After months of talks, Ally Financial, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo agreed to pay a total of $5 billion in cash to try to remedy this fiasco. They will also help homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages by reducing the principal on their loans by a combined $17 billion over the next three years.  Borrowers who qualify will get $3 billion in refinancing arrangements. Those who were improperly foreclosed on will get a combined $1.5 billion. That probably nets out to less than $2,000 a person.  The banks crowed that this settlement would help the economy and the reputation of the mortgage industry. Michael J. Heid, president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, characterized the deal as “a very important step toward restoring confidence in mortgage servicing and stability in the housing market.”  But it’s hard to imagine that this one settlement will be enough to restore trust in loan servicers. Given what we know about their questionable practices — how they larded improper fees on struggling homeowners, for example, and forced people to buy home insurance at three times market rates — restoring confidence in these firms will take some doing.  There’s no doubt that the banks are happy with this deal. You would be, too, if your bill for lying to courts and end-running the law came to less than $2,000 per loan file.  As for the supposed benefits to the economy, skeptics abound. One of them is Paul Diggle, property economist at Capital Economics in London. In a report last week, he rejected the notion — espoused by both banks and government authorities — that this deal would help turn around the American housing market.  For most homeowners, it will barely move the needle. Forgiving $17 billion in principal “is a drop in the ocean,” Mr. Diggle said, “given that close to 11 million borrowers are underwater on their loans to the tune of $700 billion in total.” Doing the math, $17 billion in write-downs would be about 2.4 percent of the total negative equity weighing down borrowers across the nation now.  Yves Smith, the perspicacious founder of the Naked Capitalism Web site, was especially critical. In a post, “The Top 12 Reasons Why You Should Hate the Mortgage Settlement,” she wrote that this deal was a stealth bailout of the major banks.  Why? It will improve the value of the second liens or home equity lines of credit they own. These vast holdings — roughly $400 billion — are worthless if the first mortgages preceding them are underwater. But if the banks don’t write down the second liens alongside the first mortgages, the seconds become more valuable. A lower principal balance on the first mortgage makes the second more likely to pay.  But perhaps the largest question looming over this settlement is how it will be policed. Recent history is littered with agreements that required banks to take specific steps to make amends. All too often, the banks have skated away from their promises.  A prime example is a settlement over predatory lending that was reached by Countrywide Financial in 2008. Led by attorneys general in California and Illinois, that deal had Countrywide vowing to provide $8.4 billion in loan relief to borrowers in the form of lower interest rates and loan modifications.  It sounded good on paper. But Bank of America, Countrywide’s parent, defied many aspects of the settlement, according to Catherine Cortez Masto, Nevada’s attorney general. She sued Bank of America last summer, contending that it had raised interest rates on loan modifications even though Countrywide had promised to lower them.  Bank of America also declined to provide loan modifications to qualified homeowners as required in the deal and improperly proceeded with foreclosures while borrowers’ modification requests were pending, Ms. Masto’s suit said. Furthermore, the bank failed to meet the settlement’s 60-day requirement on granting new loan terms, allowing months — and in some cases, more than a year — to go by with no resolution, the lawsuit said.  Bank of America has disputed the allegations.  Other borrower programs also seemed promising until bank resistance stymied them. Consider the Foreclosure Mediation Program in Nevada, set up in 2009 to help resolve the mountain of delinquent and troubled loans in that state.  Under the program, banks must mediate with borrowers who request such help. But two years of statistics, through last September, show 5,771 cases where mediators found that banks had failed to participate in good faith or were not complying with other aspects of the mediation law. That is equivalent to 42 percent of all the mediations completed in the program.  Perhaps more troubling, the percentage of mediations where lenders have failed to comply has risen in the most recent six months of data.  “It’s astounding that in such a huge percentage of cases the lenders are not complying,” said Philip A. Olsen, a former Nevada Supreme Court settlement conference judge. “The banks have learned that they can thumb their noses at the program and it won’t cost them anything.”  So you have to wonder whether banks will thumb their noses at last week’s settlement, too. That makes policing compliance crucial.  That task falls to Joseph A. Smith Jr., the banking commissioner for North Carolina since 2002. Not only must he oversee the monetary relief programs in the settlement, he must also enforce extensive changes to loan-servicing practices that the deal entails.  I had hoped to ask Mr. Smith how he planned to monitor the expansive and arcane terms of the settlement and what size of army he would be deploying to ensure that the banks fulfilled their promises. But he was not available on Friday to answer my questions.  An administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the deal, said that Mr. Smith would hire accountants and consulting firms to audit the banks’ performance and that as monitor, he would be able to interview bank employees. If the monitor finds that a bank has failed to meet its commitment, he can impose penalties of up to $5 million, depending on the errors’ seriousness or frequency.  Additional details will emerge. But this kind of minutiae will determine whether the settlement succeeds. So many borrower programs have failed since the foreclosure crisis began. Another nonstarter will only add to the mistrust that many people harbor toward those large institutions, both public and private, that contributed so mightily to this mess.
The settlement reached last week over questionable mortgage practices by major American banks hardly cracks the iceberg that is the foreclosure mess.