Here, as Lowery puts it, is the “fundamental equation of the economic crisis” yet to be fully addressed: “Unemployment drives foreclosure, and the two are jointly destroying middle-class wealth as the effects of the recession linger on.” Consistently dipping middle class wealth means no recovery.

The Obama administration’s efforts to help [unemployed] homeowners thus far have faltered, failing to put a dent in the wave of home losses. Two new programs are specifically designed to help unemployed people undergoing foreclosure… But for many, it might be too little, too late.

This week, the Home Affordable Modification Program — the administration’s flagship effort to help homeowners by letting them refinance for lower monthly mortgage payments and thereby avoid foreclosure — reported dismal numbers. In recent months, the program has kicked out far more homeowners than it has helped. It has completed only 346,000 modifications — though it initially set its sights on three million.

The top of the story is all bleakness. The bottom half of the story, though, is dedicated to two recent efforts: The $1.5 billion Hardest Hit Fund; and Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s $3 billion program to provide unemployed homeowners with low-interest loans up to $50,000, funded through the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to help them pay their mortgages for two years or until they find jobs.

It’s a story that underlines again fundamental questions about the government’s power and responsibility to influence economic realities that vitally matter to the citizens of the country every day.

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President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

Last January started out with a foreclosure moratorium, allowing time for the Obama Administration to put the final touches on Making Home Affordable — its $75 billion signature program aimed at helping 3 to 4 million homeowners. After bailing out banks and the financial system, the administration turned its efforts to borrowers on the verge of losing their homes. The program rolled out with fanfare in the spring.

But as 2010 begins, it is already clear that Making Home Affordable has fallen far short of its goals, with only 31,382 permanent loan modifications completed by the end of November. Last year, lenders were doing far more loan modifications on their own, before the Obama plan was launched. And although foreclosures show no signs of slowing down — the total number of foreclosures is predicted to reach 13 million during the next five years — no one is expecting a dramatic turnaround in helping people keep their homes. The only way the administration will get significant numbers of loan modifications done will be to bring back failed bankruptcy cramdown legislation, or to put billions of dollars into a mass effort to rework loans — neither of which seems politically feasible.

That means 2010 will likely be another year in which only a small number of loans get modified each month, while administration and mortgage servicers continue pointing fingers at each other for the impasse, some industry experts say. The only bright spot ahead for the government’s foreclosure prevention may be that down the road, foreclosures eventually will slow of their own accord. To use the Vietnam analogy, that will allow the Treasury Department to declare victory and get out of the loan modification business for good.

“I don’t hold out a great deal of hope that the administration will do more” to complete more loan modifications, said Patricia McCoy, a University of Connecticut law professor who studies financial services regulation. “There’s just no political will for that.”

As the program falters, a move to blame borrowers for problems with the effort has grown.

When difficulties with Making Home Affordable became apparent early on, servicers began contending that borrowers were refusing to provide income verification and other paperwork to quality for permanent modifications. Under Making Home Affordable, eligible borrowers first receive a three-month trial modification. In order to convert it to a permanent modification, they need to provide servicers with pay stubs and other documentation, as well as making all their trial payments.

Before the program began, servicers voluntarily completed 120,000 permanent loan modifications per month during the first quarter of last year, according to Alan White, a Valparaiso University law professor who studies loan modifications. Once the Obama administration’s program rolled out, those totals dropped to about 70,000 per month, as servicers worked to switch borrowers into Making Home Affordable. According to Treasury Department figures, nearly 700,000 trial modifications under Making Home Affordable were underway by the end of November. But with fewer than 32,000 converted to permanent modifications, it means a net drop of permanent loan modifications since the Obama plan began.

The voluntary plans by servicers, however, were called “extend and pretend” plans by critics, who said servicers simply were setting up repayment plans with late fees and other charges rolled into them, without ever actually reducing a borrower’s debt. Re-default rates on those loan modifications have been high as a result. Making Home Affordable has been more aggressive about lowering a borrower’s monthly payment, and the government is pressing servicers to switch to using its program — one reason why Making Home Affordable permanent loan modifications are lagging behind. In addition, some borrowers simply can’t qualify for the government’s program because they are too far underwater on their mortgages.

But unless a surge of permanent loan modifications suddenly occurred in December, the New Year will begin with fewer loans permanently reworked than during the same period a year ago. Treasury officials said in November that 375,000 trial loan modifications were scheduled to expire by the end of December, but it was unclear how many would be converted into permanent plans. Then, on Dec. 23, the government announced it would order servicers to give borrowers more time to complete trial loan modifications before kicking them out of the program.

Servicers have responded to the lack of progress so far by suggesting that borrowers are refusing to turn in income and other documentation because they probably lied about their incomes to qualify for their current mortgages. Liar Loans, or loans that required no documentation of income or assets, have been cited as a major culprit in the financial collapse, as some borrowers began defaulting on them just a few payments into their mortgages beginning in 2006.

Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance, which covers the lending industry, said the mortgage firms and servicers were skeptical from the start that any loan modification plan would work. “No one ever thought seriously that this would put a dent in the problem,” he said.

Now the industry is likely to fight back against any criticism not by doing more loan modifications, but by blaming borrowers, as well as the Obama administration, for a faulty program. All this may add to a backlash and moral hazard charges of helping out homeowners who may have lied to buy bigger homes than they could afford, while other homeowners who may have lost their jobs struggle to meet their mortgage payments, he said.

“I hear people saying all the time, that all the administration is doing is offering help to the people who deserve it the least,” Cecala said.

Housing counselors and attorneys find that argument infuriating. Already struggling to get servicers on board with Making Home Affordable, they now also face dealing with a shift in a public perception toward blaming the borrower.

Diane Thompson, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said the situation has gotten so ridiculous that servicers are simply looking for excuses to deny loan modifications.

“I met with a woman who oversees a counseling program in St. Louis, and she told me that the most common reason for denials now is that the borrower’s hardship isn’t permanent — surely at some point in time the borrower will get a new job,” she said. “And of course servicers continue to lose documents at an astounding rate. Any counselor I talk to is almost seething with frustration. I’ve had counselor after counselor in recent weeks tell me, “They’re just stalling.”

“I think there’s a bit of a face-off developing between the administration and servicers. My impression is that servicers find the program burdensome and so would like to see it fail, but would prefer not to be held accountable for that failure. And the administration, of course, would prefer to see the program succeed. Whether this results in a scrapping of the program or a major reworking of it, I have no idea.”

White, of Valparaiso, thinks the situation is even more dire.

“I would give it another month or two to see if they can do any better, but if not, it is definitely time to try something else,” he said of Making Home Afforable loan modifications. “As far as blaming the homeowners, that is really sad. From all reports I hear from housing counselors and legal aid lawyers, the servicers are losing the documentation. It is hard to believe that 75 percent of borrowers on temporary mods are making their payments but that they can’t come up with two pay stubs and a hardship statement. I think we are dealing with a massive failure and breach of contracts by the servicers.”

The administration will handle this by continuing its current tactic of singling out for public condemnation servicers who aren’t doing enough loan modifications. But that approach hasn’t worked so far, and it’s not likely to be any more successful this year, said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and expert on mortgage securitization.

“A shame list may work when country club members don’t pay their dues, but I don’t think it works with servicers and lenders,” Engel said. “If it did, they wouldn’t have been making and financing abusive loans all these years.”

What might work would be a massive, multi-billion dollar effort to get loans modified on a large scale, said Cecala, of Inside Mortgage Finance. But there would be little political support for spending that kind of money on troubled homeowners. Since the Obama administration sat back last year and declined to throw its weight behind mortgage cramdown legislation that ultimately failed, the White House is not expected to suddenly turn around and once again push for legislation to let bankruptcy judges modify mortgages to keep borrowers in their homes.

And not everyone agrees on the right approach to jumpstart the program. McCoy, for example, said she considers loan modifications a “one size fits one” option that can’t be done a mass scale.

As a result, Cecala sees an entirely new direction in 2010 — lenders will enlist debt collection agencies to aggressively go after homeowners who walk away from their underwater mortgages. Or lenders will move to ensure a borrower’s credit remains impaired for a decade or more, should they walk away. In the meantime, the Obama administration will likely talk a good game, and keep criticizing servicers, while only small numbers of homeowners end up with lower payments.

In the end, Cecala said, the only thing that will become clear is that “there’s plenty of blame to go around” for a program that began this time last year with lofty expectations, and then fell painfully short.

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“NPV Test: Failed.”

That was the red-lettered verdict on the computer screen of a CitiMortgage negotiator in June. The result: An 83-year-old widow in Illinois was denied a loan modification through the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable program, even though the employee admitted in an e-mail, “I am unable to come up with a reason for the denial.”

The Net Present Value test is a complex computer model used by loan servicers to determine whether a homeowner qualifies for the federal loan modification program.  The test compares two scenarios – modification and foreclosure – and determines which would be more profitable for the lender. If it’s foreclosure, the lender has no obligation to modify the loan. But the model is a black box. What goes in isn’t entirely clear, and what comes out isn’t always reliable.

The Treasury Department has refused to release the exact formula for the NPV model, bringing criticism from homeowner advocates and industry experts. Cloaking the NPV formula in secrecy makes it difficult to identify any potential flaws in the design of the program, which has generated fewer modifications than anticipated. There are assumptions built into the model, and they may not be the right ones, said Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center. “Someone needs to be able to review it.”

In congressional testimony last Wednesday, Michael Barr, assistant secretary for financial institutions, said that the Treasury Department was taking steps toward “greater disclosure of the NPV evaluation.” Full disclosure would bring the department in line with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which made public the NPV formula (PDF) developed for its loan modification program, on which Making Home Affordable is based. In the meantime, a Treasury spokeswoman responded to all questions by pointing to an overview of the model (PDF) available online.

In it, the department says that the NPV is an “objective test” that standardizes the process for evaluating mortgages under the program.

In testimony to the Senate Banking Committee in July, Thompson said that homeowners and advocates need access to the model to determine whether loan servicers have used the test accurately — or at all. Without it, she said, “homeowners are entirely reliant on the servicer’s good faith.”

She said that she had heard many anecdotal reports about servicers entering inaccurate information into the model. Because the results give little indication of which variable is to blame, there’s little recourse to challenge a lender’s refusal to modify. Nor is there an opportunity for the homeowner to correct the problem.

An additional concern is whether servicers are even using the test for all candidates. Irwin Trauss, supervising attorney at Philadelphia Legal Assistance, told a House Judiciary Committee panel in July about a homeowner who was denied a modification by Wells Fargo, even though “there was no suggestion that the NPV test … was even done.” When his organization brought the case to Fannie Mae, Wells Fargo was “embarrassed into” reversing its decision, according to Trauss. Wells Fargo did not respond to a request for comment.

The lack of transparency is also vexing because certain variables in the formula – like home value, the estimated time it will take to foreclose, the risk of default and estimated foreclosure costs – are subjective and could be improperly assessed, industry experts say.

“It’s more art than science,” said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. “Who knows whether the borrower will default, what the value of the property is, what will happen to home values,” he said. “I’m skeptical of all of it.”

“The valuation of a house is a very variable thing,” Trauss said. “A real estate agent drives by and gets a price, but it’s fairly worthless and subject to being overstated or understated depending on the lender.”

Nathan Reynolds, a mortgage broker assisting the 83-year-old Illinois homeowner with her loan modification on a pro bono basis, was given the rare chance by a CitiMortgage negotiator to see the actual numbers plugged into the NPV — and Reynolds insists that the company used an inflated home value. “They just pulled some bogus appraised value out of the air,” he said.

Mark Rodgers, a CitiMortgage spokesman, did not respond to questions about the house value, saying only, “We are pleased to have identified a solution for this borrower.” That solution is a modification requiring monthly payments that are about $900 less than she is paying now, but roughly $200 more than they would have been under the Making Home Affordable plan.

The purpose of the NPV test is to indicate to lenders how to make the most money off of a particular borrower. Ironically, homeowners who have more equity in their home may be at a disadvantage.

A “huge driver” of the test, according to Thompson, is the relationship between the current value of the home and the unpaid portion of the loan. If a house is worth more than the remaining mortgage balance, “there’s a benefit to the investor from foreclosing. It will recover the entire value of the loan if it forecloses, not if it modifies,” she said. The impact of this variable, however, can be offset by other considerations, like the amount of time it will take to foreclose or the likelihood of foreclosure.

If the NPV test ultimately churns out a “negative” result, meaning the lender will make more money by denying the modification, the homeowner won’t get a Making Home Affordable modification unless the lender agrees to take a loss.

“Even though the administration is promoting loan modifications, they’re still operating from the premise that ‘we don’t want you to make loan modifications that aren’t going to make more money than a foreclosure,’” Cecala said. “This is very different from what community groups see as the (program’s) purpose.”

This report produced by ProPublica.

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Sen Richard Durban, D-Ill.

A top Democrat on Monday warned the nation’s banks that, unless they get more aggressive in modifying mortgages to prevent foreclosure, Congress will renew previous efforts to empower families to keep their homes through bankruptcy. But Sen. Richard Durbin (Ill.), the upper-chamber’s second ranking Democrat, also gave the banks three months to comply with his ultimatum — a span over which roughly 1 million new homeowners are projected to enter foreclosure.

Congress and White House officials have created a series of programs designed to entice mortgage lenders and servicers to modify troubled loans voluntarily, but those efforts haven’t kept pace with an ever-rising number of foreclosures, which have already topped 1.5 million since January. The issue has plagued lawmakers, who have spent hundreds of billions of dollars propping up the nation’s banks, but have provided little in direct help for families caught in the swirl of the housing crisis, which was at the root of the current recession.

Durbin is the sponsor of legislation to alter the bankruptcy code to allow judges to trim, or “cramdown,” the terms of primary mortgages to keep people in their homes — an option current law doesn’t permit. The Senate killed the proposal earlier in the year, but it could resurface if foreclosures continue to rise and the banks continue their reluctance to cut mortgage rates on their own. Durbin, for his part, thinks the bankruptcy change can’t come soon enough.

“The voluntary efforts by some banks to slow the foreclosure crisis and stabilize America’s housing market have not worked,” Durbin said during a housing forum at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. “Whether the bankers and mortgage servicers are failing because of intransigence or incompetence doesn’t matter … They have to do much better.”

Read more at the Colorado Independent’s sister site in the nation’s capital, The Washington Independent.

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Durbin’s new initiative is raising the hopes of cramdown proponents. At Creditslips, University of Illinois law professor and credit expert Robert Lawless called Durbin’s revival “hopefully an indication there may be some interest in moving the legislation forward.”

There have been increasing reports (e.g., here) recently that lenders are not doing voluntary mortgage modifications in the numbers that need to happen. Yeah, I know — who could have possibly foreseen the possibility that a solely voluntary system would not work? There need to be carrots that encourage lenders to do the modifications. The change in the bankruptcy law is the missing piece — the stick that makes the program work.

A renewed interest in cramdown may have less to do with a sudden acknowledgement of its merits than the shortfalls of Making Home Affordable, the Obama administration’s program to encourage loan modifications.

The goal of that program is to rework loans for 3 to 4 million borrowers. But a new report by the General Accounting Office calls that estimate too optimistic. It also says the administration needs to do more to make sure servicers are equipped to participate – and that they follow the rules, CNN Money reports.

The GAO also critiqued the administration for not having the controls in place to properly monitor the program. Specifically, the agency is concerned that Treasury is not evaluating servicers’ capacity to meet the plan’s requirements and guidelines. Also, the agency has failed to fully staff the Homeownership Preservation Office, which is responsible for overseeing the modification program.

And, though Treasury has hired Freddie Mac to review servicers’ performance, it has not put established procedures to address those servicers who don’t comply.

Already, reports have surfaced that financial institutions are not adhering to the program’s rules. At a Senate Banking Committee hearing last week, a consumer advocate said some servicers are violating the guidelines by demanding upfront payments, denying borrowers not in default and initiating foreclosures while borrowers’ applications are being reviewed. Senator Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., has asked the administration to look into these allegations.

Given those drawbacks, it’s little wonder that tactics like cramdown are being revived. The Obama administration plans to meet with servicers July 28, to pressure them to modify more loans. But with rising unemployment contributing to a record 1.5 million foreclosures just in the first half of this year, a strategy that involves more than just a carrot may be called for. The Obama administration stood on the sidelines before, as cramdown failed, and has openly abandoned the idea. But unless it can get servicers to not only write down loans but to reduce loan balances as well — something that hasn’t happened so far – it may be forced to rethink that decision and take a second look at cramdown, the missing stick in its strategy so far.

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The Washington Independent reports:

Hoping to bring “cramdown” legislation back onto Congress’ radar, a House Judiciary subpanel met this afternoon to re-examine whether bankruptcy judges should be empowered to alter mortgage loans in order to prevent foreclosures.

Witnesses included the obligatory consumer advocates, a conservative think-tanker and a university professor. But the Treasury Department, although asked to send a representative of its own, declined to do so.

A Democratic aide said the agency was simply too slammed this week with other hearings to meet the request (and the Treasury didn’t respond to requests for comment), but the pattern is getting suspicious.

In April, for example, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was hardly enthusiastic when asked if bankruptcy changes were a vital element of the administration’s plan to stem foreclosures.

More recently, the White House watched in silence as the cramdown bill was obliterated in the Senate, where 12 Democrats voted against it. Some Democrats said later that they interpreted the president’s silence to mean they were free to oppose the measure.

And now here’s the Treasury, in the middle of the continued foreclosure crisis, saying it’s too busy to talk with Congress about ways to keep folks in their homes?

Cramdown legislation would make it possible for homeowners at risk of foreclosure to go before bankruptcy judges, who could restructure loans to make it possible for people to continue paying. Under the plan, Judges would be empowered to reduce the amount owed on the home to the home’s present value, shrinking payments significantly, especially these days, as property values have sunk. The program would save millions of homeowners from foreclosure. Keeping people in their homes would be a great boon to the economy in addition to alleviating the great social costs of rampant foreclosure and dislocation.

It’s not a radical idea. If you own a mobile home or a boat or a second home, you can already go through this process. The proposal would be a relatively simple and fast fix top an enormous problem, proponents say.

So who is opposing cramdown? Members of the financial sector, of course, and their lawmaker friends.

NPR has been covering the story. Here’s a report that aired in March and here’s one from November.

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