies to keep their businesses afloat.  It seems that Americans are increasingly turning to lending institutions as a solution to this recession as well as a scapegoat for this nation’s economic troubles.  All too often we hear that either our economic crisis was the result of banks giving out bad loans (which it was), or that economic recovery depends on lenders lowering the minimum requirements for loan qualification (which it does not).

In order “to provide support to mortgage and housing markets and to foster improved conditions in financial markets more generally,” (according to their own FAQ on the subject) the Federal Reserve Bank has been buying up $1.25 trillion in fixed rate Mortgage-Backed Securities otherwise guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Ginnie Mae.  The result has been a drop in the mortgage rate for 30 year mortgages.  The duration of this program is limited, however, and is set to expire by the end of the first quarter, 2010.

At the end of the Fed’s purchase program next Spring, the market will be ripe for a mortgage rate increase and a reduction in purchasing power for consumers looking for low monthly mortgage payments.  Experts are estimating that when the Fed steps out of its current purchasing position, 30 year mortgage rates are likely to rise to 6% despite government incentives for first time home buyers as well as current homeowners.

The Federal Housing Administration will be the next financial disaster to fall on the shoulders of American taxpayers.  Created in 1934 to help low income and first time buyers get housing loans, the agency was designed to guarantee a relatively small percentage of mortgages, for instance, two percent in 2005.  Since its inception, FHA’s budget and operational infrastructure have followed this low-ratio model, and have been designed to absorb losses without having to ask for money or help from the Federal Government.  However, the GAO is now projecting taxpayer funded subsidies for the FHA of half a billion dollars over the next three years, if no changes are made to the agency’s program.

With the housing and credit markets in dire straights, private lenders are asking for better credit scores and higher down payments.  This means fewer people are able to qualify for conventional loans.  According to the website for Housing and Urban Development (the parent organization for the FHA), the FHA’s restrictions on the kinds of loans it will guarantee are more lenient relative to conventional loans, and as such, the FHA is being called into service more and more frequently in this particular economic climate.  Up by over 1200 percent since 2005, the FHA is now expected to back one quarter of all new U.S. mortgages.

Our country’s economy has been operating from bubble to bubble.  From 1996 until 2000, we were in a tech bubble.  Our faith in the financial potential of the dot com industry was boundless, though it ultimately proved ill placed.  From 2000 until 2006, we were in a housing bubble which, when it burst, laid the foundations for the current recession.  During these periods, the country placed its economic hopes on new, seemingly plentiful, frontiers that promised new means by which to make money.  Older values were made to seem, by comparison, out of touch and out of date.  As a result, we, as a nation, allowed ourselves to slip further and further away from the fundamentals necessary for a healthy economy.

Now, we stand on a precipice.  We could create another of these economic bubbles to put our financial hopes into - an option as illusory as ever - or we could find some way to return to the fundamentals that have, historically, made our nation’s economy strong.  Over the last decade, we allowed our exports to slip and made our economy deeply reliant on imports from the rest of the world.  We have let the trade deficit grow too wide without finding new products or new technologies to export, and as a result have found ourselves without a significant industry to insure future success in the global economy.

According to realtytrac.com, 300,000 homes went into foreclosure last month.  Bloomberg reports that the U.S. delinquency rate rose to 9.4% and foreclosures rose to 1.37%.  According to Moody’s Investor Service, 42 percent of outstanding 2006-vintage subprime loans are at least 60 days delinquent, in foreclosure, or held for sale.  As we all know, the housing crisis and rising unemployment rates have served to make it difficult for many Americans to pay their mortgages on time, and the result is that many of the nation’s home owners are in dire straights.  The problem is bad, and banks need to change the way they modify mortgages if they hope to provide adequate assistance.  They are now concentrating on fixing disasters as they arise rather than preventing them in the first place.

With so many people in financial trouble, mortgage lenders like Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Wachovia, Chase, and Citigroup are finding themselves too understaffed to deal with these excessive defaults.  Given that a bank only has so many resources to extend to their borrowers, the dilemma becomes who to work with first.  Basically, the bank has to perform a kind of triage, like in a hospital, to determine which of their clients demands immediate attention, and which clients can wait.  The lender faces different kinds of repayment problems.  Specifically, they have people who cannot repay and who are defaulting right now, and people who have done everything in their power to repay (tapped into savings, changed their lifestyle, etc.) but who cannot sustain their payments any longer; they have not defaulted yet but soon they will.  According to a survey by ProPublica, it seems that most major lenders have been focusing on borrowers who are most delinquent at the expense of borrowers that are current but will quickly become delinquent unless they get help.

On April 30th, the Senate defeated the “cram down” bill that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to adjust mortgages so as to allow those people going through bankruptcy to keep their homes.  The defeat came as some democrats sided with the bill’s opposition, mirroring a general weariness from within the banking community towards this piece of legislation.

The media balked at this defeat with claims that echoed the bill’s sponsor Richard Durbin (D-Illinois) that the banks essentially controlled congress and that senators needed to vote along with the needs of the American people rather than according to the desires of the banking and mortgage lobbies.  The accusation from Durbin, and from the media following the defeat, was that these senators (particularly the 12 democrats who voted against the bill) were essentially bought out.  The media portrayed the senate as under bank control.

The barbarians, so the saying goes, are no longer at the gates.  They’ve stormed through.  In many cases, they were practically let in by negligence of the regulators whose job it was to protect us from greedy swindlers, inventive accountants, and fraudulent lenders.  The gatekeepers themselves, the various federal regulators, have not been punished for failing in their duty to protect America.  They remain, even now, at their posts as the country reels from the damage it has taken from the various scandals and crimes committed against its economy and its taxpayers.  Those whose job it was to police against these crimes have failed us and we wonder why they have not been made accountable.

Why, for instance, didn’t Christopher Cox, the head of the SEC, not resign after the Madoff scandal?  Surely the crime was glaring enough to call his competency into question.  Shouldn’t he have taken some responsibility as the scheme was carried out on his watch?  Cox offered no public apology and was never taken to task for the calamity that resulted from his oversight.  He just stayed in, despite the very real complaints of his critics, until he was replaced by the next administration.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are planning on paying out $210 million dollars in bonuses despite the fact that both these companies had to be seized by federal regulators so as to prevent dire repercussions across the economy.  Their failure has been one of the central low points to the economic devastation of this past year

James Lockhart, federal regulator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, defended these bonuses for two reasons.  First, he suggests that the bonuses are needed because of the destruction wrought upon the company employees’ savings by the crash of their stock.  The scene for such workers is, of course, tragic, but we wonder if bonuses should go out to those who lost money in the stock market, then don’t we all deserve some of that cash?  The plight of the employees at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is hardly unique—it is the plight of every American hurt in this recession.  But of course, the average American doesn’t get government bailouts for the money that they’ve lost in the various markets—we pay for them.  When all is said and done, investment is a gamble.  In other words, the people at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gambled their life savings, like so many of us, and lost.  We don’t get a safety net, why should they?

Money shows should not treat finance as entertainment by turning the buying of stocks into a joke or by turning a discussion of serious economic situations into an occasion for groundless argument.  These shows discuss issues directly involved in the managing of people’s money, pensions, savings, and 401ks. The networks that produce these shows, then, have a moral responsibility to treat the subject matter with the seriousness that it requires. 

To fulfill this obligation, the networks should do two things.  First, the network should only invite experts to discuss financial topics.  Participation should be limited to those who have actually worked in the field that they will be discussing.  All too often, financial reporters who have little or no work experience in a particular field are invited to comment on very serious economic issues and their presence drowns out the founded insights of real experts who should be listened to.  Second, the networks should see themselves as obliged to foster a healthy debate founded on factual evidence and cogent argument, and not gut feeling.  The moral obligation of these networks should be a constant pursuit of the truth.