The Origins of the Financial Crisis
The financial crisis that has been wreaking havoc in markets in the U.S. and across the world since August 2007 had its origins in an asset price bubble that interacted with new kinds of financial innovations that masked risk; with companies that failed to follow their own risk management procedures; and with regulators and supervisors that failed to restrain excessive risk taking. A bubble formed in the housing markets as home prices across the country increased each year from the mid 1990s to 2006, moving out of line with fundamentals like household income. Like traditional asset price bubbles, expectations of future price increases developed and were a significant factor in inflating house prices. As individuals witnessed rising prices in their neighborhood and across the country, they began to expect those prices to continue to rise, even in the late years of the bubble when it had nearly peaked.
The rapid rise of lending to subprime borrowers helped inflate the housing price bubble. Before 2000, subprime lending was virtually non-existent, but thereafter it took off exponentially. The sustained rise in house prices, along with new financial innovations, suddenly made subprime borrowers — previously shut out of the mortgage markets — attractive customers for mortgage lenders. Lenders devised innovative Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) — with low “teaser rates,” no down-payments, and some even allowing the borrower to postpone some of the interest due each month and add it to the principal of the loan — which were predicated on the expectation that home prices would continue to rise.
But innovation in mortgage design alone would not have enabled so many subprime borrowers to access credit without other innovations in the so-called process of “securitizing” mortgages — or the pooling of mortgages into packages and then sellSUMMARYing securities backed by those packages to investors who receive pro rata payments of principal and interest by the borrowers. The two main government-sponsored enterprises devoted to mortgage lending, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, developed this financing technique in the 1970s, adding their guarantees to these “mortgage-backed securities” (MBS) to ensure their marketability.
For roughly three decades, Fannie and Freddie confined their guarantees to “prime” borrowers who took out “conforming” loans, or loans with a principal below a certain dollar threshold and to borrowers with a credit score above a certain limit. Along the way, the private sector developed MBS backed by non-conforming loans that had other means of “credit enhancement,” but this market stayed relatively small until the late 1990s. In this fashion, Wall Street investors effectively financed homebuyers on Main Street. Banks, thrifts, and a new industry of mortgage brokers originated the loans but did not keep them, which was the “old” way of financing home ownership.
