The Backdrop for BROKE: Consumer Debt Then and Now

In the introductory chapter of the book, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class,  I present some data about consumer debt levels in the United States. As Bob Lawless and others have shown, levels of consumer debt are strongly correlated with bankruptcy filings. While conditions such as unemployment, rising health care costs, and skyrocketing college tuition--and recessions--all create pressures on consumers that lead to borrow, debt is the sine qua non of bankruptcy--the relief offered by the system is the reduction or elimination of debt--not the promise of a good paying job or a strong social safety net. Because bankruptcy is driven by debt, those filings help reveal whether the levels of consumer debt will create serious problems for the economy and American families.

In Broke, I present a figure, courtesy of the San Francisco Fed, that shows the dramatic growth in household debt in real dollars over the last few decades. Reproduced below, the figure shows that the sharp acceleration began in the mid 1980s. This is an important point to understanding why recovery is proving difficult from the recession. As I explain in the book, "The consumer debt overhang, however, began long before the financial crisis and the recession. Exhortations about subprime mortgages reflect only a relatively minor piece of a much broader recalibration in the balance sheets of middle-class families. . . . The boom in borrowing spans social classes, racial and ethnic groups, sexes and generations." Broke, pp 4-5. The gray bands on Figure show recessions; this recovery is more difficult, at least in part, because we have an unprecedented gap between income and debt. Is this gap disappearing as a consequence of consumer reluctance to borrower and tightened credit conditions?

Should the Government or the Market Set Mortgage Down Payments? A New Study

UNC's Center for Community Capital has posted a new analysis of 19.5 million mortgage loans originated between 2000 and 2008 finding that mandatory down payments of 10% would lock out nearly 40% of all creditworthy borrowers while a 20% down payment would exclude 60%. The study finds a significantly higher exclusion rate for African American and Latino borrowers. The authors (Roberto Quercia of UNC, Lei Ding of Wayne State University, & Carolina Reid from the Center for Responsible Lending) do find valuable default-reduction benefits of other forms of strong underwriting as the Dodd-Frank Act already requires (through the "QM" and "QRM" classifications), but signal caution about the significant access costs of government-mandated down payment levels that government regulators may be currently considering.

American Capitalism: Profit, But Fairly

Adam Davidson wrote up an interesting apologia for Wall Street in the NY Times last week, which I think is ultimately a call for better regulation, rather than bank-hating.  I missed the piece originally, but Yves Smith found it and has nothing good to say about it. I think Yves is a little too harsh on Davidson. I've got issues with parts of the piece, but on different grounds, namely that it efuses to engage on the real issue. The problem isn't financial intermediation.  That's a perfectly fine thing that plays a useful role in society.  

Instead, the problem is when financial intermediaries do not treat the intermediating parties (meaning consumer and investors) fairly. The history of US financial services is nothing short of a history of scandals involving financial institutions variously ripping off investors and consumers. I'm not just talking about those scandals we remember, like Milken or Madoff or the recent slew or even the second tier ones like the Salad Oil scam or all of 1920s mortgage bonds. The history of US financial services is largely a history of unregulated innovation resulting in abuse and then follow-up regulatory reform. Lather, rinse, wash, repeat. 

Davidson argues that the reason to "hate the banks" is that 

Wall Street firms enforce the cold rules of capitalism: hostile takeovers, foreclosures, fee increases, defaults. But those rules clearly do not apply to the largest banks themselves. 

Davidson misses the mark here a bit. It's not just that the banks get bailed out, meaning that the rules of market discipline don't apply to them. It's that the banks frequently break the rules when applied to others.  It's fine to do foreclosures or hostile takeovers or sell consumers speculative securities. But it's not ok to foreclose without following the law or to profit on insider knowledge on hostile takeovers or or to sell investors "safe" assets when you know they are junk.

The fundamental rule of American capitalism is "profit, but fairly." Whatever one thinks is "fair", I don't think there should be much disagreement that Wall Street too often disregards the second part of this dictum to focus on the first. But take away the "but fairly" and society quickly becomes a Gilded Age baronial kleptocracy, a post-Soviet (or pre-Soviet) Russia. If we want capitalism to work--meaning that there is social stability, pace OWS--market players must play by the rules. This is where the debate needs to be focused:  ensuring that our financial intermediaries play by the rules. 

The Consumer Finance Pantheon?

In putting together a revised syllabus for my consumer finance course this semester, I was struck with how different this nascent field is from established courses like Contracts.  No matter what Contracts casebook one uses to teach, there are a bunch of well-established chestnuts that everyone knows:  Hadley v. Baxendale, for example, or Williams v. Walker-Thomas Furniture, Raffles v. Wichelhaus, Frigaliment, Lucy Lady Duff Gordon, Hawkins v. McGee, or Jacobs & Young v. Kent (and one could go on and on).  It's hard to say the same for Consumer Finance; indeed, I've got very few cases on my syllabus. 

I'm curious what Credit Slips readers think are the leading cases in the consumer finance area.

Foreclosure Timelines and Mortgage Delinquency: More Evidence from Bankruptcy

At the end of a lively session yesterday at Duke Law School featuring Professor Stephen Ware of University of Kansas Law School, there was a brief discussion of whether shorter foreclosure timelines and clearer rules would promote more workouts of delinquent mortgages. The aforementioned paper about bankrupt homeowners suggests that the opposite might actually be the case: among homeowners in bankruptcy, longer foreclosure timelines in their home states were associated with a lower probability of foreclosure initiation while shorter timelines were associated with a higher probability of foreclosure initiation.

What is the Relationship Between Credit Cards and Mortgage Delinquency?

Previously I mentioned this new paper on homeowners in bankruptcy in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal. The central goal of the paper was to investigate what makes homeowners more or less likely to have mortgage troubles as they head into bankruptcy. One of the notable findings is that, across all the models, credit access had a significant effect on keeping mortgages current and avoiding foreclosure initiation (specifics listed pp. 302-304). But why?

BROKE: A New Book on Consumer Debt and Bankruptcy

Just in time for New Year's resolutions on 1) reading more, 2) paring back your own debt, and 3) learning more about consumer bankruptcy to help you do your job (if you are a lawyer, judge, or academic, media, etc), the book, Broke: How Debt Bankrupts the Middle Class was released from Stanford University Press.

The book makes extensive use of the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project data, providing statistics, analysis, and commentary on consumer bankruptcy and debt topics. I edited the volume, and chapter contributors are many Credit Slips regulars or guest bloggers--Jacob Hacker, Bob Lawless, Kevin Leicht, Angela Littwin, Deborah Thorne, and Elizabeth Warren--along with other top scholars.

In the next few weeks, the chapter authors will blog here at Credit Slips about the research featured in the book, but to whet your appetite, I've included a table of contents for the book after the break. The book is accessible to lay readers but its scholarly focus provides plenty of data to educate and surprise even bankruptcy experts. Working on the book, I certainly learned a great deal about timely and important topics such as how pro se debtors (those without attorneys) fare in bankruptcy, where families go after they lose their homes to foreclosure, how bankruptcy affects couple's marriages, and the ways that bankrupt households differ in their financial straits from other households of concern such as those with low assets or late payments on debt. Of course I'm biased but I think the book provides the most comprehensive overview of the consumer bankruptcy system since the enactment of the 2005 bankruptcy amendments.

In or Out of Mortgage Trouble? A Study of Bankrupt Homeowners

This is a newly published paper  in the American Bankruptcy Law Journal that I was lucky to work on with Daniel McCue and Eric Belsky at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. Using previously unexamined data in the 2007 Consumer Bankruptcy Project, we study what makes homeowners more or less likely to have mortgage troubles as they head into bankruptcy. Although much can be said about the econometric analysis, for now I wanted to mention quickly that the paper includes descriptive details about bankrupt homeowners (debtor-reported) such as numbers of missed mortgage payments, use of adjustable rate mortgages, mortgage broker use, mobile homes, and refinancing or home equity lines of credit. So please check it out!   

Buy Here Pay Here Dealerships

The LA Times did a three-part series this fall on what they call "Buy Here Pay Here" car dealerships. (Here is Part One, Part Two, and Part Three). The name, which was new to me, comes from a common requirement that customers return to the lot to make their loan payments. The high-interest-rate loans are usually for aging, high-mileage vehicles to people with ragged credit. The idea of the "pay here" is to provide ample opportunity for dealers to keep track of the car's--and customer's--whereabouts and to increase the likelihood of repayment by customers.

One year ago (almost to the day), Credit Slips discussed the repossession rates for auto title loans. Unlike buy here/pay here, auto title loans are not to purchase a car but require a person to pledge their car's ownership if a loan is not paid back. Adam Levitin came up with an estimated rate of 14-18% for repossession on auto title loans but emphasized how difficult it was to get such data. Surprisingly to me, the LA Times managed to get the buy here/pay here industry to not just share--but to gloat--about how this business model works. The key data: 1)  About 1 in 4 buyers default. 2) The dealerships make an average profit of 38% on each sale, more than double the profit margin of conventional retail car chains.

The Value(s) of Foreclosure Law Reform?

As Alan White reported recently, the Uniform Law Commission in the U.S. has named a committee to consider the need for and feasibility of proposing a uniform foreclosure act and to report back to the ULC by early 2012. A letter from the ULC president includes a list of questions that the committee is charged to consider. But what principles will guide their analysis of these questions?

Change.org Petition Plays Part in BoA Debit Fee Reversal

In early October of 2011, Bank of America announced that it would begin charging its customers an additional $5 users fee for using its debit cards. In my financial literacy class the weekend after the announcement, some students were resigned to it, some furious, but we all vowed to switch banks if we banked at BofA. Yet we all also knew what would happen next, if history was any indication. Other banks would follow suit and eventually we’d all get charged the fee, which would just go up even more over time. It turns out, at least for now, the ending is happier. People mobilized around recent college grad Molly Katchpole’s online petition requesting a reversal of the fees.The petition was brilliant in its simplicity, stating simply this:

Greetings,
I'm writing to express my deep concern over Bank of America's decision to charge customers $5 a month to use their debit cards when making purchases.

The American people bailed out Bank of America during a financial crisis the banks helped create. You paid zero dollars in federal income tax last year. And now your banks profiting, raking in $2 billion in profits last quarter alone. How can you justify squeezing another $60 a year from your debit card customers? This is despicable.

Do You Remember How Overdraft Protection, Overdraft Fees, and Free Checking Used To Work?

Calling everyone in the over-40 set to help me remember something. When dealing with those old-fashioned things called “checks,” how did your own overdraft protection used to work?  My recollection is that, back in the day, as long as a person had a certain level of creditworthiness, the bank used to cover your check in a discretionary manner. Then, as I recall, middle class people were encouraged to set up various protections to keep checks from bouncing, such as automatic transfers from savings or a line of credit to cover overdraft accounts.  Why don’t more people use these? Is it because they do not qualify? I keep hearing about $35 and even $39 overdraft fees, on both debit and check transactions, like in the New York Times blog today, and wondering who is paying them. Apparently lots of people, since the $38 billion in overdraft fees earned by lenders in 2009, is double what lenders made off these fees in 2000. Is this the ultimate example of banking for the “haves” versus the “have-nots?”

OCC Servicing Settlement--Will Homeowners Get Screwed (Again)?

The WSJ reports on the latest development in the implementation of the OCC's mortgage servicing fraud consent orders.  It seems that the banks will have OCC approved "independent" foreclosure review consultants (chosen and paid by the banks) review foreclosure files from 2009-2010 and pay homeowners damages if there are any problems found.  

This proposal really worries me.  It's hard to imagine that the banks will part with any money unless they receive releases--broad releases--from the homeowners.  The homeowners, however, will not typically have legal representation and will lack the ability adequately value their claims against the banks. $100 for a complete release?  Why not?  

Are Corporations People Too?

The "corporations are people, my friend" line was quite the momement. But as bad as it sounded, Mitt had a theoretical point. People (as well as other corporations) own corporations and people work for corporations.  The problem isn't that there aren't people at the end of the line behind corporations. The problem is that it's a minority of (primarily wealthier)people.  

According to the Federal Reserve's 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, only 17.9% of families held stocks, 11.4% hold mutual funds, and 52.6% hold retirement accounts that likely hold a lot of stocks and mutual fund assets.   

I haven't been able to find data on the percentage of people employed by corporations, but it's assuredly large. That said, it's hard to imagine that corporate tax breaks would generally result in higher salaries for most employees rather than higher dividends for shareholders. The competition to attract capital is likely fiercer than the competition to attract labor (and certainly for semi-skilled or unskilled labor), which would mean that corporate tax breaks would benefit shareholders (a minority of people) and highly skilled labor (again a minority that probably doesn't need a lot of help).  So maybe a more accurate phrase for Mitt is "corporations are wealthy people, my friend". 

Relying on Disclosure When it is Least Likely to Matter

I’ve argued in my posts so far that transparency in property/casualty insurance markets is woefully inadequate.  Transparency, however, is not always a particularly good solution to a regulatory problem. The most visible controversy in the property/casualty insurance industry in the last decade illustrates this point nicely.  

That controversy involved the payment by insurers to independent insurance agents of “contingent commissions.”  These commissions are essentially year-end bonuses to agents based on the volume and/or profitability of the business sent to the insurer.  Such commissions create obvious conflicts of interest for ostensibly independent agents – the carrier who is best for the consumer may not be the carrier who maximizes an agent’s contingent compensation.  In response to this risk, numerous insurance jurisdictions, as well as the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, embraced disclosure requirements for insurance agents.  

Unfortunately, the regulatory problems created by contingent commissions are particularly resistant to disclosure-based responses.  To understand why, it is helpful to realize that contingent commissions are simply a specific example of a general phenomenon in which market intermediaries extract side payments from other professionals for steering business to them.  Yield-spread premiums – whereby lending institutions pay bonuses to mortgage originators depending on the rate of interest paid by the borrower – are another example. 

Such trilateral dilemmas, as Howell Jackson has dubbed them, are generally unresponsive to disclosure-based solutions.  Indeed, it is for this very reason that Dodd-Frank abandons a disclosure-based approach to yield-spread premiums in favor of an outright ban.  

Responsible Lending as an Emerging International Norm

The International Association of Consumer Law, with participants present from six continents, has been meeting at Brunel University in West London the last few days, hearing presentations from regulators, industry representatives, consumer advocates, and academics.   http://qwww.brunel.ac.uk/bls/research/events/ne_41734   Not surprisingly, regulation of consumer credit has been a prime focus, giving some perspective on US struggles to achieve more effective consumer financial protection. 

Professor Iain Ramsay of the University of Kent in the UK reported on initiatives for international cooperation to enhance consumer financial protection.   The G20, World Bank, Financial Stability Board, and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are all on board with this goal, seeing it as an essential part of a program to ensure that the international financial system is safe and sound.  The OECD is expected to issue draft principles of consumer financial protection soon, and comments will be invited.  Given the primarily prudential role of these organizations, balance from other sectors will be important.

Ramsay raised an underlying and overlooked question:   what is the economic and social value of consumer credit?

Still Not Working Abroad

I've previously posted about my frustrations at being stranded abroad without a functioning credit card -- particularly at train stations -- and the refusal of American credit cards to adopt a technology that has been in my building laundry room for years.

So I was quite excited to read in this morning's Times that Chase has begun to offer "chip and pin" cards. As Katie has previously noted, I use a Chase British Airways Visa. So I called them up all excited, hoping to get a card before my summer family vacation, only to be told that only private banking clients were getting chip and pin cards.

The customer service agent seemed entirely perplexed when I said "your loss." The inability to get somebody to supply a product that consumers demand is almost enough to undermine my faith in the invisible hand.

The Three Consumer Banking Systems

For the past couple of years we've heard a lot about shadow banking versus traditional banking. But this dichotomy treats the traditional banking system as a unitary whole. That's hardly the case for consumer banking. The United States currently has three consumer banking systems. They have somewhat separate regulation and market segments, but they are fundamentally in competition with each other. 

The first system is the too-big-to-fail commercial banks. They are almost all structured as national banks, regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The second system are the community banks and credit unions.  They tend to be regulated by the FDIC and NCUA, but also by the Fed or state banking supervisors.  And the third system are the nonbank finance companies (payday lenders, title lenders, even pawn, etc).

Despite the competition between these sectors, they have cooperated to a surprising degree recently, particularly community banks and credit unions with commercial banks. For example, on both bankrutpcy cramdown and the Durbin Amendment, there were carve-outs for small institutions (<$10B net assets), but the small banks still fought furiously despite being exempted. I'm frankly puzzled why they are willing to carry water for the big boys (do they want to be part of the club?). Maybe someone will explain in the comments. But below the break I'll lay out the case for why the smaller banks should actually be strongly supportive of recent consumer finance regulatory initiatives. 

The Anti-Consumer Agenda

I often find myself annoyed by left-wing (and occassionally right-wing) anti-business screeds that decry corporations, big business, etc.  I don't find anything inherently troubling about corporate form or business size, and I have no problem with profit-motivated actors (individual or corporate), so long as they play fair. Mindless attacks on the business community have the unfortunate effect of undermining perceived validity of more targeted, thoughtful concerns through a guilt-by-association phenomenon. 

But business and consumer interests often diverge. Now, it should hardly be controversial that there is an unequal playing field between businesses and consumers. Generally, businesses know more about their products than consumers and have more bargaining power than consumers. (Yes, there are information assymetries running the opposite way, which is a particularly salient problem for credit and insurance products.) For many businesses, it is important to maintain this assymetry of information and bargaining power, as there's profit in it.

In theory, and I emphasize in theory, competition should eliminate many of the problems these assymetries create for consumers, but there's no such thing as a perfect, complete market, just varying degrees of market imperfection, so competition alone cannot be relied upon to solve everything. What, if anything else, should be done is an open question, but when one looks at a range of seemingly unconnected recent public policy issues, a troubling common theme emerges.

Instead of a laboratory of experiements to help level the b2c playing field, we see a different trend emerging:  a distinct anti-consumer agenda that aims to reduce consumer bargaining power and information.  Consider the common theme that runs through the following issues: 

• AT&T v. Concepcion (waiver of class actions in arbitrations)
• Attempts to bust up public employee unions (and attacks on unions in general, such as the failure of Card Check legislation)
• Citizens United (corporate speech rights)
• Attempts to retain the current corrupt swipe fee system (failure of antitrust)
• Attacks on public health insurance (prohibition on Medicare bargaining over prescription drug prices and the death of the public option)
• Attempts to first kill off and now to maim the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Skin in the Game-True Sale Implications

There's a proposed joint federal rulemaking on the Dodd-Frank Act asset securitization risk retention requirements that would mandate some form of "skin-in-the-game" in most asset securitizations.  The proposed rule making provides a number of options for acceptable risk retention, and some exemptions from the requirement, but I think it raises a more fundamental problem for asset securitization, namely whether it will be possible to get clean true sale opinions with federally mandated risk retention.

The economics of many securitization deals hinge on the transfer of assets to the securitization vehicle being a "true sale," meaning that they are property of the securitization vehicle and not the assets' originator (or aggregator) and thus bankruptcy remote in the sense that they cannot be claimed as part of the originator or aggregator's bankruptcy estate.  (What constitutes a sale is arguably slightly different for bankruptcy, tax, accounting, and bank regulatory purposes, but that's not really germane here.)  Investors like securitized assets precisely because the assets are (in theory) impervious to the fate of the originator or aggregator.  (Obviously that isn't true if the originator/aggregator services or provides maintenance or warranties for the securitized asset.) 

Perhaps the most fundamental aspect of a sale is the transfer of risk and reward associated with an asset. If I transfer a mortgage on Blackacre to Prince William, but bear risk on the performance of the mortgage, it's questionable whether I have sold the mortgage to him or merely loaned or leased it to him. The federal risk retention requirements make this issue hairier.  If I am on the hook for the first 5% of the losses (or 5% of the total losses), could a bankruptcy trustee come after that mortgage as an asset of the estate? The fact that the 5% stake (vertical or first loss) is mandated by federal securities law strikes me as irrelevant to the true sale question, which is not a securities law issue, and on which Dodd-Frank takes no stance. If the transaction involves too much risk retention for whatever reason, regulatory requirement or voluntary deal design, there might be problems with the sale treatment.  I'd be curious if anyone's been thinking about this potential problem. 

"Free" Checking

With banks under pressure from the CARD Act's regulation of fees and the pending implementation of price limits on interchange fees under the Durbin amendment to Dodd-Frank, the scary tales are periodically resurfacing about how government is about to cause the death of "free checking," this great perk that consumers have enjoyed at the bank's largesse in recent years. As Adam Levitin wrote here at Credit Slips several months ago, free checking is often far from free. Adam focuses on the kinds of behavior requirements to obtain a free account, like maintaining a certain balance and having direct deposit.

The Most Important Consumer Product

Going to stray out of my comfort zone for a moment to comment on and clarify a recent post I saw over at Felix Salmon's place. In short, Felix notes how confusing most retirement investment documents are, and hopes for action by the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If only. CFPB can do debt and payment systems (checking accounts), but can't do investments or insurance--where arguably the need is even greater. Congress saw to that with §1027 of Dodd-Frank. See, e.g., subparts (f), (i), and (g).

Allocating Scarce Dollars: Payment Hierachy

When Americans have fewer dollars, creditors need to position themselves at the top of the pile to get paid each month. This is called payment hierarchy, and traditionally mortgage creditors have been at the top and unsecured creditors, and perhaps ubiquitous credit card creditors, near the bottom. At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau conference on the anniversary of the CARD Act, I learned that the payment hierarchy has been upended. In 2010, consumers are paying their credit cards ahead of their mortgages. (Click on CFPB conference link above, then click on "Credit Card Profitability" by Credit Suisse and go to slide 7 to see the full data). Two key explanations for this change: 1) people may be more willing to risk losing their home when its value is plummeting and they are not certain they can hang onto it, and 2) credit card companies reduced the amount of credit lines and closed old accounts, making people more concerned about "preserving" their good standing with their credit card company. Another way to think about this is that homes used to be families' piggy banks, tapped when it is time to send a child off to college or do a home renovation. With no equity, Americans need to rely more on the credit card as their safety net. Unemployment rates are high, the economy remains fragile, medical costs are uncertain. In this economy, it seems entirely rational and reasonable to me for families to highly prize access to unsecured credit from cards.

When there are too many unsecured creditors to go around, however, how do consumers chose who gets their scarce dollars? A new research paper, Winning the Battle but Losing the War: The Psychology of Debt Management, uses a series of experiments to explore this question. The authors find that consumers focus on making payments that reduce the number of open accounts, which the researchers call "debt account aversion," rather than solely on paying off the debt with the highest cost interest rate. The latter would ultimately reduce the total cost of credit, an approach that the researchers term "perfectly rational."  In a series of stylized debt games played by students, not even one student consistently repaid in multiple rounds of the game all of their available cash to the open debt account with the highest interest rate. The pattern of debt account aversion--using some cash to pay off small accounts--held across a variety of conditions, although the researchers find some interventions that reduce the practice, such as prominently highlighting the amount of interest accumulated on each debt between rounds. But is debt account aversion really a "mistake"? Should policymakers be discouraging this behavioral trait?

New Consumer Regulation: Education and Disclosure Is Not Enough

Elizabeth Warren’s appointment as special advisor to the president was widely hailed as an achievement for consumer advocates. Professor Warren has long been a strong advocate of the middle class and famously compared financial products to flaming toasters.

The creation of a new agency brings new possibilities and new risks for consumer advocates. Most importantly will be the agency’s approach to regulation. In a two-part posting, I will comment on two key aspects of the new agency’s direction. The first revolves around understanding of consumer behavior and the second around firm behavior.

Part 1:

A core component of the CFPB mission is based around the idea that banks provided risky products to consumers that didn’t understand them. There is abundant evidence that consumers didn’t understand the products they bought; however, it’s far from clear that this is a sufficient role for the CFPB. I’ll argue here that in addition to disclosures, education and information, we need explicit regulation of the products as well.

Effectively, this boils down to a simple question: if banks want to offer a risky product (a flaming toaster) to consumers that fully understand its dangers, should the bank be permitted to offer it?

Modern Redlining in Historical Context

A paper that I wrote while an employee of the Federal Reserve System a couple years back documents the presence of ‘redlining’ in the issue of credit cards. Credit Slips picked it up here (link).

(To ensure there are no misunderstandings, this paper did not and does not represent the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston or the Federal Reserve System; in fact, both entities did their utmost to prevent its release) ... continue…

To be more specific: I find that credit issuers use the racial composition of a neighborhood in determining how much credit to give to individuals that live in it. I use the term ‘redlining’ with historical reference: this idea is that particular areas have been identified as high risk. What I find is that the ‘high risk’ areas are highly correlated with the presence of minorities.

I’ll be clear, I cannot definitely prove that lenders use race—I’m an economist, not a lawyer! Regardless, I’ll present the point that the practice is still redlining even if lenders never use race, but use location-based information that is correlated with race.

They Really Did Know the Loans Were Bad…

A firm which few know of – Clayton holdings—will likely soon be at the center of a wide variety of lawsuits and individual complaints. Clayton’s job was to validate the innards of mortgage backed securities (MBS) when made available for sale. The typical setup would have an issuer of a MBS call Clayton and ask them to take a 10 percent sample of the loans, and evaluate whether the loans met the portfolio criteria (had documents been filed, credit scores as reported, etc.). If the loans were incorrect, they could either be taken from the pool and replaced with a good one, an exception made, or a substitute placed into the sample and evaluated instead.

Clayton holdings staff testified last month that 255,802 mortgages out of 911,000 evaluated did not meet portfolio screening criteria. The bank underwriters waived more than 100,000 of them (>39%); that is, even though the mortgages failed the criteria, the banks included them in the MBS pools anyway.

So much for the idea that the issuers didn’t know the loans were bad…

Am I Paying for My House or the Brooklyn Bridge?

The foreclosure mess has raised new tough questions. We once again seem back to distributional issues. If a foreclosure is in question for a homeowner that has not been paying and a bank that has no good proof of its ownership, what should happen to the house?

1. The bank should get it because a homeowner that fails to pay should forfeit his/her collateral. Morally, why should this deadbeat get an asset for free? Particularly if the whole thing was stirred up by a lawyer. (See the WSJ article on this).

2. We should work through the mess in the courts to determine the validity of the individual case. No one should lose their home based on falsified documents. Careful determination ownership is important.

I have a new suggestion:

3. Any payments that the homeowner made to the bank, the one with no evidence of ownership, should be placed into a third party escrow account. 

Mad About Debt

Exit polls tell us that the economy was forefront in the minds of yesterday's voters, but also that the national debt was high on the list of concerns.  The deep personal anxiety about the national debt surely is not just civic worry about Uncle Sam's credit rating.  Americans are in some measure projecting their own debt anxieties onto the government.  While one in three voter's family has experienced a job loss, household debt is affecting nearly everyone.

Nearly four years into the crisis (formerly called the subprime mortgage crisis) we are still suffering a massive hangover from the debt binge of the last decade.  In ten years household debt exploded from five and a half trillion to nearly fourteen trillion dollars.  From the onset of the crisis in 2007 through June 2010 mortgage debt and all the rest (credit cards, student loans) has inched down painfully slowly.  It would take thirty years at the present rate to bring household debt back to something like its 2000 levels.  Folks seeking mortgage workouts, over a million of them, are paying an average of 80% of gross income for debt service.  Students are graduating college with six-figure debt.

The Shadow Consumer Bankruptcy System

    Bankruptcy filings have not risen at anything like the rate at which consumer debt defaults have risen since 2007.  Part of the explanation may lie in the shadow bankruptcy system, a network of alternative service providers who purport to save debt-burdened consumers from the bankruptcy court.  While consumers being sued on delinquent credit cards and mortgages receive solicitations in the mail from bankruptcy attorneys, they are also deluged with a variety of other offers of aid.  These range from foreclosure rescue scams to a wide range of legitimate and dubious debt advice and counseling services, to debt elimination and debt settlement schemes.  While pondering this post I searched in the usual places for any good empirical data on the number of consumers participating in non-profit counseling, or the number of customers enticed by those who promise to make debt disappear, with no success.   We don't seem to know how many debtors go to these debt advice services.

Empirical Caution: A Lesson from Auto Title Loans

A few weeks ago there was some nice discussion about Jim Hawkin's article on fringe banking.  Natalie questioned whether Jim's assumptions about payday lending correspond with empirical reality. Similarly, it's worth pointing out that the data Jim relies on regarding auto title lending aren't what he or even his source thought they represented.  

I make this observation not to ding Jim's paper, but to raise a really troubling problem for all academics: how to deal with data from other scholars' empirical work?  

The War on Bank Profits?

The Wall Street Journal had a peculiar opinion piece today about bank regulation.  I won't pick the low-hanging fruit of its bizarre statements about potential CFPB Director nominees, but I think it's noteworthy for the revealing language it uses.  It says that Washington should "call off the war on bank profits" and allow[] banks to make profits."  

The conceit of the piece is that a subset of businesses have an entitlement to be profitable.  That's deeply inconsistent with a belief in markets.  The fundamental rule of American capitalism is "Go Forth and Profit, but Fairly."  It's one thing to debate what sort of practice is fair or not.  But that's not what the WSJ piece argues.  It argues that legislation like the Credit CARD Act and the Consumer Financial Protection Act are wrong because the restrict banks' profitability.  This is a serious misunderstanding of financial services reform, and if this is how the financial services industry as a whole understands regulatory reform, we've got serious problems as a society.

Debt Distress: Symptoms and Treatment

From the United Kingdom comes an interesting new study, based on a survey of more than 10,000 applicants for legal aid about their problems and the means they use to address them. The study explores the linkages between overindebtedness and social exclusion.  Consumers seeking help with debt problems are much more likely to face multiple related difficulties, including employment, mental health and other civil justice problems.  This longitudinal study also reports on the duration of debt problems and the success or failure of different strategies consumers employed.  The findings support the need for a broad array of services to assist consumers overwhelmed by debt, an approach characteristic of many European consumer bankruptcy and debt adjustment systems, about which Jason Kilborn and others have written.  These coordinated social service approaches are notably absent from the US bankruptcy system, at least officially, and apart from some token counseling requirements.  

Explaining the Housing Bubble

Some self-promotion:  I've posted a new paper to SSRN, coauthored with Susan Wachter (Wharton).  It's entitled "Explaining the Housing Bubble."  Here's the abstract:

    There is little consensus as to the cause of the housing bubble that precipitated the financial crisis of 2008. Numerous explanations exist: misguided monetary policy; government policies encouraging affordable homeownership; irrational consumer expectations of rising housing prices; inelastic housing supply. None of these explanations, however, is capable of fully explaining the housing bubble, much less the parallel commercial real estate bubble.

    This Article posits a new explanation for the housing bubble. It demonstrates that the bubble was a supply-side phenomenon, attributable to an excess of mispriced mortgage finance: mortgage finance spreads declined and volume increased, even as risk increased, a confluence attributable only to an oversupply of mortgage finance.

    The mortgage finance supply glut occurred because markets failed to price risk correctly due to the complexity and heterogeneity of the private-label mortgage-backed securities (MBS) that began to dominate the market in 2004. The rise of private-label MBS exacerbated informational asymmetries between the financial institutions that intermediate mortgage finance and MBS investors. The result was overinvestment in MBS that boosted the financial intermediaries’ profits and enabled borrowers to bid up housing prices.

    Despite mortgage securitization’s inherent informational asymmetries, it is critical for the continued availability of the long-term fixed-rate mortgage, which has been the bedrock of American homeownership since the Depression. The benefits of securitization, therefore, must be reconciled with the need for economic stability. The Article proposes the standardization of MBS to reduce complexity and heterogeneity in order to rebuild a sustainable, stable housing finance market based around the long-term fixed-rate mortgage.

Direct-to-author (not posted) comments are most welcome.  

Fringe Lending and Consumer Welfare

Like Katie Porter, I found Professor Jim Hawkins' paper on fringe lending valuable for challenging some of the premises underlying calls for stricter regulation of fringe lending products like payday loans.  In my view, there are empirically testable criteria for regulation of fringe credit, which I hope to elaborate in a forthcoming paper.  Unfortunately, Professor Hawkins ultimately does not offer either a normative consumer welfare framework for credit regulation, or a truly empirical examination of the welfare impacts of fringe lending.  Instead, he relies on product descriptions that reflect industry marketing more than the experienced reality of working class borrowers who use them, and uses a very limited implicit definition of consumer harm to restrict the possible justifications for market intervention.

A Puzzle

Working my way through the local paper today, I stumbled across a story on consumer credit. Against my usual inclinations, I read on. It tells the story of how banks routinely sell old debts, that is, debts past the statute of limitations, for about 0.2 cents per dollar. For my co-bloggers, this is probably old news.

But the question that occurs to me, is why do we allow such sales? Just as we don't allow markets to sell expired milk, no matter what the discount, it would seem that allowing sales of debts that can only be enforced by trick is unlikely to be socially useful or something that our banking regulators should condone.

Financial Risks Follow to the Grave

The New York Times broke the story yesterday about how the VA may be mishandling the death-benefit accounts for life insurance beneficiaries of military personnel. Apparently many of the VA life insurance companies, including Met Life and Prudential, do not give beneficiaries a check when the policy is payable as a lump sum. Instead, grieving family are mailed a checkbook and told that the payout was ready for use in an "convenient interest-bearing account." But here are the catches: 1) The money is not in an FDIC-0insured account, meaning these beneficiaries' money could disappear if the insurers went under. This fact would be hard for consumers to discern given that the checks themselves bear the names of large banks like JPMorgan Chase. The money actually resides in the insurers' general corporate account, earning investment income. 2) The VA was under the impression that the insurers were patriotic volunteers, earning no profit on the checkbook option. In fact, the insurers earned about a 5 percent return, while the beneficiaries received 1 percent interest. When the NY Times explained this, the VA spokesperson said "Maybe I didn't ask enough questions." My former colleague at UNLV's William S. Boyd School of Law, Jeff Stempel, put a finer point on it. "[T]his is a scheme to defraud by inducing the policyholder's beneficiary to let the life insurance company retain assets they are not entitled to. It's turning death claims into a profit center."

Secrets about Elizabeth Warren Revealed

I have known Elizabeth Warren for ten years, and I know her pretty well. I've been to her home; she's been to mine. She sent me baby gifts; I got her a 60th birthday present. We exchange Christmas cards,  . . . you get the idea.

Now she's a candidate for this big-time appointment as the Director of the New Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And somehow there are these things about her that must be deep-dark secrets  because it seems like people do not know Elizabeth Warren at all. (As Bob Lawless has written, I think the debate is becoming about a caricature of Prof. Warren, not Prof. Warren the real person.) So here it is . . . Secrets about Elizabeth Warren Revealed.