What you tell me agrees with what affablestranger does. (affablestranger, in a previous incarnation, used to call himself Patchworkmind, and you may remember him as the person who turned out to be from the same parts as you were and to share some acquaintances.) He too did some time in the housing finance business, and states that the people who hawked subprime mortgages were regarded as the lowest of the low, exploiters of misfortune and ignorance.

From this point of view, probably the best thing all the remaining borrowers of subprime loans could hope for is that the federal government manage to buy up all the "toxic debt" in which their mortgages are bundled. That would effectively make the Government their landlord and debtor, and while the government may be many kinds of cruel and stupid, its survival does not depend on squeezing its clients dry. If they remain in the hands of private corporations, on the other hand, those same clients will be pursued ruthlessly for every penny they can pay.