It really is the economy, stupid!

Despite the unbridled (okay, barely bridled) glee on Wall Street at the Dow’s climb above 13,000, the tide that’s raising some boats is swamping others and running a lot of dinghies aground. Let’s follow the money to a few ports of call that UP members care about. Apparently, we’re not the only ones concerned about the health of our finances as well as the health of our bodies. MSNBC’s Gut Check America reader poll on the issues Americans care most about, with more than 6,000 participants by midnight ET on June 7, found that the top two of the five finalists are UP issues – personal economy and health insurance. The other 3 finalists are: illegal immigration, the war in Iraq, and education (in that order).

Last week’s business news contained a sprinkling of articles on the money-business’s exploitation of the working poor. Froma Harrop’s article “The Vile Business of Preying on the Poor” in the Providence Journal neatly summarized a litany of horror stories of loan sharks and con artists plundering the wide, but shallow, pool of low-income workers. We have big financial “services” (yes, my tongue is in my cheek) companies entering the payday-lending market with annual interest rates of 120 percent. Subprime mortgage lenders, who charge high interest rates and fat additional fees to people who can’t get better interest rates, are now foreclosing on all the mortgages they blithely allowed the truly not-qualified to “qualify” for during the real estate boom based on the predicted appreciation of the houses’ values. Oopsie! Well, let’s take the jaundiced view – a lot of those “not ready for prime rates” homeowners were speculators themselves, hoping to flip a few houses with a few cosmetic improvements in a rising market. They’re losing investments, not the roof over their family’s heads. But others were the working poor, hoping to become homeowners instead of renters because banks would finally lend them more money than their incomes justified. When the real estate bubble burst, so did their dreams.

Those scenarios, we can probably understand. But wait … there’s a new twist. Harrop presents the intriguing fact that “Subprime mortgages … are packaged into securities. Investors currently hold more than $1 billion in subprime loans from 22 ZIP codes in Detroit alone, according to The Wall Street Journal.” Packaged into securities? Like the hot and sour soup is “packaged into” my Szechuan chicken and fried rice lunch at the Chinese fast food place? Nah! Couldn’t be! But yes, it is.

Quoth Wikipedia in an entry titled “SubPrime Meltdown”, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke discussed the increase in home ownership coinciding with the expansion of secondary markets in which mortgage loans were packaged and sold to investors. Among Chairman Bernanke’s observations on the “background and run-up to the present crisis in subprime lending,” he opined upon the “adjustments government regulators needed to make to minimize the scope and severity of subprime mortgage problems.”

Apparently, not much. Wikipedia quotes Bernanke: “ ‘We at the Federal Reserve will do all that we can to prevent fraud and abusive lending and to ensure that lenders employ sound underwriting practices and make effective disclosures to consumers.’ But, according to Bernanke, the kinds of innovations in credit markets represented by exotic subprime loan products have had a positive effect, opening up home-buying opportunities for millions of Americans. During the years when subprime products came into wider use, home ownership has expended from about 65 percent of all Americans in 1995 to 69 percent today, he said.” Well, all right then, that makes me feel better. A rise in home ownership of four percent over twelve years, compared to … what exactly is the current rate of foreclosures?

As of November 8, 2006, RISMedia, a real estate information site, reported that “Foreclosure marks 39 percent increase compared to last year.” Looking forward to 2007, the report continued, “Industry forecasters recently estimated that more than $200 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages will “reset” at higher rates in 2006 and over $1 trillion will reset in 2007. This situation, compounded by the expected slowing of the economy and the housing market, which according the National Association of Realtors includes a growing inventory of unsold homes, may edge more homeowners into the foreclosure process.”

But Chairman Bernanke remains sanguine, even half-way through 2007: “ ‘The effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system,’ he said. On June 5, 2007, Bernanke repeated his belief that troubles in the subprime mortgage market are ‘unlikely to seriously spill over to the broader economy or the financial system.’ ”

Why shouldn’t we rely on the happy-days predictions of this economic expert? For one thing, common sense tells me that people who are losing their homes (even if they’re house-flipping speculators losing their investment capital) are not going to be contributing very robustly to the economy overall. They’ll be too worried to work at optimum productivity, and they’re sure not going to be paying real estate taxes that contribute to the local school districts so they can produce educated citizens instead of illiterate thugs preparing to matriculate at Penitentiary

Then there’s the worrying attack of conscience that Business Week produced in a veritable True Confessions series on low-end lending – “The Poverty Business” report, “Getting Rich off the Poor,” “Perspectives on Profiting off the Poor,” and “Economics of the Poverty Business.”

As more of us who were the working middle class become the working poor, we need to rely on our educations for our survival. We may have to tighten our belts, lower our expectations (at least temporarily), retrench, get creative about what kinds of work to apply our brains to, and all those things that delay gratification. Fine! We can do that. Let’s just not get trapped by our own impatience. Let’s not mortgage our lives. It’s the economy, stupid. Let’s not be stupid about the economy.

Tags: adjustable-rate-mortgages, Ben-Bernanke, foreclosure, National-Association-of-Realtors, subprime-lending, subprime-mortgages

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2007 at 11:11 am and is filed under Directors Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.