Bill’s Place

In this PBS NewsHour video-clip aired January 21, 1998 President Bill Clinton points to his accomplishment of having his 'regulators' force banks to grant loans to applicants to whom the banks would not have otherwise granted loans.

In this video-clip President Clinton, claims that 85% of the loans issued under the guidelines of the (then 20 plus year old) Community Reinvestment Act were issued during his first five years in office.

Is it any wonder that the GSE's, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, under direction from Clinton and his two administration's HUD Chairmen, Henry Cisneros, and later Andrew Cuomo, continued lowering the standards for loans they would purchase from mortgage originators?

And, is it any wonder that investment banking interests devised ways to 'package' large numbers of mortgage loans into "tranches" of different risk level in order to diversify the risk they were being pressured through regulatory mandate, and political persuasion, to accept?

Notice that Clinton mentions this activity was not necessarily an affirmative action or civil rights oriented activity, but rather that it had significant impact on the economy. . . . 

Further Reading:

See, The Community Reinvestment Act, at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

Bill Clinton's Drive to Increase Homeownership Went Way Too Far By Peter Coy -pub. in Bloomberg BusinessWeek 2/28/2008, at: http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2008/02/clintons_... 

Bill Clinton, Wanted For Crimes Against Our Economy By Jim Newman pub. 2/27/2012, at: http://kayleighmcenany.com/2012/02/27/jim-newman-bill-clinton-wanted-for-crimes-against-our-economy/

 Key words search for: Janet Reno threatens banks

The other day I was reading an article which mentioned an organization called FM Watch.¹ Out of curiosity, I did a key-words-search on: FM Watch. I discovered FM Watch was founded by private mortgage industry interests in the late 1990’s. Apparently, FM Watch was created with defined purpose of focusing attention on anti-competitive and risky mortgage lending practices employed by the Government Sponsored Enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.² And, it seems FM Watch even anticipated that, if unchecked, the behavior of these Government Sponsored Enterprises would evolve even further into more risky and stronger anti-competitive behavior.³

While I was reading about FM Watch I saw a reference and a hyperlink to a video presentation called “A Crisis of Credit Visualized” it was claimed to be a very good video presentation describing the circumstances involved in the real estate bubble and the mortgage crises. Out of curiosity I went to the link and watched the video presentation. I thought you might also find the presentation interesting.⁴  

I thought “A Crisis of Credit Visualized” was a good presentation of the basic processes in mortgage lending, mortgage securitization and mortgage financing. However, with the exception of the comment about the role of Greenspan era U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate policy, it lacks any discussion about the role of federal housing policy and the Government Sponsored Enterprises (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) in the creation and the extension of the housing bubble.

Furthermore, the presentation fails to specifically explain how government subsidized cheap money financing and government subsidized mortgage insurance increased demand and pushed home prices to levels that exceeded borrowers’ ability to repay what they borrowed (to finance their home purchases).

And, the presentation fails to emphasize that, after the bubble peaked, as riskier borrowers defaulted on their mortgages and those homes went on the market, the excess supply of houses and downward cascading home prices caused home values to drop to the point that well qualified borrowers, who could afford their mortgages, began to question the economic wisdom of continuing to pay down their mortgage. These qualified buyers’ decisions not to continue to pay their mortgage contributed further to the excess supply of homes which contributed to the further deterioration of home prices.⁵

In the viewer comments on “A Crisis of Credit Visualized” I found a comment mentioning the lack of information about how federal housing policy and the behavior of the Government Sponsored Enterprises contributed to the crises of credit. The commenter provided a link to another video titled, Burning Down the House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis?⁶ I believe that, by watching both “A Crisis of Credit Visualized” and “Burning Down The House: What Caused Our Economic Crisis” one can gain a very clear understanding of the major forces which caused the U.S. economic crisis.