Politics | Discount Mortgage Rates and Brokers

Christopher asked:

The recession was caused by people being unable to pay back their home mortgages because the mortgage rates were too high?

Banks were not getting their money back from home owners, causing a credit crunch, thus they were unable to lend money to big businesses.

Big businesses then had to cut back on expenses and began to lay people off the the thousands.

So what caused the mortgage rates to go up so high that started this financial mess in the first place?

San Diego Property Management

Sean asked:

First wave of sub-prime mortgage defaults over.

Second wave of mortgage defaults coming now to higher quality credit risks. These are people who have bought homes in the last five years and who have taken out home equity loans. Mortgages now going under water owe more than house is worth. This wave of defaults will take upwards of 10 to 12 months to clear.

Third wave of mortgage defaults due to begin this year and continue through 2011 are Option Arms and Altay; as payments are automatically resetting to higher rates. We saw some fail last month because of a 3% rate hike, next month is the beginning of the end as rates start to climb even higher.
Estimated – 8 million defaults in next four years.

As if this is not enough we have the next huge failure to come in the commercial real estate market, that will make the sub-prime fiasco look like kids play!

Then comes credit cards and auto loans in the end.

Bozeman Real Estate Listings

america first asked:

The Subprime Debacle
by Dr. Kuni Michael Beasley
30 Years in Gestation

The Democrats are doing a lot to try to pin the subprime debacle on the Republicans and the Bush administration. However, there is a long tail to this problem that just happened to pop at this time.

Now, for the rest of the story. Definitions first.

Fannie Mae is the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA), founded in 1938 as a publically traded government sponsored enterprise (GSE) that is stockholder owned that makes loans and issue loan guarantees.
Its cousin is Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC), founded in 1970 as another GSE created to expand the secondary market for mortgages. Freddie Mac buys individual mortgages on the secondary market, pooled them into packages, and sold them to investors on the open market.

The secondary market packaged mortgages as collateral and issues securities called collateralized mortgage obligations (CMO) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO), to reduce the risk of individual loans. CMOs are a separate entity that is the actual legal owner of the mortgages it has in a “pool.” CMOs sell bonds to investors based on the value of the mortgages. Investors receive payments based on the increased value of the loans in the pool. The collateral for the bonds are the actual mortgages.

CDOs are a separate entity like CMOs, but are more focused on fixed income assets such as, but not limited to mortgages (and can include commercial mortgages and corporate loans). The focus is cash flow and slices (tranches) of these cash flows are sold to investors.

The subprime mortgage crisis surfaced first in 2007, but it had been incubating for years, indeed, decades. Though roots can be traced back to the New Deal legislation in the 1930’s, the current crisis actually draws its source from the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) [1977] during the Carter administration that forced banks to lend money to less credit worthy clients. Lending institutions were evaluated to determine if it met the “credit needs of the community” and this was factored into regulatory decisions of the federal government such as applications for facilities, mergers, and acquisitions.

Interest in the CRA resurfaced in the Clinton administration when regulations in the CRA (which could be manipulated without any participation of congress) essentially forced institutions to offer loans to higher risk individuals and businesses. The term “Ninja” loans emerged describing high risk loans made to people with No Income, No Job, and no Assets, but completed a particular bank’s portfolio sufficient to keep federal regulators off their backs.

As access to easy money for high risk borrowers increased, certain institutions began to take advantage of these new opportunities to score fed points and make easy money. Name dropping here: Countrywide began to process, package, and offer investment instruments (CMOs) based on these loans. Revisions to the CRA by the Clinton administration allowed mortgage companies to offer loans without the relative reserve of deposits normally required of banks and other financial institutions.
In addition, this allowed for securitization of sub prime mortgages based on the pooling and packaging of cash-flow producing assets into securities that could be sold to investors – with the asset value not tagged to actual value of the property, but to the value of the cash flow produced by the asset held (sounds weird). The first public securitization of CRA loans was started in 1997 by (familiar name) Bear Stearns!

Now, let’s understand sub-prime loans for a moment. A sub-prime loan is a mortgage offered at a deep discount on interest the first year or two so the borrower could qualify for a larger loan and more expensive house, betting that their economic profile would get better and they could afford large payments later. Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) are a form of this where the entry rate is low and rises based on certain criteria such as the rates for government securities.

Simply put, lenders (not necessarily banks, but more often mortgage
companies) offered low cost, low entry rate mortgages to people who would not normally qualify for that amount of debt.

These loans were “warehoused” by financial institutions, where a financial institution like Merrill Lynch would set up a separate, but wholly owned mortgage company (First Franklin) to attract loans.
Merrill Lynch would retain control of the loans as a “trustee” or “servicer,” and derive benefits from fees for “managing” the loans and increase assets by keeping escrow deposits. In turn, these loans would be sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (who were assumed to guarantee the loans), who, in turn, repackaged them for the secondary market.

In 2003 the Bush administration tried to head-off what they saw as a potential crisis by moving the supervision of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under a new agency

Pikesville Homes

FozzieBear asked:

The Dow at a 10-year low.
A tax cheat running the IRS
Another tax cheat as the Chief of Staff
A trillion-dollar plus federal deficit
Over one-half of voters relieved of any federal tax liability
Government mandated limits on executive compensation
Three failed attempts and still no Commerce Secretary
Tom Daschle rides his free limo into the sunset – after paying taxes he evaded.
The White House performance czar turns out to be a tax cheat also
Lobbyists hired to work for the Obama Administration
The census gets politicized
Double government spending in one year
The word “freedom” fades into obscurity
Increasing home loan mortgage rates across the board
Millions of Americans made dependent on government
Moving unionization-by-intimidation forward
Welfare checks become “tax cuts.”
Illegal aliens free to work on taxpayer-funded “stimulus” projects
Welfare reform reversed, states ordered to increase welfare roles
Move to silence critical talk radio shows
Selling Senate seats
Obama books in religious sections of book stores
More government workers, not private sector jobs
A government bureaucracy to intrude on doctor/patient relationships
Stage set for medical services rationing
Annual welfare checks for middle income families

Greenwich Real Estate

East Coaster asked:

I guess the Chief Of Staff slot sold for 100 million to Freddie Mac, anyone else got a better guess?

President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

Emanuel was not named in the SEC complaint (click here to read) but the entire board was later accused by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) (click here to read) of having “failed in its duty to follow up on matters brought to its attention

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6201900&page=1

After all Barry is giving away Trillions to these companies and you get what you pay for.

Natural Whole Food Diets

extremist asked:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul128.html

Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing on the Treasury Department’s views regarding government sponsored enterprises (GSEs). I would also like to thank Secretaries Snow and Martinez for taking time out of their busy schedules to appear before the committee.

I hope this committee spends some time examining the special privileges provided to GSEs by the federal government. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the housing-related GSEs received $13.6 billion worth of indirect federal subsidies in fiscal year 2000 alone. Today, I will introduce the Free Housing Market Enhancement Act, which removes government subsidies from the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), and the National Home Loan Bank Board.

One of the major government privileges granted to GSEs is a line of credit with the United States Treasury. According to some estimates, the line of credit may be worth over $2 billion. This explicit promise by the Treasury to bail out GSEs in times of economic difficulty helps the GSEs attract investors who are willing to settle for lower yields than they would demand in the absence of the subsidy. Thus, the line of credit distorts the allocation of capital. More importantly, the line of credit is a promise on behalf of the government to engage in a huge unconstitutional and immoral income transfer from working Americans to holders of GSE debt.

The Free Housing Market Enhancement Act also repeals the explicit grant of legal authority given to the Federal Reserve to purchase GSE debt. GSEs are the only institutions besides the United States Treasury granted explicit statutory authority to monetize their debt through the Federal Reserve. This provision gives the GSEs a source of liquidity unavailable to their competitors.

The connection between the GSEs and the government helps isolate the GSE management from market discipline. This isolation from market discipline is the root cause of the recent reports of mismanagement occurring at Fannie and Freddie. After all, if Fannie and Freddie were not underwritten by the federal government, investors would demand Fannie and Freddie provide assurance that they follow accepted management and accounting practices.

Ironically, by transferring the risk of a widespread mortgage default, the government increases the likelihood of a painful crash in the housing market. This is because the special privileges granted to Fannie and Freddie have distorted the housing market by allowing them to attract capital they could not attract under pure market conditions. As a result, capital is diverted from its most productive use into housing. This reduces the efficacy of the entire market and thus reduces the standard of living of all Americans.

Despite the long-term damage to the economy inflicted by the government’s interference in the housing market, the government’s policy of diverting capital to other uses creates a short-term boom in housing. Like all artificially-created bubbles, the boom in housing prices cannot last forever. When housing prices fall, homeowners will experience difficulty as their equity is wiped out. Furthermore, the holders of the mortgage debt will also have a loss. These losses will be greater than they would have otherwise been had government policy not actively encouraged over-investment in housing.

Perhaps the Federal Reserve can stave off the day of reckoning by purchasing GSE debt and pumping liquidity into the housing market, but this cannot hold off the inevitable drop in the housing market forever. In fact, postponing the necessary, but painful market corrections will only deepen the inevitable fall. The more people invested in the market, the greater the effects across the economy when the bubble bursts.

No less an authority than Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has expressed concern that government subsidies provided to GSEs make investors underestimate the risk of investing in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Mr. Chairman, I would like to once again thank the Financial Services Committee for holding this hearing. I would also like to thank Secretaries Snow and Martinez for their presence here today. I hope today’s hearing sheds light on how special privileges granted to GSEs distort the housing market and endanger American taxpayers. Congress should act to remove taxpayer support from the housing GSEs before the bubble bursts and taxpayers are once again forced to bail out investors who were misled by foolish government interference in the market. I therefore hope this committee will soon stand up for American taxpayers and investors by acting on my Free Housing Market Enhancement Act.
Yes, I knew before I asked that some will divert from the fact that Ron Paul is right with things like “It’s a cut and paste”, or “he’s a nutjob”, etc. Why do you people bother answering at all?

for sale by owner

East Coaster asked:

President-elect Barack Obama’s newly appointed chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, served on the board of directors of the federal mortgage firm Freddie Mac at a time when scandal was brewing at the troubled agency and the board failed to spot “red flags,” according to government reports reviewed by ABCNews.com.

According to a complaint later filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie Mac, known formally as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, misreported profits by billions of dollars in order to deceive investors between the years 2000 and 2002.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=6201900&page=1

Real Estate Web Design

extremist asked:

http://libertymaven.com/2009/05/15/ron-paul-attacks-keynesian-economics-on-msnbc/5755/

Ron Paul had a great appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” this morning. Scarborough and the other host praised Ron Paul for being one of the only people to predict our economic crisis.

Joe reads Ron Paul’s own words in 2003 in amazement and asks how he knew what was going to happen when the others did not. The answer is quite simple really, two words: Austrian Economics. Paul then cites Keynes as the one person responsible for our current woes.

Watch the appearance below.

[video]

Here is the full article they are discussing in the video:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul128.html