The housing crisis is America's most urgent economic problem, but until now, it's been the farthest from policymakers' minds.

A recent article on Salon reports that the Occupy movement is planning to begin a nationwide action protesting the foreclosure crisis. Whatever your views of the movement itself, they are casting a bright light on the place where capitalism, our democracy, and our society have all failed: the housing crisis.

The financial crisis effectively started with the housing crisis, and it will not end until we find a way to resolve the housing crisis. Economists who have repeatedly forecast a healing economy have misjudged the need for a healthy housing market as a central component for any type of economic recovery. The administration's current plans for preventing foreclosures are woefully inadequate and housing prices are likely to decline as much as 20 percent this year, so our nation's cycle of economic misery will continue.

Since the mortgage meltdown begin in 2007, six million homes have been lost  to foreclosure. At present, another four million homes are at some stage of the foreclosure process. As the New York Times recently reported, one of the nation's leading housing analysts anticipates that a "staggering" total of more than 10 million of the nation's existing 55 million mortgages are "reasonably likely to default." Another recent article noted, "If the U.S. foreclosure crisis were a baseball game, we'd probably be in the bottom of the fourth inning." This national tragedy is a long way from over.

The housing and foreclosure crisis represents a conundrum with plenty of blame to go around: banks that violated lending standards in a search for easy profits; the creation of complex mortgage-backed securities whose risks were not fully understood; borrowers who took on far more debt than they could afford; the list goes on.

What the Occupy protesters recognize, either explicitly or implicitly, is that since the start of the housing crisis, government actions have by and large penalized suffering homeowners while rewarding banks that should have failed because of poor business decisions. The government has not adequately enforced the laws associated with ensuring that foreclosures are valid, and it appears to have no concerns when banks wrongfully take possession of homes (which, I believe, used to be called "criminal trespass" and  "breaking and entering"). On the flip side, all of the administration's plans associated with helping homeowners facing foreclosure have failed miserably.

All of this is bad economics, violates the rules of accountability and equal justice that are essential to a viable capitalist economy, and undermines our democracy. The Salon article reports that the Occupy protesters plan to "disrupt" foreclosure auctions. These actions are strikingly familiar to the "penny auctions" that took place during the Depression era. As detailed in my 2009 book, It Could Happen Here, which focused on the danger of growing income inequality to our nation:

Civil disobedience can emerge, even among the most conservative and normally upright citizens. During the Great Depression, foreclosed farms were auctioned on local courthouse steps. As the situation worsened, farmers took matters into their own hands. In what became known as "penny auctions," neighbors of bankrupt farmers would gather for an auction, physically prevent people from bidding on foreclosed farms, and then bid a token amount for the farms with the goal of returning the homesteads to their original foreclosed owners.

What is striking is the lack of creativity or sense of urgency that has been applied to the housing crisis. Here is a guiding principle for action: Homeowners must remain homeowners. Yes, this may not be an idea that is universally supported. And yes, it may be unfair to those who acted more responsibly. But the bailouts of the banks were also grossly unfair and I suspect hundreds of other significant, unfair government actions biased toward financial institutions and not consumers have taken place since the start of the crisis.

As a nation, we no longer have the luxury of concerning ourselves with fairness. Our economy is on life support, unemployment is far above the 6 to 7 percent level which then-candidate Obama called an "immediate economic emergency" when running for office in October 2008, and further declines in housing prices will send the economy into a greater tailspin.

We have adopted a dangerous complacency around the housing crisis that must be abandoned. If our economy and social fabric are to heal, a sense of urgency is desperately needed.

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One rarely remarked upon but dramatic aspect of the New Deal were the many innovations associated with ensuring continued homeownership. This was a central focus of FDR's effort to heal the nation. In 1933, Congress created the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which bought up one in every five mortgages in the U.S. and reissued longer-term, lower monthly payment mortgages. In 1934, Congress created the Federal Housing Authority to insure long-term mortgages in a manner similar to the way the FDIC insures deposits, which ultimately made private lenders comfortable with 30-year mortgages. Most of us don't realize that the 30-year mortgage was effectively invented in the era of the New Deal and that previously mortgages ran for periods as short as five years.

A recent study estimated that 29 percent of all homeowners with mortgages are underwater, and it's likely that a sizable portion of this total is more than 25 percent underwater, which is generally agreed upon as the point where even solvent homeowners simply abandon their properties (also known as jingle mail, since the former homeowners send the house keys to the mortgage lender). As housing prices continue to drop, and I strongly believe they will, these numbers will continue to accelerate.

I do not have a specific policy proposal for fixing the housing crisis, but I have no doubt that with sufficient determination and creativity, this mess can be solved and we can move forward. The solution is likely to involve some pain on both sides -- losses for financial institutions and homeowners perhaps trading a portion of their equity (under the auspices of some new type of government agency) for a substantially lower mortgage principle. Or any number of completely different solutions. But both sides made mistakes and so shared pain is not a bad thing.

But what is bad is doing nothing. We simply cannot allow the impact of additional foreclosures to further destroy our economy or allow our social fabric to disintegrate as more and more people conclude that they were cheated out of their homes.

In the era of the New Deal, increasing farm foreclosures also led to riots and widespread violence in the Midwest, something we disregard today at our peril. In It Could Happen Here, I wrote:

These generally conservative farmers viewed their rebellion within the context of American principles.  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who published the three volume study The Age Of Roosevelt, wrote, "Theirs, as they saw it was the way not of rebellion but of patriotism." ...I have no doubt that these [rioting] farmers would have explained their actions as a combination of anger and righteousness that would be echoed in our modern era: A corrupt system of home loans, combined with an economic system that was run for the benefit of a privileged few, unfairly destroyed their lives.

The housing crisis emerged and has been exacerbated by a violation of the fundamental principles that make both capitalism and democracy work: accountability, bankruptcy for bad business decisions, enforcement of our laws, and equal justice.

I have written elsewhere that the Occupy movement will not simply disappear into the night. It is the flashpoint for the deep anger and sense of unfairness that pervades our society, for millions of people who feel their lives and dreams have been unfairly destroyed, while those who played a central role in causing their misery continue to profit. The transition of the Occupy movement to a focus on foreclosures was inevitable; this is the epicenter of our national tragedy.

The movement's focus on foreclosures will shine a necessary, even brighter light on our failure to address this central aspect of the financial crisis. These actions are an important and necessary wake-up call to our society about what is happening throughout the nation on a daily basis.

We can, of course, dismiss this latest act of protests. But if we do nothing, I wonder how far we stand from the violence of the New Deal era. At the time, FDR said, "The West is seething with unrest." Where will tempers flare next?

Bruce Judson is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and a former Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management.

Citigroup made shameful and dangerous decisions. It should have to explain itself.

On the whole, I have suggested a somewhat bleak view of our political system and our future prospects. But when there are moments and people to celebrate I want to do so. And we should all celebrate Judge Jed Rakoff. (As full disclosure, Judge Rakoff is a friend, and was a graduate school classmate at Oxford.)

On Monday this week, Judge Rakoff rejected an SEC offer to settle a securities fraud case against Citigroup that entailed a $285 million payment by Citigroup but not any admission of fault or wrongdoing. Judge Rakoff said the settlement terms were "neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest."

This decision complicates the SEC's life, and I would imagine that Citigroup is absolutely dead-set against acknowledging wrongdoing. But what Citigroup and other financial institutions did was wrong at a micro and a macro level and should not be glossed over.

First, what's at issue? Citigroup created a class of securities, Class V Funding III, which consisted of bundled mortgage-backed securities (in the industry jargon they are referred to as "negatively projected," i.e. they aren't going to be worth much), then sold these securities to investors, and then bet against their own securities (and their own investors). Judge Rakoff adds some color to this: "This (Citigroup's ability to 'dump dubious assets on misinformed investors') was accomplished by Citigroup's misrepresenting that the Fund's assets were attractive investments rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser, whereas in fact Citigroup had arranged to include in the portfolio a substantial percentage of negative projected assets and had then taken a short position in those very assets it had helped select."

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Citigroup made about $160 million on its transactions. Investors eventually lost about $700 million. This stinks.

At a micro level, Citigroup's blithe willingness to do this is terrifying. For example, I sit on the investment committee of a medium sized foundation. As it happens, we would never make this kind of investment, but someone similar to us could easily have done so. If we had considered this, do you think Citigroup or the broker or the sales person would have told us what these investments really were? Of course not. Someone could have -- and, obviously, people did -- invest in these securities thinking they were making a reasonably safe investment, not knowing that they were purposely designed to blow up. I haven't counted, but my sense is that a lot more players than Citigroup did this -- so whom can you trust?

This gets to the core of what's wrong at the macro level. Citigroup's decisions to design, sell, and short these securities are not ones respectable and responsible business people should make. They erode trust, they are corrosive, and they are dishonest. One of the main functions of our kind of financial system is intermediation, but if the mediators see the investors as prey, and are allowed to do so, then the system isn't working. This is why the Volcker rule makes sense. And Citigroup's CEO and board should be ashamed of themselves. They should have to explain why they believe there was no fault or wrongdoing here.

The economy is miserable. The political system is in gridlock. The super committee has just demonstrated that Congress can't accomplish anything. But on this big issue, Judge Jed Rakoff made a gutsy, and correct, decision.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team. He has also served in senior roles in the White Houses of two Democratic presidents.

Some things -- education, health, housing -- should be rights, not financed through taking on more and more debt.

Occupiers have joined anti-foreclosure advocates to occupy home auctions and abandoned buildings and block foreclosures. A few state attorneys general have begun resisting the Obama administration's awful mortgage fraud settlement and started investigating banks and servicers. Even shareholders are in revolt, filing class action suits against their companies. By one measure, student loans are one of the biggest concerns amongst supporters of Occupy Wall Street. There is now an OccupyStudentDebt. A petition to forgive student loans has gathered 300,000 signatures and was included as part of a general debt forgiveness bill on the floor of the House of Representatives. Congress has even begun to touch on medical debt issues.

Taken together, we can say that these and other actions are the sign of growing resistance to key aspects of the social model of the past 30 to 40 years. We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care. That social model was built around the assumption that while real incomes stagnated and the state did not directly provide many basic goods through universal entitlements, cheap credit would do the trick instead. High finance was inextricably intertwined with the privileges of citizenship. This was not a very good social model. With any luck, and a serious amount of political action, current resistance could lead to alternative ways of thinking about how we make these goods available to all.

After all, while the previous decade has been represented as a debt-financed spending binge when consumers lived well beyond their means, it turns a complex story into a morality play. A major part of the credit 'binge' was about necessities, not luxuries. Sub-prime mortgages (especially with the decline of affordable housing) were the only way for many to become homeowners. Similarly, student loans were the only way for many to gain access to higher education and thus participate as equals in the radically unequal distribution of opportunity in the United States. The total value of student loans has surpassed total credit card debt, and is projected to top $1 trillion later this year. Mike Konczal posted the following graph at Rortybomb showing the dramatic rise of student debt. In a decade, student loans have gone from a third of consumer loans to far more than half.

We find a similar story in health care. Two major national studies of medical indebtedness by a group of scholars, including Elizabeth Warren, have shown that illness and medical costs are a major cause of household bankruptcy. They noted that by 2001 "illness or medical bills contributed to about half of bankruptcies." Notably, in their 2001 study, they found that 75.7 percent of medical debtors had insurance at the onset of illness. Underinsurance, as much as lack of insurance, was a major financial burden. So too was loss of income due to illness (by their estimate, income loss is 40 percent of medical-related indebtedness). Worse yet, their follow up 2007 study of medical indebtedness notes that the "number of un- and underinsured Americans has grown; health costs have increased; and Congress tightened the bankruptcy laws." That has led to a 50 percent increase in the proportion of bankruptcies attributable to medical problems. These bankruptcies, moreover, occurred in families only marginally worse than the median income and occupational class of American citizens. Once again, indebtedness is the product of the 99% trying to meet the costs of a basic good -- health care.

If there is a reasonable expectation that debtors can meet their interest payments then in theory debt is not a particularly bad way to finance access to certain goods. It is on the individual borrower to make a judgment about what constitutes a reasonable debt burden.

There are, however, two problems with this theoretical view. First, there might be very good social reasons to not want to yoke access to certain social goods to debt. Education is a prime example. Taking on debt means accepting a kind of discipline. One must make all future calculations about, say, educational and career choices with the need to meet future interest payments in mind. In conscious and unconscious ways this narrows horizons and produces a more instrumental relationship to education. In college I saw concerns about debt shape decisions about which classes to take and what to major in. I also saw many of my college classmates make more conservative professional choices (corporate law, consulting, finance, medical specialist) than they might otherwise have made (public service, teaching, science, public interest law) in order to ensure their ability to pay back loans. This appears to have been a pattern. A study of educational and career choices in the early 2000s by Princeton economists has found that "debt causes graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs and reduces the probability that students choose low-paid 'public interest' jobs."

It is frequently observed that the growth of finance sucked up the math and physics geniuses, who might have contributed something lasting to society, into hedge funds and investment banks to ruinous effect. But the alteration of professional choices is much wider than that. The number crunchers at the top were, one suspects, lured away by lucrative pay. The much more widespread, and difficult to measure, shift in career choices due to the discipline of debt burdens is probably the more important, and still ongoing, consequence of high student loans.

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If access to higher education were on the order of something like a right -- a publicly financed good, provided at little or no cost, to ensure real equality of opportunity -- then one can imagine a much different set of results. While conservatives like to talk about 'freedom,' this is a place where the left ought to have the upper hand in connecting economic practices to real freedoms. Providing necessary social goods, especially education, as a right rather than through debt not only reduces the disciplining effects of the latter. It also is a way of publicly recognizing and democratically defending the real freedoms of all citizens.

To be clear, this is not a moralistic criticism of debt as evil or irresponsible. But there are very good reasons why society would not want to impose certain kinds of discipline on (most of) its citizens. Firstly, from a social point of view, people's talents might be much more productively used in some other area than those that promise the most immediate monetary returns. There is no shortage of aspiring bankers and traders, but there is a primary care doctor shortage. Primary care doctors can graduate medical school with as much as $200,000 in debt.

A second reason is that practice does not resemble theory. Again, the theory is that so long as each individual makes a reasonable calculation about his or her ability to meet debt payments, there is nothing wrong with financing access to basic social goods through credit. Putting systematic fraud aside (but remembering it is unlikely that credit can sink that far into housing and educational markets without it), there is a deep historical reason for thinking that practice was the opposite of theory. The rise of debt-financed household consumption generally was the product of stagnating wages. Consider, for instance, this research by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco comparing the growth of debt, wealth, and income:

Or compare the above growth of household debt with the stagnation of wages and benefits during that same period (from State of Working America):

Debt-financed consumption was, in other words, a response to the declining ability of most households to afford existing rates of consumption, not an increasing ability or trust in future ability to pay back that debt.

The entire social model, then, was built on a lie. The separation of consumption (financed by future promises to pay) from production (based on limiting present ability to earn) was a mirage. The problem has been that the underlying right to maintain a certain standard of living, or even to access to certain basic social goods like housing, health, and education, was just that: implicit. Every so often, of course, it was made somewhat public -- for instance when Clinton or Bush would say something about providing housing to the poor and minorities who could not otherwise afford it (mainly by changing market incentives and promoting sub-prime borrowing, as it turned out). But this promise was always implicit and had to stay that way because it was mediated through the credit system. Access to these basic social goods was never a fully public claim each individual had against society. Instead, access to these social goods was a matter of a complex series of private, individualized claims against other private institutions like banks and employers, with the public role submerged in the form of altered market incentives. That is the difference between debt and right, and it is clear that the debt-based social model has failed.

There are certainly some situations where debt-financed consumption is a perfectly good option. For instance, the current call for more fiscal austerity at the federal level is ideological claptrap. Moreover, any economy always has to take a bet on the future if it is going to innovate, especially since innovation always comes with the risk of failure. But there are certain kinds of basic goods that are better provided as a matter of universal right, both for the sake of the freedom of the persons who need those goods and as a matter of economic efficiency and productivity. We can have risk-averse graduates and a chronically ill workforce chained to underwater mortgages, or we can have healthy, well-educated citizens with enough security, and thus freedom, to take real risks in their lives.

Alex Gourevitch a Post-Doctoral Research Associate at the Political Theory Project at Brown University. He also runs a blog called The Current Moment.

The settlement will do nothing to help fix the bruised housing market and may in fact have damaging consequences.

There are two fundamental values that are essential to any working capitalist economy: accountability and the rule of law. The reported outlines of the  proposed settlement of the robo-mortgage scandal (no official details have been released) by 46 state attorneys general working together shows how far we have diverged from the basic principles of egalitarian capitalism.

This proposed settlement has no place in a capitalist economy. First, a successful housing recovery is essential to the ultimate recovery of the economy. So the implications of any settlement that potentially hurts the housing market are extraordinarily significant for the health of the nation. Second, it is based on principles that are unrecognizable in a nation built on capitalism and hence accountability and the rule of law.

Bank officials have testified in investigations of the robo-mortgage scandal that they submitted up to 10,000 false affidavits per month. Such testimony is effectively an admission of criminal guilt. These people admitted that, on behalf of their firms, they broke numerous criminal laws, most likely including conspiracy, fraud, and misleading the court.

The banks have attempted to deflect their misdeeds by suggesting that these illegal acts did not harm anyone. The laws were related to process only. The answer to such claims is that they are irrelevant. The banks are acknowledging that they perpetrated victimless crimes on a massive scale. And, each year, I suspect thousands of American citizens go to jail for perpetrating victimless crimes on a far lesser scale.

Moreover, these illegal acts demonstrate disrespect for the mortgage process. This same disrespect for appropriate processes, although not proven to be similarly criminal, is a large part of how our current mortgage mess was created in the first place. The banks ignored many basic underwriting rules in a rush to profit from extending as many mortgages as possible.

At this moment, I suspect the individual state attorneys general have the power, through civil suits and penalties combined with criminal prosecutions, to destroy the banking institutions that are guilty of this illegal behavior. This is, perhaps, the ultimate bargaining leverage, and it should only be given up in return for a settlement that will clearly heal the housing market.

Here are the several reasons why the proposed 46-state settlement is such a disastrous policy:

1. There is no overriding public interest in a settlement of the type proposed at this time. No one believes this settlement will fix the housing market. The state attorneys general are giving up leverage (which exists only through the banks' malfeasance) in return for what are minimal penalties to these giant financial institutions. As I previously pointed out, large monetary settlements have increasingly become a simple "cost of doing business" for financial institutions that break the rules.

To date, the Obama administration has attempted a seemingly endless number of programs designed to prevent foreclosures and heal the housing market. Each has been introduced with great fanfare and as an innovation that will not suffer from the failures of the previous program. Each has then failed.

I fervently hope that the latest program proposed by the administration will succeed. Unfortunately, I do not believe it will. My analysis, which is shared by professional housing economists, is that housing prices are headed substantially downward, by 20 percent or more, which will kick off a further weakening of the economy and a self-reinforcing system of foreclosures. This past Sunday, Joe Nocera's column in The New York Times profiled the analysis of Laurie Goodman, which says we should anticipate that a "staggering" 10 million of the existing 55 million mortgages will ultimately default. The country could not be more ill served by a policy that weakens our ability to ultimately end this cycle of destruction.

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2. Since the start of the crisis, my research has indicated that only a radical restructuring of homeowner debt, combined with innovations in housing finance, will end the crisis. Prior to the bailout, Obama had the opportunity to bring banks to the table to negotiate this necessarily extraordinary change. The opportunity was missed. We bailed out the banks, but not homeowners.

Now a second opportunity exists. The state attorneys general have the ultimate leverage to demand a restructuring of the housing market without legislation. Right now we don't know what this should look like or what form it should take. But to give up this opportunity -- until the statute of limitations is exhausted -- would be inexcusable.

3. The banks (and even some government officials) assert that a settlement will spur a recovery of the housing market and the economy. This is absolute nonsense. In the words of MIT's Simon Johnson (emphasis added):

With roughly a quarter of all U.S. households with mortgages owing more on their loans than their homes are worth, it's no surprise that consumption, which accounts for 70 percent of gross domestic product, is restrained.

The consequent lack of demand discourages business investment, which means job creation remains weak. People are afraid of losing their homes and that fear keeps spending down and thus prevents them -- and their neighbors -- from getting jobs.

What can be done to break this vicious circle? One suggestion from some officials... -- and of course many banks -- is to accept a relatively small amount of money to settle the various robo-signing and other mortgage document cases that state attorneys general are pursuing. The claim is that this would put the banks back on their feet and spur lending. This is a complete illusion.

4. State attorneys general working in a coordinated action may sound positive. But in fact, it violates (at least in principle) the notion of federalism and state sovereignty that is a vital part of our constitutional government. The federal government is the place for coordinated national action.

Many of the programs that ultimately formed successful aspects of the New Deal were first developed by FDR as governor of New York. In effect, the states are laboratories for experiments, which can then be expanded in scope through the federal government. At a time when economic uncertainty is so high, we should not abandon the virtue of multiple experiments by individual states.

5. It is by no means clear that this settlement will have a meaningful impact on banks' behavior. This behavior has been so egregious that even The Wall Street Journal has been forced to acknowledge it. The idea of entitlement is anathema to a capitalist system. Yet the more we punish massive rule-breaking with the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, the more we create the impression -- among the general citizenry and the elite -- that we no longer have a fair capitalist society. As a consequence, the settlement has a strong chance of encouraging further misbehavior.

6. My study of the effects of extreme economic inequality, published as It Could Happen Here, demonstrated that as economic inequality grows, political polarization increases and legislatures become paralyzed. Sadly, we are seeing this today.

In contrast, the robo-mortgage scandal provides an opportunity for action by courageous individuals (state prosecutors and attorneys general) that does not depend on a consensus, which almost certainly prevent innovation. These individuals can make a difference in the lives of millions who suffer today -- even as our Congress fails to act. I hope they do not shrink from this awesome responsibility, one that they may not have sought but nonetheless possess.

The New York Times reports that "a handful of state attorneys general became so troubled by the direction this deal was taking that they dropped out of the talks. Officials from Delaware, New York, Massachusetts and Nevada feared that the settlement would preclude further investigations, and would wind up being a gift to the banks." These attorneys general are to be commended, and the other states should follow their example. Hopefully, their stance will not weaken over time.

There is no reason to violate the capitalist ethos, which is built on accountability and the rule of law, by agreeing to a multi-state settlement. This ethos and the accompanying rules of behavior are what made us a great nation. The far wiser policy is to develop an understanding of what actions will heal the housing market and work toward implementing a policy that realizes them.

Bruce Judson is Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and a former Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management.