So, What Took Them So Long

JP Morgan Chase, my former bank (I switched because they are not consumer-friendly) has finally done something about mortgages:

JPMorgan Chase the nation's largest bank and one of its biggest mortgage lenders, temporarily halted foreclosures Friday and offered to renegotiate a swathe of mortgages.

The global credit crisis, which began with subprime mortgages, increasingly appears to be affecting a wider range of consumer loans and, according to a report published by First American CoreLogic Friday, nearly one in five U.S. mortgage borrowers now owes more on the loan than their home is worth.

Chase was wise enough to avoid issuing subprime loans -- and then bought a whole bunch of them when it acquired WaMu.

Note: This article seems to be fairly straightforward and makes the banks sound like knights in shining armor, until you reach the parts that note that Bank of America, for example, agreed to expand its mortgage reduction program after negotiating with 11 state attorneys general. You have to wonder whether that kind of pressure was brought to bear on Chase -- NY AG Andrew Cuomo is investigating Wall Street, after all. (Don't forget that it's rumored -- and frankly, I think it's entirely likely -- that Eliot Spitzer's indiscretions were brought to light because he was doing the same thing.) And yet the feds can't seem to put any teeth in the oversight provisions of the bailout.

This is the sort of solution that banks should have been pursuing long before this, without someone waving at big stick at their behinds. You have to wonder at motivations here, and whether anyone is looking beyond the end of his next bonus.