Bill Clinton: Building the Foundation for The House of Cards

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 Institutional Home Buying Bubble

Many people and much of the media are pointing to recent improvements in home prices as a sign that the single family home market is bottoming and starting to recover. It seems to me that an alternative way to look at recent changes in the housing market might be to look at things a bit differently.

How about reading the tea leaves this way:

Several institutional asset managers have convinced investors that buying single family homes ‘in-bulk’ and then renting the houses or flipping them is a good business that will provide better yields than most other investments  currently available (in The Bernanke Economy). However, it seems the institutional asset managers that are doing this have ignored that single family home property management and single family home ‘flipping’ are generally not ‘scaleable’ activities. That is, the operational costs of single family property management and single family home 'flipping' are very high, and the activities involved usually cannot reach economies of scale.

Meanwhile, the media is reporting a recovering market in housing. And, some homeowners who have discretion about the timing of selling their homes make a discretionary decision not to list their home and to wait for a better price – because all indications and the media say home prices are rising. This reluctance to list reduces the LISTED inventory, which further creates the appearance of a recovering housing market.

Then, in a few months, the investors in the institutional funds that have purchased homes 'in-bulk' begin to realize the institutional managers are not reaping the expected returns and they begin to cash-out of the institutional home buying funds. This cashing-out forces the institutional funds to sell the homes they bought ‘in bulk’ at the best price they can get. 

Many very smart institutional investors have mentioned the operational difficulty and lack of ‘scaleability’ as reasons bulk home buyers may not succeed at single family home property management and / or single family home ‘flipping’.

Some Resources:

Private Equity Has Too Much Money to Spend on Homes By John Gittelsohn | pub. Bloomberg News - Jun 12, 2012:  http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-13/private-equity-has-too-much-money-to-spend-on-homes-mortgages.html

Institutional Investors Are Turning to Residential Foreclosures Investing in single-family rental market in its infancy By Arleen Jacobius | Pensions & Investments April 2, 2012: http://www.pionline.com/article/20120402/PRINTSUB/304029978  

Insight: The Wall Street Gold Rush in Foreclosed Homes By Matthew Goldstein & Jenneifer Ablan - Forbes Magazine 3/20/2012, at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/20/us-usa-foreclosures-investors-idUSB...

Investors Flock to Housing Looking to Buy Thousands of Homes in Bulk By Morgan Brennan - Forbes Magazine 4/3/2012, at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2012/04/03/investors-flock-to-housing-aspiring-to-own-thousands-of-homes/

Och-Ziff Calls Top Of "REO-To-Rental", And Distressed Housing Demand, With Exit Of Landlord Business Submitted by Tyler Durden on 10/17/2012 http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-10-17/och-ziff-calls-top-reo-rental-exit-landlord-business 

 The Housing Bet Warren Buffett Wishes He Could Make By Steve Shaefer pub. Forbes Markets 3/29/2012: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2012/03/29/the-housing-bet-warren-buffett-wishes-he-could-make/#  

Critics Question Investment Fund’s Sacramento Rental Venture By Hudson Sangree and Philip Reese Sacramento Bee – Monday April 8, 2013 http://www.sacbee.com/2013/04/08/5323832/critics-question-investment-funds.htm

Lower Rates Push Yield Seekers to Higher Risk By A. Gary Shilling – Bloomberg News - Jan 29, 2013, at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-29/lower-rates-push-yield-seekers-to-higher-risk.html

Warren Buffett Says, “Buy Real Estate Now!” at the same time he mentions the problem of “scaleability” see video from CNBC Squawk Box pub. February 27, 2012: https://youtu.be/XOGP6hd0B24 

The Undisclosed Inventory of Homes

My comment on the article, Foreclosure Machines Still Running on ‘Low’  By Robbie Whelan in The Wall Street Journal [Developments Blog] – pub. July 31, 2012 at: http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2012/07/31/foreclosure-machines-still-running-on-low/?blog_id=36&post_id=21215

The shadow inventory and the large inventory of bank ‘Real Estate Owned’ (REO’s) is a phenomenon which I believe has been caused to a significant extent by the decision to delay the implementation of FAS #157 [commonly known as ‘fair value accounting’ or ‘mark-to-market accounting’].

The delay in the implementation of mark-to-market accounting allows mortgage investors to report (on books and records) the value of their mortgage investments at the investment’s origination value rather than requiring these assets be valued at an estimate of current market value. See article, Congress Helped Banks Defang Key Rule By Susan Pulliam & Tom McGinty - pub. Wall Street Journal June 3, 2009 | at: http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB124396078596677535-lMyQjAxMTIyNDMzMTkzNjEwWj.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email

For further insight into the implications, and one of the likely consequences of the delay of mark-to-market accounting watch a brief video-clip of a portion of Georgetown University Law Professor, Adam Levitin's U.S. Congressional testimony titled, Federal Regulators Don't Want to Know at:

The shadow inventory and bank REO's (not under current listing contracts) represent an historically significant supply of housing which in many ways is not transparent or adequately disclosed, and therefore is not fully-factored into the ‘market's pricing” of homes (supply and demand).

Margin Call?

An excerpt from an article which appeared in The Wall Street Journal Opinion Section – December 8, 2011

Subsidizing Wall Street to Buy Chinese Solar Panels*

By T.J. RODGERS

At the end of the recently released film "Margin Call," the chairman of the fictional investment bank that triggered the mortgage-backed securities meltdown sits in his executive dining room, looking down on the Hudson River sunset while enjoying a steak and an expensive bottle of Bordeaux. Why not? He has just saved billions for his shareholders by dumping the firm's entire "toxic loan" portfolio in one hectic trading day. Just before giving a bonus to the brilliant analyst who foresaw the meltdown only hours in advance, the chairman predicts, "There's going to be a lot of money made coming out of this mess."  

Wall Street understands how to make money, up-market or down. "Margin Call" may fuel Occupy movement ire, but in creating mortgage-backed securities, Wall Street did nothing other than facilitate home-financing access to the next tier of less-qualified home buyers, as demanded by every president since Bill Clinton. After that, the bankers did exactly what their shareholders wanted: bundle those risky loans into securities, sell them to lock in the profits, and dump the risk right back onto the federal government—where it belonged.

My purpose is not to debate the morality of mortgage-backed securities but to update the Law of Unintended Consequences with the corollary Law of Misguided Subsidies: Whenever Washington disrupts a market by dumping subsidies into it, Wall Street will find a way to pocket a majority of the money while the intended subsidy beneficiaries are harmed by the resulting market turmoil.

The recent crash in mortgage-backed securities was a near-repeat of the savings-and-loan crash of the 1980s, in which Washington insured the S&L industry but failed to set limits on high-risk loans. When the bubble burst, Washington paid Wall Street the insurance money while homeowners lost huge sums in real-estate hell. Wall Street understands how to manage risk; the federal government and consumers do not.

 

 

 

The complete article may be seen at:

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052970204903804577082631863392956-lMyQjAxMTAxMDEwNTExNDUyWj.html?mod=wsj_share_email