The mortgage crisis was a result of too much borrowing and flawed financial modeling, largely based on the assumption that home prices only go up. Greed and fraud and easy money also played important parts before the mortgage crisis.…
The housing crisis can be summarized as the over evaluation of house values in the late 90’s and early 2000’s,and shortly there after peoples mortgage debt became larger than the decreasing value of their home come 2006. Sub-prime loans can also be blamed; I will further discuss predatory lending techniques. One type of predatory lending practice that mortgage companies will use is to emphasize the payment. When this happens the lender focuses on a numerical monthly payment that you are able to afford. The down side to this car salesmen like approach, is that the details of the monthly payment can be skewed to hurt you down the road in the future while appearing like a good deal in the near future.…
Subprime Mortgage loans did contribute to the bubble and crash but they were just the cards played by the government and the policies that rule them. The department of housing and urban development was pushing national homeownership since 1995 and the doing away with down payments. This was a big problem because everyone started riding the coat-tails of these MBS’s and credit started loosening drastically. After this boom, the housing department then adopted mandates for the government enterprises that issue these securities, Fannie and Freddie. Springing from 342 billion in 1997 to 741 billion a year later was this new issuance of MBSs and the beginning to bubble burst. Because the GSEs believed that the government would protect them from any losses due to the implicit guarantee from it, they continued on issuing these loans to the country. Bringing the idea that everyone and anyone could finance a home caused demand to rise and so did house prices. Along with these initial mandates, lowering of credit scores and increasing allowable debt for borrowers came in 2000 by the HUD. From 469 billion in 2000 to 2.2 trillion in2003 shows how the housing bubble with these government backed securities, toxins, just kept being pumped into the market and would soon be gone.…
Americans who had no jobs borrowed money they could not pay back to buy houses. The unprecedented borrowing of American households was facilitated by innovations in mortgage lending that fueled a bubble in home pricing. Rising home prices generated more home equity which allowed even more borrowing (Muddy Water Macro). Finally, the housing bubble burst when interest rates rose and refinancing stalled, forcing more homeowners to sell. Home prices began to fall which led to lenders fearing default and a cut off of credit. With refinancing decreasing and home prices declining, over-extended homeowners began to default on their mortgages (Muddy Water Macro). Americans borrowing money to buy houses they could not afford to pay back was one of the many leading causes to the Great…
Learning about the subprime lending scheme made me think about when I first bought a house. Lenders are pressured to get people into loans that they don’t qualify for. They also put people in adjustable rate mortgages in which people with not so good credit get a great interest rate to begin with but then go up after a certain period, usually about two years. This caused a lot of foreclosures because…
The corrupt big banks were full of greed and poor ethics. Mortgage approval rates were much too high which led to many more home buyers. This caused housing prices to rise like crazy. Mortgage companies and banks were lending money to people that should not have been lent money. They were falsifying loan documents in order to make a loan and obtain fees regardless of risk. Money was being borrowed to people…
The government’s promotion of subprime mortgages created more problems that assistance. It was the initial cause of the 2008 financial crisis due to the rise in delinquencies and foreclosures. Basically many people were approved for houses that were not financially stable or capable of the long term obligation of buying a home. As subprime lending expanded, so did the crisis due to the over-regulation, deregulation and failed regulation that the government brought…
High profit along with greed had led to the abusiveness of lending sub-prime loans. The evaluation procedure was done very loosely and accessing to housing loans became quickly and easily than ever which in turn caused caused the housing bubble.…
Alan Greenspan cut interest rates after the attacks to encourage Americans to spend more. As a result of the reduced interest rates, mortgage rates also were reduced, encouraging many Americans to buy homes. As the number of homes purchased went up, the prices of the home went up. Home prices got so high, many people could not afford to buy them, to fix this California created the sub-prime mortgage. These new mortgages allowed Americans who did not qualify for traditional mortgages, due to insufficient income or poor credit, to be able to buy a home. These sub-prime mortgages were then packaged into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and became a popular commodity on Wall Street. With such a high demand, Wall Street was trying to get lenders to make more home loans, which enticed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to become involved in the sub-prime mortgage market. Lenders soon started making no income, no asset mortgages. And with lenders ready and willing to lend more capital, homeowners began tapping into their home equity to go shopping. Wall Street quickly developed a new security, the CDO, to package and sell to their customers around the world. These CDO’s were given inappropriate top ratings by the rating companies, and investors scurried to buy them. Unfortunately, most investors did not understand the CDO and…
How real is Canada's housing bubble anyway? More real than any other countries. That is due to the following facts that I will present below, but first it is better to start with a little history. In the year of 2008, as stated on Statistics Canada, the recovery of the recession was much quicker than in other recession period such as in 1981-1982 and 1990-1992. However, was it a real recovery or an illusion? In 2011, Globe and Mail published an article on why Canada’s recession was not as brutal. In summary, Philip Cross explored what factors caused the impulsive slide, and why the downturn was not nearly as severe as in previous recessions, here are some of his findings:…
culture, one with enduring significance. During the years preceding the credit market collapse in 2008, the subprime mortgage industry thrived. Individuals with bad credit were given access to loans that weren’t supposed to be able to go to them. But as long as home prices were on the rise, these poor lending practices were simply ignored. Lenders could afford to write poorly used loans as long as the homeowner's equity outpaced their desire for new debt. If borrowers were to fail to payback their loans, lenders could always foreclose on the home, since it was an asset with ever-increasing value. The credit market's problems began when housing prices started to fall in 2007. Homeowners frequently found themselves with underwater loans, owed lenders more than the home was worth and when faced with these facts, homeowners began to fear the threat of foreclosure. Even more disturbing was the fact that some families abandoned their homes; choosing to start their lives anew elsewhere rather than worry about paying off their debts. Many Americans had wages lowered, resulting in strike, others were laid off or fired. This caused a major debt in the economy and stunted the growth of…
In return, housing prices dropped “following a period of easy money and excess demand” (27). The problem became that more and more unqualified debtors defaulted and money turned into more houses. The price of houses started to decrease and caused homeowners paying the mortgage to be overpaying as the price of their house fell. These families left their mortgage and more money turned into houses for financial institutions. “Mortgage backed securities held by financial firms, foreign investors, and governments lost most of their value” (Kharusi and Weagley, 27).…
The stock market crash in 2000 lead people and investors to lose their confidence in the market, which then prompted them to put their money into the housing market. The federal reserve and banks thought that the housing market was creating wealth. People were buying and flipping houses left and right. They noticed the prices of houses increasing, it became easier to get a loan from banks because of the lower standards for loans. When people applied for their loans at the banks, the banks would approve them, securitize the loan, and then pass the risk of the loan off to some other bank or agency.…
The housing boom lasted through the first half of the first decade of the new century. Following that, the worst recession since the Depression battered the country. The housing market fell apart, and the foreclosure debacle of the 2000s made the situation far worse than the 1990s housing bust. There was not a large quantity of subprime mortgages and home equity loans maxing out people 's equity and expenses in the 1990s. The subprime mortgage industry totaled $35 billion in 1994, and the number rose to $330 billion in 2003 and $600 billion in 2006. Prices plunged to an unprecedented level, as people could not afford to pay their mortgages. As home prices spiraled downward, people owed more than their homes were worth. Housing market practices were a major cause of the economic turmoil of the decade. It took ten years for the hardest hit housing areas of the 1990s to recover; it will take even longer for some areas to recover from the housing and economic crisis of the 2000s. The lack of regulation caused the subprime mortgage crisis—and the worst financial crisis since the…
The issue of how Gen Xers are not given the opportunity to be fully understood and recognized for their many contributions to the society throughout major events in history are dealt with within the article, “A Bubble Generation: The Millennials, Generation X, and Historical Amnesia”, by the author, Christine Henseler. Her article is intended for the general public as it includes the older and younger generations in the society. She is in favour of delivering such information to the Millennials as she emphasized that they are disconnected from their elders. Based on the article, she provides a very vague description as to why Gen Xers are disconnected from the rest of the society and how the Millennials are inhibited from knowing more about…