Mark Miller: Up next in the housing crisis: Strategic default

Mark Miller: Up next in the housing crisis: Strategic default: "Counseling services that receive HUD certification cannot advise their clients to default. White told me in a recent interview of his conversation with a counselor at one industry-funded agency that counseled 3,000 people in 2008 on how to avoid foreclosure. That agency did an assessment at the end of the year of whether any of these would have been better off with strategic default; the assessment concluded that 53 percent would have been better off due to an unsustainable debt-to-incomer ratio. But, the agency couldn't tell clients that, due to its industry funding."

"All that aside, White took pains during our interview to make clear that he isn't advising homeowners to default. 'This is an academic piece that makes the observation that it would be in the best [economic] interest of many consumers to walk away, but that they don' do so due to a double standard -- one for Main Street, the other for lenders and banks. This results in distributional inequality, and propping up market on the backs of the middle class.'"