WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Obama administration summit of housing industry leaders next week may yield clues on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac , the two mortgage heavyweights that so far have sucked up close to $150 billion in taxpayer bailout funds.

NYT piece on home-equity defaults is so aggressively anecdotal, rather than quantitative, that he even says at one point that “the amount of bad home equity loan business during the boom is incalculable”. I really don’t think that’s true: a lot of very smart analysts have done a lot of pretty accurate work on that front. And Streitfeld himself belies the statement by including a pretty illuminating chart with his story. The key thing in this chart isn’t the drop from 2009 to 2010, which is a function of the fact that the 2010 data covers only the first quarter. Rather, it’s the fact that first mortgages actually account for a minority of home-loan write-offs, and that home equity lines have accounted for significantly more, in the way of write-offs, than second mortgages. Which brings me to the first of three op-eds that the NYT has published today on the subject of Frannie and the FHA. Here’s : Until recently, most Americans paid for their homes through 30-year self-amortizing mortgages, in which interest and principal are paid at the same time. These work well as long as homeowners have stable, long-term jobs that enable them to regularly make their monthly payments. But these days such careers are increasingly scarce. Therefore, any effort to recover from the crisis must include more flexible mortgages that take today’s employment landscape, with its frequent job-hopping and episodic unemployment, into account. The problem here is, as a glance at Streitfeld’s chart will show, that “more flexible mortgages” are also more dangerous mortgages. Home equity loans had all the flexibility you could possibly want — and they failed disastrously. What’s more, Stone doesn’t actually want to get rid of the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. She just wants to layer gimmicks on top of it: an option to pay only interest if you’re laid off here, an escrow account available in the event of unemployment there. These things don’t really make the mortgage more flexible, they just make it more...

A roundup of economic news from around the Web.

Speaking of untidy accounting issues: The American Banker reports today that “Bank of America, in a new public filing, said it had $11.2 billion of “unresolved” mortgage buyback requests at June, a 50% spike since the beginning of the year.” These buyback disputes are with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ($5.6 billion), although AB reported BofA “is having trouble with claims made to mortgage insurance firms” — in particular, the monoline insurers, for another $4 billion. AB quoted the bank’s as acknowledging that “ disputes have increased with buyers and insurers regarding representations and warranties. ” BofA is the second largest residential funder in the US > Source: QUARTERLY REPORT PURSUANT TO SECTION 13 OR 15(d) OF THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934 Quarterly Period Ended June 30, 2010 Commission file number: 1-6523 SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION, August 6, 2010 http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/70858/000095012310074181/g24023e10vq.htm American Banker | Wednesday, August 11, 2010 http://www.americanbanker.com/issues/175_153/bank_america_buyback_disputes_11.2b-1023892-1.html

Home prices rose in two-thirds of U.S. metropolitan areas in the second quarter, but economists have warned the trend could prove fleeting.

Real-estate website Trulia.com says that more sellers reduced their homes prices in July, the fourth straight month in which price reductions tracked by the firm have increased.

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