F.H.A. Problems Raising Concern of Policy Makers

The New York Times ran an article today highlighting the mounting problems lurking in the FHA ("FHA Problems Raising Concern of Policy Makers"). The article also contained a skematic demonstrating how the most recent mortages are the most distressed. Specifically, more than 20% of all FHA mortgages underwritten in 2008 are in default (see below).



I have included below some key quotes/takeaways from the article. While I am convinced that the FHA will end up requiring a bailout from the federal government, it is striking to me how so many of our politicians are deluded into thinking this program is actually serving a valuable function.

• David H. Stevens [Head of the F.H.A]…acknowledged that some 20 percent of F.H.A. loans insured last year — and as many as 24 percent of those from 2007 — faced serious problems including foreclosure, offering a preview of a forthcoming audit of the agency’s finances.
• It appears destined for a taxpayer bailout in the next 24 to 36 months,” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive, said in testimony prepared for the hearing. Mr. Pinto, who was the chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989 for Fannie Mae, went further than most housing analysts and predicted that F.H.A. losses would more than wipe out the agency’s $30 billion of cash reserves.
• The government is giving as many people as it possibly can the chance to buy a house or, if they are in financial difficulty, refinance it. The F.H.A. is insuring about 6,000 loans a day, four times the amount in 2006. Its portfolio is growing so fast that even F.H.A. backers express amazement.
• The number of F.H.A. mortgage holders in default is 410,916, up 76 percent from a year ago, when 232,864 were in default, according to agency data.
• 7.77 percent of the portfolio is in default, up from 5.6 percent a year ago.
• Got to love this asinine comment from Barney Frank: Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the defaults were, in essence, worth it. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing that the bad loans occurred,” he said. “It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That’s a policy.”
• Kenneth Donohue, the inspector general of the Housing and Urban Development Department, who is also F.H.A.’s watchdog said the drop in reserves was “a flashing red light” that the agency was not taking seriously enough…”He noted that if private lenders had raised their down payment requirements in the last two years, it raised the question, “what does the F.H.A. think it is doing by asking only 3.5 percent?”
• Chaz Fullenkamp, an automotive technician in Columbus, Ohio, got an F.H.A. loan even though he was living on the financial edge. “If I got unemployed, I’d be wiped out in a month or two,” he says. Thanks to the F.H.A., however, he is better off than he used to be. Mr. Fullenkamp used F.H.A. insurance to buy a house this spring for $179,000. The eager seller paid the closing costs and also gave Mr. Fullenkamp $2,500 in cash. He immediately applied for the $8,000 tax rebate. Even taking his down payment into account, he came out ahead. “I knew in my heart I could not really afford the house, but they gave it to me anyway,” said Mr. Fullenkamp, 22. “I thought, ‘Wow, I’m surprised I pulled that off.’ ”

Higher Downpayment for FHA Loans?

In a moment of apparent sanity by our elected officials, Congressman Scott Garrett (Rep-NJ) proposed a bill today that would raise the FHA’s minimum downpayment from 3.5% to a whopping 5%. The bill would also eliminate FHA financing of closing costs (apparently the legal and title fees are too much for many homebuyers to shoulder).

While hardly a meaningful deterrent from the speculative lending helping to inflate the housing market, the bill suggests to me that at least some legislators are waking up to the disaster that is the FHA. It will be interesting to see if the bill gets passed, though the pessimist in me says that the majority of folks in Congress will not want to do anything to disrupt the “nascent recovery” in housing.

The market has been due for a correction for a multitude of reasons, not least of which is a 60% run off the bottom. However, anything that results in a tightening of mortgage credit (i.e. higher downpayments for FHA loans, allowing the $8,000 new home buyer tax credit to elapse) or represents a lessoning of the government’s influence in the overall economy remains the most critical factors to monitor as investors gauge the sustainability of this liquidity driven rally.

For those who haven’t read it yet, I would definitely take a read of Fed Governor Kevin Warsh’s op-ed piece in last week’s Wall Street Journal (“The Fed’s Job Is Only Half Over”). While Warsh generally tows the party line that the economy remains very fragile and the Fed will likely need to maintain its accommodative stance for some time, he does suggest that the Fed should begin to plan its exit policy. While very subtle, it is the first time I have distinctly heard one of the Governors hint at a potential tightening by the Fed.

You be the judge based on these three paragraphs:

Today, even more than usual, we should maintain considerable humility about optimal policy. Financial market developments bear especially careful watching. They may impart more forward-looking signs of growth and inflation prospects than arithmetic readings of stimulus-induced gross domestic product or lagged composite readings of inflation. For example, the level of asset prices and associated risk premiums, and gauging their trend and durability, will demand careful assessment.

In this environment, market participants and policy makers alike should steer clear of ironclad policy prescriptions. Nonetheless, I would hazard the view that prudent risk management indicates that policy likely will need to begin normalization before it is obvious that it is necessary, possibly with greater force than is customary, and taking proper account of the policies being instituted by other authorities.

"Whatever it takes" is said by some to be the maxim that marked the battle of the last year. But, it cannot be an asymmetric mantra, trotted out only during times of deep economic and financial distress, and discarded when the cycle turns. If "whatever it takes" was appropriate to arrest the panic, the refrain might turn out to be equally necessary at a stage during the recovery to ensure the Federal Reserve's institutional credibility. The asymmetric application of policy ultimately could cause the innovative policy approaches introduced in the past couple of years to lose their standing as valuable additions in the arsenal of central bankers.

FHA - Leverage Ratio Exceeding Bear Stearns

As indicated in the chart above (courtesy of yesterday’s WSJ), the FHA’s leverage ratio has increased from a modest 14: 1 in 2003 to an expected 50:1 by the end of 2009. This far exceeds Bear Stearn’s 33:1 leverage at the time of its rock bottom sale to JP Morgan. While the FHA continues to insist that they won’t need a federal bailout, similar to the claims made by Fannie and Freddie prior to their government takeover, a mere 2% loss rate would wipeout the FHA’s capital position. Given that its loan delinquency rate (more than 30 days due) exceeds 14%, a national unemployment rate slowly creeping towards double digits, and the agency’s subprime like borrowers (who only have to come up with a mere 3.5% to qualify for a loan) I remain highly skeptical that the agency will avoid seeking some sort of federal assistance.

While yesterday’s Case Shiller index provided yet another positive data point for housing (only 2 of the 20 regions in the index posted sequential declines in housing), it is important to emphasis how dependent housing has become on the government. As I indicated in my prior post, the FHA’s market share has increased from a mere 2.7% in 2006 to approximately 25% today (and 40% in August alone!). The agency insures approximately $750 billion of mortgages today from $410 billion in 2006. Even more concerning is the projected growth in the agency’s portfolio, which is expected to exceed over $1 trillion by the end of next year. As a point of reference, Fannie and Freddie collectively insure approximately $5 trillion of mortgages or half all of all home mortgages.

Remember how fragile this housing recovery is the next time you see those shady infomercials encouraging you to refinance into an FHA loan. However, instead of some faceless pension fund in Japan taking a loss on its portfolio of securitized subprime Countrywide mortgages, US taxpayers will be left holding the bag from these busted FHA loans.

Japan's Demographic Time Bomb

This weekend’s Barrons featured a very grim article on Japan’s demographic time bomb (Is the Sun Setting on Japan?). Although I have always appreciated the structural debt & population challenges facing the country, I never really understood how grave they were. Some scary data points from the article include:
- Japan's gross national debt now equals 217% of its gross domestic product, compared with 81.2% for the often-maligned U.S. and an average of 72.5% for the G-20 nations (the 19 largest economies, plus the European Union), according to the International Monetary Fund.
- The latest United Nations median forecast estimates Japan's population will fall from a current 127 million to just 101.6 million by 2050 (a decline of 20%), while the U.S. count will rise from 317 million to 404 million.
- The number of Japanese of prime working age (15 to 64), which totaled 83 million in 2007, is likely to tumble to 49 million in 2050, while the over-65 cohort jumps from 27.5 million to nearly 38 million. This implies more than 77 elderly dependents for every 100 workers by 2050, compared with just 33 per 100 now.
- Japan's household savings rate—more than 20% in the early 1970s—has dipped to about 3%. That's less than U.S. households' 4.2% as of July.
- Japanese businesses are highly inefficient and shielded from domestic and foreign competition by complex regulations. Output per man-hour in Japan trails that of the U.S. by approximately 30%.


While many pundits are encouraged by the strong victory of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) in last month's national elections (which has promised to implement badly needed structural reforms to the country’s ailing economy) it will be extremely difficult to overcome the demographic tsunami facing the country. If you are not a Barron’s subscriber and would like to read the article please send me an email and I will be more than happy to forward along.

Government Involvement in Housing Market

As noted repeatedly over the last few months, several recent data points suggest the housing market has begun to improve off the unprecedented lows reached in April. Seasonally adjusted housing starts are up 25%, standing inventory of existing homes has been whittled down to 9.4 months (vs. over 11x months at the peak, though well above the 4-6 months indicative of a healthy housing market), and pricing has begun to firm, with the Case Shiller Index posting its first sequential monthly increase since July 2006. Although some regions of the country continue to experience declines (Vegas and Phoenix being amongst the most troubled), the recovery has generally been broad based, with some of the hardest hit markets (southern California, western Florida) demonstrating the strongest hints of recovery.

While a stabilization in the housing market is encouraging, investors must realize how critical the government’s role has been in driving this improvement. Firstly, the $8,000 tax credit for new homebuyers has significantly brought forward demand. This is particularly the case in California where residents also benefited from a $10,000 state-specific tax credit (though the program’s funding was exhausted in July). Further, mortgage rates have been artificially suppressed thanks to the Federal Reserve’s program to buy $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities and up to $200 billion of Fannie & Freddie debt securities by year-end. With a combined $810 billion expended to date on these two programs (see below), the Fed has kept conforming interest rates below 5.5%. Low mortgage rates and 30% peak to trough declines in home prices have resulted in off the charts affordability. However, once these spending programs are exhausted, we are very likely to see mortgage rates creep up. Even a 50-100 bps widening could have a meaningful impact on the housing market, particularly as unemployment moves towards double digits.
Despite the one-time tax credits and government orchestrated effort to suppress mortgage rates, no federal program has been more distortive than the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Created during the Depression to help minority and poor households realize the promise of homeownership, the FHA has become the government’s vehicle to prop up the housing market. With required downpayments of only 3.5%(much of which will be recouped through the $8,000 tax credit), the FHA has essentially taken the place of subprime in providing financing to at-risk borrowers. In 2006, the FHA insured 2.7% of all loans in the United States. Year-to-date, the agency has provided a government guarantee for 23% of all new mortgages and nearly 40% in August. Many of the public builders suggested in their most recent earnings calls that between 40% and 75% of all their buyers received FHA-insured mortgages last quarter. In fact, when combined with Fannie and Freddie, the government is now insuring close to 90% of all home mortgages and probably close to 100% for all new home buyers (see chart below)!
Several recent articles have highlighted the problems festering in the FHA. In fact, this morning the Washington Post ran an article suggesting that the FHA could breech its minimum capital ratio of 2%. Further, some 7.8% of FHA loans at the end of the second quarter were 90 days late or more, up from 5.4% a year ago. Even more perplexing is that the agency has never operated with a chief risk officer and has only recently sought to fill the position (even AIG Financial Products, Countrywide, and Lehman had chief risk offers!).

While the government will likely continue to support the housing market through the FHA, particularly with the 2010 election around the corner, I would be extremely wary of the headlines suggesting that the housing market is on stable footing. Just as Fannie, Freddie, and later subprime massively distorted the housing market over the last decade, so too has the FHA.
I will continue to report on this organization and Ginnie Mae (the government agency whose primary function is to guarantee mortgage backed securities comprised of FHA-insured mortgages) over the coming weeks and months. While I will also continue to highlight the improving trends in housing, it is always with an eye towards the government’s overarching influence that my enthusiasm will be vastly tempered.

Rapid Growth in e-book Sales

Great chart above showing the steep rise in e-book sales since the end of 2008. E-book sales were $37.6 million in Q2 2009, rising 45.7% from Q1 2009. In June alone, e-book sales were $14mm or 1.5% of the month’s overall book sales of $942.6 million. While still a tiny sliver of the overall book publishing market, sales are set to rapidly rise over the coming year with several new products in the pipeline including a new wireless reader by Sony (launched on August 25th), Apple’s highly anticipated tablet (hopefully released by Q4 2009, but more likely in early 2010), and Plastic Logic’s 8.5 x 11 inch touchscreen device (sometime in 2010). Further many of the new product launches, including Sony’s new Reader Daily Edition, are using a more open approach, allowing for easier use of content across multiple platforms. The leading open format appears to be EPub, created by the International Digital Publishing Forum, and utilized by Sony’s new device.

China's Underconsumption

Great chart from the Economist showing how little Chinese consumption comprises of the nation's GDP -approximately 35% vs. nearly 70% in the US. In fact, despite signficant growth in the nation's economy over the last decade, consumption as a percent of GDP is actually down from 49% in 1990. With over 1.3 billion people, a robust and growing economy, maturation of the country’s financial system, and the government’s increasing focus on expanding its social safety net for its aging populace (which discourages saving and permits a higher level of consumption during one’s most productive years), the Chinese consumer remains the most compelling investment story of our generation.