October 10, 2011
The Boston Globe ran an editorial over the weekend calling for a nationwide settlement to the mortgage fraud suits. The 824 word editorial managed to repeat most of the major fallacies being circulated about the economy today. It wrongly told readers that:
1) the bad financial position of banks, and their resulting hesitance to make loans, is a major factor impeding growth;
2) house prices are depressed because of the mess in the mortgage market;
3) that housing lock is a major factor in unemployment.
All three of these claims are seriously wrong and the Globe’s editors should know it. On the first point, there is little evidence that lack of access to capital is a major factor holding back business at this point. The National Federal of Independent Businesses has been surveying their members about their biggest problems for more than a quarter century. By far the item they mention most frequently is lack of demand. Only around 10 percent of these small businesses list the availability or cost of finance as one of their two top problems.
Furthermore, many larger businesses borrow directly on credit markets by issuing bonds. At present, both the real and nominal interest rates are at historically low levels. If smaller competitors are being prevented from taking advantage of investment opportunities by lack of access to credit then we should expect to see larger firms rushing in to steal market share. We don’t see this. Even large firms like Wal-Mart and Starbucks have curtailed their expansion plans during the downturn.
The second claim is that we should expect house prices to go back up once the mortgage market is fixed. Why? The housing market was in a huge bubble. (Do the folks at the Globe still not know this?) This means that there is no more reason to expect house prices to return to their former value than there is to think that the NASDAQ would jump back to 5000 after its collapse. In fact, nationwide house prices are still above their long-term trend, so the general direction is more likely to be down than up.
Finally, there is no real support for the housing lock story. Undoubtedly there are some people who don’t move to a place where jobs are more plentiful because they can’t get out from an underwater mortgage, however this is almost certainly not a major factor in unemployment. My colleagues John Schmitt and Kris Warner did a paper that looked for evidence of a housing lock effect using the Displaced Worker Survey. They found that displaced workers in states with sharp prices declines were actually slightly more likely to move for a job than displaced workers in other states. This analysis is hardly conclusive, but it does indicate that housing lock is not likely a big factor in unemployment. (Of course if settling the lawsuit has no effect on house prices, then this point is moot anyhow.)
In short, the three reasons the Globe gave for the urgency of a mortgage settlement do not hold water. There is no obvious reason that the attorneys generals should be in such a rush for a settlement that they accept a bad one.
[Thanks to Ben Tafoya for calling this one to my attention.]
Comments