DUBYA'S BUBBLE EVERYTHING

The regulators turned a blind eye to excesses while George Bush crowed about creating an “ownership society” (which was actually an over-debted society).

Bogus appraisals and fraudulent financing whipped up into a souffle of financial pain for those who drank the coolaid.

Federal report: Home flipping drove housing bubble

Flip This Economy

A new study shows how short-term speculators made the housing bubble much, much worse.

. New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York indicates that flippers were in fact sufficiently numerous and active to make a major impact on prices, and that these facts have interesting implications for both monetary policy and bank regulation in the future.

The data let us see that the growth of house prices in the first half of the aughts was closely associated with a sharp rise in the number of people owning multiple homes. In 2000, only 20 percent of mortgages were going to multiple mortgage holders and 75 percent of those were for second houses. By 2006, 35 percent of mortgages were multiples and more than 5 percent of all loans were going to people with four or more mortgages. What’s more, the trend was especially pronounced in what we now know to have been the prime bubble states of California, Florida, and Nevada. By 2006, at least 25 percent of mortgages in these states were going to people who already owned one home, and a further 20 percent went to people with at least two.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/how_small_time_house_flippers_made_the_housing_bubble_much_much_worse_.html

Report: Flippers drove home bubble

A new federal report shows that speculative real-estate investors played a larger role than originally thought in driving the housing bubble that led to record foreclosures and sent economies plummeting in Nevada, California, Arizona, Florida and other states.

Researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that investors who used low-down-payment, subprime credit to purchase multiple residential properties helped inflate home prices and are largely to blame for the recession. The researchers said their findings focused on an "undocumented" dimension of the housing market crisis that had been previously overlooked.
More than a third of all U.S. home mortgages granted in 2006 went to people who already owned at least one house, according to the report. In Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada, where average home prices more than doubled from 2000 to 2006, investors made up nearly half of all mortgage-backed purchases during the housing bubble. Buyers owning three or more properties represented the fastest-growing segment of homeowners during that time.
"This may have allowed the bubble to inflate further, which caused millions of owner-occupants to pay more if they wanted to buy a home for their family," the researchers noted.
Investors defaulted in large numbers after home values began to drop in 2006.

http://www.lowellsun.com/ci_19568926

Federal report: Home flipping drove housing bubble

In 2006, just as the Housing market was peaking, the NYT ran this graphic of the 100-year Case Shiller chart. It showed how radically overvalued Housing had become.
Two years later, TBP reader Steve Barry updated that graphic, including the projected Home Price mean reversion. (See versions for 2008, 2009 and 2010).
Its time to update this for 2011. Note the 2009 tax credit wiggle:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/04/case-shiller-100-year-chart-2011-update/

http://www.doctorhousingbubble.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/case-shiller-history-of-home-values.jpg

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in January 2011, concluded "the crisis was avoidable and was caused by: Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages; Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk; An explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis; Key policy makers ill prepared for the crisis, lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.”

June 17 2002 :President G.W. Bush sets goal of increasing minority home owners by at least 5.5 million by 2010 through tax credits, subsidies and a Fannie Mae commitment of $440 billion to establish NeighborWorks America with faith-based organizations

2003: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac buy $81 billion in subprime securities.

2003 December: President Bush signs the American Dream Downpayment Act to be implemented under the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The goal was to provide a maximum downpayment assistance grant of either $10,000 or six percent of the purchase price of the home, whichever was greater. In addition, the Bush Administration committed to reforming the homebuying process that would lower closing costs by approximately $700 per loan. It was said it would further stimulate homeownership for all Americans.

2004

HUD increased Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac affordable-housing goals for next four years, from 50 percent to 56 percent, stating they lagged behind the private market; from 2004 to 2006, they purchased $434 billion in securities backed by subprime loans.

October:SEC effectively suspends net capital rule for five firms - Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and Morgan Stanley. Freed from government-imposed limits on the debt they can assume, they levered up 20, 30 and even 40 to 1.

2004–2005: Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, and Nevada record price increases in excess of 25% per year

High-risk mortgage loans and lending/borrowing practices

A mortgage brokerage in the US advertising subprime mortgages in July 2008.

In the years before the crisis, the behavior of lenders changed dramatically. Lenders offered more and more loans to higher-risk borrowers, including undocumented immigrants. Lending standards deteriorated particularly between 2004 and 2007, as the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage market share (i.e. the share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which specialized in conventional, conforming, non-subprime mortgages) declined and private securitizers share grew, rising to more than half of mortgage securitizations

Subprime mortgages grew from 5% of total originations ($35 billion) in 1994, to 20% ($600 billion) in 2006

In addition to considering higher-risk borrowers, lenders had offered progressively riskier loan options and borrowing incentives. In 2005, the median down payment for first-time home buyers was 2%, with 43% of those buyers making no down payment whatsoever

To produce more mortgages and more securities, mortgage qualification guidelines became progressively looser. First, "stated income, verified assets" (SIVA) loans replaced proof of income with a "statement" of it. Then, "no income, verified assets" (NIVA) loans eliminated proof of employment requirements. Borrowers needed only to show proof of money in their bank accounts. "No Income, No Assets" (NINA) or Ninja loans loans eliminated the need to prove, or even to state any owned assets. All that was required for a mortgage was a credit score

Types of mortgages became more risky as well. The interest-only adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), allowed the homeowner to pay only the interest (not principal) of the mortgage during an initial "teaser" period. Even looser was the "payment option" loan, in which the homeowner has the option to make monthly payment that do not even cover the interest for the first two or three year initial period of the loan. Nearly one in 10 mortgage borrowers in 2005 and 2006 took out these “option ARM” loans, and an estimated one-third of ARMs originated between 2004 and 2006 had "teaser" rates below 4%. After the initial period, monthly payments might doubleor even triple

The proportion of subprime ARM loans made to people with credit scores high enough to qualify for conventional mortgages with better terms increased from 41% in 2000 to 61% by 2006. In addition, mortgage brokers in some cases received incentives from lenders to offer subprime ARM's even to those with credit ratings that merited a conforming (i.e., non-subprime) loan

Subprime Debacle Traps Even Very Credit-Worthy

As Housing Boomed, Industry Pushed Loans To a Broader Market

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB119662974358911035

Mortgage underwriting standards declined precipitously during the boom period. The use of automated loan approvals allowed loans to be made without appropriate review and documentation.

In 2007, 40% of all subprime loans resulted from automated underwriting. The chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association claimed that mortgage brokers, while profiting from the home loan boom, did not do enough to examine whether borrowers could repay. Mortgage fraud by lenders and borrowers increased enormously

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported in January 2011 that many mortgage lenders took eager borrowers’ qualifications on faith, often with a "willful disregard" for a borrower’s ability to pay. Nearly 25% of all mortgages made in the first half of 2005 were "interest-only" loans. During the same year, 68% of “option ARM” loans originated by Countrywide Financial and Washington Mutual had low- or no-documentation requirements

So why did lending standards decline? At least one study has suggested that the decline in standards was driven by a shift of mortgage securitization from a tightly controlled duopoly to a competitive market in which mortgage originators held the most sway.The worst mortgage vintage years coincided with the periods during which Government Sponsored Enterprises (specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) were at their weakest, and mortgage originators and private label securitizers were at their strongest.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1924831

Why was there a market for these low quality private label securitizations? In a Peabody Award winning program, NPR correspondents argued that a "Giant Pool of Money" (represented by $70 trillion in worldwide fixed income investments) sought higher yields than those offered by U.S. Treasury bonds early in the decade. Further, this pool of money had roughly doubled in size from 2000 to 2007, yet the supply of relatively safe, income generating investments had not grown as fast. Investment banks on Wall Street answered this demand with financial innovation such as the mortgage-backed security (MBS) and collateralized debt obligation (CDO), which were assigned safe ratings by the credit rating agencies.

In effect, Wall Street connected this pool of money to the mortgage market in the U.S., with enormous fees accruing to those throughout the mortgage supply chain, from the mortgage broker selling the loans, to small banks that funded the brokers, to the giant investment banks behind them. By approximately 2003, the supply of mortgages originated at traditional lending standards had been exhausted. However, continued strong demand for MBS and CDO began to drive down lending standards, as long as mortgages could still be sold along the supply chain. Eventually, this speculative bubble proved unsustainable. NPR described it this way:

The problem was that even though housing prices were going through the roof, people weren't making any more money. From 2000 to 2007, the median household income stayed flat. And so the more prices rose, the more tenuous the whole thing became. No matter how lax lending standards got, no matter how many exotic mortgage products were created to shoehorn people into homes they couldn't possibly afford, no matter what the mortgage machine tried, the people just couldn't swing it. By late 2006, the average home cost nearly four times what the average family made. Historically it was between two and three times. And mortgage lenders noticed something that they'd almost never seen before. People would close on a house, sign all the mortgage papers, and then default on their very first payment. No loss of a job, no medical emergency, they were underwater before they even started. And although no one could really hear it, that was probably the moment when one of the biggest speculative bubbles in American history popped.

"The FBI defines mortgage fraud as 'the intentional misstatement, misrepresentation, or omission by an applicant or other interest parties, relied on by a lender or underwriter to provide funding for, to purchase, or to insure a mortgage loan.'"

In 2004, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned of an "epidemic" in mortgage fraud, an important credit risk of nonprime mortgage lending, which, they said, could lead to "a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis".

Despite this, the Bush administration actually prevented states from investigating and prosecuting predatory lenders by invoking a banking law from 1863 "to issue formal opinions preempting all state predatory lending laws, thereby rendering them inoperative."

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported in January 2011 that: "... mortgage fraud... flourished in an environment of collapsing lending standards and lax regulation. The number of suspicious activity reports – reports of possible financial crimes filed by depository banks and their affiliates – related to mortgage fraud grew 20-fold between 1996 and 2005 and then more than doubled again between 2005 and 2009. One study places the losses resulting from fraud on mortgage loans made between 2005 and 2007 at $112 billion.

"Predatory lending describes unfair, deceptive, or fraudulent practices of some lenders during the loan origination process."Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities."

Fed Chair Ben Bernanke stated in an interview with the FCIC during 2009 that 12 of the 13 largest U.S. financial institutions were at risk of failure during 2008.