U.S. May Back Refinance Plan for Mortgages

By SHAILA DEWAN and LOUISE STORY

Published: August 24, 2011

The Obama administration is considering further actions to strengthen the housing market, but the bar is high: plans must help a broad swath of homeowners, stimulate the economy and cost next to nothing.

One proposal would allow millions of homeowners with government-backedmortgages to refinance them at today’s lower interest rates, about 4 percent, according to two people briefed on the administration’s discussions who asked not to be identified because they were not allowed to talk about the information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/bu...ewanted=1&_r=1

I am very interested in this, because I have tried TWICE to refi one of my houses (which is now a rental but was not always) with HARP. In both cases, Wells Fargo took my $500 and did not give me the refi due to some scam reason. In the end I ended up getting a "mod" from 6.75% to 6.125%. The obstacles to letting people refi seem to be,
- PMI, LPMI these are sometimes paid by the bank and you don't even know about them (I have this)
- underwater
- credit worthiness of homeowner- lets get real here, if the Obama HARP plan applies standard credit rules to somebody refi-ing, NOW, nobody will get to refi due to job insecurity, reduced pay and credit scores. Why they ever thought the original HARP would work at all is beyond me.
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