Dr. Mike Walden, North Carolina Cooperative Extension economist in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at N.C. State University, responds:

"Well, I think the pluses are obvious. If we were able to rework those mortgages, we could perhaps keep more people in their homes. This would help stabilize the housing market, and stabilizing the housing market is really crucial to stabilizing the entire economy and getting us out of the recession. However, there are some downsides. Number one, some of the mortgages can't be reworked because they don't exist in the form they were taken. They've been split up into little chunks and repackaged with other investments and sold all around the world. So technically you can't rework some of those mortgages. There's also the potential for legal resistance by investors to having those mortgages reworked. And then also, there's no assurance that the affected homeowners would be financially safe. In fact, the current data show that half of the homeowners who've had their mortgages reworked still eventually are foreclosed on, and I think this is because we have now a problem not just related people who, perhaps, took out mortgages that were too big for themselves, but now we have a problem of people losing their jobs. That's really what's driving foreclosures at this point."