Why couldn’t they have prevented the systemic collapse simply by bailing out the individual homeowners? If they had gotten bailed out, so would have their banks.
The first is that the us mortgage market is 10Tn. So it would have been required a 10x bigger bailout to do it directly.
The second is that someone has to decide who get a mortgage and one what property and at what rate etc. The government would need to do that too. And it seems cheaper and easier to use the existing companies that get the fed (?) To hire 1m real estate people and managers etc.
Reason 3 is that that would have been fine for mortgage holders. But what about everyone else who used those banks? Commercial loans, bon mortgage debt, insurance services, a whole bunch of very important economic processes would have suddenly ground to a halt. Mortgage holders were the main thing bailee out. But not the only thing.
But then house prices will fall, the economy will falter and interest rates on loans will go up.
And when that happens people who were previously fine will suddenly start defaulting too.
This is the problem with contagiousness, moral risk etc. If you don't bail out the first (worst) group to default, you rapidly find that people who were fine before are now no longer creditworthy.
To be clear, I'm not arguing this is fair or right or "should" be. I'm just explaining the decision that a theoretical politician would face.
Does not follow. Whether house prices fall and/or the economy falters is not out of your control, nor are they certain. It depends entirely on the choices made in the size of payout, the payout schedule, and enumerable other factors that can be managed to some extent.
Home buyers weren't innocent in all of this, but the worst predators were the ones that were bailed out, so the moral risk argument doesn't justify the choices made IMO.
So then what?
You either bail out so many people that fewer than 1% of people default. That's basically a 100% bailout right?
Or you don't and then prices fall.
And as soon as prices fall, suddenly construction stops and more people lose their jobs and people are underwater and consider defaulting strategically even if they don't "have" to.
I really agree about buyers not being innocent. I really do. It's by far the least reformed group in the 2008 shit show of fraud.
But this isn't a moral position. It's a practical one. And you can't punish those people or they'll take their neighbours (and elected officials) down with them...
Falling prices are fine because homes were overvalued virtually by definition of the circumstances at the time. Your argument assumes this would lead to a run away effect rather than it all reaching a fixed point, but this claim isn't justified.
My position isn't that home owners were the worst actors here, but that the bailout should have gone to home owners rather than the banks; the moral hazard argument applies to both, but at least in one arguably most people get to keep their homes and you're not rewarding the people whose professional responsibilities were to assess risk and properly manage financial instruments.
I'm just claiming that this wouldn't have required a full/100% bailout, just like we didn't fully bail out the banks and let some fail.
Millions of people were buying houses by lying on their mortgage applications about their incomes and assets, getting interest-only mortgages they could barely pay, and hoping to sell the house for a profit before their fraud was discovered.
When the market moved against the fraudsters and they got caught with houses they couldn't pay for that were worth less than they owed, which is why they started defaulting on their payments. The victims weren't the people who quit paying their fraudulent mortgages, the victims were the people who were deceived into loaning them money.
Nope, nobody along the chain had any responsibility for enforcing any kind of professional standards. I mean, it's not like we have systems in place to check things like "lying".
The initial fraud happened at the level of people lying on mortgage applications.
I'm not suggesting there weren't all sorts of failures of regulators and credit rating agencies, nor that many of the financial institutions involved in trading these assets weren't complicit in perpetuating the fraud. I'm just pointing out that "bailing out" a person who committed fraud when taking out a loan isn't a good thing for society to do. I'm not trying to let anyone else off the hook for their roles in the systemic problem.
Ok, and bailing out the financial institutions and traders that perpetuated that fraud "isn't a good thing" either, AND you said that what the home buyers did was "worse" for "reasons".
Except all of the reasons you listed are exactly what those traders and financial institutions also did, and arguably they have professional duties not to do those things and to in fact report them. You're also neglecting that home buyers aren't professionals in this, they're supposed to be guided by the professionals, but the mortgage lenders were encouraging people to inflate their assets as standard practice.
Where you lay the most of the blame on this issue honestly blows my mind.
To pretend that people committing fraud lost out "through no fault of their own" makes no sense, it's entirely their own fault. Legitimate buyers wouldn't be impacted- if a person buys a house to live in it, and pays for instance $3,000 per month, then the market price after purchase doesn't matter. They still live in their house and they still pay $3,000 per month.
Maybe you weren't around at that time, but there were a dozen different wildly popular TV shows about people flipping houses, people were buying houses with zero down payments, buying houses they couldn't afford because "real estate always goes up" and advice to "buy now and refinance in 6 months when the price has gone up" and all sorts of other greedy, speculative behavior. Houses in 2007 were the cryptocoins of the day, but with massive leverage by lying on mortgage applications.
At least with a central approach, regulators could come in and monitor. There wouldn’t really be a way for regulators to check home prices / the free market at such a massive scale.
Simple three step process:
- Be the leader of the CCP
- Declare that the homeowners will be bailed out
- Sit back and watch while your entire society restructures itself to bail out homeowners
I'm only half-kidding; this kind of stuff has been done time and time again, side effects be damned.
Not sure what side effects this could cause but it seems possible in principle.
Alternatively, you could just give all homeowners a loan instead - but this doesn't change the fundamental issue of subprime mortgages, so it would really just be pumping up the bubble further.
Yeah, I guess there's definitely a ton of side effects depending on which way you go.
However, the optics of giving banks more "free" money at the expense of "the people" is not good regardless. I wonder what would happen if the government extends almost-free loans to whoever has a mortgage.
I imagine a lot of people would use it to pay it, but probably a ton more would just use it to get a bigger TV, a car or something similar.
No way to win either way it seems.