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.

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?

Financial Stability Board Calls for Effective Consumer Finance Protection

The Financial Stability Board, an international organization operating under the auspices of the G20 countries, this week issued its Report on Consumer Finance Protection. http://www.financialstabilityboard.org/publications/r_111026a.pdf FSB emphasizes the link between international financial stability and consumer protection, particularly in the mortgage markets. It calls for regulation to assure assessment of borrowers’ ability to pay and to police credit product features that increase risk. The report engages in some comparative analysis and identifies national regulatory architecture that has been particularly effective, such as that of Australia. The report is part of an initiative to stimulate more international discussion of effective means of consumer protection, particularly concerning credit. FSB increasingly sees consumer protection as part of its mission to assess and address vulnerabilities in the international financial system. The report is worthy and sensible. Of course, implementation, primarily by domestic regulation of financial institutions, is a huge challenge.

Occupiers on Bank Law: Fix It

If the Occupy Wall Street protests stand for anything they stand for a popular demand to rein in the banks and to bail out the victims of bank excesses.  Those of us who study banking law for a living have an important role as public intellectuals, to grapple with where the banking rules broke down and how to fix them. We still have a great deal of work to do. 

Dodd-Frank fell short.  It consisted of a series of half-measures and punts to various agencies.  Break up banks that are too big to fail?  Dodd-Frank instructed the FSOC to think about it but not too much, and so far FSOC has followed its mandate.  Limit executive compensation? Instead we got shareholder say on pay.  Separate utility functions of banks from casino gambling?  In lieu of restoring Glass-Steagall, the watered-down Volcker Rule. Require banks to prevent every preventable foreclosure? Hasn't happened. Make them offer transparent and competitive retail credit and savings products?  Still waiting on a CFPB director appointment before we can work on that item.

Banks don’t make anything; they either provide payment and intermediation services, or they engage in various forms of gambling with other people’s money.  The first two functions used to be thought of as low-profit utility services (3-6-3), and were separated by Glass-Steagall and its weaker cousin Section 23A of the Federal Reserve Act  from gambling and speculation. 

Banks make, sell and rent money.  Our fiat currency (decoupled from gold by Republican President Richard Nixon), consists of IOUs from banks, which in turn depend entirely on the faith of people and businesses in those IOUs, and on the willingness of the United States taxpayers to back them up.  In other words, banks trade on government backing; it is their essential product.  The days are long gone when any sensible person would accept a purely private bank note as money.  For this reason, banking is fundamentally different from industries that make things and sell them.  We need to vigorously reassert this principle, and end the charade that regulation of banking is some sort of unwarranted intrusion into a free market enterprise.  We need to get serious again about real banking regulation.

Fannie Mae Pushing Foreclosures

Story in the Detroit Free Press today here, and my commentary at Consumer Law & Policy here.

Fed to Wells: $7000 for Wrongful Foreclosure

Yesterday the Fed announced a settlement with Wells Fargo of claims that its subprime unit had 1) deliberately steered prime borrowers into higher-cost subprime mortgage refinancings and 2) falsified income documents to put subprime borrowers into unaffordable loans.  The settlement provides for an $85 million fine, plus an elaborate claims-based compensation procedure for victims, who may number 10,000 or more.  Notably, families who lost their home in foreclosure as a consequence of Wells Fargo's illegal steering are to receive $7,000 for the loss of their home.  That should cover some moving costs and a month's rent or so.   As far as I could tell the agreement does not provide for consumers to release claims in exchange for these paltry sums, but advocates would be well advised to review settlement notices with affected consumers carefully.

The Fed announcement touts this wrist-slap settlement as the largest consumer protection enforcement fine in its history.   Ample evidence that consumer protection against financial institutions needs to be transferred to a real enforcement agency at the earliest.

Insurance Redlining and Transparency

Insurance nerds like to point out that insurance coverage is a pre-requisite to a wide range of activities, from starting a business to practicing medicine to driving a car.  In this sense, insurers often serve as gatekeepers to fundamental social privileges.  Nowhere is this more starkly illustrated than in the residential real estate context.  As one court succinctly put it: “No insurance, no loan; no loan, no house; lack of insurance thus makes housing unavailable.”  

Given the centrality of both credit and insurance to home ownership, one might expect that the rules in these two domains would similarly respond to the risk of redlining, which is the practice of denying or charging more for services in residential areas with large minority populations.  But as with coverage terms and claim handling, quite the opposite is true: whereas bank regulation has embraced transparency, insurance regulation has actively rejected it.  

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?

IMF Structural Adjustment for US - Write Down Mortgages

I have argued for some time that deleveraging U.S. homeowners, who still carry more than $10 trillion in mortgage debt, is not only a social imperative but essential for the economic recovery.  According to the IMF in its latest semiannual report, failure to deleverage American borrowers is a continuing threat to global economic stability.  The Washington consensus is now fractured, apparently, with the IMF and economists on one side and the banks bleating on the other, with Treasury dithering in ambivalence.

Meanwhile, in vaguely related news, S&P, in a bid to restore its credibility after the massive reclassification of AAA mortgage-backed securities to junk, now takes a flyer into the budget debate and announces US Treasury debt's AAA rating is under review.  Really S&P?  Where would you then suggest SWF's park their excess capital instead?  Fannie and Freddie issues, perhaps.

Transmission Channels

The BIS folks have just released a literature review about the transmission channels between the financial and real sectors of the economy. This is a pretty comprehensive literature review (which also means that it is a tad dry), but there are interesting bits in their identification of gaps in the literature.

One of the observations in the paper led me to consider a question: is cash-flow based lending or collateral-based lending more susceptible to systemic risk? Which of them serves as a stronger transmission channel for risk between the financial and real sectors? The answer might point the way to better regulation of the financial industry.

Macroprudentially Yours: A Literature Review

"Macroprudential" (policy, outlook, regulation, zeitgeist ... whatever ...) has been so in  of late, it threatens to beat out its cousin "Systemic" for the Random Overuse Award of the Century.  Worse, it is even trite to say that no one knows what Macroprudential is, or how to do things Macroprudentially:  macroprudentialists are totally hip to this line and have their talking points lined up ...  but in the end, you are still left wondering, if a little more sheepishly.  Nonetheless, I am convinced that the quest for macroprudential meaning is essential to design and implement viable financial reform.  There seems to be no better language to talk about interconnectedness, transmission, contagion, spillovers, and all the other scary crisis business at once.  This is why I was thrilled to stumble on this literature review from the ever-helpful folks at BIS.

Must-read Crisis Book

Today's mail brought my hot-off-the-press copy of the essential crisis reference, The Subprime Virus by Kathleen Engel and Patricia McCoy.  Subprime Virus chronicles the rise and fall of the subprime market and the regulatory (non) response, from the Clinton Administration through the 2007/2008 financial crisis, the bailout and the Dodd-Frank reform legislation.  The most vital contribution comes in Part III, where the authors relentlessly catalog the missed opportunities, systematic capture and complete failure of one regulatory agency after another, including the Federal Reserve, the banking regulators and the SEC.  The authors, of course, enjoy a unique credibility for having warned us early and often about the dangers of subprime lending and securitization, for both homeowners and investors. For those looking for an authoritative, scholarly and accessible account of the subprime crisis from its origins in the predatory lending of the 90's through the bubble, blow-up and bailouts, look no further.

Building a Culture of Compliance

I was scheduled to speak at the AALS Financial Institutions breakfast this morning, but due to flight cancellations I was unfortunately unable to attend. I’m posting below a summary of what I intended to say there, and which I had already planned to share with the readers of Credit Slips anyway. I wanted to talk about what anthropological research among market participants and regulators tells us about how to change the way people behave in the financial markets.  After all, the whole point of regulation is just this--to change behavior. Yet how do you do it?

Debt Causes Bankruptcy (But Sometimes in Counter-Intuitive Ways)

I like NPR's Marketplace, but stories like this drive me nuts: "Why bankruptcy claims aren't as high as one would think." The story repeats a premise I often hear in media calls that I receive. The conversation usually starts something like this: "Foreclosures are up, unemployment is high, the economy is a wreck: why have bankruptcies stopped climbing?"

Wrong question. But fair enough. I get called because I am supposed to know something about bankruptcy filing rates, and my caller often has just picked up the assignment for the day. If that is the wrong question, what should we be taking away from trends in bankruptcy filing rates?

What Can We Learn from Wikileaks About Market Regulation--or, Is Transparency Always a Good Thing?

In the wake of the Wikileaks debacle, we have started to see some conversation in the editorial pages about whether transparency is always a good thing in international affairs. The point is that there are times when allowing the parties to talk in private may help to reach optimal outcomes for all sides. As we learn more about the personalities and motivations behind the leaks, also, the image of the whistleblower as the pure-hearted pursuer of truth and justice is getting a bit tarnished. It is a complicated issue, with room for reasonable people to disagree, but that in itself is news: it used to be that if you were against transparency you had to be for cronyism, corruption, and fraud, and in fact everybody everywhere felt compelled to assert that they were of course in favor of full public disclosure. Now we are not quite so sure.

I think that some of the heatlhy skepticism--or at least complexity of thought--about transparency that is coming into the public debate about foreign affairs also has a place in the conversation about the regulation of financial markets. Why?

Memo to Elizabeth Warren: How to Do Things With Documents

Elizabeth Warren has proposed, as one of her first initiatives, that banks should simplify their standardized credit card contracts with customers to insure that customers understand what they are signing.This proposal has generated lots of enthusiasm among centrists as a modest, relatively non-political initiative, something that hardly anyone could be against, but that holds out the possibility of reducing fraud and confusion in the credit markets by at least ensuring that consumers know what they are getting into.

Credit Cards to Payday Substitution?

Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Todd Zywicki spent Christmas Eve crowing about a Wall Street Journal article about the boom in payday lending. Todd sees the article as vindication for his insistence that regulation of consumer credit will inevitably result in a substitution of another type of credit. For Todd, the substitution hypothesis makes regulation not just pointless, but actually harmful because it will eventually push consumers into the arms of loan sharks.  

There are a whole bunch of problems with the substitution hypothesis, as well as for Todd's interpretation of the WSJ article. Todd writes that: 

Maybe instead we ought to acknowledge that there will be unintended consequences, such as by making credit cards less available regulation will drive many consumers to substitute to more expensive types of credit, such as payday loans? And just wait until the well-intentioned bureaucrats at the CFPB really start protecting those poor folks, then they are really going to get it.

For starters, Todd doesn't accurately summarize the WSJ article. He implies that it was referring to credit cards in general. It wasn't.  It was referring to subprime credit cards. The WSJ article quotes a payday lender as stating, "We believe that we're starting to see a benefit of a general reduction in consumer credit, particularly ... subprime credit cards."  

It turns out that subprime credit cards are often as or more expensive than payday loans. The Credit CARD Act severely curtailed a type of subprime card called "fee harvester" cards. A 2007 NCLC study shows that the costs of fee harvester cards rival or exceed payday loans. So if there's substitution here, it might actually be a good thing. The article is certainly not evidence for middle class consumers getting driven into the arms of payday lenders. Instead, at best, it shows some substitution of fringe financial products and it isn't clear that it is harmful substitution. 

Welfare Economics and Consumer Credit Paper

I have just posted a working paper on the welfare economics of microcredit and payday lending.  The paper tries to address some of the questions raised by, among others, Jim Hawkins, discussed in previous posts here and here.  Post-crisis consumer credit regulation, it seems to me, will have to proceed from norms other than revealed preferences utilitarianism.  Accepted criteria for judging the success or failure of  future regulation will be an essential first step in elaborating a fact-based regime of consumer credit rules.

Principles Aren't Always Enough; Rules Are Needed Too.

In my last posting, I discussed the tradeoffs of regulation on the consumer side, and the extent to which disclosure would be sufficient to resolve consumer protection issues.

Here, I pose a simple problem to illustrate why principles based regulation would be inadequate.

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.

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.

Rates are Low--Where Are All the Refis?

Jean Braucher's post on the Hubbard-Mayer housing market reform proposal points to a really interesting question:  why is it that despite historically low interest rates, there has been relatively little in the way of refinancings?   This is a critical question because the housing market has traditionally been a prime channel through which the Federal Reserve can use interest rates to affect the economy.  I've seen one estimate that the missing refinancings would put $90 billion into the pockets of mortgaged households (around 50 million of 'em) every year, without affecting the federal budget.  That's real a direct-to-consumer annual stimulus of $1800/mortgaged household. So, what's preventing more refinancing activity?  

The Fed's Apparently Nonexistent Interest

Last week, Katie proposed that we might have a blog category for "Beyond the Comfort Zone." I'll add another new category: "Things Bob Does Not Understand." It's sure to have lots of entries. Here is what I don't understand today.

As illlustrated by a Wall Street Journal article from last week, a number of media sources reported that credit card interest rates are rising. The conventional story is that credit card lenders are hiking rates to recoup income lost from new restrictions on fees and penalty rates. Even if credit card interest rates are rising, it would not necessarily mean the regulatory changes have backfired. The point was not to make credit card borrowing free, but just to make its costs more transparent. To the extent the regulatory changes have moved the costs into easily understood front-end interest rates instead of "gotcha" penalty fees at the back end, these changes have accomplished their purpose. But here is the thing, I don' t understand how the world has come to the conclusion that credit card interest rates are rising.

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.

If You Have Complained About Financial Industry Regulation

. . . . today's Dilbert is for you:

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.

Bank of America Settlement -- A Sign of True Progress?

In my last post I noted the beginnings of some positive movement by consumer protection agencies that have been largely dormant and, in some cases like the United States Trustee program, actively anti-consumer. A few weeks ago, as Katie Porter noted in a recent post, Bank of America (BOA) reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission with respect to certain mortgage overcharges, including overcharges in bankruptcy, on mortgages formerly serviced by Countrywide Mortgage. The settlement requires reimbursement to consumers who were overcharged. BOA, in addition to agreeing not to lie, steal, or file documents without reviewing them, will also have to follow notice procedures similar to those that are already required or are likely to be required for all mortgage companies once new Bankruptcy Rule 3002.1 becomes effective in December, 2011. The United States Trustee (UST) Program assisted the FTC in its efforts.  This settlement is the first significant positive result of increased UST scrutiny of mortgage lenders, although the extent of the UST’s participation is not known.

The Beginning of a Return to Consumer Protection?

Many years ago, in the mid 1970's, when I began my career as a legal services lawyer practicing consumer law, it seemed that we were on a roll. Congress and state legislatures were passing a bevy of laws to protect consumers (including the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978.)  The FTC was passing regulations and taking action against consumer scams. Innovative lawyers, often in legal services programs, were bringing class actions against a wide variety of illegal and unfair practices. These cases were received sympathetically by courts that, from a common sense perspective, could see that those practices took advantage of consumer ignorance or confusion.  Little did we know that we were at the peak of the consumer protection movement and it would be almost all downhill from there.

$108 Million Settlement on Countrywide's Servicing Practices

Last week, the FTC announced a $108 million settlement with Countrywide based on allegations that Countrywide's loan servicing operations collected excessive fees. The complaint describes Countrywide's servicing practices for default fees as part of its strategy to keep on profiting from consumers, even in hard economic times. I've previously commented on Countrywide's description of this as a "countercyclical diversification strategy" that it trumpeted to investors, and what Senator Schumer thought of such a strategy. The complaint alleges that Countrywide used subsidiaries to mark-up fees--often by 50-100%--on default services such as property inspections. Instead of Countrywide loan servicing working directly with vendors for these default services, Countrywide loan servicing would contract with its subsidiary, who would then work with the vendor. And that extra step--from one Countrywide entity to another--dramatically boosted the fees that got charged to struggling homeowners. To me, the lesson of the FTC's enforcement action is that businesses can use subsidiaries but they can't use subsidiaries to upcharge consumers and obscure the real costs of services.

The settlement also addresses the problems with Countrywide's mortgage servicing in bankruptcy. The FTC alleged many of the same wrongs that I identified in a law review article on mortgage servicing in 2008, including that filing claims that it could not substantiate. The UST Program cooperated with the FTC on the enforcement activity, and the settlement also resolves the UST litigation against Countrywide.

If you are a consumer who filed a chapter 13 bankruptcy case with a mortgage serviced by Countrywide, you may be eligible for a cash award. The FTC website has more details.

Rigbi on Usury on Prosper

When Credit Slips started, we intended to feature new scholarly papers by the bloggers and others. I am going to attempt to revive that tradition by featuring a paper by Oren Rigbi, an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Rigbi’s paper, “The Effects of Usury Laws: Evidence from the Online Loan Market,” exploits a change in the lending rules that apply to Prosper.com to examine the effects of interest rate caps. Prosper.com is an online lending web site, as Katie Porter explained just after it launched. In April 2008, a change in the way Prosper is organized meant that the interest rate cap was raised to 36% where previously some borrowers had a lower cap (depending on the state where the borrower lived). Thus, Rigbi was able to explore the effects of raising an interest rate cap on the ability to borrow, the amount borrowed, the interest rate for the loan, and repayments.

There are certainly differences across borrowers, time, and states, but Rigbi uses careful empirical analysis to control for these differences. What’s left is a measurement just of the effect of the changing in the interest rate cap. Rigbi summarizes his findings as follows: “I find that higher interest rate caps increase the probability that a loan is funded, especially if the borrower is risky and previously been just ‘outside the money.’ I do not find that borrowers change the loan amounts they request or that their probability of default rises. The interest rate paid for all loans, however, rises slightly probably because online lending is imperfectly integrated with credit markets.” Rigbi concludes his paper by saying, “The main takeaway point from this inquiry is that interest rate restrictions do not seem to deliver the outcomes for which they were intended.” My description of the methodology and findings glosses over a great deal of detail. Rigbi was kind enough to indulge me in an e-mail exchange and even kinder to allow me to reproduce it here:

Is U.S. Bank Collecting Illegal Interest Rates?

When their customers have complained about an unexpected fee, credit card companies have pointed to the fine print in their credit card agreements. Now, a pro se litigant in California has turned the tables on U.S. Bank, saying it has failed to read the fine print in the North Dakota statute. As detailed in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a small-business owner and bootmaker, Michael Carnacchi, is opposing U.S. Bank's collection action against him on the grounds that U.S. Bank's credit card interest rates are illegal.

It all sounds crazy, but it gets crazier. A careful reading of the North Dakota statute and the National Bank Act suggests Carnacchi might be right. U.S. Bank is a national bank located in North Dakota, and the particular language of that state's laws might give it a big headache.

More Naked Credit Default Swaps--the Role of Dealers

These post titles should definitely increase the hits on our blog...

I want to add another point to the debate:  CDS are often done through dealers, and a naked position for a dealer is different from a naked position for an end-user.  A CDS dealer's swaps desk is unlikely to have any long-term stake in the underlying asset.  Generally, a swap desk tries to execute perfectly matched swaps so that it will never have any exposure itself to the underlying assets, only counterparty risk.  (And dicey counterparties have to post collateral).  It isn't always possible to match swaps instantaneously, however, so the dealer will often enter into one swap hoping to find a match soon.  Until the dealer finds a match, the dealer has exposure.  Moreover, a dealer might be able to get a better price (and hence a bigger cut for itself) if it doles pieces of the swap into the market, rather than trying to move the whole swap position at once.  There might not be a lot of market appetite for a $25B swap position except at a steep discount(this goes for CDS as well as other types of swaps), but smaller pieces might be digestible.  Dealers tend to try and have everything cleaned up by the end of the quarter, but in between, the short-term exposure could be sizable.   If naked CDS were banned without a dealer exception, covered (i.e., not naked) CDS would become quite difficult to arrange and execute. 

Complicating this picture is that sometimes a swap dealer decides that the swap is an inherently good position given the price and holds the action itself.  This is all by way of saying that CDS go through a dealer market, not a broker market.  There might be a case for moving CDS to a broker market, but unless there's sufficient liquidity for the product, that'd be difficult. 

To illustrate the role of dealers, consider the Abacus deal.  It is usually presented as Goldman Sachs simply arranging a swap between Paulson and the CDO.  That's the economic essence of the deal, but not how it worked technically. 

Amendment to Repeal Marquette

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse is sponsoring an amendment to the financial regulation bill that would undo most of the damage from the Marquette National Bank decision. In Marquette, the Supreme Court ruled the National Bank Act preempted state interest rate regulation. Thus, a national bank in South Dakota lending to a consumer in California gets to follow the relatively lax interest rate laws of South Dakota. No matter that the high-rate loan might cause financial hardship for families in California--that's not South Dakota's problem.

I've long thought that overruling Marquette would be a wise move. The decision laid the groundwork for the the consumer credit culture we have today and is arguably one of the most momentous (but often overlooked) Supreme Court decisions of the last fifty years. Also, as an interpretation of a technical provision a 110-year old statute, Marquette might also win the prize for the Supreme Court decision with the most unintended consequences.

If you think interest-rate regulation is a bad idea, nothing in the Whitehouse amendment should bother you. It merely shifts the power to make decisions about interest-rate caps to the states and away from Washington bank regulators. California can enact laws appropriate for the conditions there, just like South Dakota can enact laws appropriate for its citizens. The Whitehouse amendment does not take any position on whether the appropriate law is a high cap, a low cap, or no cap at all. California or South Dakota or Delaware or any other state just would no longer be able to export their interest-rate laws to other states. It would allow the states to be laboratories of democracy, as the saying goes, and experiment with interest rate regulation. Also, it should be noted that the amendment would not apply to interest rates on home mortgages.

The predictable response from the banking industry will be that they cannot possibly operate and be subject to 50 different state laws. In the information technology age, however, compliance with different state interest rate statutes should be a trivial matter of computer programming. Also, the banking industry (and many other industries) capably navigate a whole thicket of laws on core state matters such as employment, taxation, and property. The Whitehouse Amendment deserves more attention than it is getting.

UPDATE: The text of the amendment is here, and an explanation of the amendment from Senator Whitehouse's office is here.

Wanted: People with Good Credit for Low-Paying Jobs

Despite the increased proportion of Americans who are behind on their mortgages or have lost their houses to foreclosure, the practice of doing credit checks on prospective employees continues to climb sharply in popularity. The Society of Human Resources Management’s recent survey found that 60 percent of employers run credit checks on at least some job applicants; back in that “healthy” economy of 2006, the comparable figure was 42 percent. The growth in credit checks by employers is some evidence to counter arguments that the stigma of financial distress, bankruptcy, or foreclosure is falling as more and more Americans struggle to meet their debt obligations. Employers seem to be taking the opposite tact, with the weak labor market permitting them to be increasingly selective about whom to hire. Credit checks are a fast and cheap way to screen out candidates. And one in 8 employers checks the credit of every applicant for every job--meaning that people like janitors and retail workers can suffer employment discrimination on the basis of their credit.

Warren op-ed: Banking on Hypocrisy

Check out Credit Slips co-blogger Elizabeth Warren's op-ed on Politico, entitled Banking on Hypocrisy. She quotes extensively from a letter that the American Bankers Association sent to banking regulators in 2006 in opposition to the proposed intra-agency guidance that would have required better underwriting of nontraditional and subprime loans. While it's entertaining--and painful--to read just how wrong the ABA was in its assessment of mortgage risk, Professor Warren's point is to compare the ABA's position on consumer protection regulation in 2006 with its current stance. In the memo, the ABA decried the "marriage of inconvenience between supervision and consumer protection," saying that it blurred "long-established jurisdictional lines." The ABA recommended that the safety and soundness provisions be separated from consumer protection provisions. Yet, now the ABA has opposed a stand-alone Consumer Financial Protection Agency, saying that safety and soundness and consumer protection need to be performed by the same agency. The ABA reminds me of Mayor Quimby from the Simpsons: "Very well, if that is the way the winds are blowing, let no one say I don't also blow."  (Thanks to Bob Lawless for offering up this quote the other day in another context; it's so apt these days!)

Financial Consumer Protection--The Last Thing We Need Is Federal Banking Regulator Oversight

Yesterday, I was talking with former Credit Slips guest blogger Pat McCoy about perhaps reprising that role for us. McCoy is a law professor at the University of Connecticut and, along with her co-author Kathleen Engel, was writing about Wall Street's role in financing predatory home loans before anyone else wanted to talk about it. Unfortunately, some upcoming professional travel is going to prevent Pat from joining us until later in the spring.

We started talking about the Dodd financial regulation bill announced yesterday. While we were talking, Pat was explaining to me that the proposed Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection would not be as independent as advertised. It was a point that I had not fully appreciated--it is a 1,300 page bill, after all. Even as she prepared to travel, Pat kindly agreed to write up a few a paragraphs on her thoughts about the issue so I could post them here:

Of Cyborgs and Repo Men

The New York Times may have thought it had the scoop on the repo man of the future, but the new movie Repo Men has it beat by several hundred years. Jude Law and Forrest Whitaker star as space-age repossession agents who track down debtors and retake their collateral. The twist is that the collateral in question is transplanted body parts. So if, for example, you fall behind on the payments for your new kidney, Law and Whitaker will hunt you down and take it off your hands. Early in the preview – the movie opens later this week – we see the two scalpel-toting contract enforcers taking the Article 9 “breach of the peace” standard to whole new levels and saying over beers that a job is just a job. But, not surprisingly, Law has change of heart, one that appears to be spurred by a literal change of heart, and suddenly . . . the repo man becomes the debtor. (That’s credit-speak for “the hunter becomes the hunted.”)

Judging from the preview, Repo Men looks like your typical sci-fi dystopia flick where good-looking people fight a seemingly losing battle against a behemoth government or corporation that controls every aspect of human life. What’s interesting is that the credit industry has a starring role as the Big Brother. The movie takes two of the worst miseries of the current credit system – overwhelming medical debt and rampant foreclosure – and twists them into one debt nightmare. I never thought the line, "We could come up with a plan that fits your [budget]" could sound so menacing. Does a movie like this mean that there’s enough anger at lenders to, say, get us a Consumer Financial Protection Agency with teeth? I don’t know. But it does suggest that this is our big chance. We may never get an action-movie moment again.

Thank you to UT student Jennifer Carter for the tip!

Fringe Banking, Financial Distress, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency

I'd like to say thanks again for the chance to share some thoughts at Credit Slips.  I've really enjoyed the comments.  I wanted to end with a post about a current issue before Congress. 

One reason it is important to know what financial distress means and to understand the relationship between fringe banking and financial distress is that policy makers consistently use financial distress to justify intervention into fringe markets.  Because financial distress creates externalities, it is a powerful tool to justify regulation.

A speech President Obama made late last year arguing for the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (still working its way through Congress) is a good example of how this works.  To make the case for the CFPA regulating payday lending, the President gave the example of a women who'd taken out a payday loan.  He linked the product to wide-spread financial distress: "Abuses like these don't just jeopardize the financial well-being of individual Americans—they can threaten the stability of the entire economy."  As I have argued, I think this claim is really hard to make out.  Financial distress might justify the CFPA regulating credit cards or mortgages, but I don't think it justifies regulating on the fringe.

Relying on a link between fringe banking and financial distress distracts from the other persuasive arguments for creating the CFPA.  And, in other contexts, it leads to regulation aimed at solving the wrong problems.  People using fringe banking need protection, but we need to rethink regulation aimed at preventing financial distress because it solves a problem that I don't think exists. 

 

Monetary Policy and the Housing Bubble

A popular explanation of the financial crisis lays the blame at the feet of the Federal Reserve for lax monetary policy.  In this story, the Fed dropped interest rates starting in 2001 and kept rates too low for too long.  Low rates induced an orgy of mortgage borrowing for leveraged home speculation. 

It's a nice story.  Only problem is it doesn't really hold up under inspection.  Low rates in 2001-2003 did fuel an amazing mortgage refinancing boom, but not a purchase boom, and the boom was mainly in conventional fixed-rate mortgages, not the exotic products later years.  Moreover, despite the refinancing boom, no housing bubble was emerging in this period. 

The Fed started to raise rates in mid 2004 and continued to do so until mid-2006.  It was during this period that the bubble emerged, when rates were going up.  (To be fair, some might argue for an earlier date to the bubble, even as far back as the late 1990s.)  If we date the bubble from 2004, it's not consistent with a rate-driven bubble story, although rates were still extremely low in absolute terms during this period. 

The monetary policy story, however, really falls apart when one compares the US and Canada, as the graph below does.  Canadian interest rates, and perhaps more importantly, Canadian mortgage rates, track US rates pretty closely.  Yet the US had a housing bubble, and Canada did not.   This means we have to look somewhere other than monetary policy to explain the housing bubble.  The answer, I believe, lies in method and regulation of housing finance. 

Usury and Securitization

Most institutional lenders in the United States are not subject to usury laws.  National banks can evade they by basing themselves in states without usury laws and exporting the laxer regulation to other jurisdictions.  State institutions often find themselves exempt because of state banking parity laws.  And usury laws are preempted for many mortgages by federal law (although originally the FHA eligibility rate cap--removed in 1983--served as a de facto federal usury law for many mortgages). 

There's plenty to say (at another date) about whether usury laws are good policy.  I want to raise a related legal question for discussion on the Slips:  are debts held in securitized pools subject to usury laws? 

Proposals for Haircuts at the FDIC

FDIC-sponsored haircuts have become a hot item in the blogosphere. My wife used to work for the FDIC, and I smile every time I hear the term as I think about the building on F Street with a big barber pole in front of it. Here, the term is not being used in its hirsuted sense but as part of the colorful vernacular that surrounds insolvency work. A "haircut" describes a situation where a creditor is paid less than that to which they are entitled.

The FDIC proposal comes from Representatives Brad Miller and Dennis Moore and would limit the recovery of secured creditors to 80% of the value of their collateral in FDIC takeovers of failed banks. (I can't seem to locate the original text of the proposal on the Internet, but it has been widely reported.) Academic types will remember a similar proposal from Professor Elizabeth Warren back in the 1990s that would have limited recovery to 80% of the collateral's value. While Warren's proposal would have applied to many types of secured lending (at that covered by Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, the current proposal is limited to failed financial institutions taken over by the FDIC.

The usual criticism has arisen in the usual places, namely that the latest proposal will discourage capital formation in banks. In turn, it is said that banks will lend less. Growth will be deterred. And we'll see even more gruesome scenarios involving the cross-breeding of dogs and cats. All of that might be true--well the dogs-and-cats part is less likely--but these criticisms miss the point. The question is not whether we like capital formation and economic growth but whether the costs are worth the benefits. The costs here come from the moral hazard that is created by asset partitioning.

The Australian Interchange Experience

The New York Times ran a story on the impact of interchange regulation in Australia.  Calling it interchange regulation is somewhat of a misnomer.  The Reserve Bank of Australia in fact acted to bust up anticompetitive private regulation of interchange.  Payments are an area with intense regulation, but that regulation is often private self-regulation.  Thus, what occurred is better thought of as interchange deregulation. 

Guess what?  Interchange regulation is working exactly as one would have predicted.  Consumers who want rewards have to pay for them directly now.  They can't free-ride off of other consumers (using cash, debit, or non-rewards credit cards) to finance their frequent flier miles, etc.  Not surprisingly, annual fees have gone up for rewards cards.  This has also pushed consumers toward greater debit card usage, which is often a healthy thing.  (To be fair, there is a similar move to debit in the US without interchange deregulation, so the causation in Australia is questionable.)

A predictable problem has arisen in Australia, however.  Some merchants are now imposing credit card surcharges that are greater than the cost of accepting credit card transactions.  This isn't good for consumers.  But it isn't a problem with interchange regulation.  This is just a symptom of less than perfectly competitive markets in other areas of the economy.  Excessive surcharging is most likely to appear in the least competitive areas of the economy. 

Evans and Wright on the CFPA: Round 2

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a short critique of one piece of a long study written by David Evans and Joshua Wright about the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and funded by the American Bankers Association.  The related blog post is here.  Evans and Wright have responded.  

There's a lot that I thought was objectionable or questionable in Evans and Wrights study, but most of it was well within the bounds of reasonable argument.  I have no problem intellectually with arguments that any particular regulation could impose costs that outweigh its benefits.  Instead, I was was moved to write because Evans and Wright were making precise numerical claims about the cost impact of the CFPA, and that these claims were based on either (1) a highly questionable comparison to dissimilar regulation or (2) pure conjecture.  

In their reply, Evans and Wright spend a good deal of time arguing about things that are really beside the point to my critique.  For example, Evans and Wright emphasize that I have not proved the affirmative case for the CFPA's positive impact (a passing point I made to show that the economic impact of regulation is susceptible to multiple predictions) and that I have "disputed virtually none of [their] findings that the CFPA Act would impose high costs on lenders and ultimately result in denying borrowers choice."  Let's be clear.  My critique was about three spurious numbers.  I didn't set out to prove a positive case in the critique and don't need to do so to make my central point.  And to imply a concession from silence about other issues is ridiculous in this context.  This sort of logical move is, however, consistent with the problems with Evans and Wright's statistical claims.  

But let's get to the heart of the matter.  My issue with Evans and Wright is about the numbers, not about their priors regarding regulation.  There are three numerical claims in Evans and Wright's piece with which I took issue. First, Evans and Wright claim that a CFPA would result in a 160 basis point increase in the cost of credit and a derivative 2.1% decrease in credit demand.  These assertions were based on a comparison with a study of non-analogous regulations that have been found to have an 80 basis point impact.  Evans and Wright argue that even though the regulations are different, they are less invasive, so therefore at least twice the impact would be the lower bound. Why twice?  Just because.  Evans and Wright still have no justifiable basis for doubling, as opposed to tripling the number, etc.  It is not as if 160 basis points is within some statistical confidence interval or the like.  While a 160 basis point number appears to have the imprimatur of social science, it is just conjecture, or, to be charitable, a very rough guesstimate.  

In a cost-benefit analysis, however, precision matters.  A CFPA might be worthwhile at 120 basis points, but not at 160 basis points, for example.  The problem with Evans and Wright's methodology is that they can no better defend a 160 basis point number than a 120 basis point number or a 700 basis point number.  Evans and Wright emphasize that there were merely setting a lower bound, but that hardly makes their number more defensible.  Evans and Wright simply do not and cannot know the impact, including what the lower bound would be.  Of course, precision is beside the point if the goal is to produce a scare statistic, rather than a rigorous cost-benefit analysis.  

The third spurious statistic in Evans and Wright is a claim that a CFPA would result in 4.3% slower job creation.  They achieved this number by taking a statistic about the role of small startups in job creation and then "supposing" that a CFPA would inhibit five percent of this.  I noted there were problems with their job creation statistic (namely that it failed to account for the spectacular failure rate of small startups after their first year, when they result in net job loss, not creation).  But that was a side point.  The critical problem was that they "supposed" a impact number without any basis whatsoever for their supposition. 

Evans and Wright take issue with my statement that "The key point here, however, is the impact of the legislation is speculative and certainly not susceptible to precise statistical predictions.”   They state, "That is a nihilistic approach."  Actually, it is an intellectually honest approach.  A debate that is poisoned by spurious statistical claims, rather than their debunking, are what will engender nihilism.  It'd be great to have an empirically informed policy debate.  But that's not license to make up numbers.  Policy debates have to function within our epistemological limitations.  There's a constructive debate to be had about the CFPA.  But constructive doesn't mean making things up.  

Bogus Statistics: The Banking Industry's Go-To Lobbying Tool

Fake statistics have been a central feature of the banking industry's lobbying strategy on every major consumer credit issue since the 2005 bankruptcy amendments. 

In 2005, there was the phantom $400 bankruptcy tax used to push through the BAPCPA.  Then there was the Mortgage Bankers Association's 200 basis point interest rate increase claim about cramdown.  For credit cards, there was no fake statistic, but a pseudo-academic study funded by the American Bankers Association.  (In retrospect, lack of a scare number was a major strategic mistake for the industry.) 

Now we have the latest installment in the parade of phony numbers:  an American Bankers Association-funded study about the likely impact of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) on consumer credit cost and availability and economic growth.  The study is by David Evans of LECG and Joshua Wright of George Mason Law School (Wright may be familiar to some Credit Slips readers from his blog comments in the past). 

There's a lot of tendentious claims in Evans and Wright's study, but the heart of it are some very precise claims as to the impact of the CFPA on the cost of consumer credit (160 basis points), the demand for consumer credit (2.1% decrease), and the net job creation (4.3% slower).

How, you might ask, did anyone possibly arrive at such precise predictions based on legislation that does not create any substantive regulation of the credit industry, but would merely transfer largely existing powers to a new agency? 

The short answer:  just make up the numbers.  I kid you not.  Evans and Wright selectively chose a study on the impact of a different regulation (interstate banking restrictions) on credit cost.  They briefly argue it is analogous to the CFPA Act, which they claim will have double the impact.  (Why double?  Why not?)   Then they take that number and multiply it by an elasticity metric for the demand impact.  And for the coup-de-grace, they take a misleading number on net job creation and conjecture with no basis that it would be reduced by 5%.  These numbers are presented as "plausible, yet conservative" assumptions. 

There's a lot of room for good faith disagreement about methodology, but Evans and Wright's numbers don't come close to passing the straight-faced test.  (Even the Mortgage Bankers Association had some facially plausible basis for their cramdown claim.)  I am still shocked that two serious scholars would attach their names to this study. My short critique of their study is here. 

Unresolved Access Issues

Yesterday’s post on means-measuring versus means-testing offered a positive perspective on the Canadian bankruptcy reforms.  The focus was on debtors who are currently able to access the bankruptcy system and how this will change with the enactment of the reforms.  Unlike the American system, the Canadian surplus payment requirements do not impose additional front-end administrative and financial burdens that in themselves will prevent the poorest of potential bankrupts from accessing the bankruptcy system. However, a number of obstacles hinder access to the bankruptcy process for the poorest debtors.  In particular, such debtors will have difficulty paying the approximately $1800 in costs associated with the administration of a bankruptcy.  The reforms go some way to address this concern by providing a mechanism for the bankrupt to reach an agreement with the trustee to continue paying for bankruptcy services after the bankruptcy period. 

Professor Saul Schwartz of Carleton University and I have been working on issues around debt, low-income households and insolvency remedies for some time now.  Jason Kilborn blogged about our 2007 article at: http://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2007/04/bankruptcy_for_.html.  In that article, we pointed out that, for two reasons, the conventional wisdom is that the poor are not likely to have needed the insolvency system. First, creditors are reluctant to extend credit to the poor because the risks of non-payment are high. Not having been able to borrow, the poor are not over-indebted and are therefore not in need of bankruptcy protection. Second, some poor debtors - lone parents on social assistance for example - are judgment-proof meaning that judgments for money recoveries obtained by their creditors are of no effect because these debtors do not have sufficient non-exempt property or income to satisfy the judgment.

HAMP--Is It Really All About the Money?

Are mortgage servicers really refusing to modify mortgage loans solely because of all of the "ancillary fees" they can generate from a completed foreclosure? Is the problem really all about the money or is there something more to it?

The New York Times reported about ten days ago that the HAMP mortgage servicers were reluctant to engage consumers in modifications because the companies collect such lucrative fees on delinquent mortgage loans. There is certainly a substantial body of evidence to support the "lucrative fees" disincentive theories. For example, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston recently shed some light on this problem with a new study that concluded that only 3% of the seriously delinquent mortgages had been modified due to the "the simple fact that the lenders expect to recover more from a foreclosure that from a modified loan." And, the number of reported bankruptcy cases where mortgage servicers have been sanctioned for imposing unlawful, illegal and unreasonable "collateral and ancillary fees" is substantial and perhaps monumental in their numbers.

Bring Back Bob the Banker

If you’re over 40 years old and didn’t grow up in the big city, you knew Bob.

Bob was a local banker. He lived in the same town where his bank was. He was a loan officer, probably a Vice President, and worked for the bank for years. Bob married his high school sweetheart, raised four or five kids in the town you lived in, belonged to the local optimist club, and attended a local church every Sunday. Bob showed up at most of the civic events in town. You saw him at many of the weddings, christenings, and funerals in town too. Bob knew everybody who was anybody in your town. He also knew a lot of nobody’s as well, but that didn’t matter to him – anybody or nobody, you were from his town and he was the banker.

Bob viewed himself as the guardian of the bank’s money, and the reputation of the bank in the local community was very important to him. When people needed money, they would come to Bob to apply for a loan. There was paperwork to fill out, but it usually wasn’t very extensive. Bob looked at the paperwork to be sure, but Bob knew you, he knew your parents, he knew where you worked, and he knew how much money you made.  Most importantly, Bob had a pretty good idea what sound financial practices were and he cared about your financial well-being because it was tied to his bank’s reputation.