Last week I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to listen to Eric Schuppenhauer, Senior VP of Fannie Mae, talk about the mortgage crisis his current role in running HAMP (President Obama’s Making Home Affordable initiative.)

Mr. Schuppenhauer was quite positive about the changes his team has managed to make so far. It is generally better for Fannie to be able to restructure mortgages than to foreclose and end up with an empty home that they must maintain and sell.

On the other hand, Mr. Schuppenhauer pointed out that the number of mortgages that they still need to work through numbers in the millions.

Interestingly, after hearing him speak, the Wall Street Journal printed this article yesterday about how Fannie and Freddie are continuing to go downhill. They didn’t mention Mr. Schuppenhauer in the article, but they did say that the Making Home Affordable program is off to a “slow start.”

I don’t know the financial costs of all of these efforts, but it seems like if they can restructure mortgages and keep people in their homes–the people who can afford to pay something–then Fannie Mae will be better off than if it had yet more foreclosures on its hands.

I’m a big believer in fixing the cause of problems, not just treating the symptoms. There’s nothing we can do now to change the fact that lenders made agreements with people who couldn’t pay. What we need to focus on now is how to make sure that in the future, loans are made to borrowers who have some chance of actually paying the loan back!