How to Solve the Foreclosure Crisis

By JONATHAN R. LAING

Listen up, Uncle Sam: Barron's plan to end the foreclosure crisis is bigger, better -- and probably cheaper -- than yours.

TEXT SIZE

NOTHING IS THREATENING THE U.S. FINANCIAL MARKETS, and indeed the U.S. economy, as much at the relentless rise in home foreclosures.

The overhang of foreclosed homes for sale is pummeling home prices and laying waste to entire neighborhoods. In the process, consumer spending has suffered mightily and deepened the recession as Americans have seen the value of their most important assets, their homes, plummet in value.

Likewise, some $1.5 trillion of securities backed by subprime and similar mortgages have continued to decline in value, destroying the capital of many major banks and other financial institutions faster than the government has been able to replenish it under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

Yet, Uncle Sam's attempts to stem the tide of foreclosures and arrest the baleful fall in home prices have been, in a word, pathetic. The latest effort -- the proposal floated last week by the Treasury Department to exhort banks to offer super-low 4.5% mortgages -- was a step in the right direction. But in extending support to buyers of homes, it completely ignores the agonies of the roughly 50 million families that already have mortgages. As a result, it does little to halt the surge in foreclosures. Some 2.85 million home owners are likely to default this year, rising to as many as 4 million next year, according to Moody's Economy.com.

That's why Barron's is proposing sweeping action. First and foremost, the government should make that same 4.5% mortgage rate, the lowest in decades, available to all American homeowners through refinancings. Banks and other lenders would write the loans and then sell them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the secondary-market giants that were nationalized in early September.

The new rates, and lower monthly payments, would be especially helpful for homeowners with negative equity (they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth). Such underwater borrowers -- prime candidates for default -- account for about $2 trillion of the $11 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt outstanding.

Meanwhile, the government must help "modify" the most troublesome group of mortgages -- the roughly $500 billion of subprime and Alt-A mortgages that are in arrears and headed toward foreclosure. The government should facilitate extending the amortization periods from 30 years to as long as 40 years, cutting rates to 4.5% or lower and, on some loans, reducing principal balances.

Ambitious as all this is, it could probably be accomplished for $100 billion. That's a relatively small sum in the context of this year's bailouts, and it would excise the very tumor that triggered the global financial meltdown last year. The key: smart use of Fannie and Freddie, which up to now have been vastly underutilized.

Is this proposal utopian? Not really. We've talked to experts, from Economy.com's Mark Zandi to former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, who in an op-ed piece in the New York Times early this year astutely warned of an impending mortgage-default tsunami. We've also borrowed from imaginative mortgage-relief ideas put forward by the likes of R. Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of the Columbia Business School, long-time market strategist Edward Yardeni and the chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair.

The FDIC leader was turned down by Treasury when she sought $25 billion of the government's $700 billion TARP plan to provide a federal guarantee and loss-sharing on approximately two million modified home mortgages. But Bair's idea clearly had merit.

TO MAKE OUR PLAN WORK, the Federal Reserve would have to create a special funding facility for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that they could effectively borrow at Treasury rates. Currently, the two organizations are borrowing at a significant spread over Treasury rates.

That higher borrowing cost was the result of Treasury's refusal during the nationalization to "explicitly" guarantee Fannie and Freddie's debt and guarantee obligations -- a move that Blinder, for one, has labeled as boneheaded. As a result, Treasury and the Fed two weeks ago unveiled a program to spend $600 billion buying back Fannie and Freddie debt and mortgage-backed securities to bring down the two titans' borrowing costs. The move has diminished but not eliminated the spread over Treasuries.

The mortgage rates offered through Fannie and Freddie tend to run about 1.5 percentage points above their funding costs. If their borrowing rates converged with Treasuries', they could offer mortgages at around 4.2% since the 10-year Treasury bond currently trades at around 2.7%. But to leave a margin for error, we'll stick to a 4.5% rate.

John Kuczala for Barron's

Such a drop in rates would set off a frenzy of refinancings similar to what occurred in the balmy days of 2005. Yet this onslaught is something that Fannie and Freddie could easily handle with their large infrastructures and close relationships with banks and other mortgage originators, from whom they purchase mortgages in the secondary market.

Fannie and Freddie would bundle the refinanced loans into basic, guaranteed securities for investors. Demand for such securities has remained brisk throughout the credit crunch, and it should get even stronger with explicit government backing.

Perhaps most important, Fannie and Freddie would have to loosen their overly stringent underwriting standard. Today, no borrower can receive the current conforming rate of 5.6% or even have a prayer of garnering a refi without a sky-high FICO credit rating of over 730 and a down payment of at least 20% to 30%. That disqualifies the vast majority of homeowners.

THE GREAT LEAP OF FAITH under our program involves the refinancing of all homeowners at the same low rate, even if they have negative equity in their homes. The latter factor would seemingly give some an incentive to walk away from their obligations.

Such lenience on the surface would seem suicidal for Fannie and Freddie, who had enough trouble making sound "qualifying" loans as to end up as government wards. But remember, the overwhelming bulk of the mortgages they would end up refinancing under our plan will come from the $5.5 trillion pool of mortgages that they already own or guarantee. So such a move, in fact, would lower rather than boost their ultimate credit risk, because the newer mortgages' lower monthly payments would reduce homeowners' likelihood of defaulting.

We would even require Fannie and Freddie to address many of the subprime and Alt-A mortgages that are sitting in the toxic, $1.5 trillion of securitizations that Wall Street confected at the 2006-2007 peak of the housing market. Remarkably enough, some $1 trillion of these loans are still current, even though virtually none of these borrowers would've ever qualified for Fannie or Freddie loan purchases using the agencies' traditional metrics of loan-to-value ratios and the like. Little or no attention was paid to borrower suitability or ability to repay.

But the risks we'd ask Fannie and Freddie to shoulder with this pool are less than they might appear at first blush. Many of the speculators and fraudsters that originally populated these Wall Street securitizations have long since defaulted and been foreclosed on, so they're gone from the pools. And there's much to be said for the moral fiber of the redoubtable subprime and Alt-A borrowers who have continued to honor their obligations. Although they likely bought their homes near the peak of the market and are now drowning in negative equity, their attachment to their homes is clearly more than financial.

Finally, Fannie and Freddie are hardly disinterested parties in how theses subprime and Alt-A securitizations fare. In fact, the two giants got caught up in the same speculative fervor that other mortgage players did, and they bought for investment some $220 billion of the securities in the $1.5 trillion total. Also, the Fed and Treasury are probably on the hook for the credit performance of another $250 billion or so of these toxic securities, not the least because of the bailouts of Bear Stearns, AIG and Citigroup.

Hence, Fannie and Freddie would be doing themselves and their federal masters an immense favor by facilitating the refinancing of the $1 trillion in performing mortgages from this pool. With lower monthly payments, many more of these subprime and Alt-A borrowers will have a chance to avoid delinquency.

The remaining $500 billion of securitized subprime and Alt-loans is the most problematic, since these loans are already delinquent or further down the road to foreclosure. Some experts, in fact, argue that this cohort is beyond redemption, and under the dictates of triage should be allowed to die an undignified death.

But under our plan, a special government entity would be created that would buy these loans out of the securitization pools at full price and thus end their zombie-like existence.

There are many advantages, of course, to cashing out and collapsing these securitizations. Banks and other financial institutions that own a ton of this stuff would enjoy an immediate boost in their capital. Also, many funds and other institutions have made costly off-track bets on the performance of these securities in the form of collateralized debt obligations and credit-default swaps; we would propose to just close down the subprime casino and allow bettors to cash in their chips.

Yet the securitization trusts wouldn't get off scot-free for our full-price purchase. They would have to shoulder, say, the first 25 cents on the dollar of any losses our entity suffered from foreclosures and other credit losses. Thus the government's effective exposure would be capped at 75 cents on the dollar.

But at least our special government entity would control these toxic mortgages. Then the FDIC, say, would be able to launch its Loan Modification Program and exercise its full panoply of measures to rehabilitate these delinquent mortgages, extending amortization periods, cutting rates and more.

Up to now, trustees and servicers of these high-risk mortgage pools have been reluctant to modify any of the mortgages holdings. They fear that any such actions would invite lawsuits from the holders of certain classes of their securitizations. The government's involvement would shield the trustees and servicers from that risk.

The Bottom Line

Our plan would require about $100 billion, a fraction of the financial bailout's total cost. One key: cutting borrowing costs for Fannie and Freddie.

Ultimately, the cost of the Barron's program could be far lower than you might suspect. Take the $500 billion modification plan. Even if 60% of these nonperforming mortgages go to foreclosure and the recovery there is only 50%, the resulting $150 billion loss would be only $75 billion after the securitization sellers cover their first-loss payment on the bad mortgages.

As for the $1 trillion of high-risk mortgage securities being assumed by Fannie and Freddie, their potential losses would seem to be manageable -- say, around $15 billion or so -- even assuming a severe cumulative default rate over the next five years of 20% and the same 50% recovery at foreclosure. A lot of the defaulting mortgages could be cured short of foreclosure. Also offsetting these credit losses are the likely $45 billion the portfolio would throw off in earnings.

LAST WEEK, FED CHAIRMAN Ben Bernanke gave a speech in which he brilliantly dissected the U.S. housing crisis and its centrality to all the financial and economic problems plaguing the U.S. But when he came to offering solutions, his proposals were both timid and ineffectual. It's not enough for a learned doctor to make the correct diagnosis. He must also come up with the correct cure, even if it involves invasive surgery.

Unless Washington begins to act boldly on the mortgage front, today's bad times will only get far worse.

E-mail comments to mail@barrons.com