The US Treasury will today unveil details of President Barack Obama’s $275bn (€219bn, £196bn) plan to help financially stretched homeowners avoid foreclosure, seen as an essential piece of the administration’s economic recovery efforts.

Lenders and servicers are hopeful the plan will provide a market-wide standard for tackling the housing crisis, which they say has worsened in part because struggling borrowers have held out for a 'better bail-out' from the government. Past attempts to tackle foreclosures, mixed government, agency and bank programmes aimed at narrowly defined categories of borrowers, have been hard to implement effectively.

Financial Times