Mortgage Insurers and The Next Housing Crisis

photo by Jeff Turner

The Inspector General of the Federal Housing Finance Agency has released a white paper on Enterprise Counterparties: Mortgage Insurers. The Executive Summary reads,

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises) operate under congressional charters to provide liquidity, stability, and affordability to the mortgage market. Those charters, which have been amended from time to time, authorize the Enterprises to purchase residential mortgages and codify an affirmative obligation to facilitate the financing of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families. Pursuant to their charters, the Enterprises may purchase single-family residential mortgages with loan-to-value (LTV) ratios above 80%, provided that these mortgages are supported by one of several credit enhancements identified in their charters. A credit enhancement is a method or tool to reduce the risk of extending credit to a borrower; mortgage insurance is one such method. Since 1957, private mortgage insurers have assumed an ever-increasing role in providing credit enhancements and they now insure “the vast majority of loans over 80% LTV purchased by the” Enterprises. In congressional testimony in 2015, Director Watt emphasized that mortgage insurance is critical to the Enterprises’ efforts to provide increased housing access for lower-wealth borrowers through 97% LTV loans.

During the financial crisis, some mortgage insurers faced severe financial difficulties due to the precipitous drop in housing prices and increased defaults that required the insurers to pay more claims. State regulators placed three mortgage insurers into “run-off,” prohibiting them from writing new insurance, but allowing them to continue collecting renewal premiums and processing claims on existing business. Some mortgage insurers rescinded coverage on more loans, canceling the policies and returning the premiums.  Currently, the mortgage insurance industry consists of six private mortgage insurers.

In our 2017 Audit and Evaluation Plan, we identified the four areas that we believe pose the most significant risks to FHFA and the entities it supervises. One of those four areas is counterparty risk – the risk created by persons or entities that provide services to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. According to FHFA, mortgage insurers represent the largest counterparty exposure for the Enterprises. The Enterprises acknowledge that, although the financial condition of their mortgage insurer counterparties approved to write new business has improved in recent years, the risk remains that some of them may fail to fully meet their obligations. While recent financial and operational requirements may enhance the resiliency of mortgage insurers, other industry features and emerging trends point to continuing risk.

We undertook this white paper to understand and explain the current and emerging risks associated with private mortgage insurers that insure loan payments on single-family mortgages with LTVs greater than 80% purchased by the Enterprises. (2)

It is a truism that the next crisis won’t look like the last one. It is worth heeding the Inspector General’s warning about the

risks from private mortgage insurance as a credit enhancement, including increasing volume, high concentrations, an inability by the Enterprises to manage concentration risk, mortgage insurers with credit ratings below the Enterprises’ historic requirements and investment grade, the challenges inherent in a monoline business and the cyclic housing market, and remaining unpaid mortgage insurer deferred obligations. (13)

One could easily imagine a taxpayer bailout of Fannie and Freddie driven by the insolvency of the some or all of the six private mortgage insurers that do business with them. Let’s hope that the FHFA addresses that risk now, while the mortgage market is still healthy.

Time Is Ripe For GSE Reform

photo by Valerie Everett

Banker and Tradesman quoted me in Time Is Ripe For GSE Reform (behind a paywall). It opens,

Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director Melvin L. Watt told the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs last month that “Congress urgently needs to act on housing finance reform” and bring Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of conservatorship after almost nine years.

Conservatorship is temporary by its very nature. There is universal agreement that it can’t go on forever, but there is widespread disagreement about what the government-sponsored entities (GSEs) should look like after coming out of conservatorship – and how to get there.

“Only a legislative solution can provide political legitimacy and long term market certainty for the housing finance system,” according to a recent Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) white paper on GSE reform. MBA President and CEO Dave Stevens said now is the time for Congress to tackle the changes that will maintain liquidity, but protect taxpayers and homebuyers.

“The last recession destroyed many communities throughout the country,” he said. “The GSEs played a large role in that. They fueled a lot of the capital that allowed all varieties of lenders to make risky loans and then received the single-largest bailout in the history of this nation. They are not innocent.”

Connecticut Mortgage Bankers Association President Kevin Moran said his organization supports the positions of the MBA.

“There’s going to be change no matter what,” Stevens said. “We’re stuck with this problem. It’s technical and complicated and needs to be done. They can’t stay in conservatorship forever.”

Taxpayers Need Protection

Professor David Reiss at Brooklyn Law School said that future delays are not out of the question.

“Change is coming, but the Treasury and FHFA can amend the PSPA [agreement] again,” Reiss said. “It’s been amended three times already. There’s a little bit of political theatre going on here. It’s incredibly important for the economy. You really hope that the broad middle of the government can come to a compromise. If there isn’t the political will to move forward, they can simply kick the can down the road.”

Reiss said the fact that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are both going to run out of money by January 2018 is a factor in why reform is needed soon, but the GSEs aren’t in danger of imminent collapse.

“They are literally going to run out of money,” Reiss said. “But keep in mind they will continue to have a $2.5 billion line of credit. It’s partially political. They’re trying to get the public conscious of this. I don’t think anyone in the broad middle of the political establishment thinks it’s good that they’ve been in limbo for nine years.”
The MBA’s proposal to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aims to ensure that crashes like the one in 2007-2008 never happen again, in part by raising the minimum capital balance GSEs have to maintain to a level at least as high as banks and other lenders.

“They have a capital standard that is absurd,” Stevens said. “Pre-conservatorship they had to have less than 0.5 percent capital. Banks are required to maintain 4 percent of their loan value against mortgages. That’s a regulated standard. Fannie and Freddie are not as diversified as banks are. Our view is to make sure they are sustainable; they should at least a 4 to 5 percent buffer to protect them against failure.”

To put that into context, a 3.5 percent buffer would have been just large enough for the GSEs to weather the last housing crash without the need for a taxpayer-funded bailout. Stevens said the MBA would go even further.

“They should also pay a fee for every loan that goes into an insurance fund in the event all else fails,” he said. “In the event of a catastrophic failure, that would be the last barrier before having to rely on taxpayers. Keep in mind: for years, shareholders made billions and when they failed taxpayers took 100 percent of the losses.”

Stevens said the MBA would like to see more competition in the secondary market, and that the current duopoly isn’t much better than a monopoly.

“There should be more competitors,” he said. “If either one [Fannie or Freddie] fails, you almost have to bail them out. Our goal is to have a highly regulated industry to support the American finance system without using the portfolio to make bets on the marketplace.”

A Bipartisan Issue

While some conservatives like Chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) have called for getting the government out of the mortgage business altogether, Stevens said that would likely mean the end of the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage.

Furthermore, GSEs are required to serve underserved communities. Private companies would be more likely to back the most profitable loans.

“The GSEs play a really important role in counter-cyclical markets,” Stevens said. “When credit conditions shift, private money disappears. We saw that in 2007. It put extraordinary demands on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae. You need a continuous flow of capital. You can put controls in place so it can expand and contract when needed.”

Reiss said getting the government out of the mortgage business would certainly mean some big changes.

“I think there is some evidence that some 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages could still exist,” Reiss said. “It would dramatically change their availability, though. Interest rates would go up somewhere between one-half and 1 percent. Some people might like that because it reflects the actual risk of a residential mortgage, but it would also make housing more expensive.”

Blockchain and Real Estate

CoinDesk.com quoted me in Land Registry: A Big Blockchain Use Case Explored. It opens,

With distributed ledger technology being promoted as a benefit to everything from farming to Fair Trade coffee, use case investigation has emerged as a full-time fascination for many.

In this light, one popular blockchain use case that has remained generally outside scrutiny has been land title projects started in countries including in Georgia, Sweden and the Ukraine.

One could argue land registries seemed to become newsworthy only after work on the use case had begun. However, those working on projects disagree, asserting that land registries could prove one of the first viable beachheads for blockchain.

Elliot Hedman, chief operating officer of Bitland Global, the technology partner for a real estate title registration program in Ghana, for example, said that issues with land rights make it a logical fit.

Hedman told CoinDesk: “As for the benefit of a blockchain-based land registry, look to Haiti. There are still people fighting over whose land is whose. When disaster struck, all of their records were on paper, that being if they were written down at all.”

Hedman argued that, with a blockchain-based registry employing a network of distributed databases as a way to facilitate data exchange, the “monumental headache” associated with a recovery effort would cease.

Modern real estate

To understand the potential of a blockchain land registry system, analysts argue one must first understand how property changes hands.

When a purchaser seeks to buy property today, he or she must find and secure the title and have the lawful owner sign it over.

This seems simple on the surface, but the devil is in the details. For a large number of residential mortgage holders, flawed paperwork, forged signatures and defects in foreclosure and mortgage documents have marred proper documentation of property ownership.

The problem is so acute that Bank of America attempted foreclosure on properties for which it did not have mortgages in the wake of the financial crisis.

Readers may also recall the proliferation of NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) subprime loans during the Great Recession and how this practice created a flood of distressed assets that banks were simply unable to handle.

The resulting situation means that the property no longer has a ‘good title’ attached to it and is no longer legally sellable, leaving the prospective buyer in many cases with no remedies.

Economic booster

Land registry blockchains seek to fix these problems.

By using hashes to identify every real estate transaction (thus making it publicly available and searchable), proponents argue issues such as who is the legal owner of a property can be remedied.

“Land registry records are pretty reliable methods for maintaining land records, but they are expensive and inefficient,” David Reiss, professor of law and academic program director at the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship, told CoinDesk.

He explained:  “There is good reason to think that blockchain technology could serve as the basis for a more reliable, cheaper and more efficient land registry.”

Arbitration and The Common Mortgage

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau posted its Arbitration Study. This is a report to Congress that was required by Dodd-Frank. By way of background, the study states that

Companies provide almost all consumer financial products and services subject to the terms of a written contract. Whenever a consumer obtains a consumer financial product such as a credit card, a checking account, or a payday loan, he or she typically receives the company’s standard form, written legal contract.

*     *     *

As a general rule, the parties to a dispute can agree, after the dispute arises, to submit the dispute for resolution to a forum other than a court — for example, to submit a particular dispute that has arisen to resolution by an arbitrator. (3)

Arbitration provisions typically do not directly apply to residential mortgages because Dodd-Frank “prohibited the use of ‘arbitration or any other nonjudicial procedure’ for resolving disputes arising from residential mortgage loans or extensions of credit under an open-end consumer credit plan secured by the principal dwelling of the consumer. 15 U.S.C. § 1639c.” (Arbitration Study § 5.4, n.34) But they can apply in mortgage-related contracts, such as those for title insurance, mortgage insurance and forced-place flood insurance. (§ 8.3, n.24 & Appendix S, § 8)

The Study thus holds some interest for those of us interested housing finance. The Executive Summary (§ 1.4) provides an overview of the CFPB’s research findings about arbitrations and other proceedings.

My overall impression after having reviewed the report is that consumers do not often raise claims against consumer finance companies in any forum, whether with an arbitrator or with a judge. The Study does not provide any information that would allow one to conclude what the socially optimal level of formalized disputes would be. It would be helpful for the CFPB to try to model that.

Strip-Downs Are Good

The Philadelphia Fed has posted a Working Paper, Using Bankruptcy to Reduce Foreclosures: Does Strip-Down Of Mortgages Affect The Supply of Mortgage Credit? The paper’s abstract reads,

We assess the credit market impact of mortgage “strip-down” — reducing the principal of underwater residential mortgages to the current market value of the property for homeowners in Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Strip-down of mortgages in bankruptcy was proposed as a means of reducing foreclosures during the recent mortgage crisis but was blocked by lenders. Our goal is to determine whether allowing bankruptcy judges to modify mortgages would have a large adverse impact on new mortgage applicants. Our identification is provided by a series of U.S. Court of Appeals decisions during the late 1980s and early 1990s that introduced mortgage strip-down under both bankruptcy chapters in parts of the U.S., followed by two Supreme Court rulings that abolished it throughout the U.S. We find that the Supreme Court decision to abolish mortgage strip-down under Chapter 13 led to a reduction of 3% in mortgage interest rates and an increase of 1% in mortgage approval rates, while the Supreme Court decision to abolish strip-down under Chapter 7 led to a reduction of 2% in approval rates and no change in interest rates. We also find that markets react less to circuit court decisions than to Supreme Court decisions. Overall, our results suggest that lenders respond to forced renegotiation of contracts in bankruptcy, but their responses are small and not always in the predicted direction. The lack of systematic patterns evident in our results suggests that introducing mortgage strip-down under either bankruptcy chapter would not have strong adverse effects on mortgage loan terms and could be a useful new policy tool to reduce foreclosures when future housing bubbles burst.
This paper seems to cut through some of the hyperbole that surrounds this topic. Its concluding paragraphs indicate how a modest introduction of strip-downs would have only a modest impact on the availability of mortgage credit. It contrasts such a modest step with more far-reaching proposals, such as using eminent domain to take underwater mortgages throughout an entire jurisdiction. The paper seems to argue that the more modest proposal could be acceptable to the lending industry. I am not so sure that that is true, particularly in the current political environment. But it is certainly true that strip-downs could be a useful tool to have when “future housing bubbles burst,” as they most certainly will.