New Jersey Real Estate Report

From the NY Times:

Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt

For decades, America’s shift from thrift could be summed up in this familiar phrase: When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping. Whether for a car, home, vacation or college degree, the nation’s lenders stood ready to assist.

Companies offered first and second mortgages and home equity lines, marketed credit cards for teenagers and helped college students to amass upward of $100,000 in debt by graduation.

Every age group up to the elderly was the target of sophisticated ad campaigns and direct mail programs. “Live Richly” was a Citibank message. “Life Takes Visa,” proclaims the nation’s largest credit card issuer.

Eliminating negative feelings about indebtedness was the idea behind MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign, the work of McCann-Erickson Worldwide Advertising, which came out in 1997.

“One of the tricks in the credit card business is that people have an inherent guilt with spending,” Jonathan B. Cranin, executive vice president and deputy creative director at the agency, said when the commercials began. “What you want is to have people feel good about their purchases.”

Mortgage lenders took to cold-calling homeowners to persuade them to refinance. Done to reduce borrowers’ monthly payments, serial refinancings allowed lenders to charge thousands of dollars in loan processing fees, including appraisals, credit checks, title searches and document preparation fees.

Not surprisingly, such practices generated dazzling profits for the nation’s financial companies. And since 2005, when the bankruptcy law was changed, the credit card industry has increased its earnings 25 percent, according to a new study by Michael Simkovic, a former James M. Olin fellow in Law and Economics at Harvard Law School.

The “2005 bankruptcy reform benefited credit card companies and hurt their customers,” Mr. Simkovic concluded in his study. He said that even though sponsors of the bankruptcy bill promised that consumers would benefit from lower borrowing costs as delinquent borrowers were held more accountable, the cost of borrowing from credit card companies has actually increased anywhere from 5 percent to 17 percent.
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Just two generations ago, America was a nation of mostly thrifty people living within their means, even setting money aside for unforeseen expenses.

Today, Americans carry $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up 22 percent since 2000 alone, according to the Federal Reserve Board. The average household’s credit card debt is $8,565, up almost 15 percent from 2000.

College debt has more than doubled since 1995. The average student emerges from college carrying $20,000 in educational debt.

Household debt, including mortgages and credit cards, represents 19 percent of household assets, according to the Fed, compared with 13 percent in 1980.

Even as this debt was mounting, incomes stagnated for many Americans. As a result, the percentage of disposable income that consumers must set aside to service their debt — a figure that includes monthly credit card payments, car loans, mortgage interest and principal — has risen to 14.5 percent from 11 percent just 15 years ago.

By contrast, the nation’s savings rate, which exceeded 8 percent of disposable income in 1968, stood at 0.4 percent at the end of the first quarter of this year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

More ominous, as Americans have dug themselves deeper into debt, the value of their assets has started to fall. Mortgage debt stood at $10.5 trillion at the end of last year, more than double the $4.8 trillion just seven years earlier, but home prices that were rising to support increasing levels of debt, like home equity lines of credit, are now dropping.

From Bloomberg:

New 20% Down Payment Makes Savers From Profligate U.S. Spenders

The U.S. housing crisis may accomplish what years of parental hectoring couldn’t: Turn Americans from spenders into savers.

Spending will fall because homeowners can no longer use rising real estate values to borrow cash — $837.5 billion in 2006, according to a report by former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and James Kennedy. With mortgage lenders requiring down payments of 20 percent, the average household, which puts away less than 1 percent of after-tax pay, will have to save 10 percent for 10 years to buy a home.

The housing market shaved almost 1.6 percent off gross domestic product growth in the first quarter and cut in half the growth rate of consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy, said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania.

“The loss of housing wealth is the difference between a recessionary economy and a growing economy,” said Zandi, an adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain. “Consumers have powered the global economy for the past 25 years. For the foreseeable future, maybe the next 25 years, the savings rate will move higher.”

The worst housing crisis in at least a quarter century still has a long way to go, Zandi said. It will take until 2015 for the median home price to return to its July 2006 peak of $230,200, while home sales and residential construction will never again reach the record highs of 2005 and 2006, he said.
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The residential housing decline will “change the structure” of the U.S. economy by forcing Americans to save, said Neal Soss, chief economist at Credit Suisse Group in New York.

“The days of wine and roses are over,” said Soss, who worked at the Federal Reserve for former Chairman Paul Volcker in the 1980s. “We were drunk on money. Getting sober is a painful process.”

From the LA Times:

Fed slaps new rules on mortgage lenders

The Federal Reserve clamped down hard on mortgage lenders Monday, issuing rules designed to curb the sorts of risky and deceptive lending practices that helped trigger the subprime mortgage crisis.

The Fed’s action, although criticized by some for not going far enough, was widely seen as a crucial step in reasserting control over a financial market that had been allowed to run wild.

“There’s lots more to come,” said Thomas Lawler, a former Fed official who is now a housing market consultant. “The pendulum is clearly swinging toward more regulation and more government involvement.”

The central thrust of the new rules is to restore sound underwriting practices, such as requiring lenders to verify that borrowers actually have the income and assets to make their loan payments.

The regulations adopted Monday were significantly stiffer than draft proposals issued six months ago, reflecting regulators’ intensifying concern over the fallout from the free-for-all lending that helped create the bubble in home values and led to the mortgage meltdown.
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In adopting the new rules on mortgage lending, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke traced the lenders’ woes back to their own practices.

“Although the high rate of delinquency has a number of causes, it seems clear that unfair or deceptive acts and practices by lenders resulted in the extension of many loans, particularly high-cost loans, that were inappropriate for or misled the borrower,” Bernanke said in a statement.

The new rules take effect Oct. 1 and will apply to all mortgage lenders, brokers, servicers and banks, not just those already regulated by the central bank.

“These rules are a step forward in returning common-sense business practices to the subprime lending market,” said Paul Leonard, director of the California office of the Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit advocacy group.
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The Fed’s final version of the regulations were much more stringent than draft proposals issued late last year. The new rules include four measures aimed at targeting abuses in the subprime mortgage market, which has been largely unregulated because the loans are securitized and held by private investors.
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Reinhart of the American Enterprise Institute said the rules also reflected an about-face from the relaxed attitude toward mortgage lending that prevailed under former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan.

“Alan Greenspan believed in the light hand of regulation. How he put that in place was in not moving at all, and that turns out not to be desirable,” Reinhart said. “So now the government is taking an active role.”

From the St. Louis Fed:

The Mortgage Crisis: Let Markets Work, But Compensate the Truly Needy

From the AFP:

Fed study says home price drop ‘necessary’

Large-scale government intervention in the US housing crisis would be counterproductive and prevent a “necessary” correction in home prices, according to a Federal Reserve study released Monday.

The study by economist William Emmons of the St. Louis Fed concluded that “government interventions directly in housing or mortgage markets are not necessarily the best policy responses.”

“By allowing markets to sort themselves out quickly, a foundation for sustainable homeownership and responsible mortgage lending can be re-established,” the regional branch of the central bank said.

The report said home prices in many parts of the country may fall from their peak levels in 2006 or 2007 by the largest amount in several decades, but that “from an economic standpoint this decline of overvalued properties is necessary.”

“If house prices are allowed to remain artificially high, homebuilders will make the eventual correction even worse by supplying more unneeded houses and driving prices down even further,” the report said.

The economist noted that the phenomenon of home foreclosure is an “unpleasant, but essential aspect of the mortgage market.”

“In order to ensure the mortgage market functions effectively, the lender must have the ability to seize the borrower’s property as collateral,” the report said.

“Without the possibility of foreclosure, mortgage rates would be more on par with those of credit cards,” said Emmons.

“It is important to keep in mind that there will be those individuals who are truly harmed by the crisis,” said Emmons.

“The financial distress to borrowers and communities caused by foreclosure should be addressed directly,” he said, with a stronger “social safety net.”