I wanted to take note of this one story from last week, about the fact that the foreclosure fraud settlement is only a three-year agreement, meaning that all the vaunted reforms of the servicing market end up expiring at the end of the time period. But the solution lies with Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s efforts to adopt permanent standards for servicers.

Regardless of the recent bullish stories on the housing market, housing market fundamentals are lousy. Demand in the last decade was wildly distorted by banker abandonment of underwriting and appraisals. Now bankers are worsening the crash they created. As a result, prices will just keep falling, and foreclosures cannot lead to clearing the market (regardless of what some say). Foreclosures can only make the problems worse.

News roundup from Tuesday, April 24, including stories and links about the François Hollande, European financial crisis, austerity, ALEC, Grover Norquist, Leon Panetta, Texas Board of Education, Brazilian dam, Cuba, honeybees, BP, Frankenfood, foreclosures, white killer whale and more.

RealtyTrac data shows that judicial foreclosure states, where the integrity of the documents is most acute, experienced a spike in foreclosure filings over these three months. The non-judicial foreclosure states have seen falling filings, perhaps correlated to the falling unemployment rate, perhaps correlated to not much. The full effect of the settlement has yet to be seen.

A small band of foreclosure fraud fighters in Florida, ground zero for the housing crisis, decided to get involved in public service at one of the most basic levels possible. These activists want to become the public official who tracks the transfer of mortgages in their respective counties. Sometimes this is called a register of deeds, or recorder of deeds, or a clerk of court. It’s traditionally a backwater for legacy types who, if they’re lucky, never get their name in the papers. But since the foreclosure fraud crisis, a few of these registers of deeds have shown real leadership in exposing criminal fraud in the mortgage document process. Inspired by their efforts, one of the leading foreclosure fraud activists in the nation, Lisa Epstein, is running for office.

I’ve noted before that one of the reasons we don’t get good housing policy in this country is that the media by and large doesn’t understand it. When Ed Henry shows that he doesn’t know how home loans work, it means more complex issues about housing policy have no chance of moving past the demagoguery stage. That’s what I thought when I saw this story from ABC News about how taxpayers are paying for mowing lawns! Oh noes!

Progressive organizations who were hopeful that the foreclosure fraud investigative unit would do its job are still waiting for the promised investigators to be idenditified and begin work. Some groups are starting to believe they’ve been had, fearing the announced unit was just to buy them off. No kidding.

We’re learning that the foreclosure fraud settlement is leading to a jump in foreclosures, as the banks feel less constrained by their document problems, secure in the knowledge that they can just buy their way out of them. And the other part of this is that, despite the settlement, the banks have not stopped the behavior that required the settlement in the first place. And here’s some more evidence of that, from yet another example of the broken servicing market.

A federal judge in DC swiftly approved the foreclosure fraud settlement yesterday. Actually four of the consent orders with the five largest mortgage servicers were approved Wednesday, but we only learned publicly of the approval of all five settlements yesterday.

Some investor groups had talked about challenging the terms of the settlement, but this approval happened so quickly, and without even so much as a hearing, that they had no time to react. This is the very definition of a rubber stamp.

Over the next several weeks, these bank accountability leaders told me they will step up their direct efforts against the banks and also the Administration.