Freddy Mac Research Paper

It’s a risk that these investors took where in the end, they were financially hurt by it due to the part of the subprime lenders acting unethically. Not only the subprime lenders, but also the investors because they started to loose their standards once the subprime mortgages were booming and becoming more profitable. The investors were blinded by the profit and not paying attention to the qualities of business and the loans. Once the investors started to loose their standards, that’s when the subprime mortgages were being overlooked in which they were hurt by it.

JP Morgan bundled subprime mortgages into securities and marketed them as for sale as investments. Investors that bought the securities being offered by JP Morgan because they thought they were relatively safe is what led to the housing bubble. When hundreds of thousands of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages because they could not afford to make their payment, the value of the securities plummeted leaving investors with huge losses. This conduct of bundling toxic loans into securities and misleading investors contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 (USDOJ, 2005). JP Morgan's unethical behavior left many families homeless and caused taxpayers billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts of the financial industry.

In the years of 2007-2008, the world economy faced the most severe global financial crisis. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market was considered to be the trigger for the Global Financial Crisis. In the United States, low interest rates and financial deregulation created credit conditions where it was easier for the American people to buy homes with subprime loans. It increased the housing demand and raised the house prices in the market, which resulted in a housing bubble. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are two private corporations that are referred to as government-sponsored enterprises. They offered a mass of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) to the high-risk borrowers. Rising house prices created home equity for the borrowers, allowing

The Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) were to central semi-public organizations that assisted buyers with qualifying for mortgages. The both the company failed during the year 2008 when they were left with no money and were bankrupt. Like every company they were unable to pay back the money and they were in the looking for the help of government via taxpayer’s money. Hence, after the bankruptcy of 2008, the government has utilized huge amount of the taxpayer’s money for not letting them to shutdown and recovering them.

The secondary mortgage market was on the up-rise when Michael Lewis accepted a job at Salomon Brother’s. The secondary mortgage market was the selling of bonds, with a promise to be paid back with mortgage loans. The lender, whomever that

Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) a Government-Sponsored Enterprise (GSE) was chartered by Congress in 1970 with a public mission to stabilize the nation's residential mortgage markets and expand opportunities for homeownership and affordable rental housing. Freddie Mac (and its sister institution Federal National Mortgage Association -Fannie Mae) was set up based on the idea that neither government nor private banking interests could address the nation's housing finance needs. The company's charter established a board comprising 18 members - thirteen elected by shareholders and five appointed by the President of the United States. Their main mission was to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the U.S. housing market.

However, these mortgages required no income verification, or resources to pay for the mortgage, as long as they signed the mortgage papers. Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac were the lending arms that provided the money. Both are now government run, but formerly were privately held companies, unlike Ginnie Mae, which is fully backed by the government. When the homeowners could no longer pay their mortgages, the house of cards collapsed. With the lack of education in this country, the middle and lower class were greatly affected by the government’s intervention in Mortgage rates. The subprime mortgage crisis can be blamed for much of this country’s economic problems, but we don’t need to point fingers at what went wrong, we need to address the problems and find solutions.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government sponsored enterprises (GSE) that purchase mortgages, buy and sell mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and guarantee nearly half of the mortgages in the U.S. A variety of political and competitive pressures resulted in the GSEs ramping up their purchase and guarantee of risky mortgages in 2005 and 2006, just as the housing market was peaking.[258][259] Fannie and Freddie were both under political pressure to expand purchases of higher-risk affordable housing mortgage types, and under significant competitive pressure from large investment banks and mortgage

These brokers have neither the credit skills nor the interest to conduct proper payment due of potential homebuyers. Their interest is only in selling the houses as fast as they can. The MBS instruments allowed all financial institutions to transfer the risks to other investors. The dissociation of ownership of assets from risks encouraged poor credit assessment and was fundamental increasing the risks.

Before the beginning of the financial crisis in 2007, rules and policies passed in the United States had required the banking sector to allow more consumers to be able buy homes (Nielsen, 2008). Starting in the year 2004, the bursting of the housing bubble took place, when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two of the largest and most well-known mortgage lenders in the United States, obtained a large quantity of mortgage assets, including some chancy mortgages. They charged substantial fees and accepted lofty margins from these subprime mortgages. The mortgages were used as safety or security for getting private label mortgage-based

One of the main problems that Fannie Mae faced during the financial crisis was the dramatic drop of their stock prices. An article published by CNN during the financial crisis said, “Shares of mortgage financing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both plummeted Monday after an analyst with Lehman Brothers wrote in a report that the two companies may need to raise billions of dollars if accounting rules are changed” (www.money.cnn.com). In 2007, Fannie Mae’s stock prices were at the lowest level they had seen in

The new lackadaisical lending requirements and low interest rates drove housing prices higher, which only made the mortgage backed securities and CDOs seem like an even better investment. Now consider the housing market which had become a housing bubble, which had now burst, and now people could not pay for their incredibly expensive houses or keep up with their ballooning mortgage payments. Borrowers started defaulting, which put more houses back on the market for sale. But there were not any buyers. Supply was up, demand was down, and home prices started collapsing. As prices fell, some borrowers suddenly had a mortgage for way more than their home was currently worth and some stopped paying. That led to more defaults, pushing prices down further. As this was happening, the big financial institutions stopped buying sub-prime mortgages and sub-prime lenders were getting stuck with bad loans. By 2007, some big lenders had declared bankruptcy. The problems spread to the big investors, who had poured money into the mortgage backed securities and CDOs. They started losing money on their investments. All these of these financial instruments resulted in an incredibly complicated web of assets, liabilities, and risks. So that when things went bad, they went bad for the entire financial system. Some major financial players declared bankruptcy and others were forced into mergers, or needed

The problem was everyone who qualified for a mortgage already had one. Lenders knew if they sold a mortgage to a person that defaults the lender gets the house, and houses were always increasing in value in that market, that would be a valuable asset to sell. To keep up with the demand from investors, lenders started selling mortgages to borrowers who wouldn’t have qualified before because of the risk for default. These mortgages are called sub-prime mortgages and lenders started creating tons of them. In the unregulated market, lenders employed predatory tactics to get more borrowers with attractive offers such as no money down, no credit history required, even no proof of income. People never would have qualified before were now buying large houses, and the lenders sold their mortgages to Investment bankers. The investors packed subprime mortgages in with prime mortgages so credit agencies would still give a AAA rating. The rating Agencies who had a conflict of interest by receiving payments from the investment banks, had no liability if their credit ratings were correct or not. They turned a blind eye to the risky CDOs and kept giving AAA ratings. This worked for a while and everyone was happy including the new homeowners. The housing market became hyper inflated with more homeowners than ever. Wall Street continued to sell their CDO’s which were ticking time bombs. The subprime mortgages began

They enticed these customers by creating a new type of mortgage- variable rate, with low to zero initial interest rates, which later reset to higher levels. A large number of Americans took on these mortgages not realizing the real estate trap they were getting themselves in caused by their own actions. In the 2000s, as the mortgages became lower quality, Wall Street’s mortgage bond became even riskier. This should have made them more difficult to sell to investors because it would affect their ratings since riskier products should have lower ratings. However, the conflict was between Wall Street and the rating agencies since it’s Wall Street who pays these agencies. Likely because of this conflict, rating agencies assigned surprisingly high ratings for these ever risky mortgage bonds. Despite the boom in mortgage bonds, Wall Streets desire for more profits grew and led them to focus on the low ratings of the bottom (riskiest) tranches of the mortgage bonds. They came up with the clever idea to package the hundreds of different mortgage bonds together and on the principle of diversification, they could convince rating agencies to give them higher ratings as a whole. Instead of holding on to the mortgages and collecting monthly payments, local lenders started selling mortgages off to other financial institutions who packaged hundreds of mortgages

In the 1980s, investments banks such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley started selling mortgage bonds. Mortgage bonds were a collection of thousands of home mortgages, purchased from lenders, and their associated income streams (monthly payment). To address the fact that some homeowners often refinance their debt when interest rates are low which prematurely pays off the debt, mortgage bonds were stacked into layers called ‘tranches’. The lowest tranche represented mortgages to be paid off early, and the highest layer was the last mortgages to be paid off.