New documents obtained by ProPublica through the Freedom of Information Act provide new insights into what a complete disaster the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has been. HAMP was supposed to facilitate mortgage modifications but the Treasury apparently had little or no real oversight of the program that was rife with problems.

Maybe S&P is right to fear a tectonic adjustment in US economic policies.

Nearly nine months after its formation, a $30 billion government fund to foster small-business lending has yet to pay out a single dime, even as the nation struggles with traumatic levels of unemployment.

Lori Montgomery reports that the White House is “speeding up” debt limit talks, with an outline of spending cuts and deficit triggers in exchange for a debt limit increase. Montgomery breaks some news about one potential trigger, which would, according to Delaware Senator Chris Coons (D), lead to tax increases and specifically entitlement cuts, if annual targets for the deficit are not met. Coons thinks this would motivate both sides to get to the savings goals by other means, rather than whacking the safety net or raise taxes, but it sounds like a dangerous game.

The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) has basically been a disaster since its start, and it remains one to this day. Roughly nine months ago, the Government Accountability Office examined the program, found many problems, and made several recommendations to improve it. Since then, the Treasury department has failed to make most of the needed changes.

At FDL News, David Dayen covers an article on Elizabeth Warren in which she argues, correctly, that if the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been up and running years ago, much of the banking/mortgage fraud could/would have been prevented.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But there’s something missing from the polite Ms. Warren’s telling.

The Financial Stability Oversight Council met today; they discussed foreclosure fraud and securitization. For less than 15 minutes.

The optics of it — this apparent lack of concern about the way the banks will postpone admitting to their own insolvency by degrading the private property system in this country at the expense of real people — suck. They sure provide zero confidence that the FSOC intends to do its job to prevent this from becoming a systemic crisis.

When the votes were tallied on the night of November 2, 2008, I was at a bar in Moab, Utah – the one rabid Democratic stronghold in a rabidly Republican state – to enjoy the hysteria as Barack Obama was summoned to lead the country out of the disaster of eight years of George W. Bush. People shook hands, hooted, clinked glasses, got drunk, raised fists, wept. The good liberals had elected a visionary Democrat to the presidency, who, blessed with a Democratic majority in Congress, would fashion “hope” and “change” into a palpable policy. I was told that in parts of Brooklyn, my hometown, voters ran through the streets banging pots and pans. The feeling was of religious jubilee – the new dispensation was upon us, and 2009 would mark the emancipation from the old rottenness. Corruption and fraud and deceit and war and oligarchy would be washed from the body politic. It was the beginning of the restoration of the republic.

Now that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been created, everyone is waiting for Obama to nominate someone to head it. The longer this drags on, it becomes a less a question of “Who?” and more a question of “Why not Elizabeth Warren?”

That’s a question that the Obama White House does NOT want to answer.

I can’t quite determine what the Times’s business columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin is trying to tell us about the Bush/NY Fed 2008 backdoor bank bailout via A.I.G. But the evidence he cites seems to support the “backdoor” theory more than ever.