“Foreclosure rates have increased substantially,” Bernanke said in the keynote speech of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition’s (NCRC) annual conference, which I attended. “Behind these disturbing statistics are families facing personal and financial hardship and neighborhoods that may be destabilized by clusters of foreclosures. … These realities challenge us to find ways to prevent preventable foreclosures” and “ensure a regulatory environment that promotes responsible lending.” (Those quotes come from the Times, which mostly mirror my own notes.)

The Center for Responsible Lending has estimated that over 2 million homes are at risk of foreclosure due to the implosion of the sub-prime lending market. Bernanke, however, mostly discussed ways to prevent a future crisis from occurring. He also mentioned the Administration’s “HOPE Now” program, an initiative based on voluntary industry action.

According to the NCRC, at this point, hope isn’t enough; people need help. That’s why they released their own proposal, “HELP Now,” which would allow the government to buy at-risk loans, modify them and then sell them back into the market, in ways that would prevent families from losing their homes and ensure lenders received adequate payment for loans they made.

At an earlier plenary discussion, Mark Zandi, the chief economist and co-founder of Moody’s Economy.com, praised the HELP Now proposal because it would help homeowners stay in their homes, would adequately regulate the market, and would not be considered a bailout.

Alys Cohen, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said another way to keep people in their homes is to pass H.R. 3609, which would allow bankruptcy courts to modify the terms of home loans during bankruptcy proceedings for recently made loans made. Zandi told the House Judiciary Committee last year that “There is no more efficacious way to short-circuit this [foreclosure] cycle than adopting legislation to allow bankruptcy judges the authority to modify mortgages by treating them as secured only up to the market value of the property.”

Even without Greenspan’s pronouncement, it seems after this weekend that the phrase “bear” economy has taken on a whole new meaning.