Property Feeds
Get the latest properties direct to your desktop 
|
Credit Crisis Interview: Susan Wachter on Securitizations and Deregulation The drive to securitize mortgages combined with deregulation were key triggers of the credit crisis, says Wharton finance professor Susan Watcher. She is one of seven Wharton professors interviewed by Interviewer for this special report on the credit crisis. An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Interviewer: The blame for this crisis has been put on all sorts of factors from the rise of securitization to low interest rate policies of the Federal Reserve, homeowners' greed, short-term mentality on Wall Street, federal regulators with their heads in the sand, and all sorts of things. What do you think were the major factors of the last 10 or 15 years have contributed to the sub-prime crisis?Wachter: Well, guilty as charged, all of the above were part. They all contributed. It would not have happened but for securitization. It would not have happened but for deregulation, and deregulation securitization came together. I don't know about the greed. There certainly are investors out there who are speculating.
But a large part of it is the prices rising -- the affordability crisis -- and pushing on the part of both borrowers and lenders for more affordable products which also ... let more people into home ownership [and] let more people refinance, but the standards eroded over time.Interviewer: Now why was that? This is what we call partly the underwriting question -- that the lenders were simply willing to lend to people that they had less likelihood of getting paid from than they were before. What led them to do that?Wachter: Well, I want to be clear too. There are two ways that standards erode over time. One, the underwriting standards literally started to come into play in 2006, where people could basically say what their income was on many of these loans. And that's underwriting eroding over time.
But also the standards [themselves] -- the LTVs (consolidated loan to values) -- went up with piggyback loans. So the lending standards that existed became more liberally offered. So as a consequence, supply function shifted. There was more supply. Now, you ask me why.Interviewer: Yes, why?Wachter: Well, it is an interesting question. That is going to be a question for economic historians to ask and answer. But in models that my colleague Andrey Pavlov and I work [with], it is the natural competitive. Moving for market share, you compete not just on price, but you compete on market. You compete for market share by competing with your fellow lenders by undercutting them. And you can undercut them on rate [and] you can undercut them on standards to increase market share, especially so if the ones who originated making the loans don't have any exposure to the risk on the other side.Interviewer: Now there also is a change in the kinds of institutions that were making mortgage loans. And back in the days when we think of it all as being Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, there were certain standards that some of these newer firms didn't have to abide by. Is that correct?Wachter: Absolutely correct. And the firms who were gaining in market share were not as exposed to risk, so that is part of the story of how this happened. Fannie and Freddie's market share, FHA's market share [in] particular -- the Federal Housing Administration government insured -- dramatically declined as sub-prime increased. We saw that starting in 2002 through the end of 2006.Interviewer: So Fannie and Freddie were simply not able to make the kinds of loans that some of these other firms started to make?Wachter: Fannie and Freddie, and I want to also include FHA because there is really a one-for-one. Fannie and Freddie and FHA were not able to make these loans because they by law [they] needed to invest in "investment grade," which excluded sub-prime.Interviewer: Now, why were these other types of firms able to get into the market at this point rather than 15 or 30 years ago or some other time?Wachter: This is a private label securitization which did not exist 15 or 20 years ago. What existed was securitization, which was Fannie and Freddie and jumbo securitization. Jumbo securitizations are loans that are investment grade prime, but over the conforming loan limit of $417,000 until recently.
So those were the markets. That was it. And that's all that there could be because there was really no way of evaluating risk, charging VARs for different risks. So with risk-based pricing came the incentive to lend to riskier borrowers and to charge them perhaps more for the loan.Interviewer: And was this a technical advance or research on what risks are and that sort of thing? What were the elements that went into that?Wachter: This is technical. Automated underwriting was first developed by Freddie Mac in the mid-1990s.Interviewer: That means computerized, basically, right?Wachter: Correct, for the risk of the borrower using credit card FICO score type of information that used to be used in consumer credit that migrated over to [the] mortgage market.Interviewer: And the purpose of the automated underwriting is to give the lender an idea of the prospects that a particular borrower is likely to default on the loan based on past history, patterns of other people in that category?Wachter: Based on past history and their characteristics.Interviewer: And I take it that one of the problems in the sub-prime situation is that now you are dealing with a group of borrowers and a group of products for which the track record is not as extensive, is that right?Wachter: That's simplified, that's really too simplified.Interviewer: Well let's hear the complicated version.Wachter: OK. The automated underwriting is quite successful at predicting based on the risk of the borrower. There's another component, which is the value of the home. So any incentive to default on a mortgage or eventually foreclosing their losses, that series of events happens because of the borrower risk, their willingness to pay, etc., which is predicted by credit score. But in addition, ... the most key factor for foreclosure prediction is loan to value.
So if values deteriorate and if loans exceed values, then it is very difficult to sell the home, therefore foreclosure is almost inevitable. That is where we are today. And the models -- the automated underwriting -- were really not developed to predict what values would be under extreme circumstances.Interviewer: Let's look at that how extreme they really were. When you look back at the period when many of these loans were being written -- earlier to middle part of this decade -- interest rates were extraordinarily low, unusually low at that time. And what happened afterward that seemed to have been the trigger event for many of these defaults and then foreclosures appears to be that interest rates simply rose to normal levels. The Fed Funds rate went from 1.0% to, I think, 5.25%, something like that. Was that really so unpredictable that rates would go back to the normal range from an abnormally low range?Wachter: Yes. First, we can't predict rates, but certainly the rates as they were in 2006 were not historically high. In fact, they are historically in a moderate range. So it is not as simple, again, [as] say[ing] it was the rate rise that occurred in 2006, nor is it [as] simple [as] say[ing] that [it] was the rate decline in 2001 to 2003 which set us up. Those, I think, were contributory factors, but they were insufficient to explain the sharp debacle that we are in now.Interviewer: Because rates certainly haven't gone back to levels we saw 20 or 30 years ago when there were double digit rates for many mortgages, is that correct?Wachter: Exactly. And at that point, obviously, we didn't have anything like we have today. We did not have this kind of crisis.Interviewer: Now the second element of this was the falling of home prices, which as you said, left lots of people under water. They can't sell or they may feel inclined just to walk away, as people say. Many people tend to think of their homes as the perfect investment that always raises in value, but there have been periods when they have retrenched. And it doesn't seem, again from the professional's point of view, all that surprising that home prices would level off and perhaps drop after the extraordinary gains from the '90s into the early part of this decade.Wachter: This is the first time in U.S. history since the Great Depression that we have had a national decline in home prices. So it is exceptional. And part of the story of the extraordinary collapse of 2007 -- and current 2008 continuing -- is the 2006 explosion of credit. So that, on one hand, we did have rates go up in 2006. On the other hand, standards eroded dramatically in 2006. And it's the 2006 book of business that is under most stress. That's where the foreclosures are coming from as of now.Interviewer: So why are we seeing this sort of unprecedented nationwide decline in housing prices?Wachter: So it is not local markets. It is not unemployment. It is not simply expectations reversing. It should be something...Interviewer: It is not the local factory shutting down or something like that.Wachter: And that indeed has been what previous housing price recessions have been attributed to. There is a critical factor that all of this misses, and it is not interest rates either. ... It is that the standards [are] eroding, especially in 2006 when there [was] a dramatic decline in standards, [which] was unsustainable and that retrenched.
We had a sharp reversal, starting in 2006, of these unsustainable standards which were artificially inflating housing prices. So over this period standards eroded, artificially inflating house prices. Housing price increases and even levels could only be sustained with this unsustainable, overly liberalized credit being manufactured, which directly caused the price rise of 2006.Interviewer: And basically, that boils down to making money so easily available that people have more to spend, and they bid up prices. Is that the mechanism?Wachter: Absolutely. It's a credit induced bubble. People are able and willing to pay more when you have zero down payment, negatively amortized. They can get into the home and the bet is not on them. The bet is on someone else [as to] what's going to happen in the future.
So it's affordability, and it also is simply that these are loans without money going into them in some cases. That's the investor side of the story.Interviewer: Now, there was during this period an increase in the use of adjustable rate mortgages. This has been one of the problems for borrowers who now are facing resets. The interests rates have gone up, and that's causing their monthly payments to rise to points where they can't pay it or don't want to pay it.
First, is it correct that the use of adjustable rate mortgages increased? And what caused that?Wachter: Not just adjustable rate mortgages. More to the point: teaser rate adjustable rate mortgages and option ARMs. All of these latter are negatively amortizing instruments. That is, you get into the loan and then you borrow more money over time.
That drives the loan-to-value ratio up, which again is going to be the key to the next part of the story which is: Now what do we do? Our loan is worth more than the home. Maybe we walk.Interviewer: And there's lots of research that people who don't have "skin in the game," as they say -- that is, equity in the house -- are more likely to walk away from it than people who do.Wachter: Absolutely. That is a key constant in all of our research. Foreclosure loan is driven by high loan to value, upside-down LTVs greater than 1.Interviewer: And one of the factors here is that lenders stop requiring the kind of down payments that many people were accustomed to years ago: 10% or 20% of the sales price. Why did they stop demanding those?Wachter: Well, in part it was the ability to expand the market, this natural competition. If one guy's doing it, the other guy's doing it. That's how you get market share.
And it's not simply the LTV of one lender. These are consolidated loan to value ratios. So they were allowing piggybacks to come on, which were very popular to allow people to afford their home. Good business, good fees.Interviewer: Now, there's lots of debate about what to do now that this has happened. It seems to me there are two broad areas: What to do about the people, the borrowers and lenders who are in trouble right now, and then what to do to prevent a recurrence of this kind of thing in the future.
Let's break it down. What do you think should be done for the borrowers who are finding themselves underwater today? This has been a big issue in Washington recently.Wachter: Yes. On the one hand there's moral hazard involved. There's the story [that] rescuing people who make bad decisions only supports bad decisions going forward. And there were bad decisions not only by borrowers, but by the underwriting agencies ... and by investors. So let's let everyone take their medicine, [become] educate[d] and go forward. Learn by doing.
There's an argument for that, unless it actually leads to a serious recession which is a destabilizing one where in fact we have a free fall in prices which feeds back to the overall economy. We don't know that that's going to happen, but we don't know that it's not going to happen.Interviewer: So, it's one thing to say that this is a homeowner who took a chance and it didn't work out. That's their tough luck. It's another thing to say to that person's next door neighbors that it's too bad that your home prices are falling because there's a glut of houses on the market in your neighborhood due to this. That's really what we're concerned about -- the collateral damage and the rest of us suffering in some way. Is that one of the issues?Wachter: And the overall economy. And what's the medicine? What's the response to that? The Fed is out of quivers at that point. So preventing that kind of free fall in housing prices has to be out there.
We have to have some tool to do that even if we don't implement it immediately. Because, in fact, the need for it depends on the severity of the slowdown or recession that we may be in.Interviewer: And what do you think is the tool for dealing with that?Wachter: Well, the concept has been supported by the Fed Chair Bernanke. There's a bipartisan legislation on [Capitol] Hill that has the FHA coming in and putting a floor on the market.
There's something to be said for that kind of response where the lenders take a haircut and the investors take a haircut. But they do it, and then in return for it the federal government then takes the risk of further price declines, which hopefully then will be slowed down.Interviewer: So you make both parties suffer enough that they wouldn't want to do it again, and at the same time limit their losses to the point where their disaster doesn't spill over and affect everyone else.Wachter: Exactly. A floor for security for all of us.Interviewer: How do we distinguish between the borrower who is just an ordinary homeowner with a primary residence who either made a mistake or was duped into a mortgage that wasn't a good idea, and somebody who is a speculator or somebody who was buying more house than they really could afford?Wachter: Well, that's a simple one. There are owner-occupants versus investors. You have to go down that line.Interviewer: Again talking about the institutions, the ones that lent money, how big a haircut do they need to take to discourage this kind of thing in the future?Wachter: Well that of course is going to be questioned. But there are already firms out there that are pricing. There is some sign, and it looks like right now there are some trades at about a 20% to 30% haircut.Interviewer: Now, this is dealing with the current crisis. Looking down the road, I think most people would like to not see this kind of volatility in these markets in the future. Are there things that can be done to tweak the way the mortgage markets and the securities markets work to prevent the kind of excesses that led to this?Wachter: "Tweaks" is a small word. There are going to have to be major changes to the way securitization works.
This exposes the Achilles' heel of securitization, which is that it leads to a pro-cyclical impact of housing on the overall economy. Housing brings down the overall economy, and then the overall economy interfaces with housing. Then we're in a free fall.
We need to have a response. I think it's early in the game, certainly early in the game to put on major changes in regulatory responses because right now we have to be very concerned about liquidity. That's the number one issue. In the sub-prime market, we have to be very concerned about liquidity in the overall mortgage market. It's major.
Looking down the line, we are going to have to question the underlying basis for where we are here today, which is risk-based price securitization. That's what's new this time.Interviewer: And can you explain that?Wachter: What's new this time is that unlike the securitization of the past, the securitization is tranching of risk in very complicated CDO's, CLO's, SIV's -- instruments which do not trade.
So we do not have market discipline. Although the price of the loan may be varied by risk, ... the price of the mortgage instrument and the securitization of the mortgage instrument, these securities did not trade. Therefore, there wasn't a market discipline to price the risk and give the signal that these were extraordinarily risky instruments.
They were marked to model, not to market. There were lots of fees up front across the board. But the ultimate risk was unknown, because in fact they weren't priced to the risk.
In some sense, it's a disaster when we have potentially the foreclosure rate that we have of 2-3%. It could bring down the economy with it if there's a recession that's serious. But on the other hand, if this is priced and if the rate of return on the instruments that Wall Street pays is high, at least we're sending the right signal. That did not happen.
In our research, what we've seen is that the standards eroded, but the rate did not go up. So this is a failure of pricing. It's not surprising because these instruments did not trade.Interviewer: Well, if they don't trade and you don't have examples of recent sales to look at to set values, how will you set values? They tried to use models and that clearly doesn't work. These are theoretical bases for setting value.Wachter: Clearly.Interviewer: What's the alternative?Wachter: If we are going to have securitization, it's going to have to be securitization with trading, or with some indicator that these are extraordinarily risky securities because they don't trade -- some kind of red flag. ... There is discussion [and] the SEC is moving along these lines. That is one answer.
The other answer is -- and these are not either/or -- ... [that] we have been in an extreme deregulated environment where basically anything goes. And in that environment, even the competitors can race to the bottom. So there maybe [is] some need for the return of prudential regulation, especially if it is the banks themselves who are engaging in this race to the bottom competition, because then all of us are exposed to demand deposit insurance.Interviewer: Now in order to encourage trading, would you have to have some form of standardization so that people would have a fairly good understanding of what this instrument is? I gather that in this recent event, many were sort of custom-made and each one was, in some respects, unique to all the others.Wachter: Which of course means you can't trade the liquidity, etc.Interviewer: So would you standardize them?Wachter: Without standardization, there is no trading. So that's an open question. There are ways, and we are just beginning to think about how that would actually come about. It could be totally market-based incentives for standardization, [and the] SEC might have to have a role, but as you say, without standardization, there is no liquidity, there is no trading.Interviewer: Another proposal that has been floating around is to make sure that the participants in these markets all keep skin in the game, as they say. That is that instead of packaging up or bundling up one of these securities and then sending it on its way into the market and forgetting about it, the creators would have to maintain some sort of position or some sort of guarantee so that if things went wrong, they would pay a price. And that would give them an incentive to produce things of a higher quality. Does something along those lines make sense?Wachter: It does. The basic research that my colleague Andrey Pavlov and I have done, which in fact helped explain the Asian banking crisis, points to the incentive to produce ... short-run fees. And if there is nothing on the other side about what the consequence is of these fee-driven returns, then you are going to have a race to the bottom. It is under certain circumstances inevitable.
So this is not the first time that we have had a real estate and banking crisis that occurs together. In fact throughout history -- we just look at ... at Japan over the last 20 years. So yes, [having] skin in the game so that decisions are not just short-term [and] fee-driven is absolutely critical in every step of the way.Interviewer: Looking at the other part of the equation, which is the home buyer who will continue to want to get mortgages. You get the impression that many people are still going to want to use adjustable rate mortgages. For some types of borrowers, they may be a better choice than the classic 30-year fixed rate mortgage. Do you agree that they should still be part of the market?Wachter: Absolutely. There is nothing wrong with adjustable rate mortgages. We have had adjustable rate mortgages for tens of years, and in the rest of the world they are the most common, they are the standard mortgage. It is not adjustable rate mortgages that are problems, the problems are negatively amortizing teaser rate option ARMs, which are predictably subjecting borrowers to payment shock at the same time that they are predictably artificially boosting the market, so that at the other side the market prices will fall. A recipe for exactly where we are.Interviewer: Now, when people take out adjustable rate mortgages, one of the appeals is that with the teaser rate, you qualify for the loan based on the low rate with a smaller payment that will fit a more modest income. But there has been some talk of having to look more deeply into the borrower's future or estimate what it is going to be and see what will be the borrower's ability to pay a higher payment if interest rates cause a reset that is much higher. Is there some way to do that?Wachter: Well certainly, very recent votes in the Fed proposed rules that indeed you underwrite to the rate that that teaser rate adjusts to, which of course would have avoided a lot of the damage that we have. The other issue of adjustable rate mortgages [is that] you can't have an adjustable rate mortgage which underwrites to any interest rate. But adjustable rate mortgages, as I said before, are not the cause of the problem that would occur in the end. They are a well wedded instrument. We can have them.
We can have adjustable rate mortgages. We can have fixed rate mortgages. What we can't have is an explosion of credit that induces price rises artificially and then induces the pullback.[There are] two things which you didn't ask me about, but that I want to quickly address. One [is that], early on, you said, "What caused this?" One of the causes was [that] default rates did not rise immediately, and of course they don't rise as long as the values are driven up. But as long as credit standards erode, and so as more credit is pushed out there, that is unsustainable [and] prices will increase. So the signal to pull back is not in the defaults. If you're looking there, you are not going to find it. So you need to have market discipline, which is looking to the long-term and being able to identify this artificial credit induced bubble and price it. That's one way out.
The other way out is a prudential way out, which is if the banking sector is part of this ... artificial boom. By the way, it was tangential this time around in the U.S., but it isn't in the rest of the world. We have seen these kinds of booms and busts brought down [in] Japan for 20 years, which came from the banking sector.
So in this case, there has to be prudential supervision of the banks themselves because banks too can engage in [a] fee-driven race to the bottom. Even if they have skin in the game, it happens and there is no reason why it wouldn't happen.Interviewer: I want to make sure we understand what prudential means in this context. Can you explain that a little further?Wachter: Thinking further... Further down for the long run.Interviewer: Further down the road.Wachter: And that, of course, is what the regulators must do if, on the one hand, they are also giving out demand deposit insurance, which basically takes out a big part of the providers of the funds to the banks from making these decisions. Someone has to have the long-run concern. Demand depositors are neither in place nor do they have the incentive for their insurance to do so.Interviewer: Finally, what is your general assessment of the way the Federal Reserve has handled this so far?Wachter: Bernanke has really pulled this off. It is really incredible. Nonetheless, even he is quite concerned with going forward. There may need to be more that happens and it's out of his hands at this point.Interviewer: And looking at the things they've done, it's a whole range of things from opening the discount window to lending out treasuries and taking mortgage securities as collateral to helping out with the Bear Stearns situation. Which of these do you think have been the most useful?Wachter: Well, we have been so exposed -- not just in the U.S. but worldwide to a potentially worldwide crash -- that there are two of these that are absolutely critical. One was the decline in short-term rates, the increased liquidity -- which is not just the Fed but worldwide -- which keeps ARMs lowered short-term rates, which allow these teaser rates to adjust to a lower rate than they otherwise would adjust to.
Secondly, [and] equally important, is the historic Bear Stearns intervention, which is going to be very controversial historically and brings on its own questions going forward now [that] we have a whole other part of the financial system that is going to be rescued to some degree. Therefore, there is a very increased moral hazard there as well. [It's] a very controversial decision.Interviewer: And have you got a conclusion of your own about that?Wachter: Well, at the time, I think without that we would have had a bank run in the non-financial sector, no doubt about it.Interviewer: And it does seem that although people have called it a bailout or a rescue, there certainly was a lot of suffering on the part of Bear Stearns' employees and shareholders and executives.Wachter: The shareholders were indeed disciplined and I am sure that was part of the planning of the event.Interviewer: Let me just finish by asking, do you think we are closer to the end of this whole process or still in the beginning?Wachter: We are not in the beginning. We are not at the end. It is really this critical middle piece of how does the overall economy perform? And how does that subvert the potential recovery in the housing market or, in fact, cause the housing market to further unravel? There is no answer. We don't know. That's uncertainty that's simply going to play out in the next three to six months.Interviewer: So this really is very much not just a routine crisis or cycle, but a kind of uncharted territory.Wachter: For the next six months, we are in uncharted territory. We simply don't know how far the economy is going to fall, if it's going to fall, and how it's going to interact with falling home prices.
Credit Crisis Interview: Todd Sinai on Home Values Don't think of your house as an investment comparable to savings or a stock portfolio, says Wharton finance professor Todd Sinai. He is one of seven Wharton professors interviewed by Interviewer for this special report on the credit crisis.An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Interviewer: Homes have long been thought of as a rock-solid investment, the thing that always gained value and never let you down. And now, in the last decade or so, a lot of people seem to have started to look at their homes as investments -- and not just speculators, but ordinary people who thought there was a huge value that they could tap in their homes. And we've seen that now they're behaving like investments, like stocks, which sometimes go down and don't always go up. Has the real estate market evolved or changed, or is this just part of a regular cycle that we see from time to time?Sinai: Wow, you're starting with a doozy of a question. There are a lot of answers to that. So, to take the last part first, the real estate has changed, but still, there's a lot that is the same. So let's start with the fact that you started with, that house values are behaving like stocks now, and they didn't behave like stocks before, that they're exhibiting more volatility now than they used to. I don't think that's really quite true. So, what we're seeing now that we haven't seen in the past is actual declines in house prices -- nominal house prices at the national level. We've seen actual declines in house prices at the local level before. If you owned a house in Boston that you bought in 1988, by 1992 you were underwater on your mortgage, even though you had put 20% down. So house prices have fallen before. The thing that they've done at the national level is they've fallen in real terms, and they've always gone up in nominal terms.Well, back in the 1970s, and even the 1980s, when we had lots of inflation, it was easy for house prices to go up a lot in nominal terms but still be losing real money in real terms.Interviewer: In other words, the price went up, but when you factor in inflation, this is where you're really losing value.Sinai: Absolutely. So, comparing your house price to nothing happening, to keeping money under your mattress, is probably the wrong thing to do. Comparing it to what you could have made in some other investment is probably the right thing to do. And housing has dropped a lot in the past. So it's evolved to a kind of asset. Now, having said that, to think of houses as an investment, I think is somewhat different. And, I think it's partly because, for people who are living in their house -- it's being used as a primary residence -- there's not a lot of investment value to it.And what I mean by that is that I bought a condo in mid-town Manhattan. Let's say I paid $500,000 for it in the mid-1990s, and it's worth $1.5 million now. Well, if I sell that and I still want to live in mid-town Manhattan, I'm still out a million-five to buy another one. So, my investment has gone up a lot, but it just covers what I need to buy with it, which is a place to live.And the difference between housing and the stock market is that when you sell the share of stock and it's doubled in value or tripled in value, you can buy more stuff. If your house doubles or triples in value, you can buy the same amount of housing -- unless you're going to move somewhere else where houses' prices didn't rise quite as much.So it's a very different thing to think about in terms of an investment. And I think when people say that people are using it as an investment, what they mean is they're using it as a line of credit. Interviewer: Now, we saw prices just soaring in the early and mid part of this decade. What was behind that?Sinai: The rest of it is due to a couple of factors. About two-thirds of the run-up, on average, for the country appears to be due to, essentially, it's cheaper to finance your house. And the way to think of that is that if you were to invest in stocks, by the time you went from 2000 to 2005, the kind of return or yield you would have gotten on the stocks would have gone down a lot. It's the same with bonds. Houses actually end up being priced a lot like bonds. When required yields are lower, bond prices go up. With houses, if the cost of your money, in terms of where else you could have invested it or the cost of borrowing for housing, goes way down, then the prices go up to compensate. Now, that's about two-thirds of it. A third of it just seems to be what we call momentum -- looking backwards and saying, "Hey, prices have gone up." It's going to go up in the future. And that's sort of a behavioral or psychological, kind of bubble story.Interviewer: And part of it, I take it, is that when interest rates are low; a person of a given income can qualify for a larger mortgage. They have more money to spend. They can bid up prices.Sinai: It's hard to tell how much of it is that qualification mechanism, that people spend as much they're allowed to spend, and how much of it is really people, in effect, behave like a really rational asset pricer would in the bond market. And I don't think you can distinguish between those.But, in essence, your intuition is right, which is, if I'm thinking of buying a $100,000 house, and the interest rate is about 10%, it's going to take me, to finance the whole thing, $10,000 a year. If the interest rate drops to 5%, that's $5, 000 a year, and if I'm willing to spend $10,000 a year, then I can pay for a $200,000 house. Well, a large chunk of that increased willingness to pay leads to bid-up house prices in markets where it's hard to build housing, because people are competing with each other to get into those houses.In markets where it's not hard to build housing, that increased willingness to pay just means developers say, "Wow, profit!" And they come and build more houses, because now the value of the house, once they build it, is greater than the cost of construction. And that's what we saw in South Florida. That's what we saw in Phoenix. That's what we saw in Las Vegas. That's what we saw in Central California.Interviewer: One of the things you notice, if you drive around in suburbs around major cities, as you compare the newer neighborhoods to the older neighborhoods, the lots may be the same size, but the houses get bigger, and they're more elaborate, and they have more stonework and all of these sorts of things. And I'm wondering to what extent is the housing market kind of a fashion industry that people just feel they need to have the house that has all these bells and whistles?Sinai: I think there are changes in tastes for what we call the structure part of housing. If you were to look at what has really driven the growth in the house prices in these markets -- what we call house prices, we mean the combination of the structure and the land that it's built on -- most of it, if you can decompose it, can be decomposed down to growth in the cost of the underlying land.So the rapid rise in house prices, in LA or San Francisco and New York, was not so much that people are buying these fancier condos in New York, or fancier apartments in San Francisco, or fancier houses in LA; it's that the cost of just getting a place in that market has gone up a lot.Having said that, the people who can afford to get a place in those markets are also the people who like granite counter-tops and massive home theaters and lots of square footage and all the other things that go along with being a high-income household. They also have a Mercedes and BMWs in their garages, and all the other stuff.So the kind of fancy housing goes along with the higher spending, but it's not driving the higher spending. And I think, really, what's driving the higher spending is that, basically, there are just a lot more rich people in the US than there ever used to be. Some of them were born here, and some came from other countries, but there are just a lot more people willing to spend a lot more money on housing, and there are only so many places that they want to live.Interviewer: Now, it's long been government policy to encourage home ownership. We now have a rate that is somewhere in the high 60s, I believe. And I'm wondering whether this was something that helped feed this subprime mortgage problem.Sinai: I don't think government policy towards home ownership explicitly fed the subprime problem. I have really no idea about what's implicit in your question, which is: did that lead to a degree of lack of regulation and oversight in the housing finance industry that led to the subprime problem?I think, in large part, the subprime problem came from the lending sector, banks and finance companies that were in a hunt for yield. They had capital they needed to put to work, and they needed to get yield. And you could take an abnormally low yield in traditional bonds, or you could put it into housing, and you could do it knowing that you were taking on risk. You might not have known exactly what the parameters of that risk were, but you knew that you were taking on risk, and it was still worth it, because then you could actually make a bit more money, or the same amount of money. I think whatever regulation the government had done, Wall Street would have found a way to circumvent it.Interviewer: So it was really a search for high-yield investments rather than the government saying, "You've got to go out and make sure you're doing loans in poor communities" and all those sorts of rules that we've seen over the years.Sinai: I think that the run-up in house prices that we have seen; if they were explicitly contained in poor communities, then you'd have an argument for that policy. Certainly, we think that the communities that have had more subprime lending have seen larger growth in the house prices. That has been a portion of the run-up. It has not been nearly all of the run-up in house prices. It explains a little bit of the differential; it can't explain the entire differential between those communities.So, I think the thing to keep in mind is that the traditionally poor communities are not the ones that have generated the bulk of the price growth. San Francisco is no longer poor. It is the rare poor person who can live in the San Francisco metropolitan area. And they had 200 some-odd percent house price increases over the last eight to nine years.Interviewer: Now, subprime mortgage is kind of a dirty word today. But as recently as a year ago, a lot of people were defending it, saying, "Well, look. Yes, a larger portion of them go bad than other types of mortgages. That's expected." But the whole impulse here is to make mortgages available and home ownership available to people who couldn't get standard mortgages, as their credit is no good or their incomes are low or some sort of problem like that. So, has this been a failed experiment to get money to those people, or is it something that just shouldn't have taken place in the first place?Sinai: Oh, I hope it's not a failed experiment. I think this is a market that's terrific. I think that the excesses and abuses...the jury is still out about what has actually happened here, and I think we need to wait a bit for the things to come in. The problems that are happening, I think, are not because subprime is subprime -- that is, that subprime has negative amortization, where you pay below market interest and your principal goes up. I don't think that's inherently a problem. I don't think adjustable-rate mortgages that turn into fixed-rate mortgages after a low teaser rate are inherently a problem. Those are all good things that borrowers should be able to have access to, and I think we actually have real evidence that credit markets get worse when you rule those things out. When you have no documentation of income, when you have people saying, "Yes, I'm living in the house" but they're not actually living in the house, that's when the model breaks down, because the investors need to be able to know what the actual risk of default is from the borrower. And they need to be able to know that the borrower is actually living in the house, because, historically, if you're living in the house, you have a much lower rate of default than if you're an investor, who will default much more strategically -- that is, if the house value drops below the loan amount. And so, for an investor to make a proper decision, they need actual, accurate information on that. And they were taking risk that they may or may not have known about, in that borrowers may not have been completely truthful; with of course, the complete consent of the mortgage originator to not actually check.That's a regulation problem. Borrowers need to be fully informed about the loans that they're taking, and investors need to actually know exactly what the risk characteristics of the actual borrowers are. And so we have full information there. But the structure of adjustable-rate mortgages, or negative-amortization mortgages, those are all fine structures for people to be able to borrow through.And the truth is that, for someone like me, I should have an adjustable-rate mortgage. It is less expensive, on average. I take interest-rate risk, but I have enough liquidity in my life that if interest rates go up, I can still afford to pay it out of cash flow. I don't become illiquid. It's like going to Las Vegas. Can I gamble in Las Vegas? Well, if I have the bankroll to back it, it's okay. It's my decision to take that gamble or not. And adjustable-rate mortgages are taking an interest-rate gamble.It's probably a bad match for someone who doesn't have the resources to take that gamble, but it doesn't mean that the product shouldn't exist.Interviewer: Now, how should we ensure that the people who take on mortgages that have all sorts of features that are hard to understand are fully informed of what they're doing? Do you need a license to get a mortgage? Or should you have to go through a seminar or read a pamphlet? Who should be responsible for delivering that kind of information?Sinai: That's an excellent question that I don't have a good answer to. I think there are lots of possible answers to this. I think it is relatively straightforward to improve disclosure on these products. So if you go and take out a mortgage, you should get more information than just, "If the interest rate environment does not change, this is what your payments will be" -- which is about the information that you get right now.You can disclose to investors how much your cash flow payments could go up, how much they could fall; and historically, what are the odds of those things happening? So, better disclosure that's mandated is probably a good thing. It certainly can't hurt.Interviewer: Those are fairly basic things that you don't have to be an economist or a financially sophisticated person to understand, that if interest rates rise to normal levels, from the sub-normal levels of the mid part of the decade, your monthly payment my double. And then you can figure, "Am I going to be able to pay that?"Anyone can pretty much understand it, if it's explained in a straightforward way, is that right?Sinai: If the calculation is done for you, you can do it. A lot of these products -- I have smart students at Wharton, and I would say that any of the students I've had, before taking a class, would not be able to figure out what their payments would be if their interest rate changed. That is not an easy calculation to do for a Wharton student; it is a harder calculation for...Interviewer: But it could be presented in a table or a chart.Sinai: A figure or a chart -- yeah, absolutely.Interviewer: In some graphic way that you could really understand it.Sinai: But that's only part of it. There's a whole host of things that -- do you need a license? Financial education clearly needs to be improved. There are a large bundle of things that probably need to be done to help people be better consumers in this market. That's a combination of consumer protection and consumer education. But wiping out a whole bunch of financial products is probably not a good idea.Interviewer: To some extent the market seems to have handled that already. I gather that there aren't a lot of sub-prime loans being issued right now.Sinai: Hopefully they will return. There aren't a lot of sub-prime loans being issued right now because the investors who bought the bonds in the end, the source of the capital, aren't willing to invest until they understand what the risks are.And one thing that sub-prime investors counted on when they invested in bundles of these underlying mortgages was that defaults would not be correlated among them all that much. That is, some might go bad because people lose their job and they default, but the whole thing en masse is not going to go into foreclosure. And they're discovering that they weren't quite right about that.And I think they don't quite know how wrong they were, and it's hard to figure out whether you should invest and feel comfortable investing until you have a sense of what that risk is. And so they're waiting on the sidelines, and I expect at some point they'll come back and this market will reemerge in some form because it's a fairly efficient way of providing capital to the housing sector.Interviewer: Now there's been a lot of talk in Washington and elsewhere of ways to help the homeowners who are in trouble over this. And they run across the board, from things like buying the mortgages from the investors who own them and writing them down and reissuing mortgages with fixed rates at lower rates. Others would postpone the resets that will raise payments to some future date. A whole basket of things have been proposed.But you've written that there are dangers inherent in any kind of bailout. And I take it that one of the problems is that inevitably you're going to favor one group over another. Is that right?Sinai: Yeah absolutely. I think the fundamental issue, some people call it fairness or whatever is that if you bail out people ex-post, based off of the outcomes that they face, then you are favoring a group who often through choices that they made, ended up in a financially bad situation.And the question you have to decide as a society is: Do you want to reward that group? For example, if you look at the data, there are lots of people who you could see could have taken out what we would a call a sub-prime mortgage, say a low adjustable rate for two years and a much higher fixed rate for the remaining 28 years. Many of those people chose not to. Some chose to. And when they chose to do it, they did it at a point where there's a good chance they could not afford the payment when it jumped up. A bail-out proposal, if you're going to bail out the people who are in trouble, bails out the people who made the financially unwise choice and basically doesn't give anything to the people who made the financially sound choice. This is because the financially sound people didn't get into trouble. As a society, you might still want to do that. You might want to say, "For the greater good of not having neighborhoods empty out because all these people have to leave their houses because they've been foreclosed upon, we're going to bail them out even though it's inequitable." But it's inequitable and you need to weigh that in.Interviewer: I gather also that the people who are in trouble are not evenly distributed around the country and in different income groups. There are certain geographical pockets and certain income pockets. Can you explain that?Sinai: Not surprisingly, when you look at the proliferation of sub-prime mortgages, most of the dollars of sub-prime mortgages are in the markets where there are lots of dollars of housing to be financed. So if you look at California and New York, California alone has about 26% of the outstanding sub-prime mortgage debt. And in large part, it's because there are two factors. One is that housing was very expensive, so when you borrowed money, you borrowed a lot of it. And another is that housing was expensive for the people who wanted to get in, so taking mortgages that had favorable initial terms allowed you to get into a house that you otherwise would not have been able to buy.And so even markets like Texas, which is a very, very large market -- it ends up being fourth on the list in terms of dollars, because the houses there were just not very expensive. I think there's a tendency for people to think of sub-prime as being an issue that was faced by poor people, because they couldn't get credit before and they can get credit now -- and that is not supported by the data. And I'll get into that.In the high house price growth markets -- the San Francisco's, etcetera -- sub-prime usage goes all up and down the income distribution. In fact, it increases as you get higher up in the income distribution. And largely because the way that you got into the $1.2 million house that you really couldn't afford rather than the $900, 000 that you could, with a 30-year fixed mortgage, is that you took out a sub-prime mortgage. And that enabled you to get to the house you wanted.In the markets where we don't see a lot of house price growth -- Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit -- sub-prime usage there is skewed to the bottom end of the distribution. People who would have been renters before get into the houses by taking out sub-prime mortgages.Interviewer: And I think that we should explain that one of the appeals to the sub-prime loan was its very low teaser rate. You might start out at 3% or some very low level. And your ability to qualify for the loan was based on that rate and whether you could support the payment that that rate would require. And the question was sort of left unanswered about whether you could afford a rate that would be higher, sometime later. And that's why you had both wealthy people who were trying to reach even further to get a bigger and bigger house taking out sub-prime loans, as well as what we tend to think of as the typical consumer which was the poorer person.Sinai: Absolutely. And you can think of the following example, which is that you can imagine a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage at whatever the going rate was, could have carried a $1,000 a month payment on a $200,000 house. If you took out a teaser rate on that same house, you maybe would have had $800 a month, in terms of payment, initially, or even $700 a month. Or, if you could afford the $1,000 a month, then you could go and buy a $275,000 house instead of that $200,000 house. And your payment would remain the same, at least initially, but it would reset later.Interviewer: Now, some people who are looking for remedies to this problem, or ways to prevent a recurrence, are talking about changing the underwriting standards so that people would not qualify for a loan based solely on whether they can afford the teaser rate but would qualify on some longer-term view of whether they could afford rates that might be higher and the payments that might be higher. Do you think that there's merit to this idea?Sinai: Yes and no. So, for any mortgage that is implicitly guaranteed by the government -- for example, a mortgage that would get bought by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, which are ostensibly independent, but everyone believes the government would step in to bail them out if they get into trouble. If they are mortgages that Fannie or Freddie could buy on the secondary market, then I think the government needs to mandate underwriting standards that make sure the mortgage is appropriate for the expected income of the borrower.And yes, that would be for the entire stream of payments on the mortgage, relative to the entire stream of income, over time, of the borrower. If it's not going to be bought by a government enterprise, then as long as there is full disclosure and understanding by the borrower and the end investor, I think the originator should just originate what they want.We need to regulate and mandate complete disclosure and understanding. But if you have a borrower who wants a different set of mortgage terms and investors who are willing to take on that risk, then there is no reason that we shouldn't allow that financial product to exist, and probably lots of good reasons that we should, because it's a way of a lot of families getting access to credit that they otherwise would not have gotten access to.Interviewer: So, transparency and education are better solutions than heavy regulation.Sinai: Again, as long as the government is not back-stopping it, yes.Interviewer: All right. Well, thank you very much.Sinai: Well, sure. It's a pleasure. |
|
|
