Subprime crisis - some notes

The New York Times asks Can the Mortgage Crisis Swallow a Town?

Mr. Stefanski should know: as the chief executive of Third Federal Savings and Loan, a Cleveland thrift that his parents founded in 1938, he has an unusual perspective on the mortgage mess. Unlike most of his competitors, Mr. Stefanski resisted the urge to cash in on the subprime lending boom.

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The result is that unlike many other mortgage lenders, Third Federal has a vested interest in making sure its loans do not go bad, so foreclosure is a last resort.

“The model has shifted,” says Mr. Stefanski. “It became very lucrative. But it was totally irresponsible for the sake of greed.” Not that Mr. Stefanski didn’t notice the profits to be had. “Absolutely, we were tempted,” he acknowledges. “We arm-wrestled and talked, but we decided not to change the model. We felt it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

Mr. Stefanski is no social worker. He lives in an affluent suburb of Cleveland and earned nearly $2 million last year. But he does not hide his feelings about just what went wrong in places like Maple Heights. “The whole system was based on raping the public,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Not everyone should own a home — just those who can afford it.”

David Ignatius uses his Washington Post column for discussing The Real Causes of the Financial Storm.

People looking at this crisis in isolation expressed relief that the Fed bailout seemed to have worked. But I find greater cause for worry. What we are seeing is a financial addiction -- to ever-more exotic classes of high-yielding assets to tempt global investors and then to the Fed's infusion of liquidity to keep the system from self-destruction. The financial world, you might say, is addicted both to the heroin of high yields and the methadone of the Fed's rehab program

Which gets me thinking there a trend is appearing. Go back to The New York Times for Subprime Time and the trend is getting clearer to me.

The absence of scrutiny on Wall Street had a profound effect on mortgage origination. As mortgage bankers discovered that investors would buy virtually any loan whatsoever, they naturally lowered their standards. What difference whether a loan was sound if you could flip it in 48 hours? The market thus corrupted, it only wanted for the right circumstances to implode. And over the last few years, as Robert Barbera, the chief economist at the investment advisory firm ITG, observed, the Federal Reserve took short-term interest rates from 1 percent to 5 1/4 percent. This raised mortgage rates and put home buyers at risk of being priced out of the market. But bankers lent to them anyway, offering, in effect, “junk mortgages” — risky loans with low teaser rates (and much higher rates later), as well as other deviations from sound finance. Lenders and borrowers alike knew that such loans were dicey; they were counting on the borrowers to refinance — which, as long as home prices kept rising, was a cinch. Naturally, when prices stopped rising, the music stopped.

Greed is good, that was from the movie Wall Street. Avarice, however, remains a cardinal sin. The online Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines avarice as "excessive or insatiable desire for wealth or gain." The same source defines greed as "a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (as money) than is needed." I am thinking some bright boys on Wall Street do not know the difference.