Yes, they have them over there too:

American politicians are considering an emergency bail-out of 2.2 million borrowers struggling with their mortgage payments.
…
Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate banking committee, said the
federal government would have to step in with direct aid. "The impact
of losing 2.2 million homes, I suspect, will be in a lot of areas of
our cities and towns that are already pretty hard hit, so we clearly
want to look at that," he said.

Apparently Dodd seems to think that if a house is repossessed then it disappears. There is also the problem of moral hazard to consider.

Clearly, it’s in everyone’s interest to miss out on a systemic collapse but this almost certainly isn’t one:

The rate of arrears on $1,200 billion of sub-prime mortgages to lower
grade lenders has reached 13.3 per cent, raising fears of a wave of
mass defaults.

Not wholly certain what that number means but perhaps $400 billion or so of loans are in arrears? In a $12 trillion economy that’s not a lot, especially as that’s the gross amount, not what might actually be lost if they all do in fact default (the houses as security might not be worth the amount of the loan, but they’re still worth something).

One thing that D2, I and Dean Baker tried to work out a few months ago (it’s somewhere in Dean’s archives…to be fair, my role was simply to ask the question). Is there a possibility of large amounts of negative equity as in the UK in the early 1990s? The best we got to was yes and no.

In the UK system, if the house is worth less than the mortgage  and you default then you still owe the full amount. So you can end up without a house and still with a mortgage. The US system, while it varies from state to state, (we think, at least,) has as a general (possibly nationwide) feature that there is always a put option in the loan. If the house is worth less than the loan then the householder can simply drop the keys off and walk away: they do not then owe the larger amount to the bank. The risk is thus transferred, from those who took out the mortgages to those who hold the mortgage notes: the buyers of the bonds supported by them. Yes, there’s still a hit of the same size but it’s spread throughout the financial system, something large enough to absorb it. My reading of Dodd’s suggestion is that he knows this and that his proposals are in fact to bail out his banking and investor friends, nothing to do with homeowners at all.

This is complicated by the (possible) fact that second (and third etc) mortgages do not have this put option in them. So whether there will indeed be large amounts of negative equity depends upon whether these sub-prime mortgages going into default are first mortgages (which could be true, the recent boom, the expansion in them has been to first time buyers and those previously thought uncreditworthy) or second (which could also be true, many have indeed borrowed further against the rising value of houses).

In short, I dunno, but I suspect that Dodd’s call for something to be done is much more about helping out his buddies than it is concern for oppressed householders.