Who’s got the mortgage credit risk?

Published in Housing Finance International Journal:

The government-centric U.S. system

I have long thought that for any housing finance system which decides to make 30-year fixed rate loans, the Danish mortgage system has created the best division of the main component risks: credit risk and interest rate risk (which includes prepayment risk). The Danish system has a far better division of risk bearing than the government-dominated, taxpayers-at-risk U.S. system.

This was made strikingly clear to me in the year 2000, when thanks to the International Union for Housing Finance (of which I was then the President), I participated in a meeting in Copenhagen in which the Danish mortgage banks presented their covered bond system, and I presented the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-based American mortgagebacked securities (MBS) system. I explained how these so-called “GSEs” or “government-sponsored enterprises” worked, how they were the dominant powers in the huge U.S. mortgage market, and how they protected their government-granted financial power with impressive political clout.

At the conclusion of our discussion, the CEO of one of the large Danish mortgage lenders made this unforgettable observation:

“You know, we always say that here in Denmark we are the socialists, and that America is the land of free markets. But now I see that in mortgages, it is exactly the opposite!”

He was so right, especially with respect to American mortgage credit risk, which had become, and still is, heavily concentrated in Fannie and Freddie and thus in Washington DC.

A fundamental characteristic of the American MBS system is that the bank or other lender that makes a mortgage loan quickly sells it to Fannie or Freddie and divests the credit risk generated by its own customer, its own credit judgment, and its own loan. The loan with all its credit risk moves to Fannie or Freddie, totally away from the actual lender which dealt with the borrower. To compensate Fannie and Freddie for taking over the credit risk, the lender must pay them a monthly fee for the life of the loan, which for a prudent and skillful lender, is many times the expected loss rate on the mortgage credit.

Why would the actual lender do this, especially if it believes in its own credit judgment? In America, it does so because it wishes to get the loan financed in the bond market, so it can escape the interest rate risk of a 30-year fixed rate, prepayable, loan.

But the two risks do not necessarily need to be kept together – to divest the interest rate risk you do not in principle need to divest the credit risk, too. The brilliance of the Danish housing finance system is that it gets 100% of the of the interest rate risk of the 30-year fixed rate, prepayable loan financed in the bond market, but the original mortgage lender retains 100% of the credit risk for the life of the loan and gets a fee for doing so. The interest rate risk is divested to bond investors; the credit risk and related income stays with the original private lender. This division of risks, in my judgment, is clearly superior to that of the American system, and results in a far better alignment of incentives to make good loans in the first place

After our most interesting symposium in Denmark, how did the MBS system of the U.S. work out? The risk chickens come home to roost in the US. Treasury. In 2008, both Fannie and Freddie failed from billions in bad loans. They both were bailed out by the Treasury, as being far “too big to fail.” All their creditors, including subordinated debt holders, were fully protected by the bailout, although the stockholders lost 99% from the share price top to the bottom. Fannie and Freddie were both forced into a government conservatorship, which means a government agency is both regulator and exercises all the authority of the board of directors. They became owned principally by the government through the Treasury’s purchase of $190 billion in preferred stock. In addition, the Treasury obtained an option to acquire 79.9% of their common stock for a tiny fraction of one cent per share.

In short, from government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie and Freddie were made into government-owned and government-controlled enterprises (so I call them “GOGCEs”). So they remain in 2024. The government likes having total control of them in political hands, the Treasury likes the profits it currently receives as the majority owner, and no change is anywhere in sight.

While having become part of the government, Fannie and Freddie have maintained their central and dominant role in the U.S. housing finance system. The actual lenders are still divesting the credit risk of their own loans to the GOGCEs. Mortgage credit risk is still concentrated in Washington DC. My mortgage market contacts tell me that Fannie and Freddie’s old arrogance has returned. The two at the end of 2023 represented the remarkable sum of $6.9 trillion of residential mortgage credit risk.

To this huge number, to see the full extent of the U.S. government’s domination of mortgage credit risk, we have to add in Ginnie Mae. Ginnie is a 100% governmentowned corporation, which guarantees MBS formed from the loans of the U.S. government’s official subprime lender, the Federal Housing Administration, and of the Veterans Administration. It guarantees $2.5 trillion in mortgage loans.

Thus, in total, Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie represent about $9.4 trillion or 67% of the $14 trillion total U.S. residential mortgages outstanding. Two-thirds of the mortgage credit risk is ultimately a risk for the taxpayers. In Denmark, in notable contrast, all the credit risk of the mortgage bond market is held by the private mortgage banks.

Can it make any sense to have two-thirds of the entire mortgage credit risk of the country guaranteed by the government and the taxpayers? No, it can’t. The GOGCE-based MBS system can only result in political pressures to weaken credit standards and in excess house price inflation. This is not the system or the risk distribution the U.S. should have, but it is politically hard to get out of it.

The current U.S. MBS system is, I believe, the path-dependent result of the anomalous evolution of American housing finance in the wake of the 1980s collapse of the old savings and loans, combined with the lobbying force of the complex of housingrelated industries. Danish housing finance has superior risk principles, but we in America are unfortunately stuck with our government-centric system.

House prices are falling in Canada, rising in the U.S. — why the difference?

Published in Housing Finance International.

Canada and the United States both span the North American continent, sharing a 3,900- mile border running between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In GDP, the U.S. is more than twelve times as big, but they are both rich, economically advanced countries, with sophisticated financial systems and active housing finance markets, and similar home ownership ratios of about 66%.

The central banks of both countries practiced extreme “quantitative easing” to suppress interest rates and expand credit; both the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada multiplied their total assets to nine times in 2021 what they were in 2008; both central banks reduced short term interest rates to nearly zero in response to the Covid crisis. Both countries experienced a massive house price bubble, which took average house prices by 2022 to far above the former housing bubble peaks of 2006 (U.S.) and 2008 (Canada).

With both countries suffering runaway inflation in 2022, both central banks rapidly pushed short-term interest rates up to about 5% and started “quantitative tightening,” letting their balance sheets shrink. The mortgage interest rates in both countries more than doubled, the standard Canadian five-year mortgage rate jumping from 2.4% to 5.5%, and the standard U.S. 30-year mortgage rate from a low of 2.7% to over 7%. (But note the difference between a very low interest rate fixed for five years and one fixed for 30 years, as discussed further below.)

In both countries, the house buyers’ monthly interest payments for a new mortgage loan of the same size has more than doubled. A normal expectation is that this should be making house prices fall. In Canada, they have indeed fallen, but in the U.S., average house prices have been rising.

As of January 2024, average Canadian house prices have dropped more than 18% from their peak of March 2022, although they of course vary by region. In greater Toronto, Canada’s largest city, for example, house prices are 20% down from their peak; in the Hamilton-Burlington area, down 25%. On the other hand, in the oil and gas capital of Calgary, in western Canada, house prices have reached a new all-time high. On average, across the country, house prices are down significantly from their peak, but the peak was steep, and house prices are still historically high. It would not be surprising for them to continue their decline.

In contrast, U.S. average house prices, after dipping about 5% after their June 2022 peak, are back over it. The S&P Case Shiller national house price index was 308.3 at that peak, in December 2023 it was 310.7, in spite of the greatly increased mortgage interest rates. According to the AEI Housing Center (AEI), year-over-year U.S. average house price appreciation,1 measured monthly, has always been positive from 2022 to early 2024, and in January 2024 the year-over-year house price increase was 6.4%. AEI predicts a 5% average U.S. house price increase for the full year 2024.2

Of course, there is regional variation. Along the Pacific coast, San Francisco prices are down 13% from their 2022 peak, Seattle down over 12%, and Portland down about 8%. On the other side of the country, Miami and New York City have made new highs.

An interesting surprise is that the fastest house price appreciation is now in the mid-sized, Midwestern cities of Indianapolis, Indiana; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin; all far from the Sun Belt and where they have a real winter. House prices are up over the last year by 13% in Indianapolis, 12% in Grand Rapids and about 11% in Milwaukee.

Overall, the U.S. looks not only different from Canada, but an exception to what the Financial Times described as “the widespread drop in global house prices that hit advanced economies” and “the deepest property downturn in a decade.”3

The U.S. house price behavior is even more notable when combined with its dramatic shrinkage of the volumes of house purchases and of mortgage originations. The volume of mortgages for house purchases in early February 2024 was 35% less than it was in 2019, before the Covid crisis. It was 10% below the already weak same period in 2023. Refinance mortgages with cash taken out were down 60% from 2019, and refinance mortgages with no cash out were down 75%.

With these drops in business volumes, U.S. mortgage banks, which rely on an originate-tosell business model, are in their own recession. United Wholesale Mortgage, the top mortgage originator in 2023 with $108 billion in mortgage loans, was second in 2022 with $127 billion. Its volume was thus down 15% and it posted a loss of $70 million for 2023. Rocket Mortgage, the top originator in 2022 with $133 billion in loans originated, was second in 2023 with $79 billion, or down 41% in volume. It made a 2023 annual loss of $390 million. “One of the worst quarters for mortgage origination in recent history,” said its chief financial officer about the end of 2023.4

How can prices still be rising when volumes are so reduced, and interest rates are so much higher? The most common explanation is that the supply of houses for sale also remains low. Among many others, AEI observes the “historically tight supply.”5

Contributing to the tight supply is that people with 3% or less 30-year mortgages are less inclined to sell and give up the striking financial advantage of the cheap mortgage, which is locked in for a very long time, as long as they stay in the house. There is no way to monetize the large value of that existing mortgage to the borrower except by staying put.

A key difference between the Canadian and U.S. mortgage markets, which presumably affects the house price behavior, is the contrast between a typical five-year mortgage and a typical 30-year mortgage, respectively. With low- rate mortgages from three years ago, for example, the Canadian homeowners have only two years left of value from the cheap financing. The new, higher rates work their way into the household finances much more quickly. After the same three years, the American homeowners have 27 years of a large, valuable liability left—a new, higher rate is very far off indeed, if they keep the house. But if they sell it, the mortgage is due on sale, and they will face the new, more than doubled interest rate right away.

The unique American political and financial commitment to the 30-year fixed rate mortgage is now suppressing the supply of houses for sale and helping hold up house prices, postponing the correction of the 21st century’s second house price bubble, and making American houses less affordable for new buyers. This is certainly an unintended consequence of U.S. national housing finance policy.

The provocative financial writer, Wolf Richter, suggests that the causality runs not only from low supply of houses for sale to higher prices, but also the other way around. “Now the hope for lower mortgage rates is holding back potential buyers and potential sellers alike,” he writes. “The housing market remains frozen because prices are still too high.”6 On a historical basis, it appears that both Canadian and U.S. house prices are still too high. The difference between their principal mortgage instruments is one factor explaining why prices have been falling in one and rising in the other, as we continue to live through the distortions of and adjustments to the Covid crisis.

It might be argued that the U.S. housing finance system would be improved by less subsidy for and less political devotion to the 30-year mortgage. There could be more emphasis on 15-year mortgages instead, which have less interest rate risk and create a faster build-up of housing equity for the borrower. A gradual transition by changing the rules applied to the government mortgage promoters, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration, could be imagined. However, the political probability of such a change is zero.

__________________

1 A better name for this measure would be “house price change,” since there of course can be “depreciation” as well as “appreciation.” But we seem to be stuck with the “HPA” term. “Appreciation,” it is true, has prevailed on average over time, especially in nominal, as opposed to inflation-adjusted terms. Inflation-adjusted U.S. year-over-year house prices were falling from November 2022 to June 2023, but remained positive in nominal terms, as reported by AEI.

2 “Home Price Appreciation (HPA) Index—January 2024,” AEI Housing Center.

3 “Global house price downturn shows signs of reversal as rate-cut hopes rise,” Financial Times, February 26, 2024.

4 “Rocket posts $233 million net loss in 4Q,” National Mortgage News, February 22, 2024.

5 “Housing Finance Watch, 2024 Week 6,” AEI Housing Center.

6 “Mortgage Rates Rise Back to 7%, Housing Market Re-Freezes, Buyers’ Strike Continues. Prices Are Just Too High,” Wolf Street, February 21, 2024.

Federal Reserve Losses and Monetary Policy

Published by the American Enterprise Institute with Paul H. Kupiec.

Past monetary policy decisions have resulted in the Fed suffering more than $140 billion in accumulated cash losses in addition to $1 trillion in unrealized losses on its securities portfolio. The Fed System and the majority of Reserve Banks are technically insolvent on a GAAP basis. Fed officials claim that the Fed’s losses and negative GAAP capital do not compromise its ability to conduct monetary policy because the Fed can create money to cover its losses, however large the losses may become. The Fed’s narrative leaves out important details including that the Fed’s ability to print paper currency is limited by law and deposits held at insolvent Reserve Banks are unsecured liabilities that are legally at risk because they lack a federal government guarantee. We calculate the GAAP capital of each Reserve Bank and the System, and estimate depositors’ loss exposures under current law. We review the current legal framework in place for addressing insolvent Reserve Banks. We conclude that the framework will be ignored, and the Fed will continue to operate at a loss while deeply technically insolvent as long as depositors maintain their belief that Fed deposits are protected by an implicit federal government guarantee. Congressional action may be needed should this confidence waiver.

Read the full paper here.

Central Banks and Housing Finance

Published in Housing Finance International Journal:

Although manipulating housing finance is not among the Federal Reserve’s statutory objectives, the U.S. central bank has long been an essential factor in the behavior of mortgage markets, for better or worse, often for worse.

In 1969, for example, the Fed created a severe credit crunch in housing finance by its interest rate policy. Its higher interest rates, combined with the then-ceiling on deposit interest rates, cut off the flow of deposits to savings and loans, and thus in those days the availability of residential mortgages. This caused severe rationing of mortgage loans. The political result was the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 that created Freddie Mac, which with Fannie Mae, became in time the dominating duopoly of the American mortgage market, leading to future problems.

In the 1970s, the Fed unleashed the “Great Inflation.” Finally, to stop the runaway inflation, the now legendary, but then highly controversial Fed Chairman, Paul Volcker, drove interest rates to previously unimaginable highs, with one-year Treasury bills yielding over 16% in 1981 and 30-year mortgage rates rising to 18%.

This meant the mortgage-specialist savings and loans were crushed in the 1980s. With their mandatory focus on long-term, fixed rate mortgages, the savings and loan industry as a whole became deeply insolvent on a mark-tomarket basis, and experienced huge operating losses as its cost of funding exceeded the yields on its old mortgage portfolios. So did Fannie Mae. More than 1,300 thrift institutions failed. The government’s deposit insurance fund for savings and loans also went broke. The political result was the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, which provided a taxpayer bailout and, it was proclaimed, would solve the crisis so it would “never again” happen. Similar hopes were entertained for the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act of 1991. Of course, future financial crises happened again anyway.

In the early 2000s, faced with the recessionary effects of the bursting of the tech stock bubble, the Fed decided to promote an offsetting housing boom. This I call the “Greenspan Gamble,” after Alan Greenspan, the Fed Chairman of the time, who was famed as a financial mastermind of the “Great Moderation” and as “The Maestro” – until he wasn’t. For the boom, fueled by multiple central bank, government and private mistakes, became the first great housing bubble of the 21st century. It began deflating in 2007 and turned into a mighty crash – setting off what became known as the “Global Financial Crisis” and the “Great Recession.” Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both ended up in government conservatorship. U.S. house prices fell for six years. The political result was the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, which engendered thousands of pages of new regulations, but failed to prevent the renewed buildup, in time, of systemic interest rate risk.

Faced with the 2007-09 crisis, the Federal Reserve pushed short term interest rates to near zero and kept them abnormally low from 2008 to 2022. It also pushed down long-term interest rates by heavy buying of long-term U.S. Treasury bonds, and in a radical and unprecedented move, buying mortgagebacked securities. As the Fed kept up this buying for more than a decade, it became by far the largest owner of mortgages in the country, with its mortgage portfolio reaching $2.7 trillion, in addition to its $5 trillion in Treasury notes and bonds. This remarkable balance sheet expansion forced mortgage loan interest rates to record low levels of under 3% for 30-year fixed rate loans. The central bank thus set off and was itself the biggest single funder of the second great U.S. housing bubble of the 21st century.

In this second housing bubble, average house prices soared at annualized rates of up to 20%, and the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller National House Price Index (Case-Shiller), which peaked in the first housing bubble in 2006 at 185, rose far higher – to 308 in June 2022, or 67% over the peak of the previous bubble.

The Fed financed its fixed rate mortgage and bond investments with floating rate liabilities, making itself functionally into the all-time biggest savings and loan in the world. It created for itself enormous interest rate risk, just as the savings and loans had, but while the savings and loans were forced into it by regulation, the extreme riskiness of the Fed’s balance sheet was purely its own decision, never submitted to the legislature for approval.

Confronted with renewed runaway inflation in 2021 and 2022, the Fed pushed up short-term interest rates to over 5%. That seemed high when compared to almost zero, but is in fact a historically normal level of interest rates. The Fed also began letting its long-term bond and mortgage portfolio roll off. U.S. 30-year mortgage interest rates increased to over 7%. That is in line with the 50-year historical average, but was a lot higher than 3% and meant big increases in monthly payments for new mortgage borrowers. A lot of people, including me, thought this would cause house prices to fall significantly.

We were surprised again. Average U.S. house prices did begin to fall in mid-2022, and went down about 5%, according to the Case-Shiller Index, through January 2023. Then they started back up, and have so far risen about 6%, up to a new all-time peak. Over the last year, Case Shiller reports an average 3.9% increase. Compared to consumer price inflation of 3.2% during this period, this gives a real average house price increase of 0.7% – slightly ahead of inflation. How is that possible when higher mortgage rates have made houses so much less affordable?

Of course, not all prices have gone up. San Francisco’s house prices are down 11% and Seattle’s are down 10% from their 2022 peaks. The median U.S. house price index of the National Association of Realtors is down 5% from June 2022. The median price of a new house (as contrasted with the sale of an existing house) fell by over 17% yearover-year in October, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and home builders are frequently offering reduced mortgage rates and other incentives, effectively additional price reductions, in addition to providing smaller houses. (Across the border to the north, with a different central bank but a similar rise in interest rates, the Home Price Index of the Canadian Real Estate Association is down over 15% from its March 2022 peak.)

The most salient point, however, is that the volume of U.S. house purchases and accompanying mortgages has dropped dramatically. Purchases of existing houses dropped over 14% year-over-year in October, to the lowest level since 2010. They are “on track for their worst performance since 1992,” Reuters reported.1 The lack of mortgage volume has put the mortgage banking industry into its own sharp recession. So, the much higher interest rates are indeed affecting buyers, but principally by a sharply reduced volume of home sales, not by falling prices on the houses that do sell – highly interesting bifurcated effects. The most common explanation offered for this unexpected result is that home owners with the exceptionally advantageous 3% long-term mortgages don’t want to give them up, so they keep their houses off the market, thus restricting supply. A 3% 30-year mortgage in a 7% market is a highly valuable liability to the borrower, but there is no way to realize the profit except by keeping the house.

As for the Federal Reserve itself, as interest rates have risen, it is experiencing enormous losses. It has the simple problem of an old-fashioned savings and loan: its cost of funding far exceeds the yield on its giant portfolio of long-term fixed rate investments. As of November 2023, the Fed still owns close to $2.5 trillion in very long-term mortgage securities and $4.1 trillion in Treasury notes and bonds, with in total over $3.9 trillion in investments having more than ten years left to maturity. The average combined yield on the Fed’s investments is about 2%, while the Fed’s cost of deposits and borrowings is over 5%.

Investing at 2% while borrowing at 5% is unlikely to make money – so for 11 months year to date in 2023 the Fed has a colossal net operating loss of $104 billion. Since September 2022, it has racked up more than $122 billion in losses. It is certain that the losses will continue. These are real cash losses to the government and the taxpayers, which under proper accounting would result in the Fed reporting negative capital or technical insolvency. Such huge losses for the Fed would previously have been thought impossible.

When it comes to the mark-to-market of its investments, as of September 30, 2023, the Fed had a market value loss of $507 billion on its mortgage portfolio. On top of this, it had a loss of $795 billion on its Treasuries portfolio, for the staggering total mark-to-market loss of $1.3 trillion, or 30 times its stated capital of $43 billion.2

While building this losing risk structure, the Fed acted as Pied Piper to the banking industry, which followed it into massive interest rate risk, especially with investments in long-term mortgage securities and mortgage loans, funded with short-term liabilities. A bottoms-up, detailed analysis of the entire banking industry by my colleague, Paul Kupiec, has revealed that the total unrecognized market value loss in the U.S. banking system is about $1.27 trillion.3

If we add the Fed and the banks together as a combined system, the total mark-to-market loss- a substantial portion of it due to losses on that special American instrument, the 30-year fixed rate mortgage- is over $2.5 trillion. This is a shocking number that nobody forecast.

We can be assured that the profound effects of central banks on housing finance will continue with results as surprising to future financial actors as they have been to us and previous generations.

_______________

1 “Home sales fell to a 13-year low in October as prices rose,” Reuters, November 21 2023.

2 Federal Reserve financial data is taken from the weekly Federal Reserve H.4.1 Release, and from the Federal Reserve Banks Combined Quarterly Financial Report as of September 30 2023.

3 Paul Kupiec, “Forget Climate Change and NBFIs, the Biggest Systemic Risk are the Unrealized Losses in the Banking System,” American Enterprise Institute, November 2023, and personal correspondence with the author.

Common Fallacies in the 2023 Debt-Ceiling Debates

Published in the Mises Institute’s Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

Abstract: This article investigates the veracity of three claims made by current and former government officials in the context of the 2023 debt-ceiling debates: it would be unconstitutional to enforce the debt ceiling; the U.S. government has never defaulted; and there are no measures that could be taken to avoid a government default except raising the debt limit. None of these claims is true.

As Congress and the Biden administration carried out the combative negotiations that led to the passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (H.R. 3746), the news media was replete with stories and opinion pieces about the debt-ceiling debates. Many of these repeated claims made by administration officials and surrogates were designed to promote a political narrative. Such claims included the following: it is unconstitutional for the United States to default on its debt (Blinder 2023); the U.S. has never defaulted on its debt (Biden 2023); there are no additional measures that can be taken to prevent default (Janet Yellen, quoted in Condon and Hordern 2023); and finally, the sole solution to averting a debt crisis is to raise the debt ceiling (Powell 2023). This article will analyze these claims and explain why they are exaggerations, if not demonstrably untrue.

Read the full paper here.

The Federal Reserve loses billions on mortgages

Published in Housing Finance International.

Can house prices achieve a soft landing?

The largest holder by far of residential mortgages in the United States, a country often supposed to favor private markets, is none other than the central bank, the Federal Reserve. The Fed owns the remarkable sum of $2.5 trillion (that’s “trillion” with a T) in mortgage-backed securities (MBS).[1] That is more than one-quarter of the entire federal agency residential MBS market, the dominant U.S. source of housing finance. The Fed has mainly invested this enormous amount in the typical American 30-year fixed rate, freely prepayable, mortgage, an instrument of notorious interest rate risk. This risk infamously sank the savings and loan industry in the 1980s, and in 2023 was a principal factor in sinking Silicon Valley Bank, the second largest bank failure in U.S. history at the time of its collapse.

In this Fed MBS investment program, the entire risk of the mortgage is absorbed by the government: the credit risk of the Fed’s MBS investments is taken by other government organizations (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae), but the Fed itself bears 100% of the interest rate risk. How has the Fed managed this risk as interest rates have dramatically risen since 2022? Not well.

Faced with the runaway inflation of 2021- 22, the Fed pushed short-term interest rates rapidly up from close to zero to 5 ½% after it belatedly stopped buying MBS. Interest rates on 30-year mortgage loans have more than doubled from less than 3% to more than 7%. The resulting mark-to market on the Fed’s MBS portfolio is a loss of $394 billion as of June 2023, or more than 9 times the Fed’s total capital of $42 billion. Striking numbers![2]

The Fed’s huge purchases of mortgage securities began as an emergency, “temporary” action in the crisis of 2008, accelerated again in the Covid financial crisis of 2020, and lasted longer than needed—until March 2022. These central bank purchases drove the interest rates on 30-year fixed rate mortgage loans down to under 3% in late 2020 and 2021-- as low as 2.7% in late 2020—not much return for a 30-year risk! —and the yields on MBS can run 1% or so lower than the mortgage loan rates. The Fed bought a lot of MBS at the bottom in MBS yields—that is, it bought a lot at the market top in MBS prices which its own buying created.

In a leveraged balance sheet like the Fed’s, mark to market losses move into operating results through negative interest spreads. The Fed now has a $2.5 trillion MBS portfolio yielding a little over 2%, which to finance, it pays its depositors and repurchase agreement lenders over 5%. So this massive investment is now running at an interest rate spread of about negative 3%.

One hardly needs to say that lending at 2% and borrowing at 5% is a losing proposition. The $2.5 trillion MBS investment at a negative 3% spread is costing the Fed (and the Treasury and the taxpayers) about $75 billion a year. When added together with the rest of the Fed’s operations, principally the profits from issuing currency and losses from investing in long-term Treasury securities, the Fed accumulated from September 2022 through the end of August 2023 net losses of the notable sum of $95 billion.[3]

The losses will clearly continue for the rest of 2023, by which time the Fed will have lost on operations about three times its capital, and on into the future if interest rates stay at their current historically normal levels. Since the Fed’s profits mostly go to the Treasury, its losses mean that the U.S. Treasury and the taxpayers also lose. The many banks which also bought MBS and hold fixed-rate mortgage loans acquired at 3%, also have very large mark-to-market losses and negative spreads on them. These banks, like the failed Silicon Valley Bank, could correctly claim that they were only doing the same thing the Federal Reserve was.

From the point of view of mortgage borrowers, those who borrowed at 3% or less for 30 years obviously got a great and very attractive deal. A current borrower at 7.2% has to pay 2.5 times as much in monthly interest to buy the same house at the same price as a lucky 2.7% borrower did. On a house in the median price range costing $400,000, that is $1,500 more a month. Naturally, this much more expensive mortgage financing puts a downward pressure on house prices, but it also gives former borrowers a strong motivation to stay in their current houses and keep them off the market, in order to preserve the large financial advantage of the great 30-year mortgage rate the Fed created.

The astronomical house price increases of the second great American house price bubble of the 21st century are over. National average house prices, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Index, fell 1.2% yearover-year in June 2023. Over the same period, U.S. consumer price inflation was 3%, so in inflation-adjusted (real) terms, house prices fell 4.2%. That is a far cry from the bubble’s annualized increases in nominal terms which reached 18% and more in 2021 and early 2022. However, U.S. house prices have not fallen as much as many, including me, expected.

Serious reductions in house prices have indeed occurred in overpriced cities in the U.S. West. These year-over-year decreases reported by Case-Shiller as of June 2023 include the following. In real terms, the drops are in double digits.

House Price Changes Year-Over-Year June 2023

| Nominal | Real

San Francisco | -9.7% | -12.7%

Seattle | -8.8% | -11.8%

Las Vegas | -8.2% | -11.2%

Phoenix | -7.5% | -10.5%

These drops are, however, from very high peaks, and prices in these areas remain historically high.

The two metropolitan areas with the largest price increases in the June Case-Shiller report are the Midwestern cities of Chicago, at +4.2%, and Cleveland, at +4.1%, being in real terms, 1.2% and 1.1%, respectively, which are similar to the long-term growth rate in real house prices.

The AEI Housing Center finds that in July 2023, national average house prices increased year-over year by 3.5%, or by +0.3% real, after falling year-over-year in real terms for eight months in a row. Can falling real prices becoming more or less flat make for a “soft landing” of U.S. average house prices? Maybe--considering that 7% is in a historically normal range of mortgage interest rates. It only seems so high to us because of the previous suppression of mortgage rates to abnormally low levels by the Fed.

Still, many observers wonder why U.S. house prices have not fallen more, given the large reduction in buying power for most people from the sharply increased cost of mortgage loans.

Two measures which have dropped like a rock are the volume of home sales and of mortgage originations. Sales of existing houses were down 40% in July 2023 compared to the pre-pandemic July 2019[4] . The volume of interest rate commitments for new mortgage loans is down about 30%- 40% from 2019, and the volume of mortgage refinancings (“refis” in U.S. parlance) simply to lower the interest rate, is correspondingly down 95%.[5] The mortgage banking and brokerage businesses are experiencing heavy stress and their own painful recession with the disappearance of business volumes. Their total staffs have been cut by 43,000 employees or about 11% over the last year.[6]

How can house prices stay high while sales volume shrivels?

One factor is that while sales of existing houses are way down, so is the inventory of houses being put up for sale. The July 2023 inventory of houses for sale was down 36% from July 2019, which helps support house prices.[7]

A popular and plausible theory is that this low inventory at least in part reflects the desire of the lucky mortgage borrowers at 3% or less to hang on to their great mortgages by simply staying in their current houses. As a typical article explains, “Borrowing costs have not had the expected effect of cooling house prices [because] most US homeowners…have in effect been trapped in their properties by [the] low rates.” So the Fed’s manipulation of mortgage interest rates to exceptionally low levels created an unexpected factor to later restrict the supply of houses for sale and help hold house prices up. In addition, when working from home, the borrowers don’t have to change houses to change jobs, which supports the ability to hang on to the old mortgage.

These factors help slow prepayments of 30-year mortgage loans, extend the duration of the Fed’s MBS portfolio, and increase the Fed’s mark-to-market and operating losses.

It doesn’t help right now, but as a long-term strategy the Federal Reserve needs to return the amount of MBS in its balance sheet to what it always was from its founding in 1913 to 2008--namely zero.

_________

1 Federal Reserve H.4.1 Release, August 31, 2023, Section 5.

2 Federal Reserve Banks Combined Quarterly Financial Report, June 30, 2023.

3 Federal Reserve H.4.1 Release, August 31, 2023, Section 6.

4 AEI Housing Center, Home Price Appreciation Index report, July 2023.

5 AEI Housing Center, Housing Market Indicators report, August 1, 2023.

6 “Nonbank mortgage jobs undergo a seasonal dip,” National Mortgage News, September 1, 2023.

7 AEI Housing Center, Home Price Appreciation Index report, July 2023.

8 “Investors keep close eye on US mortgage rates,” Financial Times, September 3, 2023.

Will the Fed Ever Relinquish Its New Powers?: The Fed's "Cincinnatian Problem"

Published by the Mises Institute. See the PDF here.

In times of banking and financial crises, central banks always intervene. This is not a law of nature, but it is an empirical law of central bank behavior. The Federal Reserve was created 110 years ago specifically to address banking panics by expanding money and credit when needed, by providing what was called in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 an “elastic currency,” so it could make loans in otherwise illiquid markets, when private institutions can’t or won’t.

The great Victorian banking thinker (as well as private banker) Walter Bagehot proposed that the Bank of England “lend freely” to quell a panic, and the central banks of the world today are all his disciples in this respect. With the post–Bretton Woods, pure-fiat-currency Federal Reserve, the US currency is elastic with a vengeance. That’s how we got a Fed with assets of $3 trillion during the great real estate bust of 2007–12 and then the truly remarkable $8.9 trillion Fed balance sheet in the wake of the covid financial crisis of 2020.

Austrian economists are generally against any central bank intervention at all, but suppose with me arguendo that the case for intervention in a crisis prevails: that the periodic financial crises that do and doubtless will continue to occur should be addressed by the temporary expansion of the compact power and money-printing ability of the government and its central bank—especially the money-printing power, which shifts assets and risks to the government’s balance sheet. The central bank’s balance sheet thus expands to offset the pressured private balance sheets. Even if the crisis was caused by the actions of the central bank itself, as Austrians would point out, and even though the expansion creates moral hazard for the future, the central bank’s elastic currency and balance sheet are handy in midst of the crisis. This is the credo of all modern central banks.

But what happens when the crisis is over?

Note well the essential word temporary in the preceding argument for crisis intervention. The crisis interventions should be temporary. If prolonged, they will tend more toward monopoly and bureaucracy and less toward innovation, growth, and economic well-being than will competitive, enterprising markets. In the extreme, long-term intervention will produce markets characterized by socialist stagnation. How do you get interventions withdrawn when the crisis is over?

Consider a huge and radical intervention of the last fifteen years. The Federal Reserve started buying mortgage securities at the beginning of 2009. The amount of mortgage securities which had been owned by the Federal Reserve until then, from 1913 to 2008, was exactly zero. Then, faced with the shriveling of the vast housing bubble and the panic of 2008, the Fed was led by Chairman Ben Bernanke into a new intervention and started buying mortgage securities to prop up house prices and the housing finance market. This was the opposite of the former Fed orthodoxy, which held that the monetary power of the central bank should not be used to favor any particular economic sector.

Bernanke’s theory was that this radical intervention would be temporary. As he testified before Congress in February 2011: “What we are doing here is a temporary measure which will be reversed so that at the end of the process, the money supply will be normalized, the amount of the Fed’s balance sheet will be normalized, and there will be no permanent increase, either in money outstanding, in the Fed’s balance sheet, or in inflation” (Italics added).

Needless to say, the promised normalization didn’t happen. As of the end of April 2023, the Fed owns $2.6 trillion of mortgage securities. That is larger than what the total assets of the Fed were at the end of 2008. That number and the interest rate risk it represents would have astonished previous generations of Federal Reserve governors. The Fed also experienced a massive mark to market loss on these mortgage securities: a loss of $408 billion as of the end of 2022, or almost ten times the Fed’s total capital of $42 billion.

In the intervening years, the Fed’s mortgage purchases, driving down mortgage interest rates to an unprecedented less than 3 percent, stoked a major house price inflation. By 2021, US national house prices were in a new bubble, their increase rising to an annual rate of over 16 percent. Faced with runaway inflation of house prices, the Fed has unbelievably continued to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of mortgage securities, and never sells any. I know of no one who now defends this far overextended intervention.

In my view, the Federal Reserve should get out of the business of pushing up house prices, and the Fed’s mortgage portfolio should go back to the normal amount of exactly zero.

Emergency interventions, however sincere the original intent that they be temporary, inevitably build up political and economic constituencies who profit from them and want their continuation. When the central bank monetizes government debt, the biggest such constituent is the government itself.

So here is our essential and unsolved problem: How do you reverse the central bank emergency programs, originally thought and meant to be temporary, after the crisis has passed? No one has successfully addressed the issue of how to do this—not even central banking’s most ardent supporters propose an answer.

That the emergency interventions of the crisis should be withdrawn in the normal times which follow I call the Cincinnatian doctrine. The name comes from the ancient Roman hero Cincinnatus, who was called from his plow to save the state and made temporary dictator of Rome. He did save the state, and then, mission accomplished, eft his dictatorship and went back to his farm. Similarly, two millennia later, George Washington, the victorious general and hero who had saved the United States and might perhaps have made himself king, voluntarily resigned his commission and went back to his farm, becoming to the eighteenth century “the modern Cincinnatus.”

But the Federal Reserve does not have the republican virtue of Cincinnatus or Washington, so how do we get the Fed to go back to its farm? The difficulty of ending vast emergency interventions whose day has passed but which have become established and advantageous to their constituencies and have increased the power enjoyed by the central bankers is the Cincinnatian problem. There is no easy answer to the Cincinnatian problem. It deserves our intense focus.

U.S. banking problems: Mortgage interest rate risk strikes again

Published in Housing Finance International.

Notable U.S. bank runs and failures in spring 2023 followed speeches from the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve in 2022 and early 2023 about what a good shape the U.S. banking system was in. Of course, they wanted the non-bank financial companies (so-called “shadow banks”) to be regulated more, but they claimed the commercial banks were in great condition. This was thanks to the Dodd Frank Act and its greatly expanded regulation, it was suggested, and we could congratulate ourselves for this banking stability.

Surprise! Shortly thereafter came the second, third and fourth largest bank failures in U.S. history (First Republic, Silicon Valley, and Signature banks, respectively). These were accompanied by emergency government declarations that the failing banks were “systemically important”—in other words, that the banking system in general was at risk. Such declarations allowed bailouts of wealthy depositors who had accounts with the failing banks of far over the normal statutory maximum of $250,000 for government deposit insurance coverage. Those depositors should have taken a loss on the risky investments they had made and from their folly in maintaining hundreds of millions, in some cases, or even billions of dollars, in single small-enough-to-fail banks. That was quite unwise risk taking on their part, but big money venture capitalists, tech entrepreneurs and cryptocurrency barons, among others, got all their deposits back by being given other people’s money. The insurance fund of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was reduced below its minimum statutory level by the cost of these failures.

Central to the failures were billions of dollars in losses resulting from investing in long-term, fixed rate mortgage securities and financing them with short-term, floating-rate liabilities. The interest rate risk of the American 30-year fixed-rate mortgage strikes again! Although these mortgages were often held in securitized form, making them theoretically liquid, once their market value was far below their cost, selling them would trigger the realization of the huge losses, which could and did set off a run on the bank. So just as in the case of the U.S. savings & loans in the 1980s, the shortfunded 30-year mortgages contributed to first massive interest rate risk and then fatal liquidity risk for the failed banks.

However, not only the failed banks, but hundreds of banks across the country have made this mistake. In doing so, they were following the Pied Piper of the Federal Reserve and its long lasting, but now ended, suppression of both short-term and long-term interest rates, its predictions of “lower interest rates for longer,” and quite remarkably, its own practice of investing trillions of dollars in long term fixed rate assets funded by borrowing short in its own balance sheet. Investing in long-term mortgages and also long-term Treasury securities, the banks and the Federal Reserve together created huge amounts of interest rate risk for the total banking system.

This is a classic banking risk, a classic banking mistake. Along with it comes a classic problem: although it is often said that bank runs reflect irrational fears, in fact runs are highly rational from the viewpoint of the depositor.

Keeping your money in a questionable bank instead of getting it out, when you can’t really know what the bank’s assets are worth or what is really going on inside it or who is lying, has no upside potential and large downside potential of serious losses on money you didn’t intend to be at risk at all. So, it is rational to run.

Every bank should be structured with the thought that runs are rational from the viewpoint of the depositors. This is an old and essential banking truth. As the great Walter Bagehot wrote in Lombard Street in 1873, “A banker, dealing with the money of others, and money payable on demand, must be always, as it were, looking behind him and seeing that he has reserve enough in store if payment should be asked for.” Bagehot adds, “Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.”

One recent academic analysis has estimated the mark to market loss of all U.S. banks, including both their fixed-rate securities and fixed-rate loans, and concluded that the banking system has a mark to market loss of about $2 trillion on these assets. That’s $2 trillion.

In comparison, the book capital of the U.S. banking system is about $2.2 trillion, and of that $2.2 trillion, $400 billion are intangible assets. So, the tangible capital is approximately $1.8 trillion, while the mark to market loss may be something like $2 trillion. That would suggest that we have an entire banking system with something like zero real capital. While there is large variation among the 4,700 banks and savings associations, the overall situation is certainly sobering on a mark-to-market basis.

The way unrealized losses turn into real losses in financial institutions that have fixed rate, long term assets funded with short term floating rate liabilities, is that the cost of their liabilities goes dramatically up and the yield on their assets doesn’t.

The big question in the banking system has thus become: how resistant are the banks to the cost of their deposits rising to full market levels of 5% or so, in order to fund the deeply underwater fixed rate loans and securities on which there is a $2 trillion market value loss? How much is their interest cost going to rise? In other words, as the unrealized losses turn into greater interest expense, how much can you continue to cheat the savers in order to prop up the banks? What we will observe going forward is the contest between the inexorable rise in the funding cost, and the hope that banks can continue to cheat the savers and keep the deposit cost below market. This puts the banking regulators, who are in favor of bank safety, on the side of cheating the savers. All this is just like the U.S. savings & loans and their regulators in the 1970s and 1980s.

On top of its interest rate risk, we find out the U.S. banking system has, once again, a large risk exposure to troubled commercial real estate. Consider this observation: “The unfavorable conditions in banking were greatly aggravated by the collapse of unwise speculation in real estate.” That is from the report of the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency in 1891. Little about this connection has changed since then.

The famous Fed Chairman Paul Volcker observed that “There are no new problems in banking, only new people.”

But why do crises keep recurring if we have comprehensive regulation, like the Dodd Frank Act and its thousands of pages of implementing regulations? The banking scholar, Bernard Shull, insightfully wrote, “Comprehensive banking reform, traditionally including augmented and improved supervision, has typically evoked a transcendent, and in retrospect, unwarranted optimism.”Writing in the 1990s, Shull continued, “Confronting the S&L disaster with yet another comprehensive reform, the Secretary of the Treasury proclaimed ‘Two watchwords guided us as we undertook to solve this problem. Never again.’”

That was the savings & loan reform of 1989, and then came the banking reforms of 1991, and the housing finance reforms of 1992. But in the following decade, instead of “never again,” another massive crisis happened again anyway. Then after that 2007-09 crisis, comprehensive reform was once again debated with the political result of the Dodd Frank Act. But another decade or so later, once again we have bank runs and failures.

We are up against the reality of the politics of banking and finance. All finance is political, especially housing finance. No matter how we politically organize any bank regulation, it will over time have to be reorganized, because the perfect answer does not exist. Whenever we try to engineer and control human behavior, the attempts at control themselves induce unexpected adaptations and reactions in the behavior of financial markets, and also in the behavior of the regulators and politicians themselves. Hence, as we observe historically, every reform requires another reform to address the unexpected results and failures of the prior reform, and so on, ad infinitum. The current troubles are part of the ongoing crisis of 2020. Starting in 2020, we experienced the Covid crisis, the financial panic, the sharp economic contraction, the vast expansion of money printing and government expenses in response, the following bubble markets, the everything bubble, the runaway inflation, the correction with rising interest rates, the deflation of the everything bubble in 2022, and now the banking problems of 2023. I think of that as all one big crisis-- we’re still in the aftermath of 2020.

In that aftermath, with assets inflated to $8.4 trillion, the Federal Reserve is by far the biggest bank in the country. It is also the biggest savings & loan, because inside the Fed is a mortgage portfolio of $2.6 trillion of long-term fixed rate mortgages, funded short with floating rate liabilities. This makes it far and away not only the biggest savings & loan in the country, but in all of history. The Fed is now earning more or less 2% on its mortgages, and more or less 2% on its long-term Treasuries. The duration of its mortgages has become longer than expected with their negative convexity and increasing interest rates. Its Treasuries are also very long, over $1.4 trillion with remaining maturities of more than 10 years. While earning 2%, the Fed is now paying over 5% to carry those investments. If your income is 2% and your cost is 5%, it’s hard to make money that way! From September 2022 to early June 2023, the Fed has had a net loss of $68 billion, and is on its way to an annual loss of about $100 billion, more than twice its capital.

The Fed’s own balance sheet was and is jammed with gigantic interest rate risk. One might not unreasonably ask, how could the Fed criticize banks like the failed Silicon Valley Bank for doing exactly the same thing that the Fed itself was and is doing? A fair question!

Of course, if the failed banks or the technically insolvent Fed had been right in the forecast that short-term interest rates would stay abnormally low, that kind of balance sheet would have been a profitable bet. They could have had 2% income and say, 0.25% interest expense. So let us ask: what was the Fed’s own interest rate forecast as it was accumulating its massive portfolio and interest rate risk?

Consider the Fed’s interest rate forecast done in June 2021 for the end of the year 2022. The median forecast for fed funds target was 0.25%. Of Federal Open Market Committee members submitting estimates, the highest rate was 0.75%. Compared to the 4.25%-4.5% reality, a big miss indeed!

What about the projection for 2023 at that same meeting? What did they think the fed funds target interest rate would be by the end of 2023? The median forecast was 0.75%. The highest submitted estimate was 1.75%. Another big miss, to say the least, with the rate now at 5%-5.25% five months into 2023.

The Fed’s poor forecasts bring to mind that famous American baseball poem, Casey at the Bat. In trying to forecast interest rates, and inflation, and banking problems, just like “Mighty Casey,” the mighty Fed has struck out.

In the meantime, the spring of 2023 provided some extreme drama in U.S. banking, tied significantly to the risk of the American 30-year fixed rate mortgage-- and this cycle is not over. Whatever may the coming in the way of further increases in interest rates, or interest rates continuing at current levels, or an often-predicted recession with lower interest rates but increased loan defaults, all will cause risks to the banking system. In any case, financial markets should remember not to put their trust in the forecasts of the Federal Reserve.

The second housing bubble of the 21st Century ends

Published in the Housing Finance International Journal and re-published in RealClear Markets.

The 21st century, only 23 years old, has already had two giant, international housing bubbles. It makes one doubt that we are getting any smarter with experience.

Among the countries involved in the second bubble, both the U.S. and Canada fully participated in the newest rampant inflation of house prices. Prices this time reached levels far above those of the last boom peak. In the U.S., the S&P/Case-Shiller National House Price Index by mid-2022 had risen to 67% over its 2006 bubble peak (130% over its 2012 trough). In Canada, the Teranet-National Bank House Price Index had soared to 143% over its 2008 peak (168% over its 2009 trough). What the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada both wrought with their hyper-low interest rate policies, were house prices which would be unaffordable as soon as mortgage interest rates returned to more normal levels. For a number of years, one could ask: When would that ever happen? Now we know: in 2022.

Now, in late 2022, with mortgage interest rates higher, housing bubbles are deflating, and house prices are dropping on a nationwide basis in both the U.S. and Canada. Here we go again into another house price fizzle following another house price boom.

How is it that we could find ourselves caught up in the problems of another housing bubble so soon? It is only ten years since 2012, the year house prices stopped falling in the U.S., and formed the trough of the painful bust which had followed the preceding bubble of 1999- 2006. Up to the point when house prices started falling across the U.S. last time, expert voices pronounced that U.S. house prices could fall on a regional basis, as they had numerous times, but that it was not possible for house prices to fall on a national basis in an economy so large and diversified. That theory could not have been more mistaken, and national average house prices fell 27%. In 2022, the theory is again being shown to be wrong, but how big the fall will be this time is not known or knowable.

We can take as a key ironic lesson that when large numbers of people believe house prices cannot fall, especially when they are emboldened by central bank behavior, it makes it more probable, and finally makes it certain, that the prices will ultimately fall. When they do, what had been built into everybody’s financial models as “HPA,” or “House Price Appreciation,” becomes instead “HPD”— “House Price Depreciation.” It would be better all along to refer to it as “HPC,” or “House Price Change,” thus reminding ourselves that prices of any asset can go both up and down, perhaps by a lot.

Ten years, it seems, is long enough to dim the memories that prices can move dramatically in both directions, even on a nationwide basis. A bubble market when extended for years makes a great many people happy, since they are making money and seem to be growing richer, and the higher their leverage, the faster they seem to be growing richer. As the great financial observer Walter Bagehot wrote 150 years ago, “the times of too high price” mean “almost everything will be believed for a little while.”

Then the reversal comes and different beliefs come to prevail. In just four months, from June to October 2022, U.S. median house prices dropped a remarkable 8.4%, with prices declining from their peak in all 60 of the largest metropolitan areas in the country. In October, sales of existing houses declined for the ninth month in a row, and were down 28% from a year earlier. Applications for a mortgage to buy a house were down 42% from the year before. Mortgage banks reported they were on average losing money on mortgage originations and many were laying off staff. The share price of 2021’s largest mortgage bank, Rocket Companies, was down 70% from its 2021 high. The CEO of the National Association of Home Builders stated, “We’re heading into a housing recession.”

In Canada, average house prices fell 7.7% from May to October, the largest five-month drop in the history of the Teranet index, which goes back to 1997. In Toronto, the country’s financial capital and a former star of rapid house price inflation, the May to October house price drop was a vertiginous 11.9%. Successive headlines in monthly Teranet-National Bank House Price Index announcements read: “Record price drop in August”; “Another record monthly decline in September”; “Another monthly decline in October.”

In spite of these rapid percentage rates of decline, house prices in both countries are still at very high levels. How much further can they fall from here? For the U.S., the Federal Reserve carefully stated in its latest Financial Stability Report, “With valuations at high levels, house prices could be particularly sensitive to shocks.” Coming to specifics, the AEI Housing Center predicts a 10%-15% nationalaverage fall in house prices during 2023. That would wipe out a lot of housing wealth that the bubble made people think they had, a reduction of perhaps $4 or $5 trillion of perceived wealth on top of the $3 trillion lost so far this year. It would put many houses bought near the top of the market, especially under government low- down payment programs, into no or negative owner’s equity.

For Canada, the Wall Street Journal suggested that its housing market is “particularly sensitive to monetary tightening,” and reported that Oxford Analytics “estimates that home prices in Canada could fall 30%.”

Recall that a price has no substantive reality: it is an intersection of human expectations, actions, hopes and fears. I like to ask audiences, “How much can the price of an asset change?” My proposed answer: “More than you think.”

Of course, nobody, including the Federal Reserve and the Bank of Canada, knows just where house prices will go, but we can all guess. Noted economist Gary Shilling wrote in November, “Price declines are just starting,” and “recent weakness probably has far to go.” This seems to me likely.

In any case, the second great housing bubble of this still young century is over and a new phase has begun.

The historical waning of the U.S. Savings & Loans

Published in Housing Finance International Journal.

At its founding in 1914, the original name of the association which publishes Housing Finance International was the “International Union of Building Societies and Savings & Loan Associations.” This narrow focus fit the times; the name got the unattractive acronym of “IUBSSA.” When it was 75 years old, and after the disastrous number of failures in the U.S. savings & loan industry during the 1980s, a broader perspective was reflected in a new name for the association in 1989: the “International Union of Housing Finance Institutions” (“IUHFI”). Fundamental change in housing finance markets continued, notably the great expansion of mortgage securitization, and showed this was still too narrow an idea. So 1997 brought a yet broader and still current name: the “International Union for Housing Finance.”

I had the honor of co-chairing the committee which proposed the by-law revisions of 1997 that included changing the name, symbolizing that the IUHF is interested in and welcomes participation from all forms of the essential, worldwide activity of housing finance, one of the largest credit markets in the world, as well as one of the most politically and socially most important. Financial evolution, as it has continued in the 25 years since then, shows that wider perspective to be the correct approach.

A fundamental idea governing the shape of housing finance in its historical form of building societies and savings and loans was what was called the “special circuit” of funding for housing finance. As Michael Lea, a former Director of Research for the IUHF, and Douglas Diamond, Jr. wrote in 1992:

“Housing finance traditionally has been an area of intervention by governments, especially through the creation of special circuits for [mortgage] funding flows. … In many countries, governments intervened in the market to set up special circuits, characterized by a significant degree of regulation, segmentation from the rest of the financial markets, and often substantial government subsidy.”1

American savings & loan associations were a large and perfect example of such a special circuit, with savings accounts, which received regulatory advantages, directly linked to mortgage loans, both of which got a lot of favorable political attention. In the U.S. case, the savings & loans were required by law and regulation to make principally very long mortgage loans, with the interest rate fixed for 20 or 30 years. A special circuit was also represented by building societies in the United Kingdom and other countries, thus making up the two parts of the original name and membership of the International Union of Building Societies and Savings & Loans. As Lea also wrote:

“Specialist-deposit funded institutions… traditionally dominated the provision of housing finance in Anglo-Saxon countries (for example, Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States) as well as Commonwealth countries… Through most of the 20th century, the building societies/savings & loan model dominated housing finance in the English-speaking world.”2 In the U.S., the specialist institutions included, in addition to the savings & loans, their close cousins, the mutual savings banks, known together as “thrift institutions.” In 1980, there were 5,073 thrift institutions in the United States.

As Lea observes, “Starting in the 1980s, this model began to lose influence and market share to commercial banks.” In the U.S., they also lost massive market share to the government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as that duopoly’s government-guaranteed securitization replaced the balance sheets of thrifts for mortgage funding. By the late 1980s, one housing finance expert could write, “Mortgage-backed securities have forever blown apart thrift balance-sheet compartmentalization.”3

The decline of the special circuit was especially marked in the United States by the collapse of much of the thrift industry. There were failures by the hundreds. Between 1982 and 1992, 1,332 U.S. thrift institutions failed. That is on average 121 housing finance institution failures per year continuing over eleven years, or a rate of more than two failures per week for a decade.

The savings & loan industry as a whole became insolvent on a mark-to-market basis. The government’s deposit insurance fund for the savings & loans, the Federal Savings & Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC), itself became completely broke. In 1989, the same year IUBSSA was renamed IUHFI, all these failures resulted in a $150 billion U.S. taxpayer bailout under the emergency Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act. Expressed in inflation-adjusted 2022 dollars, that is a bailout of $350 billion.

This was a crisis indeed: the collapse of an entire housing finance structure of a special circuit promoted and guaranteed by the U.S. government. The thrifts had total assets of $796 billion in 1980, or $2.8 trillion in 2022 dollars.

Since the savings & loans had unwisely been required by the government to make primarily long-term fixed rate mortgage loans with their short term, variable rate deposits, when the Great Inflation of the 1970s resulted in double-digit interest rates—with 3-month Treasury bill rates reaching 15% in 1981—such a balance sheet was an obvious formula for disaster.

The savings & loans and other thrifts were, for example, financing assets yielding 6% with liabilities costing 10% or more, spilling an ocean of red ink. The savings & loan regulator of the time, the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), tried earnestly, frantically, and unsuccessfully to avoid the fate of the industry, but it was too late.

Thomas Vartanian, a General Counsel of the FHLBB during the 1980s crisis, looking back from 2021, reflected on the culpability of the government, which had promoted and tried to protect the thrifts, but ended up first trapping them and then charging the taxpayers for their losses.

“In this government-made economic biosphere,” Vartanian wrote, “Savings & loans generally had portfolios of thirty-year fixed-rate that they normally held to maturity. Variable rate mortgages were disfavored and actually prohibited under federal law until 1981”—that applied to federally-chartered savings & loans. “A few states did permit state-chartered savings & loans to make variable rate mortgages…but most savings & loans were compelled by law to do what no sane businessperson would ever advocate: borrow short…and lend long”—very long.

Vartanian concluded, perhaps not too diplomatically, “This financial gross negligence had been imposed on savings & loans by federal law.”4 Of course it was all imposed with good intentions and with cheering from housing interest groups.

By 2000, the more than five thousand thrift institutions had shrunk to 1,589, a nearly 70% attrition. By 2022, the total had been reduced to 602, 88% fewer than as the 1980s began.

This was a dramatic shift in industrial structure from the days of the great post-World War II American housing boom, when savings & loans were the most important mortgage lenders. In this golden age of the savings & loans, the American home ownership rate increased dramatically, from about 50% in 1944 to over 64% in 1980. Waving the banner of housing and home ownership, the savings and loans were politically potent. Their national trade association, the U.S. League for Savings, was a political lobbying force to be reckoned with.

They had their own government deposit insurance fund and their own governmentsponsored liquidity facility, the Federal Home Loan Banks.

The list of the 25 biggest savings & loans in America in 1983 contained many names famous in housing finance circles in those days. How many do you think still exist, thoughtful Reader? Make your guess before you read the answer.

The answer is that of these 25 formerly industryleading institutions, the number still existing as independent companies is zero. Of the 25, 17 failed or were acquired by institutions that later failed. The other eight were acquired and became just a part of much bigger commercial banks. These 25 formerly well-known names are unheard of now, a good lesson for the young in the fragility of institutions and a source of nostalgia, perhaps, for old housing finance veterans.5

The U.S. League for Savings no longer exists, having first changed its name to the Savings and Community Bankers of America, then to America’s Community Banks, then joining with the commercial banks by becoming part of the American Bankers Association.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board was abolished by Congress and replaced by the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS). The OTS was subsequently abolished, and its responsibilities moved to regulator of national commercial banks, the Comptroller of the Currency.

FSLIC was abolished by Congress and its deposit insurance fund first taken over by, and then merged into, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the guarantor of commercial bank deposits.

The Federal Home Loan Banks (FHLBs) remain large and active, but the thrifts, which used to represent all of the FHLB stockholding members, now are only 9% of the members, while commercial banks are 58%.

Lea and Diamond concluded that “Political and market forces seem to have eroded the reasons for having special circuits and the ability to maintain them.” In the U.S. savings & loan case, they certainly did.

The government triangle at the heart of U.S. housing finance

Published by Housing Finance International.

The U.S. central bank’s great 21st century monetization of residential mortgages, with $2.7 trillion of mortgage securities on the books of the Federal Reserve, is a fundamental expansion of the role of the government in the American housing finance system.

In Economics in One Lesson (1946), Henry Hazlitt gave a classic description of those whose private interests are served by government policies carried out at the expense of everybody else. “The group that would benefit by such policies,” Hazlitt wrote, “having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case,” with “endless pleadings of self-interest.”

Such pleadings have characterized the U.S. housing and mortgage lending industries over many decades, in Hazlitt’s day and in ours, with notable success, and resulted in the massive involvement and interventions of the U.S. government in housing finance. Through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the U.S. government guarantees about $8 trillion of mortgage debt. That’s $8 trillion. This sum is about 70% of the $11 trillion of mortgages in the country. Does it make sense for the U.S. government to guarantee 70% of the whole market? It does not. But so it has evolved in the politics of U.S. housing.

As part of this evolution, U.S. mortgage finance has become dominated by a tightly linked government triangle. The first leg of the triangle is composed of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie (with its associated Federal Housing Administration). This leg we may call the Government Housing Complex.

The second leg in the government mortgage triangle is the United States Treasury. The Treasury is fully liable for all the obligations of the 100% government-owned Ginnie. The Treasury is also the majority owner of both Fannie and Freddie and effectively guarantees all their obligations, too. Through clever financial lawyering, it is not a legal guarantee, however, because that would require the honest inclusion of all Fannie and Freddie’s debt in the calculation of the total U.S. government debt. Unsurprisingly, this is not politically desired.

The same politically undesired, but honest, accounting result would follow if, on top of owning 100% of Fannie and Freddie’s $270 billion of senior preferred stock, the Treasury controlled 80% of their common stock. Government accounting rules require that at 80% the entity's debt must be consolidated into the government debt. That is why Treasury controls 79.9%, not 80%, of their common stock, which is done through warrants with an exercise price that rounds to zero. This is historically consistent, since to get Fannie’s debt off the government’s books was the main reason for its 1968 restructuring it into a so-called “government-sponsored enterprise,” so that President Lyndon Johnson’s federal deficit did not look as big.

The Federal Reserve didn’t used to be, but it has become the third leg of the government mortgage triangle, as the single biggest funder of mortgages by far. Its $2.7 trillion of mortgage securities holdings are limited to those guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie. But those guarantees are only credible because they are in turn backed by the credit of the Treasury.

However, there is another curious circle here. How can the Treasury, which runs huge continuing deficits and runs up its debt year after year, be thought such a good credit? It turns out that an essential support of the credit of the Treasury is the readiness of the Federal Reserve always to buy government debt by printing up the money to do so. This is why having a fiat currency central bank of its own is so very useful to any government. The intertwined credit of the Treasury and of the Federal Reserve are intriguingly dependent on each other, and they both support the credit of the government mortgage complex of Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie.

In this sense, it is helpful to think of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury as one thing – one combined government financing operation, whose financial statements should be consolidated. In such consolidated statements, the $5.8 trillion of Treasury debt owned by the Federal Reserve would be a consolidating elimination. With this approach, we could see the reality more clearly. The Federal Reserve buys and monetizes Treasury debt. Consolidate the statements. The Treasury bonds disappear. What is really happening? The consolidated government prints up money and spends it. In order to spend, it is taxing by monetary inflation, without the need to vote on taxes and without the need for the legislature to act at all.

We should then bring Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie into the consolidation. The government mortgage complex issues mortgage securities, then the Federal Reserve buys and monetizes them. Consolidate the statements, and the mortgage securities held by the Federal Reserve also disappear as a consolidating elimination. What reality is left? The consolidated government prints up “free” money and uses it to make mortgage loans, inflating the price of houses. This arrangement suits housing lobbyists, to be sure, and the proponents of “modern monetary theory” who wish to have no limits on the government’s ability to spend. Of course, this theory is an illusion. The reality, and the most fundamental of all economic principles is: Nothing is free. Free printed money becomes very expensive indeed when it turns into destructive inflation.

In principle, a fiat currency central bank can buy and monetize not just bonds and mortgages, but any asset. For example, the Swiss National Bank (the central bank) includes a large portfolio of U.S. stocks in its investments. It recently reported a net loss of $33 billion for the first quarter of 2022, caused by its $37 billion in investment losses. In the U.S. case, the Federal Reserve in the Covid financial crisis, in cooperation with the Treasury, devised ways to buy corporate debt and even the debt of the nearly insolvent state of Illinois as investments for the central bank.

Further back in history, in the 1960s, some members of the U.S. Congress thought, with the encouragement of the savings & loan industry, that the Federal Reserve ought to buy bonds to provide money to housing. Federal Reserve Chairman William McChesney Martin resisted, arguing that this would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy, in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”

That was the right answer, consistent with Economics in One Lesson. But it did not please the politicians. Senator William Proxmire pointedly threatened the Fed:

“You recognize, I take it” he said to the Fed Vice Chairman in 1968, “that the Federal Reserve Board is a creature of the Congress? [That] the Congress can create it, abolish it, and so forth?... What would Congress have to do to indicate that it wishes…greater support to the housing market?”

A new Federal Reserve Chairman, Arthur Burns, arrived in 1971, and decided it would be a good idea to “demonstrate a cooperative attitude.” So, the Federal Reserve began to buy the bonds (not mortgages) of federal housing and other government agencies. It ended up buying the bonds of Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Banks, the Federal Farm Credit Banks, the Federal Land Banks, the Federal Intermediate Credit Banks, the Banks of Cooperatives, and – believe it or not – the debt of the Washington DC subway system. There were suggestions it ought to buy the debt of New York City, when it nearly went bankrupt in 1975.

The Federal Reserve fortunately managed to get out of this program starting in 1978, but the liquidation of the portfolio lasted until the 1990s. Will it be able to get out of its vastly bigger mortgage program now?

In 1978, Hazlitt wrote in The Inflation Crisis, And How to Resolve It: “Inflation, not only in the United States but throughout the world, has… not only continued, but spread and accelerated. The problems it presents, in a score of aspects, have become increasingly grave and urgent.”

In 2022, with U.S. inflation is running at over 8%, here we are again.

As the Federal Reserve now moves to address the inflation, interest rates on the standard American 30-year fixed rate mortgage have gone from their suppressed level of 3% in 2021 to about 5½% in May 2022. Although historically speaking, that is still rather low, it will make many houses unaffordable for those who need a mortgage loan to buy. The interest expense for the same-sized mortgage for the same-priced house has increased by about 80%. How much higher might mortgage interest rates go? With higher mortgage rates, how quickly will the runaway house price inflation end? Will that be followed by a fall in U.S. house prices from their current bubble heights? We are waiting to see.

Who Owns Federal Reserve Losses and How Will They Impact Monetary Policy?

Published by the American Enterprise Institute.

By Paul H. Kupiec and Alex J. Pollock

Abstract

For the first time in its 108-year history, the Federal Reserve System faces massive and growing mark-to-market losses and is projected to post large operating losses in the near future. In a 2011 policy statement, the Federal Reserve Board outlined its plan to monetize system operating losses notwithstanding the (apparently) little-known fact that the Federal Reserve Act requires Federal Reserve member banks (the stockholders who own the Federal Reserve district banks) to share at least a portion of district reserve bank operating losses. Contrary to opinions expressed by Federal Reserve system officials, should the Fed abide by the legal requirements in the current version of the Federal Reserve Act, operating losses could impact monetary policy. If the Fed chooses to ignore the law and monetize operating losses, member banks will be in the enviable (if difficult to justify) position of directly benefiting from the current inflation. Because they are now paid interest on their reserve balances and receive guaranteed dividends on their Federal Reserve stock, member banks will monetarily benefit from the Fed’s policy to fight inflation while the public bears Federal Reserve system losses. Meanwhile, the public at large will also face the costs of higher interest rates, reduced growth and employment and losses in their investment and retirement account balances. Should the public recognize the implications of the Fed’s plan to monetize its operating losses, the Fed could face an embarrassing “communication problem”.

Read the full PDF here.

Post page here.

The Federal Reserve KeepsBuying Mortgages

Published by the Housing Finance International Journal.

Runaway house price inflation continues to characterize the U.S. market. House prices across the country rose 15.8% on average in October 2021 from the year before. U.S. house prices are far over their 2006 Bubble peak, and remain over the Bubble peak even after adjustment for consumer price inflation. They will keep on rising at the annual rate of 14-16% for the rest of 2021, according to the AEI Housing Center.

Unbelievably, in this situation the Federal Reserve keeps on buying mortgages. It buys a lot of them and continues to be the price-setting marginal buyer or Big Bid in the mortgage market, expanding its mortgage portfolio with one hand, and printing money with the other. It should have stopped before now, but the purchases, financed by newly created fiat money, or monetization, go on. They proceed at the rate of tens of billions of dollars a month, stoking the house price inflation, making it harder and harder for new families to afford a house. A recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece was entitled, “How the Fed Rigs the Bond Market” – it rigs the mortgage market, too.

The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve has grown to a size that would have amazed previous generations of Federal Reserve governors and economists. Although we have become somewhat accustomed to it, so fast do perceptions adjust, it would also have surprised readers of Housing Finance International of five years ago, and readers of 15 years ago would probably have judged the current reality simply impossible. Over time, we keep discovering how feeble are our judgments of what is possible or impossible.

The total assets of the Federal Reserve reached $8.7 trillion in November 2021. This is just about double the $4.5 trillion of November 2016, five years before – and we thought it was really big then. Today’s Federal Reserve assets are ten times what they were in November 2006, 15 years ago, when they were $861 billion, and none were mortgages.

The Federal Reserve now owns on its balance sheet $2.6 trillion in mortgages. That means about 24 % of all outstanding residential mortgages in this whole big country reside in the central bank, which has thereby earned the remarkable status of becoming by far the largest savings and loan institution in the world. Like the historical U.S. savings and loans associations, the Federal Reserve owns very long- term mortgages, with their interest rates fixed for 15 to 30 years, and neither marks its investments to market in its financial statements nor hedges its substantial interest rate risk. It accounts for its mortgages at par value, not what it paid for them, and separately reports $338 billion of unamortized premiums (net of discounts) on securities – presumably a significant proportion of this is premiums paid on mortgages and thus additional investment in them.

This $2.6 trillion in mortgages is 48% more than the Federal Reserve’s $1.76 trillion of five years ago, and of course, infinitely greater than the zero of 2006. Remember that from the founding of the Federal Reserve until then, the number of mortgages it owned had always been zero. That was what was normal. Whether moving into directly subsidizing mortgages and inflating the price of houses be considered progress or deterioration, or perhaps first the former and then the latter, it was certainly a big change. It was an emergency action in both the financial crisis of 2007-09 and the financial panic of 2020. Should a giant Federal Reserve mortgage portfolio be permanent or temporary? If temporary, how long should it go on?

The Cincinnatian Problem

An abiding problem is how you can reverse central bank and government crisis interventions, initially thought and meant to be temporary, after the crisis passes. The idea that government intervention, required in times of crisis, should be withdrawn in the renewed normal times which follow, I call the Cincinnatian Doctrine. It is named for the ancient Roman hero Cincinnatus, who was called from his plow to save the State, became temporary Dictator, did save the State, and then, mission accomplished, went back to his farm. (I introduced this term at the IUHF World Congress in 2006, just before the housing bubble of the time imploded.)

However sincere the intent that they should be temporary, the emergency interventions inevitably build up economic and political constituencies who profit from them and want them continued indefinitely. The difficulty of winding them back down, once they have become established, I call the Cincinnatian Problem. There is no easy answer to the problem. How, so to speak, do you get the Federal Reserve to go back to its farm, once it has enjoyed becoming the dominant mortgage investor in the world?

In the 1960s, the Congress pushed the Federal Reserve to support the housing market by buying the debt issues (not mortgages) of Fannie Mae and other federal agencies involved with housing. The Federal Reserve of the time resisted. Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin testified that such an idea would “violate a fundamental principle of sound monetary policy in that it would attempt to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize programs benefitting special sectors of the economy.”

That seems to me exactly the right principle for normal times. In the last two crises, the Federal Reserve has decided to do precisely the opposite, that is “to use the credit-creating powers of the central bank to subsidize” a particularly political sector of the economy, namely housing finance. When the crises are over, and the interventions have become huge distortions, what next? Can we now even imagine a Federal Reserve which owns zero mortgages? At this point, can the Federal Reserve itself imagine that?

“Tapering”

In November 2021, the Federal Reserve belatedly announced it would begin to “taper” its purchases of mortgages (as well as of Treasury debt) and in December announced further that it would “taper” more quickly. This still means with ongoing, unabated inflation in house prices, the Federal Reserve is going to continue buying mortgages – only it will buy less than before. It will reduce the rate at which it increases its mortgage portfolio.

Specifically, the Federal Reserve had been buying enough mortgages to make its portfolio go up by $40 billion a month, after replacing all principal repayments and prepayments. Now the net increase will be reduced by $10 billion a month. If it proceeds at this rate, the Federal Reserve will add $60 billion to its mortgage portfolio over three months before getting to a zero net addition. What happens then? Will it keep buying to maintain the size of its massive portfolio? Will it let the portfolio run off? – which would take a long time, perhaps lasting to the next financial crisis. Will it ever sell a single mortgage security? I believe nobody knows, including the Federal Reserve.

Our closing questions on the outlook are: If the Federal Reserve stops being the Big Bid for mortgages, how much higher will mortgage interest rates go from their present abnormally low level? When the mortgage rates rise, how quickly will the house price inflation end? Will it reverse? How will the Federal Reserve, and the country, address their Cincinnatian Problem?

Since 2008, Monetary Policy Has Cost American Savers about $4 Trillion

Posted in Audio Mises Wire.

After thirteen years with on average negative real returns to conservative savings, it is time to require the Federal Reserve to address its impact on savers.

Click here to listen.

Two house price inflations, two central banks

Published in Housing Finance International.

In 2021, North America is the home of runaway house price inflation. In both the U.S. and Canada, house prices are far over their Bubble peaks of the first decade of the 2000s and they continue to rise rapidly. In both countries, they are increasing at double-digit annual rates: over 15% in the U.S., according to the AEI Housing Center’s current estimate, and 11.9% in Canada, according to Teranet. They are journalistically described by terms like “surging,” “soaring,” and “red-hot.”

The Case-Shiller national index of U.S. house prices is at about 243, compared to its 2006 Bubble peak of 184. That puts it 32% higher than at the top of the Bubble. “Record-high home prices are happening across nearly all markets, big and small,” says the National Association of Realtors.

In Canada, the comparison is even more striking. The Teranet Canadian composite house price index is at about 261, almost double its 2008 peak of 133.

Anecdotes match the numbers. “Brokers describe the current market as frenzied,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Many homes receive multiple offers within days.” One Texas broker “said she has never seen a market like this before. In some cases, buyers are offering $100,000 above asking prices. …It’s just crazy, there’s no other word to describe it.”

One Canadian commentator wrote recently, “A sellers’ market prevails…I was surprised to learn that bidding wars…were now common in my hometown, Windsor, Ontario, for sales of even relatively modest houses.” Windsor is a modest industrial city, across the river from Detroit, Michigan.

This house price inflation of both countries, far outrunning the growth of wages, is obviously not sustainable, but it has already gone on longer and to higher prices than many thought possible, including me. As one of my economist friends said recently, “It can’t go on, but it does.”

Very appropriately, in my view, the Bank of Canada in February discussed “excess exuberance” in Canada’s housing market. In April, it added that this market shows “signs of extrapolative expectations and speculative behavior” – strong language for a central bank to use. The term “excess exuberance” is obviously a variation on the “irrational exuberance” made famous by then-Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in 1996, warning about the dot.com stock bubble of the day. That bubble pushed prices up for three more years after Greenspan’s warning, but did ultimately implode. How long will the Canadian and U.S. house price inflations continue, and how will they end?

The Federal Reserve is far less direct than the pointed comments of the Bank of Canada, but it also discusses house prices, albeit with much blander language (or “Fedspeak,” as we say in the U.S.). In its updated Financial Stability Report of May 2021, the Fed observes about asset prices in general, “Prices of risky assets have risen further” and “Looking ahead, asset prices may be vulnerable to significant declines.” True, and it applies among other things to house prices. A number of my financial friends were particularly amused that this report never mentions the Fed’s own continuing role in stoking the inflation of asset prices and the systemic risk they represent.

Specifically on housing, the Fed says, “House price growth continued to increase, and valuations appear high.” Further, “Low levels of interest rates have likely supported robust housing demand.” Yes, except that we need to change that “likely” to “without question.” Implied in this statement, although not made explicit, is how vulnerable house prices, which depend on financing with high leverage, are to interest rates rising from their current historic lows of 3% or so.

What might a more normal interest rate be for the typical U.S. 30-year, fixed rate, freely prepayable mortgage? We can guess that if inflation were at 2%, and the 10-year Treasury yield at inflation plus 1.5%, and the mortgage rate at 1.5% over the 10-year Treasury, that suggests a mortgage rate in the 5% range. An increase in U.S. mortgage interest rates to this level would doubtless entail major house price reductions. (Of course, general inflation going forward may be higher, perhaps a lot higher, than 2%.)

The single most remarkable factor in the U.S. housing finance system at this point is that the central bank has become a massive investor in long-term mortgages. This started as a radical, emergency action in 2008 and ballooned again as an emergency action in 2020, but continues to expand – for how long? As of May 26, 2021, the Fed owned over $2.2 trillion in mortgages at face value, or over 20% of the whole national market. It also reported $349 billion of total unamortized premiums on its books. Assuming half of that is for mortgages, the Fed’s total investment in mortgages is $2.4 trillion. It is by far the biggest savings and loan in the world and getting constantly bigger.

In instructive contrast, the Bank of Canada stopped buying mortgages last year, in October 2020. But the Fed keeps buying, continuing to increase its mortgage portfolio at the rate of $40 billion a month, or $480 billion a year. The central bank thus continues to stimulate and subsidize a market already experiencing a buying frenzy and runaway price inflation – a fascinating, and some would say, astonishing, dynamic in unorthodox housing finance and central banking. The Federal Reserve, like the Bank of Canada, should stop buying mortgages.

Another Bad Idea: Fannie and Freddie as Utilities

Published by the American Enterprise Institute with Patrick Lawler and Edward J. Pinto.

In the more than twelve years since their 2008 failure, nobody has been able to figure out how to end Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac being wards of the state, as their continued existence is wholly dependent on the generosity of the taxpayer by way of the U.S. Treasury’s credit.  Many proposals, legislative and otherwise, for restructuring or replacing these behemoths have come and gone. Now, arguments are increasingly being made to retread these government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) as privately owned, public utilities.  While this idea has its promoters, we believe it is fundamentally a bad idea.  How the Government Mortgage Complex does love to propose rent-seeking solutions that operate with the largest possible government guarantee.

In March 2020, the Center for Responsible Lending published a paper by Eric Stein and Bob Ryan urging that a utility approach to regulation of the GSEs be implemented post-conservatorship, which they asserted was essentially how they were being regulated in conservatorship.  In December, 2020 the National Association of Realtors in a paper by Richard Cooperstein, Ken Fears, and Susan Wachter, reiterated and updated their earlier position that made the public utility model the centerpiece of their “enduring vision of housing finance reform.”  They recommend that the GSEs should be prevented from excessive competition for market share in good times and from hiking fees in bad times to an extent that would undermine their public missions.  In January 2021, the former CEO of Freddie Mac, Don Layton, now at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, continued to argue for utility style regulation of GSE guarantee fees, the amount they change lenders for assuming mortgage credit risk.

Also in January 2021, the Treasury Department released a blueprint for GSE reform that called for continued regulatory oversight of GSE pricing post-conservatorship in a way that would simultaneously protect the safety and soundness of the GSEs while seeking to channel the benefits of federal support to homebuyers and renters rather than shareholders and managers.  The blueprint builds on its earlier housing reform plan that appeared to endorse giving greatly enhanced regulatory authorities, such as a utility regulator might have, to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) with regard to permissible activities and products.  And in February 2021, the Brookings institution published a paper by Michael Calhoun (president of the Center for Responsible Lending) and Lewis Ranieri calling for utility oversight focusing on increased transfers to affordable housing and racial equity programs.  These proposals build on previous ideas going back more than 20 years, but are now achieving greater visibility and wider mention.

These encomiums ignore the all too foreseeable consequences of a public utility structure, especially when applied to these national financial giants that have little in common with a local water company. The combination of political clout and a greatly expanded cookie jar of fees and cross subsidies would repeat, and in some respects worsen, the ills of the GSE structure that failed so spectacularly in 2008.  Their insolvencies were critical precipitating events of the financial chaos in the fall of that year.  In the early post-crisis years, there was general agreement that reliance on these giant institutions as the foundation of that market had revealed manifold problems that required a major change in approach.  Fannie and Freddie:

• Were intended for public purposes, but controlled by private investors; they earned outsized returns for their owners during most of their existence, but in 2008 needed massive taxpayer bailouts exceeding all their previous profits;

• Used the advantages of their special status to expand their franchises into new activities, crowd out competitors, and dominate less favored firms;

• Concentrated mortgage risks in two entities with extraordinary leverage;

• In response to congressional low-income affordable housing mandates, used a portion of the subsidy provided by the taxpayer’s implicit guarantee to increase debt, and subsidize the cost of that debt, rather than making homes more affordable and building wealth for low-income buyers.

• Failed to durably raise homeownership rates, but did contribute to significantly bigger houses for the all classes of homebuyers; and

• Wielded powerful economic and political clout to bully customers, suppliers, regulators, executive branch agencies, and Congress for their own benefit.

Please click here to view the PDF

Banking Credit System, 1970-2020

Published by the Office of Financial Research, U.S. Department of Treasury.

BY Alex J. Pollock, Hashim Hamandi, Ruth Leung, OFR*

This essay puts the depository institutions industry into broad historical perspective, looking at the fifty year changes from 1970 to 2020.

For this analysis, we aggregate the Banking Credit System, defined as the government-chartered depositories and their principal chartered support entities. We define the relevant components as:

• The largest ten bank holding companies (BHCs)

• All other insured depository institutions

• The Government Mortgage Complex (Fannie Mae + Freddie Mac + Ginnie Mae)

• The Federal Reserve Banks.

As the following five tables demonstrate, the changes in this system and its components over this period with respect to asset size, relative size, share, size relative to nominal GDP, and long-term growth rates are dramatic.

As shown in Tables 1 and 2, there has been dramatic expansion in the scale of the institutions involved. Table 1 measures this in nominal dollars. Table 2 adjusts these numbers for inflation, using constant 2020 dollars. The increase in size in both nominal and real terms is remarkable.

Over the same period, the number of insured depositories has dropped dramatically: from over 19,800 in 1970 to about 5,000 in 2020—a reduction of 75% since one co-author (Alex Pollock) was a bank management trainee.

Meanwhile, the huge residential mortgage sector has become dominated by the Government Mortgage Complex, which was in 1970 relatively small, almost a rounding error, but has grown very big indeed. In nominal terms, it is now almost 260 times as big as it was in 1970, compared to the depository institutions asset growth of 28 times.

Table 1.

(1)Our goal is to understand the banking sector. If we expanded to non-bank companies, the size and growth would be even larger. Some of these companies’ activity is reflected in the Government Mortgage Complex, where they have a dominant share of mortgage servicing, and also in auto loans, credit cards and other consumer lending.

(2)1971

Of course, a lot of the growth when expressed in nominal dollars represents the endemic inflation of the post-1970 monetary regime. Table 2 shows the system’s still remarkable growth after adjusting for inflation.

Table 2.

(1)Values for 1970 are expressed in constant 2020 dollars using CPI values for June 2020 and December 1970.

Equally remarkable is the shift in the composition of the system, as shown in Table 3.

The ten largest BHCs in 1970 together equaled only 16% of the Banking Credit System, equal to about one-quarter of the aggregate size of all the other insured depositories. By 2020, the top ten have become 34% of the total system and have 1.3 times the assets of all the rest of the banks put together. Alternately stated, over these decades the consolidation of the historically highly fragmented American banking business has proceeded very far.

The big winners of share of the system over 50 years are the largest ten banks, the Government Mortgage Complex, and the Fed. The big losers of share are all the other depository institutions.

Table 3.

(1)Totals may not sum exactly due to rounding.

As shown in Table 4, the Banking Credit System over 50 years grew enormously relative to the economy as a whole—from 89% to 182% of GDP.

Table 4.

(1)Totals may not sum exactly due to rounding.

The assets of the biggest ten banks grew much faster than the other banks, increasing from 14% to 62% of GDP. All the other banks put together, now numbering about 5,000, fell from 63% to 47% of GDP.

The Government Mortgage Complex hugely inflated from 3% of GDP to 40%, by far the biggest change.

Table 5 shows the 50-year compound average rates of growth, both nominal and real, for the Banking Credit System, and GDP growth rates as a baseline comparison.

Table 5.

The Banking Credit System as a whole grew substantially faster than GDP over 50 years.

The Federal Reserve, now by far the biggest bank of all, grew much faster than GDP.

The Government Mortgage Complex grew fastest of all by far, at 11.8% per year in nominal terms, almost double the 6.1% for nominal GDP.

In Sum

Over the last 50 years, the Banking Credit System grew vastly bigger relative to the economy, much more consolidated, and much more dependent on both the government mortgage complex and the government’s central bank, greatly increasing its dependence on explicit and implicit government guarantees. This history exemplifies the maxim of Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber (1) that every banking system is a deal between the bankers and the politicians.

(1)Fragile by Design (2014)

*Views and opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent official positions or policy of the OFR or Treasury. All the data used in this paper are from public sources, including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Congressional Budget Office, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Comment Letter To OCC, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and FDIC

Published by the R Street Institute.

Via e-mail to:

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency

Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

         Re.: Comments on the Proposed Joint Rule on “Regulatory Capital Treatment for Investments in  Certain Unsecured Debt Instruments of Global Systemically Important U.S. Bank Holding Companies, Certain Intermediate Holding Companies, and Global Systemically Important Foreign Banking Organizations”

              OCC: Docket ID OCC-2018-0019; RIN 1557-AE38

              Board: Docket No. R-1655; RIN 7100-AF43

              FDIC: RIN 3064-AE79

Dear Sirs and Mesdames:

Thank you for the opportunity to comment on this proposed joint rule.

In my view, the logic of the proposal is impeccable.  Because it is, it should be applied to another, parallel situation, as discussed below.  The proposal’s objective, “to reduce interconnectedness and contagion risk among banks by discouraging banking organizations from investing in the regulatory capital of another financial institution,” makes sense, but might be improved by adding, “or if such investments are made, to ensure that they are adequately capitalized.”

I believe another rule with exactly the same logic and exactly the same objective is required to address a key vulnerability of the U.S. banking system.  That is to apply the logic of the proposed rule to any investments made by U.S. banks in the equity securities of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two of the very largest and most systemically risky of American financial institutions.  As you know, hundreds of American banks took steep losses on their investments in the preferred stock of Fannie and Freddie when those institutions collapsed, and such investments caused a number of banks to fail.  That banks were able to make these investments on a highly leveraged basis was, in my judgment, a serious regulatory, as well as management, mistake.  On top of this, U.S. regulations allowed banks to own Fannie and Freddie securities without limit.

Banks were thus encouraged by regulation to invest in the equity of Fannie and Freddie on a hyper-leveraged basis, using insured deposits to fund the equity securities.  Hundreds of banks owned about $8 billion of Fannie and Freddie’s preferred stock.  For this disastrous investment, national banks had a risk-based capital requirement of a mere 1.6%, since changed to a still inadequate 8%.  In other words, they owned Fannie and Freddie preferred stock on margin, with 98.4%, later 92%, debt. (With due respect, your broker’s margin desk wouldn’t letyou do that.)

In short, the banking system was used to double leverage Fannie and Freddie, just as the investments in TLAC debt addressed by the proposal would otherwise double-leverage big banks.  To analogously correct the systemic risk, when banks own Fannie and Freddie equities, they should have a dollar-for-dollar capital requirement, so that it really would be equity from a consolidated system point of view.

I respectfully recommend, true to the principle and the logic of the proposed joint rule, that any investments by a bank in the preferred or common stock of Fannie and Freddie should be deducted from its Tier 1 regulatory capital.  I believe this should apply to banks of all sizes.

These are my personal views.  It would be a pleasure to provide any further information or comments which might be helpful.

Thank you for your consideration.

                                                                                    Respectfully,

                                                                                    Alex J. Pollock

Financial Goblins

Published by the R Street Institute.

Just in time for Halloween last week, three financial goblins appeared in the Financial Times in the same October 31 issue:

-China Minsheng Investment Group, “the country’s largest private investment company,” with “crushing debt problems,” reportedly is cutting senior and mid-tier salaries by 53% “in a bold decision to save itself.”

-WeWork, the struggling former financial darling, drew a forecast from hedge fund manager Bill Ackman that it has “a high probability of being a zero for the equity as well as for the debt.”

-“South Korea’s biggest hedge fund, Lime Asset Management” is “swamped by investors’ demands to get their money back,” is “forced to sell hard-to-trade assets…at fire-sale prices,” and has “suspended withdrawals.”

The next day, the Wall Street Journal added:

“Depositors swarmed a rural bank here…rushing to pull money out.”

Perhaps these four goblins represent various leaks springing in the global “Everything Bubble” the central banks have inflated?

Do you believe central bank assurances?

Published by the R Street Institute.

To reassure savers worried about the safety of their deposits, the Reserve Bank of India (India’s central bank) recently announced it “would like to assure the general public that Indian banking is safe and stable and there is no need to panic.”

The problem is that when government officials issue such assurances, do you believe them?

Governments confronted by the risk of a banking crisis have to say the same thing regardless how severe the risk really is. They must say that the system is safe and you should not panic, because they are afraid that, by sharing any doubts, they would themselves set off the panic they fear. Therefore, their statements of assurance have no informational substance.

“When it becomes serious, you have to lie,” Jean-Claude Juncker, then head of the eurozone finance ministers, with admirable candor said of the European financial crisis of the 2000s.

“We have no plans to insert money into either of those two institutions,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the summer of 2008. One month later, he began inserting into both of them what became $187 billion of bailout money.

Governments and banks in stressed situations are up against Walter Bagehot’s insight into the fragility of credit. “Every banker knows that if he has to prove he is worthy of credit,” Bagehot wrote in 1873, “in fact his credit is gone.” I imagine that will always be true.

The term “credit” comes from credo = “I believe.” In a threatened crisis, you suddenly realize that you have not much ground, if any, for believing in a bank’s soundness or believing the government’s assurances that things are fine.