Obama didn’t get to determine the state of the economy when he took over, but he had the largest mandate of any modern president and his economic recovery plan failed to deliver for anyone except bank owners.
“What it shows is we bailed out Wall Street — that wasn’t entirely Obama’s doing at all, that was Bush and the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, and so forth — but housing was almost entirely under his control. Homeowners were not bailed out,” Ryan Cooper, one of the report’s authors, told The Intercept about the findings of the report.
The authors singled out the Home Affordable Modification Program for censure for seeking to incentivize mortgage services to modify loans.
The failures of HAMP are well-documented — it ended up helping big banks and doing very little for homeowners.
The authors suggest that the New Deal’s Home Owners’ Loan Corporation is a model that may have yielded different outcomes. HOLC purchased mortgages directly and refinanced them, but such a model of direct government intervention and control of an economic problem has been anathema to modern government officials.
What’s wild is that an HOLC-type solution as the auuthors suggest also would have bailed out the banks. It just would have done so in a way that saved homeowners too. Obama specifically pursued a policy that bailed out the banks without saving the homeowners.
Obama didn’t get to determine the state of the economy when he took over, but he had the largest mandate of any modern president and his economic recovery plan failed to deliver for anyone except bank owners.
What’s wild is that an HOLC-type solution as the auuthors suggest also would have bailed out the banks. It just would have done so in a way that saved homeowners too. Obama specifically pursued a policy that bailed out the banks without saving the homeowners.