The Hopeless Mortgage Freeze Plan

Bush Subprime Plan: Too Much or Too Little?

Excerpts:

What would the plan accomplish? The plan is limited and tries to help homeowners, not speculators. It specifically targets borrowers who have teaser rates that eventually reset to much higher rates. Typically the rates are low for the first two or three years and are known as 2-28s or 3-27s.

For these borrowers, a rate freeze would only prevent foreclosure in the short term. The freeze is voluntary for mortgage lenders, who have no real incentive to participate.

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A mortgage happens to be a contract between a borrower and a lender. Do we really want to be in a position where the government changes the playing field and makes legislative changes to modify those contracts? Would it even be legal to do so? The implications of any government deal are far-reaching and need to be better understood.

Given that mortgages are a contract, there's a larger problem here. How do we get the two parties together to agree to these modifications? Mortgages are often repackaged and then sold off to investors. How would the government get all of these investors into a room to make this decision?
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According to Countrywide, 58.3% of people face trouble because of lost income, another 13.2% have illness/medical problems, and divorce causes problems for 8.4%. Can a government plan really stop these problems? I think not.


Comment: 5 pages ... read it all. The key question (in my mind): "Do we really want to be in a position where the government changes the playing field and makes legislative changes to modify those contracts?". The answer is NO!

More below:

S&P Says Mortgage Freeze Plan May Cause Downgrades

Paulson's Plan to Punish the Public

Excerpt:

Remember, the only reason those teaser-rate loans were made in the first place was because lenders (and thus the investors buying the mortgages from the lenders) could count on a much larger, contractually guaranteed payoff in the future, when those interest rates were due to reset. Take away that payoff, and you take away any incentive to loan to borrowers of marginal credit quality. Usher in an era when government and banks reset loan rates at their whim, and you can be sure that investors will never again buy securities based on adjustable-rate mortgages.

If you think credit is tight now, just wait until you yank away potential returns from the people putting up the capital for all those loans.

And let's not forget that Paulson's plan introduces an incredible moral hazard. By rescuing greedy and naive borrowers from their mistakes, our government encourages others to take big, stupid, bankruptcy-inducing risks, secure in the knowledge that the government will bail them out when times get rough. That means trillions of dollars in capital will be ill-invested yet again, something that's much less likely to happen when speculators are made to suffer the consequences of their behavior.



Paulson Subprime Plan Offers Little Aid, Analysts Say

Excerpt:

The extent of home price declines and economic conditions will have a ``far greater impact'' on the rates of loan modifications and foreclosures, wrote UBS's Zimmerman, who is also based in New York.

``I think it's lip service and essentially not meaningful,'' said Michael Burry, president of Cupertino, California-based hedge-fund firm Scion Capital LLC, which manages about $1 billion. ``It will only help those who don't need to be helped.''

Mortgage Mess: Is Relief in Sight? Why Bush's bailout will leave many borrowers out in the cold.

Excerpt:

Under the terms of the deal, lenders are offering to freeze the interest rates and monthly payments for five years for subprime borrowers who fit a limited set of conditions. Borrowers must be current on the loan, the loan's interest rate may not yet have reset, and the lender must determine that the borrower lacks the capacity to afford the higher payment if the interest rate adjusted upward. According to a study cited by today's New York Times, Barclay's Capital estimates that just 12 percent of subprime borrowers will benefit from the interest-rate freeze.
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By definition, someone who has taken out a subprime mortgage has either shown a history of having trouble managing his credit or did a less than stellar job of shopping for a mortgage. (On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal reported that many subprime borrowers could have obtained a regular mortgage but were steered into a higher-cost loan.) So it's not surprising if many of these borrowers have also made other poor financial decisions. The government's bailout plan is trying to deal with the mortgage mess in isolation. Helping people with more complicated financial problems is trickier, not unlike the challenge facing doctors treating patients who suffer from two or more diseases simultaneously.




Final comment: We need less government interference in the markets not more!