Negative. The term "subprime" may not have existed until then ( I wouldn't know) but Fannie Mae was created with the intent of providing a secondary mortgage market through purchasing risky loans, thus setting the groundwork. A rose by any other name still has thorns.

Yeah, because Wall Street thought it had a backup plan in the security promised to GSEs by the Fed. You're missing a key point here, and that is that this whole industry is a reflection of what it is built on. Like dollars themselves, it was only worth anything because people thought other people thought it was. A whole industry was built, and then expanded upon the premise that the state would buy debt, and there was a killing to be made while high- interest payments came in. It didn't take long for a whole trading system to grow up around that system, but the system itself was bound to collapse. If there had been no Federal housing initiatives of this type banks wouldn't usually lend to high-risk customers and there would be no crisis.

And why didn't they care? Why was there a way to trade bad loans in the first place? Government made it happen. It's just another unintended side-effect of screwing around with the market.

Like I said, they laid the groundwork. They created a market where none existed before, and where one should not yet have existed.

I've made my argument, but I'd like to address this point. GSEs are no different from government agencies in my mind, as they are backed by a fitness guarantee and operate much in the same way government does, which is to say the same way any guaranteed industry does, which is to say stupidly. They are only private firms in the nominal sense in that respect.

Furthermore, they may not have been the first to fall out of everyone, but that's splicing hairs and disregarding the Federal backing they recieved. They were definetly the first dominoes to fall, though. When they went, the market built on top of them went.

You've got me on that one. I don't know for sure. It could be any number of things, but I suspect that if the GSE's were to blame then the world runup would have something to do with everything being tied to the US economy and perhaps other nations following suit with respect to housing policies.

As far as the time element is concerned, that's a non factor. Times change, and when these agencies were established there was not a great demand for home-ownership from people who couldn't afford it. There was a moderate crisis in the late 70's, as I mentioned, which just happened to come right after an immigration spike, so this has happened before.

Perhaps, but this crisis reminds me of a lot of earlier economic crises where everything under the sun was blamed except for government, or rather, particular policies embraced by persons in office at the time, and all that turned out to be BS. As such I am inclined to believe that the simplest explanation is the correct one.

Take, for instance, the gas crisis of the 70's, as one of the most severe in recent history. The shortage and inflation of the time were blamed on everything from the weather to OPEC to speculation to greedy oil tycoons, but those things have always been around. What caused the shortage was the government price-fixing gasoline. As Milton Friedman put it (paraphrased)"Economists may not know much, but we know how to create a surplus or a shortage. Want a surplus? Set prices above the market rate. Want a shortage? Set prices below the market rate."
He was right, and the whole truckload of BS that followed was blamed on everything except the bulls.

I see the same thing here. Affordable housing is a popular political stance, and it comes with all the trappings of similar failed initiatives of the past. You can blame anything on anything if you try hard enough, but you can't deny empirical evidence unless you are blind.

You misunderstand what FNMA/FHLMC actually did. They were bound by charter to only buy conforming (i.e. not subprime) mortgages. This only changed in the mid-2000s when they began losing market share of the mortgage market to private securitizers.

No. The ace in the hole "backup plan" was the fact that the originating lender did not need to keep the loan on their books. they could make any loan at all, as they knew that there would be someone on Wall Street would would buy it and securitize it. The voracious demand for securitized debt can be traced back to the decisions of the Fed - with rates as low as they were, the reach for yield led asset managers to take on other assets than traditional bonds and Treasuries. Mortgage backed securities were yielding much higher rates than any other security out there - coupled with the fact that defaults were low due to housing boom, and credit rating agencies putting their stamps of approval on all of it. It was a great deal.

It was a system of passing the buck and shortsightedness. Loan originators didn't care about the quality of the loans they made, as they could sell it to a Wall Street securitizer. Wall Street securitizers didn't care about the quality of the loans they bought, as the risk of any individual loan would be mitigated (or so they thought) by pooling it with other loans and selling it to investors. The investors didn't care, as they were earning great yields and the credit rating agencies had rated this stuff AAA. Everyone wins.

Ah, ah - be careful there. Did government MAKE it happen? Or did government LET it happen? It's the latter - the Federal Reserve completely failed to reign in banks making liar loans (loans with no income verification) or NINJA (No Income, No Job or Assets) loans. And why was there a market for these kind of loans? FNMA/FHLMC were forbidden by charter to purchase these in the early years of the credit bubble? Where were they going? To the private label securitizers!


Are you blaming securitization? The process of pooling mortgages into a security? If you are, then you should realize that the first mortgage backed security was issued in 1981. That's way before the crisis, and thus cannot be a cause of it.

FNMA and FHLMC were rife with fraud and poor risk management practices. but they did not create the market for mortgage backed securities. The private label securitization market had developed on its own by the 1990s. Wall Street was securitizing all sorts of debt - as I said before, auto loans, credit card debt, student loans, etc.

Let's do a little experiment. Imagine that the GSEs had been taken out of the picture during the mid to late 1990s (imagine they went bankrupt, or swallowed up by a black hole, or whatever). What happens? It changes nothing! The Fed still lowers rates to historic lows, asset managers still search for yield, loan originators still make crappy loans to satisfy that yield and earn a hefty profit, the credit rating agencies still stamp it all AAA, the Wall Street firms still get heavily into derivatives and still overleverage themselves. None of that relies on the GSE's existence or non-existence to happen.

That's news to me. IIRC there were several initiatives passed concerning affordable housing well before 2000 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were governed by.

But let's say that they did buy only conforming mortgages. Why did they exist? By that token alone they are interfering with the market by creating demand where there was none before. The private sector creates artificial demand as well, but it doesn't have a state to back it up, so the damage is minimized. What happens when a GSE has state backing?

Of course it was a great deal. The government made it that way. The Fed was to blame, yes, but the whole structure never should have existed in the first place. FNMA was the beginning of the first national "housing project", and like every other housing project it failed utterly and was ruinously expensive because it went against the grain of market forces.


Everyone wins, because the system was federally guaranteed, or at least it was until it failed. I think you look too much into the symptoms and not enough into the cauases.

I'd say both. We still come down to the essential problem of a market existing where it should not. A market that is not truly governed by market forces is no market at all, and it will eventually collapse. We see this all the time in the form of subsidies and legislation and trade restrictions - ever evolving, never "just right", always requiring more and more capital expenditure and legislative adjustment. This time the bubble happened to be a little too big for the market to bear.

No, I am not blaming securitization. If I did I'd be after insurance and every other securitized asset as well, which I'm not. What I am blaming is state interference in natural market mechanisms... especially price mechanisms. That's it.

There was no secondary mortgage market to speak of before 1938. No supply. FNMA created it.
I'd be interested in hearing your explanation of the housing crisis in the late 70's.

One key thing is missing, the fitness guarantee that created the problem in the first place. Granted, rates at historic lows would have created a bubble, but nothing like what you get when investors think there's a safety.

I can see your points, Mark, but I don't think you're getting to the heart of the issue. It is true that private companies often seek maximum profit, as do investors, but they aren't stupid. If they bought into the scenario you presented there would have been an explosion of investment in everything from commodities to crops. I still see a missing factor, and that missing factor is most likely the fitness guarantee. At least, that's my opinion now. I'll have to look into it more, but this whole thing is disturbingly familiar, so I'm wary of it.