Using Social Proof And Common Biases

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.

In his essay “The Mansion: A Subprime Parable,” Michael Lewis uncovers the reality about the American real estate issue. A great number of Americans have obtained homes that they cannot afford. Banks have loaned out home loans that individuals cannot pay back. Some days it seems as if half of the nation is financially submerged. It is no doubt that certain home loan specialists, and numerous huge firms can be blamed for this crisis, yet they cannot be blamed for everything. Most of the blame, Lewis argues, has to be given to us, the citizens. The fact of the matter is that Americans are greedy, we desire luxurious things that we can show off to everyone around us to prove how well we are doing. This is true especially when it comes to housing. Numerous have been brainwashed into accepting that if a major house implies achievement, then the

In 2008 America’s financial system was brought to a stand still as decades of negligence and financial decisions caused our economy to sink into the worst recession since the great depression. Cultivating a problem worse than America has seen in roughly a century points one finger not at a particular cause, but a string of events that finally gave way. Now, eight years later our economy is still recovering, and time has allowed us to look back at decades of mistakes to try and connect the dots of the perfect storm that collapsed our financial market in 2008. In 2009 Brookings Institution, one of Washington’s oldest think tanks, concluded there were three causes that resulted in the crisis. Economists Martin Baily and Douglas Elliot stated that the results of government intervention in the housing market, the influences Wall Street had on Washington, and global economic forces were the three main causes of the economic collapse. They believed that a housing bubble inflated when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises, intervened in the housing market. The banking industry was called out to be blamed for years of manipulation of our political and financial systems. Lastly, Baily and Elliot cite the global economy and the existence of a credit boom throughout European and Asian nations. Low inflation and consistent growth throughout the world economy spiked investors’ interest in acquiring riskier investments, which encouraged

Michael Lewis, The Big Short, film strategically provided three separate but parallel stories of the U.S mortgage housing of 2008. The movie demonstrated how Wall Street, in a desperate search for profits, lunched “bonds” products with riskier mortgages. As a result, lenders were no longer interested in if a borrower could pay them back. In disbelieved, I noticed deceitful tactics that lenders used, throughout the movie, to convince Americans to take out mortgages they could not afford. Chronologically, Americans’ saving levels dropped while countries ' savings tripled. Once the Recession was in full effect, the US government rescued Wall Street, passing an unimaginably large bill, the bill we are still paying off. To most Americans’ surprise, nearly all of the rescue money went into Wall Street executives’ pockets.

Now these financial markets have allowed many to become successful and live the “American Dream,” but have also caused many to suffer and lose everything. Back in 2007, the United States’ economy experienced a large financial crisis that almost paralleled the financial crisis during the Great Depression. Large financial institutions suffered a great deal and the stock market plummeted worldwide. The housing market took a huge hit as well, causing many foreclosures and evictions. This crisis stemmed from a major default in the subprime mortgage market. The bad credit records should have given some forewarning to the looming crisis, but the financial innovation for these mortgages gave investors a chance to succeed in the market. So as a large volume of cash flowed into the United States, the subprime mortgage market took off and became a trillion dollar market by 2007 (Mishkin 208). With prices rising in the housing market, subprime borrowers could simply refinance their houses by taking out even larger loans as homes appreciated in value. These borrowers were also unlikely to default because the houses could be sold off to pay back the loan. This benefited investors since the securities backed by cash flows from subprime mortgages had high returns. And this continued growth of the subprime mortgage market further increased the demand for houses and continued to fuel the increase in housing prices.

The “Great Recession,” the name given to the financial crisis that occurred in the United States between 2007 and 2009, saw the biggest contraction of the US economy since World War II (Amadeo). Real GDP fell as sharply as a -6.4% annual rates and unemployment rose above ten percent in the aftermath of the crisis. The primary culprit of the Great Recession was the US housing market. New financial instruments that allowed for lending to subprime customers, along with deregulation of the banking industry, and asymmetric information produced by credit agencies all played significant roles in these happenings. Moral hazard on behalf of financial product providers ultimately led to the asymmetric information that allowed the housing market to collapse.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” These words were first written by Italian philosopher, George Santayana. The meaning is all but spelled out for the reader, the past is important, it deserves its due - don’t brush it aside, don’t pretend it didn’t happen – to better build the world of tomorrow, you need to remember (and account for) the mistakes of yesterday. The mortgage crisis, and all that it lead too for our economy, back in 2007, is an event that should never be forgotten… lest we inadvertently doom ourselves by going through it all over again. Today, of course, the situation has significantly improved; our nation managed to get over this rather sizable hump and bounce back from it (not fully healed, but certainly better than we were only a few years ago). That’s not good enough for me though; in order to truly overcome this event (that many have already put behind them and forgotten about, myself included, prior to writing this essay) and push ahead, we need to go over how it happened in the first place. Therefore, today I’ll be talking about the mortgage meltdown crisis, suffered by the United States and felt around the world, of 2007; I will cover how the crisis actually happened, the lessons learned from the collapse / the silver linings of the collapse, and how real estate buyers are intelligently learning from the past in order to benefit today.

During the housing boom, the insecurity of consumer’s financial situations was used by those in finance to make a profit. Many entities were enticed by their greed to take risks and cut corners that ultimately affected the consumer, not themselves. The consumer’s own search for profit and their trust in the housing market made it easy for them to be lured into the gambling game being played by banks and investors.

In the late 2000’s, the US encountered an unforgettable financial crisis which was caused by low interest rates and sky high real estate prices. This enticed not only those within the US to purchase

After destroying an estimated $19.2 trillion of household wealth, costing an estimated 8.8 million jobs domestically, and preventing unknown trillions of dollars in productivity, ethics in the capital markets industry has become a topic of great debate (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2012). This section will look at the events and behaviors that contributed to the 2008 Financial Crisis and attempt to answer the question: Who is to blame for the Financial Crisis?

The year 2008 was a horrendous year for most, in terms of money. The housing bubble deflated and the steep drop in prices sent both institutional investors and average investors into financial turmoil. There is quite a bit of controversy as what actually caused the housing bubble, but in this essay we will be using the explanation given by John C. Coffee Jr. Here he identified various factors that worked in tandem to subsequently cause the financial crisis of 2008. The first was the systematic failure by what he termed a “gatekeeper.” Which he later defines as financial institutions that provides verification for investors. In this instance the gatekeeper was the credit agencies who failed to appraise the actual value of the mortgaged backed

Indeed, the economy had experienced a bubble, especially in the housing department ("Wall Street gamed and inflated the housing bubble"), and the citizens had enjoyed a period of financial stability. With the occurrence of the Wall Street incident, to the contrary, a widespread downward trend had taken place, not gradually, but in one effective spurt. In this sense, Rich's claims are rather indisputable: the facts are not distorted or manipulated, and are highly sensible. In strengthening his first argument, that Wall Street had been the downfall of the modern United States economy, Rich also affirms that "[Wall Street] made out like bandits, and left millions of households in ruin". Here, his presentation of the citizens' experiences with the crisis lends great credibility to the publication as a whole, and itself is a well-supported stance by the actual course of events. Just as it would not be correct or in line with the truth of history to assert that the citizens of the country had remained in the same condition as before, it would be absolutely justified to confirm millions of citizens' losses of their homes and lifestyles. Henceforth, building upon his opening statement, Rich not only recounts the economic crisis and its associated terrors, but puts forth a call to action. Specifically, his column persuades his audience, the American public, to prevent the

Numerous defaults, slump in the value of houses and mortgage finance securities, and shortage of liquidity in banks characterized the real estate and mortgage meltdown in the United States. The relative ease of credit, complexity of loans, and exuberance by people to procure loans fuelled the meltdown (Paul 2010). Sun, Stewart, and Pollard (2010) observe that policymakers, financial manipulators, and market speculators contributed to the meltdown. Competing needs among stakeholders also aggravated the meltdown. Mortgage finance firms, United States government, market investors, homebuyers, and shareholders also contributed towards the worsened meltdown (Sun, Stewart, & Pollard 2010.) The meltdown had disastrous economic and social consequences. Banking and non-banking financial institutions closed down while individual homeowners lost their houses via foreclosure. The fall in house prices resulted in investors incurring substantial losses. Banks closed due to liquidity challenges associated with default from loan borrowers. Closure of mortgage and financial institutions also led to massive unemployment. The meltdown had vital lessons, attributes, and roles to the real estate and mortgage participants.

With loose regulations investment banks were buying MBS’s from banks and mortgage brokers, repackaging and reselling them to institutional investors, insurance companies, pension funds, university endowments and hedge funds.4 Without worrying about if or when a borrower would default on a loan, banks and mortgage brokers qualified people for loans who would under normal circumstances would never qualify. After September 11, 2001 Allen Greenspan lowered interest rates, resulting in a frenzy of new home loans between 2001 and 2004. Many mortgages financed with a variable interest rate to people who bought much more home than needed at a time when home values had already increased at an unsustainable rate. Borrowers not acting responsibly, overleveraged themselves with teaser rates and low down payments, achieving the American dream had never been so easy. Banks and mortgage brokers were incented to approve as many mortgages as possible as they were making money on both ends. A buyer paid origination

Due to such events as the subprime mortgage crisis, the auto market and Wall Street’s failure, the United States suffered a severe economic blow. Looking at the situation from an economic view, supply is supposed to equal demand. Due to the mortgage crisis and the careless attempts of some to make money, there is a superfluous amount of empty homes throughout the United States. In the subprime mortgage crisis, the nature of the failure was the inability to account for money given to individuals, who lack the appropriate requirements. In order to obtain a loan, collateral is needed. References were not being checked and poor credit history went ignored. People were obtaining loans and not paying attention to the interests rates associated. “This time around, the slack standards allowed millions of high-risk borrowers to get easy home mortgages. When this so-called subprime market collapsed beginning about a year ago, ordinary working people bore the brunt” (Gallagher, 2008). Companies were so anxious to place people in homes, that it cost them billions of dollars and