Your taxpayer credit card is on the counter, all set to get the economy moving again. Caveat emptor – let the buyer beware.
The value of the mortgage-backed securities the federal government is set to buy is hard to decipher when the good, the bad and the scary are bundled together.
Some are arguing that the government could profit by spending $700 billion on bonds discounted by panic that will surely command a higher price when they mature.
“They’re gonna make money on them, in all likelihood,” billionaire investment guru Warren Buffett told CNBC Wednesday as he was flying across the country.
But remember the reason for this rescue. A bubble has collapsed. Home prices are down in Dallas, but they are plunging in California, Florida and the Northeast.
Americans hold $10.6 trillion in mortgage debt. So far in this meltdown, $1.8 trillion or more of that debt is for mortgages that are underwater – loans that are higher than the value of the property.
In the 1980s, residential property values plunged in Texas. Since then, abundant land and loads of builders have resulted in enough houses on the North Texas market to slow home appreciation.
But in California, Nevada, Arizona and all along the Atlantic coast, mortgage lending and borrowing had been based on faith that homes would keep rising in value. If you believed that, all the traditional prudence about buying a home was just silly moralizing.
“A home used to be something you felt people worked for. There was a sense of accomplishment,” said Dallas mortgage lender Karen Watson. “But then it became where a home was almost an entitlement. People said, ‘I deserve it,’ even though they hadn’t saved for it or watched out for their credit.”
In the church of collateral appreciation, lending standards lapsed. Banks outsourced their risk by selling mortgages to investors. People looking for higher returns than those available with stocks and bonds flipped houses.
Crime crept into the process as lenders preyed on naïve borrowers and colluded with others who lied about their creditworthiness.
Computers and the Internet automated credit evaluations, sped appraisals and calculated default and prepayment risks for chopped-up bundles of mortgages so they could be turned into tradable derivatives.
Home, sweet home
The government has done much to encourage homeownership. Mortgage interest was made tax-deductible in the same 1913 legislation creating the federal income tax. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were created to provide mortgages with low down payments to qualified buyers and to sell bundles of those mortgages as federally backed bonds.
Prodded by the Clinton administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac relaxed their guidelines in 1998 and encouraged banks to do deals with borrowers not otherwise qualified for a mortgage.
These borrowers were sold subprime and Alt-A (alternative-A paper) mortgages, which carried higher interest rates to compensate for the higher risk of failure. The higher rates meant higher returns for investors. As long as home values rose, a borrower could sell the property before a mortgage became too expensive.
These changes in the mortgage market took off in 2000-2001, when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to stave off a recession from the dot-com bust.
More than a third of the 202,000 subprime loans issued in Texas went to borrowers in the Dallas-Fort Worth- Arlington area, according to Dallas Federal Reserve Bank estimates. (By April, of 76,000 subprime mortgages in D-FW, nearly 12,000 were delinquent or in foreclosure.)
A home became collateral for consumer spending. From 2001 to 2004, an astonishing 45 percent of U.S. mortgages were refinanced, according to the Federal Reserve’s 2004 Survey of Consumer Finance.
Business magazines lauded investors who cashed out the equity in their homes and used the money to buy cars or stocks and bonds. A major motivator was that all the mortgage interest was tax-deductible.
“People were [refinancing] to pay off other debts,” said Ms. Watson. “The saying was, ‘Why get a car loan when you can get a mortgage loan and write off your interest?’ Lenders were giving $15,000 or $20,000 lines of credit that would be covered by a home equity loan at the same time they did a refinance, and the buyer didn’t even ask for it.”
The risk in these mortgages spread around the world as the loans were chopped up into bonds and derivatives.
In 2001, lenders sold $1.093 trillion of mortgage-backed securities. In 2003, they sold $2.131 trillion. Between 2001 and 2006, the total came to $6.654 trillion, according to data compiled by the Bond Market Association.
The Treasury Department’s $700 billion rescue plan is aimed at this pool of mortgage- backed securities.
(Why $700 billion? “We wanted to choose a number that was especially large in order to instill market confidence that we have enough authority to deal with the problem,” said Treasury spokeswoman Jennifer Zuccarelli.)
By 2006, nearly half of all new mortgages were subprime or Alt-A.
Crooks on both sides
Increasingly, international economists say, crooks sat on both sides of the table.
“A significant proportion of borrowers were financially overstretching … with many apparently lying about their financial resources to get loans,” John Kiff and Paul Mills of the International Monetary Fund wrote in a July 2007 working paper, “Money for Nothing and Checks for Free.” “Fraud appears to have played a key role in accelerating the deterioration.”
Luci Ellis of the Reserve Bank of Australia, in a paper written last month for the Bank of International Settlements, noted that thousands and thousands of homebuyers were guided to “silent second” mortgages to cover their down payments – silent, because the people evaluating the buyer’s credit risk on a first mortgage were kept in the dark.
Two years ago, silent seconds were used for 25 percent of subprime mortgages and 40 percent of Alt-A mortgages. This isn’t just fraud; it is also predatory lending.
“There is no evidence that silent seconds (as opposed to second mortgages that the lender knows about) exist in any significant numbers in other countries,” Ms. Ellis wrote.
Some lenders offered “statement loan” mortgages – whatever the borrower said was his income was good enough to qualify. Many now derisively call these “liar loans.”
California borrowers scooped up neg-am – negative amortization – mortgages in which the borrower’s discounted payments meant the loan got larger every month.
“The customer was told he could buy a $500,000 home and only owe a $1,000 a month,” Ms. Watson said. “A lot of customers only think in terms of that monthly payment, so that’s what they were sold.”
Typically, these loans were written with adjustable interest rates and balloon payments that kicked in after a few years, pushing up the payment by 50 percent or more. If the value of the house rose fast enough, the borrower could sell or refinance and still come out ahead.
But builders did so much work to meet this demand for homes that there’s now a surplus across the country. In Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix and other cities, prices have fallen more than 25 percent just in the last year.
As air rushes out of the bubble, resets are kicking in on adjustable-rate mortgages – subprime, Alt-A and prime alike. Economists say it will be at least another year before these are sorted out. Foreclosures, meanwhile, are soaring, with 35,000 a month in Florida alone.
Ms. Watson sees the pendulum swinging toward tougher loan terms. The more exotic mortgages – statement loans, neg-ams, silent seconds and piggybacks – are gone.
Like Warren Buffett, Ms. Watson is confident that the government will make out on the $700 billion rescue plan.
“Will we get our money back? Absolutely. Absolutely,” she said. “Historically, real estate has appreciated.”
Credits: Dallas News