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.

Ezra Klein has a very long kind of apologia of the political class for why they failed to return the nation to prosperity after the financial crisis and Great Recession of 2008. I think the article is very good in capturing a point of view of the Administration and its defenders and their litany of excuses.

I could hardly keep up with all the reports on housing that came out over the past 24 hours. So let me try to summarize a couple: • A recently unsealed lawsuit shows that banks cheated military veterans by illegally adding attorney’s fees to their refinancing loans. Illegal fee additions have a rich history, especially [...]

A couple stories today show regulators engaging in the absolutely shameful tactic of looking backward and not forward when it comes to the systemic fraud in the mortgage market, in the mistaken belief that crimes perpetrated in the past should be punished. I don’t know where they got this idea.

Let’s review the bill together! The legislation is an amalgam of two different efforts. A bill co-sponsored by Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and Olympia Snowe (R-ME) would give unions and industries greater ability to file claims against illegal Chinese trade practices on a case-by-case basis, and would allow the Commerce Department to factor in currency manipulation into any tariffs the US puts up as a result. This would increase duties against Chinese products, which are being effectively subsidized by currency manipulation. The Congressional Budget Office estimated last year that such a measure would collect $125 million in new tariff revenues, but the main impact would be to put political pressure on China to revalue its currency.

The market may be pricing in the fact that Treasury has more cash on hand than it claims, enough to hold things together past August 2nd, past the Social Security payments on August 3rd and even past the large debt rollover on August 4th.

There’s a great deal of credibility tied up in the imprecise rendering of August 2nd as the drop-dead date. If the Administration actually has the cash to go a bit further, it will confirm the basest suspicions of the conservatives.

That’s why OMB Director Jack Lew was out there today denying that Treasury had the additional headroom.

I don’t think the President is a weak negotiator. He wants different things from the people who elected him. And people are beginning to see that. There was no reason to yoke deficit reduction to the debt limit, building a doomsday device that could blow up in the country’s face. Obama had to make that decision, or at least accede to the Republican request. He wanted a grand bargain to “take deficits off the table” and burnish his image. He was willing to compromise plenty to do that, enough so it confused the entire notion of what was a compromise and what was a belief.

It was fun while it lasted, though I never thought this Administration would try anything so risky. And indeed, today the Treasury Department’s General Counsel, George Madison, via an email to the New York Times, says that they have no ability to issue debt if Congress doesn’t increase the debt limit.

This could be the ultimate in finance lobby chutzpah:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s potential departure is highlighting how much Wall Street’s reputation might have recovered from the financial crisis — and sparking chatter that one of their own could take his place [...]

Geithner’s departure would represent a full turnover of the Obama economic team that came into office in January 2009. It’s too soon to speculate on a replacement, but consider this. A lot of people focus their ire on Geithner and Summers, as if they just magically popped up in the most critical positions on the economy to give an otherwise Keynesian liberal socialist President bad advice. When both of them are gone, I hope we get around to reassessing that.