Tag Archives: housing finance

Tall Mortgage Tales

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Todd Zywicki has posted The Behavioral Law and Economics of Fixed-Rate Mortgages (and Other Just-So Stories) to SSRN. The article contains

SPOILER ALERT!

a spoof, in order to make a larger point.

The abstract reads,

A major cause of the recent financial crisis was the traditional American mortgage, which is distinctive for the following features: it is a thirty-year, self-amortizing loan with an unlimited right to prepay. The United States is unique in the world for standardizing on a mortgage product with these features. Yet not only have a majority of the foreclosures that occurred during the financial crisis been fixed-rate mortgages, the fixed-interest-rate characteristics have undermined efforts by the Federal Reserve and government to assist recovery of the housing market. Moreover, the long fixed-rate term and ability to refinance are highly expensive and suboptimal features for many consumers. Nevertheless, many consumers persist in purchasing this mortgage. Drawing on the methodology of behavioral law and economics, this article provides rationalizations for how behavioral law and economics can explain the persistence of a product that is so harmful to many consumers and to the economy at large. The article then draws conclusions about what this analysis means for the behavioral law and economics research program generally and for the use of behavioral law and economics in government policymaking.

 I have a lot to say about this article but I don’t want to ruin it for you!  Suffice it to say, the article is a provocative critique of behavioral law and economics. Those of us who hope to see a healthy mortgage market develop would do well to take this critique seriously — even if you end up rejecting its broader implications.

Reiss on The FHFA’s Common Securitization Platform

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I have submitted my response to the FHFA’s Request for Input on the Proposed Single Security Structure.  The abstract for my response, The FHFA’s Proposed Single Security Structure, reads,

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) has posted a Request for Input on “the proposed structure for a Single Security that would be issued and guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.”  The FHFA states it is most concerned with achieving “maximum secondary market liquidity” (Request for Input, at 8)

I am skeptical about the reasons for this move to a Single Security and whether it will achieve maximum liquidity. Moreover, it is unclear to me that this move reflects an urgent need for the FHFA, the two companies, originating lenders or borrowers. While I have no doubt that it could slightly increase liquidity and slightly decrease the cost of credit, I do not see this move as having a meaningful effect on either.

This move is consistent, however, with a move toward a new model of government-supported housing finance, one that could contemplate an end to Fannie and Freddie as we know them and the beginning of a more utility-like securitizer.  If, indeed, the FHFA is taking this step, it should be more explicit as to its reasons for doing so.

A Framework For Housing Finance

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The Government Accountability Office has released Housing Finance System: A Framework for Assessing Potential Changes. The GAO writes,

To help policymakers assess various proposals for changing the single-family housing finance system and consider ways in which the system could be made more effective and efficient, we prepared this report under the authority of the Comptroller General. Specifically, this report (1) describes market developments since 2000 that have led to changes in the federal government’s role in single-family housing finance; (2) analyzes whether and how these market developments have challenged the housing finance system; and (3) presents an evaluation framework for assessing potential changes to the housing finance system. (2)
It is useful to have a framework to figure out what kind of housing finance system we want for the 21st century. The GAO’s has 9 elements:
  1. Clearly defined and prioritized housing finance system goals
  2. Policies and mechanisms that are aligned with goals and other economic policies
  3. Adherence to an appropriate financial regulatory framework
  4. Government entities that have capacity to manage risks
  5. Mortgage borrowers are protected and barriers to mortgage market access are addressed
  6. Protection for mortgage securities investors
  7. Consideration of cyclical nature of housing finance and impact of housing finance on financial stability
  8. Recognition and control of fiscal exposure and mitigation of moral hazard
  9. Emphasis on implications of the transition (54-55)
This all sounds very Yoda-like, but the report itself goes into great detail as to what each of these 9 elements means. Given that Congress has left the housing finance system to its own devices, it is helpful that other branches of government like the GAO, Treasury and the FHFA are trying to move us beyond our current state of limbo. We need a housing finance system that is designed to last longer than the Band Aids and duct tape that were applied to it during the financial crisis.

Housing Goals and Housing Finance Reform

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The Federal Housing Finance Agency issued a proposed rule that would establish housing goals for Fannie and Freddie for the next three years. The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992 required that Fannie and Freddie’s regulator set annual housing goals to ensure that a certain proportion of the companies’ mortgage purchases serve low-income households and underserved areas. Among other things, the proposed rule would “establish a new housing subgoal for small multifamily properties affordable to low-income families,” a subject that happens to be near and dear to my heart.(54482)

This “duty to serve” is very controversial, at the heart of the debate over housing finance reform. Many Democrats oppose housing finance reform without it and many Republicans oppose reform with it. Indeed, it was one of the issues that stopped the Johnson-Crapo reform bill dead in its tracks.

While this proposed rule is not momentous by any stretch of the imagination, it is worth noting that the FHFA, for all intents and purposes, seems to be the only party in the Capital that is moving housing finance reform forward in any way.

Once again, we should note that doing nothing is not the same as leaving everything the same. As Congress fails to strike an agreement on reform and Fannie and Freddie continue to limp along in their conservatorships, regulators and market participants will, by default, be designing the housing finance system of the 21st century. That is not how it should be done.

Comments are due by October 28, 2014.

Top Ten Issues for Housing Finance Reform

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Laurie Goodman of the Urban Institute has posted A Realistic Assessment of Housing Finance Reform. This paper is quite helpful, given the incredible complexity of the topic. The paper includes a lot of background, but I assume that readers of this blog are familiar with that.  Rather, let me share her Top Ten Design Issues:

  1. What form will the private capital that absorbs the first loss take: A single guarantor (a utility), multiple guarantors, or multiple guarantors along with capital markets execution? How much capital will be required?
  2. Who will play what role in the system? Will the same entity be permitted to be an originator, aggregator, and guarantor?
  3. How will the system ensure that historically underserved borrowers and communities are well served? To what extent will the pricing be cross subsidized?
  4. Who will have access to the new government-backed system (loan limits)? How big should the credit box be, and how does that box relate to FHA?
  5. Will mortgage insurance be separate from the guarantor function? (It is separate under most proposals, but in reality both sets of institutions are guaranteeing credit risk. The separation is a relic of the present system, in which, by charter, the GSEs can’t take the first loss on any mortgage above 80 LTV. However, if you allow the mortgage insurers and the guarantors to be the same entity, capital requirements must be higher to adequately protect the government and, ultimately, the taxpayers.)
  6. How will small lenders access the system? (All proposals attempt to ensure access, some through an aggregator dedicated to smaller lenders—a role that the Home Loan Banks can play.)
  7. What countercyclical features should be included? If the insurance costs provided by the guarantors are “too high” should the regulatory authority be able to adjust capital levels down to bring down mortgage rates? Should the regulatory authority be able to step in as an insurance provider?
  8. Will multifamily finance be included? How will that system be designed? Will it be separate from the single-family business? (The multifamily features embedded in Johnson-Crapo had widespread bipartisan support, but the level of support for a stand-alone multifamily legislation is unclear.)
  9. The regulatory structure for any new system is inevitably complex. Who charters new guarantors? What are the approval standards? Who does the stress tests? How does the new regulator interact with existing regulators? What enforcement authority will it have concerning equal access goals? What is the extent of data collection and publication?
  10. What does the transition look like? How do we move from a duopoly to more guarantors? Will Fannie and Freddie turn back to private entities and operate as guarantors alongside the new entrants? How will the new entities be seeded? What is the “right” number of guarantors, and how do we achieve that? How quickly does the catastrophic insurance fund build? (16-17)

None of this is new, but it is nice to see it all in one place. These design issues need to thought about in the context of the politics of housing reform as well — what system is likely to maintain its long-term financial health and stay true to its mission, given the political realities of Washington, D.C.?

Speaking of politics, her prognosis for reform in the near term is not too hopeful:

The current state of the GSEs can best be summed up in a single word: limbo. Despite the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were placed in conservatorship in 2008, with the clear intent that they not emerge, there is little progress on a new system, with a large role for private capital, to take their place. Legislators have realized it is easy to agree on a set of principles for a new system but much harder to agree on the system’s design. It is unclear whether any legislation will emerge from Congress before the 2016 election; there is a good chance there will be none. (26)

She does allow that the FHFA can administratively move housing finance reform forward to some extent on its own, but she rightly notes that reform is really the responsibility of Congress. Like Goodman, I am not too hopeful that Congress will act in the near term. But it is crystal clear that there is a cost of doing nothing. In all likelihood, it will be the taxpayer will pay that cost, one way or another.

Insuring Mortgages Through the Business Cycle

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Mark Zandi and Cristian deRitis of Moody’s, along with Jim Parrott of the Urban Institute, have posted Putting Mortgage Insurers on Solid Ground. They wrote this in response to the Private Mortgage Insurance Eligibility Requirements set forth by the FHFA. While generally approving of the requirements, they argue that

Several features of the rules as currently written, however, would likely
unnecessarily increase costs and cyclicality in the mortgage and housing markets.
With a few modest changes, these flaws can be remedied without sacrificing the
considerable benefits of the new standards. (1)

I would first start by reviewing their disclosure:  “Mark Zandi is a director of one mortgage insurance company, and Jim Parrott is an advisor to another. The authors do not believe that their analysis has been impacted by these relationships, however. Their work reflects the authors’ independent beliefs regarding the appropriate financial requirements for the industry.” While, I understand that the authors believe that their views are not impacted by their financial relationships with private mortgage insurers, readers will certainly want to take them into account when evaluating those views.

The authors argue that FHFA’s requirements are procyclical, that is they become more burdensome just as mortgage insurers are facing a distressed environment. This could contribute to a vicious cycle where mortgage credit tightens because of regulatory causes just when we might want credit to loosen up. This is certainly something we should look out for.

They also argue that the FHFA’s requirements will increase mortgage insurance premiums unnecessarily because they increase capital reserves too much. I find this argument less compelling. The Private Mortgage Insurance industry has typically done terribly in distressed environments from the Great Depression through the 2000s. Not only have there been failures but they have also reduced their underwriting of new insurance just when the market was most fragile.

But there are certain shaky assumptions built into this analysis. For instance, they argue that Private Mortgage Insurance companies will need to maintain their historical after-tax return on capital of 15%. But if the business model is shored up with higher capital reserves, investors should be satisfied with a lower return on capital because the companies are less likely to go bust. That is, instead of increasing premiums for homeowners, it is possible that higher capital requirements might just reduce profits.

The authors write that while “the increase in capital requirements is clearly warranted, there are certain features of the requirements as currently drafted that will increase mortgage insurance premiums unnecessarily, running counter to the aim of policymakers, including the FHFA, to encourage greater use of private capital in housing finance.” (2-4) Policymakers have lots of goals for private mortgage insurance, including having it not implode during down markets. An unthinking reliance on private capital is not what we should be after. Rather, we should seek to promote a thoughtful reliance on private capital, taking into account how we it can best help us maintain a healthy mortgage market throughout the business cycle.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

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Yesterday, I wrote about the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA)’s FHFA comment letter. Today I write about SIFMA’s comment letter in response to Treasury’s request for input relating to the future of the private-label securities market. Like the FHFA comment letter, this one is written with the concerns of SIFMA’s members in mind, no others, but it identifies many of the structural problems that exist in the housing finance system today.

If I were to identify a theme of the comments, it would be that the federal government has not moved with sufficient speed to establish a well delineated infrastructure for the housing finance market. Some commentators identify benefits of a slow approach — time to get consensus, time to get rules right, time to for trial and error before committing for the long term. Few identify the costs of regulatory uncertainty — failure to get buy-in for capital-intensive ventures, atrophy of existing resources, limited investor interest.

Now, SIFMA’s members want a vibrant private-label MBS market to make money. But a vibrant private-label MBS market is also good for the overall health of the mortgage market as it spreads risk to private MBS investors and reduces the footprints of the gargantuan GSEs and the government’s own FHA. After all, most of us want the private sector taking a lot of the risk, not the taxpayer.

Notwithstanding the strengths of SIFMA’s comment letter to Treasury in critiquing the status quo, I will highlight a few passages from it that hit a false note. The first relates to the role that private-label securities (PLS) have played

in funding mortgage credit where loan size or other terms may differ from those available in the Agency markets, or where economics dictate that PLS execution is superior. The PLS market may also be more innovative and flexible than the Agency markets in adapting to economic conditions or consumer preferences, or to changing capital markets appetite. (3)

This innovation has obviously cut both ways in terms of introducing new products that can help expand access to credit as well as expand access to credit on abusive terms. The latter way seems to have predominated during the most recent boom in PLS MBS.

The second one relates to assignee liability. SIFMA states that

Investors are concerned with the prospect of assignee liability stemming from violations of the ability-to-repay rules contained in Title XIV of Dodd-Frank and embodied in the CFPB’s implementing regulations. SIFMA has raised concerns with assignee liability in many forms over the years based on the fact that mortgage investors are not at the closing table with the lender and borrower, and should not be held liable for defects of which they have no knowledge or ability to prevent. While efforts were made by policymakers to provide some level of certainty through the inclusion of safe-harbor provisions, no safe harbor is entirely safe, and it is important to note that none of these provisions have been tested in court. It will be in litigation where the market learns the exact boundaries of the protections provided by any safe harbor. This potential liability for investors is likely to reduce the availability of higher-priced QM loans and non-QM loans, all else equal, due to higher required yields to compensate for the increased risk. (5-6)

This focus on assignee liability seems to be a red herring, one that SIFMA has floated for years. The risk from assignee liability provisions is not limitless and it can be modeled. Moreover, the notion that investors should face no liability because they are not at the closing table is laughable — without them, there would be no closing table at all. They paid for it, even if they are not in the room when the closing takes place.

The last one relates to the threatened use of eminent domain by some local governments to take underwater mortgages and refinance them to reflect current property valuations:

Investors have significant concerns with, and continuing distrust of the policy environment because of a sense that rules have been and continue to be changed ex-post. The threat by certain municipalities to use eminent domain to seize performing mortgage loans has been a focus of MBS investors for the last two years and would introduce a significant new risk into investing in PLS. These municipalities propose to cherry-pick loans from PLS trusts and compensate holders at levels far below the actual value of the loans. SIFMA’s investor members view such activity as an illegal taking of trust assets, and successful implementation of these plans would severely damage investor confidence in investing in PLS. (6)

This is another red herring as far as I am concerned.  The use of eminent domain is not an ex post legal maneuver. Rather, it is an inherent power of government that precedes the founding of this country. I understand that MBS investors don’t like it, but it is not some kind of newfangled violation of the rule of law as many investor advocates have claimed.

Notwithstanding its flaws, I recommend this letter as a trenchant critique of the housing system we have today.