Posts Tagged ‘mortgage’
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As anyone who has been monitoring this blog will have noticed, my posting has dropped off a cliff lately. I’m on a bit of a hiatus for the next couple months as I ramp up for the CFA exam. I will try to make some occasional posts as I stumble across anything of interest.
Along those lines, check out Rick Santelli’s recent rant on the new “stimulus plan” to socialize mortgages. As a rule, I tend not to be very political as politics is 99% hot air and 1% follow through, but I would have to agree with Santelli’s beef on this one.
Ciao,
Franco
In the first part of this two part series, we covered the different types of home loans and the role of a mortgage broker in the “no cost refinance.” Now let’s look at what information we need in order to maximize our savings. As previously discussed, the no cost refinance uses a lender credit to cover the cost to close a refinanced home loan. The lender credit is generated when the mortgage broker sells you a loan at a rate that is higher than the current market rate. This is known as the yield spread premium (YSP). The key to having the YSP work in your favor (cover closing costs) as apposed to lining your mortgage broker’s pocket is being well informed on the market wholesale rate and the YSP compensation.
The worst part of refinancing (other than the headache) is paying all those closing costs. With so many hands in the cookie jar, the fees just keep piling up. And some of them are just plain stupid…I mean, why do I need title insurance for a refinance on a home financed in my name? If you have ever gone through the refinancing process, you know it can be quite a hassle. Unfortunately, there is nothing I can do about the refinancing process being a royal pain in the rear, but what I can help you with is the cost of refinancing. There is a way to refinance your home without having to pay any additional out of pocket expenses AND without raising your principal balance.
The final episode of this series opens in summer of 2006 at the peak of the US housing markets. Consumers have been leaning on their home equity to finance their spending and drive economic growth. In addition, the advent of the credit default swaps have made risk a transferable and tradeable product. The perception that risk can be stripped out of an investment vehicle and transferred to another counter party has driven credit spreads (the difference between the cost of risky, corporate debt and the risk free US government debt) to historically low levels. Tight credit spreads have made it very cheap to borrow money and create leverage to amplify returns. But all that is about to change as the era of easy money and excessive leverage comes to a screeching halt.
In the first two parts of this series, we covered the rise of securitized loans and birth of credit default swaps. We left off in the throngs of a raging bull market being driven by a new era of technology companies. With the exception of a few hiccups, Wall Street has perpetuated almost 20 years of wealth creating, bull market returns on the backs of financial leverage, innovation, and good ol’ fashion greed.
We last left off with a red hot financial market in the mid 1980’s being led by the fancy MBS (mortgage backed security) and CMO (collateralized mortgage obligation) securities running in tandem with a leveraged paradise known as the junk bond market. The easy money and lavish lifestyles of the 1980’s were not isolated to Wall Street. Savings and loan (S&L or “thrifts”) institutions across the nation were taking advantage of the newly implemented Tax Reform Act of 1986. The new act was passed to update “old banking standards” and allow thrifts to take on more risk in order to better compete in the “complex financial markets” of the 1980’s. Thrifts ran with their new found freedom and grew like wild fire. Some of the more aggressive ones were doubling in size every year with less than ethical lending practices. All this easy money was making thrift executives very rich and further compounded the greed running rampant through the markets of the 80’s.
Falling home values, growing unemployment, plunging stock prices; how did we get into this mess? Well, in order to fully understand our current economic funk, we need to go back and examine the roots of what has now been coined the credit crisis. So take a walk with me down memory lane while we explore the origins of securitized loans and unregulated swap contracts in a fascinating tail of innovation, riches, stupidity, and good ol’ fashion greed.
