There leveraged balance sheets where part of the problem, thats Glass Segall.
So where people borrowing money on a sub prime event
If the payments where being made the same they where in the peak
Why is there a crises?
You liberals amaze me
First of all, I'm not a liberal. Refuting an ideological meme does not make one an ideologue, especially when it is backed up by data.
Then what did?
am serious, if the collapse of the housing market followed by the collapse of the financial institutions that invested in the housing market
what caused it?
Bubbles are complex. This was no different. But bubbles have commonalities. The first is excess creation of credit. Excess credit creation does not mean there will be a bubble, but all bubbles are driven by excess credit. I do not know of a single bubble anywhere where credit was not loose.
So understand where credit is created. I don't want to write paragraphs and paragraphs, but the biggest influence on the creation of credit is the Federal Reserve. The Fed sets the funds target which various money markets key off of. Since the term structure of the yield curve is influenced by the short end, if the Fed takes rates down to very low levels, the back end will follow, at least to some extent. And since mortgage rates are affected by government yields, when yields head lower, so do mortgage rates, making it cheaper for people to borrow. It's simple, really. If the funds rate had been lowered to 4% instead of 1%, then there is no housing bubble. It might have been the wrong policy, but that shows the power of the Fed.
What else creates credit? I agree that the GSEs were part of the problem, but that's because they were part of the financial ecosystem, not because they were pushing housing mandates. They were trying to maximize profits, and increased their leverage and lowered underwriting standards to do so. The GSEs were losing share, so they did what all other banks do when they are losing share, they lowered standards. Since political partisans always want their pound of flesh, if you want to blame the Democrats for something, blame them for allowing Freddie and Fannie to leverage themselves 50:1 debt to equity. That's ******* insane. A 2% drop in their asset base wipes out the companies. Utterly moronic. However, Wall Street was doing the same thing, just not to the same level.
But that pales in comparison to financial "innovation" on Wall Street, which allowed shit mortgages to be passed off as AAA. Trillions of dollars of this garbage was foisted onto the market, increasing credit supply and funds available for housing. The Fed is partly responsible for this because without lowering rates so low, there would not have been as great of demand for this shit. If a 10 year govie is yielding 4.5%, then a AAA super-senior subprime mortgage CDO would yield 30 or 40 basis points above at 4.9%. That's huge in fixed income world. And it matters because assets were not growing enough for pension funds to hit their actuarial liabilities and caused insurance companies to reach for yield because they needed investment income in a soft market and couldn't raise prices. I heard from salesmen that for 18 months, all the Europeans wanted to talk about was structured products. They didn't wanted to talk about vanilla products such as corporate bonds.
Then there is deregulation. Deregulation is often a good thing, including in the financial industry, but it often leads to excess credit creation and asset bubbles. This happened in the Baltic states recently and in Latin America in the 1980s. It contributed here when the SEC allowed the big five Wall Street firms to lower their equity capital from 8%. Wall Street leveraged up big time, with Lehman and Bear going to 33:1 or 40:1 assets to equity. Of the five, only two firms exist as independent entities today - Morgan Stanley and Goldman. Merrill was sold, Bear and Lehman went tits up, Morgan was effectively insolvent as it couldn't meet some of its cash calls (I am told) and Goldman was rumoured to be days away from shutting down. Also, those overseeing federal regulation of the mortgage market effectively barred states from pursuing companies that were engaged in predatory lending practices. The Commodities Modernization Act, which explicitly barred barred regulation of derivative securities, also played a big role.
More on the CRA and the GSEs here.
http://www.usmessageboard.com/economy/70006-cra-not-to-blame-for-housing-debacle.html