Mortgages in the Brink of Meltdown

The mortgage crisis of 2007 marked catastrophe for millions of homeowners who suffered from foreclosure and short sales. Most of the problems involving the foreclosing of families’ homes could boil down to risky borrowing and lending. Lenders were pushed to ensure families would be eligible for a loan, when in previous years the same families would have been deemed too high-risk to obtain any kind of loan. With the increase in high-risk families obtaining loans, there was a huge increase in home buyers and subsequently a rapid increase in home prices. As a result, prices peaked and then began falling just as fast as they rose. Soon after families began to default on their mortgages forcing them either into foreclosure or short sales. Who was to blame for the risky lending and borrowing that caused the mortgage meltdown? Many might blame the company Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but in reality the entire system of buying and selling and free market failed home owners and the housing economy.

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.

The bursting of the housing bubble, known more colloquially as the 2008 mortgage crisis, was preceded by a series of ill-fated circumstances that culminated in what has been considered to be the worst financial downfall since the Great Depression. After experiencing a near-unprecedented increase in housing prices from January 2002 until mid-2006, a phenomenon that was steadily fed by unregulated mortgage practices, the market steadily declined and the prior housing boom subsided as well. When housing prices dropped to about 25 percent below the peak level achieved in 2006 toward the close of 2008, liquidity and capital disappeared from the market.

After the optimistic forecast from the realstate that the houses value were going to increase, many institutions started to make adjustments to take profit from this trend. In some cases, prime mortgages were allowed for subprime borrowers to take. This might look like a great idea to financial institutions because the house values were rising: if a people (who in the first place couldn’t afford a house) stop paying their mortgages then the bank could sell the house for a value greater than the one at the moment of default. Everything was going well, so how is it that the crisis unfolded? Well, these institutions wanted to make more profit

In 2008 the real estate market crashed because of the Graham-Leach-Bliley Act and Commodities Futures Modernization Act, which led to shady mortgage lending or “liar loans” (Hartman). The loans primarily approved for lower income and middle class borrowers with little income or no job income verification, which lead to many buyers purchasing homes they could not afford because everyone wants a piece of the American dream; homeownership. Because of “reckless lending to lower- and middle-income borrowers who could not afford to repay their loans many of the home buyers lost everything when the market collapsed” (Tankersley 3). Homeowners often continued to live in their houses for months or years without paying any

When the housing bubble came tumbling down, there were high defaults rates on the electorate and this led to the emergence of high risk borrowers (Bianco, 2008). These were people with a questionable financial history and may have lacked the sufficient means to sustain their mortgage payments and hence, went under. This occasioned massive loses to all the players in the housing sector. The worst hit was the lenders and the various investors.

In the lead up to the current recession, when the real estate market began to fall, there were so many investors shorting stocks and securitized mortgage packages that were already falling, that the market simply fell further. There were no buyers at the bottom, and the professional investors made millions off of the losses of others. Beyond this, there was no real federal regulation for securitized mortgages, since there was no real way to gauge the mathematical risk of any given package. This allowed the investors to take advantage of the system and to short loans on real people’s homes. Once these securities were worthless, many of the homebuyer’s defaulted on their mortgages and were left penniless. No matter from which angle this crisis is looked at, the blame rests squarely with the managers who began the entire cycle, the ones who pursued the securitization of mortgages. Their incompetence not only led to the losses of Americans who have never invested in the stock market, but to losses for their shareholders.

The same way that President Clinton boosted about 67.5% of all American people could become homeowners in 1995, will be the same amount of people that lose their homes potentially putting children out on the street and increasing the unemployed homeless population taking up residence in tent cities, where is the hope now? Now is the time to act and include benefits to all homeowners that still believe in the America Dream. The Government and the Banks need to provide modification programs to all homeowners to reduce their interest rates to 4.75% regardless of equity or loan to values. If these homeowners who are currently 200% loan to value, care enough to strive to make every payment timely but are in loans that are coming due or ready to adjust, the industry owes these homeowners the right to a loan that they can afford and maintain regardless of the economy. Each homeowner in America is surrounded by foreclosed properties or short sales affecting their value and impeding any ability to successfully sell their properties.

I was unlucky enough to be front and center working for a homebuilder at the time of the real estate crisis. The mindset of sellers, realtors and mortgage brokers before the “bubble burst” was something that was very obvious to me as a lack of care for the long term homeowners and their financial welfare. While the banks like Countrywide Home Loans and Bear Stearns (JPMorgan Chase Bank) were making billions of dollars on mortgages, they were ridiculous in thinking that this would not come back on them tenfold. How can you purchase a loan and approve it through underwriting without first verifying the documents were accurate? How could I get a home loan when I was 21 and had a credit score of 1? Well, this definitely happened. I had a cosigner, of course, but still, the qualifying standards back in 2005 were relaxed to a fault. I liked to think that I was responsible enough to have this investment in a property to call my own, but we bought at the height of market in Orlando, and only gained in equity for about 6 months. In 2007, our house was worth $40,000.00 less than what we purchased it for.

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

The U.S. subprime mortgage crisis was a set of events that led to the 2008 financial crisis, characterized by a rise in subprime mortgage defaults and foreclosures. This paper seeks to explain the causes of the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and how this has led to a generalized credit crisis in other financial sectors that ultimately affects the real economy. In recent decades, financial industry has developed quickly and various financial innovation techniques have been abused widely, which is the main cause of this international financial crisis. In addition, deregulation, loose monetary policies of the Federal Reserve, shadow banking system also play

With all of the incentives and mortgage products given so easily to people that couldn’t afford the high prices (including interest rates), many people defaulted on their first mortgages because they were no longer were able to receive the profit from the homes they first intended to flip. “During the first quarter of 2008, nearly 9% of all mortgage holders were delinquent or in foreclosure, the highest rate since recordkeeping began in 1979. Foreclosure filings more than

Again, there were certainly many people who bought homes that they couldn’t afford and used their equity for loans like there was no tomorrow. Therefore, the foreclosure was sort of a formality and an appropriate action by the banks in those cases. Although, there were many responsible people who bought affordable homes, but got behind on payments after the economy crashed. Normally under those circumstances the bank has an incentive to keep borrowers in their homes because foreclosure is generally a costly decision for the bank as foreclosed homes are sold at a discount on the open market. However, many lenders have a perverse incentive to foreclose on a loan if the loan is insured through various investments such as derivatives and government guarantees. That insurance pays the lender the full price of the loan, instead of the reduced price from a sale on the open market. Thus, in a predictable fashion, the homeowners with loans that were backed by insurance have been foreclosed upon at significantly higher rates, as opposed to the borrowers with loans without insurance.

In addition, members of the market were looking for “higher yields” without realizing the risks and did not do proper research on the real estate industry. Meanwhile, insubstantial financial standards, unreliable preparations of risk management, and gradually complex and not clear financial products together created some weaknesses in the real estate system that led to the so-called “subprime mortgage crisis.” These are some of the causes of the subprime.

The case study discusses about the problems of meltdown of American economy due to the toxic subprime mortgages. This study combines the financial crisis and responsibility with ethical issues and moral hazards. It also gives a detailed description about the failure of world’s largest economy and tried to calculate its impact across various stakeholders. It goes inside the facts and analyzed different stakeholders’ roles and responsibilities towards the crash. It also discusses about the government’s policies which further contributed towards the destruction and had huge impact not only in one sector but also to many other countries, which took years for its recovery.