Wall Streeter opines upon the sub prime mortgage disaster

Ethan Penner, “a pioneer in real estate finance” shared his thinking with us on yesterday’s Wall St Journal op-ed page. He laments the fall of “securitization” and the business model for large sections of Wall St. He feels that credit rating agencies are completely capable of assessing the worth and risk of mortgage backed securities. Right there, we can see the difference between the Wall St world and the real world. A home mortgage is a sound investment only if the borrower[s] are both willing and capable to make their payments until the either they sell and move, or they pay the mortgage off. No way can a paper pusher in an office at Moody’s Investor Services have the faintest idea about the stability of a borrower. An experienced loan officer conducting a face to face interview with the borrowers can make a pretty good call (most of the time) but without that personal contact with the borrowers, you don’t have a clue. To say nothing of inspecting the property to see if its sale value is somewhere close to the amount of the loan. If the borrowers cannot/will not make their mortgage payments, the lender is going to take a huge loss. After foreclosure, the lender has to sell the property to get any money back. If the house was salable, the owners would have sold it to pay off the mortgage. Only the unsalable properties get as far as foreclosure.

Then Mr. Penner explains the difficulties doing thirty year mortgages with depositor’s funds with can be withdrawn at will. He blames the 1980’s savings and loan (S&L) disaster on depositors withdrawing their money from the S&L’s. In actual fact, the S&L’s went broke after Congress repealed the laws that restricted S&L’s to doing home mortgages. They used this new freedom to play the stock and commodities markets. Being unsophisticated newbies, the S&L’s got taken to the cleaners by sharp/dishonest salesmen. In the real world, a bank, even a junior bank like an S&L, can increase deposits by paying depositors higher interest.

Mr. Penner’s suggests a new system where the bank keeps owner ship of the mortgage, and issues some sort of trick bond to raise cash to do more mortgages. He doesn’t understand that, with or without trickery, such a bond works just like the ordinary bonds issued by ordinary companies every day. Investors buy ordinary corporate bonds based on the reputation of the issuer and the interest rate promised. The “securitized mortgage bonds” that fueled the sub prime lending spree, and of which Mr. Penner is so fond, were “backed” by the mortgages. Starting last summer, investors learned that the “backing” was worth no more than the underlying mortgages were worth, and surprise surprise, those mortgages turned out to be worthless.

A basic fact of mortgage lending, the lender has to borrow the funds for LESS interest than that charged for the mortgage. Today my local band is offering 30 year fixed rate mortgages for 6 and a fraction %. That means no way can an investor in mortgages make more than 6 and a fraction %. Mr. Penner states that investors could earn mid to high teens and that wasn’t very appetizing. This is the sort of thing a mortgage backed security salesman might say.