Instead, the Obama administration rolled out the industry-backed Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP), relying on the voluntary cooperation of servicers to modify mortgages. The program was, even by the administration’s own modest objectives, a failure, ultimately reaching less than a quarter of the three to four million homeowners it hoped to target. In the critical first two years, the administration don’t even spend step three % of what they were allotted to save homeowners.
New ease of the applying construction, with its simple cancellation thresholds ($10,000/$20,000) and you may qualification criteria (Pell updates and you may home income), function the insurance policy is to submit nearly ninety percent of the recovery cash to people and work out below $75,000 per year
Just as with cramdown, one reason the Obama administration failed to swiftly help homeowners was their obsession with ensuring their policies didn’t help the wrong type of debtor. When Obama first announced HAMP in 2009, he said the program would not reward folks who bought homes they knew from the beginning they would never afford. The resulting Goldilocks proposal, with its focus on weeding out undeserving borrowers, would not be available to homeowners with incomes too high or too low and would be backstopped with voluminous income and financial verifications (in many cases, more than what was required to take out the loan in the first place). (more…)
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