Although, Bear Stearns is no more, the NY times has some interesting observations on the now dead bank....
WHAT are the consequences of a world in which regulators rescue even the financial institutions whose recklessness and greed helped create the titanic credit mess we are in? Will the consequences be an even weaker currency, rampant inflation, a continuation of the slow bleed that we have witnessed at banks and brokerage firms
Stick around, because we’ll soon find out. And it’s not going to be pretty.
Agreeing to guarantee a 28-day credit line to Bear Stearns, by way of JPMorgan Chase, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York conceded last Friday that no sizable firm with a book of mortgage securities or loans out to mortgage issuers could be allowed to fail right now. It was the most explicit sign yet of the Fed’s “Rescues ‘R’ Us” doctrine that already helped to force the marriage of Bank of America and Countrywide.
But why save Bear Stearns? The beneficiary of this bailout, remember, has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach. Until regulators came along in 1996, Bear Stearns was happy to provide its balance sheet and imprimatur to bucket-shop brokerages like Stratton Oakmont and A. R. Baron, clearing dubious stock trades.
And as one of the biggest players in the mortgage securities business on Wall Street, Bear provided munificent lines of credit to public-spirited subprime lenders like New Century (now bankrupt). It is also the owner of EMC Mortgage Servicing, one of the most aggressive subprime mortgage servicers out there.
Bear’s default rates on so-called Alt-A mortgages that it underwrote also indicates that its lending practices were especially lax during the real estate boom. As of February, according to Bloomberg data, 15 percent of these loans in its underwritten securities were delinquent by more than 60 days or in foreclosure. That compares with an industry average of 8.4 percent.
Let’s not forget that Bear Stearns lost billions for its clients last summer, when two hedge funds investing heavily in mortgage securities collapsed. And the firm tried to dump toxic mortgage securities it held in its own vaults onto the public last summer in an initial public offering of a financial company called Everquest Financial. Thankfully, that deal never got done.
Why does every growth rate in the housing market have to be massive. First, large price growth numbers, then large price falls, and now a 60 percent increase in foreclosures.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Foreclosure filings nationwide jumped 60% in February compared with the same month last year, but they decreased slightly versus January, according to a report released Thursday.
RealtyTrac, an online marketer of foreclosure properties, said 223,651 homes got hit with foreclosure filings last month, which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. 46,508 of those were lost to bank repossessions, which more than doubled over last year. The report also indicated that foreclosure filings in February fell 4% compared with January, similar to a 6% decrease that occurred during the same time-span in 2007.
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Seems sensible to keep away from the US housing disaster, at least for the time being....
BOSTON (Reuters) - For decades, buying a home was a key step on the path to financial security for the American middle class. Home owners could count on a fixed mortgage payment rather than rising rent, take advantage of tax breaks, and build equity as their houses increased in value over time.
But with home prices falling and families losing their homes to foreclosure, some people who under other circumstances would be looking to buy their first home now see greater security in renting. One such person is Lisa Chesnut, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, and works as an information systems coordinator. With a good job and two young sons, 29-year-old Chesnut and her husband, Bryan, look like classic first-time buyers.
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The fed's attempts to save the housing market have come to nothing. Risk has returned with a vengence. Banks have remembered how interest rates should properly reflect default probabilities.
Feb. 29 (Bloomberg) -- Consumers like Valerie Jacobsen aren't getting much of a break on borrowing costs even after five months of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Jacobsen, 30, wants to refinance her 7.25 percent first and 8.5 percent second mortgages into one loan at a lower cost. To cut the payments enough to recoup her $3,000 in closing costs, she needs a rate well below 6 percent. She wasn't ready when costs dipped in January and now they're back at levels that make her plan too expensive, the Austin, Minnesota, resident says.
``Rates I'm seeing aren't really mimicking what the Federal Reserve is doing,'' said Jacobsen. ``I'm wondering why that is.''
Trying to spur lending and avert a recession, the Fed has chopped 2.25 percentage points off its benchmark rate since September. Wariness among lenders and fears of inflation are keeping mortgage and auto loan rates close to or above levels before the central bank began easing, while credit-card issuers are tightening their standards.
The slippage between the Fed's rate cuts and consumers' ability to borrow or reduce loan costs is weakening the central bank's ability to stimulate the biggest part of the economy, consumer spending. It accounts for more than two-thirds of goods and services output and stalled for the second consecutive month in January after adjusting for inflation, the Commerce Department said today.
This must be a bank's worst nightmare; a homeowner who doesn't care about foreclosure. If there are enough people like Mr. Zulueta, then the very existence of the US banking system is in question. The walk-away home debtors are very dangerous.
When Raymond Zulueta went into default on his mortgage last year, he did what a lot of people do. He worried. In a declining housing market, he owed more than the house was worth, and his mortgage payments, even on an interest-only loan, had shot up to $2,600, more than he could afford. “I was terrified,” said Mr. Zulueta, who services automated teller machines for an armored car company in the San Francisco area.
Then in January he learned about a new company in San Diego called You Walk Away that does just what its name says. For $995, it helps people walk away from their homes, ceding them to the banks in foreclosure.
Last week he moved into a three-bedroom rental home for $1,200 a month, less than half the cost of his mortgage. The old house is now the lender’s problem. “They took the negativity out of my life,” Mr. Zulueta said of You Walk Away. “I was stressing over nothing.”
You Walk Away is a small sign of broad changes in the way many Americans look at housing. In an era in which new types of loans allowed many home buyers to move in with little or no down payment, and to cash out any equity by refinancing, the meaning of homeownership and foreclosure have changed, economists and housing experts say.
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The fiscal bust is just a few years ago - medicare, social security, the national debt - just give it ten more years.
December 4, 2005 (WLS) -- For years, every generation of twenty-somethings has had nicknames. Generation X and Y come to mind. But the latest phenomenon is well-educated, well-financed and not eager to pay dues. Employers, sociologists and even the media have dubbed them "the entitlement generation." They are images of desire, and they are everywhere. And many times they are expensive. In a world of instant communication and instant gratification, having it all can't wait. In the working world these people are known as the entitlement generation.
"Yes, there's an entitlement generation we are seeing a little bit more of," said Debbie Bougdanos. Bougdanos would know. She works at the world renowned advertising firm Leo Burnett and is in charge of recruiting for the creative department. Plenty of portfolios come across her desk. Many of the applicants think they are ready for the prime assignments, but she says, most assuredly, they are not.
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When will it end? Housing just keeps on sliding into a black hole. The December numbers top off a truly terrible year:
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Capping the worst year for the housing market in 25 years, resales of U.S. homes and condos fell 2.2% in December to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.89 million, the National Association of Realtors reported Thursday.
For all of 2007, sales of single-family homes fell 13%, the biggest decline since 1982. The median sales price of an existing single-family home fell for the first time in the 40-year history of the survey, dropping 1.8%. Although no hard data are available, most economists believe median home prices hadn't fallen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. December resales at 4.89 million were weaker than the 4.98 million pace expected by economists surveyed by MarketWatch.
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Will the collapse of bond insurers usher in the next stage of financial collapse? It certainly looks like it.....from the New York Times....
Even as stocks ended five days of losses with a surprising recovery on Wednesday, officials began moving to defuse another potential time bomb in the markets: the weakened condition of two large insurance companies that have guaranteed buyers against losses on more than $1 trillion of bonds.
Regulators fear a possible chain of events in which the troubled bond insurers, MBIA and Ambac, might be unable to keep their promise to pay investors if borrowers default on their debt.
That could leave the buyers of the bonds — including many banks and pension funds — on the hook for untold billions of dollars in losses, shaking confidence in the financial system.
To avoid a possible crisis, insurance regulators met with representatives of about a dozen banks on Wednesday to discuss ways to shore up the insurers by injecting fresh capital, much as Wall Street firms have turned to outside investors recently after suffering steep losses related to subprime mortgages.
While it is unclear what steps, if any, the banks and regulators may ultimately take, the talks focused on raising as much as $15 billion for the companies, according to several people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the discussions.
The notion that the failure of even one big bond insurer might touch off a chain reaction of losses across the financial world has unnerved Wall Street and Washington. It was a factor in the Federal Reserve’s decision on Tuesday to calm investors by reducing interest rates by three-quarters of a point, to 3.5 percent
“The severity of the subprime debacle may be only a prologue to the main act, a tragedy on the grand stage in the corporate credit markets,”
Ted Seides, the director of investments at Protégé Partners, a hedge fund of funds, wrote in Economics & Portfolio Strategy.
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It is not just the poor who are losing out from the housing crash; the rich are also taking a hit. Caliber Global Investment Ltd., a $908 million fund, will close after running up losses in the sub prime mortgage market. The fund reported an almost $9 million loss in the second-quarter. Meanwhile, another London based hedge fund - Queen's Walk Investment Ltd - stacked up a $91 million loss during the first quarter of this year. Again, most of the losses were due to rising defaults in the US sub prime market.
Thus, it would seem that investors have suddenly rediscovered that risk exists in the housing market. Between 2001-06, investors had systematically and wilfully mispriced the potential losses from the US housing bubble. Now, investors are desperately running for the exit, frantically avoiding the investment products that they purchased with abandon during the exuberant years of double digit house price inflation.
Yet, here is the great mystery of today's housing crash - risk is not a difficult thing to understand. If a financial institution gives a borrower with a poor credit history a massive loan to finance an overpriced house, then the probability of default is rather high. In principle, this increased risk should be reflected in the interest rate charged to the borrower. This simple observation seems obvious now, as default rates are rocketing. Yet somehow, this was all forgotten during the crazy hazy speculation of 2003-5.
Unfortunately, mispricing risk wasn't the only stupid thing that mortgage lenders were doing. They were also backend loading interest charges through teaser rates and complex adjustable rate mortgages. In effect, institutions pushed their problems out two years by offering inappropriate mortgages to people who didn't understand the financial products they were buying. It was as if the sub prime industry had designed a marketing strategy that would maximise the chances of a wave of defaults.
Now, losses are piling up, and default rates are undermining any prospect of a recovery in the housing market. Not that the prospects for a recovery were ever going to be particularly high. The market remains fundamentally imbalanced. With inventory rising to all-time highs, and prices falling, the correction has a long way to go yet. Nevertheless, the sub prime crash has the potential to undermine housing finance for years to come. With investment funds abandoning the sub prime market, stung by a large losses, it will take a long time before investors feel confident enough to return. As the supply of funds drying up, the number available mortgages will likewise diminish.
Today's housing market has become one massive wealth destruction machine. The poor sub prime borrowers can't afford the houses they are living in. As they default, they incur personal losses which they cannot cover. These losses end up on the balance sheets of sub prime lenders, whose investors ultimately take the hit. Everyone loses; all are to blame; all are punished.
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After years of easy money, cheap credit, and reckless monetary policy, central banks are coming to the realisation that an old ghost has returned to haunt us - inflation. The Bank of International Settlements, the organisation that acts as the central bank for central banks warned that central banks must act now and push interest rates higher. The warning was especially directed towards countries with high current-account deficits, in other words, the United States.
The BIS also provided a stark assessment of the US housing market. It said that "The impact of the downturn in the US housing market might not yet have been fully felt." The organisation was right on the money with this one. Housing data from May shows that the crisis is deepening with no end in sight.
The warning from the BIS is welcome, but it is way too late. It would be much better if it had explained the dangers of low interest rates five years ago. All over the world, central banks are now confronted with increasing inflationary pressures, and reluctantly they are beginning to push interest rates up. However, central banks continue to seek the line of least resistance. Rather than aggressively pushing up rates, central banks are doing it slowly, in a forlorn hope that they can avoid recessions.
This reluctance to deal with the problem aggressively threatens to prolong a recession rather than avoid one. It would be better if interest rates were hiked quickly, rather than this low and passive approach that we are witnessing now. People would understand that central banks across the world were serious about tackling inflation, and adjust their behaviour accordingly. Firms would avoid hiking prices, workers would moderate their wage claims, and global imbalances would adjust more quickly and with less pain.
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Today, Bloomberg provided a neat summary of the state of today's housing market.
June 20 (Bloomberg) -- The worst is yet to come for the U.S. housing market. The jump in 30-year mortgage rates by more than a half a percentage point to 6.74 percent in the past five weeks is putting a crimp on borrowers with the best credit just as a crackdown in subprime lending standards limits the pool of qualified buyers. The national median home price is poised for its first annual decline since the Great Depression, and the supply of unsold homes is at a record 4.2 million, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Confidence among U.S. homebuilders fell in June to the lowest since February 1991, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo index released this week. Housing starts declined in May for the first time in four months, the Commerce Department reported yesterday. New-home sales will decline 33 percent from 2005's peak to the end of this year, according to the Realtors' group, exceeding the 25 percent three-year drop in 1991 that helped spark a recession.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc., the world's biggest securities firm, and Bear Stearns Cos., the largest underwriter of mortgage-backed securities in 2006, said last week that rising foreclosures reduced their earnings. Bear Stearns said profit fell 10 percent, and Goldman reported a 1 percent gain, the smallest in three quarters. Both firms are based in New York.
The investment banks, insurance companies, pension funds and asset-management firms that hold some of the U.S.'s $6 trillion of mortgage-backed securities have yet to suffer the full effect of subprime loans gone bad, said David Viniar, Goldman's chief financial officer. Subprime mortgages, given to people with bad or limited credit histories, account for about $800 billion of the market.
Homebuilding stocks are down 20 percent this year after falling 20 percent in 2006, according to the Standard & Poor's Supercomposite Homebuilding Index of 16 companies. Before last year, the index had gained sixfold in five years.
The average U.S. rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.74 percent last week, up from 6.15 percent at the beginning of May, according to Freddie Mac, the second-largest source of money for home loans. That adds $116 a month to the payment for a $300,000 loan and about $42,000 over the life of the mortgage.
The recent increase in mortgage rates is the biggest spike since 2004. The change means buyers can afford 8 percent less house than they could five weeks ago, Kiesel said.
In addition to their primary mortgages, homeowners had $913.7 billion of debt in home equity loans in 2005, more than double the $445.1 billion in 2001, according to a paper by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and James Kennedy on equity extraction issued by the Fed three months ago.
About a third of that money, extracted as home values surged 53 percent from 2000 to 2005, was used to buy cars and other consumer goods, according to the paper. The interest rate on those loans doubled to 8.25 percent in 2006 from 4 percent in 2003.
Homebuyers who got an adjustable-rate mortgage, a so-called ARM, in 2004 have seen their rate climb by about 40 percent. That's enough to add $288 to the monthly payment for a $300,000 mortgage. The average adjustable rate last week was 5.75 percent, an 11-month high, according to Freddie Mac.
A Fed survey of senior loan officers issued in April said that 45 percent of lenders had restricted ``nontraditional'' lending, such as interest-only mortgages, and 15 percent had tightened standards for the most creditworthy, or prime, borrowers. More than half had raised standards for subprime borrowers, according to the survey.
Subprime mortgages have rates that are at least 2 or 3 percentage points above the safest so-called prime loans. Such loans made up about a fifth of all new mortgages last year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington.
The median U.S. price for a previously owned home fell 1.4 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, the third consecutive decline, according to the National Association of Realtors. Before the third quarter of 2006 prices hadn't dropped since 1993. The quarterly median may dip another 2.4 percent in the current period, the Chicago-based industry trade group said in its June forecast. Measured annually, the national median hasn't dropped since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to Lawrence Yun, an economist with the trade group.
The share of mortgages entering foreclosure rose to 0.58 percent in the first quarter, the highest on record, from 0.54 percent in the final three months of 2006, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report last week. Subprime loans going into default rose to a five-year high of 2.43 percent, up from 2 percent, and late payments from borrowers with poor credit histories rose to almost 13.8 percent, the highest since 2002.
Prime loans entering foreclosure increased to 0.25 percent, the highest in a survey that goes back to 1972. That's a sign that even the most creditworthy borrowers are being squeezed, Roubini said.
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Moody's investor services finally picked up on the reality confronting the US mortgage market; it downgraded 131 subprime mortgage investment products. It also put 237 under review.
The downgrades will inevitably make it harder for lenders to finance subprime mortgages. It should push mortgage rates up, and put further pressure on an already deeply distressed housing market.
To put it another way; it is just one more nail in the coffin.
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Moody's Investors Service said Friday it downgraded 131 mortgage investments backed by loans issued to people with weak, or subprime, credit histories. More people who took out subprime mortgages, especially adjustable-rate loans issued over the past two years, have been defaulting on their monthly payments as their mortgages reset to higher rates. That, in turn, makes mortgages pooled into securities and sold to investors a riskier proposition.
Moody's said it also put 237 securities on review for further downgrades, including 111 of those already downgraded Friday. The downgrades affects both investment-grade and below-investment grade debt, including securities that had been rated 'Aa', 'Aaa' or 'A' and below, Moody's said.
The ratings agency's action affects mortgage securities issued by companies including Bear Stearns Cos., Merrill Lynch & Co., Credit Suisse Group, First Franklin Corp., and IndyMac Bancorp Inc.
Moody's said the downgrades were a result of a higher-than-expected rate of defaults among second mortgages issued to subprime borrowers last year. Moody's said the loans "were originated in an environment of aggressive underwriting."
US homebuilder confidence is at a 16 year low. The industry isn't short of misery; rising inventory, falling sales, rising defaults, falling profitability, rising interest rates, and falling prices. Who could hold a happy face after that litany of problems?
June 18 (Bloomberg) -- Confidence among U.S. homebuilders fell this month to the lowest since February 1991 as interest rates climbed and delinquencies surged. The National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo index of sentiment declined to 28 this month from 30 in May, the Washington-based association said today. Readings below 50 mean most respondents view conditions as poor. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg News forecast the gauge to stay unchanged this month.
Homebuilders including Hovnanian Enterprises Inc. are losing money as they cut prices to stem a slide in sales amid stricter standards for getting mortgages. Builders have scaled back projects to work off bloated inventories, a sign housing construction will weigh on growth for the rest of the year, economists say.
The median forecast of 35 economists surveyed by Bloomberg was for the index to stay at 30. Predictions ranged from 28 to 32. The group's measure of single-family home sales fell to 29 from 31. The index of traffic of prospective buyers slipped to 21 from 22. A gauge of sales expectations for the next six months declined to 39 from 41.
Federal Reserve policy makers last month acknowledged that the housing recession will hold down growth longer than they had anticipated. At the same time, officials have kept their outlook for ``moderate'' growth in the overall economy as consumer spending gains and manufacturing accelerates.
Some reports in recent weeks pointed to reviving demand for homes. The Mortgage Bankers Association's index of applications for mortgages to purchase homes rose an average 5 percent in May from the prior month and was up 6 percent from a year ago. Purchases of new homes unexpectedly jumped in April by the most in 14 years from April, the government reported last month.
Still, a large stock of unsold homes means that builders are reducing their projects. Inventories in April equaled 6.5 months' worth of sales, down from a record high of 8.1 months' worth in March.
Building permits, which signal intentions of starting projects, fell in April to the lowest since June 1997. The Commerce Department may say tomorrow that housing starts fell last month to an annual rate of 1.473 million, from 1.528 million in April, according to the median forecast. The housing market also must deal with the burdens of rising mortgage rates and tighter lending standards.
Thirty-year mortgage rates at the end of May averaged 6.37 percent, rising further to an average 6.74 percent at the end of last week, according to Freddie Mac, the second-largest purchaser of U.S. mortgages.
The number of U.S. homeowners who face possible eviction because of late mortgage payments rose to an all-time high in the first quarter, led by subprime borrowers, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a report last week. U.S. foreclosure filings surged 90 percent in May from a year ago, RealtyTrac Inc., which monitors foreclosures, said June 12. The failure of at least 50 subprime lenders, who make loans to consumers with poor or limited credit history, raised concern homes will be thrown back on the market as foreclosures rise.
From liar loans to FICO scores, the housing market is riddled with dishonesty. Things are so bad that you begin to sorry for the poor hapless mortgage brokers out there. Is there anyone out there that they can trust?
Here is one scam that needs to be stopped quickly. People with poor credit can boost their credit scores by linking up with people with good credit histories. The trick is quite straightforward; people with good credit histories attach people with poor credit histories onto their credit cards. Furthermore, the Internet is there, ready to match up the credit cripples with the people with beautiful FICO scores.
The scam has some interesting implications for the current foreclosure crisis. Suppose that a large number of low interest mortgages were extended to people who should have received high interest subprime loans on account of the poor credit history. Superficially, this might mean that these pseudo-high quality borrowers have a lower probability of default, since the interest on their loans is lower than it otherwise would have been.
However, it is more likely that these irredeemably irresponsible borrowers maxed out on their credit limits. They probably took out larger loans in the otherwise could have, leaving them just as vulnerable to default, regardless of their fake credit scores.
Will this have an impact on the fast imploding housing market? It comes down to a question of how many subprime borrowers infiltrated the quality mortgage market. One thing is for sure: mortgage brokers were not asking too many searching questions about default risk. Perhaps, we shouldn't feel so sorry for them after all.
(Washington Post, June 16) The days may be numbered for dozens of Internet-based companies that promise to quickly boost FICO credit scores by 200 to 300 points. Fair Isaac, the developer of the widely used FICO score, plans to introduce key changes designed to derail schemes that transplant high-quality credit card histories to the files of people with low FICO scores.
The credit-boost companies, easily found on the Web by searching for "credit trade line," claim that they violate no federal laws and are not seeking to defraud mortgage lenders. But mortgage industry groups, federal and state regulators, and credit industry leaders say the programs represent significant threats to the home lending system -- opening the door to fraudulent home loan applications.
Using a FICO-boost service, for example, a mortgage applicant with a history of late and missed payments and a FICO score in the 500s could puff up his or her score well above 700 and be eligible for the best interest rates and fees.
How could that happen? Check out the online pitch of one promoter: "Rent your credit and earn thousands," it proclaims. The company offers cardholders with sterling payment histories on cards with high balances "as much as $10,000 a month or more" simply by accepting unseen borrowers with poor credit backgrounds as "authorized users" on their card accounts for 90 days.
Although the add-on users receive no access to the credit card and cannot rack up charges, Fair Isaac's FICO model allows the cardholders' excellent payment histories to flow directly into the credit files of all authorized users on the card. The addition of the high-quality credit quickly raises the scores of any authorized users -- even though the add-on users may still be poor credit risks.
April housing permits down; new home starts up. There is difficult choice here; which indicator more accurately reflects the true state of the housing market. The new home starts numbers are up only when compared to the previous months. Therefore, it is time to invoke the NAR excuse - the weather. Less rain in April relative to March artificially inflated the new home starts data. So don't worry folks, the housing crash continues.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The battered housing market got another vote of no-confidence from builders last month as applications for new projects tumbled to the lowest since 1997, even as housing starts themselves edged higher.The numbers confirm other recent reports from home builders and real estate groups of a housing market that is still searching for a bottom and that is likely to get weaker before it picks up.
Housing starts rose to an annual rate of 1.53 million in April, according to the Census Bureau report, from the revised 1.49 million pace in March. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had forecast a slip to a 1.48 million pace in April.
But building permits, which are often seen as a measure of builder's confidence in the market, sank to an annual rate of 1.43 million in April from a revised 1.57 million in March. It was the lowest reading since June 1997. Economists had forecast a dip to 1.52 million
Californian pending sales took another major hit in market. According to a new report from Hanley Wood Market intelligence, sales fell by almost 4 percent between February and March. Compared to the same month last year, pending sales are down almost 40 percent. Throughout the state in March, around 5,775 pending sales were agreed. During March last year, buyers agreed to purchase 9,160.
Mortgage refinancing played a crucial role in sustaining the housing bubble. Maybe the lenders adopted some rather aggressive sales techniques. However, far too many people entered the housing market with a chain of unrealistic expectations.
The chain started with a belief that housing prices never drop. This expectation linked into the idea that interest rates would not go up significantly. These misplaced imaginings pushed borrowers into taking on too much debt to pay for overvalued houses. Interest only loans and teaser rate arms reconciled the borrower’s high levels of debt with stagnant incomes. People could only think of monthly payments, and not long term personal debt sustainability. Finally, refinancing was the last link in the chain. People stupidly thought that they could keep their monthly payments low by periodically refinancing.
It is not hard to see how many borrowers, desperate to refinance, could fall prey to unscrupolous sales pitches. “Oh yes, we can keep your interest rate at just 7 percent, so long as you sign here”. However, refinancing only makes sense as long as rates remain low. Once they rise, the chain breaks, and over-leveraged borrowers begin to understand that the level of debt and not just the monthly payments are important.
Here is a story of one lawsuit from St.Louis. The accusation has a ring of plausibility.
(STL Today, May 10th 2007) Twenty-nine families in St. Louis and four Missouri counties have filed lawsuits accusing Ameriquest Mortgage Co., a California-based mortgage lender, of engaging in abusive practices related to refinancing home loans.
The suits say that Ameriquest encouraged borrowers to refinance their loans by saying they could get better rates. When the loans were refinanced, the borrowers owed more than previously because of prepayment penalties and other fees, and their interest rates went up, not down.
The lawsuits were filed on behalf of families in the St. Louis and Kansas City areas. Four were filed Wednesday in circuit court in St. Louis, St. Louis County, St. Charles County and Jackson County, Campbell said. Another suit was filed March 30 in Jefferson County Circuit Court.
One plaintiff, Harold Bowyer of Festus, refinanced a $107,100 mortgage with a 7.7 percent interest floor and a 13.7 percent ceiling. He was told the new loan would have an interest rate of 6 or 7 percent. But after the new loan was closed, Bowyer learned that the amount he owed had risen to $122,550, including $6,519 in fees. The interest rate floor was 10.15 percent, and the ceiling was 16.15 percent, according to the lawsuit.
Here is another shocker - 8 out of 10 subprime loans have variable interest rates. Sit back in your chair and think about that one for a moment. Lets repeat; eight out of ten loans given to people with bad credit will shortly reset to higher rates. This means just one thing; the US housing market is sitting on a foreclosure time bomb.
May 7 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. homeowners entered the foreclosure process in April at more than double the rate of a year ago as tightening credit made it more difficult to refinance and a swelling supply of unsold homes made it tough to sell.
The number of homeowners in all three phases of foreclosure rose last month over the same period a year ago, according to Sacramento-based Foreclosures.com, which gathers data from county courthouses nationwide. Those receiving their first notice of foreclosure from a bank climbed 127 percent, those with homes going up for sale by auction jumped 164 percent and those whose homes were repossessed by banks went up 40 percent.
Eight of 10 subprime loans, given to borrowers with bad or limited credit histories, adjust over time to higher interest rates and many homeowners can no longer afford their mortgages. With existing home sales at a four-year low, it's more difficult to sell because there are so many homes on the market.
Banking is a simple business; you take deposits, and you extend loans. So long as your loans are good, and your interest rates competitive, people are generally happy depositing money in your bank. However, competitive interest rates often means that profitability in the banking sector is quite low. Banks can only increase profitability by increasing volumes, which means taking on riskier loans. It is a strategy that has the potential to send a bank into bankruptcy. When a bank increases its lending volumes, it does so by reducing lending standards. It spends less time checking on the credit worthiness of its borrowers.
Now the New Century Financial is bankrupt, the true story of its extraordinary growth is coming to light. Guess what; it is a textbook case of a bank gone bad. Management focused on volumes and not on asset quality. Loan appraisers were told to ignore the risks from clients with dubious credit histories, and issue the loans. Inevitably, New Century Financial ended up with a loan portfolio riddled with defaults and foreclosures. Once this fact became public knowledge, the companies' financiers pulled the plug, and took away their deposits.
In today's Washington Post, a loan appraiser tells the hair raising story of what went on inside the company. The lesson is a simple one, if the lender doesn't allow it appraiser is to assess risks, the lender will end up with a lending book full of bad loans, and it will go bust.
The New Century saga raises very difficult questions for the Financial Sector Regulator, who was supposed to oversee and prevent lenders from behaving like this. After all, it is not the first time that the US has suffered from failed banks. So what exactly were they doing when New Century middle management were walking around with baseball bats intimidating loan appraisers?
(Washington Post) Maggie Hardiman cringed as she heard the salesmen knocking the sides of desks with a baseball bat as they walked through her office. Bang! Bang! " 'You cut my [expletive] deal!' " she recalls one man yelling at her. " 'You can't do that.' “Bang! The bat whacked the top of her desk. As an appraiser for a company called New Century Financial, Hardiman was supposed to weed out bad mortgage applications. Most of the mortgage applications Hardiman reviewed had problems, she said.
But "you didn't want to turn away a loan because all hell would break loose," she recounted in interviews. When she did, her bosses often overruled her and found another appraiser to sign off on it. Hardiman's account is one of several from former employees of New Century that shed fresh light on an unfolding disaster in the mortgage industry, one that could cost as many as 2 million American families their homes and threatens to spill over into the broader economy. New Century has become the premier example of a group of companies that grew rapidly during the housing boom, selling working-class Americans with questionable credit huge numbers of "subprime" loans with "teaser" rates that typically rose after the first two years. This business transformed the once-tiny New Century into a lending powerhouse that was held up as a model of the mortgage industry's success.
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