Easy money, loose lending, greed and fraud

Blame abounds for housing bust

Excerpt:

This year's housing bust is shaping up to be one of historic proportions. Sales and construction have sunk to levels not seen since the 1990 savings and loan crisis, while foreclosures and price drops are the largest since the Great Depression — and expected to get worse next year.



Many parallels can be seen with earlier housing debacles. Each episode had some combination of easy money, loose lending, greed and fraud that turned a housing boom into a speculative bubble. But few housing bubbles have ended so badly as the one today, when the nation is confronting the prospect of mass foreclosures and family dislocations.



John Stumpf, president of Wells Fargo & Co., the second-largest U.S. mortgage lender and a survivor of the housing busts of the 20th century, blames today's crisis on unscrupulous lending practices, which joined in a toxic mix with outright greed and extraordinarily low interest rates to send house prices soaring 90 percent between 2000 and 2006. When the bubble burst, house prices collapsed by 5 percent to 20 percent in cities nationwide.



"We have not seen a nationwide decline in housing like this since the Great Depression," Mr. Stumpf told investors in New York last month as major banks and securities firms reported an accumulated $80 billion of losses on their portfolios of mortgage investments and widely cut back on lending as a result.



Comment: When one considers housing costs logically, they should not consistently rise faster than the rate of inflation. It was a bubble that was ripe for bursting!