How and Why the Financial Crisis Really Happened
Easy Credit, Hard Landing
The financial insights of Raghuram Rajan.
by Christopher Caldwell | Weekly Standard | July 26, 2010
Rajan offers a bold and convincing diagnosis of how a screw-up in the regulation of poor people’s mortgages in one country has brought the world to the brink of economic disaster, where it teeters still. He goes beyond the proximate causes of the problem—the subprimes and derivatives and trade imbalances and the like. The ultimate cause, Rajan convincingly argues, is a widening of economic inequality that American politicians of both parties found politically intolerable, and chose to fix by turning the credit market into an under-the-table welfare state…
…This is an account of what ails us that is radically at odds with the familiar tale of greedy bankers in $5,000 suits. “Almost every financial crisis has political roots,” Rajan writes. The credit market—at least as regards housing—was distorted by government policy, not by a sudden and mysterious escalation in “greed.” The trends that shook the world economy came out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, out of the Federal Housing Administration, and out of their “regulator,” the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
By 2000, HUD required that low-income loans make up 50 percent of Fannie and Freddie’s portfolios. Out of “compassionate conservatism,” perhaps, the Bush administration raised that mandate to 56 percent. Rajan cites Fannie Mae’s former chief credit officer, Edward Pinto, who notes that, by 2008, “the FHA and various other government programs were exposed to about $2.7 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans, approximately 59 percent of total loans to these categories.” Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute found that government-mandated loans accounted for two-thirds of “junk mortgages.”
Another way of looking at this problem is provided in a study done by Rajan’s Chicago colleagues Atif Mian and Amir Sufi. They found that, if you look at the period between 2002 and 2005, the number of mortgages obtained in a given ZIP code “is negatively correlated with household income growth.” In other words, lenders preferred un-creditworthy borrowers to creditworthy borrowers. In a market governed by “greed” and undistorted by government pressure, such a result would make no sense…
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