The Role of Government Affordable Housing Policy in Creating the Global Financial Crisis of 2008

The Role of Government Affordable Housing Policy in
Creating the Global Financial Crisis of 2008
Staff Report
U.S. Housuse of Representatives
111TH Congressss
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
July 7, 2009

INTRODUCTION

EXCERPTS

The housing bubble that burst in 2007 and led to a financial crisis can be traced back to federal government intervention in the U.S. housing market intended to help provide homeownership opportunities for more Americans. This intervention began with two government-backed corporations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which privatized their profits but socialized their risks, creating powerful incentives for them to act recklessly and exposing taxpayers to tremendous losses. Government intervention also created “affordable” but dangerous lending policies which encouraged lower down payments, looser underwriting standards and higher leverage. Finally, government intervention created a nexus of vested interests – politicians, lenders and lobbyists – who profited from the “affordable” housing market and acted to kill reforms. In the short run, this government intervention was successful in its stated goal – raising the national homeownership rate. However, the ultimate effect was to create a mortgage tsunami that wrought devastation on the American people and economy. While government intervention was not the sole cause of the financial crisis, its role was significant and has received too little attention.

In recent months it has been impossible to watch a television news program without seeing a Member of Congress or an Administration official put forward a new recovery proposal or engage in the public flogging of a financial company official whose poor decisions, and perhaps greed, resulted in huge losses and great suffering. Ironically, some of these same Washington officials were, all too recently, advocates of the very mortgage lending policies that led to economic turmoil. In a number of cases, political officials even engaged in unethical conduct, helping their political allies, family members and even themselves obtain lucrative positions in the mortgage lending industry and other benefits. At a time when government intervention in private markets has become alarmingly common, government “affordable housing” initiatives offer important lessons about the dangers of government efforts to manipulate or conjure outcomes in the market

However, unlike any other publicly traded corporation, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also answered in a very direct way to the federal government and elected officials in a manner reminiscent of the “crony capitalism” of countries such as Russia or China, which preserve a large state-owned enterprise sector. Fannie and Freddie answered to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”), which set quotas for GSE investment in affordable housing, as well as to Congress and the White House, which sought to use them as vehicles to advance the politically popular goal of increasing the national home ownership rate. This was done directly through legislation and regulation which mandated affordable housing lending and indirectly through political pressure from politicians and advocacy groups. This created incentives for Fannie and Freddie to curry political favor with Congress and necessitated a massive lobbying effort which GSE executives termed “political risk management.”

However, in 1995, the Clinton Administration implemented a major regulatory reform of CRA which emphasized “performance-based evaluation.” The impact of this reform was that regulators would no longer rate banks based on their efforts to lend to customers using equitable procedures but rather on the volume of their lending. When combined with the endorsement of “flexible and innovative” mortgage underwriting, this change in the CRA represented a troubling move away from prudent and sustainable mortgage lending towards government endorsement of lower quality lending to those of modest means.

Government actions distorted the housing market, yet advocates of affordable housing policies, such as Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), have asserted that those who criticize these policies seek to place blame for the financial crisis solely on borrowers of modest means. This misses the mark entirely. In fact, responsibility for the erosion of mortgage lending standards, which began with government affordable housing policy, rests squarely on the policy makers who advocated these ill-conceived policies in the first place. Borrowers quite naturally responded to the incentives they were given, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, and risky lending spread to the wider mortgage market.