June 25, 2010
That is a question that the NYT should have asked in an article reporting on Fannie Mae’s new plans to punish people who walk away from a mortgage that they could still pay. The article notes several problems that Fannie Mae will encounter in trying to impose its announced penalties on strategic defaulters, but only mentions in passing that the company many not even be in business for 7 years.
This matters in the current context, since one of the sanctions is that Fannie Mae will refuse to buy a mortgage by anyone who had strategically defaulted for 7 years. This could have a big impact on a person’s ability to get a loan if Freddie Mac adopts the same policy and the two companies still dominate the secondary market 7 years from now. However, if the companies are shut down, as many people advocate (perhaps more will now), then this sanction will be meaningless.
In this context it probably is also worth noting that the top executives of both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac earn $6 million a year (more than 30 times the pay of the Treasury Secretary). These publicly owned companies have repeatedly upped their estimates of losses from the collapse of the housing bubble.
The article is also far too generous in its explanation of Fannie Mae’s collapse, telling readers: “during the housing boom Fannie overreached and bought many loans of buyers who were ill-equipped to pay them.” Actually, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both completely missed the housing bubble. Even though housing is all these companies do, they could not see the $8 trillion bubble in the market. They did not alter their loan buying behavior at all (actually they became less cautious) as house prices grew ever more out of line with fundamentals. It was easy for anyone, other than the highly paid executives who ran the companies, to see that they would face serious problems when the bubble burst.
Comments