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The Fallacy of Banks Needing 'Skin in the Game' for Mortgages
May 13, 2011 1:44 PM

There's an interesting debate going on now on Capitol Hill as to whether to require the big banks to have a vested interest in the mortgages that they are issuing. On Wednesday, there was a hearing about this very topic:

The Atlantic covered this hearing, as well:

By now, anyone who follows financial news has heard the theory that banks originated so many bad mortgages during the housing bubble, in part, because they had no skin in the game. Since they could securitize the loans -- that is, bundle them up and sell them to investors as bonds -- there was no reason why the banks should care whether the loans would go bad or not. So the solution sought by last summer's financial regulation bill was to require banks to keep some of portion of the mortgages they originate. Then, the theory goes, they'll be more careful, since they'll loose if those loans are bad too. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple idea could cause more harm than good.

He details Josh Rosner's testimony, which gets fun at 52:48 in the video above (and at 1:15:00, where Rosner is asked what the remedy should be to eliminate "too big to fail"):

On the surface, this appears to make sense. If a lender or securitizer knows he will have to drink the poison in the chalice he offers to others, then he would be more careful. If, however, because of his belief in his modeling prowess, his own systemic importance, or his financial strength, the pourer believes that he has an enhanced immunity to poison or that he will be first to receive an antidote, then perhaps he may ignore the disincentives to poison others. More likely, as we saw in the past crisis, the same firms that poisoned their investing customers failed to recognize the power of the poison. After all, the banks that were in most dire need for direct government support were so precisely because they had ingested large quantities of the poison they had sold to others. Often, as we witnessed with Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, these firms didn't have the operational controls, available information or resulting ability to fully model their exposures. To force them to increase concentrations of these held securities will only increase their risks.

The real question is, if the big banks can't model the risk properly, why would more transparency make a difference? Why would investors have a better chance of recognizing risk than the originators of the Mortgage Back Securities (MBS)?

At the same time, this is certainly true:

The reality is that the banks who issued bad mortgages actually had very, very large amounts of skin in the game. That, in fact, is what triggered the financial crisis. When that skin proved toxic, it nearly killed them all. The problem wasn't that they didn't care about issuing bad loans: it was that they didn't realize that the loans were bad. They really believed that the housing market would continue to go up and that most borrowers would be able to refinance their way out of trouble.

So, while it's hard to believe that transparency on its own will just magically eliminate the problem, it's also true that in a bubble, everyone can be wrong. If real estate values just kept going up, voila! -- No Problem!

Unfortunately, we don't live in Oz, Dorothy. Where we go from here is uncertain.


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