Housing bubble

I mentioned the bay area housing bubble in the last post, and was asked to elaborate. Coincidentally, the Economist just posted this survey on property worldwide.

I can't claim to be an expert on this topic, but here goes...

I think there is clear evidence for a bubble in places like the bay area, Boston, NYC, LA and some other cities. The metric I find most compelling is price to rent (P/R) ratio, which is analogous to price to earnings (P/E) for equities. This is at an all time high in many cities, although not nationwide. The other metric which is very inflated in certain markets is price to average (family) income. Some of this data is available at the Case-Shiller-Weiss (CSW) Web site. (That's Robert Shiller, of "irrational exuberance" fame.) The bay area is particularly hard to understand, since something like 250K jobs were lost since the peak of the tech bubble in 2000, and there has actually been net migration out of the area. Rents have actually dropped slightly, but property values continue to increase.

On the behavioral front, I think a lot of people jumped into real estate thinking it was one of the few "safe" investments after the stock bubble burst a few years ago. One sure sign of a bubble is that people buy with the expectation of near-term price increases. I keep reading that units in developments in places like Florida and LA are often unoccupied - the owners have purchased them as investments with the intention of flipping. These speculators are going to get burned when interest rates rise, but until then they get to brag to their friends about their big gains. (Sound familiar?)

I mentioned in a previous post that bubbles can persist for surprisingly long periods of time, even after a fairly wide consensus has emerged that things are overpriced. I claim this has a lot to do with the timescales and effectiveness of arbitrage in a particular market. See here for related discussion in the Economist, and here for derivatives related to real estate prices.

Finally, let me note that I must not be very smart, since I thought the bay area was already overpriced 10 years ago, and should have bought something back then...

Economist on global housing bubble

Informed readers are already familiar with the situation, but the Economist as usual does a wonderful job of summarizing. In the first figure, note the oscillation of price/rent about the long-term average. In the second figure, you see a possible decades-long unwinding of the bubble, as in Japan.

Robert Shiller (quoted in the article) has called this the biggest bubble of all time, and the Economist agrees. In addition, his research shows only a tiny (.4% per year) real return on US house prices over the last century, contrary to conventional wisdom.

The most compelling evidence that home prices are over-valued in many countries is the diverging relationship between house prices and rents. The ratio of prices to rents is a sort of price/earnings ratio for the housing market. Just as the price of a share should equal the discounted present value of future dividends, so the price of a house should reflect the future benefits of ownership, either as rental income for an investor or the rent saved by an owner-occupier.

Calculations by The Economist show that house prices have hit record levels in relation to rents in America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland and Belgium. This suggests that homes are even more over-valued than at previous peaks, from which prices typically fell in real terms. House prices are also at record levels in relation to incomes in these nine countries.

...To bring the ratio of prices to rents back to some sort of fair value, either rents must rise sharply or prices must fall. After many previous house-price booms most of the adjustment came through inflation pushing up rents and incomes, while home prices stayed broadly flat. But today, with inflation much lower, a similar process would take years. For example, if rents rise by an annual 2.5%, house prices would need to remain flat for 12 years to bring America's ratio of house prices to rents back to its long-term norm. Elsewhere it would take even longer. It seems more likely, then, that prices will fall.

A common objection to this analysis is that low interest rates make buying a home cheaper and so justify higher prices in relation to rents. But this argument is incorrectly based on nominal, not real, interest rates and so ignores the impact of inflation in eroding the real burden of mortgage debt. If real interest rates are permanently lower, this could indeed justify higher prices in relation to rents or income. For example, real rates in Ireland and Spain were reduced significantly by these countries' membership of Europe's single currency—though not by enough to explain all of the surge in house prices. But in America and Britain, real after-tax interest rates are not especially low by historical standards.

...Another mantra of housing bulls in America is that national average house prices have never fallen for a full year since modern statistics began. Yet outside America, many countries have at some time experienced a drop in average house prices, such as Britain and Sweden in the early 1990s and Japan over the past decade. So why should America be immune? Alan Greenspan, chairman of America's Federal Reserve, accepts that there are some local bubbles, but dismisses the idea of a national housing bubble that could harm the whole economy if it bursts. America has in the past seen sharp regional price declines, for example in Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco in the early 1990s. This time, with prices looking overvalued in more states than ever in the past, average American prices may well fall for the first time since the Great Depression.

But even if prices in America do dip, insist the optimists, they will quickly resume their rising trend, because real house prices always rise strongly in the long term. Robert Shiller, a Yale economist, who has just updated his book “Irrational Exuberance” (first published on the eve of the stockmarket collapse in 2000), disagrees. He estimates that house prices in America rose by an annual average of only 0.4% in real terms between 1890 and 2004. And if the current boom is stripped out of the figures, along with the period after the second world war when the government offered subsidies for returning soldiers, artificially inflating prices, real house prices have been flat or falling most of the time. Another sobering warning is that after British house prices fell in the early 1990s, it took at least a decade before they returned to their previous peak, after adjusting for inflation.

History is impossible

... and economic history is even harder.

Andy Lo (MIT) explains that economists have yet to agree on the causes and consequences of and remedies for the recent financial crisis. This is a must read. I hope to provide further comments when I have more time.

Although I covered the housing bubble (which I called a bubble as early as 2004) and ensuing financial crisis in great detail on this blog, I've spent very little time discussing books about the crisis. That's because many (most?) of the authors (who, as Lo points out, tend to disagree strongly with each other) are rehearsing their own priors rather than seeking truth. My talk on the financial crisis.

Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review

Andrew W. Lo

Abstract
The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.

From the introduction:

... Six decades later, Kurosawa’s message of multiple truths couldn’t be more relevant as we sift through the wreckage of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Even the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission—a prestigious bipartisan committee of 10 experts with subpoena power who deliberated for 18 months, interviewed over 700 witnesses, and held 19 days of public hearings—presented three different conclusions in its final report. Apparently, it’s complicated.

To illustrate just how complicated it can get, consider the following “facts” that have become part of the folk wisdom of the crisis:

1. The devotion to the Efficient Markets Hypothesis led investors astray [CERTAINLY TRUE], causing them to ignore the possibility that securitized debt was mispriced and that the real-estate bubble could burst. [TOO STRONG]

2. Wall Street compensation contracts were too focused on short-term trading profits rather than longer-term incentives. Also, there was excessive risk-taking because these CEOs were betting with other people’s money, not their own. [CEOS DID NOT KNOW WHAT WAS GOING ON -- HAVE TO LOOK AT INCENTIVES OF LOWER LEVEL PEOPLE]

3. Investment banks greatly increased their leverage in the years leading up to the crisis, thanks to a rule change by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). [REPORTEDLY TRUE... BUT SEE THE PAPER FOR INTERESTING DETAILS]

While each of these claims seems perfectly plausible, especially in light of the events of 2007–2009, the empirical evidence isn’t as clear. ...

From the conclusions:

There are several observations to be made from the number and variety of narratives that the authors in this review have proffered. The most obvious is that there is still significant disagreement as to what the underlying causes of the crisis were, and even less agreement as to what to do about it. But what may be more disconcerting for most economists is the fact that we can’t even agree on all the facts. Did CEOs take too much risk, or were they acting as they were incentivized to act? [NOT CEOS, LOWER LEVEL TRADERS; YES] Was there too much leverage in the system? [YES] Did regulators do their jobs [NO] or was forbearance a significant factor? [REGULATORS DID NOT UNDERSTAND CDOS OR CDS] Was the Fed’s low interest-rate policy responsible for the housing bubble [PARTIALLY, BUT GSES LIKE FANNIE DESERVE MUCH MORE BLAME], or did other factors cause housing prices to skyrocket? [ANIMAL SPIRITS; IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE; BOUNDED COGNITION] Was liquidity the issue with respect to the run on the repo market, or was it more of a solvency issue among a handful of “problem” banks? [IT WAS FEAR AND COMPLEXITY]

[THERE WAS REGULATORY CAPTURE TO GET THE CASINO GAMES GOING IN THE FIRST PLACE, BUT NO "TOO BIG TO FAIL" MORAL HAZARD. ONLY ACADEMICS AND JOURNALISTS COULD THINK SO. DURING THE CRISIS REAL FINANCIERS WERE SCARED OUT OF THEIR MINDS AND HAD NO FAITH IN A GOVT BAILOUT. (I WAS ON THE PHONE WITH LOTS OF THEM.) MANY PEOPLE, FROM CEOS DOWN TO MD LEVEL AND BELOW TRADERS, LOST MUCH OR MOST OF THEIR NET WORTH IN THE COLLAPSE. DOES THAT SOUND LIKE MORAL HAZARD? ACADEMIC ECONOMISTS HAVE A CUTE THEORY (OR IDEOLOGY) AND WANT TO CONFIRM IT. STUPIDITY EXPLAINS A LOT MORE THAN CONSPIRACY.]

For financial economists—who are used to dealing with precise concepts such as no-arbitrage conditions, portfolio optimization, linear risk/reward trade-offs, and dynamic hedging strategies—this is a terribly frustrating state of affairs. Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science [ONLY IN THE MOST LIMITED SENSE], but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality. John Maynard Keynes had even greater ambitions for economics when he wrote, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people on a level with dentists, that would be splendid”. Instead, we’re now more likely to be thought of as astrologers, making pronouncements and predictions without any basis in fact or empirical evidence.

To make this contrast more stark, compare the authoritative and conclusive accident reports of the National Transportation Safety Board—which investigates and documents the who-what-when-where-and-why of every single plane crash—with the 21 separate and sometimes inconsistent accounts of the financial crisis we’ve just reviewed (and more books are surely forthcoming). Why is there such a difference? The answer is simple: complexity and human behavior. ...

See also Physics Envy by Lo and Mueller.

Noted added: I think the movie Margin Call knows more than the worst 10 of these 21 books ;-)

Foreign investors support US housing bubble

...through their purchases of mortgage-backed securities. Note the Bank of China trader thinks the Fed will keep the bubble going for at least a few more (five?) years!

WSJ: Strong demand for mortgage-backed securities from investors world-wide is allowing American lenders to make more loans -- and riskier ones -- in a way that is helping prolong the boom in U.S. house prices.

The cash pouring in -- not only from U.S. investors but increasingly from Europe and Asia -- keeps stoking the housing market even as the Federal Reserve Board continues to raise interest rates, normally something that damps home prices. The market has shown a few signs of slowing recently, and talk of a bubble has grown louder, but prices continue to rise or remain at lofty levels as investors continue to gobble up mortgage-backed securities and banks keep lending.

"As the Fed has tightened, lenders have eased" terms for borrowers, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, a forecasting firm in West Chester, Pa.

Investment banks and other firms have been buying mortgage loans from lenders and packaging them into securities for sale to investors since the 1980s. But investor demand has surged in recent years, largely because in an era of low returns, mortgage-backed securities offer yield-starved investors much higher returns than government bonds.

U.S. lenders will make about $2.8 trillion in home-mortgage loans this year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The MBA estimates that about 80% of these loans will end up in mortgage-backed securities. Mortgage-backed securities outstanding at the end of the first quarter totaled $4.61 trillion, up 61% since the end of 2000. In the same period, total Treasury securities outstanding grew 35% to $4.54 trillion.

Investors' strong demand for mortgage debt, besides allowing lenders to offer many borrowers better terms, has also made it easier to offer mortgages to borrowers who might not easily qualify for a loan. The growth of the mortgage markets spreads the risks around. But some mortgage-industry analysts say lenders have become less stringent in their loan terms because they can sell almost any type of loan to those who package mortgage securities for investors.

"Loose lending standards are probably the single biggest thing fueling the speculative fever we have today" in housing, says Kenneth Rosen, an economist who is chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate at the University of California at Berkeley.

In a world of low interest rates, the market for mortgage securities is simply too big and profitable for many investors to ignore. Investors can earn about 5.5% on mortgage securities whose payments are guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, government-sponsored companies. Those who can stomach greater risk can buy subprime mortgage securities, which come with no guarantee but can yield as much as 15%, according to Bear Stearns. By contrast, 10-year U.S. Treasurys yield about 4.2%; the equivalent government securities in Germany yield about 3.2% and in Japan 1.5%.

The buyers of mortgage-backed securities include U.S. pension funds, hedge funds and insurance companies. But overseas investors are the fastest-growing source of demand. The trade publication Inside MBS & ABS estimates that foreigners held $280 billion of U.S. mortgage securities at the end of 2004, or 6% of the total outstanding. The foreigners' holdings rose 26% last year and have continued to bound ahead so far this year, Inside MBS & ABS says.

"There's this insatiable appetite for mortgage-backed securities world-wide," says Andrew Sciandra, a senior vice president at IndyMac Bancorp, a California thrift, who heads a team that creates those securities. In the past year, Mr. Sciandra has met with investors from places like Germany, France and Abu Dhabi. Asian investors now account for roughly 10% to 20% of mortgage securities sold by IndyMac.

For homeowners, the growing international demand for mortgages means it's increasingly likely that the money they borrow to buy a home or refinance their mortgage is coming ultimately from outside the U.S. When Claude Gaty, a chef and co-owner of a bistro in Las Vegas, recently refinanced the mortgage on his four-bedroom Las Vegas home, the lender was IndyMac. But the bulk of the money came from investors in Asia.

IndyMac pooled Mr. Gaty's loan with about 3,000 other mortgages that carry a fixed rate for the first three, five or seven years. Mr. Gaty is paying both principal and interest on his loan, but most of the loans in the pool are interest-only mortgages, which allow borrowers to pay no principal in the early years. When the $650 million offering of triple-A rated bonds backed by these mortgages came to market in June, it drew more than a dozen investors from Europe, Asia and the U.S., according to Deutsche Bank, which handled the deal. Such bonds typically yield 0.75 to 1.15 percentage point more than Treasurys, Deutsche Bank says.

The most recent entrant to the market is China. Its banks are rich with deposits from Chinese companies that earn dollars exporting to the U.S. Dollars have also been handed to some banks by the government in Beijing as part of its efforts to strengthen their balance sheets.

Until a few years ago, Chinese investors restricted U.S. investment mostly to Treasurys. Now, to boost their yields and because they consider the market safe, bankers from a number of institutions say they are devoting more of their portfolios to mortgage securities. Some bankers say their goal is to have 40% of their U.S. dollars in asset-backed securities.

China's government also is testing U.S. mortgage investment. The country's Bank of Communications, the only bank with a mandate to help manage China's $700 billion of foreign-exchange reserves, has recently put a sliver of those reserves into mortgage-backed issues, according to a banker there. The State Administration of Foreign Exchange, the government agency in charge of the reserves, declined to comment.

Zhu Kai, who helps manage U.S. dollar investments at Bank of China, says in a rare interview that his mortgage-backed portfolio has "plenty of room to grow." Mr. Zhu expresses confidence in the U.S. dollar and the health of the U.S. home market. Housing is so vital to the U.S. economy, Mr. Zhu and some of his counterparts at other Chinese banks reason, that U.S. authorities will prevent a bust.

Even the recent decision by the Chinese government to raise the value of its currency by about 2% isn't likely to lead Chinese banks to shift their plans. "The timing may be a little bit surprising but we will not change our investment portfolio," Mr. Zhu says.

While Asian investors have largely focused on triple-A-rated bonds, other investors are buying lower-rated debt. These bonds, which are created when bankers carve up pools of mortgages, offer higher yields, but also bear the first risk of losses should borrowers default. Investors who buy these bonds in effect set the standards for which mortgages are made by deciding how much extra yield they need to compensate for the added risks of lower-quality loans. They include real-estate investment trusts, hedge funds and investors from Europe.

Strong investor interest has also made loans available to borrowers with poor credit and many other people who might otherwise have trouble getting a mortgage. Subprime loans included in mortgage securities totaled $401.5 billion last year, nearly double the total for 2003, according to Standard & Poor's. Meanwhile, loans with less than full documentation of the borrower's income and assets accounted for 70% of mortgage securities rated by Standard & Poor's in this year's first half, double the level recorded in 2000.

"There's no question that [lending] standards have loosened over the past couple of years," says Arthur Frank, director of mortgage research at Nomura Securities International in New York. If house prices fall, "you may well have some pretty serious credit problems," hurting holders of the lower-rated mortgage securities.

Mr. Zhu, the Chinese fund manager, is sanguine, for now. The U.S. housing market is "maybe losing a bit of steam," Mr. Zhu says. "I think the monetary authorities, they don't want this housing market to burst. I don't think it is a bubble. But if things go on like this for another five years, it's a different story."

On a related note, the Economist can't figure out why financial markets aren't punishing economies for budget deficits. It is amazing how low real interest rates are now relative to the last 20-30 years.

...a more efficient international capital market is supposed to ensure that capital is allocated to the most productive use. Yet much of the recent inflow of foreign money into America is not financing productive investment, but a housing bubble and a consumer binge.

...The inevitable correction, when it comes, is likely to be all the more painful. When financial conditions tighten, investors are sure to become more discriminating. Sooner or later, the traffic lights will turn red.

And the winner is...

We all know who the losers are in the subprime meltdown: shareholders of Citi, Merrill, Countrywide Financial, etc. One of the winners is profiled below, a hedge fund manager who made $15B (keeping $3-4B himself!) from the bursting subprime housing bubble.

WSJ: Trader Made Billions on Subprime
John Paulson Bet Big on Drop in Housing Values

By GREGORY ZUCKERMAN
January 15, 2008

On Wall Street, the losers in the collapse of the housing market are legion. The biggest winner looks to be John Paulson, a little-known hedge fund manager who smelled trouble two years ago.

Funds he runs were up $15 billion in 2007 on a spectacularly successful bet against the housing market. Mr. Paulson has reaped an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion for himself -- believed to be the largest one-year payday in Wall Street history.

Now, in another twist in financial history, Mr. Paulson is retaining as an adviser a man some blame for helping feed the housing-market bubble by keeping interest rates so low: former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. (See article.)

On the way to his big score, Mr. Paulson did battle with a Wall Street firm he accused of trying to manipulate the market. He faced skepticism from other big investors. At the same time, fearing imitators, he used software that blocked fund investors from forwarding his emails.

One thing he didn't count on: A friend in whom he had confided tried the strategy on his own -- racking up huge gains himself, and straining their friendship. (See article.)

Like many legendary market killings, from Warren Buffett's takeovers of small companies in the '70s to Wilbur Ross's steelmaker consolidation earlier this decade, Mr. Paulson's sprang from defying conventional wisdom. In early 2006, the wisdom was that while loose lending standards might be of some concern, deep trouble in the housing and mortgage markets was unlikely. A lot of big Wall Street players were in this camp, as seen by the giant mortgage-market losses they're disclosing.

"Most people told us house prices never go down on a national level, and that there had never been a default of an investment-grade-rated mortgage bond," Mr. Paulson says. "Mortgage experts were too caught up" in the housing boom.

In several interviews, Mr. Paulson made his first comments on how he made his historic coup. Merely holding a different opinion from the blundering herd wasn't enough to produce huge profits. He also had to think up a technical way to bet against the housing and mortgage markets, given that, as he notes, "you can't short houses."

Also key: Mr. Paulson didn't turn bearish too early. Some close students of the housing market did just that, investing for a downturn years ago -- only to suffer such painful losses waiting for a collapse that they finally unwound their bearish bets. Mr. Paulson, whose investment specialty lay elsewhere, turned his attention to the housing market more recently, and got bearish at just about the right time. ...

Looking back at the credit crisis

I thought it worthwhile to re-post my 2008 slides on the credit crisis. I wrote these slides just as the crisis was getting started (right after the big defaults), but I still think my analysis was correct and better than post-hoc discussions that are going on to this day.

I believe I called the housing bubble back in 2004 -- see, e.g., here for a specific discussion of bubbles and timescales. The figure above also first appeared on my blog in 2004 or 2005.

(2004) ... The current housing bubble is an even more egregious example. Because real estate is not a very liquid investment - the typical family has to move and perhaps change jobs to adjust to mispricing - the timescale for popping a bubble is probably 5-10 years or more. Further, I am not aware of any instruments that let you short a real estate bubble in an efficient way.

I discussed the risks from credit derivatives as early as 2005; see also here and here.

Finally, there was a lot of post-crisis discussion on this blog and elsewhere about mark to market accounting: were CDO, CDS oversold in the wake of the crisis (see also The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets; if you want to know what "leading experts" were saying in 2008, see the Yale SOM discussion here -- oops, too embarrassing, maybe they took it down ;-), or was Mr. Market still to be trusted in the worst stages of a collapse? The answer is now clear; even Fannie and Freddie have returned $180 billion to the Feds!

Housing bubble: dynamics of a bust

The first figure is from today's WSJ and incorporates data from Q4 2007. The second figure appeared in the Economist some time ago and was discussed previously on this blog. Does anyone care to predict the future for bubble states like California, Florida and Arizona using the Japanese data as a guide?

Lower interest rates will not re-inflate the housing bubble (although they may affect the rate at which it deflates; note the BOJ dropped real interest rates below zero in the wake of their bust). People understand now, as they did not just a few years ago, that home prices can go down. This change in ape psychology (try putting that in your macro model!) makes all the difference.

Below is historical data compiled by Yale economist Robert Shiller showing that home prices have not on average provided attractive real returns (right hand axis is inflation adjusted returns for same house sales over time; previously discussed here -- the real rate of return was 0.4% between 1890 and 2004). This is yet another example in which market participants (home buyers) made decisions based on faulty assumptions that might have been easily corrected by a modest amount of research. So much for efficient markets!



Here's some detailed data from Case-Shiller and OFHEO indices (also from WSJ; note OFHEO only tracks conforming mortgages so has less sensitivity to the high end of the market):



Finally, it is worth noting that the subprime mortgage meltdown is merely a symptom of the real estate bubble. If home prices continue to fall we will see (as we are already beginning to) higher default rates in so-called "prime" as well as subprime mortgages.

WSJ: ...I assumed, for the sake of calculations, that California prices fell 8% last quarter from the third quarter, a huge number by historic measures but not out of line with Zillow's data. For Florida and Arizona I assumed declines of 5% and 5.5%. You could use other, more modest estimates for the recent declines: They won't change the outcomes much. I also assumed personal incomes in these states rose in line with recent and historic averages."

The results? In all three markets, the prices are well off their peaks when compared to incomes. But they remain far above historic averages.

Median prices in California peaked in 2006 at 13.3 times per capita incomes. Hard to believe, but true. They may be down now to about 11.1 times.

But that's still way above the ground. Throughout most of the 80s and 90s they ranged between six and seven times incomes.

Just to get down to seven times incomes, prices would have to fall 37% tomorrow.

Those who bought at the peak of the cycle may be pinning their hopes instead on "incomes catching up" instead. But they had better be patient. Even if house prices stayed exactly where they are, it would take around 10 years for rising incomes to bring the ratios back into any sort of alignment.

Housing revisited

Coincidentally, I was referred to two housing bubble reports today. This one is from FDIC, and these are slides from a talk by NY Fed VP Richard Peach. The latter is remarkably sanguine - it seems to say that price to rent and price to median income indexes are off because they don't adjust for improving quality of units sold (for instance, increased median square footages, etc. - sounds to me like the "hedonic" adjustments in the CPI that Bill Gross is suspicious about). Once that adjustment is made the housing market doesn't look overpriced, at least nationally. The Fed report also claims that while many buyers are motivated by low interest rates, few are buying in anticipation of near term price increases (classic sign of a bubble).

I guess I'm skeptical, and in any case there is a big difference between a national housing bubble and one in selected markets like CA, Boston, DC, etc. You can read the reports and decide for yourself...

Bubbles and timescales

It seems to me that the persistence of a financial bubble is related to temporal limits on the arbitrage process. In the strong efficient market view (which I don't subscribe to), there are no bubbles because the price incorporates all available information (questionable, due to information asymmetries and bounded cognition) and arbitrage acts to eliminate any mispricing. However, even if all parties are smart and have equal information, it is not always possible to sustain a bet against a bubble long enough to collect.

During the tech bubble of a few years ago, many investors strongly believed that the market was mispriced (I was convinced by '99). But, it takes mucho cojones to sustain a bet against the market for several years - the best I was able to do is just stay away from techs during this period. An institutional investor is in an even worse position, as he or she may have performance-based compensation that effectively precludes trades taking more than a quarter or perhaps a year to reach fruition.

This conclusion is supported by a recent paper in the Journal of Finance, which shows that hedge funds were riding the tech bubble, not betting against it. Hedge funds are subject to redemptions by investors over quarterly (or at most yearly) timescales, and managers are compensated based on annual performance, so again really long-term bets are off the table. It seems to me that in the financial markets there are almost no actors capable of taking long term bets against a persistent bubble. (To be more precise, the fraction of total capital controlled by such actors is very small.)

The current housing bubble is an even more egregious example. Because real estate is not a very liquid investment - the typical family has to move and perhaps change jobs to adjust to mispricing - the timescale for popping a bubble is probably 5-10 years or more. Further, I am not aware of any instruments that let you short a real estate bubble in an efficient way.

Finally, one can consider the FX case. Everyone thinks the dollar will have to fall on a trade-weighted basis over the coming years. But one doesn't know when or how, due to possible intervention by central banks. Any individual hedge fund that leverages up and bets against the dollar is taking a big risk. We won't see large moves until a critical mass of capital is willing to take that risk.

The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent!

The heterodoxy strikes back

James K. Galbraith, interviewed in the NYTimes magazine.

Do you find it odd that so few economists foresaw the current credit disaster? Some did. The person with the most serious claim for seeing it coming is Dean Baker, the Washington economist. I saw it coming in general terms.

But there are at least 15,000 professional economists in this country, and you’re saying only two or three of them foresaw the mortgage crisis? Ten or 12 would be closer than two or three.

What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science? It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.

You’re referring to the Washington-based conservative philosophy that rejects government regulation in favor of free-market worship? Reagan’s economists worshiped the market, but Bush didn’t worship the market. Bush simply turned over regulatory authority to his friends. It enabled all the shady operators and card sharks in the system to come to dominate how we finance.

...

Any thoughts on Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who engineered the bailout? He is clearly not a superman. This is the guy who had the financial crisis on his plate for a year, and when it finally became so pervasive that he couldn’t handle it on a case-by-case basis, the best he could do was send Congress a bill that was three pages long.

What’s wrong with that? Maybe he’s pithy. It shows he wasn’t adequately prepared. The bill did not contain protections for the public that Congress had to put in.

Regulation is the new mantra, and even Alan Greenspan in his mea culpa before Congress seemed to regret he hadn’t used more of it. I would say a day late and a dollar short. Greenspan blotted his copybook disastrously with his support of deregulated finance. This is a follower of Ayn Rand, an old Objectivist. His belief was you can’t really regulate and discipline the market and you shouldn’t try. I think Greenspan bears a high, high degree of responsibility for what has happened.

More from Robert Shiller, one of the "10 or 12" that Galbraith mentioned. Shiller's wife is a psychologist.

...I clearly remember a taxi driver in Miami explaining to me years ago that the housing bubble there was getting crazy. With all the construction under way, which he pointed out as we drove along, he said that there would surely be a glut in the market and, eventually, a disaster.

But why weren’t the experts at the Fed saying such things? And why didn’t a consensus of economists at universities and other institutions warn that a crisis was on the way?

The field of social psychology provides a possible answer. In his classic 1972 book, “Groupthink,” Irving L. Janis, the Yale psychologist, explained how panels of experts could make colossal mistakes. People on these panels, he said, are forever worrying about their personal relevance and effectiveness, and feel that if they deviate too far from the consensus, they will not be given a serious role. They self-censor personal doubts about the emerging group consensus if they cannot express these doubts in a formal way that conforms with apparent assumptions held by the group.

...In 2005, in the second edition of my book “Irrational Exuberance,” I stated clearly that a catastrophic collapse of the housing and stock markets could be on its way. I wrote that “significant further rises in these markets could lead, eventually, to even more significant declines,” and that this might “result in a substantial increase in the rate of personal bankruptcies, which could lead to a secondary string of bankruptcies of financial institutions as well,” and said that this could result in “another, possibly worldwide, recession.”

I distinctly remember that, while writing this, I feared criticism for gratuitous alarmism. And indeed, such criticism came.

I gave talks in 2005 at both the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, in which I argued that we were in the middle of a dangerous housing bubble. I urged these mortgage regulators to impose suitability requirements on mortgage lenders, to assure that the loans were appropriate for the people taking them.

The reaction to this suggestion was roughly this: yes, some staff members had expressed such concerns, and yes, officials knew about the possibility that there was a bubble, but they weren’t taking any of us seriously.

I BASED my predictions largely on the recently developed field of behavioral economics, which posits that psychology matters for economic events. Behavioral economists are still regarded as a fringe group by many mainstream economists. Support from fellow behavioral economists was important in my daring to talk about speculative bubbles.

Speculative bubbles are caused by contagious excitement about investment prospects. I find that in casual conversation, many of my mainstream economist friends tell me that they are aware of such excitement, too. But very few will talk about it professionally.

Why do professional economists always seem to find that concerns with bubbles are overblown or unsubstantiated? I have wondered about this for years, and still do not quite have an answer. It must have something to do with the tool kit given to economists (as opposed to psychologists) and perhaps even with the self-selection of those attracted to the technical, mathematical field of economics. Economists aren’t generally trained in psychology, and so want to divert the subject of discussion to things they understand well. They pride themselves on being rational. The notion that people are making huge errors in judgment is not appealing.

In addition, it seems that concerns about professional stature may blind us to the possibility that we are witnessing a market bubble. We all want to associate ourselves with dignified people and dignified ideas. Speculative bubbles, and those who study them, have been deemed undignified.

In short, Mr. Janis’s insights seem right on the mark. People compete for stature, and the ideas often just tag along.

Has anyone ever heard of the post-autistic economics movement? :-)

Against finance

Paul Krugman rails against Goldman's big quarterly numbers in yesterday's Times. He goes as far as to claim that Goldman's success is bad for America!

At the core of his argument is the following observation:

Over the past generation — ever since the banking deregulation of the Reagan years — the U.S. economy has been “financialized.” The business of moving money around, of slicing, dicing and repackaging financial claims, has soared in importance compared with the actual production of useful stuff. The sector officially labeled “securities, commodity contracts and investments” has grown especially fast, from only 0.3 percent of G.D.P. in the late 1970s to 1.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2007.

Such growth would be fine if financialization really delivered on its promises — if financial firms made money by directing capital to its most productive uses, by developing innovative ways to spread and reduce risk. But can anyone, at this point, make those claims with a straight face? Financial firms, we now know, directed vast quantities of capital into the construction of unsellable houses and empty shopping malls. They increased risk rather than reducing it, and concentrated risk rather than spreading it. In effect, the industry was selling dangerous patent medicine to gullible consumers.

This point has not received enough attention in the volumes of analysis produced by the financial crisis. Some comments.

1. Markets and capitalism are good -- overall, they benefit society by providing (mostly) efficient allocation of scarce assets (including human, as well as other, capital).

We've just been through a bubble, with resulting misallocation of resources, but perhaps bubbles are an unavoidable side effect of capital markets, and perhaps their short term negative consequences are compensated by the long term benefits of market economics. Of course, it is beyond our capabilities to address this question with high confidence, so what is left is people arguing their priors. At the bottom of this post are some previous comments of mine on this topic.

2. Concentration of the control of wealth is inevitable, given advances in communications and information technology, the complexity of our economy, and cognitive limits of average people. By control I don't mean ownership, I mean investment and allocation decisions -- think mutual fund investors of modest means, but whose money is aggregated into a billion dollar fund controlled by a few investment professionals.


Given 1 and 2, I doubt Krugman really wants to eliminate the financial sector. His outrage is really motivated by populism, and relates to the following question:

3. How should these professionals be paid? How much value do their decisions actually add to the economy?

This is the fundamental question, also unanswered. Would less extravagant pay for money managers (e.g., as a consequence of more egalitarian cultural values) lead to reduced economic growth? By how much? (By the way, I don't think we can lay all the blame for the current crisis on the professionals -- millions of Americans participated in the housing bubble.)

Personally, I think Wall St. compensation practices need to be changed. I debated this and related points with a hedge fund manager in some previous posts: On the benevolence of financiers , Money talks.


Here's what I wrote in 2008 on topic 1 above. Can anyone do better than these estimates?

Now to my heterodox heterodoxy: always estimate costs and benefits when making a decision. A little calculation is in order: suppose unfettered markets lead to systemic crises every 20 years that cost 15% of GDP to clean up. I think that's an upper bound: a $2 trillion (current dollars) crisis every 20 years. [That $2 trillion was an estimate for the direct housing bubble losses, but I can see now that the collapse of credit markets and of business and consumer confidence is going to increase that number substantially.]

Easy Question: What growth rate advantage (additional GDP growth rate per annum) would savage, unfettered markets need to generate to justify these occasional disasters?

Answer: an additional .1 percent annual GDP growth would be more than enough. That is, an unregulated economy whose growth rate was .1 percent higher would, even after paying for each 20 year crisis, be richer than the heavily regulated comparator which avoided the crises but had a lower growth rate.

Hard Question: would additional regulation decrease economic growth rates by that amount or more?

Unless you think you can evaluate the relative GDP growth effects of two different policy regimes with accuracy of better than .1 percent, then the intellectually honest answer to the policy question is -- I don't know -- no shouting, no shaking your fist, no lecturing other people, no writing op eds, just I don't know. Correct the things that are obviously stupid, but don't overstate your confidence level about additional policy changes.

(Note I'm aware that distributional issues are also important. In the most recent era gains went mostly to a small number of top earners whereas the cost of the bailout will be spread over the whole tax base.)

Pop!

Bubbles last longer than you expect, and deflate faster than you expect. Has the US housing bubble finally popped? Will it be a hard, soft or hard-soft landing? The Fed is clearly convinced the housing slowdown is well underway, and that it will reduce inflation and economic growth.

The WSJ reports today on some of the associated mayhem. It's anecdotal journalism, but backed up by statistical data as well.

PIMCO's Bill Gross has been betting on a slowdown for some time -- and taking the pain while waiting. This article describes how hard trading can be, even for a superstar like Gross. Another interesting tidbit is that PIMCO actually sends out researchers posing as house buyers to test markets around the country.

Excerpts from both articles below.

"It would be difficult to characterize the position of home builders as other than in a hard landing," says Robert Toll, chief executive of luxury home builder Toll Brothers Inc., which reported yesterday that net income fell 19% in the third quarter ended July 31. (See related article.)

In his 40 years as a home builder, Mr. Toll says, he has never seen a slump unfold like the current one. "I've never seen a downturn in housing without a downturn in employment or... some macroeconomic nasty condition that took housing down along with other elements of the economy," he says. "This time, you've got low unemployment, you've got job creation, you've got a stable stock market and relatively low interest rates."

Joan Guth is one homeowner who was taken by surprise. Last September, she put her stately five-bedroom home in Herndon, Va., on the market for about $1.1 million. She was confident she would get something near that price, and planned to use the proceeds to buy a retirement home in Florida. But her home in the Washington suburbs attracted few serious lookers, and in March, she cut her asking price to $899,900. Still there were no takers. Finally, on the advice of her broker, she called in an auction firm, beginning a process that would eventually reveal to her just how weak the Northern Virginia market had become. [Eventually, she gets only $500k!]

...In a speech yesterday, Michael Moskow, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, noted: "While we factor a housing slowdown into our outlook, there is some evidence -- such as higher rates of cancellation in home-building contracts -- that the slowdown could be more extensive."

With fewer consumers applying for home loans, some big mortgage lenders are already retrenching. Countrywide Financial Corp. last month announced plans to reduce costs by $500 million. Earlier this year, Washington Mutual Inc. eliminated 2,500 jobs at loan-processing centers.

Builders, who were optimistic about prospects until a few months ago, are cutting back too. KB Home, a big home builder based in Los Angeles, has eliminated 7% of its work force, or 440 jobs. In July, U.S. home builders started construction at an annual rate of 1.45 million single-family homes, down 20% from the January peak.

Last August, when Horsham, Pa.-based Toll Brothers reported that its quarterly profit had doubled, Mr. Toll boasted: "We've got the supply, and the market has got the demand. So it's a match made in heaven." Since then, Toll has cuts its guidance four times on the number of homes it expects to close on, and its share price has fallen by more than 45%. Yesterday, the company said orders for new homes in the third quarter were down 48% from a year earlier.

...At D.R. Horton Inc., the nation's largest home builder by units built per year, executives said late last year they were confident that quarterly earnings would continue to increase even during a housing-market slump. In July, Horton reported a 21% decline in net income for the third quarter ended June 30, the first quarter in 28 years in which it didn't report year-over-year profit growth. Horton's chief executive, Donald Tomnitz, said the surge in home prices had priced many people out of the market.

"Every time we've gone into a downturn in the home-building industry, they've always been longer and deeper than we've all imagined," Mr. Tomnitz told analysts in a July 20 conference call. "So we're preparing for the worst, and we think this one will be longer and deeper than just the last six months."

Bill Gross is Wall Street's long-reigning bond king, but he is struggling to adapt to a new world.

For more than three decades, Mr. Gross, the 62-year-old chief investment officer at Pacific Investment Management Co., which has $617 billion in assets, has run the world's largest bond mutual fund. In that time, the $95 billion Pimco Total Return Fund has handily outpaced both the bond market and almost all of its competitors. In 2000, when Germany's Allianz AG bought Pimco, based in Newport Beach, Calif., it was so eager to keep Mr. Gross at the helm that it agreed to a pay package valued at about $200 million to keep him around through next year.

As hedge funds and other investors have been scooping up riskier bonds with the highest yields, however, it has been harder for Mr. Gross to beat the market by buying this kind of debt.

...At the same time, Mr. Gross has taken a contrarian view for many months, predicting a slowdown for the economy and an end to the Federal Reserve's campaign to raise interest rates. For much of the year that stance didn't work. The losses, and the added volatility, took a toll on Mr. Gross, a soft-spoken manager who usually keeps an even keel by practicing yoga.

A month ago, with Pimco's bets misfiring, Mr. Gross was so stressed that he left the office, taking an unplanned vacation, sitting at his home with his wife, he says.

"I just had to leave for nine days, I couldn't turn on business television, I couldn't pick up the paper, it was just devastating," Mr. Gross says in an interview at Pimco's headquarters, near the Pacific Ocean. "We've increased the volatility [of the portfolio] but I'm not enjoying it. You can't sleep at night."

...Now, his predictions that the housing market would slump and the economy would suffer are starting to show signs of materializing, sending the bond market on an impressive rally that has sent the benchmark 10-year yield -- which moves in the opposite direction of its price -- down to 4.817% yesterday from 5.25%, since June 28.

...Mr. Gross remains bullish on bonds, which tend to do well in a slowing economy, in part because weakness in the housing market will discourage the Fed from raising short-term interest rates -- and could even get them to cut rates in the year ahead, he says. Mr. Gross collects reams of data on the housing market and reads it at home on the weekends, and Pimco even sends "shoppers" to key markets across the country to pose as home buyers and pick up intelligence on where housing is going.

Part of his concern stems from the aggressive adjustable-rate mortgages he has seen many consumers -- including two of his children -- take on. He isn't sure they will be able to handle the monthly payments when the interest rates on these mortgages adjust higher.

"We could really see a drop in home prices that hurts the economy," he says.

Housing bubble, and possible hedge

Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who coined the phrase "irrational exuberance" to describe the tech bubble, has been advocating new financial instruments that let ordinary people manage the increasing levels of risk in their financial lives. This NYT article describes new derivative instruments designed by Shiller's company that are essentially index funds linked to home prices in certain major markets. They will trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and allow investors to, e.g., hedge against a decline in real estate values in their city.

Interestingly, there will be a pair of derivatives linked to each underlying index, whose prices behave oppositely. This allows bets against the index without requiring a short position that might lead to margin calls or unbounded losses. One mismatch between the Shiller indices and the actual housing markets is the favorable tax treatment of leverage for someone who buys a house (as opposed to the index).

"Volatile markets are increasingly becoming a part of our lives," Mr. Shiller added. "The home market itself is becoming more volatile. We're in the biggest real estate bubble in history, I believe.

Nationwide, home prices rose 7 percent a year, on average, from 1999 to 2003, roughly double the rate for rental prices. Over the previous 15 years, the two rose more or less in tandem, with one outpacing the other for a while before the pattern reversed. I discussed bubble dynamics in a previous post.

Almost over?

What's a factor of 2 between friends? :-) Note no long term appreciation of houses relative to CPI.




Here's Japan for comparison. Our bubble has popped much more quickly.




Yes, Virginia, we knew it was a bubble back in 2005, but no one believed us. Next time, watch the price to rent ratio:




Yes, equities beat housing over the long run, and even at the peak of the biggest housing bubble of the 20th century.

More Shiller

Get ready for more Robert Shiller, the Yale economist who called the tech bubble, coining the Greenspan-adopted term "irrational exuberance" along the way. Shiller has been doing some nice work on historical real estate prices, finding inflation-adjusted appreciation to be quite modest over the last century. This is violently against the conventional wisdom, but then what does the madding crowd know about calculating real returns?

See this Times piece on the latest prognostication about how our housing bubble is going to end.

Earlier related posts here and here. The second link has a nice figure comparing our bubble to the Japan real estate bubble of the 80's. You can see we could easily give back half the recent gains over, say, the next 10 years.

Mortgage securities oversold by 15-25 percent

Below are some quotes which support the view that mortgage assets are currently undervalued by the market. Yes, the market is inefficient -- it overpriced the assets at the peak of the bubble (greed), and is currently underpricing them (fear). Both Buffet and ex-Merrill banker Ricciardi below think the mispricing is about 15-25 percent. That is, the "fear premium" currently demanded by the market is 15-25 percent below a conservative guess as to what the assets are really worth. This is the margin that can be used to recapitalize banks, perhaps without costing the taxpayer any money, simply by providing a rational buyer of last resort and injecting some confidence into the market. Note to traders: yes, this is obvious. Note to academic economists: this is yet another market failure -- but of an unprecedented scale and complexity.

(Actually, 15-25 percent is not bad, and just shows that credit markets are generally more rational and data driven than equities. During the Internet bubble and collapse you had mispricings of hundreds of percent, even an order of magnitude.)

Warren Buffet interview from CNBC:

Government intervention necessary to restore confidence in the market.

If I didn't think the government was going to act, I would not be doing anything this week. I might be trying to undo things this week. I am, to some extent, betting on the fact that the government will do the rational thing here and act promptly.

Mispricing is about 15-20 percent:

...all the major institutions in the world trying to deleverage. And we want them to deleverage, but they're trying to deleverage at the same time. Well, if huge institutions are trying to deleverage, you need someone in the world that's willing to leverage up. And there's no one that can leverage up except the United States government. And what they're talking about is leveraging up to the tune of 700 billion, to in effect, offset the deleveraging that's going on through all the financial institutions. And I might add, if they do it right, and I think they will do it reasonably right, they won't do it perfectly right, I think they'll make a lot of money. Because if they don't -- they shouldn't buy these debt instruments at what the institutions paid. They shouldn't buy them at what they're carrying, what the carrying value is, necessarily. They should buy them at the kind of prices that are available in the market. People who are buying these instruments in the market are expecting to make 15 to 20 percent on those instruments. If the government makes anything over its cost of borrowing, this deal will come out with a profit. And I would bet it will come out with a profit, actually.

Christopher Ricciardi, former head of Merrill's structured credit business, in an open letter to Paulson. Note his comments illustrate the role that psychology, or animal spirits (Keynes), plays in the market.

The securitization market worked exceptionally well for decades and was the financing tool of choice for large and small institutions alike. As investments, performance for securitized assets typically exceeded corporate and Treasury bond investments for decades.

Where securitization went wrong in recent years was with subprime mortgages. These securitizations performed disastrously, causing people to mistakenly question the practice of securitization itself.

Decades of historical data were ignored, with the subprime experience exclusively driving market perceptions: The entire securitization market was effectively shut down, and this explains the depth and persistence of the ongoing credit crisis.

Government purchases of illiquid mortgage assets from the system will cost taxpayers significant sums and expose them to downside risk, without addressing this fundamental issue. Billions of dollars held by all the major institutional bond managers, hedge funds and distressed funds are already available to purchase mortgage assets.

However, in the absence of a way to finance the purchase of these assets, such funds must bid at prices which represent an attractive absolute return acceptable to their investors (15% to 25% typically), resulting in typical transaction terms that have significantly impeded the sale of mortgage securities to these funds. If these funds could finance their purchases, especially under efficient financing terms, they would still require similar returns, but would be able to buy many more assets, and bid higher prices for the assets.

Our financial system needs the capital markets and the natural power of securitization to get a jumpstart from the government. I propose using the powers granted to Treasury to create “vehicles that are authorized…to purchase troubled assets and issue obligations” under currently contemplated legislation to more efficiently address the crisis and establish a program which we might call the Federal Bond Insurance Corporation (”FBIC”), as an alternative to simply having the government directly purchase assets.

Comment re: behavioral economics. The preceding housing bubble and the current crisis are very good examples of why economics is, at a fundamental level, the study of ape psychology. On the planet Vulcan, Mr. Spock and other rational, super-smart traders and investors would have cleared this market already. But we don't live on Vulcan. Anyone who wants to model the economy based on rational agents who can process infinite amounts of information without being subject to fear, bounded cognition, herd mentality, etc. is crazy.

When the conventional wisdom is that house prices never go down (people believed this just a couple years ago), you risk little of your reputation or self-image by investing in housing. When the conventional wisdom is that all mortgage backed securities are toxic, you must be extremely independent and strong willed to risk buying in, even if metrics suggest the market is oversold. This is simple psychology. Very few people can resist conventional wisdom, even when it's wrong.

Equities vs real estate

It is well known among professionals that historical equity returns beat real estate returns by quite a margin. Successful companies generate innovation and create real economic value, so it would be surprising if equities didn't outperform an inert asset like housing over the long run. (On a risk-adjusted or tax and leverage-adjusted basis housing might be competitive, though.) We're nowhere near running out of space in this country, despite what housing bubble speculators might think. See previous posts, here and here.

NYTimes: When Marti and Ray Jacobs sold the five-bedroom colonial house in Harrington Park, N.J., where they had lived since 1970, they made what looked like a typically impressive profit. They had paid $110,000 to have the house built and sold it in July for $900,000.

But the truth is that much of the gain came from simple price inflation, the same force that has made a gallon of milk more expensive today than it was three decades ago. The Jacobses also invested tens of thousands of dollars in a new master bathroom, with marble floors, a Jacuzzi bathtub and vanity cabinets.

Add it all up, and they ended up making an inflation-adjusted profit of less than 10 percent over the 35 years.

That return does not come close to the gains of the stock market over the same period. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has increased almost 200 percent since 1970, even after accounting for inflation.

Rent-buy arbitrage

The analysis below of bay area rent-buy arbitrage is taken from Bay Area Housing Crash, where you can find much more information on the housing bubble. The author claims that recent reported sales price numbers are inflated and that prices have already started to decline in certain bay area markets.

"There are great tax advantages to owning." FALSE.

It is now much cheaper to rent a house in the San Francisco Bay Area than it is to own that same house. This is true even with the deductibility of mortgage interest figured in. It is possible to rent a good house for $1800/month. That same house would cost $600,000. Assume 6% interest ($3000 per month), $2000 closing costs, and a buyer loses $770 more per month buying than renting. Renting is a loss of course, but buying is a bigger loss.

Renting: Monthly Rent: $1,800.00

Buying:
Property Tax: $400.00 ($625 per month at 1.25% before deduction, $400 lost after deduction)
Interest: $1,920.00 ($3000 per month at 6% before deduction, $1920 lost after deduction)
Other Costs: $250.00 (insurance, maintenance, etc)
Total: $2,570.00

Buyers still have to come up with the principal payment as well, just to watch it wiped out as the value of their house declines.

Remember that buyers don't deduct interest from income tax; they deduct interest from taxable income. Interest is paid in real pre-tax dollars that buyers suffered to earn. That money is really entirely gone, even if the buyer didn't pay income tax on those dollars before spending them.

Buyers do not get interest back at tax time. If a buyer gets an income tax refund, that's just because he overpaid his taxes, giving the government an interest-free loan. The rest of us are grateful.

Under current conditions, a renter would be able to live in a house for 30 years, then buy that house outright with the saved principle payments, and have an extra $277,200 of savings on top of that: ($770 x 12 x 30). The renter comes out way ahead of the owner, and this doesn't even count the huge losses the owner will suffer as housing falls year after year for the next decade or more, just as in Japan.

Another way to look at it is that except for the rich, everyone either rents a house or rents money to buy a house. To rent money is to take out a loan. A mortgage is a money-rental agreement. Owners with a mortgage seem to be renting their house from the bank, but there's an important difference. The bank takes no risk, the same as real renters take no risk. It's the owners who bear all the risk of falling house prices, and all the costs of repairs.

More Soros

Soros' central observation is that markets do not necessarily function properly, even when left to themselves. He is not referring to the usual causes cited for market failure, such as imperfect competition, externalities, information asymmetry, etc. Instead, he is attacking the fundamental assumption that markets are reliable processors of information, that they can be depended on to generate price signals which indicate how resources should be allocated within society.

New York Review of Books: ...This remarkable sequence of events can be understood only if we abandon the prevailing theory of market behavior. As a way of explaining financial markets, I propose an alternative paradigm that differs from the current one in two respects. First, financial markets do not reflect prevailing conditions accurately; they provide a picture that is always biased or distorted in one way or another. Second, the distorted views held by market participants and expressed in market prices can, under certain circumstances, affect the so-called fundamentals that market prices are supposed to reflect. This two-way circular connection between market prices and the underlying reality I call reflexivity.

More excerpts below.

...the current crisis differs from the various financial crises that preceded it. I base that assertion on the hypothesis that the explosion of the US housing bubble acted as the detonator for a much larger "super-bubble" that has been developing since the 1980s. The underlying trend in the super-bubble has been the ever-increasing use of credit and leverage. Credit—whether extended to consumers or speculators or banks—has been growing at a much faster rate than the GDP ever since the end of World War II. But the rate of growth accelerated and took on the characteristics of a bubble when it was reinforced by a misconception that became dominant in 1980 when Ronald Reagan became president and Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the United Kingdom.

The misconception is derived from the prevailing theory of financial markets, which, as mentioned earlier, holds that financial markets tend toward equilibrium and that deviations are random and can be attributed to external causes. This theory has been used to justify the belief that the pursuit of self-interest should be given free rein and markets should be deregulated. I call that belief market fundamentalism and claim that it employs false logic. Just because regulations and all other forms of governmental interventions have proven to be faulty, it does not follow that markets are perfect.

Although market fundamentalism is based on false premises, it has served well the interests of the owners and managers of financial capital. The globalization of financial markets allowed financial capital to move around freely and made it difficult for individual states to tax it or regulate it. Deregulation of financial transactions also served the interests of the managers of financial capital; and the freedom to innovate enhanced the profitability of financial enterprises. The financial industry grew to a point where it represented 25 percent of the stock market capitalization in the United States and an even higher percentage in some other countries.

Since market fundamentalism is built on false assumptions, its adoption in the 1980s as the guiding principle of economic policy was bound to have negative consequences. Indeed, we have experienced a series of financial crises since then, but the adverse consequences were suffered principally by the countries that lie on the periphery of the global financial system, not by those at the center. The system is under the control of the developed countries, especially the United States, which enjoys veto rights in the International Monetary Fund.

Whenever a crisis endangered the prosperity of the United States—as for example the savings and loan crisis in the late 1980s, or the collapse of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998—the authorities intervened, finding ways for the failing institutions to merge with others and providing monetary and fiscal stimulus when the pace of economic activity was endangered. Thus the periodic crises served, in effect, as successful tests that reinforced both the underlying trend of ever-greater credit expansion and the prevailing misconception that financial markets should be left to their own devices.

It was of course the intervention of the financial authorities that made the tests successful, not the ability of financial markets to correct their own excesses. But it was convenient for investors and governments to deceive themselves. The relative safety and stability of the United States, compared to the countries at the periphery, allowed the United States to suck up the savings of the rest of the world and run a current account deficit that reached nearly 7 percent of GNP at its peak in the first quarter of 2006. Eventually even the Federal Reserve and other regulators succumbed to the market fundamentalist ideology and abdicated their responsibility to regulate. ...

Financial engineering involved the creation of increasingly sophisticated instruments, or derivatives, for leveraging credit and "managing" risk in order to increase potential profit. An alphabet soup of synthetic financial instruments was concocted: CDOs, CDO squareds, CDSs, ABXs, CMBXs, etc. This engineering reached such heights of complexity that the regulators could no longer calculate the risks and came to rely on the risk management models of the financial institutions themselves. The rating companies followed a similar path in rating synthetic financial instruments, deriving considerable additional revenues from their proliferation. The esoteric financial instruments and techniques for risk management were based on the false premise that, in the behavior of the market, deviations from the mean occur in a random fashion. But the increased use of financial engineering set in motion a process of boom and bust. ...

It should be emphasized that this interpretation of the current situation does not necessarily follow from my model of boom and bust. Had the financial authorities succeeded in containing the subprime crisis—as they thought at the time they would be able to do—this would have been seen as just another successful test instead of the reversal point.

...Sophisticated financial engineering of the kind I have mentioned can render the calculation of margin and capital requirements extremely difficult if not impossible. In order to activate such requirements, financial engineering must also be regulated and new products must be registered and approved by the appropriate authorities before they can be used. Such regulation should be a high priority of the new Obama administration. It is all the more necessary because financial engineering often aims at circumventing regulations.

Take for example credit default swaps (CDSs), instruments intended to insure against the possibility of bonds and other forms of debt going into default, and whose price captures the perceived risk of such a possibility occurring. These instruments grew like Topsy because they required much less capital than owning or shorting the underlying bonds. Eventually they grew to more than $50 trillion in nominal size, which is a many-fold multiple of the underlying bonds and five times the entire US national debt. Yet the market in credit default swaps has remained entirely unregulated. AIG, the insurance company, lost a fortune selling credit default swaps as a form of insurance and had to be bailed out, costing the Treasury $126 billion so far. Although the CDS market may be eventually saved from the meltdown that has occurred in many other markets, the sheer existence of an unregulated market of this size has been a major factor in increasing risk throughout the entire financial system.

Since the risk management models used until now ignored the uncertainties inherent in reflexivity, limits on credit and leverage will have to be set substantially lower than those that were tolerated in the recent past. This means that financial institutions in the aggregate will be less profitable than they have been during the super-bubble and some business models that depended on excessive leverage will become uneconomical. The financial industry has already dropped from 25 percent of total market capitalization to 16 percent. This ratio is unlikely to recover to anywhere near its previous high; indeed, it is likely to end lower. This may be considered a healthy adjustment, but not by those who are losing their jobs.

In view of the tremendous losses suffered by the general public, there is a real danger that excessive deregulation will be succeeded by punitive reregulation. That would be unfortunate because regulations are liable to be even more deficient than the market mechanism. As I have suggested, regulators are not only human but also bureaucratic and susceptible to lobbying and corruption. It is to be hoped that the reforms outlined here will preempt a regulatory overkill.

Who pays?

I'm trying to understand how the subprime mortgage mess is going to unwind. Below are links to two recent articles I found useful.

1) WSJ on leading subprime lender New Century and how its bankruptcy was driven by decisions on Wall St. by firms like Citi, JP Morgan and Merrill that both lend to mortgage issuers and repackage their loans for resale as CMOs.

2) The Economist's remarkably sanguine summary of the situation. (Some useful excerpts below -- the first hard analysis numbers I've yet seen.)

America's residential mortgage market is huge. It consists of some $10 trillion worth of loans, of which around 75% are repackaged into securities, mainly by the government-sponsored mortgage giants, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Most of this market involves little risk. Two-thirds of mortgage borrowers enjoy good credit and a fixed interest rate and can depend on the value of their houses remaining far higher than their borrowings. But a growing minority of loans look very different, with weak borrowers, adjustable rates and little, or no, cushion of home equity.

For a decade, the fastest growth in America's mortgage markets has been at the bottom. Subprime borrowers—long shut out of home ownership—now account for one in five new mortgages and 10% of all mortgage debt, thanks to the expansion of mortgage-backed securities (and derivatives based on them). Low short-term interest rates earlier this decade led to a bonanza in adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs). Ever more exotic products were dreamt up, including “teaser” loans with an introductory period of interest rates as low as 1%.

When the housing market began to slow, lenders pepped up the pace of sales by dramatically loosening credit standards, lending more against each property and cutting the need for documentation. Wall Street cheered them on. Investors were hungry for high-yielding assets and banks and brokers could earn fat fees by pooling and slicing the risks in these loans.

Standards fell furthest at the bottom of the credit ladder: subprime mortgages and those one rung higher, known as Alt-As. A recent report by analysts at Credit Suisse estimates that 80% of subprime loans made in 2006 included low “teaser” rates; almost eight out of ten Alt-A loans were “liar loans”, based on little or no documentation; loan-to-value ratios were often over 90% with a second piggy-bank loan routinely thrown in. America's weakest borrowers, in short, were often able to buy a house without handing over a penny.

Lenders got the demand for loans that they wanted—and more fool them. Amid the continuing boom, some 40% of all originations last year were subprime or Alt-A. But as these mortgages were reset to higher rates and borrowers who had lied about their income failed to pay up, the trap was sprung. A new study by Christopher Cagan, an economist at First American CoreLogic, based on his firm's database of most American mortgages, calculates that 60% of all adjustable-rate loans made since 2004 will be reset to payments that will be 25% higher or more. A fifth will see monthly payments soar by 50% or more.

...Mr Cagan marries the statistics and concludes that—going by today's prices—some 1.1m mortgages (or 13% of all adjustable-rate mortgages originated between 2004 and 2006), worth $326 billion, are heading for repossession in the next few years. The suffering will be concentrated: only 7% of mainstream adjustable mortgages will be affected, whereas one in three of the recent “teaser” loans will end in default. The harshest year will be 2008, when many mortgages will be reset and few borrowers will have much equity.

Mr Cagan's study considers only the effect of higher payments (ignoring defaults from job loss, divorce, and so on). But it is a guide to how much default rates may worsen even if the economy stays strong and house prices stabilise. According to RealtyTrac, some 1.3m homes were in default on their mortgages in 2006, up 42% from the year before. This study suggests that figure could rise much further. And if house prices fall, the picture darkens. Mr Cagan's work suggests that every percentage point drop in house prices would bring 70,000 extra repossessions.

The direct damage to Wall Street is likely to be modest. A repossessed property will eventually be sold, albeit at a discount. As a result, Mr Cagan's estimate of $326 billion of repossessed mortgages translates into roughly $112 billion of losses, spread over several years. Even a loss several times larger than that would barely ruffle America's vast financial markets: about $600 billion was wiped out on the stockmarkets as share prices fell on February 27th.

In theory, the chopping up and selling on of risk should spread the pain. The losses ought to be manageable even for banks such as HSBC and Wells Fargo, the two biggest subprime mortgage lenders, and Bear Stearns, Wall Street's largest underwriter of mortgage-backed securities. Subprime mortgages make up only a small part of their business. Indeed, banks so far smell an opportunity to buy the assets of imploding subprime lenders on the cheap.

Some open questions (experts please help!):

1) Effect on housing bubble: how much of the recent bubble was driven specifically by increased availability of credit (as opposed to the usual irrational exuberance or speculation)?

2) How much of bad mortgage debt is insured by CDO derivatives? Who is on the hook? Selling this kind of insurance was reportedly a popular income strategy for hedge funds.

3) Is $100B of mortgage-related losses over several years a big number or a small one? Will anyone blow up (CMO insurers)? Who is holding the riskiest CMO tranches?

4) If $100B over several years is chump change, what are the chances of contagion still leading to a housing bust, credit crunch and recession?

Earnings of big Wall St. banks will be negatively impacted, but some smart guys are surely buying up these loans on the cheap, as markets overreact in the negative direction.