This is a great example of what is wrong with "progressive" America.

(1) there has never been an actual settlement - just years of uninformed speculation - you have no idea whether it is bank friendly or not, just a naive reliance on what people with agendas leak.

(2) the decision is not up to the Federal government alone, the state AGs are independent agents

(3) People who actually know something about litigation understand why settling for sub-optimal terms is often a good idea. Particularly when we have the right wing judiciary to consider: the DOJ would have to be fucking stupid not to worry about losing.

(4)nobody who is not participating in the negotiations has any idea about what is on the table and only the various representatives know the difference between stated position and actual position. This is a common "progressive" mistake: staring at the poker table and without looking at the cards panicking about what faces people make.

So you have ZERO IDEA what the Obama administration is doing. You are just making use of circular reasoning to agree with yourself.

A simplistic, blame the victims gloss! Most of the damage was done to people who needed to buy a house during the bubble which was blown by Wall Street fraudsters who commissioned and financed mortgage originators and who financed the process with cheap money from "Bubbles" Greenspan. They were left underwater when prices dropped and then defaulted when one or more family members lost their jobs. But the tip of the spear was the sub-prime, adjustable rate and alternate A loans which were pushed by the Wall Street commissioned mortgage originators even for people who qualified for FHA and other standard loans. Greenspan is on record telling a room full of real estate and mortgage originators that "financial innovation" had a lot of room left to keep the expansion going. You gloss over the massive differential in market knowledge between the originators and the borrowers as well as the incentives for originators to saddle borrowers with expensive and risky loans, even when they could have qualified for better terms.

As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

There is a wave of foreclosures and then there is foreclosure fraud (e.g., foreclosing on people who never borrowed to buy their home, forging documents, stacking courts...).

I'm talking about the latter, and you misdirect with the former.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker