[Rick Lee]

I think you have to be current with you loan to get this special deal, so it will weed out a lot of folks already. As RandyP mentioned in the real estate thread, people with option ARM's, which have negative amortization if you pay only the minimum, will have even more incentive to walk away once this freeze expires. Think about it. If you make just the minimum payment on an option ARM, the difference between that and the normal rate payment gets tacked onto the loan balance. This is ok for people who use that savings to invest in something that pays returns at a better rate than their mortgage is set to and then pay it down at the end of the year. But most people in these kinds of loans don't do this. So having their teaser rate frozen only exacerbates their upsidedown position. Each month they keep making that low payment means more and more is being tacked onto their loan balance. Once the game is up, there's nothing they can do but walk away from it. Surely, someone in the gov't. must know about this. It's too big to ignore.