Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor, consumer advocate and candidate for US Senate in Masachusetts, said today that the Federal Housing Finance Agence (FHFA) must increase their actions on behalf of homeowners, including principal reductions, something that the agency has resisted to this point. Speaking along side Barney Frank, Mike Capuano and MA AG Martha Coakley, Warren’s message was aimed straight at FHFA’s Ed DeMarco, who’s been stalling on principal writedowns.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman abruptly cancelled a conference call yesterday 10 minutes before it was to begin. The subject was supposed to be the foreclosure fraud settlement, amid speculation Schneiderman would announce that he would join. This would spur other holdouts to join, presumably, and at the very least break the somewhat united front against the settlement. But it didn’t happen, and the cause is likely the banks objecting to the lawsuits he and others have filed or could file.

The STOCK Act was a media-driven bill that politicians felt they could not resist after 60 Minutes ran a (somewhat flawed) exposé on the insider trading activities of members of Congress. Once a must-pass bill like that gets into circulation, it’s going to become an attractive target for messaging amendments where members try to hitch a ride with their pet issues. And because Congress is held in low public esteem, the best of these amendments would deal with the same kind of ethics issues.

I didn’t think much of the HAMP changes announced last Friday, but my pessimism mainly came from the fact that HAMP itself is an irreparably damaged program that nobody wants to use. There’s also the point that the GSEs are generally uninterested in a principal reduction program, and servicers are conflicted. There’s little reason to hope these changes will help much.

There’s wide agreement President Obama will likely have to make more recess appointments if he wants to staff key positions, including the newly-created vacancy at the Office of Management and Budget, as Jack Lew has become White House Chief of Staff. The assumption here is that Republicans will react to recess appointments at the CFPB and the NLRB by refusing to confirm any other Presidential appointee. Now California Dems want a recess appointment for the FHFA.

Bloomberg News has another blockbuster story today on the heels of its release of information about Federal Reserve bailouts. Here they have former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson essentially aiding and abetting an insider trading scheme while in office. But will there be prosecutions?

California Attorney General Kamala Harris has been awfully quiet amid pressure from the Obama Administration to agree to a settlement with the big banks over foreclosure fraud. So it’s interesting that she popped up this week to call for the resignation of Ed DeMarco, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

Mike Bloomberg is a pretty rich man. He made his money delivering financial information to people in power. Needless to say, he doesn’t have that personal touch when it comes to talking about the concerns of the poor. In fact, he’s decided to get the story of the mortgage meltdown completely wrong to implicate Congress rather than his Wall Street buddies.

Tom Miller’s feewings are huwt. He doesn’t like how he’s being portrayed by those who have actually taken a look at how he’s been handling the 50-state “investigation” on foreclosure fraud. And he’s having his top deputy defend him to major media.

I don’t know if Gretchen Morgensen’s story on the backroom attempts at arm-twisting to get Eric Schneiderman to play ball with the foreclosure fraud settlement, and drop his efforts to actually investigate the depths of the abuse, should come as a surprise to anyone. I think we can actually be happy that it’s being made explicit and public, however, because the leak is certainly not coming from the Obama Administration, who look pathetic in this telling, completely in the pockets of the likes of “we’ll help you out” Bank of America.