Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis
Mortimer B. Zuckerman

 

Class warfare, American style, is being waged between Main Street and Wall Street. With President Obama and Democrats in Congress turning up the populist heat against Wall Street, the financial community is losing. Its back is up against the wall. But the administration is also getting its share of the public's rage, as we saw in the devastating defeat of the Democratic candidate in the Massachusetts Senate race.

Who's really to blame?

It's easy to see why Main Street America is seething at Wall Street for its role in our present afflictions. We endure an unconscionable national unemployment rate that shows little sign of easing. There's justifiable anxiety among the employed or partly employed that they will be the next to lose their jobs. Millions fear that the devaluation of their home equity, 401(k)'s, and other financial assets means that we are not just being shaken by a little bump but have fallen into an abyss, a free fall that will play havoc with plans for retirement and the ability to provide for the education of the next generation.

All this heightens Main Street's sense of victimization.

Americans see a financial world that was saved by taxpayers footing the bill for an unprecedented rescue, after which bankers walked away not only without a scratch but with executives' pockets abulge with bonuses out of all proportion to the way most Americans live and work.

There's plenty of fuel here for the most raw form of populism -- and the president and the Democratic-controlled Congress are ready to exploit it. President Obama's response within two days of the Massachusetts election was to announce he would limit dramatically the activities of banks and increase their costs and taxes -- all in the context that they are the principal perpetrators of the Great Recession.

But that's both opportunistic and simplistic. Victory always has a thousand fathers; defeat is always an orphan.

A realistic examination of the history suggests that a fairer verdict is that our catastrophe has any number of fathers: homeowners as well as mortgage lenders; borrowers and consumers as well as bankers; political leaders of both parties as well as corporations' chief executives; not just a lamentably dozy Securities and Exchange Commission but reckless government-supported mortgage agencies (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae); the august Federal Reserve Bank; and the commercial rating agencies. The American public, by default, was complicit. For at least a generation, U.S. consumers overspent and undersaved, while simultaneously accumulating large personal debts. They purchased homes they couldn't pay for with mortgages they couldn't afford.

And then there are the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The Bush years saw unsustainable budget deficits and massive trade deficits, all requiring huge funding. Bush lowered taxes and waged wars without cutting spending or raising revenues. The Obama administration understandably loses no chance to remind us of these eight reckless years. But while it was swift in its first year to do more to extinguish the flames in the basement, the current administration failed in rebuilding the economy to concentrate on jobs, jobs and to focus on energizing the economy. It allowed Congress to give a job-stimulus program a bad name by distorting where the money would go (and go far too slowly).

Politicians in both parties share blame for long pressuring the banks and mortgage companies to facilitate homeownership for minorities and people who would have difficulty paying.

By 2007, the regulations of the Department of Housing and Urban Development stipulated that 55 percent of the loans that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac made had to go to borrowers at or below the median income level. And nearly half of these loans had to be to low-income borrowers. The Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Barney Frank, seems to have forgotten his assertion that he was willing to "roll the dice" on subsidized housing, denying there was any cause for concern. For the better part of a decade, Fannie and Freddie were bringing on risky mortgages that loaded the dice heavily against the taxpayer. They had a huge advantage in capital costs because of an implicit government guarantee. This enabled them to ramp up mortgage lending programs to less creditworthy borrowers at high margins and with exorbitant fees. The low-cost capital the banks were able to accumulate through low-cost federal funds and foreign oil revenues found its way into the U.S. residential real estate market, fostering the housing bubble.

U.S. home prices grew by an average of 3 percent per year from 1945 to 2001. During the next five years, they rose at an estimated 16 percent annually. That includes homes that took on mortgages to extract equity, helping to reduce the equity content in U.S. housing from nearly 70 percent in 1965 to 43 percent in 2007.

At the same time, Freddie and Fannie wriggled out of tighter regulation by donating thousands of dollars to political action committees.

The disastrous subprime market was thus the creature not so much of Wall Street as of our political leaders, who created the subprime market by pressing banks to make riskier loans and then virtually compelling Fannie and Freddie to liquefy these toxic assets by putting more and more of them on their own balance sheets.

Fannie and Freddie had been buying risky loans since 1993 to meet the "affordable housing" requirements established by Congress. No one in successive administrations effectively monitored the consequences, especially the workings of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which was designed to make loans available in poorer communities. Obsessed by this political objective, Democrats would not support regulations suggested by the Republicans in the Senate Banking Committee in 2005 that would have established more auditing and oversight.

The result?

At the end of 2008, these two agencies held or guaranteed about 10 million subprime and alt-A mortgages through mortgage-backed securities. These hazardous loans had a principal balance of $1.6 trillion. These are the loans that began to default at unprecedented rates in 2008 and 2009 and forced the government to take control of Fannie and Freddie, which then continued to buy dicey mortgages to minimize the housing crisis.

More troubling, Peter Wallison's report in the Wall Street Journal on research by Edward Pinto, a former chief credit officer at Fannie Mae, says that "from the time Fannie and Freddie began buying risky loans . . . they routinely misrepresented the mortgages . . . as prime when they had characteristics that made them clearly subprime or alt-A." According to Wallison, "Of the 26 million subprime and alt-A loans outstanding in 2008, 10 million were held or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, 5.2 million by other government agencies, and 1.4 million were still on the books of the four largest U.S. banks." And 7.7 million subprime and alt-A housing loans were in mortgage pools supporting mortgage-backed securities issued by Wall Street banks.

Where were the rating agencies when this house of cards was being built? Most of the loans were rated AAA. But what did that mean?

The raters went merrily along assuming that any losses incurred from defaults would be within the historical range. But the assumptions were false, in part because of irrational exuberance and in part because of the mislabeling of defaults and actual losses after foreclosures exceeded all prior experience. Everybody was incurring unprecedented losses and deficits, but the rating agencies and regulators seemed to have lost touch with reality.

In the meantime, while the party was on, some 75 percent of the interest-only or negative amortization loans that didn't require near-term principal payments were packaged into securities. The banks sold these and other complex financial products as securities worldwide to monetize a lending binge of consumer loans of all flavors: mortgages, home equity lines, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, and commercial real estate. Many mortgages were too large in relation to the real value of the homes, and some were taken out to support lifestyles by drawing down the equity in the homes. When the housing bubble burst and homeowners could no longer service the mortgages, the default rate soared to levels never before experienced or contemplated -- way beyond the 1 percent to 2 percent during good times or even the 6 percent to 7 percent during recessions, to levels of nearly 10 percent for fixed rate mortgages, more than 25 percent for subprime adjustable rate mortgages, and almost 60 percent for option adjustable rate mortgages.

Not surprisingly, investors lost confidence in the ratings; they fled the market for mortgage-backed securities and ultimately withdrew entirely from all asset-backed securities. The result was to destroy the capital of private mortgage lenders like Countrywide, Washington Mutual, and Golden West, as well as Wall Street firms such as Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers, not to mention Fannie and Freddie.

Their financial assets could no longer be sold, except at seriously discounted prices. This, in turn, undermined the confidence, stability, and even the solvency of some of the world's largest financial institutions. A freeze-up followed in interbank lending as one crisis fed into another, putting many major banks under water. The global credit markets ground to a halt. Interest rates soared and loan availability plummeted, resulting in the implosion of the world's asset markets, including global equity markets. The end result was the Great Recession, which plagues us to this day.

There is, in short, plenty of blame to go around, and it's important to understand the origins of the crisis to judge the fairness and efficacy of the restrictions and taxes that the Obama administration now proposes for the banks.

Availbale at Amazon.com:

The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050

 

 

 

 

Who to Blame for the Financial Crisis | Mortimer B. Zuckerman

 

(c) 2010 Mortimer B. Zuckerman