Behind the U.S. Mortgage Mess

I thought this short article in the WSJ was a nice, quick synopsis of the U.S. mortgage mess. The graphic is pretty nice as well. Basically, the sequence of events was as follows:

As housing was booming, lenders made more subprime loans to unqualified borrowers (around 20% of mortgages were classified as subprime).

The subprime loans were securitized and sold to investors (many of which didn't understand the real risk inherent in the investment as the complexity behind them were hidden by how simply they were packaged up).

Delinquencies on these subprime loans remained low at first as home prices were rising. As home prices rose, borrowers were able to refinance their mortgages to continue to make payments.

As the housing market leveled off, delinquencies steadily increased. Rating agencies have been downgrading all these investments and investors have no one to sell them off to.

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A Possible Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

Came across this one on Mankiw's blog as well (... someone has been stealing my WSJ's each morning before I can pick them up outside). Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Reagan, had an opinion article in the WSJ yesterday that outlined a possible solution to the mortgage crisis. Criteria for the plan is: don't shift burden to taxpayers, don't force banks to eat all the losses, and create an incentive for homeowners to stay in their homes. The idea is that the US government would provide loans to homeowners up to 20% of their mortgage amount, with a 15 year pay-back period and adjustable interest rate based on the two-year treasury note. The whole thing would be funded by selling more two-year treasury notes. This would obviously not stop anyone from walking away from their home if they have negative equity, but it might prompt those that are worried about that scenario happening to them in the future to sti...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

I read The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid while on vacation in Italy and thought it was really good. The book basically tells the story of a Pakistani man who comes to the US, attends a good university, gets a dream job in financial services in New York, falls in love with an American girl, and then abandons it all to return to his home country after 9/11. Although the story is a little contrived - the parallel between the man's failing romance with the girl and his failing romance with America is a little too obvious - it's really wonderfully written and a real page-turner. Given my ethnic background, how I went to a good school, moved to New York to do consulting, and was there on 9/11, much of the story felt familiar. At its core, for me, it was really a story about identity in the U.S. Particularly about changing your identity here - the ability to transform from an immigrant or an outsider to one of the elite and how America post-9/11 developed an isolationi...

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...

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