(function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start': new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0], j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src= 'https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f); })(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-NHW25TH'); window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'G-BPZENKSMDF');

Tag Archives: Mortgage Loan Modification

Mortgage modifications failing, meeting only 16% of intended goals, says NY Times

NY Times columnist David Streitfeld reports that the dropout rate from the Making Home Affordable Program (HAMP) is very high. 96,000 trial modifications were canceled by the lenders in July 2010. The number of canceled trial modifications now exceeds 616,000.

Those numbers are leading some housing experts to call the program, which modestly rewards lenders for modifying mortgages, a failure.

About 422,000 mortgage modifications overseen by the government were considered permanent as of July 2010, up from 389,000 in June. But the pool of candidates is shrinking rapidly. Only 17,000 trial modifications were started in July, down sharply from the 150,000 enrolled in September 2009 when the program was new according to a report by NY Times columnist David Streitfeld.

After reviewing the new data, Calculated Risk, a popular financial blog, wrote, “Those borrowers are still up to their eyeballs in debt after the modification,” and many will default again.

“My concern is that if we have another protracted housing dip, it’s going to bring the economy down.” Mr. Feder, chief executive of the real estate data firm Radar Logic explains, saying that he expects prices to ‘get whacked’  in the Fall of 2010.

“If consumers don’t think their houses are worth what they were six months ago, they’re not going to go out and spend money. I’m concerned this problem isn’t being addressed,” says Mr. Feder as quoted in the article by Mr. Streitfeld of the NY Times, published on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

Financial Reform: Will the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Law destroy the private mortgage industry and lead to risky government lending?

Banks lend money (a mortgage) against your house. The banks then put 1,000 mortgages or so together and sell the package of mortgages to an investor in a “pooled mortgage”. Some pooled mortgages have held a government guarantee of performance through FHA (Federal Housing Administration), Fannie Mae, or Freddie Mac, other pools were not insured because they were supposedly riskier loans, as the borrowers did not qualify under loan risk guidelines established for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Under the new rules contained in Dodd-Frank, the original lender must retain 5% of the risk in the pool if it is not a federally guaranteed (e.g. FHA, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac) loan pool.

CNBC.com editor John Carney writes that exempting FHA, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from the 5.0% risk retention requirement will destroy the private mortgage industry and make the US government the unintentional backer of all mortgages:

“…a little-noticed provision of the Dodd-Frank act threatens to undermine efforts at rebuilding an innovative and healthy private sector for mortgages. Under Dodd-Frank, financial firms that securitize mortgages are required to retain 5.0% of the risk of those securities. The goal, a laudable one, is to encourage companies to more closely monitor the quality of the mortgages they securitize (sell off in pooled bundles). But it is also likely to increase the cost of affected mortgages, because banks will seek to pass on the costs of the risk to home buyers. Mortgages guaranteed by the F.H.A., however, are exempt from the 5 percent risk-retention requirement. This means that lenders will find that it costs far more, and involves more risk, to offer mortgages they back themselves than those covered with a guarantee from the agency. There’s little doubt this will lead to a huge increase int he volume of business done by the F.H.A., as banks creating securities will seek out mortgages on which they don’t have to cover the risk. Purely private mortgages will quickly be pushed out of the market.”

The complete article by Mr. Carney was published in the NY Times on August 12, 2010.

Economy slowing down again, and Federal Reserve Bank is running out of traditional stimulus options says UCSC Economics Professor Carl E. Walsh

The economy is slowing down again despite interest rates being lower than ever: What is the government going to do next? Here is the answer, by NY Times Reporter Sewell Chan:

“The challenges the Federal (Reserve Bank) faces aren’t going to get any easier in the coming months,” said Carl E. Walsh, a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The choices ahead are only getting worse as the economy seems to be slowing down.” Professor Walsh was quoted in the New York Times Thursday, August 12, 2010 edition, Section B1

Sewell Chan’s August 12, 2010 NY Times article introduces us to a new term, “Quantative Easing”, and says that after lowering short term interest rates, about the only thing that the Federal Reserve can do is to pursue a policy of “Quantitative Easing”. According to Mr. Chan, Quantitative Easing is a controversial and uncertain central bank tactic. There is little modern historical precedent by which Quantitative Easing can be studied and analyzed by economists to predict results.

Mr. Chan explains that because short term interest rates are already close to zero, that now the Federal Reserve Bank’s last and final option is more “Quantative Easing”. Will it work?

What is “Quantative Easing”? Simply put, it is the printing of additional money to purchase financial assets in the market place, by using government money to buy instruments held by investors. The instruments purchased by the Government Treasury in “Quantitative Easing” are things such as (a) mortgage backed securities (b) buying/cashing out debts owed by the government such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac obligations/bonds and (c) buying Treasury Securities like government bonds.

How does “Quantative Easing” seek to help the economy? My understanding is that Quantitative Easing intentionally creates some inflation as it increases the money supply, and thus with more money rolling around, there is an incentive to invest it by lending it to others. People and investors who now have this freshly borrowed cash then go on spending sprees, and it is these sprees which are supposed to stimulate economic growth by more lending to people who buy things with the newly borrowed proceeds.

In short, more people buying things with borrowed money increases demand for goods and services and such. Increased demand keeps prices for goods and services higher, which is supposed to offset the deflation of prices of goods and services that is occurring in this recession. (See following blog post describing why deflation is “bad”)

Shortly put, deflation is supposed to be “bad” during a recovery from economic recession because deflation will result in a further economic slowdown as people conserve their cash and do not spend it in order to wait for lower prices on everything from TVs to cars to houses to ocean cruises.

This would be a “Second Wave” of “Quantitative Easing” as the Federal Reserve Bank already took a first “Quantitative Easing” step between January 2009 and March 2010 by printing money in the amount of $1.725 trillion (that is 1,000,000,000,000!) dollars to purchase $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities (essentially buying mortgages from private investors), $175 billion in debts owed by government-controlled entities like Fannie Mae (more mortgages) and $300 billion in Treasury securities.

Here are the pros and cons:

Pros of “Quantitative Easing” to buy mortgages and investment instruments held by private investors when lowering interest rates doesn’t seem to be getting the job done to stimulate the economy: Sewell Chan of the NY Times writes that the Federal Reserve Bank’s Chairman Ben Bernanke is an astute student of the Great Depression and that Mr. Bernanke has long argued that the central bank (The Federal Reserve Bank) has the additional tool of Quantitative Easing which should be somewhat readily used to avoid deflation in prices, as deflation will slow, stop or reverse a recovery as people look at cash as an investment in and of itself instead of spending the cash. For example, if you know that the $500 TV set will reduce to $475 in six months (a mere 5.0% deflation in price) then you are more inclined to wait six months to purchase. If you know that your $300,000 home you are looking at buying will decrease 5.0% in one year to $285,000 then you will keep in renting one additional year and will not buy the home, thus stagnating the housing market.

Cons of “Quantitative Easing” More conservative voices (according to the NY Times Swell Chan) propose that the Federal Reserve Bank should not go out into the marketplace to buy mortgages, and that the most aggressive steps taken should be to lower short term interest rates (please note that short term interest rates are almost zero!)

Problem #1: Those economists wary of “Quantitative Easing” say that in a “perfect storm” of circumstances, Quantitative Easing can lead to 1970s style “stagflation” as the government floods the economy with too much available money when it buys out the debt obligations of (a) mortgage backed securities (b) debts owed by government entities to investors such as Fannie Mae bonds and (c) Treasury securities, in an atmosphere when the economy is operating at a reduced level, because there is a surplus or bumper crop of money floating around, but not so much to buy.

Problem #2: According to economists skeptical of “Quantitative Easing” say that further purchases of mortgages, government debts and treasury bills by the Federal Reserve will undermine faith in the US dollar as an accepted stable world currency and the safety of the US Treasury bill as keeping ahead of inflation because it fosters “perceptions of monetizing indebtedness,” according to Mr. Chan’s analysis of economist Kevin M. Warsh, in that it looks like it is the printing of money to pay off the public debt. “On a very simple level [with Quantitative Easing], the Federal Reserve Bank is printing money so the Treasury can spend more than it’s collecting in tax revenues…these are highly unusual circumstances, so no one is too worried about it [right now]. But it is always a temptation to use the central bank to finance government expenditures.”

Mr. Chan writes that economist Kevin M. Warsh notes that the Federal Reserve already has purchased 2.3 trillion worth of debt which includes vast sums of Treasury Bills, perhaps too much. The Treasury Bills are essentially a large share of the national debt. (Note that the Chinese probably now hold the remaining balance. That is a none too funny note for another day). Mr. Warsh notes that the Federal Reserve Bank’s institutional credibility is at stake, if it threatens the currency’s stability to pursue domestic growth.

Problem #3: Economists wary of Quantitative Easing relate that economists “don’t have a lot of good historical episodes in modern economies to know exactly what the effects of quantitative easing are.” Mr. Chan quotes Professor Walsh.