Loan Modification Explosion

Data released from the Mortgage Bankers Association shows the Obama “mortgage-rescue plan” has been a total failure. While the Obama regime boldly predicted that “4 to 5 million”Americans would he helped by the plan in the first year, after three months only 13,000 mortgage-refinancings have been executed by U.S. banksters as part of this program. This works out to only about 50,000 when projected over a full year, or about 1% of Obama’s absurd prediction.

As I pointed out more than two months ago (see “Obama’s mortgage-rescue plan: give banks money”), there was never any possibility that this sham/band-aid would accomplish anything. The plan called for the Obama regime to give banks “incentives” – with absolutely no strings attached.

The cooperation of the banks was totally voluntarily. Even worse, there is no oversight or auditing of this program. This means that U.S. banks are free to pretend they are helping millions of Americans, pocket the “incentives” (i.e. hand-outs), and walk away.

The MBA has now revised downward its estimate of the total dollar value of refinancings for this year by 30% – from an estimate made only three months earlier. Expect the real numbers to end up being much worse still.

Even the propagandists at CNN have been forced to acknowledge that yet another “housing fix” is turning out to be nothing but more empty promises. However, this didn’t stop CNN from mounting an absurd defense of this failure: the reason why the program has been such a dismal disappointment was because too many people applied for refinancings.

Naturally, this nonsense does not hold up to scrutiny. Further on in the CNN article, it was stated that with the banksters “flooded with requests”, they would handle “the easiest ones first.” Of course, if they really were “flooded with requests” and were handling them as efficiently as possible, then we should have expected a large number of “mortgage rescues” rather than virtually none.

CNN went on to “predict” that if the volume of total applications dropped that the number of “mortgage rescues” under the Obama plan would rise. In reality, data over the last month has shown the volume of mortgage applications has collapsed, with the biggest drop occurring in refinancing applications. In other words, this nonsense has already proved to be false.

As I have been writing for nearly a year, there is an obvious conclusion to be drawn from the fact that two, successive U.S. governments have done nothing more to fix the U.S. housing collapse other than make one empty promise after another. The U.S. government does not want to keep Americans in their homes, it wants to push them out. In a previous commentary (“U.S. government paying homeowners to walk away”), I pointed out how the U.S. government has been quietly slipping financially-devastated Americans a cheque for $1000 – to get them to vacate their homes.


Of course, neither the Obama regime nor the U.S. propaganda-machine want to publicize this government program, so there have been no aggregate figures released. However, obviously the total number of Americans pushed out of their homes over the last three months would have exceeded the pitiful total of those who were (temporarily) “rescued”.

The natural question to ask is: why would the U.S. government want Americans to lose their homes? The answer to that question comes in two parts. First of all, echoing a recent quote from Senator Richard Durbin (“U.S. Senator: Banksters “own” Congress”), the U.S. financial crime syndicate “owns” the U.S. government – having paid for it in “installments” (i.e. campaign contributions) over the last twenty years. (Indeed, no one in the U.S. government was raking in contributions from U.S. banksters faster than Obama, himself.)

This is hardly a secret. With more than 90% of all bail-out dollars going straight into the vaults of U.S. banks, U.S. politicians have left no doubt about whom they are working for.

Secondly, why would the banksters want Americans thrown out of their homes? Simple. To start with, U.S. banks have been explicitly permitted to hide their trillions in losses, through fraudulent accounting (see “FASB strong-armed into mark-to-fantasy accounting”). Furthermore, they have already proven they can order (and, if necessary, extort) all the trillions of dollars they need in hand-outs to ensure their own survival.

Thus, ultimately, the banksters will be scooping up trillions of dollars of U.S. real estate through foreclosures (i.e. for free), and when U.S. real estate values eventually begin to re-inflate some time around the middle of next decade, they will make fabulous gains on this real estate. For those who are skeptical that the U.S. financial crime syndicate engages in such long-term planning, simply read “The Bankers Manifesto of 1892” – where they described their plans, in detail.

Meanwhile, the job assigned to the lackeys in the U.S. government and the U.S. media are to lie and stall. The corporate propaganda-machine is doing its part (see “Bloomberg’s Sunday propaganda: U.S. housing has bottomed”). The talking-heads in the media generally proclaim a “bottom” in the U.S. housing market about once a month – at the least.

The actual “plan” to fix the U.S. housing market is very straightforward: demolish millions of excess homes to reduce inventories to a level where demand can eventually meet supply (see “U.S. banks bulldozing NEW homes”). When you are getting trillions of dollars in real estate for free, you can afford to destroy a couple of million homes.

Expect the puppets of the Obama regime to stall for a few more weeks, claiming that “the plan needs time to work”. By sometime this summer (after another million Americans have been thrown out into the streets), yet another “housing fix” will be announced (with a huge fanfare from media propagandists). This will be yet more empty promises, and this “circus” will continue.


Banks want Americans to lose their homes. They even explicitly promised this more than a century ago. And unlike most of what you read from the media today, that was a promise which you can actually believe.