Baseline Scenario

The Baseline Scenario
Vermont, Texas, and Subprime Loans
Posted: 18 Aug 2009 04:48 PM PDT
The Wall Street Journal has a story about Vermont and subprime loans:
…For the past five years, as home loans went to even Americans with poor credit and no proof of steady work, Ms. Todd couldn’t get a mortgage in spite of her good credit and low debt. Vermont banks told the self-employed landscaper that her income stream was unreliable. The 32-year-old changed careers, taking a permanent job as a teacher, to boost her chances.
Vermont’s strict mortgage-lending laws largely prevented the state’s residents from signing the types of dubious home loans written in other markets across the country. Its 1990s legislation made mortgage lenders warn customers when their rates were relatively high, and put the brokers who arranged loans on the hook if their customers defaulted. Now, by at least one measure, the state has the lowest foreclosure rate in the U.S…
These tendencies help explain how, in the 1990s, the state moved to rein in mortgage lenders based on just a few instances its chief regulator says raised red flags. According to Vermont’s Department of Banking, Insurance, Securities and Health Care Administration, one broker solicited customers through newspaper classified ads, charging up to $5,000 for referring customers to a lender. Another searched property records for owners’ tax liens, a town clerk reported, searching for what the department believes were people who could be desperate to borrow….
In laws passed between 1996 and 1998, Vermont required lenders to tell consumers when their rates were substantially higher than competitors’, with notices printed on “a colored sheet of paper, chartreuse or passion pink.” And in what officials believe is the first state law of its kind, Vermont declared that mortgage brokers’ fiduciary responsibility was to borrowers, not lenders. This left Vermont brokers partly on the hook for loans gone sour…
Vermonters didn’t see the same sharp rise in home ownership that swept much of America in recent decades, which, despite the bust, buoyed economic growth. And while part of the increase in U.S. home ownership reflected excesses in lending and borrowing, some of it represented real progress in the form of more Americans achieving the cherished goal of getting — and keeping — a home of their own. By 2007, the percentage of owner-occupied households as a whole reached 68.1%, up from 63.9% in 1990, according to U.S. Census data. Vermont started at a higher base but saw ownership rise just 1.1 percentage points in that span, to 73.7%.
Daniel Indiviglio follows up it with an in-depth comparison to Florida, while Tim Duy goes through the article and ends with this fantastic note: “according to the article, the ‘pitfalls’ amount to: Informed consumers, fewer foreclosures, healthier banks, higher rates of homeownership, and virtually no impact on average growth. Those are some ‘pitfalls’ – truly, greater consumer financial protection would spell ruin for us all.” Ha!
Two additional things:
Prepayment Penalties To go back to an old soapbox of mine, it’s worth noting that Vermont has outlawed prepayment penalties. Why is this important? My own thoughts, and the research is finding this as well, is that “lenders designed subprime mortgages as bridge-financing to the borrower over short horizons for mutual benefit from house price appreciation…Subprime mortgages were meant to be rolled over and each time the horizon deliberately kept short to limit the lenderís exposure to high-risk borrowers.” The prepayment penalty is what made these bad-faith loans profitable to the lenders, and with house prices increasing, prepayment penalties allowed lenders to bet directly on this housing appreciation.
To put it a different way, banks, instead of underwriting borrowers, were betting that house prices would increase, and paying consumers to sit in the houses. The fees and prepayment penalties were the payout that made this bet profitable (with that consumer getting what’s left over in housing appreciation). Banks don’t normally bet on house prices – they have exposures, but they are secondary exposures related to recoveries and risks – they bet on consumers. Getting rid of these prepayment penalties keeps them from taking that side bets. It also helps markets actually do their job, by allow borrowers to shop between outfits and products while reducing this transaction cost – and allow the innovation of interest rate risk management to make things a little easier for the consumer.
Texas Like Vermont, Texas has some of the strictest mortgage regulations on the books. No prepayment penalties, no balloon mortgages, etc., and as a result of the Homestead Act of 1839 and subsequent laws strict rules on Home Equity Loans (pdf).
I mentioned earlier in the year, that these consumer protection laws may have played a major role in keeping Texas from having a major housing bubble. I did not know at the time that there was a study at the Dallas Federal Reserve, Why Texas Feels Less Subprime Stress than U.S., that also came to the same conclusion:
Due to the state’s strong predatory lending laws and restrictions on mortgage equity withdrawals, a smaller share of Texas’ subprime loans involve cash-out refinancing, which reduces homeowner equity and makes default more likely when mortgage payments become unaffordable….
State data on subprime mortgage delinquencies suggest that housing prices and local economic factors are still the primary drivers of subprime default rates. Even so, mortgage characteristics also matter—from the incidence of ARMs to the purpose for which the loan was taken out. In general, cash-out refinancing loans are more prone to delinquency than loans for outright purchases.
Recent tightening of credit standards in the mortgage market has put a lid on the growth of subprime and exotic mortgages. Nevertheless, a sharply deteriorating economy, weak home sales and a continued downward trend in housing prices suggest that delinquencies and foreclosures will continue at a high level.
I find it very ironic that places like the AEI are using Texas as the role model for The Way States Should Conduct Themselves in the future, which is by association bootstrap-tugging laissez-faire financial capitalism. The research produced at the Dallas’ Federal Reserve, by economists on the ground, points out the exact opposite – consumer protection is a major reason why Texas isn’t Arizona or California or Florida. Consumer protection allows a baseline of financial safety, a net where the work of building our real economy can take place.

United States Inequality in the Recovey Period
Posted: 18 Aug 2009 11:41 AM PDT
I want to point out this post from the LA Times, The consumer isn’t overleveraged — the middle class is:
That’s one conclusion to draw from a new Bank of America Merrill Lynch report this week, “The Myth of the Overlevered Consumer.”
The report hammers home what you might already suspect: The consumer debt problem in the economy really is a debt problem for the middle class. The need to work off a chunk of that debt will sap middle-class families’ spending power for perhaps years to come.
By contrast, the upper 10% of income earners face a much smaller debt burden relative to income and net worth. Those people should have ample spending power to help fuel an economic recovery.
Using 2007 data from the Federal Reserve, BofA Merrill defines the middle class as people in the 40%-to-90% income percentiles. It defines lower-income folks as those in the zero to 40% income percentiles, and the wealthy as those in the top 10%.
I looked at similar data here; what I find interesting is one of their conclusions, one I’m trying to think through these days. There’s a general assumption that, to whatever extent historically record-high inequality is present, it will almost certainly be gone post-recession. But what if it isn’t? What if this recession, and the recovery, will cement inequality in the United States even further? From them:
What’s more, on the asset side, BofA Merrill says the middle-class has suffered more than the wealthy from the housing crash because middle-class families tended to rely more on their homes to build savings through rising equity. Also, the wealthy naturally had a much larger and more diverse portfolio of assets — stocks, bonds, etc. — which have mostly bounced back significantly this year.
There are a lot of moving parts going on with the interaction between the top percents and the middle class, inequality and collapse, but it isn’t hard to see a story where the stock market picks up, housing is in decline for a decade, and we have a jobless recovery. I’m not sure how that would effect our quantitative measures of inequality, like the gini coefficient, but we could end up with much more inequality, and inequality that stings a lot harder than it did during the boom times.
I bring it up because, in a seperate analysis of similar data, Zero Hedge made similar points in their massive weekend A Detailed Look At The Stratified U.S. Consumer (my underline):
…It is probable that the dramatic increase in savings as disclosed previously, is an indication that at long last the richest 10% of America may be finally feeling the sting of a collapsing economy. Yet estimates demonstrate that even though on an absolute basis the wealthy are losing overall consumption power, the relative impact has hit the lower and middle classes the strongest yet again…
The main reason for this disproportionate loss of wealth has to do with the asset portfolio of the various consumer strata. A sobering observation is that while 90% of the population holds 50% or more of its assets in residential real estate, the Upper Class only has 25% of its assets in housing, holding the bulk of its assets in financial instruments and other business equity. This leads to two conclusions: while average house prices are still dropping countrywide, with some regions like the northeast, and the NY metro area in particular, still looking at roughly 40% in home net worth losses, 90% of the population will be feeling the impact of an economy still gripped in a recession for a long time due to the bulk of its assets deflating. The other observation is that only 10% of the population has truly benefited from the 50% market rise from the market’s lows: those better known as the Upper class.
And to add insult to injury, the segment of housing that has been impacted most adversely in the current downturn, is lower and middle-priced housing: that traditionally occupied by the lower and middle classes. The double whammy joke of holding a greater proportion of net wealth in disproportionately more deflating assets is likely not lost on the lower and middle classes.
Consumption and savings might be hit relatively harder among the working and middle classes, as their primary investment vehicle deflates away while green shoots in the financial markets should kick start the healing for the upper classes. I don’t want to put my name too strongly on these predictions, because this part of the economy is very uncertain, but it’s a development I’m watching very closely.