Cross-posted at OneUtah.
The argument keeps coming up. It's a zombie lie that won't die no matter what the facts say. So, here we go again.
From Joe Nocera's article Explaining the Crisis With Dogma:
It would all be pretty laughable if it didn’t have serious consequences. But it does. First, with the commission’s Republican members having now issued this public, partisan smoke signal, the final product, no matter how rigorous, will be inevitably dismissed as a Democratic document. As a result, it will have little impact and, once Bill O’Reilly has finished mocking it, will be consigned to the dustbin of history. By creating this partisan rift, the Republicans have succeeded in tarring the entire enterprise.[snip]
To fix a problem, though, it helps to know what the problem is. The F.C.I.C., with all those witnesses and documents, could have really helped here. But the paper released by the commission’s Republicans this week reads as if they couldn’t be bothered. It simply reiterates longstanding Republican dogma that could have been written without a $6 million investigation. None of which bodes particularly well for the next two years of “financial reform.”[snip]
It is easy enough to understand why Mr. Wallison and his fellow Republicans would find this a comforting prism through which to view the financial crisis. If government housing policy is the chief culprit, it means that the market itself is off the hook. See, it was all the fault of wrong-headed government policy! Blaming it all on Fannie and Freddie also gives the Republicans a nice cudgel with which to beat Democrats, who for years defended the G.S.E.’s from even the most muted criticism.
The Republican document issued earlier this week did little more than regurgitate this theory of the case. “Subsidizing mortgages through the G.S.E.’s was a particularly expedient way to increase the homeownership rate,” they write at one point. At the same time, they tread lightly over the culpability of other nongovernmental culprits like the credit ratings agencies and Wall Street itself.
The only problem with Mr. Wallison’s theory is that it’s not, as they say, reality-based. Anyone who has looked at the role of Fannie and Freddie will discover they spent most of the housing bubble avoiding subprime loans, because those loans didn’t meet their underwriting standards . . .
When Fannie and Freddie finally did get into the business, it was very late in the game. But the motivation wasn’t pressure from the government; it was pressure from the marketplace. You see, the subprime companies and Wall Street had long used subprime loans as a way to do an end-run around Fannie and Freddie. By the mid-2000s, subprime underwriting and securitization had become so profitable — and such a large part of the overall mortgage business — that Fannie and Freddie felt they had no choice but to dive in. In other words, the G.S.E.’s were reacting to the realities of the market, not to the government. They were worried about losing market share.
If you're into long reads, you can check out the Senate report on the financial crisis or the FCIC's report - both come in at over 600 pages.
Nocera's point - that for ideological reasons Republicans have chosen to tell a story that is not reality based - presents us with a major problem. We can't fix a problem if we've diagnosed it incorrectly. Like claims that FDR and the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression, the assertions that the financial crash can be laid at the feet of government policy and GSE's is a fiction in service of an ideological goal. It's not about actually addressing and redressing the causes of the crash, it's about advancing a predetermined agenda, separate from what actually happened in the real world. It's about using a crisis to achieve an otherwise unachievable goal. Like, you know, invading Iraq.
Barry Ritholtz summarizeshis response to this nonsense:
That lack of evidence, however, doesn’t stop ideologues from trying. Consider this attempt at rewriting the causes of the credit crisis by Kevin Hassett:
“The worst financial crisis in generations was set off by a massive government effort, led by the two mortgage giants, to make loans to homebuyers no matter whether they could make the payments. Lenders were willing to lend money to just about all comers, no matter how low their income. Why? Because the lenders knew Fannie and Freddie would purchase the loans from them for a high price before bundling them into securities to sell to investors.”
Now, this makes for a fascinating narrative that plays into a number of different ideological beliefs. It exonerates the radical free market deregulators, it ignores what the private sector did, and it somehow ignores the fact that Congress was controlled by a very conservative GOP from 1994 to 2006 — the prime period of time covered leading up to and including the beginning of the crisis.
But worse than all of that, the data supporting Hassett’s position simply isn’t there.
Here's his challenge - a hundred grand to anyone who can provide data disproving the following:
-The origination of subprime loans came primarily from non bank lenders not covered by the CRA;
-The majority of the underwriting, at least for the first few years of the boom, were by these same non-bank lenders
-When the big banks began chasing subprime, it was due to the profit motive, not any mandate from the President (a Republican) or the the Congress (Republican controlled) or the GSEs they oversaw.
-Prior to 2005, nearly all of these sub-prime loans were bought by Wall Street — NOT Fannie & Freddie
-In fact, prior to 2005, the GSEs were not permitted to purchase non-conforming mortgages.
-After 2005, Fannie & Freddie changed their own rules to start buying these non-conforming mortgages — in order to maintain market share and compete with Wall Street for profits.
-The change in FNM/FRE conforming mortgage purchases in 2005 was not due to any legislation or marching orders from the President (a Republican) or the the Congress (Republican controlled). It was the profit motive that led them to this action.
University of Oregon Economist Mark Thoma:
There is lots to fault in the behavior of Fannie and Freddie and in government oversight of them - the decisions of management, the lobbying efforts that were funded by their ability to extract a premium from the implicit government guarantee - all of this was a big problem. The bubble, and later the financial crisis expressed itself in these institutions, and they may have also contributed to it to some extent as they took on more risky securities when their business began to go elsewhere.
But the agency issues and the failures of risk models and securitization would have created problems in the largely unregulated shadow banking sector even if these two institutions had taken on nothing but the safest of mortgages. The bubble still would have inflated in the shadow banking system - maybe it's a little smaller, I don't know - but it still would have been large enough to cause big problems when it burst.
The best behavior of Fannie and Freddie would not have been enough to stop the bubble from inflating in other parts of the financial sector, and then turning into a full fledged financial crisis as housing prices plunged.
The problems we are having were caused when lots of available liquidity rushed past the checks and balances that a proper agency provides in pursuit of promises that risk models and complex securities did not deliver. The unexpected losses alone might not have caused a crisis had the losses been widely distributed, but, the losses were concentrated and hidden in ways that created widespread fear and threatened the entire system. Getting rid of that fear is not going to be easy.
CEPR:
It really is incredible to see such a concerted effort to rewrite history in front of our faces. There is not much ambiguity in the story of the housing bubble. The private financial sector went nuts. They made a fortune issuing bad and often fraudulent loans which they could quickly resell in the secondary market. The big actors in the junk market were the private issuers like Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Lehman Brothers. However, George Will and Co. are determined to blame this disaster on government "compassion" for low-income families.[snip]
So we have banks that are not covered by the CRA, being forced to make loans that are not covered by the CRA, which were hugely profitable, by a rule that had no enforcement mechanism. Welcome to the world of George Will logic.
The beating up on Fannie Mae as the main cuplrit in this story is similarly short on logic. Fannie Mae and Freddiie Mac lost market share at an incredibly rapid pace in the peak bubble years precisely because they were not buying the worst of the junk. That was going to the private investment banks.
This is not a secret. They did start to get into the junk market late in the game in 2006, precisely because they were losing market share.[snip]
But it is a tremendous re-write of history to blame misguided do-gooders for the core problem. Good old-fashioned capitalists were making money hand over fist and they were doing it largely without government support, except for the implicit too-big-too fail (TBTF) guarantees that ensured that outfits like Citigroup and Bank of America would survive no matter how reckless they had been. If Will wants to blame the government because of the implicit subsidy of TBTF then he has somewhat of a case.
The basic outlines should be easy enough to understand. Lack of regulation, lots of greed, and a willingness to throw caution to the wind by private companies were more than sufficient to create the bubble and to cause the crash. Blaming government policy and Fannie and Freddie is suspect behavior.