Cause of the Financial Crisis: Left vs Right

Their Mistake Was Trusting the Government
03/13/09 - ChicagoBoyz by Shannon Love

Shannon Love participated in a detailed, interesting discussion of his post about the failure of a small bank and the causes of the financial crisis.

Here is an edited version of what appears at the link. I intend it to be a bit more readable, and intact in tone and meaning. Red marks the comments of Shannon and his supporters. Blue marks the comments of his critics on the Left. Gray marks my editorial comments.

Rep. Maxine Waters was a major investor in OneUnited Bank, which lost heavily on its investment in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they were taken over by the Treasury.

Ironically, she fully supported Fannie and Freddie in her congressional role on the House Financial Services Committee. That committee had oversight and detailed knowledge of what Fannie and Freddie were doing. They supported lending to risky borrowers without verifying the loan applications.

Her experience is an example of what happened to banks worldwide because of Fannie and Freddie and their government supported actions in the housing market.

Read more for the discussion ...

Shannon Love:

For leftists, OneUnited should represent the perfect small, minority owned bank. The “socially responsible” Maxine Waters invested in the bank and sat on its board. There is no evidence that it made predatory loans.

Yet, OneUnited failed, but not due to any short-sighted, greedy decisions of the bank’s management. The bank’s management and board members, including Waters, trusted that the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) issued by the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fanny and Freddie were worth the paper they were written on.

OneUnited is a microcosm of the entire financial collapse. Over the past 40 years, the GSEs have piled up a vast store of toxic assets created by the attempt to get something for nothing, by fooling the market about the risk of residential mortgages.

A "toxic asset" is a loan that is hard to investigate or value. A "good" loan is supported by an honest borrower and by a house with enough value to repay the loan. A "toxic" loan may have a borrower in default or who can go into default, backed by a house of little value or fraudulently represented value. -amg.

Ratings firms gave the GSEs, and the MBS they issued, top ratings because of their implied government guarantee and oversight. Banks like OneUnited bought into the political myth, and now they and everyone else are paying for it.

I regard the failure of OneUnited and other institutions as the result of government action. Leftists need to explain why this is not true. They won't, of course.

Fred Lapides:

So, that explains the entire economic meltdown? Then, why is Greenspan apologetic? Glad to see the SEC, under Bush, and the credit rating dudes are all in the clear.

Shannon Love:

They are not in the clear. But the critical failure, the one that did everyone in, was with the GSEs. If everybody else had performed perfectly, the failure of the GSEs would still have brought down the system.

Look at Maxine Waters' bank. Are you seriously going to suggest that one of the most radical leftists in the congress was playing fast and loose? Should the SEC and other regulators have prevented her bank from purchasing government sponsored securities?

We're paying for 40 years of intentional market distortion. The crisis was caused by issuing too many risky loans. The entire reason for the existence of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac was to encourage lenders to make loans that the free-market had determined were too risky.

How exactly was the SEC supposed to prevent that?

BGates:

Are you seriously suggesting that being a radical leftist puts Waters above suspicion?

Shannon Love:

No, but it probably puts Waters above suspicion for someone like Fred Lapides.

The sad truth is that no fraud is needed to bring down an institution if they bought into the GSEs. A lot of people fell for it across the financial world.

The basic problem is that the market is like Mother Nature; you can't fool her without paying a price. Government programs tried to trick the market and now we have to pay the consequences.

Andrew Garland:

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were specifically put outside the regulation of the SEC.

Congress maintained close oversight of what Fannie and Freddie were doing, and approved of it. Congress created OFHEO (The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight) especially to regulate Fannie and Freddie. The much larger and more visible SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) was available, but Congress wanted its own regulator.

OFHEO was captive to House congressional committees, and outside the influence and control of the Bush administration.

This seems unconstitutional to me, but I am not an expert.

The House Financial Services Committee did not object, and actually encouraged more lending to subprime borrowers. Barney Frank (D. MA) has served as most senior Democratic member on this committee at least since 1992, and has chaired the committee since 2007 in the Democratic majority.

There is a long history of Barney Frank proclaiming that all was well with Fannie and Freddie, and no further oversight or inquiry was needed.

"We Guarantee It"
A collection of news and analysis about the causes of the mortgage and financial crisis. How the government directed massive resources into subprime lending by implicitly guaranteeing the actions of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Zach:

Despite the rating agencies and the role of Fannie and Freddie, there was still considerable private sector action needed to make this crisis endemic to the system itself.

1. Greedy, mostly middleclass homeowners who sought homes slightly outside their means.

2. CDO's which made "too big to fail" a reality

A "CDO" is a Collateralized Debt Obligation. This is a collection of MBS bonds that is bundled together and sliced into layers. Each layer is a CDO bond having a different priority of repayment, if there are losses in the underlying MBS bonds. This complexity is blamed for the current difficulty in "unwinding" the bond obligations and renegotiating the underlying mortgage loans. -amg.

Saying that leftists have to explain themselves is just a hyperbolic, knee-jerk simplification.

Shannon Love:

Blaming financial problems on greed is like blaming a building collapse on gravity. Both are universals that need to be planned for. Creating a system that will fail if people are "greedy" is just stupid.

The central problem here is that government intervention blinded the market to the risks of residential mortgages. The government made it seem safe to buy securities based on bundled mortgages. That is why their use grew in the private sector. Indeed, most of the growth in the industry came about as private institutions took market share from the GSEs.

This isn't a moral problem of greed. The government intentionally destroyed information so that the financial system could no longer calculate risk. Once blinded to risk, the entire system began to come off the rails.

Leftists who extoll the virtues of political systems versus private alternatives should explain why government issued securities proved to be worth less than similar, private securities. If the political system makes such great decisions, then the GSEs should be a financial Gibraltar in a private collapse, instead of ground zero.

Sean F:

The issue is not with greed, which is universal. The issue is with market failure to accurately price risk. The market is imperfect, like any human creation.

Factors such as imperfect information and bad incentives make it more likely for market failure to occur. To oversimplify a little, markets aggregate human behavior and markets are more likely to fail where humans don't know very much and have structural incentives to behave badly. Both of those things were true about the US banking and securitized debt markets.

It is unsurprising that Canada, which regulated CDO and MBS trading in general, has come out of this rather well. It is unsurprising that Iceland has come out of this mess in perhaps the worst shape, whose banking system was run by an ideologue whose favorite thinker was Hayek.

Personally, I think the current economy is a huge problem for the conservative movement in the US.

Here's why. People are remarkably reluctant to admit mistakes. Political opinions and "truths" tend to be formed early and are very resistant to change. Cognitive dissonance (when the real world annoyingly refuses to do what we think it should) actually tends to encourage further denial.

And the conservative movement in the US is in denial right now. It experienced some success with the idea of solving economic problems through tax cuts and deregulation. It then jumped to the unwarranted conclusion that deregulation and tax cuts were the panacea to any economic issue. Predictably, that led to a giant mess.

Now, the movement is in denial and produces convoluted explanations that convince only those who are already conservatives. I think this is good news for the Democrats because the Republicans will lose independents, new voters, and the educated.

The whole effort to paint the GOP as the party of Rush was a masterstroke. It's hard to deny because it's at least partially true. The conservative "base" has only helped the GOP electorally - so far. If Rahm's strategy to make the GOP "base" an electoral liability pays off, we could experience a realignment along the lines of 1980.

So in short: the GOP's attempt to blame the collapse on Clinton, Maxine Waters, and big government is a good strategy -- for the Democrats.

K.J. Webb:

What is it, Sean F, that you think conservatives are denying? If it's the ability of the Dems to make rhetorical hay out of the crisis, you could be right. Politics ain't beanball, as a noted Chicagoan once said. And another notable once said that a conservative is someone who stands athwart history and yells Stop.

But if you're really talking about the roots of the crisis, and not just indulging in schadenfreude, then I haven't really heard you take issue with Shannon's thesis that at the bottom of it all is a government policy, which encouraged making loans to folks who would not otherwise have gotten them, with ensuing moral hazards and unnatural events cascading therefrom.

I'm a Canadian. Right now we're sitting somewhat prettier than we customarily do when we compare ourselves with our elephantine neighbour. However, history matters. Canada didn't have to confect a social policy to deal with a legacy of slavery and a permanent underclass.

It didn't matter so much to Canadians that it was relatively harder for our poor to get credit, not having institutions like Fanny and Freddie. We didn't see the necessity, given that there aren't racial and cultural divides in need of healing.

In big cities like Montreal, the poor and somewhat poor happily rent apartments all their lives and don't think of buying a house. Nobody thinks they need to do this to show that that they've escaped the noose of poverty and racism.

Canadians are inherently less likely to take risks anyhow. This is broadly the cultural effect of a former colony in a northern climate with a great playground for adventure next door. The risk-takers in our midst usually head off south of the 49th [the U.S.]. These are not reasons for national congratulation, particularly, but history and culture matter.

A dose of reality always gets administered by the dismal science [economics] when nature is mocked. It may be hard for a liberal to believe, but conservatives see such effects as validation. As another Chicagoan said [economist Milton Friedman], ideas have consequences

Shannon Love:

Sean F said:
The issue is not with greed, which is universal. The issue is with market failure to accurately price risk. The market is imperfect, like any human creation.

Factors such as imperfect information and bad incentives make it more likely for market failure to occur. To oversimplify a little, markets aggregate human behavior and markets are more likely to fail where humans don't know very much and have structural incentives to behave badly. Both of those things were true about the US banking and securitized debt markets.

I agree with everything in these paragraphs. Where you go off the rails is your lack of examination of why the market failed to accurately price risk.

Let me give you a hint: The commercial real estate market has no government intervention at all, it has some securitization, and it was fine until the entire financial system tanked. You have previously argued that private individuals cannot price risk without the guiding hand of the State. If so, why didn't the commercial real estate market bubble and burst before the heavily regulated residential market?

The market did not price risk properly because the government set out specifically to blind the market to the risk of residential mortgages. The entire point of the creation of Fannie, Freddie, and other GSEs was to hide the risk of residential mortgage lending!

Do I need to repeat that?

You claim that free-market advocates are in denial, but it is you that can't see the problem, even when you type it out yourself. Unless you can explain why 40 years of government intervention in the market did not produce dangerous distortions, you look really foolish.

K.J. Webb:

In a talk show interview, Phil Donahue accused Milton Friedman of basing everything on greed. Friedman pleaded guilty, but asked incredulously whether Donahue really believed that leaders in the Communist world, and politicians in general, operated on some different principle. Donahue didn't have much of a reply except to suggest that virtue would be a better principle.

Doesn't that say it all about the wishful thinking of the liberal worldview? And there is a sinister implication that if you aren't virtuous, then a Robespierre or Pol Pot will see that you get that way.

Tyouth:

The government made securities based on bundled mortgages seem safe. That is why their use grew in the private sector.

When the GSEs changed the rules of the game by backing insecure loans, private institutions figured to stay in the game and began the same loose practices in order to stay competitive and get what they saw as their share of the spoils.

You can call it greed if you want to, I suppose, although it also might be seen as a matter of keeping one's job, a created moral hazard.

Ginny:

In previous booms and busts, weren't commercial properties hit harder than private ones? They would seem considerably more volatile in theory, but they haven't been exceptionally problematic at this time. This may indicate how much more tinkering it takes to increase that volatility.

Sean F:

To KJ Webb:

I think conservatives are denying the responsibility for the economic collapse that occurred under 8 years of a conservative presidency that prided itself on a lack of oversight and a lack of regulation of new financial products. And of old financial products too, like stocks. The SEC went down the tubes.

The excuses go something like this. Bush wasn't conservative (so only successful conservatives are conservative?), and excessive regulation was really the problem.

The problem is that sure, people tend to believe even imperfect explanations if the explanations reinforce their current beliefs, and yes, these explanations might convince conservatives. They're not likely to convince non-conservatives, because they're not very credible. When even Greenspan thinks deregulation was the problem, the old time religion just ain't gonna fly, if you pardon the mixed metaphors.

To Shannon Love:

You are rational and smart, from what I've seen of your posts. Try a thought experiment -- assume you're not correct. Assume that government policy with Fannie and Freddie wasn't the problem that led to the collapse. Don't assume they didn't distort the market -- that would be unrealistic -- but set aside, for a minute, the assumption that their distortion was the trigger.

Look at all the evidence suggesting that something other than Freddie and Fannie was the problem. Give it a fair hearing, no preconceptions. Do what I do. read the rational people you don't necessarily agree with you ideologically. Try Krugman. Read Marginal Revolution. Not everyone's opinion is entitled to the same weight so discount those who, regardless of partisan affiliation, don't have any basis for their opinions.

You may still come out the same way, believing regulation is somehow, as usual, the problem. But you may not. At least you may not be so sure whatever answer you have is correct.

Dave T:

To Sean F:

If deregulation is the source of the current economic problems, then what, specifically, needed to be regulated? If something like risky mortgages needed further oversight, for example, that would put banks and other lenders in a difficult position.

On the one hand, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were encouraging such mortgages and willing to buy them. On the other hand, a stronger regulatory body would be telling lenders that they can't do those mortgages.

So, Fanny and Freddie would themselves really need to be regulated. Without Fannie and Freddie to buy those loans, banks would be less willing to take on any risky mortgages. The responsibility for that regulation would fall on Congress, rather than the President. And now, we have the problem that Barney Frank and others prevented any such further restrictions on Fannie and Freddie.

K.J. Webb:

Let me see if I understand you, Sean. You're willing to half accept that the underlying cause of our current problems was government policy regarding Fannie and Freddie. But you think that lots of regulation could have controlled the underlying pathology, permitting the benign aspects of market distortion and suppressing the malignant ones.

That is, poor people would get loans backstopped by the government (a good thing), and the same government would root out all the morally hazardous activity that would otherwise naturally flow from this policy. Voila: the Just Society.

Conservatives don't deny the possibility of crisis, whoever is at the helm. Indeed they think it's part of the structure of reality. Liberals think it's always preventable and always someone's fault, likely someone with evil in his heart, a greedy Republican or Texas yahoo, or both.

Sean F:

To KJ Webb:

First of all, I disagree that "liberals always think it's preventable and always someone's fault." It does not jibe with my experience, but I do get what you mean, and it is probably how conservatives see liberals. Reverse the words and it probably equally and more accurately (in my admittedly biased perception) applies to how liberals see conservatives, especially social conservatives.

Any attempt to "remedy" human behavior through enforced control is bound to fail. Human behavior is, for better or for worse, human behavior. Yes, of course government regulation of private activity, economic or not, always creates its own set of problems.

But one has to maintain a sense of proportion. The solution is not always worse than the problem. Our system of criminal justice is plagued with all sorts of problems. Would you rather have no police system and no criminal courts at all?

Also, I don't think that government policy was "half the problem". The policy probably made it worse. Would regulation of the CDO market have helped? It may not have eliminated the problem but it may very well have. And we came to know about the problems with Fannie and Feddie first, before the full scope of the crisis emerged, only because they were regulated and subject to public disclosure requirements.

Personally, I think you're right. We probably will see some liberal ascendancy as the pendulum swings back a bit. We're also likely to see liberal overreach; the left is just as susceptible to that as the right.

Personally, I suspect the growth of the regulatory state -- police, the SEC, zoning laws, whatever -- is really the result of the increasing and mindboggling complexity of modern life. State action is not a great tool to order human life. I don't know whether my view is shared by most of those on the American left, but I'm certainly not a big fan. I just don't see a better alternative. Some regulation, at least, is essential.

At a (rather pessimistic) minimum one could say that regulation through the political process at least legitimizes outcomes and prevents social instability.

One reason I don't hate taxes as much as I could is that I do think it's the price we pay for civilization. I can't think of one society that has endured as a democracy for a long time without a strong middle class and the attendant lower levels of income inequality that implies.

In my view the naive ones are conservatives who buy into the "research" churned out by think tanks like AEI. They imagine they are living in some heroic Randian free-market Eden with rewards for the deserving, risk-taking, yet honest, small business, salt of the earth, and with justice for everyone else.

K.J. Webb:

Sean, you're one of a vanishing breed - a liberal one could actually have a conversation with. I reckon that's why you're a regular on this site!

I will grant the wisdom of much of what you say about government as a sort of necessary evil, and it being a question of where we draw the line. At the very end of your post you make the natural assumption of all good liberals, that the real goal of the regulatory state is redistribution. You believe that disparities of wealth are socially destructive, perhaps evil.

When you say that regulation "legitimizes outcomes", aren't you really saying that it rigs the deck to get the outcomes which it wants? For only the best of reasons, of course!

That's what makes a reasonable guy like you, one that's half right!, a man of the Left on a continuum that leads to the Naomi Kleins of this world.

Thomas Sowell has written well on the reason socialism never dies. We thought it had been finally discredited some time in the late 80's, but he knew otherwise. The longing for utopia is perennial. So is the longing to soak the rich. I have some of those longings from time to time myself.

Shannon Love:

To Sean F:

Look at all the evidence suggesting that something other than Freddie and Fannie was the problem.

I would point out that your role in this conversation is to provide that evidence. Yet, although I've asked repeatedly for you to provide alternative evidence, you never do so. For example, you should explain why the commercial real estate securities market did not boom and bust.

Instead you make arguments like the following:

Try a thought experiment -- assume you're not correct. Assume that government policy with Fannie and Freddie wasn't the problem that led to the collapse. Don't assume they didn't distort the market -- that would be unrealistic -- but set aside, for a minute, the assumption that their distortion was the trigger.

I have had religious people make this exact argument to me in discussions on evolution/creationism. They ask me to ignore actual science and instead think about the possibilities of their particular religious explanation. I am unwilling to consider a religious explanation for matters subject to scientific study. They claim that this makes me closed minded and a slave to scientific authority.

You've made the same type of argument: You consider it axiomatic that markets will fail without continuous political interference. You take the recent collapse as "proving" your axiom and don't understand why I don't see that. Just like the creationist, you want me to ignore data and instead just adopt your viewpoint as an act of faith.

It ain't gonna happen.

You can't ignore the role of the GSEs (Fannie and Freddie) in the collapse for two reasons:

(1)  The GSEs were huge. Imagine what would happen to the economy if every bit of debt issued by the federal government prior to 2009 had been declared worthless overnight. That is pretty much what happened with the GSEs. If you want me to ignore them, you need to present a stronger, numbers based argument. You need to explain how the economy could have survived such a massive hit.

(2)  You need to explain your position, that even though the GSEs' insolvency preceded the crisis in the rest of the financial system, that the GSE insolvency was actually caused by the failure of the private parts of the financial system, and not the other way around.

I don't insist that the GSEs alone caused all the problems in the world's financial system. Obviously, the GSEs did not cause the problems that German and French banks have in Eastern Europe. However, they did play an enormous role in the damage done to the American part of the system. You have offered me no intellectual or quantitative argument for why I should think otherwise.

You are an honest and thoughtful guy, but I think you have a bad case of leftist insularity. You think it is so obvious that political intervention in the economy is usually for the better, that you don't even understand contrary arguments enough to shoot them down. You fall into the religious type of argument above, because you don't personally know anyone who thinks otherwise.

You believe that we here at a libertarian blog are just gaga over Bush's big-government conservatism. This shows that you really don't understand how we think. You don't address the factual argument we make, instead you invite us to abandon our intellectual constructs and make a leap of faith to join your "church".

Sean F:

To KJ Webb and Shannon:

Thanks for your gracious comments. The reason I read Chicagoboyz is because I find the posts interesting, the dialogue rational, and the posters intelligent. Quite unlike a lot of the blogosphere.

FYI, my aim is not to “convert” anyone. Joining a movement requires loyalty and faith – two things I suspect you can’t afford to have, if you want to think for yourself. I post here for selfish reasons - because debating ideas with thoughtful people helps me think through things, and because I think I can learn more by having a discussion with those who have a genuinely different perspective.

To Shannon:

Yes, the GSEs MBS debt was huge. But why do you think that somehow proves that big government or regulation was to blame for poor decisions at the GSEs? And why do you think that the GSEs' debt is the most important trigger of the entire financial crisis when so many other actors were involved? The real story is more interesting.

1.  Mortgage brokers, all private, are an unregulated part of the financial market with no controls. In the mid-1990s, they began surging growth by targeting high-risk borrowers, to the point that 20.1% of all US mortgages were subprime. They didn’t care about the risk because they repackaged and sold the loans immediately to investment banks. The credit rating agencies were paid to rate, and had an incentive not to upset their customers. They rated the higher tranches of CDO bonds as considerably lower risk than they actually proved to be.

Fannie and Freddie, and private institutions, bundled collections of home mortgages into MBS bonds (Mortgage Backed Securities). Private institutions bundled MBS into CDO bonds (Collaterallized Debt Obligations).

Mortage payments support the repayments of principal and interest on the MBS, and so on the CDOs. The CDOs are divided into layers called "tranches". If there are any mortgage defaults, the "higher" tranches ae paid first, leaving any losses entirely to the lowest or lower tranches. Buyers of CDOs knew this, and CDO tranches were priced accordingly.

2.  The investment banks made a lot of money selling these loans (now smelling like roses) as MBS to international investors. By 2007, the international market for these loans was $1.5 trillion.

3.  AIG and other international insurers sold insurance (credit default swaps) to the buyers of these loans who needed to hedge their risk. AIG probably knew that their risk estimation completely ignored systemic risk, but the money was too good to pass up. Investors thought they were golden because they had high-grade MBS bonds backed by insurance.

4.  This whole thing worked as long as payments were being made. When the economy slowed, payments stopped being made, and the whole system came crashing down, because the risk estimation, from everyone, was completely off. Some people, certainly the mortgage brokers, knew this from the start. But they didn’t have the right incentives to care, not when so much money was to be made in the short term.

Who came out ahead? According to the Prospect article below, the executives and officers of some mortgage finance companies cashed out before the market crashed.

• The poster boy is Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, the largest sub-prime lender. He made more than $270 million in profits selling stocks and options from 2004 to the beginning of 2007.
• The three founders of New Century Financial, the second largest sub-prime lender, together realized $40 million in stock-sale profits between 2004 and 2006.
• Paul Krugman reported in The New York Times that the chief executives of Merrill-Lynch and Citigroup were paid $48 million and $25.6 million last year.

But they are just poster boys. The financial services industry made a killing by packaging sows ears as silk purses.

And where do the GSEs come into this? They were a part, but not the central part by a long shot. In 2000, Fannie, a "mortgage insurance" company, made a fateful decision to expand into sub-prime, relying on computer models to manage risk. Why? Politics. The Bush Administration wanted to expand home ownership, and the Democrats were not going to complain. If you want to be a cynic, the real explanation is supercharged stock prices. Franklin Raines was the CEO of Fannie for a while. He made $90 million between 1998 and 2004.

In 2004, Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide threatened to end it’s partnership with Fannie unless Fannie bought Countrywide loans. In 2003, Fannie had lost 56% of its business to competition from Wall Street banks. Also, Mozilo was a major GOP donor and player. The new CEO, Mudd, caved and agreed. Between 2005 and 2007, the company’s acquisitions of mortgages with down payments of less than 10 percent almost tripled. By 2007, the whole thing came crashing down.

Fannie wasn’t the cause of the crisis. It made the crisis worse because it was captured by unregulated mortgage brokers like Countrywide, who used it for their own short term profit.

See The NYTimes: Fannie, or more generally The NYTimes: The Reckoning.

Who is really responsible? Very poor structural incentives, a belief in deregulation for the sake of deregulation, a complete failure by the Bush Administration, and unwarranted faith in the ability of free markets to fix their own failures despite all the causes for market failure being present.

If you can get past the partisan language, the authors of the Prospect article below think conservative dogma had a major part to play in this crisis, and they make good factual points. An early analysis, from 2007 is eerily prescient. Looking back from 2009, they were dead on.

The American Prospect: Conservative Origins of the Subprime Mortgage Crisis

Shannon Love:

Yes, the GSE MBS debt was huge. But why do you think that somehow proves that “big government” or “regulation” was to blame for poor decisions at the GSEs?

Because they were government creations.

• They operated under an implied government guarantee that allowed them to borrow money at around half the cost of private actors.
• They operated under a custom set of laws and accounting regulations established by congress purely for the GSEs.
• They were created solely for the purpose of distorting the market to encourage the making of loans that the free-market judged as too risky.
• There is simply no way that their distortions of the market and their eventual catastrophic failure cannot be laid at the feet of the political system.

I don't think you understand just how huge the GSEs were in terms of market share of the MBS market.

Since the late 1980's, the GSEs bought at least 40% of every residential mortgage issued in the U.S. That grew to 54% by 2003, when they got busted for corruption.

Unlike in the private sector, most of those mortgages were bundled into MBS. The accumulation of these long term MBS means that 60%-70% of all MBS in the market today were issued by the GSEs.

Almost every company that went broke due to MBS, such as Waters pet bank, did so because they bought government sponsored MBS. Had the GSEs remained solvent and their MBS retained their value, we would not now have a major crisis even if every private issuer failed.

That is one reason why the GSEs and the political complexes that created them bear the lion's share of the blame in the crisis.

I would point out that when it came to the regulation of the GSEs, the Democratic and Republican roles reversed. Bush tried on 18 separate occasions to bring the GSE practices in line with those of private issuers. The Democrats shot him down each time. This is especially important because the GSEs did not have the external discipline of the market as private actors did. They really needed political oversight.

The GSEs had the implicit guarantee of the government. Private banks would lend them money, buy their corporate bonds, no matter how risky was their inventory of mortgages. They could do what they wanted unless restrained by government regulation. But, the oversight committees encouraged further and riskier purchases of subprime loans. -amg

Mortgage brokers, all private, are an unregulated part of the financial market – no controls.

This is not true. All private mortgage issuers operate under the same set of federal and state laws. Countrywide and a small town bank all operated under the same laws. But, mortgage brokers didn't have the same free-market limits as did small banks that kept their mortgages in house.

In the mid-1990s, they began surging growth by targeting high-risk borrowers – to the point that 20.1% of all US mortgages were subprime.

Well, here the government played a role. It doesn't take a genius to know that high risk borrowers are more likely to be people in the bottom half of the income distribution. These are exactly the people that the Clinton administration sought to help by leaning on banks and by empowering leftist organizations to sue banks for discrimination.

This led to changes in long standing lending standards evolved in a free-market. Banks can't legally discriminate between borrowers, so changes in lending standards for some borrowers became changes in standards for all borrowers. Again, a government intervention drove a change that the free-market would not have made, because subprime loans are too risky.

They didn’t care about the risk because they repackaged and sold the loans immediately as MBS to investment banks.

You left out a part. It should read, "They didn’t care about the risk because they sold the loans to the GSEs which repackaged and sold the loans immediately as MBS to investment banks."

The GSEs were created specifically to sever the issuing of a mortgage from the risk of holding it. The mortgage brokers, both pure brokers and banks who acted like brokers, were not bugs in the GSE system, they were its intended agents!

The entire point in creating the GSEs was to induce banks to make loans that the free-market judged as too risky. To this end, they induced mortgage issuers to pay attention only to whether they could sell the mortgage to the GSEs.

The GSEs, with their government backing and political mandate, grew less and less concerned about the risk of the mortgages they bought. The entire risk assessment system of the residential mortgage market broke down. Which, again, was the point of creating the GSEs in the first place.

1.  The credit rating agencies were paid to rate, and had an incentive not to upset their customers. They rated the higher tranches as considerably lower risk than they actually proved to be.

There was no significant residential MBS market prior to the GSEs. No private MBS issuer could assure buyers that the securities would retain their value. The government stepped in to address this "lack" in the market. Only after the GSEs had been issuing such securities for nearly 30 years, did private institutions find they could also issue them.

The GSEs conditioned the market to treat MBS as safe investments, an intentional distortion. The private issuers used the same risk assessment methods of the GSEs. The rating agencies gave good ratings to the GSEs based initially on their [implicit, not formal] government backing, so they had no reason to downgrade the private issuers.

Again, without GSEs, there would be no high rating for MBS. The industry would not have developed on its own to the scale it did.

2.  The investment banks made a lot of money selling these loans (now smelling like roses) to international investors. By 2007, the international market for these loans was $1.5 trillion.

The GSEs did this first. You imply that the private MBS issuers where doing something different and irresponsible when in fact they were following the GSEs. And again, the accumulation of GSE MBS was so large that even if the private issuers remained solvent, the failure of the GSEs would have destroyed the system.

3.  AIG and other international insurers sold insurance (credit default swaps) to the buyers of these loans who needed to hedge their risk.

Which would have worked if the GSEs had not collapsed. We see private actors using the statistical models of the GSEs to assess risk. Had the GSEs not existed, this market would not have existed or it would not have grown so large.

4.  This whole thing worked as long as payments were being made. When the economy slowed, payments stopped being made

That is wrong. The whole system worked as long as the market value of the properties backing the MBS stayed up. When those values tanked, the MBS became worthless. It had little to do with the money coming in the door. Instead, the accountants downgraded the value of the GSE issued MBS to near zero. Anyone who held those MBS as assets found themselves technically insolvent, such as Waters' bank.

In 2000, Fannie, a mortgage "insurance" company, made a fateful decision to expand into sub-prime loans, relying on computer models to manage risk. Why? Politics. The Bush administration wanted to expand home ownership, and the Democrats were not going to complain.

You need to check your dates. Bush assumed office in 2001 and Fannie and Freddie had both been increasing their subprime lending since 1995. Bush certainly wanted to increase home lending, all politicians do, but when it comes to oversight on the GSEs, Bush is clearly on the side of the angels. He tried 18 times to reform their practices, but got shot down by the Democrats every time. The record on this is very clear.

The damage to the market was already done by the time Bush came into office. All of the trends that would lead to disaster were already running. Had Bush gone to the mat to restrict lending to home buyers, who would have supported him? Certainly, not the Democrats.

Fannie wasn’t the cause of the crisis. It made the crisis worse because it was captured by unregulated mortgage brokers like Countrywide, who used it for their own short term profit.

Fannie and Freddie did cause the crisis, because they created the entire residential MBS market along with the intentional alteration of the perception of risk.

• Had they never existed, the residential MBS market would be small and stable like the commercial MBS market.
• Had they never existed, there would have been no mortgage brokers or banks acting like mortgage brokers.
• The American Prospect article simply ignores the creation of the GSEs as instruments of market distortion.
• It ignores the role of the GSEs in the rise of the mortgage broker.
• It ignores that the mortgage industry is the most heavily regulated part of the financial sector.
• It ignores that the volatility of the mortgage industry has increased as regulation has increased.
• It ignores that the least regulated sectors work just fine, such as commercial mortgages.

I've read dozens of articles, blog posts, and comments from the leftist perspective, and none of them address any of the complaints of the free-market perspective. Indeed, just like the articles you link to, they don't give a hint that they understand the crucial free-market role of prices as a means of communicating information such as the risk of mortgages.

Instead, they see a moral drama, a narrative, in which the noble and altruistic leftist restrains the greedy and stupid business people. The entire story is not a technical examination of a system, but a morality tale with the conclusion that one political group should be dominant over the other.

If you want to criticize free-market types, conservative or not, criticize us for not recognizing the market distortions and responding accordingly.

• We should have pushed harder and sooner for more oversight of the GSEs.
• We should have forced rating agencies to asses the risks of private MBS without regard to the GSE versions.
• We should have destroyed the GSEs.

In the end, we collectively produced this problem by wanting something for nothing. We wanted houses, but we couldn't accept the verdict of the market that we couldn't afford them.

Our short sighted politicians gave us the easy answer of tricking the market. Back in the 70's, we built our housing policy around the guarantee of the Federal government, to hide the risk of mortgages. We were going to have a major problem. The market cannot be fooled forever.

Sean F:

You're saying that the GSE's distorted the market perception of risk and created the problem. That view allows you to sidestep any responsibility for private actors, and retain your trust that unregulated free markets don't fail.

But consider, if the GSE's were mostly responsible for the bulk of the crisis, then the commercial MBS market should be fine. After all, you claim it is the GSE's that are the major source of the distortion. So a market subject to the same forces but without the GSE's should be fine, or at least much less affected.

And therein lies a problem. The facts. The commercial MBS market is as dead as a dodo. See Commercial Mortgage Alert for a rather depressing roundup of the current news.

The above link is to the front page of a blog on mortgage news. The headlines change over time. It is not directly possible to identify the source of Sean F's conclusion. -amg

Perhaps one could jump through a few more hoops and come up with yet another explanation that somehow implicates the GSE's. I'm sure it might be fun to try. But at some point, you run into Occam's razor.

For most of those without the faith that markets can effectively self-regulate, anyone not part of the conservative movement, the simpler explanation is probably correct.

The conditions for market failure were ripe. The market failed. That doesn't mean markets are bad, they're great, better than most other forms of economic ordering.

But they're not perfect. Lowering taxes and trusting in the market doesn't always work. Deregulation or non-regulation can sometimes lead to an incredible amount of value destruction and market failure. It isn't always good.

I think this is very hard for the GOP to accept. Goes against the dogma. I think the party needs some more electoral drubbing before that happens. Sort of like the Democrats and welfare reform.

Shannon Love:

If the GSE’s were mostly responsible for the bulk of the crisis, then the commercial MBS market should be fine.

I will turn the question around in two ways.

First, if the free-market is to blame, why didn't the commercial real estate market exhibit the same rabid boom, and why didn't the commercial MBS fail? If your model is true, we should expect to see a correlation between the degree of government intervention and oversight and the stability and reliability of the market. Instead, we see the opposite, in many different financial sectors.

Second, if the free-market is to blame, why did the GSEs fail? They were and are government creations operating under special laws and with government backing? If any government agency should have been able to judge the systemic risk of the residential mortgage market, it was the GSEs. Why didn't they see the problem years in advance and limit their purchases to safe mortgages?

Why did they fail before the private entities? Why did their failure bring down so many otherwise solvent private entities? If government regulation is so good and great, why aren't the GSEs safe harbors in a financial storm, instead of the eye wall [most destructive part] of the hurricane?

At best, you are arguing that the politicians you place so much faith in are no better at managing risk than the free market. At worst, the political intervention created the problem.

And, I will answer your question directly. As a leftist, you have a hard time understanding that conditions alter economic behavior, especially government force. The GSEs distorted the entire residential mortgage market and altered the behavior of all actors in the market, whether they dealt directly with the GSEs or not.

Almost all players did deal directly, either selling mortgages to the GSEs 50% market share or buying their MBS or stock. The GSEs altered the standards and practices of the entire industry over the course of 40 years, as they were designed to do.

Even if private companies had done everything right (which they never do), the failure of the GSEs would have brought the system down, and they were certain to fail. The cost of distorting the market had to be paid eventually.

Without GSEs, there would be no failure. Without the example of the GSE MBS, no private company would have gone into the business, because no private buyers would invest in such risky securities based on only the assurances of a private issuer.

No private issuer could purchase the large numbers of mortgages needed to get statistical protection against mortgage defaults. It took the enormous pockets of the federal government to get the ball rolling. Only after two decades of large scale government backed MBS flooding the market, could private issuers get a foothold by using the same standards as the GSEs.

The GSEs are the elephant in the leftist parlor. You are sitting around sipping tea and leaning around the elephant to talk about the failure of the free-market. You won't acknowledge that it's your elephant that you brought to the parlor. You won't even admit that it died. Its comical.

The market failed. That doesn’t mean markets are bad. They’re great, better than most other forms of economic ordering. But they’re not perfect.

Perfection is for leftists and their utopias. The only thing that free-marketers assert is that the free-market is more robust than political meddling. The failure of the GSEs and the politically regulated markets, and the stability of the unregulated markets bear this out.

Markets fail, but they fail small-time. It takes the power and enormous scope of government to wreck an entire economy.