Waarom stapten banken in 'slechte hypotheekleningen'

[Cees Binkhorst]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Het verwonderde me al een tijd waarom de banken zo algemeen in 'slechte'
hypotheekleningen waren gestapt. Was het slechte voorbereiding, jacht op
winst, etc.?

Onderstaand deel van een blog verklaart veel.
Het zou een systematisch foutieve beoordeling zijn, die moeilijk te
onderkennen was.

Wat me wel verwondert is dat de posting van maart 2007 is, dus voordat
sommige banken groots in dit soort leningen stapte (b.v. UBS).

Groet / Cees

PS. Onderstaande 'post' is een onderdeel van 13 afzonderlijke
verklaringen van onderdelen van de hypotheekmarkt op het adres
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2007/07/compleat-ubernerd.html
Zoals 'ubernerd' al enigzins aangeeft, nogal technisch ;)

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2007/03/ficos-and-aus-we-will-add-your.html

FICOs and AUS: We Will Add Your Distinctiveness to Our Collective
[deel weggelaten]
>>From using FICOs as a short-hand indication of credit quality, it was a
short step to using them to price things. By price, I mean more than
just setting the interest rate and points for an individual loan, or
even the price of a security or tranche thereof. FICOs are involved in
setting the required credit enhancement levels of a security (such as
overcollateralization), the MI premium required, the due diligence level
required, and any number of things that, basically, come out of the
yield of a loan. I, actually, worry as much if not more about this issue
than I do in using FICOs as part of the initial underwriting. We’ve had
occasional discussions here on the blog about “guideline rationing”
versus “price rationing” as mechanisms of credit crunching. That whole
issue is about whether available credit is reduced as much by making it
too expensive as by re-writing the guidelines so that people don’t
qualify for certain kinds of loans. It’s a true chicken-and-egg problem,
though. Suffice it to say, for now, that a large distortion may have
entered the market during the boom because FICO (a kind of derivative or
simplification of a complex credit analysis) drove a lot of pricing
decisions. That, in short, is the “Alt-A” problem in a nutshell: not
only did the FICO of those loans make them look like “prime,” it made
people willing to price them at tiny risk premiums over prime. So
pricing models have to get as complex as AUS models, and they have to be
applied to the right kind of product, or else you have the same problem
as I’ve indicated above with using LP or DU to underwrite a
“nontraditional” loan. Borg pricing is as scary as Borg underwriting.

The rating agencies do have their own software—S&P’s Levels is generally
the standard—that are supposed to account for pricing/credit enhancement
levels on nontraditional product. I still think those models over-weight
FICO, and that that’s a large part of why it seems that “Alt-A” is
deteriorating “so fast.” There’s a whole issue out there about why,
then, people aren’t using more AUS like CLUES or AssetWise, which were
designed to handle Alt-A, but that kind of gets complicated by what
we’re hearing from Countrywide and RFC about their own little Alt
problems. Perhaps building an Alt AUS is harder than everyone thought?
Perhaps speed and efficiency are more “expensive” than we thought?
Perhaps you don’t have to be an outright Luddite to conclude that,
maybe, we should give this tech fetish another thought? I have observed
before now that I very often think we fail to consider certain kinds of
tech in the mortgage business at its “true cost,” and that once you do
that, you often find the vaunted cost savings and productivity increases
kind of evaporating on you when your business adapts, like the Borg
does, to whatever high-tech weapon you can fire at it. But I am known as
an unassimilated thinker.

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