Mortgage Brokers

The mortgage broker is the middleman between the applicant and the rest of the mortgage industry. As banks and lenders grew in size, they lost personal contact with their applicants. This, in addition to the increasing complexities associated with financing a property, a need developed for a service that would help the applicant. This service gives the applicant the tools needed to make intelligent decisions when applying for a mortgage. The mortgage broker fills this need.

The lenders quickly realized that is was cost effective to deal with mortgage brokers. The manpower they required to deal directly with the consumer was large and the demand for mortgages was different year to year. If the lender didn’t hire additional personnel during periods of high volume, their staff would be overworked, errors would occur and they wouldn’t be able to capitalize on the increased volume of originations. If they increased their staff during periods of high volume, they would have too many people on their payroll when the market corrected, thus forcing them to lay off staff. This didn’t make for a healthy work environment.

The support staff that a lender needs to service a mortgage broker is far less than when dealing directly with the public for several reasons. To begin with, lenders can make demands on the broker that they can’t impose on the general public. Packages being submitted by a broker must be complete. If they are not, the lender is under no obligation to accept the package. The lender can demand that most of the application packages submitted not only meet the lender’s standards, but that they will also close. Typically, only 40% of the applications submitted directly to a lender by consumers, actually close. A lender will expect at least 80% of the applications submitted by a broker will close. All the “hand holding” that is an important part of customer service is passed onto the broker. A lender has better control of their manpower requirements over time, making for a stronger company because their employees feel secure in their positions.

The discounted pricing that a lender gives to a broker costs them less than it would cost the lender to originate the same total value of closed mortgages. This makes dealing with a mortgage broker a sound business decision for the lender.

Most mortgage brokers are small businesses. Their staff tends to develop a personal relationship with their clients. This gives the applicant the ability to be in constant communication with the same people over and over throughout the process. Becasue of the discounts provided to the broker from the lender, this personalized level of service comes with little or no cost to the consumer, making it a win-win situation for the applicant. This is the reason that the market share of broker originated mortgages reached nearly 70% a couple of years ago. An impressive number, when you consider residential mortgage brokers have been in existence for less than 20 years.

As efficient as this system was, it was missing one thing- accountability. Lenders were not as careful in deciding which brokers they wanted to deal with. A lender may have been negligent in their due diligence prior to working with a broker; they may have been afraid of losing market share if their standards were too high; they may have over-estimated their staff’s ability to underwrite mortgages; they may have under-estimated the greed of many brokers, etc. This resulted in the inferior quality of mortgages that were being closed on. Lower quality mortgages yield higher default rates, which lead to higher foreclosure rates, which lead to decreasing values of Mortgage Backed Securities, which in turn yields losses to investors.

The common element that we’ve seen, in all the businesses involved in the mortgage market, is that everyone was assuming that all other entities were doing their job properly. The lender assumed the broker was doing the right thing, the wholesaler assumed the lender had properly underwritten all mortgages, the investor had confidence in the rating agencies, the broker assumed that the lender’s interpretation of underwriting standards was valid, etc.

None of the industry players were doing their job as thoroughly as they should have. Something was bound to give. The spark that initiated the problems in the mortgage market was that the housing market began to slow down. Once appreciating housing prices could no longer be relied on and the entire mortgage marketplace gradually became stressed. The sloppiness of all the industry participants quickly became apparent and the downward spiral accelerated.

The access the industry has to the applicant is through the lender and the mortgage broker. The mortgage broker’s role is pure; he is only working as the middleman between the public and the industry. The lender, as we noted earlier, plays a duel role. He is not only dealing with the consumer but also has a responsibility to write profitable mortgages. Of all the industry players, I feel the broker had the greater degree of responsibility to the applicant and therefore was in the position to minimize the damage of the mortgage meltdown. Unfortunately, too many brokers did not live up to this responsibility. Far too many brokers were putting their own interests over the interests of their clients. There were three general reasons for this: greed, incompetence and the lack of respect for their clients. I don’t want you to conclude that all mortgage brokers failed to do their jobs properly. As a mortgage broker and being active in the various broker associations, I can say with confidence that many of us do our job right. It’s just unfortunate that not all brokers fall into this category.

From the consumer’s prospective I feel that using the right mortgage broker is the best way to finance a home. I also feel that with additional government regulations and improved due diligence from the wholesalers’ and lenders’ prospective, that finding the right mortgage broker will get easier every day.

Let’s look at each of the reasons. Greed is the easiest one, so we’ll start there. There has never been any regulatory limit on the fees charged by mortgage brokers or any other business involved in the mortgage process. The government’s position is to allow for the competitive marketplace do its job. For the most part it has. In most areas of the country there are numerous sources of financing and the free market works. Wholesalers and lenders were historically cautious in limiting broker compensation, although over the last few years this has been changing. This system fails when high-pressure selling tactics are employed or access to mortgages is limited in a community. Greed, in any profession, will never be eliminated. All we can hope to do is to minimize it. Lenders and wholesalers are now recognizing they need to be more proactive in this regard as well as becoming more particular in choosing the brokers they want to deal with.

Regulators are finally addressing the incompetency issue. Someone looking to become a mortgage broker needed little or no education or work experience. For example, in New York State, there was never an educational requirement to become a mortgage broker. This changed on January 1, 2008, but it took 20 years of fighting with State government and a mortgage meltdown, before any education requirement was imposed on a mortgage broker. There is no worse combination; incompetent professionals in a field that the public assumes has at least minimum standards. This low standard literally invites criminals in. This is why the FBI has identified mortgage fraud as the fastest growing white collar crime in the country.

The most ethical person can be incompetent. If the owner doesn’t take the time to teach his originators all the details of the various mortgage programs and underwriting standards, how competent can the originator be? This has been a big problem in the industry. The standard to become an originator is lower than the standard to become a mortgage broker. This puts a high level of responsibility on the mortgage broker regarding the education of his staff. Many mortgage brokers are more interested in hiring salesmen, not financial consultants. A large number of applicants were put into mortgages that were not in the applicants best interest, simply because the originator didn’t know any better.

Regulations are being passed by each State that will not only add an education requirement for originators and a criminal background check but will also assign an identification number to the originator. The number will be put on every application taken by the originator. Now a mortgage can at any time, be tracked ,creating accountability.

The final reason is the most important, lack of respect for the client. If you have respect for your client, regardless of your quality of education or experience level, you will be an asset to your client. Respect requires you to find the answer to a question that is posed to you instead of making something up. Respect requires you to ask enough questions of your client to get a complete picture of their needs and goals. Respect prevents you from charging more for your service than is fair. The most important quality, respect for your client, is the easiest standard to meet. You just need to be a professional.

The easy lending standards we’ve been working with over the last few years have been a powerful set of tools for a mortgage broker to work with. But like all power tools they need to be used intelligently. A chain saw in the right hands takes all the work out of cutting trees, in the wrong hands you are left with a bloody mess. The mortgage meltdown we are currently experiencing is the bloody mess when powerful tools were misused.

Where the Lender Fits In

The Lender is the entity that deals directly with the customer in originating a mortgage, commits to fund and then closes on the mortgage. It can use its own money to fund mortgage, use an investor’s money or broker the mortgage out to another funding source. Every lender operates in a way that best suits its needs. A large lender with substantial cash reserves may be closing the majority of mortgages with its own money whereas a small lender will elect to close most of its mortgages using investor’s money. A savings bank would be an example of a large lender. They have a depositor base supplying the cash needed to fund its own mortgages. A mortgage banker would be an example of a small lender. Not having access to a depositor base it will need to depend on investors to fund mortgages.

A lender utilizing its own funds writes its own underwriting standards and sets its own pricing. A lender that uses investor funds will be using the investor’s underwriting standards and is more limited in setting pricing. Now let’s look at the impact each style of operation has on the mortgage market in general.

A lender that uses its own capital to fund mortgages is called a portfolio lender. As the name implies, this lender is holding all their mortgages in their own portfolio. The underwriting standards they use will directly influence the performance of the portfolio. If they are too conservative, they may not be writing enough mortgages to generate the profits needed. If they are too liberal, the performance of the portfolio will be poor due to a higher than expected default rate. The portfolio lenders suffered the same problems that the wholesalers faced in this market. The combination of a desire to increase their volume of originations and turning a blind eye to the risk exposure of their underwriting standards, leads them down the path to a non-performing portfolio.

It’s a little different with the smaller lender. Here, thier wholesalers and investors are dictating the underwriting standards. A mortgage banker is interpreting those guidelines that have been given to him. The act of underwriting the mortgage application is one of matching the attributes of the applicant to the underwriting standards. The mortgage banker’s contribution to our current problems is their liberal interpretation of the underwriting standards. They were closing on mortgages that they should not have closed on. Common sense was ignored, in order to keep the volume of closed mortgages as high as possible. The moertgage banker didn’t feel responsible since they were following the guidelines of their investors. The investors, however, saw it differently and quickly stopped funding their mortgages with an end result of driving the mortgage banker into bankruptcy.

In theory, lenders could have prevented a lot of our current problems. Using a common sense interpretation of underwriting standards, a more diligent investigation of the details of the purchase transaction and the financial profile of the applicant, our problems would be much less severe. Few lenders took this approach, preferring to “go with the pack” and do the same thing their competitors were doing. This seemed to be the safer path. Investors were looking to buy high yielding mortgages, the rating agencies gave these pools of mortgages high marks, the population was demanding that they be given mortgages and the Federal government was praising the high percentage of Americans who now owned their own homes. Additionally, the expanding mortgage market was keeping the country’s economy strong. In such an environment, it’s extremely difficult for any person or company to break away from the pack.

This, in no way, is meant to minimize the responsibilities of the lenders for this mortgage market nightmare. It is being presented to give you an overall prospective of how we’ve gotten to where we are. They only way we can avoid making the same mistakes again, is to identify the underlying factors that caused the problem in the first place.

The Responsibility of the Wholesaler

Before we can discuss the responsibility of the Wholesaler in this mortgage market, we first need to define what the wholesaler does. We know that once a mortgage is originated and closed, it will eventually wind up in the secondary market. It will become part of the portfolios of the GSEs or a MBS on Wall Street. The mortgage will move from the originating entity though an intermediate entity until it finally makes its way to the investor. An entity whose primary job is that of an intermediary, is called the wholesaler.

The wholesaler doesn’t deal with the consumer; the broker or banker does that. The wholesaler bundles mortgages and sells them to either a GSE or Wall Street firm who will then proceed with the securitization. The wholesaler is obligated to pool mortgages to meet the specific standards of the company. They pass on these same specifications to the originating entities they work with.

Wholesalers will buy closed mortgages from bankers or they will underwriter mortgages for brokers. A banker will use a wholesaler for an expanded product line. They may not originate enough of a particular mortgage type to warrant selling to them directly, so they will utilize a wholesaler instead. Or they may use a wholesaler during times of heavy volume of originations. A broker needs a wholesaler to place his mortgages since he doesn’t have direct access to the GSEs or Wall Street.

The long-term success of a wholesaler is dependant on how accurate they are in writing their underwriting specifications and how diligently their staff follows their investors’ guidelines. If the investor’s requirements are interpreted liberally, the quality of the pools of mortgages will suffer. If their staff isn’t kept informed of changing standards, they can easily be approving mortgages that cannot be pooled. If the staff is overworked or additional manpower is brought in that isn’t properly qualified, the wholesaler’s ability to function suffers.

While the mortgage market was rapidly expanding and Wall Street grew more hungry for mortgages they could securitize, the wholesalers got caught up in the momentum. To meet the record setting volume of business, additional personnel needed to be hired and current employees were working longer hours. This caused the quality of the mortgages to suffer. As commonly happens in industry, the production volume became more important than the quality of the finished product. As the quality of mortgages quickly began to fall, the wholesalers found themselves holding mortgages they couldn't sell. This forced many out of business.

These issues can easily be addressed. Internal communications improve, new employees gain experience and the workload for all employees becomes more manageable. The increased workload was responsible for only a portion of the problems we see.

If the wholesalers were doing their job properly, the problems we’re realizing today would be much less severe. We keep hearing that the originators placed people into mortgages they couldn’t afford. Wall Street was buying mortgages at such a rapid rate, they didn’t care what they were buying. Originators wanted their commissions by hook or by crook and Wall Street needed product to securitize. I have no argument with these statements. I only question the magnitude of the impact of bad originators and greed on the Street.

Wall Street needed mortgages; there is no question about it. They wrote underwriting standards that were generous; again, no argument. The wholesalers were in the position to maintain a narrow interpretation of those standards and should have. The perfect example of this is the "stated income" mortgage, which has now been dubbed the “liar’s loan”. When this product was originally designed, it was meant for business owners, individuals whose financials are not consistent from year to year, thereby making it difficult for them to qualify for a loan under traditional underwriting standards. In an effort to minimize the risk associated with mortgages of this type, a higher down payment was required. This higher down payment not only put more of the borrower’s personal funds ito the transaction, it was also a way to confirm that the borrower has proven fiscal responsibility by saving up the required assets.

In their drive to increase volume, Wall Street began to work with lower down payment requirements and began accepting salaried employees under a stated income program. Here’s where the wholesaler’s responsibility is. An applicant who is putting a small down payment on his purchase and is working in a fast food restaurant probably isn’t making the $100,000 a year that is "stated" on the application. The wholesaler needed to be responsible and use good judgment by not approving this applicant. The mortgage may have technically met the standards but the wholesaler wasn’t doing his job. The standard wasn’t written for mortgages to be granted to individuals that have no ability to make the payments.

Now let’s look at it from the originator’s position. Let’s assume that the originator didn’t care about the applicant and was only interested in making his commission on the mortgage. The application is taken and then submitted to the wholesaler. If the wholesaler were doing his job responsibly, the application would be declined.

Bottom line is that wholesalers were not doing their jobs. They were solely concerned with production figures. Refering back to my example, a wholesaler would have been afraid to decline this loan for two reasons. First, the fear that the wholesaler down the block would close on it anyway. Second, fear that the originator would no longer submit mortgages to them. This logic is the reason so many wholesalers are now out of business.

The Problems on Wall Street

Wall Street is where Mortgages are pooled, securities are created and then sold to investors. Basically it’s the marketplace. This is a world of alphabet soup. RMBS, CDOs, SIVs, etc. is the language of this market place. For the rest of us they are referring to residential mortgage backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and structured investment vehicles.

The brokerage houses role in the mortgage market is to take a pool of mortgages and create securities with various yields. The best way to gain an understanding of what they do is with an example. Let’s say we have a pool of mortgages with an average interest rate of 8%. Not all mortgage are going to perform as expected. A series of tranches, securities yielding a specific rate of return, are created. For our example we use 3, one yielding 6%, one yielding 8% and one yielding 10%. As the borrowers make mortgage payments the investors who purchased the securities yielding 6% are paid first. Once all those obligations are met then the next group of investors, those expecting 8%, is paid. Only after the obligation to these securities are satisfied can the investors who purchased the securities yielding 10% see any money. As this example illustrates, the higher the yield, the higher the risk of the investment.

These securities can then be pooled with other securities, creating new tranches that are also sold. Mortgage backed securities can be pooled with credit card receivables, personal loans, car loans, etc. The brokerage houses of Wall Street create complicated investment vehicles that are designed to meet the goals of all the various investors. This system is totally dependant on the ability to accurately predict the performance of the underlying mortgages and promissory notes. The current problem in the mortgage market today is because the predictions were very wrong.

How could all these experts be so wrong? There are several reasons, all of which have contributed to the problem. We’ll probably never know for sure the magnitude each reason played but we do know the results, today’s mortgage meltdown.

The first reason is both the investor as well as Wall Street depend on the rating agencies to analyse the risk of each security offered. As discussed earlier, the rating agencies miscalculated the risk of the securities. The Wall Street firms, as well as all investors, use the rating of a security as a starting point. They will then do their own calculations to determine risk. It’s obvious now that those calculations were no better that those performed by the rating agencies.

The next issue is the magnitude of the complication of the securities being offered. It’s being discovered only now that the securities that have been offered are so intertwined with each other that, every missed mortgage payments is magnified a hundred times over. It seems that the people who designed the securities didn’t have a full understanding of this. To make matters worse, the investors that were purchasing these securities also had no clue about all these inter-dependencies.

This brings us to the most important question. Were the people involved in this market aware of these shortcomings and just ignored them? Millions of dollars were made, both by the company as well as the individuals working in the industry. Did the money they were making blind them all or were they ignorant to what they were doing?

Whatever the reason, it is clear that Wall Street is not living up to its obligation to maintain a marketplace where investors can depend on the data provided. Investors need to be able to make informed decisions. Wall Street can only function if it has the confidence of the investment community. We live in a global economy; Wall Street isn’t the only marketplace for investors. Once investors lose faith in Wall Street, they will simply invest in other markets. Should this occur, we will no longer be a leader in world economics; we will become a second rate country. The current state of our economy isn’t as strong as it should be; what state of economic health will we be in, when investors begin to put their money elsewhere?

Wall Street needs to regain its international creditability before we can hope to re-ignite our economy. The mortgage market is only one piece of a large security market; yet when it went bad, the effects were and stil are, being felt around the world. Imagine what will happen if another component of the market was to go bad.

The Investor's Role

The process of pooling mortgages and selling shares to investors is called securitization. Without investors willing to buy these shares, there would be no way for lenders to convert closed mortgages into fresh capital to lend out. This is the basic problem we are facing today. Investors have lost their desire to purchase these securities and when there are no buyers in a market sellers are forced to hold onto their wares.

Investors are extremely important to the mortgage market, because without them there is simply no market. The class of investors purchasing these securities is made up of individuals, companies, mutual funds, pension funds and government entities, both domestic as well as foreign. The spread of these securities is amazing, they seem to be held in every investor’s portfolio regardless of how large or small the investor is.

The world economy has been awash with available cash for some time now and there seems to be no end in sight. Countries that were once seen as “third world” have developed thriving economies and are responsible for generating new wealth. Their economy can be based on modernization; such as we’ve seen happen in China and India. It could be based on the development of a country’s national resource; such as we’re seeing in Nigeria and Venezuela. Whatever the source, new wealth is being created at a record pace.

What this means is there has been and still is a tremendous amount of capital throughout the world looking to be invested somewhere. This has resulted in lower yields than have been historically available. It’s basic economics, the law of supply and demand. In this case, the commodity or “supply” is money and the user or “demand” is companies needing cash to run their businesses. In the case of the mortgage market, lenders need to sell off closed mortgages in order to free up capital to close fresh mortgages. The avenue used is securitization. Investors will typically want to diversify their investments. Some money will be invested in more speculative and therefore higher yielding ventures; other money will be invested conservatively with the appropriate low yield that accompanies a safer investment.

In looking at the different levels of risk an investor is involved in, he will try to get the highest yield possible in each investment made. This includes whatever money he is investing in secure ways. Mortgage Backed Securities have traditionally been considered a safe investment while giving a slightly higher yield than, say, US Treasuries.

As investors pushed for higher yields, the lenders were encouraged to originate mortgages that were at a higher interest rate. The only way for a lender to close loans at higher interest rates was to attract less qualified borrowers, who would be willing to pay the higher rates. This cycle of investors looking for higher yields and the lenders responding by lowering their lending standards brought us to today’s problems in the mortgage market.

What went wrong? The obvious answer is, greed. In the drive for higher profits, the investors destroyed the money making machine know as the mortgage market. I’m not satisfied that investor greed is the only issue in play here. We assume that investors are number-crunching businessmen and all decisions are calculated with nothing else influencing the decision. Humans make investment decisions and all humans have a set of consistent qualities that may vary in intensity from person to person but are always present. The attribute that’s important to this discussion is the desire to be part of the group. The comfort zone we have of running with the pack, the uncomfortable feeling we have in being different, and the fear of jeopardizing our income or reputation by disagreeing with the opinions of our company or the general assumptions of the industry we’re in.

When you combine greed with a pack mentality, the result is always a severe market correction. We’re seeing it right now in the mortgage market, we experienced it with the dot com market and I’m sure 10 years from now we’ll be experiencing yet another speculative bubble burst. Until investors develop the strength to think independently and the confidence to base their decisions on their personal analysis, we are destined to move from bubble to bubble.

Investors have no one to blame their losses on but themselves. Today’s troubled mortgage market is going to prove to be one of the most lucrative investment opportunities for independent thinking investors. One by one we are going to see major investors, hedge funds, companies, high net worth individuals and even foreign governments making selective purchases that will prove to be brilliant investment decisions over the next few years.

We all need to be more independent in our thought process. If we continue to hide in the pack we are destined to eventual failure.

The Rating Agencies

The rating agencies play an important role in the financial marketplace. Their job is to evaluate publicly traded securities and estimate the risk an investor exposes himself to when purchasing the securities. The agencies review past performance of the type of security they are evaluating, the history of the particular security, current overall market conditions and future trends of the market.

Reviewing the historical performance of the market or a particular security is straightforward. The data is readily available and it is simply a mathematical analysis. The tough part is developing future market trends. This is where the rating agencies earn their money. By studying historical market trends and evaluating current market conditions they then attempt to predict the future. In the case of rating Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) it is now obvious that the predictions were wrong. Not a day goes by that we don’t see a rating agency lowering the credit grade on some MBS.

How could they be so wrong? Until I see some solid evidence, I’m not buying the conspiracy theory. On the surface it seems to me that the agencies have far too much to lose in jeopardizing their creditability by misclassifying the bond ratings. I feel the problem lies within the combination of two issues. To begin with, there is not a long history of subprime mortgages and whatever history that is available only covers a timeframe of rapidly appreciating home values in a strong economy. In addition, the volume of subprime mortgages originated was increasing on a monthly basis. Without a dependable history to work with, the reliability of future projections becomes questionable.

Should this short history have impacted the rating? After all, they certainly must have seen this? I believe they did recognize the limitations of the data they were working with and concluded that it wasn’t a big enough issue to negatively affect their rating. In hindsight this proved to be a bad decision and became a major component in the mortgage meltdown.

Investors make money by finding abnormalities in a market. They search for opportunities where they feel the yield on a particular investment is not in line with its level of risk. If the investor is right, he makes money. If he’s wrong, he loses money. Investors were seeing high rated MBSs carrying a higher yield than other investments with the same rating. Many investors focused on this imbalance and bought. They were betting on the credit rating being a better barometer of risk that the actual yield on the security. The bet proved to be wrong, the market yield proved to be a better representation of the risk of the mortgages.

Under normal market conditions, securities are bought and sold on an ongoing basis. This provides investors the opportunity to sell when they feel the investment is becoming riskier, or buy when they feel the timing is right. This results in small market fluctuations day-to-day as investors adjust their portfolios.

The problem the market faced in August is that, almost overnight, there were no buyers for MBSs. With no buyers there is no market and therefore a market price couldn’t be determined. This started a cascading effect throughout the mortgage market, the domestic security markets as well as the foreign security markets. The end result has been massive writedowns of the values of the securities held by investors, mortgage companies going out of business, consumers finding mortgage money harder to find with a resulting increase in foreclosures and real estate depreciation.

Just as the value of MBSs got too high before investors responded, we are currently seeing the value being too low. Buried in all the bad news we’ve been reading, there are some positives things happening. As investors begin to look closely at the financial institutions and MBSs, they are finding buying opportunities. It started with the $7.5 billion investment in Citicorp by Abu Dhabia. They saw a buying opportunity and took advantage. Goldman Sachs is on the verge of buying Litton Loan Servicing, another example of an experienced investor taking advantage of an undervalued asset. Investors from Singapore and the Middle East purchased a 10% ownership of UBS. We are going to see more and more of this as the weeks go on.

The market is slowly re-establishing. Many investors, both large and small, have taken huge loses in the meltdown of the mortgage industry. This has created a buying opportunity for other investors and they will be taking advantage of this.

Will investors lose faith in the ratings given by the agencies? Will investors look to other avenues for risk evaluation? Only time will give us answers. There is one thing we all can re-learn from this situation. There are no sure things in life; every investment is a gamble. In any market there will be winners and there will be losers. Winners are quick to take credit for their wise decisions and losers are just as quick to try to find someone to blame for their losses.

Government Sponsored Enterprises

The Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSE) play an important role in the mortgage market. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac contribute to the increase of homeowners in the country through the symbiotic relationship they have with government.

The GSEs develop programs specifically targeted to first-time homebuyers and operate under the supervision of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO). The government’s contribution is granting them access to a credit line from the US Treasury and allowing them to operate with lower cash reserves than the private industry is required to have. This lower cost of operation is then passed onto the marketplace. That’s why mortgages that are underwritten to conform to Fannie or Freddie standards carry a lower interest rate.

Before we see how the GSEs impact today’s mortgage market we need to take a look at how they evolved. Fannie Mae website will supply you with a more detailed history but this brief summary will give us all we need right now.

The FHA Administrator chartered Fannie Mae on February 10, 1938. The impetus for creation of Fannie Mae was twofold: the national commitment to housing and the inability or unwillingness of private lenders to ensure a reliable supply of mortgage credit throughout the country. The primary purpose of Fannie Mae was to purchase, hold, or sell FHA-insured mortgage loans that had been originated by private lenders. After World War II, Fannie Mae's authority was expanded to include VA-guaranteed home mortgages.

The 1968 Charter Act split Fannie Mae into two parts: Ginnie Mae and a reconstituted Fannie Mae. Ginnie Mae would continue as a federal agency and be responsible for the then-existing special assistance programs, and Fannie Mae would be transformed into a "government-sponsored private corporation" responsible for the self-supporting secondary market operations. The reconstituted Fannie Mae was to be stockholder-owned and managed. Fannie Mae retired the last of its government stock on September 30, 1968, and transformation to a government-sponsored private corporation was completed in 1970. The 1968 Act provided the authority to issue Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS).The Act also established a regulatory structure to ensure Fannie Mae's adherence to its public purpose. It provided for continuing HUD oversight of Fannie Mae, granting "general regulatory power ... to insure that the purposes of this Title are accomplished."

The Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 created Freddie Mac and authorized it to create a secondary market for conventional mortgages. Parallel authority and limitations to deal in conventional mortgages were given to Fannie Mae.The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act ("FHEFSSA") of 1992 modernized the regulatory oversight of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It created the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight ("OFHEO") as a new regulatory office within HUD with the responsibility to "ensure that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are adequately capitalized and operating safely."

OFHEO is funded by assessments on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and is authorized to act without HUD oversight on a range of regulatory issues enumerated in the statute. FHEFSSA established risk-based and minimum capital standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And, it established HUD-imposed housing goals for financing of affordable housing and housing in central cities and other rural and underserved areas.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac purchase over 50% of the mortgages originated in the country. Because of their market share they essentially wrote the underwriting standards for the industry as well as developed nearly all of the standard documents that the industry uses. The public purpose component of their mission is to maintain an orderly mortgage market, encourage homeownership to as many consumers as possible and to keep the cost of mortgage financing as low as possible.

Roughly 2 years ago both agencies were involved in accounting scandals. There were several companies involved in accounting scandals at the time but the GSEs issues were different. Companies typically try to make their financial statements look as profitable as possible. A more profitable company yields higher stock prices and that makes shareholders happy. When accountants get too creative in their jobs they find themselves crossing the line and break the law, this creates the scandal.

The GSEs were caught declaring less income than they actually made that year. Their reason was they were smoothing out their income over the years. They felt that consistency in year-to-year profits made for a better public image. It doesn’t matter if their intentions were good or bad. It was not an accepted practice, it was unlawful and they were forced to reissue their financial statements for several years. Coming off the boom years their profits, as you would have expected, were extremely high.

Combine record high profits with their government mandates and you have the foundation for a problem. The government, seeing the record profits, pushed the GSE’s to purchase mortgages with a lower credit grade than they historically did. The feeling was that the profits weren’t due to an overactive housing market but due to underwriting standards that were too conservative.

Not all mortgages perform perfectly. They is always a percentage of borrowers that don’t live up to their contractual obligations with their lenders. The reasons that borrowers can’t keep their mortgages current are numerous. There could be a job loss, a medical emergency, a natural disaster, a divorce, etc. Things happen in lifenand they aren’t always good things.

A lender, or an investor in mortgages, tries to predict the percentage of mortgages that are not going to perform before pricing the mortgage or pools of mortgages. This is a very important piece of information because that is the largest factor in the profitability of the final decision. If the prediction is more than the actual number of defaults, the investor finds himself making more money that he expected. If the prediction is too low, meaning that more mortgages go into default than planned, the profit seen by the investor is less than expected or could even become a loss.

In an attempt to maintain the growing percentage of people becoming homeowners in the country and to offer lower cost financing to more people, the government made the GSEs revise their lending standards. Their profits were high because the rate of defaults were lower than anticipated. This was viewed as justification in requiring the underwriting standards to be lowered. The GSEs were now purchasing mortgages that were considered Alt-A or Subprime previously.

What’s been happening over the last 6 months is that the portfolio of mortgages held by the GSEs were no longer performing as well as they had been. Not only were the newer mortgages not performing as well as they were expected to but the default rate of the entire portfolio was increasing. The net result is that both agencies are no longer in a strong financial position. Their stock prices have suffered and they are raising their cash reserves to handle the higher level of defaults. This will prove to be a manageable problem for the GSEs. They are large enough and financially strong enough to weather this.

The biggest problem is that the public is losing confidence in the GSEs and this is fueling their negative attitude to the housing market. The average person is seeing the large drop in profitability from last year to this year but they are not taking into account that last year was a record year. Once the financials of Fannie and Freddie are looked at over a several year period, a different conclusion becomes evident. Yes, this is a bad year for both GSEs, there is no argument there. A longer historical prospective will yield a more accurate evaluation of the magnitude of the situation.

The facts are that the more liberal underwriting standards that the GSEs used, made a substantial contribution to the problems in the housing market today. Both the GSEs and the government had the best of intentions; more people becoming homeowners and at a lower cost. Unfortunately, it encouraged some people to take on more debt than they were financially ready for resulting in a mortgage default that could quickly become a foreclosure statistic.

We shouldn’t condemn the GSEs for lowering their standards. Not every mortgage closed under these standards went into default. We need to encourage Fannie and Freddie to review their standards and make revisions as needed, that will allow them to continue to fulfill their government mandates and at the same time maintain adequate profits.

The GSEs share responsibility for the mortgage crisis in yet another way. We’ve just shown that one of the consequences of lowering their underwriting standards was an increase in their default rate. An increase that was larger than they anticipated. In lowering their standards, they began funding the better-qualified Alt-A and Subprime borrowers. The lenders who specialized in Alt-A and Subprime were now loosing their better borrowers. This meant that these lenders would now be exposed to a higher rate of default because the better quality mortgages that were adding stability to their portfolio were now elsewhere.

The problems in the mortgage market caused by the aggressive lending policies of the Subprime lenders were now being magnified. Less qualified borrowers were being given mortgages which resulted in higher defaults and at the same time, their better-qualified borrowers were leaving the Subpirme marketplace. The default rate was now being pushed up from both sides.

The GSEs need to avoid fast changes in their underwriting standards no matter how much they are pushed by the government. Revisions need to be done slowly so as not to shock the marketplace. They need to be careful now and not tighten their standards too much, too quickly, in response to the current market. An overreaction now will cause serious damage and only make matter worse.