Somehow it all comes back around to what's happening at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a Boston Globe writer contends. In a new opinion piece, a Globe editorial writer suggests that without principal reductions at the agencies, the banks recent push to allow principal reductions is not enough to create a full housing rebound.

Here's a bit more from the piece:

Principal write-downs work, but Fannie and Freddie have dodged them because they’re politically poisonous. So even as one branch of the government has forced the country’s biggest banks to use principal reduction as a tool for keeping homeowners out of foreclosure, the two mortgage companies that taxpayers own, Fannie and Freddie, won’t join in. The companies would rather foreclose than write down principal for troubled borrowers. They’re refusing to sell foreclosed homes to nonprofits that sell foreclosed homes back to their former owners — a post-foreclosure tool for reducing principal — even in the face of a Massachusetts law banning such restrictions.