Securitizing Home Loan

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.

The real estate industry is thriving with approximately sixty-eight percent of all Americans being homeowners. With low interest rates, 1st time home buyer down payment assistance programs, and government funded educational opportunities (i.e. the Home Ownership Center of Greater Cincinnati), the real estate and mortgage lending industries will continue to flourish. However, there are some unethical lending practices that are threatening the housing industry as a whole.

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.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) explains the old system of lending and the new securitization process. Matt Demon narrates how the home buyers repaid their loans to lenders, and consequently, the lenders sold the loans to the investment banks which combined the mortgage loans with other credit loans creating a collateral debt obligation a complex derivative. The collateral debt obligation sold to investors who paid the rating agency to evaluate the CDO's. The home buyers were now paying investors through this

Prior to the 2008 economic depression, obtaining a mortgage was relatively simple for home buyers. However, many of those mortgages had provisions that made it difficult for borrowers to repay their mortgages (“Dodd-Frank,” n.d.). As a result, many homeowners lost their homes when they were unable to repay their mortgages, which led to the real estate crisis. In 2010 the Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act, also known as the Dodd-Frank Act, was enacted to reform how mortgage servicers vetted borrowers and to eliminate the use of predatory loan practices (Cheeseman, 2013, p. 485). Under the Dodd-Frank Act, creditors must establish borrower’s credit history, income and expected income, debt-to-income ratio, and other factors before

In these days of economic upheaval, rising unemployment, increasing bankruptcies, and car and credit card loan defaults, perhaps nothing is more frightening than the rising rates of home foreclosures. Owning a home has long been considered the cornerstone of the Great American Dream, and now for many that dream has turned into a nightmare, from which there seems no escape. The combination of predatory lending practices and consumers who have for to long lived beyond their means has created an escalating problem. Unfortunately, there are no easy answers.

The beginning of the crisis: From the early to the mid-2000’s, high-risk mortgages became available from lenders who funded mortgages by repackaging them into pools that were sold to investors. New financial products were used to apportion these risks, with private-label mortgage-backed securities providing most of the funding of subprime mortgages. The less

Burning Down the House: Mortgage Fraud and the Destruction of Residential Neighborhoods Ann Fulmer March 2010

Within the past three to four years, the United States has seen the dramatic collapse of the housing market. The housing bubble spurred by ill-advised loans to individuals who could not afford a mortgage, complicated contracts which had interest rates and payments changing without reason, and the mass purchasing of bad loans by lending superpowers, had popped. The rapid increase in the value of homes across the country for the previous decade, had been a falsity, in which billions of dollars funded by investments and home purchases were lost within a few months (Wikipedia.org: United States housing bubble). Millions of home owners were found to be unable to pay their mortgages, leading to hundreds of thousands of foreclosures. These

Several years ago, many of us could not imagine mortgage meltdown ending. It seemed as if the foreclosures/short sales were increasing and the American dream of buying a home was decreasing. Many people felt hopeless and cheated when it came to the economy’s poor status due to the housing crash. Many lessons were learned from the collapse and although it may seem hard to believe, there were silver linings in the mistakes made during the mortgage meltdown. Today, real estate buyers are benefiting from the past mistakes and have more confidence in their home buying purchases.

It is no secret that tens of millions of homeowners got into trouble with predatory home mortgages. Tens of millions of them have MERS-originated Mortgages. If you asked the average mortgagor on the street if they knew what a “MERS-originated Mortgage” was, they couldn’t tell you. They don’t know because they weren’t told at closing that the “funds” they were receiving to buy their (generally over-appraised) home may NOT have come from the source named on their Mortgage or Deed of Trust. Instead, the MERS® System was used because the borrowers’ loans were securitized. This “system” was created specifically for that purpose (to track the sale and transfer of loans electronically, in a MERSCORP-owned database, with no regulatory oversight). You can’t believe everything you read either. Due diligence is required here.

Loans that have been securitized by banks were readily sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in large pools where it has become obvious that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were turning a blind eye as to the quality of the mortgages they were purchasing. This became evident with the complete breakdown of the mortgage industry even though regulations were in place to serve the public Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was supposed to be watchdogs for the industry but any and played a vital role in contributing to what is become known as the great recession. It is important to mention that very little has still been done to these institutions and they are still buying the same low quality paper that got them into trouble in the first place.

You now know why people do securitization and why people risk getting their hands and clothes stained with soot. The benefits are too good to be true, it’s as low risk as you want it to be, you can share the blame with your friends and co-workers, and lastly, it is all recorded on one neat, clean, and organized Balance sheet. The cons are also easily summarized by the pros, the reward is as big as you want it to be so the more money you put in the bigger the risk and the bigger the loss if it all goes under, this was the main tone of the financial crisis of 2007 big risk big

Traditionally banks funded their loans from deposits. But the us government found that they could not keep pace with the demand for residential mortgages with this type of funding. Portfolios of mortgages were created and cash flows (principal amount and interest payments) were packaged as securities and sold to investors. Securitization allowed the banks to increase their lending faster than their deposits were growing. The US government created Government National Mortgage Association which protected the mortgage backed securities investors against defaults by borrowers. As the securitization market developed investors became comfortable with the situations where there was no guarantee against defaults by borrowers.

My analysis of securitization processes will be supported by a number of multimedia and scholarly discourses, ranging from case studies from across the world to econometric analyses using