By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
QUICK SKIM
Following the subprime mortgage meltdown in 2007 and subsequent housing crisis, the line from most commentators was that no one saw it coming. The near-collapse of finance and credit in this country was like a bolt from the blue. Who could have possibly predicted it?
Another bit of post-meltdown conventional wisdom was that all the parties involved — Fannie and Freddie, government regulators and policy makers, Wall Street’s biggest banks, investment ratings agencies, mortgage brokers, borrowers, and even real estate practitioners — played some part in the collapse. The overall system was more or less healthy, but the selfish and shortsighted decisions of some “bad actors” from all of these groups led to market failure.
Michael Lewis, acclaimed author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and The Blind Side, offers a contrarian perspective on both of these phenomena in his most recent book, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2010). Regarding the first point, there were at least a few people who figured out what was going on in the financial markets. For them, it was never a matter of whether there would be a day of reckoning or not — it was just a question of when. They invested accordingly, and their bets paid off big as the economic edifice came crashing down.
That part of the book is interesting, but the more important issue for readers is the second one. Lewis, who once worked on Wall Street, says the origins of the collapse were not in the rapacious greed of a few scoundrels from various groups, but rather in systemic problems — some of which have been in place for several decades — that create reckless investments and obfuscate risk. To that end, Lewis discusses the following details to make a very compelling case.
FROM THE BOOK: 5 LESSONS FOR THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY Continue reading »
By Brian Summerfield, Online Editor, REALTOR® Magazine
QUICK SKIM
As Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.” In his book Bailout Nation, author Barry Ritholtz lays out the causes and effects of the recent economic downturn in a voluminous feast for the market-minded reader. In a clear and entertaining fashion, he explains how the evolution of big business and big government led us to our current state, and offers important lessons about the interrelationship of money, credit, and value along the way. He also discusses problems that led to a meltdown in real estate, and provides a few suggestions on how to avoid these difficulties in the future.
In sum, if you’ve ever wondered why the Federal Reserve exists, why Bear Stearns was bailed out but Lehman Brothers wasn’t, and why your local classic rock radio station seems to play the same 20 songs over and over again, this book is for you. Continue reading »
The following is excerpted from Financial Shock: A 360-degree Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis (Pearson Education, 2009) by Mark Zandi, chief economist and cofounder of Moody’s Economy.com. Here are four policy changes Zandi recommends to prevent the next financial crisis. Read all 10 in his book.
Policy Step #1: Adopt a voluntary mortgage write-down plan
Many troubled mortgages could be salvaged if lenders would agree to modify them, typically by reducing the principal owed. The borrower would get to stay in the house, the lender would avoid a costly foreclosure, and the economy might avoid falling into a destructive self-reinforcing cycle in which house price declines beget foreclosures which beget still more price declines. Thus it seems both reasonable and urgent to encourage this wherever possible.
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