Excerpts from the latimes.com:

The federal government’s response to the home mortgage crisis always has been an exercise in living down to one’s lowest expectations.

The $25-billion settlement with five big banks over foreclosure abuses that U.S. housing officials and 49 state attorneys general announced last month was supposed to be an exception. Here, at last, was real compensation from those who played key roles in the disaster.

But with every passing day, the shortcomings of this deal appear to proliferate. That is, as far as we know, because the specific terms of the settlement are still not public, nearly one month after it was unveiled in Washington with the sort of fanfare formerly associated with the splashdown of a space capsule.

The latest explanation for the secrecy is that the parties are waiting until the settlement is filed with a federal court in Washington, which could happen this week or next. But the explanation only evades the question of why the deal wasn’t filed in court before or simultaneously with the big dog-and-pony show, as is customary with high-profile legal settlements.

It’s fair to say that there are positive aspects to the settlement. It creates some incentives for the five banks — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Ally Financial (the former GMAC) — to be more aggressive in offering relief to strapped borrowers whose home values have fallen below their mortgage balances.

For each variety of mortgage relief, the banks will get a certain credit against their $20-billion target. For every dollar of balance reduction offered a homeowner who is up to 75% underwater, for example, they get a dollar credit; for principal forgiveness on delinquent home-equity lines, the credit ranges from 10% to 90%.

We’ve got a frozen housing market,” observes Arthur Wilmarth, a banking expert at George Washington University Law School. “If we can unfreeze it to some extent and still make the banks feel some pain for what they’ve done, that’s not a bad result.”

California Atty. Gen. Kamala D. Harris also extracted special consideration for the state, which with 26% of the nation’s negative housing equity is the deepest-underwater state in the union.

Despite the secrecy shrouding the overall deal, it does appear that the California-specific provisions in the settlement require BofA, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo to meet a $12-billion target in California homeowner relief. State officials believe that the provisions will encourage the banks to do more writing down of principal balances on underwater loans than they will in the rest of the country, front-load the relief more into the first year of the agreement, and to focus more on 12 particularly hard-hit counties.

Yet some troubling aspects that emerged when the settlement was unveiled Feb. 9th, look even worse a month later. One is how federal regulators are helping the banks meet the costs of the settlement. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a major bank regulator, said on the very day of the settlement announcement that it was giving the five banks in the deal a pass on $394 million in penalties it would otherwise have assessed them for shoddy, and shady, mortgage and foreclosure practices.

It turns out that two other federal regulators quietly took similar steps. The Federal Reserve Board rolled $766.5 million of penalties it assessed the banks for unsafe and unsound mortgage practices into the foreclosure settlement. And just last week, the Treasury Department announced that it would pay BofA and JPMorgan Chase some $171 million in incentives it had withheld since June because of the banks’ shortcomings in dealing with homeowners under the government’s chronically underperforming Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP.

The comptroller’s office and Fed write-downs are predicated on the banks’ meeting their obligations under the foreclosure deal. The idea is that the banks will have to take actions valued at as least as much as the penalties being waived. BofA, for example, was assessed $175.5 million in sanctions by the Fed. If it attains credits of $175.5 million under the foreclosure settlement by modifying borrowers’ loans and taking other steps, it will owe the Fed nothing.

Another murky question involves the number of homeowners who may be helped with mortgage relief. Initial estimates from the state and federal negotiators placed that figure at 2 million families. This always seemed a bit on the high side, especially since mortgages owned by the government-sponsored companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which hold more than half the nation’s underwater mortgages, aren’t participating in the deal.

Brookings Institution analyst Ted Gayer last week concluded that other carve-outs will limit the number to 500,000 of the nation’s 11 million underwater borrowers. Among other points, he observes that the five participating banks service only 55% of all mortgages.

The aspect of the lost opportunity is that the settlement, to the extent it inflicts any pain on the banks, does so entirely at the institutional level.

“What’s most discouraging is that you see none of the individuals who were driving these things being held in any way accountable,” Wilmarth says. “The only thing that will actually change behavior going forward is for the individuals who were at the center of this to be held personally responsible and be forced to give up their ill-gotten gains. Then maybe their successors might think twice.”

http://www.latimes.com/business/realestate/la-fi-hiltzik-20120307,0,246162.column