The NYT’s Gretchen Morgenson sounds a tad bit skeptical about President Obama’s call last week to convene a new task force to investigate last decades’s mortgage-market debacle, including Wall Street’s bundling of “crap” mortgages into massive securities.

After all, it’s now four years since Bear Stearns went belly up. The SEC and Justice Department have had all that time to go after Bear Stearns and other financial houses. Why wasn’t there a task force before this? It’s obviously an election year, she notes, but there’s also still a need to find out exactly what happened and who did what and why, Morgenson notes.

But she doesn’t sound confident much will be done. Here’s a shocker: We’re not confident either.

File under: Doubting Thomas

This is potentially big: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may allow people mortgage forbearances (i.e. skip payments) if they can prove unemployment interfered with their ability to pay their mortgages.

This will undoubtedly help people who are jobless and financially struggling. There’s no question about it. But here’s the question: What does it do to the economy and housing market in general? Does it simple delay the foreclosure day of reckoning? Will the housing market improve, thus helping the economy, or does it merely prolong the agony, thus hurting the economy? Close call on both counts.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Some libertarians — and supporters of Ron Paul — think home “ownership” as currently defined and structured is basically a fraud.

We’ll let you read the above link and decide for yourself. But even one of the libertarian proponents of a revamped mortgage-loan industry concedes: “Of course, all of this would mean effectively returning to something like a Victorian-era banking standard, which no rentier, politician, or most of the public will accept.”

So it’s never going to happen — and therefore why should people take these libertarian ideas seriously? That’s the obvious question.

Bank of America has organized a good-intentioned event: It plans to meet in Boston with mortgage holders, face to face, in person, to go over how mortgage-payment pressures can be eased.

“The purpose of this event is to eliminate the faxes, the FedEx mailings and the phone calls to 800 numbers and allow for face-to-face interaction with a home-loan specialist,” a spokesman says.

Walk-in participants are welcome. But Bank of America would appreciate it if people could make advance appointments by phone or the Internet. One supposes that’s the surest way of guaranteeing face time.

So to avoid infuriating phone calls and other forms of non-human interaction, you have to make infuriating phone calls and other forms of non-human interaction. OKaaaaaay.

File under: Alice in Wonderland (take your pick on which passage)

Scott thinks that a 20 percent downpayment requirement to get a mortgage may actually help the housing market in the long run, largely by keeping home prices down and preventing market bubbles. He makes a persuasive case.

Currently, all the media hype aside, most lenders are not requiring 20-percent downpayments. The national downpayment average is 12.29 percent and the Massachusetts average is 13 percent, according to data collected by Scott.

Would requiring a larger downpayment hurt or help the market? Any thoughts on the matter would be appreciated.