What Happened to the Real Estate Market (Updated) (Updated Again) 8
Robert Reich tries to explain.
Shorter version: Mortgage bankers and hedge fund managers saw a way to make a few lots of easy bucks lending money to people who couldn’t afford the loans, then reselling the loans over and over again as investments. It’s part of the “everything should be for sale” mentality.
It’s called “securitization.” It means turning items that are not traditionally investments (that is, not stocks and bonds, but, rather, things like credit card debt and mortages) into things that look like investments (that is, turning them into “securities”–see definition number 6 here).
These things that have been “securitized,” though, have no intrinsic value (unlike a stock or a bond that, supposedly, is backed by the value of the products manufactured by the company issuing it). Those who buy those “securities” are investing in the debt of others and in the expectation that the debt will be paid off.
And, when persons suddenly can no longer afford to pay the debt, as when their mortgage rate suddenly goes up two or three percentage points, the “investors” are left holding a bag of useless paper. (Aside: When buying a house, 30-year fixed is your friend.)
Anyhoo, back to Robert Reich:
It was not just a housing bubble but a financial house of cards that would tumble when central bankers tightened up on the global money supply in order to fight inflation, as they inevitably would, and when the home loans were thereby revealed to be far riskier than thought. Because the bad loans are so widely dispersed and because so much additional credit is connected to them through derivatives, a contagion of fear has spread through financial markets. The credibility of the whole financial system has become shaky. Large numbers of stocks and bonds appear riskier than before, which is why Wall Street is taking a beating.
(snip)
In other words, the Fed has to bail out the speculators because we’ll all suffer if it doesn’t.
That doesn’t mean, though, that the irresponsibilities now so clearly revealed in American financial markets should be excused or forgotten when the crisis ends. Wall Street has been living in an anything-goes world for too long. It has been widely – and wrongly – assumed that investors, creditors, and borrowers are smart enough to take care of themselves, especially if they’re big. That’s wrong.
Yeah.
Watch.
Poor people will lose their homes because they were sold loans they couldn’t afford with assurances from the salespersons that they could, indeed, afford those unaffordable loans, and no one, absolutely no one, who knowingly sold them those unaffordable loans will lose a home or see the inside of the pokey.
Mark my words.
Addendum, Later That Same Evening:
In the case of securitized credit card debt, the risk of default is negligible, because the default by a few of millions of credit card users has little or no effect on the value of the overall portfolio. But when you start looking at mortgage holders, whose debt is measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars, and see, suddenly, that hundreds or thousands of mortgage holders are falling into default, well, you can see what is happening . . . .
Securitization dot net, your free source for structured finance (whatever the hell that means) information.
Addendum, 8/20/2007:
My two or three regular readers have pointed out that the customers for many of the mortgages were adults who did not exercise due care. In many cases, that was the case. Nevertheless, I do think there were additional factors in play, so I’m putting my reaction to the comments up front, rather than burying them in the comments. Here’s what I originally wrote as a comment:
Unfortunately, as cases come to light, it’s apparent that many of the mortgage companies (Ameriquest comes to mind; remember, companies don’t sign consent decrees for nothing) exercised less than–er–full disclosure. Customers can’t ask questions that they don’t know to ask.
They were, in fact, selling the mortgage equivalent of toothpaste with antifreeze in it. Some of us (like Bill and Opie and, indeed, me) wouldn’t touch anything less that a fixed rate mortgage, ever. But we shouldn’t have to ask whether there is antifreeze in the toothpaste, either,
To call some of the mortgage sales practices “predatory” is to insult predators.
One of the damned shames of what’s going on right now is that Countrywide, which, by all reports, conducted itself with good business sense and treated customers fairly, is getting caught in the riptide.
Remember, too, that people do tend to be trusting (enron). They tend assume that, if a company (enron) is doing something, that something (enron) is not only legal, but, at some level, ethical (enron).
Until the roof caves in.
August 20, 2007 at 2:29 am
Meh. This all happened among consenting adults.
August 20, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Consumers have some responsibility in all this. They need to educate themselves and know what they’re getting into. The average consumer probably spends more time and energy figuring out what cell phone to get next than they do looking at loan papers or credit card terms.
Just because a real estate agent tells you that you can afford to spend up to 33% of your income on a home doesn’t mean you have to. People buy McMansions and then can’t afford to furnish or heat them.
I know folks who use a home equity line of credit like it’s a checking account. They use them to buy big screen TVs and other “stuff”, take vacations, and pay other bills. They’re in debt up to their eyeballs because they have no self control or can’t (or won’t) exercise any financial discipline.
You can blame the financial companies for extending credit, but you have to blame the consumers for abusing credit.
August 20, 2007 at 10:17 pm
In case anyone is wondering, what Bill said in the second comment was exactly what I meant in the first, only I was too lazy to explain it as clearly.
August 20, 2007 at 10:20 pm
BTW, my first mortgage was a variable rate with a teaser, which I used while it suited my purposes, and then when rates went down in the early 90’s I dropped it like a jilted lover and re-fi’d with a fixed rate.
August 21, 2007 at 12:47 am
I used to listen to Harry Gross on WCAU-AM back when talk radio had a different definition than it does now. Harry hosted a call-in financial talk show on Sunday mornings. I learned much from Harry’s show.
One thing I learned was that you can’t underestimate the stupidity of Americans when it comes to money and finance. Almost every Sunday someone called in who had been flimflamed out of thousands of dollars by purchasing penny stocks or platinum futures over the phone from some boiler room operation. Or they owned stock in a company and had no idea what the company did or they owned a mutual fund with no idea what it invested in or what its objectives were.
I used to say people spent more time reading Consumer Reports deciding what washer/dryer to buy than they did considering investments. Now I think it’s cell phones.
To paraphrase Julius Westheimer, I’m not as worried about the return on my money as I am the return of my money…
August 22, 2007 at 2:34 am
“…back when talk radio had a different definition than it does now…”
I miss those days. Rush came along with his own brand, and all the shows I liked went by the wayside as the medium was flooded with Rush imitators. Twenty years later, nobody still does Rush like Rush, and his imitators are a bunch of boring wannabees. Sean Hannity is dull. Glenn Beck is dull. Michael Medved is dull. And those are just the conservative talkers who at least can get on the air – the liberal ones are so dull nobody wants to carry them!
Thank heavens for podcasts, where I can still listen to Milt Rosenberg on WGN and Bruce Williams on what’s left of his network.
August 23, 2007 at 1:13 am
“…and no one, absolutely no one, who knowingly sold them those unaffordable loans will lose a home or see the inside of the pokey…”
Well, they may not lose a home or spend time in the pokey, but according to AP 40,000 people working in the mortgage industry have lost their jobs.
August 23, 2007 at 10:40 pm
And sending someone to the pokey for trying to loan money to people who previously had no access to mortgage credit and failing could cause serious damage in the future. It’s like saying, “Try to make something affordable to the poor, and if you succeed, we’ll make you a saint. But if you fail, you’re in for criminal penalties.” Nobody’s going to go for that.