Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.
As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.
Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.
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Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.
The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).
How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth
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