What the HAMP series shows in excruciating detail is that the current set of procedures to reduce foreclosures and keep people in homes just haven’t worked for the vast majority of borrowers at risk. But what can be done to reverse this trend and achieve the following goals: 1) help borrowers, 2) clear the market and return housing prices to a sustainable level and 3) mitigate the overall financial risk to the economy. These are the near-term crisis points for housing, what hasn’t been resolved by focusing on anti-predatory lending laws or the future of Fannie and Freddie. So what’s out there?

This chart showing US home vacancies tells you everything you need to know about the near-term future of the economy. The United States has twice as many vacant homes as the entire housing stock of Canada. The US has ten times more people than Canada, too, but that doesn’t exactly help us think about the problem.

Treasury defended the mortgage program they set up to prevent foreclosures, which hasn’t met any of the Administration’s initial goals, by saying that homeowners benefited from temporarily low monthly payments and some foreclosures, which were inevitable, were delayed.

Shahien Nasiripour and Arthur Delaney have done the nation a great service with their very detailed examination of the failed HAMP program, which has succeeded only in delaying foreclosures rather than stopping them, and which has led to more indebtedness for borrowers and more cash for the big banks.

Everyone who has tried to make this voluntary system work must know that they are operating without a hammer, a legitimate incentive (not the relatively weak cash outlay HAMP offers) to the banks, in the form of a stick and not a carrot, to implement the modifications. Cramdown could have been that hammer, but a captured Congress decided against it. So all that’s left as leverage for someone facing foreclosure is the threat to walk away.

While it’s perhaps a subtle rhetorical point, it is, to me, a stunning revelation of the way in which the Obama Administration still fails to see how the banks should be punished, because their fraud devastated all these families. Obama fails to see that housing has not just an upside–investment, jobs, growth–but also a huge downside of crumbling communities as one after another neighbor gets evicted from their home.

The Banksters have been fighting tooth and nail against financial reform, and have been having a good bit of success while the nation is focused on health care reform. Their strategy is the same as it always is: they call on the members of Congress with money past and future peeking out of their pockets; they invent some minimal justification for the weakest possible regulation; and they find someone to front for their faulty arguments.

The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009, one of the most sweeping regulatory changes to the financial industry since the Great Depression, passed the House of Representatives today by a final vote of 223-202. On final passage, 27 Democrats voted no along with every Republican voting.

I saw Dana Milbank hovering for a few minutes at the back of the panel I was speaking on at America’s Future Now yesterday. He fills his word quota for the day by concluding that there were fewer people at this year’s conference and therefore less passion, but anyone who lived through the Clinton years should have been able to predict that if a Democrat won the White House most