Tag Archives: financial crisis

Reiss on Marketplace: Cash Cows to Slaughter

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I was interviewed on Marketplace for its story, Fannie and Freddie: Cash Cows Avoid The Slaughter? (sound file) The text of the story reads

We are making money – the tax payer, that is – on Fannie and Freddie Mac.

When Freddie Mac hands the treasury a $10.4 billion dividend next month, tax payers will have received more money in interest than was put in. (Technically the two institutions still owe the principal on the loan that bailed them out, but the interest they’re paying will shortly exceed that amount).

But.

There always is a but with these things.

Making money for the tax payer isn’t good if you ask those who want reform.

Back during the financial crisis, conservatives and liberals disagreed over whether Freddie and Fannie were a victim of or a cause of the housing collapse, but they agreed that the institutions needed reform. The profits are throwing a wrinkle into this debate.

“As long as Fannie and Freddie continue to pay substantial amounts of money to the government, they are looked at by some people in Congress as a great source of revenue that reduces the deficit,” explains Peter Wallison with the American Enterprise Institute. His concern – shared by reformers on both sides of the political spectrum – is that if Fannie and Freddie become cash cows, congress won’t want to touch them.

David Reiss, professor of law at the Brooklyn Law School, agrees. He says the financial crisis wasn’t a one time problem.

“We should think of it as that we dodged a bullet. There’s fundamental problems with the Fannie and Freddie business model which rests on this notion of privatizing profits and socializing losses.”

Freddie and Fannie buy mortgages from lenders, and then bundle them into “mortgage backed securities” that can be sold to investors. It’s useful because it converted illiquid mortgage loans into liquid securities. In plain English, it means a bank or investor who made a mortgage loan to someone didn’t have to wait around for 30 years to be paid back. They could sell their stake in the mortgage to Fannie or Freddie, move along, and go invest in other things. This helped more people get mortgages.

One concern was that Fannie and Freddie were simply too big and too concentrated. Another concern was that the federal government implicitly guaranteed investments in Freddie and Fannie, and that encouraged people to make home loans that were too risky.

Even without the complication of profits, the debate over how to reform Fannie and Freddie is at a stand still.

House Republicans don’t want the government involved at all, they want an efficient market. The Senate wants the government to be involved a little bit, essentially to promote housing.

“What I see,” says David Reiss, “is nothing really happening, and us being a holding pattern for a long time.”

It’s possible that reform-minded politicians will compromise before they lose their chance. Also possible they won’t.

Subprime Mortgage Conundrums

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Joseph Singer has posted Foreclosure and the Failures of Formality, or Subprime Mortgage Conundrums and How to Fix Them (also on SSRN). Singer writes,

One of the striking features of the subprime era is that banks acted without adequate regard for state property law. They were intent on serving the national and international financial markets with new and more profitable products, and they treated state property law as an obstacle to get around rather than a foundation on which to build. Rather than sell mortgages to families that could afford them, they hoodwinked the vulnerable by picking their pockets. Rather than honestly disclose the high risks associated with subprime loans, they paid rating agencies to give them AAA ratings, inducing investors to take risks they neither were prepared for nor understood. The banks made huge amounts of money marketing mortgages to people who could not afford to pay them back while offloading the risks of such deals onto hapless third parties. And rather than observe longstanding laws and customs designed to clarify property titles, banks evaded requirements of publicity and formality that traditionally governed real estate transactions. In short, the banks misled both borrowers and investors while undermining property titles. This was both a clever and a profitable way to engage in  business, but it was neither honorable nor responsible. (501, footnotes omitted)

Brad Borden and I have made a similar point in our debate with Joshua Stein, but Singer’s article plays it out in far greater depth. The article is a property prof’s cri de coeur over the near death of real property law principles during the early 2000s subprime boom, but it is also a very thorough inquest. The article concludes with a review of tools that are available to respond to failures in the mortgage market. All in all, it provides a nice overview of what led to the crisis as well as potential policy tools that are available to prevent future ones.

 

Reiss on Single Family Rental-Backed Bonds

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Law360 Quoted me in Newest Property-Secured Bonds Invite Scrutiny (behind a paywall). It reads in part,

The Blackstone Group LP’s recent groundbreaking move to sell bonds secured by single-family rental homes may have created the next securitization blockbuster, but attorneys say the product could attract the same type of litigation that has plagued the commercial and residential mortgage-backed securities markets.

Blackstone is among a growing group of entities that amassed large numbers of foreclosed homes after the crisis and are turning them into profitable rentals. Now some are hoping to take that profitability one step further, extending loans secured by these single-family homes and securitizing them.

This process offers benefits both to players like Blackstone and to smaller landlords that own groups of single-family rentals and can’t get traditional lenders to lend against their assets. Blackstone’s debut product — sold to a syndicate led by Deutsche Bank AG — has been very well-received, but attorneys caution that many questions remain unanswered, and REO-to-rental-backed bonds could pose litigation risks.

*    *    *

Blackstone’s $480 million deal, in which it pooled 3,200 homes owned by its portfolio company Invitation Homes and used them to secured a single loan that it then securitized, made waves as the first of its kind.

Several other opportunistic real estate investment companies, including American Homes 4 Rent and Colony Capital LLC, are expected to follow suit, but they are treading lightly as the new product is assessed by the market and investors.

*    *    *

The homes themselves may also be subject to condemnation or landlord-tenant litigation that could encumber the overall loan indirectly by affecting the value of the collateral, according to David Reiss, a real estate finance professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Before the recession, single-family homes were considered too expensive to be managed by a large institution like Blackstone or American Homes 4 Rent because of their geographic diversity and because it was hard to control property management on so many different homes, according to Reiss.

The financial crisis made distressed single-family homes cheaper and more attractive to opportunistic investors, and the low price may compensate for the other issues, he said.

“This is a new asset class, and it is not yet clear whether Blackstone has properly evaluated its risks,” Reiss said.  “Time will tell whether these bonds will become a significant new category of asset-backed securities or whether the financial crisis presented a one-time financial opportunity for some firms.”

Reiss on BK Live!

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The BK Live segment on Mortgage Inequities in Brooklyn has been posted to the web. Mark Winston Griffith (Brooklyn Movement Center Executive Director), Alexis Iwaniszie (New Economy Project) and I discuss mortgage inequities and how they effect Brooklyn (and beyond). REFinblog.com gets a nice shout out from BK Live.

Reiss on Mortgage Inequities

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I will be appearing on a segment on BK Live on BRIC , the Brooklyn Public Network, about “Mortgage Inequities/Fair Housing in Brooklyn” on Thursday, February 13th at noon (running again at 2pm, 8pm, 9pm and 10pm (Cablevision Ch 69, Time Warner 56, RCN Ch 84, Verizon Ch 44 or online at: www.bkindiemedia.bricartsmedia.org).

I will be appearing with Mark Winston Griffith, Executive Director of the Brooklyn Movement Center, a community organizing group based in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, and Alexis Iwanisziw of the New Economy Project.

We will be discussing The New Economy Project’s recent study about inequities in mortgage lending based on race in NYC:

Mortgage lenders made markedly fewer conventional home mortgage loans in communities of color than in predominately white neighborhoods in New York City, according to a series of GIS maps published today.

The maps show unequal lending patterns based on the racial composition of communities in New York City, controlling for the number of owner-occupied units in each neighborhood. New Yorkers who live in predominantly white neighborhoods on average receive twice as many conventional home purchase loans as New Yorkers who live in predominantly black or Latino neighborhoods, for every 100 owner-occupied housing units in the neighborhood.

“The maps show that banks continue to redline communities of color across New York City,” said Monica M. Garcia, Community Education Coordinator at New Economy Project, which produced the maps. “For decades, banks have excluded neighborhoods of color from fair access to mortgage financing, allowing predatory lenders to flourish right up to the financial crisis. Now it’s déjà vu all over again, with banks failing adequately to provide conventional mortgages to people in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

“The maps highlight the profound and continued need for strong government action against banks that violate fair housing and fair lending laws,” said Sarah Ludwig, Co-Director of New Economy Project.

The series includes a map of New York City and borough-level maps of Brooklyn, Queens and Bronx.

To produce the maps, New Economy Project analyzed home mortgage lending data for 2012, the most recent year for which the data are publicly available. New Economy Project received partial funding to produce the maps from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fair Housing Initiatives Program.

The Road to Securitization

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Miguel Segoviano et al. of the IMF released a helpful Working Paper, Securitization:  Lessons Learned and the Road Ahead (also on SSRN). It opens,

Like most forms of financial innovation, there are cost and benefits associated with the securitization of cash flows. From a conceptual perspective, a sound and efficient market for securitization can be supportive of the financial system and broader economy in various ways such as lowering funding costs and improving the capital utilization of financial institutions—benefits which may be passed onto borrowers; helping issuers and investors diversify risk; and transforming pools of illiquid assets into tradable securities, thus stimulating the flow of credit—an issue of particular relevance for some European countries. However, these features need to be weighed against the potential costs, including the risk that securitization contributes to excessive credit growth in and outside of the formal banking system; principal-agent problems that amplify perverse incentives; the complexity and opaqueness of certain products which make efficient pricing problematic; and the heavy reliance of the industry on credit ratings. (3)

The authors identify lessons learned from the financial crisis as well as impediments to a renewed securitization market. They conclude with a set of policy recommendations.

I recommend this paper as a good overview. I particularly like that it looks beyond the United States market, although it does spend plenty of time looking at the history and structure of the U.S. market. The recommendations tend to be pretty reasonable, but not particularly innovative — implement Dodd-Frank-like requirements in non-U.S. jurisdictions; de-emphasize the role of NRSRO credit ratings; increase transparency and decrease needless complexity throughout the industry; modernize land record regimes, etc.

It is surely hard to get your hands around the global securitization industry, but it is important that we try to. Securitization is here to stay. We should manage its risks the best that we can.

Foreclosure Prevention: The Real McCoy

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Patricia McCoy has posted Barriers to Foreclosure Prevention During the Financial Crisis (also on SSRN). In the early 2000s, Pat was one of the first legal scholars to identify predatory behaviors in the secondary mortgage market. These behaviors resulted in homeowners being saddled with expensive loans that they had trouble paying off. As many unaffordable mortgages work themselves through the system, Pat has now turned her attention to the other end of the life cycle of many an abusive mortgage — foreclosure.

The article opens,

Since housing prices fell nationwide in 2007, triggering the financial crisis, the U.S. housing market has struggled to dispose of the huge ensuing inventory of foreclosed homes. In January 2013, 1.47 million homes were listed for sale. Another 2.3 million homes that were not yet on the market—the so-called “shadow inventory”—were in foreclosure, held as real estate owned or encumbered by seriously delinquent loans. Discouragingly, the size of the shadow inventory has not changed significantly since January 2009.

Reducing the shadow inventory is key to stabilizing home prices. One way to trim it is to accelerate the sale of foreclosed homes, thereby increasing the outflow on the back-end. Another way is to prevent homes from entering the shadow inventory to begin with, through loss mitigation methods designed to keep struggling borrowers in their homes. Not all distressed borrowers can avoid losing their homes, but in appropriate cases—where modifications can increase investors’ return compared to foreclosure and the borrowers can afford the new payments—loan modifications can be a winning proposition for all. (725)

The article then evaluates the various theories that are meant to explain the barriers to the loan modification and determines “that servicer compensation together with the high cost of loan workouts, accounting standards, and junior liens are the biggest impediments to efficient levels of loan modifications.” (726) It identifies “three pressing reasons to care about what the real barriers to foreclosure prevention are. First, foreclosures that could have been avoided inflict enormous, needless losses on borrowers, investors, and society at large. Second, overcoming artificial barriers to foreclosure prevention will result in loan modifications with higher rates of success. Finally, knowing what to fix is necessary to identify the right policy solution.” (726)

It seems to me that the federal government dealt with foreclosures much more effectively in the Great Depression, with the creation of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. In our crisis, we have muddled through and have failed to systematically deal with the foreclosure crisis. McCoy’s article does a real service in identifying what we have done wrong this time around. No doubt, we will have another foreclosure crisis at some point in our future. It is worth our while to identify the impediments to effective foreclosure prevention strategies so we can act more effectively when the time comes.