Critics of the mortgage settlement negotiated between the state attorneys general and five of the nation’s biggest banks have claimed that the $25 billion settlement is merely a drop in the bucket compared to the size of the overall housing market problems. But is this a fair characterization?

The settlement will help over a million households, and provide $25 billion in relief to struggling homeowners, including an average of more than $20,000 in principal reduction for approximately one million homeowners. This appears to be a relatively small number of homeowners being helped when compared with the 11 million households that are currently “underwater,” owing a total of $699 billion more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.

But this simple comparison ignores the fact that this settlement is limited to mortgages that were originated for private label securitization. According to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, approximately 35 percent of the nine million loans originated for Wall Street securitization are currently underwater, with an average negative equity balance of about $50,000.

In other words, one in three underwater homeowners with a mortgage originated for Wall Street securitization is going to receive loan forgiveness equal to nearly half of their negative equity.

Critics are also ignoring the fact that the settlement is narrowly tailored to claims around robo-signing and other foreclosure process violations, claims which have very uncertain litigation value and would have taken a long time to resolve. Under the terms of this deal, state and federal prosecutors are free to pursue all other mortgage fraud claims, of which there are many. As the banks themselves understand, they are still subject to an enormous amount of potential liability around their past and present wrongdoings.

When we take these items into consideration, yesterday’s settlement seems like a lot bigger deal than most of the critics are willing to acknowledge. Certainly, the state AG settlement is not a solution to the problems of the housing market, but it is clearly a good and important step towards rectifying the problems of the housing market and holding accountable those responsible.

However, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) — whose high profile assault on workers’ rights has prompted a recall effort against him — isn’t planning to use the money to help homeowners. Under the terms of the settlement, Wisconsin is set to receive $140 million, $31.6 million of which comes directly to the state government. And Walker is planning to use $25.6 million of that money to help balance his state’s budget:

Of a $31.6 million payment coming directly to the state government, most of that money – $25.6 million – will go to help close a budget shortfall revealed in newly released state projections. [Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen], whose office said he has the legal authority over the money, made the decision in consultation with Walker.

“Just like communities and individuals have been affected, the foreclosure crisis has had an effect on the state of Wisconsin, in terms of unemployment. … This will offset that damage done to the state of Wisconsin,” Walker said.

A memo from Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau released yesterday notes “it is anticipated that Wisconsin will receive $31.6 million. Based on discussions between the Attorney General and the administration, of the amounts received by the state, $25.6 million will be deposited to the general fund as GPR-Earned in 2011-12, and the remaining $6 million will be retained by the Department of Justice to be allocated at a later date.”

Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) criticized Walker’s move, saying “not one dime [of the settlement] should be used to fund the unbalanced state budget.” Adding insult to injury, Walker has previously criticized using one-time settlement money to fill budget holes.

The settlement money already doesn’t come close to addressing the depths of the nation’s housing problem, though it will provide real relief to the people whom it does reach. But the money was certainly not intended to paper over state budget problems, particularly in a state whose governor assured everybody up and down that busting his state’s public unions was the key to fiscal solvency. (HT: Jessica Arp)

In terms of the size of the housing problem, as Reuters’ Agnes T. Crane and Daniel Indiviglio noted, $26 billion is a “mathematical drop in the bucket,” considering that homeowners are underwater by some $700 billion. As far as being a knock for the banks, Nasdaq.com columnist Daniel Pereira noted that the $26 billion is about half what the four publicly traded banks involved in the settlement made in profits last year:

The $26 billion represents a significant settlement, but it clearly won’t stagger the banks too much. Together, the four banks mentioned above took in a total profit of $47.6 billion in 2011. It’s not as if the banks will be paying the settlements out of pure profits, either; they’ve all set aside a fair amount of capital to pay for their mistakes. Still it’s telling that the banks will be paying just about half of their annual profits to walk away from the foreclosure mess.

Several state attorneys general were hesitant to join the settlement, fearing that the terms were too easy on the banks and that the extent of the banks’ fraudulent activities had not been uncovered. As we noted before, the settlement protects the banks from state and federal lawsuits pertaining to some abuses, such as “robo-signing” foreclosure documents, but doesn’t prevent individuals from moving forward with their own individual actions against the banks.

While it certainly won’t be a panacea for all that ails the housing market, it will certainly help those people who, until this point, had little hope of receiving a principal reduction any other way.

A former Fannie Mae employee told the committee that the mortgage finance company had developed a pilot program for reducing mortgage debt for borrowers who owe more on their house than the property is worth.

The purpose of the plan was to develop “a responsible way to reduce principal balances for underwater mortgage borrowers without creating undue incremental moral hazard,” the employee told the committee.

The pilot had preliminary approvals from officials at Fannie Mae, FHFA, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bank regulator, according to the former employee.

In mid-2010, two weeks before its launch, senior Fannie Mae executives cancelled the program because they were “philosophically opposed to writing down principal balances,” according to the former worker, who was quoted in the letter without being identified.

Edward DeMarco — the acting head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the regulator for both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — has also been, as one former administration official said, a “boulder” in the way of allowing the mortgage giants to reduce principal for troubled homeowners, on the grounds that it would be bad for Fannie and Freddie’s bottom line. Meanwhile, “some economists counter that while principal reductions might lead to a short-term hit for Fannie and Freddie, it would ultimately result in fewer underwater mortgages, fewer foreclosures and a healthier housing market — all good for Fannie and Freddie’s bottom line.”

The opposition to principal reductions within Fannie Mae, according to Bloomberg, seems to be much more pernicious, in that they think mortgage writedowns are an unfair bailout for homeowners. But this ignores the fact that many homeowners are underwater — owing more on their mortgage than their home is currently worth — not due to anything they did but because of the 2008 bursting of the housing bubble and the foreclosure epidemic that followed, which dragged home values down to a point from which they have yet to recover.

On the campaign trail in Colorado this week, however, Santorum offered an even further out there explanation for the crisis. According to the Colorado Independent, Santorum told one crowd that gasoline and oil prices rose so sharply in the build-up to the collapse that they caused Americans to default on their mortgages in droves, thereby triggering the housing crisis that is still acting as a drag on the nation’s economy:

Stressing the importance for the country to provide cheap energy to its citizens, Santorum blamed the recession not on sub-prime mortgages or the derivatives market but on spiking fuel prices.

“We went into a recession in 2008. People forget why. They thought it was a housing bubble. The housing bubble was caused because of a dramatic spike in energy prices that caused the housing bubble to burst,” Santorum told the audience. “People had to pay so much money to air condition and heat their homes or pay for gasoline that they couldn’t pay their mortgage.”

The theory that rising oil prices blew up the housing market exists only in Santorum’s mind. “All The Devils Are Here,” an inside account of the crisis written by Fortune editor and columnist Bethany McLean and New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, doesn’t mention oil or gas prices a single time. New York Times financial reporter Aaron Sorkin’s “Too Big To Fail,” another inside account, never points to oil prices as a factor in the crisis. And the official government report about the crisis, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission Report, mentions oil prices multiple times as a symptom of the declining economy but never blames rising prices for the collapse of the housing market.

In reality, the primary cause of the financial crisis is quite clear. Mortgage lenders and large banks, driven by an insatiable thirst for profits, divvied up subprime mortgages and junk loans into mortgage backed securities, credit default options, and various forms of derivatives, then sold them around the world, creating a housing bubble that burst the minute the market overheated. Unfortunately, in their quest to prevent Wall Street banks and rogue mortgage lenders from taking responsibility, many Republicans have created an alternate reality in which anything else — even something as disconnected as fuel prices — caused the crisis, even if those claims have no basis in reality.

The new HAMP features include expanding the debt-to-income requirements for participation, paying investors more for principal reductions, and extending the program’s application deadline through 2013. According to an analysis from JP Morgan Chase, the changes should aid 500,000 homeowners:

A recent expansion of the Home Affordable Modification Program is expected to result in 500,000 mortgage modifications that otherwise would not have taken place, bank analysts said…JPMorgan Chase [[JPM]] analysts said in a report Monday they expect 1.7 million additional borrowers could qualify for the program under the more lenient DTI requirements – meaning more of their debt not just their first lien mortgage would be calculated in.

The administration’s housing programs have reached just 20 percent of the households they were supposed to, with HAMP helping 910,000 homeowners, far short of the 4 million at which it was aimed. Just a fraction of the money allocated to the program has even been spent.

“The housing crisis has been the single biggest drag on our recovery from the recession,” Obama said in his latest weekly address. “It has kept millions of families in debt and unable to spend, and it has left hundreds of thousands of construction workers out of a job.” Today, the economics bloggers at Calculated Risk predicted that the housing market it at its bottom, while “the list of housing markets showing measurable improvement expanded by 29 metros in February to 98 on the National Association of Home Builders/First American Improving Markets Index released on Monday.”

Hopefully these numbers, as well as renewed interest from the administration in aiding troubled homeowners will result in housing going from a drag on the economy to a boost.

Part of the hesitation on the part of AG’s such as New York Attorney General Eric Schneidermann and California Attorney General Kamala Harris is that the settlement would have shortchanged investigations into the true extent of foreclosure abuses, which have reportedly gone back decades. In fact, according to a report in the New York Times over the weekend, government-backed mortgage giant Fannie Mae knew about foreclosure fraud as far back as 2003, but did nothing about it:

Even then, [Florida businessman Nye Lavalle] discovered, some loan-servicing companies that worked for Fannie Mae routinely filed false foreclosure documents, not unlike the fraudulent paperwork that has since made “robo-signing” a household term. Even then, he found, the nation’s electronic mortgage registry was playing fast and loose with the law — something that courts have belatedly recognized, too…For two years, he corresponded with Fannie executives and lawyers. Fannie later hired a Washington law firm to investigate his claims. In May 2006, that firm, using some of Mr. Lavalle’s research, issued a confidential, 147-page report corroborating many of his findings.

And there, apparently, is where it ended. There is little evidence that Fannie Mae’s management or board ever took serious action.

Schneidermann has sued Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Wells Fargo for their use of a mortgage database that may have led to improper foreclosures. And evidently a look into what Fannie Mae knew about foreclosure fraud is also warranted.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R), for instance, told Nevadans that they shouldn’t try to stop the foreclosure process in October, a statement that earned a strong rebuke from Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) and other state Republicans. After seemingly changing his position on housing in Florida, another state that has been ravaged by foreclosures and falling home prices, Romney has mostly avoided the subject since coming to Nevada.

Letting “markets work,” however, isn’t likely to help the Nevadans who are struggling to deal with falling home prices, high foreclosure rates, and underwater mortgages. With that in mind, here’s a look at just how hard the housing crisis has hit the state:

60: Consecutive months that Nevada has led the nation in foreclosures.

177: One in every 177 Nevada homes was in foreclosure in December 2011. Nationally, 1 of every 634 homes is in foreclosure.

58: Percent of Nevada homeowners that are underwater — meaning they owe more than their home is worth. The national average is 22.1 percent.

10.6: Percent drop in Nevada home prices in 2011, the second-worst rate in the nation.

167,000: Number of vacant Nevada homes. The rate of vacancies, about 1-in-7, has doubled since 2000.

1: Las Vegas’ rank among the worst cities for foreclosures. One of every 150 Las Vegas homes is in foreclosure, the highest rate in the nation. Two-thirds of the city’s homeowners are underwater.

9.1: Percent drop in Las Vegas home values since November 2010, the second-worst performance of the 20 cities surveyed by Case Shiller and Standard & Poor’s.

70: Percent of homes in foreclosure in one Summerlin, Nevada ZIP code, according to local real estate agents.

89031: The North Las Vegas ZIP code that is the worst in the nation for foreclosures. The five worst ZIP codes for foreclosures are all in Las Vegas.

Photo by flickr user gilsonrome

Two weeks ago the couple got formal notice of an eviction. On Monday, a contractor attempted to place a dumpster on the Garrett property, a step required before an eviction can take place, according to city code.

But also on Monday, members of Moratorium Now, Occupy Detroit and Homes Before Banks rallied at the Detroit office of the Bank of New York Mellon Trust Co., the trustee of the Garretts’ mortgage. The family’s supporters also blocked the contractor from placing the dumpster.

On Tuesday morning a representative of Statebridge Co., a servicer for their mortgage, called the family to say the company would accept their offer of $12,000 to buy back their home, said the Garretts’ daughter, Michele Finley.

This is not the only house that Occupy Detroit has tried to keep out of foreclosure, nor is it the only successful instance of the Occupy movement keeping someone in their home. In places as far apart as Atlanta, Rochester, and Cleveland, Occupy members have managed to prevent foreclosures. Bank of America went so far as to warn its field managers to prepare for Occupy actions around soon-to-be foreclosed upon homes.

Detroit is the 18th worst city for foreclosures in the nation, down from its number one ranking in 2008, and already has more than 70,000 unoccupied homes. The mayor has set a goal of demolishing 10,000 empty homes by the end of the year.

Congressional Republicans, however, aren’t willing to go along with such a plan and have declared it “dead on arrival” if Obama proposes it, the Wall Street Journal reports:

But any such scheme that relies on a bank tax “would be dead on arrival,” said Rep. Scott Garrett (R., N.J.), chairman of the subcommittee on Capital Markets and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, in an interview last week. “No one is going to suggest that the way to help the mortgage market is to propose a tax indirectly on the system,” he said.

The housing crisis, now in its sixth year, remains one of the biggest drags on the economy, with four million Americans behind on their payments or in foreclosure. The crisis has strangled homeowners who are current on their mortgages too, as housing prices continue to fall. Prices dropped to a post-bubble low in November 2011, according to analysis by Standard & Poor’s and Case Shiller, and “there are few, if any, signs in the numbers that a turning point is close at hand.”

The proposed bank fee is similar to an earlier Obama proposal, the Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee, that was killed by Republicans. Such a fee would apply only to the largest banks — those with greater than $50 billion in assets. Many of those banks were at the center of the housing crisis, proliferating subprime loans and engaging in fraudulent and discriminatory lending and foreclosure practices.

The ten congressional districts that would benefit the most from mortgage relief are all represented by Republicans. But in declaring Obama’s proposal “dead on arrival,” it appears the GOP has put the interests of big banks ahead of those of struggling homeowners.

DOCUMENTARIES

Under African Skies: It says a lot about how wonderful I thought the music-making part of this story about Paul Simon’s Graceland, and his return to South Africa decades later, that I’m willing to forgive its less-than-stellar work on the cultural boycott of South Africa. It’s a debate about the responsibility artists owe politics that’s too heavily weighted in one direction. But the video footage of the recording sessions is amazing, as are the interviews with South African musicians about everything from what it was like to have this strange Paul Simon dude show up and want to work with them to what it was like to be able to go to Central Park without a pass.

The Invisible War: There’s nothing particularly stylistically innovative about Kirby Dick’s documentary about the epidemic of rape in the U.S. military. But the movie falls with the force of a sledgehammer, exposing as ineffective and dishonest the brass in the armed forces responsible for keeping women and men safe, and making it clear that an epidemic of sexual assault is hurting both men and women, and driving out of the armed forces exactly the people the Pentagon should most want to keep there.

The Atomic States of America: Based on Kelly McMaster’s memoir of growing up in a town on Long Island polluted by atomic runoff, the movie is the story of an agency captured by powerful interests and backed up by powerful presumptions of authority, and the ordinary citizens who have fought back against the industry they believe is poisoning their communities. I’d have been curious to hear more about how citizens in other countries that are more dependent on atomic energy than we are, but it’s amazing looking into our past romance of the peaceful atom—and thinking about what it means for our uncertain energy future.

Love Free or Die: Bishop Gene Robinson’s story has been told before, and the first openly gay Anglican bishop is hardly a retiring figure. But Macky Alston’s wonderful documentary isn’t just about him. It’s about the difficult process of organizing within the Anglican church, which shut Robinson out of the Lambeth Conference, to make it a more welcoming and affirming institution for the gay people who have kept faith with it. And the movie argues that a gay rights movement without the faith community is leaving power and influence on the table, and risks making gay people choose between love and faith.

The Queen of Versailles: Tons of ink and miles of film have been devoted to chronicling American excess in a recession age. But it’s hard to imagine that anything will do better than this story about David and Jackie Siegel, who built an empire selling time-shares to people who couldn’t afford them and then pushed themselves to the brink of financial ruin by building what would have been the largest house in America. Whether it’s expertly breaking down the housing crisis’ role in the crash or chronicling the horrifying wastefulness of the Siegel’s consumer spending, The Queen of Versailles is funny, biting, and utterly American.

FICTION

Keep The Lights On: This tender gay love story has two things going for it. First, it’s an unconventional romance that bucks the Hollywood insistence that the story ends when a couple gets together or decides to stay together. It’s tremendously refreshing to see a movie that chronicles the rise and fall of a relationship, insisting that just because two people can’t continue to be together doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Second, it’s a warm, funny, explicit look at what it means to be gay and in love in a post-AIDS era. The movie’s specificity, whether it’s the results of an HIV test, the documentary the main character Erik is working on, or changes in the hookup scene give the movie wonderful roots.

The Surrogate: The funniest, warmest sex comedy I saw at Sundance is also one of the better movies I’ve seen in a long time about disability, intimacy, and independence. John Hawkes, of Deadwood and Winter’s Bone fame, which will certainly escalate after this performance, is marvelous as Mark O’Brien (a real-life journalist), who decides that though he spends most of his life in an iron lung due to childhood polio, he’s going to lose his virginity. The acting is top-to-bottom fantastic, and the movie is a forceful rejection of the idea that folks with disabilities are asexual, humorless, or mere victims.

Red Hook Summer: The community of critics who liked this movie (as opposed to the ones who savaged it, I’d argue unfairly) is growing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if I remain in the minority in my adoration of this movie, which takes on everything from the black church to asthma rates in Red Hook in its exploration of a New York summer. Centered around three pivotal church sequences and an amazing performance by Clarke Peters, transcending his acting on The Wire, this is a gorgeous, moving, unrepentantly and uncompromisingly black movie, and whatever Hollywood thinks, better for it.

Compliance: A terrifying look at what our trust in the police and other authorities can lead us to do to each other, Compliance is based on a true story of a man who convinced restaurant employees to commit more than 70 incidents of harassment and assault by pretending to be a police officer over the phone. As fast-food outlet manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) searches, detains, and ultimately sets cashier Becky (Dreama Walker, who should get real notice for this) up to be sexually assaulted, the movie raises deeply uncomfortable questions about what we’d do in the same situations.

Beasts of the Southern Wild: Joyous, strange, frightening and loving, this beautiful movie is about everything from global warming to the appropriate psychological response to Hurricane Katrina. If you like apocalypses, dire beasts from the past, gorgeous landscapes, great music, and remarkable little girls as your protagonists, run, don’t walk. If there’s justice, this would be a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon-type phenomenon, a wonder from another country within our own. A warning: once you’ve seen it, you may experience profound irritation at standard Hollywood fare for a period of time afterwards.

That made last night’s debate, which was held in Jacksonville, the appropriate place to ask the remaining Republican candidates how they would address the crisis. Voters, in fact, were waiting to hear the candidates’ answers.

Unfortunately, the debate’s moderator, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, bungled his opportunity, turning to a submitted question that couldn’t have possibly led to substantive answers from the candidates. And then, after Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney gave answers littered with falsehoods and turned the discussion toward each others’ investment portfolios, Blitzer failed to press them for actual plans to deal with housing:

BLITZER: We have a very important subject: housing. Not only here in Florida, foreclosures really, really bad, but all over the country. A lot of people are wondering if the federal government contributed to the housing collapse in recent years. We got a question that came into us. Let me put it up there and I’ll read it to you: How would you phase out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Does the private mortgage industry need additional regulation?

Watch it:

Blitzer’s original question focused on what the candidates would do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage firms that have been targets of Republican ire since the crisis began. But it was private industry, not Fannie and Freddie, that sparked the crisis. More than 84 percent of the subprime loans in 2006 were issued by private lenders, including 83 percent of the loans that went to low- and moderate-income borrowers.

Blitzer could have asked Republicans to address the misconception that Fannie and Freddie sparked the housing crisis. He could have pressed Romney on what seemed like a change of position on housing in Florida. He could have asked where the candidates stood on the plan President Obama put forward in his State of the Union address to refinance mortgages, or asked what the candidates would do about the rampant fraud and abuse that private lenders perpetuated during both the housing boom and its subsequent bust. And yes, he could have pressed Romney to find out how much he knew about his investments into funds that profited off of Florida foreclosures.

But he didn’t. The result, as Reuters noted today, were soft outlines of policies that “could prolong the pain for years,” aren’t supported by market data, and showed little understanding of how the crisis happened in the first place. The Republican candidates continue to dodge questions about what, specifically, they plan to do about the housing crisis. Unfortunately for voters, questions like Blitzer’s only make it easier for those dodges to continue.

Along with his investments in Bain Capital funds linked to offshore tax havens, the Romneys have large investments in the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund (institutional class). The firm’s March 2011 annual report for the fund notes that about 8 percent of the fund is invested in banks and 24.5 percent is invested in mortgage-backed obligations. Romney’s form says he has invested between $1,000,001 and $5,000,000 in the fund and his wife Ann has invested an additional $1 million-plus. Since the 2008 economic meltdown and the enactment of the Troubled Asset Relief Fund, this fund has done quite well, growing 7.88 percent between April 2010 and March 2011.

The mortgage-backed securities in the fund include adjustable rate mortgages from Bear Stearns, Countrywide, IndyMac, and Washington Mutual. A 2009 Center for Public Integrity report identified all four of those companies as among the top-25 subprime lenders in the lead-up to the market’s collapse. Countrywide ranked first in that report and Washington Mutual ranked second. While the remnants of those companies have been purchased by major financial institutions, an array of mortgage loan service companies bought up the individual mortgages.

An examination of civil cases filed in Miami-Dade county alone, by just the current owners of the mortgage obligations for now-defunct Washington Mutual and Countrywide, suggests more than 5,000 foreclosure cases were filed in 2010.

And Miami-Dade makes up only about 13 percent of the Florida population, suggesting that these and the other owners mortgage-backed securities included in this fund likely have attempted to foreclose on tens of thousands of Floridians.

A review of Romney’s August 2007 financial disclosure for his 2008 campaign reveals no mention of the Goldman Sachs Strategic Income Fund, suggesting the investment was made at some point between the two campaigns.

The funds are identified on the disclosure form as technically being in a “blind trust,” but now that he has publicly disclosed these assets, the trust is no longer functionally “blind.” The trustee for the trust, R. Bradlford Malt, said this week that he dropped some other Romney investments that conflicted with the Republican Party’s values.

In October, Romney suggested that the solution to the foreclosure crisis was “don’t try and stop the foreclosure process. Let it run its course and hit the bottom.” While that process is bad for Florida homeowners, these investments show it may have been good for the Romneys.

To much fanfare, the Obama administration unveiled a number of housing aid programs several years ago, claiming that those programs would aid millions of homeowners. However, these programs have not reached as many homeowners as they were supposed to, due to a combination of design flaws and bank intransigence:

The HAMP program, which was designed to lower troubled borrowers’ mortgage rates to no more than 31% of their monthly income, ran into problems almost immediately. Many lenders lost documents, and many borrowers didn’t qualify. Three years later, it has helped a scant 910,000 homeowners — a far cry from the promised 4 million.

HARP, which was intended to reach 5 million borrowers, has yielded about the same results. Through October, when it was revamped and expanded, the program had assisted 962,000.

So HAMP and HARP were meant to help 9 million homeowners combined, but have so far only reached 1.8 million. Also, just a small fraction of the money that Congress allocated to HAMP — the Home Affordable Modification Program — has been spent.

So far, the administration has been reluctant to push for principal reductions (reducing the outstanding amount of mortgage loans), even though such reductions could pump billions into the economy. Many of the nation’s attorneys general have also been crafting a settlement with the nation’s biggest banks that could involve some number of homeowners receiving some principal relief, but the numbers that have been floated are not large enough (in terms of dollars or homeowners helped) to substantially alleviate the housing problem. And until a solution to this problem is found, housing will continue to act as an anchor on the economic recovery.

But Romney is throwing stones from within his own glass house, as he also profits from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as the Boston Globe detailed back in September:

On his financial disclosure statement filed last month, Romney reported owning between $250,001 and $500,000 in a mutual fund that invests in debt notes of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, among other government entities. Over the previous year, he had reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in interest from those investments.

And unlike most of Romney’s financial holdings, which are held in a blind trust that is overseen by a trustee and not known to Romney, this particular investment was among those that would have been known to Romney.

Over the weekend, Romney intends to start airing an ad that will say, “While Florida families lost everything in the housing crisis, Newt Gingrich cashed in. Gingrich was paid over $1.6 million by the scandal-ridden agency that helped create the crisis.” Shockingly enough, the ad fails to mention Romney’s own investments in the government backed mortgage giants, which have netted him tens of thousands of dollars.