Here’s a fun fact for the day, derived by Harm Bandholz of Unicredit from the Fed’s latest Flow of Funds data:
Since the beginning of the financial crisis in mid-2007, … 130% of
all newly issued home mortgages were financed by GSEs.
GSEs mean government-sponsored enterprises, which mean Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the explicitly government-sponsored duo of the Federal Housing Administration and Ginnie Mae (which buys FHA-insured loans). How can they possibly have a 130% market share? A lot of refis into GSE-backed loans.
The numbers are even more dramatic if you just look at the most recent period for which data are available, the first three months of this year. Total home mortgage lending increased by $313 billion. GSE lending increased by $539 billion. That’s a 172% market share! Private asset-backed securities issuers, meanwhile, reduced their lending by $281 billion.
By contrast, in the peak year of the mortgage boom, 2005, the asset-backed securities issuers accounted for $560 billion in new loans, or 51%. The GSE market share was just 10%.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Fannie, Freddie and the FHA are all getting caught now in the shock wave from the housing collapse. But they certainly aren’t to blame for it.
Update: Tanta at Calculated Risk makes the important point that Fannie’s and Freddie’s relatively small role in the housing bubble wasn’t for lack of trying:
Fannie and Freddie had about as much to with the “explosion of high-risk lending” as they could get away with. We are all fortunate that they couldn’t get away with all that much of it. It is a fact that their market share dropped like a brick in the early years of this century, except of course for years like 2003, when fixed rates dropped to cyclical lows, refis boomed, and GSE market share shot up again, only to plummet in the years following during the purchase boom.
But they didn’t like losing their market share, and they pushed the envelope on credit quality as far as they could inside the constraints of their charter: they got into “near prime” programs (Fannie’s “Expanded Approval,” Freddie’s “A Minus”) that, at the bottom tier, were hard to distinguish from regular old “subprime” except–again–that they were overwhelmingly fixed-rate “non-toxic” loan structures. They got into “documentation relief” in a big way through their automated underwriting systems, offering “low doc” loans that had a few key differences from the really wretched “stated” and “NINA” crap of the last several years, but occasionally the line between the two was rather thin. Again, though, whatever they bought in the low-doc world was overwhelmingly fixed rate (or at least longer-term hybrid amortizing ARMs), lower-LTV, and, of course, back in the day, of “conforming” loan balance, which kept the worst of the outright fraudulent loans out of the pile. Lots of people lied about their income (with or without collusion by their lender) in order to borrow $500,000 to buy an overpriced house in a bubble market. They weren’t borrowing $500,000 from the GSEs.
Update 2: Now I’ve got charts!