Today Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke called for greater efforts to prevent more homeowners from reaching foreclosure, such as having lenders reduce the principal on home loans, the Associated Press reported.

“Reducing the rate of preventable foreclosures would promote economic stability for households, neighborhoods and the nation as a whole,” Bernanke said in a speech to a banking group in Florida. “Although lenders and servicers have scaled up their efforts and adopted a wider variety of loss-mitigation techniques, more can, and should be, done.”

Reducing the amount of a loan to provide relief to a struggling homeowner may be something lenders are reluctant to do, Bernanke said, because they could face pressure to write down loans again in the future if home prices fall further. Still, he suggested that longer-term permanent solutions could help the situation more than temporary ones, where the homeowner could end up in trouble again.

“When the mortgage is “under water,’ a reduction in principal may increase the expected payoff by reducing the risk of default and foreclosure,” he said.

Bernanke expects that despite current relief efforts, it’s likely that foreclosures and late payments on home mortgages will continue to rise in the near future.