Coyote Blog

If I asked you what three major American consumer products saw the largest steady price rises in the last decade (as opposed to price volatility, as we see in commodities like gasoline) one might well answer "housing, medical care, and college tuition."

Two or more of each of these share a number of features in common

• Long, sustained government programs to increase access / ownership / usage
• Substantial portion of pricing paid by third parties.
• Easy to obtain, government subsidized debt financing.

The housing bubble has of course burst.  Obamacare, by further disconnecting individual use from the true costs of the services, will likely push health care costs ever higher.  And then there is the college bubble.  I am a bit late on this, but this is truly a remarkable chart:

I have already heard the leftish talking point on this, which is that this increase in debt is the fault of (surprise!) private lenders and loan originators.   This is a similar argument to the one made in the mortgage bubble, arguing that all the bad loans are the results of unscrupulous private originators and securities packagers.

And certainly there were many private companies originating awful mortgages and selling them to Fannie and Freddie.   But what we forget in hindsight is that the government was begging for them to do so.  Fannie and Freddie had active programs where they were encouraging mortgages with Loan-to-value of 97% or more.  This kind of leverage is absurd, particularly for American-style no-recourse home mortgages.  Sure, it was crazy to write them, but they were getting written only because the government was asking for them to be written and buying them all up.

In fact, in student loans, almost all of this loan growth is eagerly being underwritten by the Feds, not by private lenders.  Note the only consumer credit line really growing below is the "federal government" line (in red), which is primarily being driven by federally backed student loans.

One might argue that this is once again due to private originators going crazy.  But the Feds took over origination of all federal student loans in 2010.  You can see that much of the growth has occurred after the Feds took over origination.  In fact, I think most of us can understand that when the origination decision is shifted from being a business decision to a political decision, student lending standards are certainly not going to get tougher.  We can see that in home lending, where Fannie and Freddie have already returned to most of their worst pre-crash origination standards (here is an example of government promotion of these low down payment programs).

The other day my mother-in-law argued that the student lending business (particularly private lenders) needed reform because some students were being charged exorbitant rates.  Having not been in the market for student loans lately, I wondered if this were the case.  But the first thing that caught my eye was this stat:  The 2-year default rate (not lifetime, but just in the first 2 years) of student loans was 8.8% last year, and 12% if one looks at the first 3 years.  Compare that to credit card default rates which are around 6%.  And recognized that these are apples and oranges, the student loan numbers actually understate lifetime default rates.

Based on that, the interest rate on student loans should be in the twenties.  Against this backdrop, the rates I see online seem like a screaming deal.  Probably too good of a deal.  Which is why so many people are piling into these loans on the explicit promise society has made to them that their college degree will pay off, no matter what the cost.
Beyond the absurd price increases in both public and private education, here is the 900 pound gorilla in the room -- some majors are simply more valuable than others.  A computer programming grad is going to have a lot more earning potential than the average poetry or gender studies major.

What we really need is tiered lending standards based on a student's major.  Banks don't treat the earning potential of a dog-grooming business and a steel mill the same, why treat a mechanical engineering degree the same as a sociology degree?  But, of course, this is never, ever going to happen.

Years ago I had these thoughts along this line, in response to a Michelle Obama rant about the cost of education

This analogy comes to mind:  Let’s say Fred needs to buy a piece of earth-moving equipment.  He has the choice of the $20,000 front-end loader that is more than sufficient to most every day tasks, or the $200,000 behemoth, which might be useful if one were opening a strip mine or building a new Panama Canal but is an overkill for many applications.  Fred may lust after the huge monster earth mover, but if he is going to buy it, he better damn well have a big, profitable application for it or he is going to go bankrupt trying to buy it.

So Michelle Obama has a choice of the $20,000 state school undergrad and law degree, which is perfectly serviceable for most applications, or the Princeton/Harvard $200,000 combo, which I can attest will, in the right applications, move a hell of a lot of dirt.  She chooses the $200,000 tool, and then later asks for sympathy because all she ever did with it was some backyard gardening and she wonders why she has trouble paying all her debt.  Duh.  I think the problem here is perfectly obvious to most of us, but instead Obama seeks to blame her problem on some structural flaw in the economy, rather than a poor choice on her part in matching the tool to the job.  In fact, today, she spends a lot of her time going to others who have bought similar $200,000 educations and urging them not to use those tools productively, just like she did not.

Postscript:  Kids who find they cannot pay their student debts and think bank home foreclosures are the worst thing in the world are in for a rude surprise -- home mortgage default consequences are positively light in this country.  The worst that happens is that you lose the home and take a ding on your credit record.  Student debt follows you for life, with wage garnishments and asset losses.  People walk away from home debt all the time, the same is not true of student debt.

Michigan has  a huge problem with jobs and capital leaving the state for more favorable climates.  Which makes it incredible that the ruling Democrats in the state have this plan to improve things:

• Hiking the minimum wage to $10 an hour for all workers.
• Imposing a blanket moratorium on home foreclosures for 12 months.
• Cutting utility rates 20% across the board.
• Requiring all employers to provide health care to their employees.
• Hiking, by $100 a week, and extending, for six months, unemployment benefits.

Wow, that should really bring companies running to the state to invest their capital.  This is always a powerfully attractive package:

• Raise the price of unskilled labor and entry-level employees
• Reduce protections for lenders investing capital in the state
• Set the state up for power shortages
• Increase the price of labor by $12,000 or more per year
• Increase employment-related taxes  ( a sure outcome of raising unemplyment benefits)

It is interesting that with home prices and gasoline prices going in opposite directions, the media can declare both trends to be disasters for Americans.  Via Scrappleface:

The U.S. housing crisis reached fever pitch this month, with potential foreclosures up 48 percent compared with May 2007.

The devastation of receiving foreclosure notices has now swept
through a full 2/10ths of one percent of American homes. About 1/10th
of one percent of owners may lose their homes. For some of those
people, it's actually their primary residence in jeopardy, rather than
a second home, rental property or vacation condo.

 

To add insult to misery, mortgage rates skyrocketed this month to
6.32 percent, a shocking figure a full third of what it was during the
Carter administration.

As a result of the flood of homes on the market, real estate agent
commissions have dipped precariously, and home buyers increasingly
wrestle with the guilt of paying bargain prices for excellent
properties.

Market analysts say home prices could plummet as much as another 10
percent by the end of 2009, leaving first-time home buyers to face the
specter of owning a more spacious residence. The additional square
footage inequitably boosts the burden of cleaning, heating and air
conditioning.

I am just fine with prosecuting mortgage brokers for fraud  who deliberately misrepresented the payments and risks of the loan products they were selling.  However, to be fair, we must then also prosecute borrowers and home buyers who deliberately misrepresented their assets and income to lenders, actions that are equally fraudulent.

Or, we could just let the whole foreclosure and bankruptcy system sort everything out and let bygones by bygones. 

Interestingly, it seems to be advocates for borrowers who want to stir the whole fraud thing up and are reluctant to just let the system play itself out.  I find this odd, for a couple of reasons:

• Fraud by lenders will be hard to prove, since they all are covered by written disclosures that I am sure reveal all the terms of the loan.  The government itself has designed a number of written disclosures lenders must use  [by the way, if reformers want to start somewhere, they might begin with these government disclosures.  My experience is that they are silly and uninformative, and were put together by someone in the government who does not actually understand loans].  Fraud by borrowers, on the other hand, should be dead-easy to discover - they signed their name to an income statement and list of assets and liabilities which are quite easy to check.
• The current foreclosure and bankruptcy system is pretty fair to borrowers.  In particular, in the case of subprime loans where the borrower has little equity, foreclosure costs almost nothing in current dollars - all the loss is on the bank, with absolutely no come-backs on the borrower in the future.  The borrower must endure years of difficult credit and rebuilding trust in the system, but that is the kind of minimum cost we should expect a foreclosure or bankruptcy to carry.  We always seem to get worked up about foreclosures, because we have this picture of someone losing a home they have lived in 20 years and losing all their equity.   But in these subprime cases, where the buyer has been in the home only a few months and put in virtually no equity, I think our mental picture of the costs, at least to the borrower, of foreclosure are overblown.

As an aside, I am easily convinced that there were many mortgage brokers offering their customers atrociously bad deals and rates.  I can't imagine personally not shopping around for mortgage rates from multiple suppliers, but there are clearly people who want to walk into one guy's office and buy something from that first person.   And a number of these people chose to do business with firms that gave them really poor service (if service is defined as getting the best possible loan for the buyer).  Which gets me to the subject of branding.

I know that there are a lot of folks, particularly on the left, who hate large corporations and national brands, but to a large extent the uneven and unpredictable quality of mortgage brokers may be due to a lack of national players and national brands in mortgage brokering. 

Mortgage brokers, stock brokers, and real estate brokers are all licensed by the government.  By statist thinking, that should be enough to ensure quality.  But while stock brokers and real estate brokers can be independent, most of them have organized themselves into groups under a brand name (e.g. Merrill Lynch or Century 21).  Few such national brands, if any, exist in mortgage brokering.

These brands exist because they have proven themselves useful and valuable to consumers.  Presumably they communicate some form of quality or reliability or capability beyond the level that having a government license affords.  This is not necessarily a gaurantee of perfection, of course.  Certainly Merrill Lynch brokers, form time to time, have been accused of fraudulent behavior.  But Merrill has been very fast to act on these occasions, taking actions designed to save its brand from being tainted.  It is this incentive, plus the history such brands carry in the collective memory, that gives consumers extra confidence to use brokers with these brands rather than individual practitioners.

If I was a contrarian with a load of money and a knowledge of mortgage brokering, I might be thinking about building a Century 21 or Remax-type brand in mortgage brokering.