Treasury Undersecretary for Domestic Finance Robert Steel said Thursday that current mortgage-related initiatives — including HOPE NOW’s loss mitigation programs, an ASF-led “rate-freeze” plan, and Project Lifeline — need time to work, and that now was not the time to be considering a Federally-funded mortgage bailout. In remarks delivered at Reuters’ Housing Summit in New York, [...]

The Office of Thrift Supervision is weighing a proposal that would allow lenders to refinance underwater borrowers into a government-insured loan without immediately forgiving principal, creating a so-called “negative equity certificate” to cover the difference between the original loan amount and current property values. The idea is that OTS-regulated lenders would establish a nominal certificate representing [...]