What about housing? There seems to be universal dissatisfaction with the process for helping people who are facing foreclosure.
We were very careful from the beginning—but the qualifications get lost—to say that we are going to focus the bulk of the financial force on bringing interest rates and mortgage rates down to cushion the fall in housing prices and help stabilize home values, which will feed into people's basic sense of financial stability.?[We tried to make clear] that what we'd do to prevent foreclosure would be very targeted and limited. We wouldn't try to keep people in homes they couldn't fundamentally afford. While we thought we'd lowered expectations, we're still being hung for letting expectations get ahead of policy.
You idiots, you expected too much!!!
This pace of modifications puts the program on track to offer assistance to up to 3 to 4 million homeowners over the next three years, our target on February 18.
Of course "to offer assistance" is not the same thing as assisting, but who knows where anyone would get the crazy idea that a $75 billion program might actually help some people...