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.

Reckless Endangerment describes the players that helped create the housing bubble and bust that were at the heart of the financial crisis. Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner focus on how regulators and other officials were complicit by promoting liberalized housing finance as a way to increase homeownership. Their account chronicles how a naïve vision of the American Dream, that of homeownership as the foundation of upward mobility and stable communities, turned into a nightmare in the hands of a growth driven and increasingly predatory mortgage complex.

While there is a rhetorical pivot to jobs, jobs, jobs , what the White House is proposing is not even close to the most they could do. What we have here is actually a poverty of imagination. There are plenty of things that the executive branch can do – power they’ve had since they came into office – to boost jobs. They have $80-$100 billion in unused TARP funds that could be put to productive use, including at least $40 billion dedicated for housing. They could use Fannie and Freddie much more aggressively than this renting idea, creating a kind of modern-day HOLC to buy up homes.

The Obama Administration knows that they’re going to be cutting spending at some level over the next year, damaging economic performance coming into an election year. If it doesn’t happen on the debt limit deal, it’ll happen in the 2012 budget. So they’re looking elsewhere for how to use the power of the office to improve the economy and by association their political position in 2012. And they’ve hit on the point that the housing market is a giant lead weight on the economy.