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Was the homebuyer tax credit an imaginative response to a weak housing market and a fragile economy, or “a failure of imagination,” and a costly failure, at that?

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Foreclosures continue to outpace government efforts to rescue struggling homeowners. 

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The Senate Banking Committee finally approved a financial reform bill without winning the bi-partisan support the committee’s chairman, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-CT) had sought.

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Perhaps one month, we’ll be able to tell you that the economic signals are clear, pointing unambiguously up or down. But not this month. Despite growing evidence that the economy is improving (albeit more slowly than most would like), and notwithstanding welcome strength in the March employment report, the economic indicators remain stubbornly mixed, enough so in the housing market that some analysts see a threat of a double-dip that will bring further home price declines before the market stabilizes.

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Consumers accusing banks of charging “abusive” overdraft fees on debit cards cleared a major hurdle recently, when a federal district court judge refused to dismiss their class action suit. 

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Manufacturing activity and retail sales are gaining strength but consumer confidence has dipped (again); the February employment numbers were better than expected, but home sales disappointed most analysts and the commercial real estate market is beginning to scare just about everyone.

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It appears that financial institutions are not “going gentle” into the night.  They are railing big time against the darkness descending on the industry in the form of new regulations that threaten to slash the income from credit cards and overdraft fees. 

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The continued flow of improving economic reports is making analysts more optimistic about the outlook and more confident that the recovery is sustainable.

"We have seen increased evidence that a self-sustaining recovery in consumer and business spending may be taking hold," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told a Congressional committee last month – enough evidence to produce more upbeat statements, such as this, but not enough to reverse the Fed’s decision to purchase an additional $600 billion in government bonds to boost the speed and strength of the recovery.

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It looks like a stalemate – again - on regulatory reform, as another effort to craft a bipartisan agreement on a Senate bill appears to have crashed and burned.

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If you think of economic analysis as a footrace between positive and negative news, the positives pulled ahead of the negatives last month. But that doesn’t seem to have altered the contest in the economic forecasting arena, where economists predicting that the fledgling recovery will stumble under the weight of high unemployment and weak home sales are running pretty much neck-and-neck with those who think the recovery has the “legs” to make it sustainable, if not robust.

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President Barack Obama has made banks the subject line of the populist message he is sending to Americans disgruntled by the sour economy and furious over the outsized bonuses bank executives awarded themselves following the government bail-out of their industry. 

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It’s a now familiar pattern.  The Treasury Department releases a quarterly report on the Home Affordable Mortgage Program (HAMP), the Obama Administration’s flagship foreclosure prevention initiative. The results are disappointing.  

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Vowing to recover “every single dime the American people are owed,” President Barack Obama announced that his Administration will collect up to $117 billion from the nation’s largest banks over the next 12 years to cover losses from the government-funded rescue of the financial industry.

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As signs of the times go, this recent headline in the New York Times Sunday magazine could not have been a welcome one for mortgage lenders: “Just Walk Away.” That’s the advice contributing writer Roger Lowenstein offered to homeowners with under water mortgages, telling those who are able to make their mortgage payments that it may not be in their financial self-interest not to do so.

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The Congressional session will resume this month pretty much where it ended before the holiday recess, with lawmakers trying to decide how to reshape the financial regulatory structure.