The Administration continued to push back on one particular story from Shahien Nasiripour by devoting an entire blog post about whether bank servicers can count the incentives from HAMP modifications toward the “credits” in the foreclosure fraud settlement. But Shahien’s story didn’t make that claim (thought the title hinted), and we’re still without actual terms to see how it all works.

The state and federal regulators may complain that criticism of the bank settlement without actual terms are distortion, and that they have a very difficult job to figure out the terms for 49 states and multiple federal agencies, and they’re just working out the complexities. Well, they should have thought of that when they announced a settlement to great fanfare. Terms matter, and without them, the settlement is no more than a theory.

Shahien Nasiripous has posted two stories for the Financial Times about the intersection of the foreclosure fraud settlement and HAMP. I wrote previously about how HAMP modifications could count toward the settlement, meaning that banks would get partially paid out. Shahien confirms this.

Because there’s no actual term sheet for the foreclosure fraud deal it’s virtually impossible to assess it, and every group who released a press statement calling it “a drop in the bucket” or a “down payment” or a “first step” should withdraw before the facts are known. But we should be talking about how the settlement will interact with the existing Administration policies around housing.

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.

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.

SIGTARP isn’t happy about the failure of the Treasury to enforce its regulations on home mortgage servicers. Treasury has no response, and just whines. Anonymously.

I actually find it positive that no settlement has been reached, because the driving forces behind the settlement – the Treasury Department, DoJ and HUD – did no meaningful investigation that would dictate the amounts needed for a reasonable settlement. In fact, to the extent that anything has happened on foreclosure fraud over the past year, it has come from the only entities willing to do their jobs and follow the law: a handful of state Attorneys General doing the investigations and handing out the indictments that others won’t. Beau Biden, Eric Schneiderman, Martha Coakley and Kamala Harris, among others, have pointed the way forward for legitimate accountability for banks involved in systematically stealing homes. And Catherine Cortez Masto, the Attorney General of Nevada, needs to be singled out for special praise. Because thanks to the law she helped push in the state, criminalizing wrongful and fraudulent foreclosures, evictions have slowed to a crawl.

The Obama administration’s new proposals to help struggling home owners avoid foreclosure will help some, but they’re too limited. Here are some ideas that would accomplish a lot more.