Obama Administration Learned Nothing from 2008 Financial Crisis, Mortgage Expert Says

Ed Pinto had a depressing and revealing op-ed in The Wall Street Journal Friday about how the Obama administration is artificially creating markets for risky mortgages, using the Federal Housing Finance Agency and the government-controlled mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Not only will this put taxpayers at risk, but it will burden prudent homebuyers through “cross-subsidies” for risky borrowers “subsidized by less-risky loans.”

Long ago, Pinto worked as an executive and credit manager at Fannie Mae before it began buying up massive amounts of risky mortgages to pursue short-run profits and meet federal affordable-housing mandates.

As Pinto notes in “Building Toward Another Mortgage Meltdown,” Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Mel Watt has pushed for a resurgence in risky mortgage loans, and hinted at more mischief to come in his January 27 testimony to the House Financial Services Committee, in which he “told the committee” that he expects to release by “March new guidance on the ‘guarantee fee’ charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to cover the credit risk” on the loans they acquire. 

As Pinto points out,

In the Obama administration, new guidance on housing policy invariably means lowering standards to get mortgages into the hands of people who may not be able to afford them. Earlier this month, President Obama announced that the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) will begin lowering annual mortgage-insurance premiums ‘to make mortgages more affordable and accessible.’

Government programs to make mortgages more widely available to low- and moderate-income families have consistently offered overleveraged, high-risk loans that set up too many homeowners to fail. In the long run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, for example, federal mortgage agencies and their regulators cajoled and wheedled private lenders to loosen credit standards. They have been doing so again. When the next housing crash arrives . . . homeowners and taxpayers will once again pay dearly.

Even progressive media like the Village Voice have reported on how the Department of Housing & Urban Development—especially Clinton’s HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo—spawned the mortgage crisis by pressuring lenders and the mortgage giants to promote affordable housing, helping “plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.” A 2011 book by The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson also chronicles how “it was Fannie Mae and the government housing policies it supported, pursued, and exploited that brought the financial system to a halt in 2008.”

But the Obama administration learned nothing from this, and has expanded this risky, “affordable-housing” push. Pinto notes, lowering mortgage-insurance premiums for risky borrowers is the centerpiece of a “new affordable-lending effort by the Obama administration,” which led to the “the latest salvo in a price war between two government mortgage giants to meet government mandates”:

Fannie Mae fired the first shot in December when it relaunched the 30-year, 97% loan-to-value, or LTV, mortgage (a type of loan that was suspended in 2013). Fannie revived these 3% down-payment mortgages at the behest of its federal regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA)—which has run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac since 2008, when both government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) went belly up and were put into conservatorship. . . .

As Pinto notes,

Mortgage price wars between government agencies are particularly dangerous, since access to low-cost capital and minimal capital requirements gives them the ability to continue for many years—all at great risk to the taxpayers. Government agencies also charge low-risk consumers more than necessary to cover the risk of default, using the overage to lower fees on loans to high-risk consumers. Starting in 2009 the FHFA released annual studies documenting the widespread nature of these cross-subsidies. The reports showed that low down payment, 30-year loans to individuals with low FICO scores were consistently subsidized by less-risky loans.“

But HUD consistently prodded the government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to loosen safeguards against risky loans:

In 1997, for example, HUD commissioned the Urban Institute to study Fannie and Freddie’s single-family underwriting standards. The Urban Institute’s 1999 report found that “the GSEs’ guidelines, designed to identify creditworthy applicants, are more likely to disqualify borrowers with low incomes, limited wealth, and poor credit histories; applicants with these characteristics are disproportionately minorities.” By 2000 Fannie and Freddie did away with down payments and raised debt-to-income ratios. HUD encouraged them to more aggressively enter the subprime market, and the GSEs decided to re-enter the “liar loan” (low doc or no doc) market, partly in a desire to meet higher HUD low- and moderate-income lending mandates.

Despite the calamitous consequences for taxpayers of past risky loans that were overvalued or underpriced, the Obama administration is promoting such lending. It is ignoring “Congress’s 2011 mandate that Fannie’s regulator adjust the prices of mortgages and guarantee fees to make sure they reflect the actual risk of loss—that is, to eliminate dangerous and distortive pricing by the two GSEs.” The prior director of the FHFA, a non-political appointee, had “worked hard to do so.” But “Mr. Watt, his successor, suspended [those] efforts to comply with Congress’s mandate. Now that Fannie will once again offer heavily subsidized 3%-down mortgages, massive new cross-subsidies will return, and the congressional mandate will be ignored.” The Obama administration is also ignoring the law’s capital requirements for the Federal Housing Administration, which “hasn’t met its capital obligation since 2009 and will not reach compliance until the fall of 2016” even under rosy economic projections.

We previously discussed how the Obama administration is prodding banks to make risky loans, and suing some banks that were reluctant to do so, here, here, here, and here.