The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is pushing lawmakers — yet again — to expand the first-time homebuyer tax credit. NAR hopes that lawmakers will make the tax credit available to everyone, rather than just first-time homebuyers — among other things. For more on this, read the following article from HousingWire.
NAR today called for expansion of the $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit to include all home buyers at all income levels.
The push for a broadened tax credit comes after US Department of Housing and Urban Developmentsecretary Shaun Donovan announced home buyers pursuing Federal Housing Administration-insured mortgages may soon use the tax credit as a down payment at the closing table.
An expanded tax credit, combined with HUD’s initiative to make the credit available at the closing table for down payment purposes — called ‘monetization’ of the tax credit in the industry — would make federal assistance available to anyone pursuing a government-insured mortgage.
NAR, from its legislative summit this week, also urged Congress to make the ‘08 loan limit increase formula and loan limit caps permanent, and to “fortify” mortgage giants Fannie Mae (FNM: 0.7867 +2.17%) and Freddie Mac (FRE: 0.8166 +2.08%) to ensure the continued availability of capital for mortgage lenders.
“Housing is the engine of economic growth, and real estate is the road to economic recovery,” says Charles McMillan, NAR president and Dallas-based broker, in a statement today. “With many of the country’s current problems resting on a wobbly foundation of declining home prices, rampant foreclosures and increasing job loss, our members will be asking Congress to pass further legislation that moves the housing market forward.”
More and more people are jumping on the housing recovery bandwagon, but the excitement is a little premature. There are many signs pointing to the fact that the bottom is still far off in the distance. For more on this, read the following blog post from Tim Iacono.
This report by Ben Rooney at CNN/Money takes a few rather ambivalent comments by impartial analysts and combines them with more drivel from a National Association of Realtors shill, interpreting it all as a hopeful sign for the housing market.
Despite last month's decline, existing home sales appear to be stabilizing, according to Ian Shepherdson, economist at High Frequency Economics.
"Sales are volatile month-to-month, but the trend appears to be flattening off," Shepherdson said in a research note.
Yes, and they flattened out last year too before falling off a cliff (see chart from previous post), back when distressed sales accounted for a much smaller portion of overall sales.
By the way, what's with the characterization of distressed sales accounting for "just over half of all transactions in March" in the latest report? In the past, the NAR has cited percentages or a range of percentages, last month putting that figure at between 40 and 45 percent.
The phrase "just over half" could be anywhere between 51 and 60 percent, perhaps higher....
Here's the comment from the realtors' trade group:
First-time buyers made up 53% of existing home sales in March. Charles McMillan, NAR's president, said first-time buyers are "crucial" to a recovery in the overall housing market.
"The housing market always heals from the bottom up, and with large numbers of first-time buyers entering the market it will become a little easier for sellers to trade up or down," McMillan said in a statement.
Between this sort of optimism and word of bidding wars on foreclosed properties (discussed here yesterday and reported again in the Wall Street Journal today), this is probably a very good indication that there is much more pain to come in the housing market.
It is no secret that millions of Americans have put themselves in an unmanageable debt situation thanks to easy credit over the past few years, and while it is unfortunate, hopefully we all can learn from this. Tim Iacono talks about some of the lessons we should have learned, and offers additional insight in his blog post below.
Since credit cards were first issued and automobiles were first financed, bankers and car salesman have been more than happy to assist individuals in realizing their full borrowing potential. Realizing their full potential, that is, by borrowing more money than they really should.
For young adults, perhaps living independently and with their first full-time job, this could lead to important life lessons about managing debt and living within their means. After many months or years of credit card and automobile payments, the initial thrill having long since worn off leaving only the payments, valuable lessons about borrowing too much money have often been learned - lessons that are not quickly forgotten.
When purchasing homes, on the other hand, it used to be quite difficult to take on more debt than would seem reasonable - there, the bar was set higher. Years ago, couples would walk out of their mortgage broker's office disappointed and dejected because their dreams had been thwarted by a loan officer without a heart.
These too were valuable lessons about debt.
Maybe it seemed unfair, but someone who was presumably older and wiser had determined that the dream home so coveted by the young couple was simply beyond their means. Maybe when the couple later reflected on their denied attempt to purchase their dream home, they realized that the lender probably knew best.
But, the financing of real estate purchases has changed dramatically in recent years. Now that home financing has become as easy as getting a credit card or buying a car, valuable lessons about debt learned early on, are being unlearned later in life - this is probably not a good thing.
Credit Cards
Everyone has stories of their first credit cards or a friend’s initial experience with credit cards. It is probably still fairly common for young adults to get a new VISA or MasterCard with a $1000 credit limit, immediately go out and spend the $1000, then begin paying $20 per month to service this debt. Of course the debt never seems to get paid down - but, initially at least, it is easily serviced.
After a while a new credit card would be acquired - You're Pre-Approved!
The process would then be repeated. Another $1000 in debt and another $20 debt service. Many young adults have ended up going back to their parents when this process had been repeated many more times - when the debt service rose much more rapidly than their income and the funds to service the debt began coming up short at the end of the month.
The debt service payment had been multiplying along with the number of credit cards, and was now in the hundreds of dollars per month. Then an emergency arose, and it was game-over - back to the parents, a little groveling, some stern warnings, a few promises, and problem solved.
A valuable lesson was learned.
Automobiles
The purchase of a first automobile can result in a similar learning experience. This one, however can be much more personal - the memory of the car salesman may accompany the monthly payments. Many years ago, a roommate car salesman would occasionally come home and announce, "We buried this guy!” This was invariably a reference to some poor schmuck that came in off the street, and despite his best effort to resist, ended up driving off the lot with a car that he really couldn't afford.
Apparently, there is something both magical and legal about driving the vehicle off the dealer's lot - even if the paperwork was not quite right or the loan wasn't quite approved, you just bought a car - one way or another. You've just made a multi-year commitment to repay many thousands of dollars in both principle and interest in return for that shiny new car that maybe you really can't afford.
Missing too many car payments carries serious consequences - this could be an excellent learning experience if a new car owner needs to be taught this lesson. However, most borrowers who buy more car than they should just live with the strain of seemingly never ending monthly payments until the loan is paid in full. Then they can look back and reconsider the decision that was made on that fateful day. Was it a good decision? Was it worth it?
Another lesson was learned.
[Unfortunately, automobile leases today have given many people the impression that it is completely normal to make car payments forever. Individuals who will never experience the joy of owning automobiles outright and not having any car payments - these people do not know what they are missing.]
Houses
That brings us to today's wild world of home mortgage finance and housing appreciation. If either of the above two lessons about debt were learned earlier in life, it is understandable how they may be quickly forgotten when confronted with a force as powerful as today's global real estate boom.
With lending standards relaxed and home prices rising, debt has taken on an entirely new character - monthly payments now have a much friendlier air about them. Much friendlier in that the underlying asset seems to rise in value at a rate many times the debt service payment.
That never happened with credit cards or automobiles!
If you pay $2000 per month in debt service, and the home value rises by $5000 or $10,000 during that month, and this gets repeated month after month, and you also get a nice place to live in - this seems like an excellent kind of debt.
What lessons are there to learn here? Maybe the lesson is that more debt would be better.
But we are reminded that these are not normal times. We are living in what The Economist magazine calls "the biggest financial bubble in history" - the global real estate bubble. What happens if current trends do not continue? What happens when real estate appreciation regresses to the mean - slowly with stagnating prices or quickly with price declines?
Would there perhaps be some valuable lesson about debt to be learned at that time?
Is the entire Anglo Saxon world about to be taught a valuable lesson about debt?
[This was originally written and published almost four years ago...]
The new mark-to-market rule changes are very controversial. On one hand they have the potential to help stem some of the mounting losses being reported by financial institutions, but on the other hand there is the potential for some ambiguity in relation to the use of “judgment”. For more on this, read the following post from Mark Thoma.
John Berry likes the recent changes in the rules for valuing distressed assets:
Mark-to-Market Rule Gives More Clarity, Not Less, by John M. Berry, Commentary, Bloomberg: Mark-to-market accounting rules are being brought a little closer to economic reality -- accompanied by misplaced howls of outrage. ...[T]he standards have forced many financial institutions to overstate losses on trillions of dollars worth of assets, intensifying the global financial crisis.
Defenders of the rules say they protect bank investors and changing them will allow institutions to hide future losses. To the contrary, they have helped drive down the value of bank stocks, made shorting the shares much easier and caused bank stockholders to lose hundreds of billions of dollars in such companies as Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp. ...
The problem with mark-to-market accounting is that it officially has presumed there’s a functioning market in whatever asset is being valued -- and that means a deal between a willing buyer and seller that isn’t being forced to sell. Actually, no such market exists for many mortgage-backed securities.
Nevertheless,... accountants have required many banks to calculate values based on distressed sale prices. That has meant large writedowns even on mortgage-backed securities that the institutions intend to hold to maturity.
Take the case of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta. Following the mark-to-market rules, it wrote down the value of its portfolio of mortgage-backed securities by $87.4 million in last year’s third quarter. Its actual projected loss on the securities: $44,000. For the fourth quarter the bank recorded a further $98.7 million loss on the securities.
That result makes no sense when the bank doesn’t trade such assets. ... A writedown might still be required under the changes FASB approved yesterday. Yet auditors can now use “significant professional judgment” when valuing illiquid securities. That’s what they should have been allowed to do all along. ...
The key points in this example are that almost all the mortgages involved are still performing and the bank plans to hold the securities to maturity -- and yet large writedowns were required. ...
Now accountants are supposed to use their judgment... That’s a big improvement over just using the last transaction price, as many auditors have been doing. ...
According to a couple economists our present financial crisis looks like a recipe for a depression. The main difference they see between a normal recession and a depression, is that a depression originates in consumer debt. If these economists are correct in their theory, the recent positive market movement will only be a suckers rally. Tim Iacono looks closer at the recent article published by these economists, and adds some of his own thoughts, in his blog post below.
In this commentary in today's Wall Street Journal, economists Steven Gjerstad and Vernon Smith offer a theory about why we could again be going from a bubble into a depression.
Over the years, there have been quite a few bubbles, but not all of them cause the sort of economy-wide damage that was seen in the 1930s or over the last year or so. Why?
Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we're witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.
Most people forget that it wasn't just a stock market bubble in 1929 that led to America's last lost decade. There was an enormous housing and credit bubble in the mid-1920s during which Groucho Marx and others lost a good deal of money on Florida swampland.
As has been the case thoughout history, you can't get a really good bubble going until you get broad participation from the public - preferably lots of people at the lower end of the socio-economic scale levered up courtesy of a banking system that is gushing with easy money.
That pretty much described the situation in the 1920s and in the 2000s.
The entire piece is worth a look as they go through the recent history of financial bubbles in the U.S., a sequence that really accelerated about 20 years ago when you-know-who started sitting in the big chair at the Federal Reserve boardroom.
Interestingly, they touch on one of my all-time favorite subjects since this blog began a few years ago - how owners' equivalent rent duped the Fed.
During the 1976-79 and 1986-89 housing price bubbles, the effective federal-funds interest rate was rising while housing prices rose: The Federal Reserve, "leaning against the wind," helped mitigate the bubbles. In January 2001, however, after four years with average inflation-adjusted house price increases of 7.2% per year (about 6% above trend for the past 80 years), the Fed started to decrease the fed-funds rate. By December 2001, the rate had been reduced to its lowest level since 1962. In 2002 the average fed-funds rate was lower than in any year since the 1958 recession. In 2003 and 2004 the average fed-funds rates were lower than in any year since 1955 when the rate series began.
Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan originations increased an average of 56% per year for three years -- from $1.05 trillion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!
By the time the Federal Reserve began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the Case-Shiller 20-city composite index had increased 15.4% during the previous 12 months. Yet the housing portion of the CPI for those same 12 months rose only 2.4%.How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-ownership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased from 19.0 to 20.2, so the change had little effect on measured inflation: The CPI underestimated inflation by about 0.1 percentage point per year during this period. Between 1999 and 2006, the price-to-rent ratio shot up from 20.8 to 32.3.
With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidly increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the index. In 2004 alone, the price-rent ratio increased 12.3%. Inflation for that year was underestimated by 2.9 percentage points (since "owners' equivalent rent" is about 23% of the CPI). If home-ownership costs were included in the CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.
Yes, "an important component of inflation remained outside the index" - that sort of thing almost always ends badly as noted here on many occasions before.
There are a lot of people who deserve blame for the housing crisis, but who are these people exactly? Dateline recently took it upon themselves to expose the key individuals that they feel are behind the mess. Some are easy to see, while others are a little more abstract in their involvement. Scott Wilson looks closer at the Dateline piece, and adds some of his own input in his blog post below from Your Mortgage or Your Life.
Sunday March 22, 2009, Dateline NBCaired a piece called “Inside the Financial Fiasco,” in which Chris Hanson finally takes a break from exposing sexual predators to take a closer look at the current housing mess.
NBC attempts to assign blame for the mortgage meltdown, and also tries to make it seem like they have finally identified the handful people who were the “only ones who knew” what lay in store for the economy when Wall Street embarked on the derivatives end-run that fueled the crisis.
So let’s go down the list of people that are prime candidates in the vicious circle of blame, and what their role where in the making of this fiasco.
Let’s start at the top. Back in the mid ‘90’s, The Government loosened credit guidelines and required lenders to make mortgages available to more to minority buyers.
By doing this, they gave the lenders an open check book to write questionable loans, all the while knowing that they would be able to sell them on the secondary market (Wall Street).
This was the creation of the infamous “Subprime” loans which later morphed into Alt-A and Expanded Approval loans.
Next, let’s look at the Product Managers who wrote the underwriting guidelines for the toxic loans known as SISA’s and NINA’s, which required little or no documentation of income and assets. The SISA loans are highlighted in the Dateline piece.
Do you think that these product managers had no idea that these types of loans may be misused, or did they only see the underlying profit that was possible from billions of dollars of loan fees collected by creating millions of loans that were virtually just ticking time bombs?
Yes, there are some cases where these loans were appropriate, such as for the business owner who had a lot of write offs, or the borrower whose spouse may not have the best of credit, but will nonetheless contribute towards the monthly mortgage payments.
But the types of borrowers who where actually put into these loans were completely unqualified, as mentioned in the NBC piece.
People like Delores Parker Jackson, who took out multiple loans on four condos totaling over $1.3 million with a negative (-$6000) shown on her tax returns.
Mrs. Jackson, who claims to have run a profitable daycare, and says that she is not to blame, but is actually the victim of predatory lending.
REALLY? She took out multiple mortgages on four different properties totaling over a million dollars with a payment of more than $10k a month, and she claims she had no idea that she could not afford the terms. Now she wants to pretend that she is not culpable, and that the mortgage company committed fraud?
Come on, do seem we that stupid?
Thirdly, let’s look at another “innocent” party: The CEO’s of all the banks and mortgage companies.
These people should have overseen the product managers and acted as the final line of defense by looking out for the company’s long term interests by saying “Hey, stop! These loans may be too risky.”
But the CEO’s saw only a “pot of gold” in the form of billions in loan fees, and where slaves to the corporate bottom line.
Do you think that Angelo Mozilo, the former CEO of Countrywide who earned over $400 million during his last five years at the company, had absolutely no idea that SISA and NINA loans with zero money down would backfire?
Chris Hansen attempts to talk to Mr. Mozilo, but to no avail.
Since he quit Countrywide and the mortgage mess started to blow up, Mozilo has been hiding out at his palatial estate in Southern California, ala Howard Hughes. Chris tried to get the guard at Mr. Mozilo’s gate outside his house to let him in, but was turned away.
Also to blame are the former CEO’s at places like Bear Stern’s and Lehman Brothers, who ended up driving their companies into the ground by buying up these toxic securities. And none of these guys saw the writing on the wall?
I think they did, but also saw big dollar signs in the racket, and choose to ignore the hazards.
Next up for their heaping of blame are The Borrowers. I was an LO for 15 yrs, and used Countrywide as a purchaser for many of my loans.
I knew that some of my borrowers were “less than qualified,” but the underwriting said to “make the loan.”
Like when I would be working for a builder, and a borrower would come to me and asked what loan amount they qualified for, my reply often was, “How much can you afford?”
I told them that I could tell them all day how much they can and cannot get approved for, but only they could tell me how much they really afford.
I could tell them on paper or with calculator that you could qualify to pay, but only the borrower could tell me if they could actually maintain that payment.
I cannot tell you how many times I was told by borrowers, “Don’t worry about me affording it. You just write that mortgage.”
This is where I move on to include the next culprit in this mess, The Loan Officers.
How many LO’s wrote loans for people that they knew would end up in foreclosure?
Many borrowers who I turned down for a mortgage would come back to me later to say, “See, I knew I could get approved. Thanks for nothing.”
At the height of the bubble, there were so countless mortgage brokers who were willing to do anything to write a loan and collect a fee.
They would falsify the numbers to make them work if they had to.
In the Dateline piece, they showcase a woman who was employed as a personal trainer, and who claimed to of told the LO at People’s Choice that she only made $1600/mo.
She was approved for a $259k loan.
Even after she was told that the payment would be over $2100/mo, she figured that she would just have her sister move in and help with the payment.
Do you think that the LO at People’s Choice had any idea that she may NOT be able to make the payment on this house? When Chris Hansen looked at the original paperwork, it stated that she made $7300/mo, which surprised the woman.
She claims she never provided that figure to the LO.
How many LO’s committed fraud because the commissions that they were going to make on each loan they closed could be well into the tens-of-thousands of dollars?
Even though my job was commissioned based, I only made loans if I had some degree of certainty that the borrower had both the ability to pay the mortgage payment and that they completely understood why I was giving them a SISA or NINA loan product.
I did not want a former borrower hunting me down in the parking lot some night after work because I put them in a loan that that left them flat broke.
Next in line is a major player, one who no one seems to put much blame on or even mention much, The Appraiser’s. I believe these guys had a huge impact on the housing explosion, and no one seems to want to bring them up.
As the appraisers continued to inflate the values of the properties, the mortgage companies continued to write mortgages to cover the obscene appraisals.
I knew that if a borrower told me that they were short on funds to close, I could call the appraiser and ask him to “bump up” the value of the property a bit, so that I could give the borrower the money cover closing costs.
This was considered a legitimate practice because real estate only increases in value, remember? But in reality, the value of that house did not go up $5k in the 2-3 weeks since they had done the actual appraisal.
I also found out the hard way how much of an “opinion” an appraisal really was.
Prior to working for the builder, I worked for a short time as a mortgage broker. I only did one loan at the place. , and it was for a gentleman who was doing some renovations on his house, but did not have enough money to finish the project.
Less than a year earlier, the value of the house came in at $85k. When he wanted to do another cash-out refinance a year later, but the new appraisal came in again at $85k. So when I went to my boss and told him that I did not have the value to support the loan, he handed me a business card and said, “Call him.”
Two weeks later, I had an appraisal for $115k, enough to cover the loan.
Was there that much movement in the values of the house? Did it really go up $20k in three weeks, or did the new appraiser just want more business?
What do you think? I know when I worked for one of the big mortgage companies and did a ton of refi’s, every time I had to put an initial value of a home on an application (which typically came from the borrower) nine times out of ten, the appraisal came back with the exact same value.
Curious.
Another big part of the mess, the people who were supposed to catch any fraud or mistakes, were The Underwriters.
They were the final check points in the mortgage process, and when they were presented with a SISA loan that showed that a “house cleaner” made $12k/mo, they should have sounded the alarm.
Like the appraisers, the underwriters are merely mentioned in the piece on Dateline.
Ilene Lanacano, who worked for “People’s Choice,” says that when she brought up some of these problems with the questionable loans, she was often overruled by the CEO of the company.
She states that she was often offered “incentives” by loan officers (money, jewelry, even a car) to approve loans. Ilene says that she never took any of these incentives.
She also claimed that there was harassment and intimidation if you did not approve loans, such as flattened tires and physical threats.
Ilene finally left “People’s Choice” for a consulting firm whose business was to analyze the loans to be pooled in Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS’s). When she raised some flags, she ended up getting in trouble by management.
Next, let’s look to good old Wall Street. You would think that one of the supposed guru’s of Wall Street could have seen the possibility that at least some of these loans were destine fail. But they too, only saw the bottom line, and they sold these MBS to everyone: investors, pension funds, municipalities and other countries.
And then there is China, who bought up trillions of dollars in MBS in an attempt to control the US. By owning all these MBS, China has a huge stake in our mortgage meltdown.
They were only briefly mentioned in the “Dateline” piece, and no real repsonsibility was levied on them. If China had not been so greedy, there wouldn’t have such a demand for MBS, which would have cut down the toxic loans being written.
And the Chinese are smart, shouldn’t they have seen some of the signs?
Next ones to heap some blame on are the Bond Rating Agencies, such as Standard and Poors, who was also briefly mentioned in NBC’s piece.
As Dateline explained, they were hired to give credit ratings to these MBS, which are supposed to indicate their level of risk to investors. “AAA” was the highest rating that they could give a security, and 80% of MBS received that top stamp of approval.
They suggested that most MBS would perform well, despite the fact that the agencies did not have any historical data to back the ratings up. Richard Gufliota of S&P, stated that they were so over inundated with securities to rate that most were not examined to the extent that they should have been.
It should also be mentioned that they made their money in volume too. More quantity over quality.
Finally, a lesser acknowledged culprit of this financial fiasco is The Media itself.
If it wasn’t for the greed of the media (TV, Radio and Newsprint), rolling out with advertisement after advertisement for these mortgage companies and their products, borrowers would not have been so encouraged to accept some of these toxic loan.
In years leading up to this mess, there wasn’t a commercial break that did not produce a mortgage ad.
Often advertised were the No Closing Cost, Stated Income, No Income Verified, and so forth.
There wasn’t a Radio host in the nation who didn’t have at least one mortgage company in their back pocket paying them to be their spokesperson.
Did any of them look into the products that they were pitching to their listeners? Nope. I think they just laughed all the way to the bank.
And what is strange about the media’s role, is that I have yet to see anyone try to add them into the equation. Now, all you hear out of radio talk show hosts spewed crap about how everyone else is to blame. None have come forward to say, “Hey, I guess I had a hand in it too.”
All in all, it is going to be a vicious circle of blame.
There is plenty of blame to go around, and I think when it comes down to it, we can sum it all up with one little word: “GREED;” the Greed of the Government, the greed of the Product Managers, the greed of the CEO’s, the greed of the borrowers, the greed of the Loan officers, the greed of the Appraisers, the greed of the Underwriters, the greed of Wall Street, the greed of China, the greed of the Bond Raters, and greed of the media.
More and more people are starting to pay attention to the economy, and specifically the actions the government is taking to rectify it. One problem that many people are running into, though, is that things in the financial world are getting pretty complicated. We have these things called toxic assets that are destroying banks, but how did they get to be toxic? Furthermore why are they causing so many problems? When most Americans hear about the plans to fix the toxic asset problem, their heads are probably spinning. Economics professor Mark Thoma to the rescue. In his blog post below, Thoma does a great job of breaking the problem — and several of the proposed solutions — down into layman's terms using a car analogy.
Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars - the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless - and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer's "balance sheet" - the cars on its lot - are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase.
If all the cars were in perfect shape, they would sell for $20,000 each. Thus, there are (50)*($20,000) = $1,000,000 in assets on the books according to one way of doing the accounting, but that doesn't necessarily represent the true value of the cars on the lot.
The town where this dealership is located relies upon this business for jobs, it is essential, but, unfortunately, business has fallen off to nothing. Nobody is willing to risk losing $20,000 by purchasing a car that might die just after purchase, so the price has fallen. The expected value of a car is $10,000, but it's an all or nothing proposition, the car runs or it dies, and since people are risk averse nobody is wiling to pay the $10,000 expected value. In fact, the highest price they are willing to pay, $6,000, is lower than the minimum price the dealer is willing to accept (I've assumed a reservation price of $7,500 for illustration, and a horizontal supply curve to make the illustration easier):
So how could the government fix the problem?
1. Government purchases of toxic cars
The government could buy the cars itself, say at $7,500 per car, or $750,000 total for the lot, drive them around a bit (stress test them), wait for the bad ones to blow up, then sell the 50 good cars back to the public (who will no longer be fearful since the bad cars are out of the mix). If they can get anything more than $15,000 for each good car, they will make money on the deal (well, there would be overhead and other costs to cover, but let's abstract from minor details). But if cars end up selling for less than $15,000, they will take a loss.
(In the graph, the government intervention shifts the demand curve outward until it intersects at the kink in the supply curve at Q=100).
The problem with this option is knowing what price to offer for the cars. There is no market, and the firm's reservation price may be too high, i.e. paying the reservation price will eventually lead to a loss. And it's worse. In this example the percentage of bad cars is known, but the percentage of bad cars would also be unknown in a more realistic example, so there's no way to know how many good cars there are for sure, and what price they will sell for after the defective cars have been culled out of the herd. If the government pays $7,500 per car, and more than 62.5% of them go bad (not that much more than the 50% estimate), then taxpayers will lose money even if they sell for $20,000. With the percentage unknown, there's no way to know for sure what the breakeven price will be.
This is, in essence, the original Paulson plan. The only twist is that the price - the $7,500 in the example above, would be determined by an auction among many dealers with the government accepting the lowest bid (which could be $7,500 in this example since that is the price the firm is willing to accept). As you can see by thinking this through, there are questions about what price such an auction would reveal.
One danger in this plan is that if you overpay for the cars, e.g. give $7,500 when the breakeven price was, say, actually $5,000, then you have given the owner of the car lot $250,000 more than the cars were actually worth (this will be the loss to taxpayers). The dealer may need this money to stay solvent and stay in business, but, nevertheless, it is a windfall.
There are a lot of uncertainties here, and lots of ways to lose money. But it's possible to make money too.
2. Subsidies and Public-Private partnerships
Here, the government offers a subsidy to private sector buyers. Suppose that the demand curve intersects the vertical line in the graph (at Q=100) at a price of $4,000. Then in order to sell 100 cars, the government must subsidize buyers by $3,500 so that the $4,000 offer is raised to the $7,500 the firm is willing to accept (notice that the buyer willing to pay $6,000 gets a $2,000 windfall, so, except at the margin, this plan gives surplus to people purchasing the assets - as with the first plan, this shifts the demand curve out until it intersects at the kink in the supply curve).
However, once again, the government will not know if it is getting this right or not. Suppose it offers a $1,000 subsidy thinking that is generous enough. In this example, that won't bridge the gap between the highest offer of $6,000, and the reservation price of $7,500. Thus, the subsidy would be too small to restart the market and the plan would fail. So the answer is to make the subsidy large enough to encourage buyers, but the problem is that if it is too large, the government will be giving money away unnecessarily.
And there's another problem. If there's a large gap between what people are willing to pay and what dealers are willing to accept(the gap between $6,000 and $7,500 in the example), this would be problematic politically since it would require subsidies that are unacceptably large.
And I should note that it doesn't have to be a subsidy. That's one way to do this - as a giveaway - but another way is through a no recourse loan (what is being called a partnership). Suppose that the government gives (up to) a $3,500 loan to a private sector buyer to purchase the car for $7,500. If it's a good car and the value rises above $7,500, say to $15,000, then government will get paid back (with interest) since the asset can be sold profitably (another option is for the government to demand a share of this profit through warrants or other means). But if it's a bad car, the price falls to zero and the loan is forgiven - it does not need to be repaid. So the private sector agents only have to put up a fraction of the price to control the asset, and their losses are limited to the amount they put up while the gains are potentially large.
This is, in essence, the Geithner Plan. If many of the loans are not repaid, or if the subsidy is too large, it could lose a lot of money, but it could also make money too.
3. Nationalization
Now for the Saab story. Another option is for the government to simply take over the car dealership. The dealership is essential to the economy of the town, without it people will struggle, and the government - for that reason - might consider temporarily taking over the dealership to prevent failure. In doing so, it would make an evaluation of the company's assets, pay off the people who loaned the business money up to this amount, which may require having them take a haircut, i.e. accept some percentage of what they are owed on the bad loans they made, and the owner would simply be wiped out (which is a benefit since the business is insolvent and this allows the owner to escape the loans that cannot be paid through liquidation).
After taking over, the government would stress test the cars it now owns, put the bad ones in the junk pile, and sell the rest back to the public. So long as it didn't pay the creditors too much when it took over, i.e. the haircut is sufficiently large, it ought to make money on the deal. But it could lose money here too.
The Point
But, and I want to stress this, the point of these plans is not to make money, the point is to keep the economy of the town going, to keep people employed. If people place a large value on security, then even if the government takes a loss on paper, it may not be an economic loss. That is, we must put a value on the jobs that are saved and the security it brings (simply imagine that the utility function has risk as one of its arguments - by lowering the risk of job loss and the associated household disruption, you have made the agent better off, and this must be counted against any loss from any of the programs above). There is value in economic stability and security over and above whatever the government makes (or loses) on the actual financial transactions, and this must be factored into the evaluation of the policy.
Thanks to a recent TV spot on Good Morning America (along with other press exposure) banks are going to be hearing these words a lot, "Produce the note." A new movement is under way that is causing banks a lot of pain and grief. Essentially how it works is that a homeowner in foreclosure will submit paperwork requesting that the bank produce a copy of the original note. Sounds easy enough, but with the number of times these notes have been bought, sold and transferred, the paper trail can be hard to follow. Desperate homeowners are finding that if nothing else this tactic is buying them a little more time in their home. Tim Iacono looks at this new tactic in his blog post below:
The little guy fights back by making a simple request - prove that the borrower owes the money to the bank before foreclosing.
It really is hard to have much sympathy for the borrower, at least in this case - the lady borrowed $140,000 against a house for which she paid just $39,000.
It does, however, add great irony to the situation.
It appears that we finally (hopefully) will be able to see where our tax dollars are going, thanks to a recent court ruling. This court order will force the Treasury to release some of the information that they have been concealing from the American public in regards to the massive bailout of the country's financial system. Anthony Freed provides us with more information on this development in his blog post below:
Advocates of an open Government and transparent allocation of taxpayer funds celebrated the news late Friday afternoon (2-20-09) that the U.S. District court has moved to enforce a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to release more details about exactly how TARP bailout funds have been and are being used.
The TARP was passed in early October, 2008, in an effort to stem the damage to the nation’s financial industry incurred during a decade of lax risk-abatement that pervaded the banking culture after the legislative emasculation of the Glass-Steagall Act.
FOX Business sued Treasury on Dec. 18 over failure to provide information on the bailout funds or respond to FBN’s expedited requests filed under the FOIA.The initial request, filed on Nov. 25, sought actual data on the use of the bailout funds for American International Group (AIG) and the Bank of New York Mellon (BK), and an additional request, filed on Dec. 1, sought similar data on the bailout funds for Citigroup (C).
FBN asked the Treasury Department to identify, among other issues, the troubled assets purchased, any collateral extended, and any restrictions placed on these financial institutions for their participation in this program.
The Treasury Department - along with the other banking regulators like the FDIC, OTS, and the Federal Reserve - are notoriously secretive concerning the data they collect and their subsequent analysis of the viability of any particular institution, preferring to operate instead behind closed doors.
This tendency often leaves investors in the dark, which generally tends to work in the banks’ favor. Regulators would argue that they are not in the business of moving markets, and that some data may be misinterpreted and inadvertently cause a run on funds at named institutions, evidenced by Schumer’s now infamous disclosure of details that may have led to the collapse of Indy Mac Bank in 2008.
That argument may have held some water until the TARP bailout effectively made the U.S. taxpayer a shareholder in any number of as yet identified institutions, and the owner of any assortment of exotic financial instruments which have proved toxic to Global capital markets.
Judge Richard J. Holwell of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said in a decision Friday that the government is directed to comply with FOX Business’s request under the FOIA “within 30 days and to produce a Vaughn index with 45 days.”That means Treasury must comply with FOX Business’s request by Monday, March 23, and must produce a Vaughn index by Monday, April 6.
The Treasury will have the chance to withhold some documents and information they deem too sensitive, but now have to provide an itemized “Vaughn index” of which documents and information have been redacted, and for exactly what reason.
“A Vaughn Index must: (1) identify each document withheld; (2) state the statutory exemption claimed; and (3) explain how disclosure would damage the interests protected by the claimed exemption.”
This may open the door to further FOIA challenges to release the remaining information if the Treasury fails to convince the courts that their vetting of information was reasonable.
I don’t think Treasury has realized that they are not the only ones who have new powers and responsibilities in the implementation of this historic bailout - the courts have yet to weigh-in on much of this, including who is ultimately going to be held responsible for the mess that is the economy, even if it is still taxpayers who have to foot the bill to clean it all up.
My guess is that the courts feel very differently about full disclosure than does the insider Wall Street elite who regulate themselves from Washington D.C. in seeming perpetuity.
Frank Rich of the New York Times wrote a good op-ed piece called What We Don’t Know Will Hurt Us, which helps further the argument that it is time to get to bottom of exactly what is going on with our economy, and why their seems to be so little consequence for the perpetrators of so much devastation.
Americans are right to wonder why there has been scant punishment for the management and boards of bailed-out banks that recklessly sliced and diced all this debt into worthless gambling chips. They are also right to wonder why there is still little transparency in how TARP funds have been spent by these teetering institutions. If a CNBC commentator can stir up a populist dust storm by ranting that Obama’s new mortgage program (priced at $75 billion to $275 billion) is “promoting bad behavior,” imagine the tornado that would greet an even bigger bank bailout on top of the $700 billion already down the TARP drain.
Remember, the fundamental point of the TARP bailout is to funnel incredible amounts of taxpayer money - debt, actually - to the very institutions and people who are responsible for driving the markets off the cliff in the first place.
And they got paid handsomely for doing it.
It is time for our nation’s financial machine to drop the self-righteous arrogance they have cloaked themselves in for too long, for all of those paper-pushing money lords to release their false sense of entitlement, relinquish their ill-gotten wealth from the last 10 years, and to return to their proper place in the economic landscape as facilitators of capital creation, not the creators of capital.
Accountability in the largest disbursement of public funds in history is not only a good idea, it is essential to our democracy, as is ending the revolving door between corporate boardrooms and the regulatory offices of our government.
The Fox Business FOIA request and the court’s decision to release more information should serve as a warning to the Wall Street good ol’ boys that their orgy of omnipotence is truly over, and that the era of accountability is in.
It appears the government is ready and willing to do whatever it takes to fix the housing crisis, but there is one little problem: They can’t. As part of the new stimulus package, there will likely be a $15,000 homebuyer tax credit, and not just for first-time homebuyers, but for all homebuyers purchasing a primary residence. In addition, the government will likely attempt to drive mortgage rates down to around 4.5 percent and work particularly hard to modify troubled loans to keep homeowners out of foreclosure. With these new measures in place the housing market will surely recover…right?
The answer to that question depends on your definition of recovery. Will it be enough to stop prices from falling, and possibly even help them start going up again? It’s definitely possible, but the problem won’t be fixed even if prices do turn around. Artificially inflated prices caused the housing crisis in the first place. Homeownership became an attractive option for more people than ever before through financing options that were cheap and widely available—a little too widely available, we are now discovering. ARMs, interest-only and other creative loan programs kept monthly payments low, and people could suddenly afford a more expensive house—or so it appeared. When interest rates started rising and ARMs reset, housing values stopped climbing and all hell broke loose.
So why would we believe that artificially boosting housing values will be sustainable this time? What do we think will happen when mortgage rates rise again and the tax credits expire? We won’t have to worry about ARMs resetting this time around because they are now shunned by banks for the most part, but the fundamental problem remains that housing is just too expensive compared to income. Interest rates can’t stay this low forever, and the tax credit will expire after the end of the year. Then homebuyers will only have their personal income to rely on to pay for their homes. This is how it has always been (minus government intervention), and it is how it should be. People making $50,000 a year shouldn’t be living in a $400,000 house—It’s that simple. People need to live within their means, but the government doesn’t seem to grasp this and keeps pushing measures to modify home loans. We can try to modify people’s loans all day long, but if they can’t afford their homes, then they can’t afford their homes. According to the Wall Street Journal, over 40 percent of borrowers were at least 60 days past due eight months after their loan was modified. It seems to me that these loan modifications are just delaying the inevitable and costing banks and taxpayers more money.
Before the housing crisis can truly end, housing prices must come into balance with incomes. When this happens, the problem will solve itself. When buying a home starts to make more sense than renting, people will start buying again. It isn’t that hard to figure out. Spending taxpayer money to prop up housing is not only a waste, but an unethical perpetuation of the problem. It is completely unfair to renters as well as our youth. Unfortunately, those groups represent the minority, so their voice isn’t likely to be heard. If these measures are passed, expect to pay handsomely for it and to see another bubble burst a few years from now. At least this time no one should be able to use the excuse that they didn’t see it coming.
There has been a lot of talk this morning about the unexpected rise in existing home sales in December, and specifically whether or not it signals the beginning of the end. Unfortunately, we also saw a less positive statistic released: The median home sale price fell 15.3 percent in 2008—the largest drop on record since 1968, according to the Associated Press (AP). So what exactly are we to make of these statistics?
In my mind, this is positive news overall. First and foremost, property values are still too high and they will continue their decline until they reach equilibrium with income levels. That prices dropped so much means that we are ever closer to that point. Increased home sales in December is also a good sign, but one must wonder how much can be attributed to suppressed mortgage rates.
Most homebuyers do not look at the overall cost of the home, but rather focus on how much money they need to put down and the resulting monthly mortgage payment. When mortgage rates were under 5 percent, that dream home was suddenly within reach, and many people came down off the fence to buy. As rates rise again the opposite will happen.
Let’s also not lose site of the fact that thousands of people are losing their jobs every day, and as long as job losses and layoffs are on the rise, it is hard to imagine that the real estate market or any other sector of the economy will recover any time soon. And let’s keep in mind that although home sales increased in December, overall 2008 saw 13 percent fewer home sales than in 2007 and the lowest total since 1997, according to the AP.
This correction was necessary, and we are closer to recovery every day. I wouldn’t get too excited about it yet, as we should expect to see an over-correction before total recovery in this type of market, but as the chart below further illustrates, we are getting closer to what appears to be an historical equilibrium.
It is no secret that builders are hurting, and some experts predict that upwards of half of them will be out of business before this economic crisis is over. The tough real estate market plagued by indecisive buyers and oversupply, combined with the restrictive lending environment, means that even those builders who manage to stay in business are still going to be hurting. It should be no surprise then that new construction is reaching all time lows. Overall it is a good thing, and something that needs to happen in order to allow the market to recover, but it is painful for builders nonetheless. Tim Iacono from The Mess That Greenspan Made looks closer at the latest new homes report and offers his take in his blog post below.
The Census Bureau reports new home construction reached record lows last month, a fitting end to the worst year in the home building business since record keeping began in 1959. Housing starts fell 15.5 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of just 550,000, worse than the previous low of 651,000 set in November.
In population-adjusted terms, the previous record monthly lows in the low-700,000 range set in the mid-1970s are about double the current rate of home building, an astonishing statistic.
For example, prior to 2008, the low-water mark was 709,000 in May of 1975 which would be just over one million after adjusting for the growth in the U.S. population.
During all of 2008, housing starts totaled just 904,000, a decline of 33.3 percent from the level of 1.36 million units in 2007. The previous low was in 1991 when 1.01 million units were started, a total that, after adjusting for the increase in population was actually worse than last year.
Building permits, a leading indicator for new home construction, dropped to an annual rate of 549,000 in December, a decline of 10.7 percent from November, and also a record low.
This follows yesterday's dismal report by the National Association of Home Builders that pessimism has reached new all-time lows. The monthly confidence survey dropped to just 8 in January, down from 9 in December. Recall that, not more than two years ago, this index was over 50.
There is a lot of momentum gaining right now behind the idea to create a so called, "Bad Bank." This bank would be set up by the government and would be used to take toxic debt off of the balance sheet of the banks like Citigroup and Bank of America. Paul Krugman thinks this "Bad bank" is simply a bad idea. Economics Professor Mark Thoma revisits Krugman's article in his blog post below.
Are policymakers about to take another wrong turn?:
Wall Street Voodoo, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: Old-fashioned voodoo economics — the belief in tax-cut magic — has been banished from civilized discourse. The supply-side cult has shrunk to the point that it contains only cranks, charlatans, and Republicans.
But recent news reports suggest that many influential people, including Federal Reserve officials, bank regulators, and, possibly, members of the incoming Obama administration, have become devotees of a new kind of voodoo: the belief that by performing elaborate financial rituals we can keep dead banks walking.
To explain..., let me describe ... a hypothetical bank that I’ll call Gothamgroup, or Gotham for short.
On paper, Gotham has $2 trillion in assets and $1.9 trillion in liabilities, so that it has a net worth of $100 billion. But a substantial fraction of its assets — say, $400 billion worth — are mortgage-backed securities and other toxic waste. If the bank tried to sell these assets, it would get no more than $200 billion.
So Gotham is a zombie bank: it’s still operating, but the reality is that it has already gone bust. Its stock isn’t totally worthless — it still has a market capitalization of $20 billion — but that value is entirely based on the hope ...[of] a government bailout.
Why would the government bail Gotham out? Because it plays a central role in the financial system. ... Gotham has to be kept functioning. But how can that be done?
Well, the government could simply give Gotham a couple of hundred billion dollars... A better approach would be to do what the government did with zombie savings and loans at the end of the 1980s: it seized the defunct banks, cleaning out the shareholders. Then it transferred their bad assets to ... the Resolution Trust Corporation; paid off enough of the banks’ debts to make them solvent; and sold the fixed-up banks to new owners.
The current buzz suggests ... policy makers aren’t willing to take either of these approaches. Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward ... moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” ... “The aggregator bank would buy the assets at fair value.” But what does “fair value” mean?
In my example, Gothamgroup is insolvent... The only way a government purchase of that toxic waste can make Gotham solvent again is if the government pays much more than private buyers are willing to offer.
Now, maybe private buyers aren’t willing to pay what toxic waste is really worth... But should the government be in the business of declaring that it knows better than the market what assets are worth? And is ... paying “fair value,” whatever that means,... enough to make Gotham solvent again?
What I suspect is that policy makers — possibly without realizing it — are gearing up to attempt a bait-and-switch: a policy that looks like the cleanup of the savings and loans, but in practice amounts to making huge gifts to bank shareholders at taxpayer expense...
Why go through these contortions? The answer seems to be that Washington remains deathly afraid of the N-word — nationalization. ...Gothamgroup and its sister institutions are already ... utterly dependent on taxpayer support; but nobody wants to recognize that fact and implement the obvious solution: an explicit, though temporary, government takeover. Hence the popularity of the new voodoo, which claims, as I said, that elaborate financial rituals can reanimate dead banks.
Unfortunately, the price of this retreat into superstition may be high. I hope I’m wrong, but I suspect that taxpayers are about to get another raw deal — and that we’re about to get another financial rescue plan that fails to do the job.
Recently a coalition of homebuilders, real estate agents and other housing stakeholders have come together to formulate a plan to fix the economy. For the purpose of making their plan known, they have even created a website: fixhousingfirst.com. They proclaim that the main reason that the economy is so down right now is because the real estate market is being battered. After all, the problems began when housing values started to fall and foreclosures mounted, which exposed troubled mortgage-backed securities. So naturally, if we hope to fix this financial crisis, then we must address the most glaring problem first and foremost, right?
“So what is their big plan,” you ask? To create another housing bubble of course!
Their plan, as written on the website, is outlined below:
Enhance the initial Home Buyer Tax Credit:
Eligible purchases: Primary residences between April 9, 2008, and December 31, 2009.
Credit amount: 10% of home price capped at 3.5% of FHA loan limits (geographically dependent) — ranging between approximately $10,000 and $22,000.
Eliminate the recapture — a true tax credit [Here they are referring to the repayment of credit described above. In the previous housing bill there was an interest free loan for first time homebuyers of $7,500.]
Monetization: credit available at time of closing.
Available to all home buyers and not just first-time home buyers.
Couple the enhanced tax credit with a below market 30-year fixed-rate mortgage for home purchases
2.99% rate available for contracts closed between now and June 30, 2009.
3.99% rate for contracts closed between June 30, 2009 and December 31, 2009.
Continue foreclosure prevention measures to keep people in their homes, help stabilize home prices and bolster the economy.
Restated, they want taxpayers to pay the down payment for homebuyers and subsidize their mortgage payments as well. What would the net effect of this be? Housing would all suddenly become much more attractive and people would buy, pushing prices up. This is exactly what they say will happen, and is what they are striving for. The trouble is that it is an artificial boost to housing prices, which will inevitably lead to another housing bubble. Housing just isn’t worth what it currently costs. That is the simple truth, and a truth that we all need to grasp. Once the subsidies are gone, housing prices will once again fall until they hit their true value point.
If we are looking for a solution to temporarily get us out of this mess, I think this is certainly one plan that will help with that. However, to me it seems like a waste of time and money when in the end we are ultimately going to return to the same place we were before. This plan is not sustainable in any way shape or form, and should not be seriously considered. Then again what did one expect to see from a plan constructed entirely by home builders, real estate agents and other housing stakeholders?
I was reading through some blog posts this morning and came across one on housingdoom.com that just reaffirms my anti-bailout position. The blog post is simply a rental listing that was posted on Craigslist in Tampa, and while a rental listing in itself is nothing to rant about, you really need to read this particular one.
Here it is:
I HAVE A 3 BEDROOM HOUSE THAT I AM LETTING GO, IT SHOULD BE ATLEAST ANOTHER YEAR BEFORE THE COURT WANTS THE KEYS, SO I AM RENTING OUT THIS HOUSE WITH NO CREDIT CHECK AND ON A MONTH TO MONTH TERM, SO NO ONE IS LOCKED IN, IT IS A CHEAP WAY FOR YOU TO SAVE MONEY. THE HOUSE HAS NO APPLIANCES BUT YOU CAN GO TO CRAIGS LIST AND GET FREE ONES UNDER THE FREE STUFF. CHECK OUT THE LINKS BELOW. IF YOU ARE INTRESTED PLEASE E-MAIL ME. ALSO THERE IS NO SECURITY DEPOSIT AND THE HOUSE IS ON A 1/4 ARCE. YOU CAN E-MAIL ME DIRECTLY AT JOEYCARLO@******** FIRST COME FIRST SERVE.
This guy Joe is asking $499 a month for this house, which is ridiculously low, so I’m sure that he won’t have a problem finding a tenant to take him up on his offer. Obviously he has no intention of using the rental proceeds to pay his mortgage, and is planning to take full advantage of the system for as long as he can.
This is one of the reasons why I am so adamant that a foreclosure moratorium is a bad idea. Sure a lot of homeowners really want to stay in their homes. However, many have no intention of staying in a house that is thousands underwater, and a majority of those homeowners who do want to stay in their homes probably can’t afford it, so they would just be delaying the inevitable. Then you have guys like this, who plan to milk the system for every dime they can get. He already stole the appliances, and now he plans to take advantage of the lenders some more. Since taxpayers are basically on the hook for many of these lenders, he is also taking advantage of taxpayers.
If we can figure out a way to limit the bailout to only those homeowners who actually want to stay in their homes and who can afford to do so, I might be more inclined to support it. But any bailout, or other measure, that supports guys like this, will never get my backing. This guy may be an extreme example of the potential problems at hand, but I can’t help thinking that there are tens of thousands of people out there doing this exact same thing. They probably just aren’t disclosing the situation outright like Joe here. Just reading this listing makes me angry. If Joe isn’t going to live in the house or at least try to make the payment, then he needs to return the keys to the lender. Anything short of that should be illegal, especially when taxpayers are ultimately on the hook for the bill.
If you thought we were almost done with the collapse of the mortgage market, you are sadly mistaken. Last night 60 minutes did a piece about the looming wave of mortgage defaults, Alt-A and option ARMs. While, as Scott Wilson outlines below in his guest post on Your Mortgage or Your Life, 60 minutes did not do a fabulous job on this story, they did reveal some very interesting facts and figures. One that was especially scary occurs 3 minutes and 40 seconds into the video. This shows how most of the subprime mortgages have already reset, but what is looming over the next few years is a huge number of Alt-A and option ARMs due to reset. The graphic will definitely make you change your tune if you think this carnage is almost finished.
by guest author and good friend Scott J. Wilson
I know that I am just smart enough to get by, and I know am not a genius by any stretch of the imagination. I have just been in the mortgage industry - working everything from mortgage sales to secondary markets - for more than fifteen years.
I happen to be watching CBS’s 60 Minutestonight (12-14-08) and they had a piece called Mortgage Meltdown: Where’s the Bottom? with Scott Pelley, who did the story, and not a very good job of it. Either he or his writers need to better research their topic before they to such a report.
Mr. Pelley failed to note that POA’s qualified borrowers with “teaser” interest rates, and not the actual “payment” interest rates. But that is not what I am griping about. My complaint lay in Pelley’s false assumption that no one but a few sage individuals could see these consequences of poor lending standards coming.
All of my experience is in the explosive Orlando, Florida area, so I know a thing or two about exotic mortgage products like the soon to be infamous Pay Option ARM (POA), ticking time-bomb of the mortgage world, and the subprime’s little brother ALT A.
During the bubble from in 2004-2006, I worked for one of the biggest lenders in the nation (one of the survivors thus far) and I doing a truckload of Condo-conversions. I sold a hell of a lot POA’s to borrowers during that period, and most will all be recasting over the next two years.
I tried to always do one thing when I did sell a POA, I tried to explain to the borrowers exactly what these loans were intended for - people with season variances in income like construction and tourist trades, or for those whose income is mostly delivered from quarterly bonuses like sales people.
I did my best to point out to the borrower advantages and traps in POA’s. That being said, I am no “expert” by 60 Minutes standards, let alone “one of (only) six experts in the nation who saw this (tsunami of foreclosures) coming,” as 60 Minutes called Mr. Eagan in tonight’s story.
I knew way back when in the bubble, as did most of the loan officers that I worked with, that these were potentially bad products if they were sold to the wrong borrowers, and that most would probably fail if they allowed more than 80% loan to value (LTV), or made them available to speculators and subprime borrowers.
I also know that most of these loan officers were not geniuses either. Could we have been the only ones to know? I doubt it. So to say that the banks that offered them had no idea that POA’s had a high risk of potentially failing is just completely incorrect.
The bank’s own greed got the best of them; all they saw was the dollar signs in their eyes, as fees and points that filled their coffers.
The borrowers were really no less greedy- like I said, I did my best to explain, even tried to talk some borrowers out of using a POA to buy the property that they were interested in. But most times, it was to no avail. They either didn’t care about the risks or worse yet, their Realtor “over talked” me and told them that I did not know what I was talking about, and that the POA was their best choice:
Real estate always goes up, remember? It’s different here! No need to worry about that negative amortization loan if you stick with the only payment you can really afford, the one with the 1% teaser, your house will be worth double what you paid for it in a year or two!
But, unfortunately, the problem as the banks saw it wasn’t that these loans were going to fail in droves, nope.
The problem the banks saw was that the people were using these loans as short-term real estate investment loans with a really low initial payment, giving the investors time to remodel the property in order to “flip” the house and then move on to the next investment without having to sink so much capital into principle and interest with a higher interest commercial loan payment.
The banks were not making enough money, so they started tacking on prepayment penalties, which investors took as a cost of doing business and the banks thought of as a new revenue stream.
So the big banks and mortgage lenders had to have done some sort of analysis of these POA loans (I know Anthony did when he worked for them, whether the executives ever really read them I don’t know).
Did they not anticipate that the loans would be bad? That if someone who was taking this completely unaffordable loan out for a long period of time they would get burned, especially if the borrower had a two or three year pre-pay penalty on it and the market took a quick downturn, leaving them unable to refinance - just like it did.
Come on though, everyone can’t be so smart that we all saw this coming, but the leadership at Corporate of these mega-institutions did not - especially when they were offering No Income/No Asset options as well - now commonly know as “Liar-Loans” for their lack of any documentation in exchange for a higher interest rate.
Again, profit driven.
At one point, I told people that it was not a matter of if you can qualify or not for an Option ARM or not, if you had below-average or sub-prime credit, you would qualify , with no problems. All I had to do, was run their credit and if they had a 620 credit score (below average credit at the time), then I told them that they were approved with out even having an underwriter look at it.
Underwriters could approve even lower scores with the advent of “risk-based” and “exception” pricing add-ons, basically charging more for the additional risk posed by a riskier borrower, hence the birth of the ALT A loan, among other expanded approval products meant to sell more loans to more people.
So to have Mr. Pelley and 60 Minutes do this completely un-researched and absolutely baseless story that has little or no semblance to the truth is a more than a shame - lots of people knew this crisis was headed our way.
Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if close to a million people knew that these loans were problems and a lot of them were going to fail. Do you think that any of them just might have worked in upper management of a these now failing banks?
Or are we really all just geniuses after all?
Well in that case then, I’d say my superior intellect makes me really doubt it.
So which city was hit harder by the real estate collapse, Las Vegas or Phoenix? To be sure they both have taken serious hits, but only one will go down as the winner. Tim Iacono from The Mess That Greenspan Made looks at the latest reports and gives the latest update on the markets. If your city is not in the top spot, don't fret because there is still lots of time to play catch up.
The September report(.pdf) for the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indices shows the 10-City and 20-City Composite Home Price Indices at new record annual declines of 18.6 percent and 17.4 percent, respectively. Price indices for all 20 cities are shown below. To aid in viewing this graphic, the order of the legend (upper left) reflects the top-to-bottom position of all 20 cities for the current month (far right). As such, the legend order indicates which cities have managed to hold onto the largest real estate price gains since 2000.
Congratulations New York!
You've just surpassed Washington D.C. as the metro area that has held onto home price gains the best in this decade. The bad news is that, with all the recent troubles on Wall Street, this may not last that long.
Not surprisingly, Phoenix and Las Vegas continue to lead the way down, year-over-year home price declines in both areas pushing past 31 percent in September as indicated in red in the table below - the death match continues.
A few other areas are also threatening to crack the 30+ percent annual decline threshold as indicated in blue, notably, San Francisco, an area where the annual price decline worsened to 29.5 percent. Two areas showed month-to-month improvement - Cleveland and Boston - while home prices in Dallas were unchanged from August. Cleveland was the only region where the annual home price decline improved from a year ago, from -6.6 percent in August to -6.4 percent in September.
David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at Standard & Poor's, noted:
The turmoil in the financial markets is placing further downward pressure on a housing market already weakened by its own fundamentals.
All three aggregate indices and 13 of the 20 metro areas are reporting new record rates of decline. Looking at the returns of the U.S. National Index, prices are back to where they were in early 2004. As of September 2008, the 10-City Composite is down 23.4% from its peak, the 20-City Composite is down 21.8% and the National Composite is down 21.0%
You'd think that things couldn't get any worse for home prices, but they probably will.
This article has been reposted from The Mess That Greenspan Made. The full post can also be viewed on The Mess That Greenspan Made.
Many people were excited about the Hope for Homeowners program that was recently rolled out to help curb the growing number of foreclosures, and keep people in their homes. Unfortunately, as Anthony Freed points out in his blog post on Your Mortgage or Your Life, things did not quite turn out as planned.
It’s reassuring to know that our dedicated civil servants are willing to put in the long hours required, on nights and weekends, to make sure their banking buddies and colleagues don’t have to suffer the same fate as many banking executives of late, having to retire with hundreds of millions of dollars that were fraudulently paid out as options and bonuses as reward for investing long and naked, and exposing their companies to tremendous risks.
By the way - none of those profits from the ‘boom’ are being appropriated in order to reimburse those now failing companies, and none of that money is going to be recovered in order to soften the blow to taxpayers.
That money is considered to be lawful compensation for a job poorly done. What is on the table is just exactly how much more bonuses they should get before their companies are declared illiquid then subsequently sold off to the lone bidder for pennies on the dollar, and how much of the bailout money they will use to buy up competitors instead of lending it out as promised.
And for the lowly taxpayer on whose backs both the illicit corporate profits as well as the cost of the bailout are borne? What has this unprecedented dash to action by the bureaucrats, political appointees, and elected representatives of the people wrought in the way of sanctuary from the economic tempest that has engulfed their citizenry?
How about the dandy “Hope for Homeowners” program, designed to help more than 400,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure by making as much as $300 billion dollars available for the effort. What a fantastic idea, it would seem at first glance. Of course, the Devil really is in the details.
As of today, October 27, 2008 - nearly four weeks since the program was unveiled - a remarkable 79 people have applied for the program (Fox News 8-27-08).
Yes, 79 homeowners have been accepted (Fox News 8-27-08).
There are at least 77 banks participating in the program. I am not going to try to do that math in my head, but my best guess is that each of those banks has only helped about one homeowner avoid foreclosure on average in that 27 day period.
With all of the poorly underwritten loans Countrywide booked - and the tens of billions of dollars in profits they made in the process - one would think they might be on the list of participating lenders. Not surprisingly, they are not. Although a unit of Bank of America now, there has been no indication they will assume the responsibility for modification of existing Countrywide loans.
My first impression was that this had to be due to a simple lack of awareness by the public that such a program was available to them. Not the case at all I have found. The program has generated a great deal of interest from distressed homeowners since it was unveiled.
Lenders have been deluged with inquiries from interested borrowers, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this program could help as many as 400,000 homeowners through September 2011, when the program ends.
“Our phones have been going crazy,” said Anthony Logan, president of Group Capital Mortgage in Cerritos, Calif, a participating lender.
What’s the hold up? Why, it’s the program itself, which was designed almost certainly to fail. First of all, the program is completely voluntary for both the lenders and the participating banks. It also requires the lenders to forgive a portion of the original loan balance in an effort to bring the mortgage in line with the market and affordability for the borrower to enter a long term fixed mortgage.
It allows certain borrowers at risk of foreclosure to refinance into a 30- year fixed-rate loan insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) if the current lender agrees to write down the existing loan to 90% of the home’s market value today. In plummeting areas such as California, if a lender holds a $500,000 mortgage and the home’s current appraisal comes in at $400,000, the lender would forgive $140,000 in all. Even before the program launched, lenders expressed concerns about the potentially enormous write downs they would face.
Incredibly, in the face of receiving the largest publicly funded bailout of private industry in history, supposedly caused by nonperforming securities backed by rapidly foreclosing mortgages, the banks themselves are refusing to use a portion of that bailout money to help alleviate the very circumstances that had predicated the public bailout in the first place.
“Refinancinginto the new government-backed program requires your current lender’s approval. If the home’s value is less than the mortgage — which real estate data provider Zillow.com estimates applies to nearly one-third of American borrowers who bought in the last five years — the note’s owner must also agree to reduce the amount owed on the house to 90 percent of its current appraised value. If you owe $190,000 on a house that’s only worth that much, the bank would have to agree to reduce the loan to $171,000, giving up $19,000 in principal, plus interest.”
Meanwhile, two million families are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure in the next two years.
There is a serious leadership vacuum in this country, especially at the upper echelons of both government and business. Their priorities and policies are bankrupting our nation, and the close relationship between these private industries and our government regulatory agencies should be rigorously examined.
Heavy deregulation and the elimination of the safety barriers that had existed between the retail banks and investment banks, as well as the experimental distribution of risk to world-wide markets through untested financial vehicles, led to the erosion of the credit markets.
This system, partially conceived and enthusiastically advocated by Paulson, directly led to the current financial crisis that threatens the first worldwide depression since the 1930’s.
Now, for better or worse, we have handed the job of fixing this mess to the very people most instrumental in it’s cause, namely Paulson.
Is it any wonder that the phones are ringing off the hooks as desperate homeowners look for help and scramble to avert financial ruin by refinancing out of predatory loans, and yet only 79 loans being made to save them nationwide?
If it is not for lack of a program, and if it is not for a lack of interest on the borrowers part, that only leaves the failure of the program to the usual culprits - the banks.
“We know the interest from the public is there, and the next question that can’t be answered yet is are the lenders going to do this?” says Bill Glavin, special assistant to the FHA commissioner, who notes that it generally takes at least 45 to 60 days to complete the process for a regular FHA loan.”
Well Bill, here is your answer from them banks: “No.”
This article has been reposted from Your Mortgage or Your Life. The full post can also be viewed on Your Mortgage or Your Life.
Realtors and mortgage brokers are being hit hard in their pocket books thanks to this financial crisis, but when they each met at their respective conventions they were in store for things they had never seen before. In the case of the mortgage brokers' convention, they were forced to deal with unwanted distractions, while on the other end, Realtors were surrounded with fun distractions.
The mortgage brokers' convention was met by herds of protestors and at one point a vigilante ran up on stage and attempted to arrest Karl Rove, a former advisor of President Bush, according to the New York Times. That was in addition to the constant heckling from protestors during the convention. Typically, after the convention, attendees will go to a local bar and network, but according to one attendee interviewed by the New York Times, “…there wasn’t anybody there last night.” This had the attendee longing for the old days when the most distracting thing might be streakers running across the stage.
At the Realtor convention there were definite signs of distress among the participants, but the atmosphere was much more upbeat. Venders at the convention attempted to distract the attendees from the downbeat market by keeping things lively and fun. According to the Los Angeles Times, vendors did things from handing out life vests to setting up skee-ball and other games for attendees to play.
While these two professions have both been devastated by the crisis, it is apparent that one in particular is bearing the brunt of the blame for creating it. I think a case could be made that Realtors had just as much--if not more--to do with creating the crisis than mortgage brokers, though. But the truth is that, while they both had a part, neither should bear the blame. The government and homeowners played critical parts as well, so in my mind, no one is exempt from blame. Heckling mortgage brokers and blaming them for the crisis we face today is ludicrous. Instead, why don’t some of these homeowners look in the mirror and start asking themselves some tough questions.
Yesterday I talked a bit about how, through the bailout bill, the government was given the authority to invest the $700 billion in things outside of mortgage debt, the requirement being that the investment be critical to supporting the U.S. economy. This has led to auto finance companies to lobbying the government for aid. I also threw out that we could soon be looking at credit card companies such as American Express following suit. I thought that I should expand a bit on this and explain that mortgages are by no means the only problem assets for banks right now, and even though the other debt out there hasn’t received the same type of publicity, the threats are serious.
Mortgage debt has been the poster child for this financial crisis, and rightly so, considering the sheer size of the market and the juicy stories about people getting swindled and then losing their homes. With property prices falling across the country and borrowers defaulting at record paces, banks began to see losses mount beyond their worst case projections. We all know where that has led. Now we have passed bailout after bailout and are desperately trying to fix this mess before all the troubled debt out there brings down the financial system as we know it. Unfortunately for us, there are some other factors that could contribute to this degradation as well.
Americans have almost $2.6 trillion in consumer credit outstanding, according to the Federal Reserve. Credit card defaults rose 45 percent for JP Morgan Chase in quarter three, according to a Washington Post article, and they are expecting things to only get worse. Auto finance companies are echoing the sentiment. This has me worried.
Typically, owner-occupied mortgage borrowers are going to pay their mortgages above every other bill they have. That means they will default on their credit cards, car loan and whatever else before they stop paying their mortgage. They know that if they stop paying their mortgage, they will lose their home, whereas if they stop paying their credit card bill, all they lose is their credit rating. So the fact that credit card defaults are rising as quickly as they are tells me that people are at the end of their ropes. Before they might have been able to get by with using one credit card to pay another, but with banks actively reducing the credit lines of existing borrowers, and being more selective about new borrowers, this option is running out. What happens next is that these people are going to stop paying their mortgages, which will mean a double whammy for banks.
To make matters worse for banks, when people don’t pay their credit card bills, they essentially are out of luck because it is unsecured debt. When people default on their mortgages, at least the bank can go after the house. With car loans banks can go after the car, but since cars depreciate so fast they really are left with little (sounds kind of like the real estate market in some areas).
Despite the attempts by the government to “rescue” the industry it appears things might be getting even worse, and I think it is pretty clear by now that $700 billion isn’t going to be close to enough to actually right this ship.
As most people know by now, the government has seized control of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. While seizing any company comes as a bit of a shocker, in this instance it was not completely without warrant. One of the nice ramifications of the government seizure for homebuyers is that interest rates have fallen substantially, down around 0.5 percent so far. This translates into almost $100 a month in savings on a $300,000 loan. Savings like this could have an obvious impact on the real estate market.
The fact that people can now buy more house for the same monthly payment is definitely helpful for the market. As we learned in the housing boom, people don’t pay attention to the price they are paying for the house, but rather their monthly payment. This dynamic has likely changed some as people have become more cognizant of the fact that housing prices don’t always go up, but I would still venture to say that the monthly payment is still the primary focus for most residential home buyers.
The tricky thing with this new lower conforming rate is that a good portion of the population isn’t going to qualify. The new lending environment has changed greatly from a few years ago. It used to be that practically anyone could get a mortgage, but that just isn’t the case anymore. Credit score requirements are higher and income qualifications tighter. The net effect in all this is that fewer people can buy homes. Let’s now take into account the record levels of debt and late payments; one could venture to say that credit scores across the population are not as good as they could be. Again, this is a bad sign and it appears to only be getting worse.
The government appears to be pulling out all the stops to fix this housing problem. The new Housing Bill initiatives will become effective October 1, and they include several measures which should provide assistance to the market. Will lower mortgage rates and the Housing Bill be enough to right this failing market? Will job losses continue to increase and economic hardships make matters worse?
I don’t have the answers, and I don’t think anyone truthfully does. There are so many variables at play here that the best predictions are sure to be wrong. We will have to wait and see how this all plays out. As an investor, my advice to you is to stay diversified and keep a good portion of your funds in cash equivalents. This will allow you the flexibility to pounce on great opportunities when they present themselves.
In a bit of bright news for the ever-gloomy housing market, Freddie Mac’s debt sale yesterday went better than planned. Freddie was able to sell $1 billion of 3 month bills and $1 billion of 6 month bills with relative ease, according to Reuters. This debt sale went over much better than the company’s last offering earlier this month, despite all the talk about a possible nationalization. This is great news for the real estate market because a poor showing at this debt offering would have led to higher mortgage rates for borrowers, which would have led to even more pressure on the floundering market. Fannie Mae’s debt offering is scheduled for tomorrow, so we shall see soon if they share a similar success.
Personally I have not been very high on Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, and while it is a good sign for the companies that their debt offerings are still attractive, It does not cure the bigger problems plaguing the companies. The own a lot of mortgages on properties that are losing value. If values don’t correct soon, then they are going to face a huge number of defaults. I think we’ve seen pretty clearly that when people are upside down on their houses, they lose the incentive to pay their mortgages. The trend of how many people are going under is alarming, as evidenced in yesterday’s post about underwater homebuyers.
As long as the companies can continue to sell their debt at cheap rates, they should be able to weather the storm. The question is, how much longer will investors be willing to buy their debt? It is certainly encouraging for the companies that investors seem as confident in the debt offerings as they are despite the negative publicity, as this latest offering has shown. Investors must be under the assumption that the government will step in and save the companies if need be while still honoring each company’s debt obligations. The majority consensus about financial minds seems to be that if the government ends up nationalizing the companies it will indeed honor the debt, but would probably wipe out shareholders.
The result of this latest debt offering was definitely a positive for the housing market, but we will have to see if investor sentiment remains strong through the next wave of bad news.
Mortgage rates have been low for many years, but if things continue at their current pace, that isn’t going to last much longer. The biggest factor controlling the rates charged for standard 30-year mortgages is the price of bonds (called mortgage-backed securities) sold by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Over the past few years, these bonds have been selling with an interest rate just a little higher than U.S. treasuries. Now, with all the problems being talked about surrounding Fannie and Freddie, investors are becoming more cautious. In case you need help connecting the dots, that means investors are requiring a higher spread on these notes.The more Fannie and Freddie have to pay to secure funds, the more they are going to have to charge to their borrowers; it’s that simple. The bigger question to think about is how these higher mortgage rates will affect an already suffering real estate market.
Probably the biggest single factor behind the housing bubble was the abundant access to cheap credit. More people than ever were buying homes because more people than ever could qualify for loans. This was in part because of law borrower credit standards required by lenders, but it was also in part because of the low interest rates offered. Homebuyers tend to focus more on the monthly payment than the actual purchase price of a home. If they know they can afford $2,000 a month, then they are willing to buy a home for up to that payment, whether it costs $250,000 or $400,000. With all these new buyers entering the market, and people now able to afford more home than ever before, this scenario created the perfect atmosphere for a run-up in housing prices. Now let’s look at present circumstances.
On a historical scale interest rates are still low, but compared to the interest rates during the height of the bubble, they are substantially higher. While interest rates are low compared to historical averages, housing prices are high compared to historical averages. With mortgage rates rising, along with the credit standards of lenders, we are getting the opposite effect of what we had during the bubble run-up. This means that we are decreasing the number of people who can buy homes in addition to decreasing the amount of home for which people can qualify. Obviously this is going to negatively affect the housing market. While we certainly have seen a sharp contraction in the housing market compared to what existed during the bubble’s peak, if mortgage rates continue to rise, you can bet that the contraction will continue and become even sharper.
Keep an eye on the investor confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If somehow the companies can regain this confidence, then mortgage rates could stabilize, but at this point that doesn’t appear likely to happen anytime soon.
Last Friday the Orange County Register published an article that uncovered the details of a recent real estate transaction which was blatant mortgage fraud and will likely be left on taxpayer’s plates. Reading this article just made me shake my head because it is apparent that banks have learned nothing from the mortgage mess we are in today. If you haven’t read the article I suggest you do so, but I will attempt to summarize it below.
An investor purchased the home on Camile St. in Santa Ana at a foreclosure auction for $304,500, about half of what the home had sold for in 2006. This investor then fixed the home up and flipped it to a Hispanic family for $625,000. On a street where homes are selling in the mid $300,000s, this sales price should be an immediate red flag. However, Wells Fargo which issued a $500,000 loan on the property, didn’t bother looking deeper into the deal. The investor sold the home as a for sale by owner and had a plan in place where he could offer a potential home buyer 100 percent financing, even though that is all but unheard of right now. As part of the sale, the seller paid the $125,000 down payment for the buyer, but that’s not all. The seller also agreed to pay the buyer $30,000 in cash, pay the first 3 months of the mortgage and buy them a 52-inch LCD TV. So the real sales price was around $460,000 once the seller concessions are taken into account.
The author of this article went so far as to call up the mortgage broker, escrow officer, appraiser and even Wells Fargo to get their reaction to the deal; it's no surprise, though, that they all brushed it off, saying the details weren’t their business and that it was between the buyer and seller. Wells Fargo declined to commit on this loan in particular because of privacy issues, but beyond that, the best they could come up with was that they have tightened their lending standards. I don’t know about you, but if this is their idea of tightened lending standards, then they have some problems. I sure hope that Wells Fargo uses this information to take some action against this sort of practice, but I’m not holding my breath.
It gets better though, the Hispanic couple who bought the home claim they were lied to. They said that they were told they were buying the home for $500,000 and that they were going to get 100 percent financing. They didn’t know about the $625,000 sales price till the end when they signed the papers. Translation: Either this couple didn’t bother to read the purchase and sale agreement when they signed it, or else they are lying in order to protect themselves now that this information is on the public radar. My take is it is probably option #2. This couple already owns another home on the same street, so this is not their first time buying a property. In addition, they admitted to noticing the price at closing, but agreed to sign anyway. I think an honest person would have questioned that then and there.
If you ask me, these buyers were in on the deal, along with the seller, mortgage broker, appraiser and escrow officer. They were wooed by the prospects of $30,000 in cash. All they had to do was sacrifice their credit. The investor would pay the mortgage for 3 months, taking away the chance of the bank red flagging the deal for further investigation if the loan goes non-performing right away. After that, the buyers don’t even need to bother paying the mortgage, they can just let it fall back into foreclosure and get lost in the crowd. After all, Camile St. is already a foreclosure haven; what's one more?
So the next question is, who is going to be stuck with the final bill when all is said and done? The buyer? The lender? That would be a no and a no. The buyer has nothing at stake in this deal; in fact, they were paid to buy the home. If you thought the lender, you are also mistaken, because guess what? This was likely a conforming loan. That means it is going to be guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Thanks to the new housing bill that President Bush signed into law yesterday, taxpayers are likely going to be the ones to take the hit on this one, as well as for other mortgage frauds out there. It is disheartening to see that obvious cases of mortgage fraud are still occurring. But now that we as taxpayers are ultimately responsible for the bill, this just makes me mad.
The Fed approved some new measures Monday meant to crack down on what they deem to be deceptive lending practices. Because most of these problems have already worked themselves out, thanks to the whole credit crisis thing going on, these measures likely will have little impact. But just for fun, let’s take a look at what the changes are.
The following summary was collected from the San Francisco Chronicle:
Rules for all mortgages
- Prohibit creditors and mortgage brokers from coercing appraisers into misstating a home's value.
- Require additional information about rates, monthly payments and other loan features in all advertising.
- Ban seven deceptive or misleading advertising practices, including calling a rate or payment "fixed" when it can change.
New lending rules
- Force lenders to consider a borrower's ability to repay loans from income and assets other than the home's value.
- Require lenders to document a borrower's income and assets.
- Ban penalties for borrowers who pay off loans early if the payment can change in the first four years. In certain cases, a prepayment penalty period can't exceed two years.
- Mandate that creditors ensure certain borrowers set aside money to pay for property taxes and insurance by establishing escrow accounts.
The “new” rules for all mortgages are welcome additions, I guess, and really should be no brainers. I’m pretty sure coercing appraisers into misstating home value was already a no-no, but now it is “official,” for whatever that’s worth.
The new subprime lending rules are, for the most part, already being followed. At this point in time a borrower is going to be hard-pressed to get a loan if they can’t document their income (unless they are putting down a large down payment). Also, on almost all loans now--and in recent memory--lenders have required escrow accounts to pay for taxes and insurance. Since this was the norm even during the subprime heyday, I’m not sure exactly what they were trying to accomplish, but I guess we can now use that “official” word again. The biggest change that I can see is with the pre-payment penalties. In the past, having a two year pre-payment penalty was pretty much the norm, and borrowers who wanted to get that waived had to buy it off. From the lender's perspective it made complete sense: They wanted to ensure that they were able to make at least X dollars on the loan even if the borrower sold the house the next day. This is one that I think could backfire for borrowers. Now that lenders are not going to be able to add a pre-payment penalty, they are going to make the loan more expensive because they have to ensure that they are able to make their profit no matter what the borrowing time frame. So we can expect that buy-down pricing will now be included in every loan--whether the borrower wants it or not. The borrower who knows that they are going to be in the property for at least two years will now have to pay a little more on their loan. I think a better solution might have been to make the pre-payment penalty opt in rather than opt out--that way people who do want it can still have it.
All in all, I think these new regulations were more for show than for function. The government needed to appear like they were trying to do something about the problem, so they put together a list of things that look good on paper, but in practice are pretty much useless.
Yesterday, former St. Louis Federal Reserve President William Poole was quoted by Bloomberg as saying Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were insolvent, followed by reports that the Bush administration was working on a possible bailout—the culmination of a very bad day for the two companies. Freddie saw their shares fall 23.2 percent, and Fannie’s shares shed 15.4 percent. The government will certainly come to the aid of the two companies if push comes to shove, but there is speculation that a government bailout could leave shareholders with little to nothing according to the Associated Press.
I’ve been harping the potential fallout of a Freddie and Fannie failure for some time, and it is a scary to contemplate. A failure of one or both of these companies would have serious consequences in the real estate market, the economy and of course tax payers. Some estimates have put the price tag on a potential bailout at over $1 trillion. With the current state of the economy as well as the national debt (over $9.5 trillion) this is a number that could cripple us.
Now that I have painted this doom and gloom picture, you should know that most people still think a bailout is unlikely. Here is a quote from a Wall Street Journal article this morning: “The government doesn't expect the entities to fail and no rescue plan is imminent. Government officials and market analysts expect both companies will be able to raise large amounts of capital relatively easily.” The two companies have been raising billions of dollars in additional capital to shore up their balance sheets, and analysts believe that they will continue to do just that if necessary. This strategy will dilute the holdings of existing owners of the company, but it appears to be the best strategy at this time.
I’m certainly not daring enough at this stage to invest in Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae, and though I do think the chances of a government bailout are increasing I don’t think it is the most likely scenario. Readers of this blog know that I like to plan for the worst and hope for the best, and I think this falls right in line with that. I’m starting to consider what might happen if the two giants were to fall, and specifically how it would affect my investments. I wouldn’t take any drastic measures at this point, but it doesn’t hurt to have a plan, just in case.
In the latest of what seems like bad report after bad report for Countrywide, now Governor Chris Gregoire of Washington state is looking to revoke Countrywide’s lending license in the state. Charges were filed June 23 by the DFI accusing Countrywide of unfair dealings with minorities in addition to $5 million of assessments the state says the company short-changed them. Countrywide now has 20 days to respond to the charges and request a hearing, according to a blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
This matter is increasingly complicated considering that Countrywide is set to be acquired by Bank of America. However, according to the blog post from the Seattle PI, Gregoire is planning to see these charges through regardless of the takeover. Considering that other states, such as California and Illinois, are also working on lawsuits against Countrywide, if I were Bank of America, I certainly would not be feeling too good about the acquisition right now, and would be looking for an out.
Beyond the Bank of America ordeal, the larger underlying factor that needs to be considered is whether or not these states are looking at serious unintended consequences by revoking Countrywide’s license since Countrywide is one of the largest home lenders in the nation, and in fact largest lender in some markets. With today’s tightening credit markets, acquiring a loan to buy a home is getting harder and harder--now take out the top lender and just think how things may become.
Last August I put one of my houses, which happened to be a prime candidate for a knock-down and rebuild, on the market in Bellevue, Wash. During the process of selling the home, I had three different deals fall through because of financing, specifically the inability of the buyers to acquire the necessary construction financing. It turns out that the lenders they were working with kept closing up shop (or at least closing the construction lending side of their business) in the middle of their loans; in the end the only lender left doing construction loans in the area was Countrywide. Needless to say, they were pretty busy--so busy in fact that the last buyer’s loan rep said they would be lucky to get into underwriting within 30 days after submission, even with a full package. In the end I decided to sell the house to an investor who wanted to keep the home as a rental. I lost a few grand off what the builders were willing to pay, but the deal got done. I’m not sure if it would have got done through Countrywide or not, but I do know that without Countrywide, there wouldn’t have been anyone even willing to do the construction loan (at least according to these loan reps I spoke with). So that is one example of how Washington real estate may be impacted by the loss of Countrywide as a lender, and of course construction loans are just one of the loan types they offer.
There has been a lot of talk recently about down payment assistance programs, and specifically whether or not they should be banned. Politicians and these down payment assistance companies have been fighting for some time on the subject, and so far the down payment assistance companies have won. Many believe that these programs are simply taking advantage of a loop hole in the FHA system and contributing to a huge number of foreclosures, while supporters proclaim that the companies are providing a vital service that is allowing low income and minorities the opportunity to enjoy homeownership for the first time. But what are we to believe? Are these programs really good or bad?
Ultimately, proclaiming whether these programs are good or bad is tough because in the end, it is subjective. On one hand, they are providing a way for people to own their own home; on the other, we have to ask ourselves, first off, whether or not owning a home is really the best thing for these people if they have no money? Are they, and are we as a country, better off with these individuals as homeowners? A tough question, but let’s take a stab at it.
The main objections to down payment assistance programs are that they have an unusually high default rate and put undue pressure on the homeowners and the FHA; they really aren’t non-profits; and they violate the intent of FHA regulations.
The unusually high default rate is most certainly a valid point. According to data on FHA loans, the down payment assistance loans result in around 3 times the normal level of default. In addition, I used a quote from FHA commissioner Brian Montgomery in a previous post in which he said, “…no insurance company can sustain that amount of additional costs year after year and still survive. Unless we take action to mitigate these losses, F.H.A. will soon either have to shut down or rely on appropriations to operate.” This quote was directly aimed at increased losses stemming from down payment assistance programs which now comprise around 35 percent of FHA loans. Supporters of the down payment assistance programs prefer to take the glass is half full approach and focus on the fact that 94 percent of these homeowners pay their mortgages with no problem, but it is hard to argue that the default is a serious problem when the FHA chief is on record saying that it could be the FHA’s downfall if they are not stopped.
The next complaint against these companies is that they aren’t really non-profits. In fact, the IRS has a big beef with the way many of these companies have been operating, and has revoked the charitable status of a number of these companies. That being said, as you can see the big players in the field have yet to be shut down and appear (at least in the IRS’s mind) to be operating within the guidelines set for charities.
The last point is the big one in my book: These companies are clearly violating the intent of the FHA’s guidelines. To qualify for an FHA loan, buyers have to be able to provide at least a 3 percent down payment--the catch is they do allow for gift funds to cover the 3 percent. However, it is expressly forbidden for those funds to come from the seller. In a typical down payment assistance arrangement, that is precisely what happens, only the down payment money is “cleaned” by passing through the non-profit (sounds kind of like money laundering, huh).
These deal work like this: The buyer and seller come to an agreement on price (typically bumped up enough to account for the following contribution), the seller donates 3 percent of the purchase price to XYZ non-profit and the non-profit issues a grant to the buyer for the 3 percent they need to buy the home--minus a handling fee, of course. Now how doesn’t that violate the intent of the FHA guidelines? The down payment assistance companies can spin this all sorts of ways, but at the end of the day they need to be able to answer this question: If the seller didn’t donate that 3 percent, would you still make that grant to the buyer? If they can truthfully answer that question, yes, then so be it; however, I’m pretty sure that is not usually the case. So it doesn't matter whether one seller’s funds are technically supporting some other buyer, and this buyer is being supported by some other seller. If the only way the deal is getting done is by the seller making the 3 percent donation, then it is a violation of the true intent of the guideline.
I’m not going to argue that these programs provide zero benefit, because I think in certain circumstances they can prove to be a valuable resource for people. But these programs are a blatant attempt to circumvent established FHA guidelines and should be put to an end. If we want to legitimize these programs then we need to change the guidelines to allow for them, and in my mind if we are going to do it, we need to create a box around it as well. I don’t think people should ever be buying a home if they have no money. What happens if the roof fails, or if they are out of work for a couple months? Everyone should have some savings, but homeowners need to have a substantial amount. Now if these people have some money, but want to keep it in reserve instead of putting it as a down payment on a house, then that is where I see down payment assistance programs as useful. Maybe the new guideline should be that buyers have at least 3 percent of the homes’ value in savings.
Senators Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) have been implicated in a mortgage scandal involving Countrywide bank. This is obviously a touchy issue considering that Dodd is the chairman of the Senate banking committee, it is an election year and a $300 billion lender bailout is supposed to be voted on today in the Senate.
In Dodd's case, the accusations basically boil down to whether or not he was given special pricing in relation to a couple refinance loans he got from Countrywide in 2003. Dodd denies receiving any special rates and adamantly claims that the rates were at market, but he does admit that he was likely on Countrywide’s VIP list.
Dodd's accusers have e-mail evidence apparently showing that Countrywide did, in fact, give Dodd preferential treatment. Countrywide sent an internal e-mail message that said to give Dodd a 0.5 discount on his rates because he was a U.S. senator, according to Portfolio.com.
Dodd denies any wrongdoing and is prepared to fight all allegations against him. Considering the facts that I have read, I don’t think they will ultimately find him guilty, yet the effects could be hard-felt nevertheless. The major $300 billion mortgage bailout bill has already been delayed while this investigation is underway, according to the New York Times. In a time when Democrats are trying to support their presidential candidate, Barack Obama, any bad press for the party certainly affects him. Dodd is a high-ranking Democrat who was a candidate in the 2008 presidential election himself, and whether or not Obama has anything to do with Dodd, it won’t change how the Democratic party in general is perceived by some.
Personally, I’m all for the investigation. If Dodd did, in fact, take advantage of his position, then he should have to pay the consequences. More importantly, this has held up the $300 billion bailout bill. Since I am adamantly opposed to a mortgage bailout, I hope that this bill gets delayed permanently.
The first quarter of 2008 saw commercial real estate sales of $39.2 billion in the U.S., a 69 percent drop from 2007, according to a report by Jones Lang LaSalle as reported by National Real Estate Investor. According to the same report, commercial real estate sales worldwide declined 46 percent.
These significant drops vividly indicate the impact that the many and various economic crises have had on the commercial sector. The biggest hits have come from tighter lending standards, a substantially smaller and more narrowly focused conduit lending market and sharply higher lending spreads according to Earl Webb, CEO of capital markets at Jones Lang LaSalle as reported by National Real Estate Investor.
Analysts at Jones Lang LaSalle estimate that the markets won’t return to normal until sometime in 2009, but even that estimate might be a tad optimistic. Just as with residential real estate, many of these commercial real estate transactions just didn’t make sense financially during the bubble. We saw record sale after record sale, especially in markets like New York. Investors were paying way too much for property that offered measly returns. In the past, they wouldn’t have even been able to buy those buildings at the debt coverage ratios they were, but during the real estate bubble investors had lenders throwing money at their feet. All these property funds had to buy something in order to appease their investors, so they bought whatever they could for whatever price. Some of these investors had grand plans to increase revenue, many of which included raising rents in the building. However, with many businesses suffering at the hands of the economy, it is doubtful that these investors will be able to raise rents as planned.
In the end, I foresee many of these investors stuck with assets producing negative cash flow. An even bigger potential problem is that many of these investors originally secured loans which were only meant to be only short-term solutions. The investors had planned to use these higher-interest short-term loans as temporary financing until they could increase revenues and refinance with more traditional loans, but unable to raise revenue in many cases, and with the refinance market dried up, these lenders are stuck with bad loans and negative cash flow properties.
This situation has not been overlooked by opportunistic investors who are patiently awaiting desperate sellers to come calling. “In anticipation of that seller distress, a number of investment groups are building funds to buy up distressed properties and distressed commercial real estate debt. For now, those funds are still waiting for opportunities to appear,” according to Josh Scoville, director of strategic research at Property & Portfolio Research as reported by National Real Estate Investor.
Several months ago the Bush administration came up with a great plan to fix the foreclosure problems plaguing the U.S.: The FHA Secure Loan. This loan was to be made available to homeowners who were having, or had, their variable interest rates adjusted and needed to refinance in order to keep making payments. So just how many people has the FHA Secure program helped avoid foreclosure since its inception?Try 3,000, according to an article from CNNMoney.
Though only 3,000 people have been saved from foreclosure, the FHA Secure program has become widely popular, with over 200,000 loans issued to date according to CNNMoney. While the program was meant to help people avoid foreclosure it has turned out to be a great program for people looking to refinance. The average homeowner refinancing with an FHA Secure loan is saving approximately $400 a month, according to the article.
Many of the people using the FHA Secure program could continue to make their payments without a problem, and additionally many of them even had other options for refinancing out of their existing mortgages. For a program that was meant to help prevent foreclosure, I’m just not sure how effective it is. It is certainly helping people save money, but when the time comes that the government has to start coming good on these guarantees, taxpayers are going to have to foot the bill. Lending out at high LTVs to high risk homeowners is not appealing to banks for a reason, so if we think we are going to avoid having to pay up when all is said and done, we are sadly mistaken.
In my mind if the government is trying to help those who are on the ropes (which I didn’t agree with in the first place), then they can do that, but they shouldn't also offer up resources to those who have other options. This program should be reserved for those who have nowhere else to turn, not those who are just looking to save 0.25 points over what the bank’s other loan program will offer them. Taxpayers shouldn’t have to front the bill when there are others willing and able to do so.
Mortgage giant Fannie Mae today reported first a first quarter loss of nearly $2.2 billion, or $2.57 a share, much higher than the expected loss of $0.81 analysts were expecting, according to The New York Times.
Those who are regular readers of this blog know that one of my biggest fears is that one of these mortgage giants will fail. The impact of a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac failure would be felt hard and fast, and would likely send the already precarious economy into a colossal tail spin. Not only would the housing market tank, but so would the entire U.S. economy. I am not excited about those prospects and the new-found power given to these companies by the government is not increasing my confidence level at all.
I understand why the government loosened the guidelines for the companies, yet at the same time it scares me. While the possibility remains that these changes will help the credit markets, and in turn the housing market and economy, they also increase the chances of these companies failing and the potential impact of a failure. According to The New York Times, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now control more than 80 percent of the mortgage market--more than double their market share of just a couple years ago. If these companies fail, the mortgage market is for all intents and purposes dead--a scary possibility. Of course, the government won’t let these companies fail, but how much would a bail out cost taxpayers? Some estimates put the number over a $1 trillion, a number that would have serious consequences to a nation already over $9 trillion in debt.
I have my fingers crossed that we won’t have to witness the failure of either of these mortgage industry giants, but as the losses continue to mount, I get more and more fearful. America has a lot riding on these two companies, so let's hope that they are able to keep it together.
Homebuyers who thought mortgage rates were heading down because of all the Fed interest rate cuts need to think again. According to Freddie Mac, 30-year mortgages rates increased 0.15 percent this week, despite all the rate cuts from the Fed. If you think that is strange, remember that 30-year mortgage rates are not tied to the Fed interest rates, but instead are controlled by the mortgage-backed securities market. Read our previous post: How Do Fed Interest Rate Cuts Really Affect Mortgage Rates? for more background on that. The bottom line is that when 30-year mortgage rates go up, despite the lowering of key Fed interest rates, it is typically because of inflationary fears.
It seems that mortgage rates won't be going down until the Fed can get inflation under control. The Fed is likely to only cut rates by 0.25 percent at their next meeting because they are concerned about inflation, according to the Associated Press. My thought is that if they were truly concerned about inflation they wouldn’t be dropping interest rates, even by the quarter point. Considering past actions from the Fed, I would say that inflation concerns are not at the top of their list.
I’m not sure who in their right mind is buying these mortgage backed securities anyway. I wouldn’t touch these, or even U.S. treasuries, at this point in time. Considering that the returns they offer are barely above inflation--that is, if you believe the government’s CPI numbers are accurate (I think they are much higher than that)--they just aren’t worth it…but that is a post for another day.
The moral of the story is that if you are in the market to buy a home, don’t wait in anticipation of mortgage rates going down. You can wait because of the market and you can wait for better opportunities, but don’t wait because you think mortgage rates are going down, because they just might not.
I read an article this morning in CNNMoney that discussed the potential for a Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailout that I thought I’d share. For those who aren’t familiar with the companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government-sponsored entities which help stabilize the mortgage market by purchasing mass quantities of loans and packaging them into securities. With the credit markets in disrepair, the importance of these two companies has increased dramatically. According to the article, 82 percent of U.S. mortgages are being backed by one of the companies, up from 46 percent in the second quarter of 2007. With the value of real estate continuing to decline, the mounting losses and increased exposure of the two companies could lead to disaster. The government can’t and won’t let these companies fail--and will come to their rescue if necessary. The price tag of a potential bailout could be more than $1 trillion dollars, along with additional ramifications to the U.S. economy. Let’s look at some of the warning signs and potential outcomes as described in the CNNMoney article:
Risks and warning signs
“...other experts expect that declining home values will force more borrowers who have a Fannie- or Freddie-backed loan to stop making payments in the coming months, rather than continuing to make payments on a home now worth less than their loan balance.”
“Rising job losses may also make it difficult for other borrowers who formerly had good credit to stay current on their mortgage payments.”
“Some economists suggest that if investors start to see problems in the performance of loans backed by Fannie and Freddie, they'll dump them. And that would force the federal government to step in.”
“’I would say there's at least a 50-50 chance of some sort of bailout. I'm not saying it will necessarily cost $1 trillion, but they'll need some kind of help, and it very well could happen this year,’ said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research”
“The yield premium for securities backed by Freddie and Fannie compared to the yield on Treasury bills has grown to about 2.25 percentage points from 1.7 percentage points at the beginning of the year. That's a sign that the investors see a greater risk of Fannie and Freddie running into bigger problems.”
“OFHEO, in its annual report this week, said that while Fannie and Freddie have made progress clearing up accounting problems that had dogged both firms, they remain ‘a significant supervisory risk.’”
“...since current home price declines are without precedent, the firms will have a difficult time correctly pricing the risk of the mortgages they're backing.”
“...Fannie and Freddie's role in the mortgage and real estate markets is likely to grow, as Congress recently allowed them to back larger mortgages, up to $729,750, up from the previous limit of $417,000.”
“The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), which regulates both firms, also recently lowered the capital requirements for Fannie and Freddie in an effort to pump $200 billion more into the credit markets.”
“The new loan limits will increase the risks and losses for Fannie and Freddie, said Wagner and other experts.”
“The high priced markets where homeowners and buyers need larger loans are now the ones seeing steep home price declines. And the default rates on larger loans are greater than the smaller loans that had previously been the core of their business.”
Potential costs for a bailout
According to the article, Standard and Poor’s predicted a bailout out of the companies could cost between $420 billion and $1.1 trillion dollars of taxpayer money—a cost so high that it puts the U.S. government’s AAA credit rating at risk. This has potentially enormous ramifications, because the lowering of the government’s credit rating would mean the cost of borrowing money would go up and the number of potential investors interested in buying U.S. treasuries would go down. Since the U.S. is financing its extravagant lifestyle with debt, if our ability to borrow decreases significantly we are going to have to make serious changes as a nation.
Many people have set up a home equity line of credit (HELOC) to use in case of emergency or as a cash flow buffer for their businesses. Many investors even use their HELOC to buy foreclosures or international properties. All of these individuals may need to rethink their strategies. Several lenders have recently begun freezing borrowers' HELOC accounts without warning and without disclosing the reason for the freeze to the homeowners, according to an article in the New York Times. Washington Mutual, Indy Mac and the GreenPoint Mortgage unit of Capital One are specifically mentioned in the article.
According to the banks, the measures are being taken to protect themselves from declining property values, but even homeowners in markets which have not seen declines in value have been affected. These markets include: Yakima, Wash.; Appleton, Wisc.; Raleigh-Cary, N.C.; and Champaign-Urbana, Ill. So if you think you are protected because you are in a market thus far unaffected by the housing bubble, think again.
This news will be hard on those who were banking on using their HELOC for their business, investments or tax payment, who are now simply out of luck. The banks are within their rights to do this, and considering the housing market it is surprising they didn’t do it sooner, but the negative impact on the economy will surely be felt.
Let this also be a warning to those who were counting on the equity in their home to save them in the event something bad was to happen: Home equity is not a substitute for savings.
The Bush administration is calling for a major overhaul of how we monitor the financial industry in what would be the largest financial regulatory makeover since the Great Depression. It isn’t as much oversight as many Democrats are demanding, but it is fairly substantial.
I am generally against added government regulation, so this doesn’t sit well with me. The government has a way of making things more complicated and costly than they need to be, and it is taxpayers who bear the burden. Increased regulations in the financial and mortgage industries will only make lending tougher. It seems that people want the government to protect them from themselves and from lenders who might take advantage of them. If the government gets involved, some people may be protected, but fewer people will receive mortgages. In an already struggling market in which it is increasingly difficult to find funding, the last thing we need to do is to make it even more difficult.
I expect that the regulatory agency will, at a minimum, call for increased documentation and transparency on the part of the lenders. I’m all for transparency, but the documentation is already overdone. When I signed the docs for the last house I bought, my hand started to cramp halfway through signing all the paperwork. If increased paperwork is all they do, and they do not become too restrictive, then the legislation shouldn’t have much negative impact, though it will mean more work for the loan officers, processors, lenders and escrow agents. If they start modifying loan qualifications and guidelines, or imposing penalties on lenders, it might scare many lenders out of even remotely related programs. If lenders become even more hesitant and restrictive, this only spells more bad news for the housing market.
New higher conforming loan limits (See New Conforming loan limits post) created by temporary federal legislation have resulted in a new type of loan: The conforming-jumbo loan. Strange as it may be to say those two words together, the conforming-jumbo loan amount is above the previous conforming loan limit, but less than or equal to the temporary limit which will last until at least the end of this year.
The conforming-jumbo is being treated differently than the previous conforming or jumbo loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac add on a .25 percent rate adjustment for conforming-jumbo loans, and they require a minimum credit score of 660 to qualify. There are other requirements, and if you are interested, you should read this post from Rain City Guide.
It is important to note that those are only the standard adjustments from Freddie and Fannie, and each individual lender then decides whether they should make additional ones. One loan officer commented on a Rain City Guide post that Plaza (a mortgage lender) is adding a 2.5 price hit on FHA loans above the previous conforming limit. Many other loan officers suspect that several other lenders will be making similar adjustments, although it is not certain that they will be as extreme.
In order for the new loan limits to work, they need to be an available and sensible option. If they turn out to be just as difficult and/or expensive as jumbo loans, then this all will become a big waste of time. It doesn’t seem that this will be entirely the case; they should help high-cost markets somewhat, and they won’t be as bad as jumbo loans, but it does seem that these loans will be more expensive and of less help than many people anticipated.
HUD officially rolled out the new higher limits for FHA loans yesterday, and the conforming loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were also increased. The government is hoping that these new limits will help an estimated 250,000 new people become homeowners and benefit areas with high real estate values. The cap increases max out at $729,750 for single family homes, $934,200 for duplexes, $1,129,250 for triplexes, and $1,403,400 for fourplexes.
The maximum levels were reached in several counties across California, as well as places like Washington D.C. and the metro New York City area. To see the new conforming loan cap in your county check out the FHA mortgage limits tool on HUD’s website. The tool also has the new Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac conforming loan limits, although they are basically the same as the FHA ones.
These new loan limits last only for the rest of the year and revert to the old levels in January 2009, barring any legislative changes. For more details about the new limits you can find out more on HUD’s website.
First-time buyers made up 53% of existing home sales in March. Charles McMillan, NAR's president, said first-time buyers are "crucial" to a recovery in the overall housing market.
How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-ownership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased from 19.0 to 20.2, so the change had little effect on measured inflation: The CPI underestimated inflation by about 0.1 percentage point per year during this period. Between 1999 and 2006, the price-to-rent ratio shot up from 20.8 to 32.3.
Housing starts fell 15.5 percent in December to a seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of just 550,000, worse than the previous low of 651,000 set in November.
Two areas showed month-to-month improvement - Cleveland and Boston - while home prices in Dallas were unchanged from August. Cleveland was the only region where the annual home price decline improved from a year ago, from -6.6 percent in August to -6.4 percent in September.
