Personally, considering the rampantly fraudulent way the mortgage market seems to have been run, I personally think that the solution is to have a process whereby a homeowner can apply to have the state can examine a mortgage, redetermine its terms baased on say a 30 year term and a monthly payment that the homeowner can afford (say, 40% of income as a baseline, with modifiers based on things like kids etc), and tell the "owner" (as I understand it, locating said owner can sometimes be difficult) that they get to suck on what they get instead of the insane returns that were promised them by the charlatan that packaged it up in the first place. If the person sells the home before the mortgage is up, any extra proceeds from the sale can be split between the owner of the mortgage- and the home-owner, based on a formula that bears some relation to the amount of write-down on the original mortgage, working on the idea that people that were complete dumbasses should not get a big reward out of future rises in house prices at the expense of the person who ended up taking the haircut on their behalf.

Among other things, that would also make some of mortgage owners more likely to finger the individuals that did this shit, so as to make it easier to go after the people that were fraudulently handling mortgages this decade.

Thoughts?