Rethinking FHA Insurance

The Congressional Budget Office issued a report on Options to Manage FHA’s Exposure to Risk from Guaranteeing Single-Family Mortgages. FHA insurance stands out from other forms of mortgage insurance because it guarantees all of a lender’s loss, rather than just a portion of it. It is certainly a useful exercise to determine whether the FHA could reduce its exposure to those potential credit losses while also making home loans available to people who would otherwise have difficulty accessing them. This report evaluates the options available to the FHA:

The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insures the mortgages of people who might otherwise have trouble getting a loan, particularly first-time homebuyers and low-income borrowers seeking to purchase or refinance a home. During and just after the 2007–2009 recession, the share of mortgages insured by FHA grew rapidly as private lenders became more reluctant to provide home loans without an FHA guarantee of repayment. FHA’s expanded role in the mortgage insurance market ensured that borrowers could continue to have access to credit. However, like most other mortgage insurers, FHA experienced a spike in delinquencies and defaults by borrowers.

Recently, mortgage borrowers with good credit scores, large down payments, or low ratios of debt to income have started to see more options in the private market. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the share of FHA-insured mortgages going to such borrowers is likely to keep shrinking as credit standards in the private market continue to ease. That change would leave FHA with a riskier pool of borrowers, creating risk-management challenges similar to the ones that contributed to the agency’s high levels of insurance claims and losses during the recession.

This report analyzes policy options to reduce FHA’s exposure to risk from its program to guarantee single-family mortgages, including creating a larger role for private lenders and restricting the availability of FHA’s guarantees. The options are designed to let FHA continue to fulfill its primary mission of ensuring access to credit for first-time homebuyers and low-income borrowers.

*     *     *

What Policy Options Did CBO Analyze?

Many changes have been proposed to reduce the cost of risk to the federal government from FHA’s single-family mortgage guarantees. CBO analyzed illustrative versions of seven policy options, which generally represent the range of approaches that policymakers and others have proposed:

■ Guaranteeing some rather than all of the lender’s losses on a defaulted mortgage;

■ Increasing FHA’s use of risk-based pricing to tailor up-front fees to the riskiness of specific borrowers;

■ Adding a residual-income test to the requirements for an FHA-insured mortgage to better measure borrowers’ ability to repay the loan (as the Department of Veterans Affairs does in its mortgage guarantee program);

■ Reducing the limit on the size of a mortgage that FHA can guarantee;

■ Restricting eligibility for FHA-insured mortgages only to first-time homebuyers and low- to moderate-income borrowers;

■ Requiring some borrowers to receive mortgage counseling to help them better understand their financial obligations; and

■ Providing a grant to help borrowers with their down payment, in exchange for which FHA would receive part of the increase in their home’s value when it was sold.

Although some of those approaches would require action by lawmakers, several of the options could be implemented by FHA without legislation. In addition, certain options could be combined to change the nature of FHA’s risk exposure or the composition of its guarantees. CBO did not examine the results of combining options.

What Effects Would the Policy Options Have?

Making one or more of those policy changes would affect FHA’s financial position, its role in the broader mortgage market, and the federal budget. All of the options would improve the agency’s financial position by reducing its exposure to the risk of losses on the mortgages it insures (see Table 1). The main reason for that reduction would be a decrease in the amount of mortgages guaranteed by FHA. CBO projects that under current law, FHA would insure $220 billion in new single-family mortgages in 2018. The options would lower that amount by anywhere from $15 billion to $77 billion (see Figure 1). Some options would also reduce FHA’s risk exposure by decreasing insurance losses as a percentage of the value of the guaranteed mortgages. (1-2)

Reiss on Housing Finance Reform

Inside MBS and ABS, the trade journal, quoted me in DeMarco Cites ‘Structural Improvements’ in Housing Six Years After GSE Conservatorship, More Needed (behind a paywall). It reads,

Six years after the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the former regulator of the government-sponsored enterprises noted that the housing finance system has made “significant progress.” But even as critical structural changes are underway, comprehensive improvement is still several years out.

In a policy paper issued last week, Edward DeMarco–new senior fellow-in-residence for the Milken Institute’s Center for Financial Markets–said that house prices, as measured by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have recovered more than 50 percent since their decline in 2007.

“While the damage from the housing crisis has been substantial, we are finally seeing a sustained market recovery,” said the former FHFA chief. “The crisis showed that numerous structural improvements were needed in housing–and such improvements have been underway for several years.”

Poor data, misuse of specialty mortgage products, lagging technologies, weak servicing standards and an inadequate securitization infrastructure became evident during the crisis.

“New data standards have emerged…with more on the way,” wrote DeMarco. “These standards should improve risk management while lowering origination costs and barriers to entry.” Development of the new securitization structure, begun more than two years ago, “should be a cornerstone for the future secondary mortgage market,” he added.

DeMarco said the major housing finance reform bills in the House and Senate share key similarities: “winding down Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, building a common securitization infrastructure and drawing private capital back into the marketplace while reducing taxpayer involvement.”

DeMarco added, “We should build on these similarities, making them the cornerstone features of final legislation.” Prolonging the GSEs’ conservatorship, he warned, “will continue to distort the market and place taxpayers at risk.”

David Reiss, research director of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at the Brooklyn Law School, lauded the common securitization project. But Reiss worried the former FHFA head is too optimistic about the state of Fannie and Freddie.

“The GSEs have been in a state of limbo for far too long,” said Reiss. “All sorts of operational risks may be cropping up in the entities as employees sit around or walk out the door waiting for Congress to act.”

Shiller on Primitive Housing Finance

Robert Shiller has posted Why Is Housing Finance Still Stuck in Such a Primitive Stage? The abstract for this brief discussion paper reads:

The institutions for financing owner-occupied housing have not progressed as they should, and the financial innovation that has followed the financial crisis of 2007-9 has not been focused on improving the risk management of individual homeowners. This paper lists a number of barriers to housing finance innovation, and in light of these barriers, the problems of some major innovations of the past and future: self-amortizing mortgages, price-level adjusted mortgages (PLAMs), shared appreciation mortgages (SAMs), housing partnerships, and continuous workout mortgages (CWMs). (1)

The paper is more of an outline than a fleshed out argument, but it has some interesting points (and not just because the author recently won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics).  They include

  • Shared appreciation mortgages (SAMs), which offered some risk management of home price appreciation, were offered by the Bank of Scotland and Bear Stearns in the 1990s, but acquired a damaged reputation with the boom in home prices. U.K. homeowners who took such mortgages, and lost out on the speculative gains, were so angered that they filed a class-action lawsuit against the issuers. The suit was dropped, but the reputation loss was permanent. (5)

  • There has been some questioning of the assumption that insuring homeowners against a decline in home value is a good thing. Sinai and Soulelis (2014) have written that the existing  mortgage institutions may be close to optimal given that people want to live in their house forever, or move to a similar house whose price is correlated with the present house, and so are perfectly hedged. But their paper cannot be exactly right, given the sense of distress that homeowners are experiencing who are underwater. They are more certainly not right about all homeowners, many of whom actually plan to sell their home when they retire. (5-6)

  • The difficulties in making improvements in mortgage institutions have to do with the complexity of the risk management problem, coupled with mistrust of institutional players. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created by the Dodd-Frank Act and having authority over mortgages, among other things, seems oriented towards addressing complaints from the public, and has focused its attention so far on such things as unfair collection practices, bias against minorities, and excessive complexity of financial products being used to confuse customers. These are laudable concerns, but complaints that economists might register about the fundamental success of mortgage products to serve risk management well have not yet taken center stage. (6)

  • New Development economics, Karlan and Appel (2011), Bannerjee and Duflo (2012) has shown how carefully controlled experiments can reveal solid steps to take regarding new financial institutions for poverty reduction. The same methods could be used to improve mortgage institutions, as well as rental, leasing, partnership and cooperative institutions, in advanced countries. (7)

These are just brief thoughts. It will be interesting to see how Shiller develops them further.

Reiss on Risk Management

Law360.com interviewed me in Banks Caught In Middle Of Regulators’ Fair-Lending Pursuits (behind a paywall).  The article reads in part,

Federal and state regulators are increasingly enlisting banks in their pursuit of fair-lending and other violations at payday and auto lenders and other financial services providers with which they do business, a tactic that has also increased banks’ risk of penalties for conduct by third parties.

In late October, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency was the latest to put out new guidance for banks’ responsibility to monitor the activities of third-party vendors that perform operations on behalf of the bank. Other federal and state regulators have been calling on banks with growing frequency and force in recent years in order to ensure their vendors and clients comply with fair lending and other laws.

*     *     *

The increased use of pressure on banks to indirectly go after firms that may not be subject to federal or state laws or regulations comes after banks outsourced a great deal of their mortgage-lending operations and other services during the financial crisis, according to David Reiss, a professor at Brooklyn Law School.

While many of those vendors met high standards, others, particularly in the subprime loan context, did not. And banks didn’t monitor those failings, Reiss said.

“The crazy thing about that is you’d think banks would do this on their own,” Reiss said. “Why do they need their regulators to say, ‘Check on these things’?”