by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 08:51:00 PM

Last week, after two years of blogging, I decided to take some advertising to defray some of the costs of this hobby. Today I'd like to welcome the first direct advertiser to CR: Zacks Investment Research.

And a special thanks to the Director of Research for Zacks, Dirk Van Dijk, who is a frequent participant in the comments.

I hope the banner advertisers receive fair value for their advertising dollars. Please visit them if you are interested in their products or services. However, just to be clear, there is no connection between the advertisers and the content on this blog. I've quoted Dirk in the past, and I probably will in the future (Tanta mentioned him today), but that is completely separate from any advertising relationship.

Second, I'm grateful to the readers for allowing me to assault their eyes with those annoying little links. I tried putting some links below the posts, but that was just too distracting. After puzzling over the payment algorithm for a few days, it is basically weighted entirely towards clicks - with little or no weighting for impressions. Hopefully some interesting Ads will show up in the sidebar for readers to check out - it's mostly been advertisements for subprime mortgages, and that hasn't generated a lot of click interest - but it has been good for some enjoyable snark in the comments!

And finally the blushing ... two of the blogs I reference frequently made some nice comments about me today. I sincerely appreciate the comments, and also the mention at CNN's Pat Reigner's blog Generation Risk.

Professor Hamilton (who literally wrote the book on Time Series Analysis) wrote at Econbrowser that Calculated Risk is "your one-stop-shop for all housing news" - an obvious exaggeration, but much appreciated.

And from Professor Roubini: Mainstream Monday Morning Quarterbacking on Subprime Mortgages..While Still Being Blind to the Spillovers and the Coming Credit Crunch

A minority of scholars and analysts - including Robert Shiller, David Rosenberg, the blogger Calculated Risk and a few others - already warned last summer about a severe housing recession ...

Roubini is too generous with his praise.

In many ways, Nouriel Roubini has been out front and taking the heat for those of us cautioning about excessive speculation in the housing market - and who now find ourselves cautioning about the probable unfortunate consequences (that hopefully won't be too severe).

Last year we jokingly calling Roubini "Eeyore" (from Winnie The Pooh). This started with a speech from Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher last August:

"I expect second-quarter GDP growth to be revised upward to closer to 3 percent. And my best guess one month and two weeks into the third quarter is that the speed at which we are now proceeding is roughly of that magnitude. From my vantage point, despite what you hear from some of the Eeyores in the analytical community, a recession is not visible on the horizon."

Of course we had some fun with Fisher's Eeyore remark. It was actually Professor Duy at EconomistsView who, after Fisher's speech, first jokingly called Dr. Roubini the "archetypical Eeyore".

It's looking more and more like Eeyore was right.

Best to all.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 05:15:00 PM

From Reuters (hat tip mp): Countrywide CEO says mortgages in liquidity crisis

Countrywide Financial Corp. Chief Executive Angelo Mozilo said on Tuesday the U.S. mortgage sector is entering a "liquidity crisis," but that investors and speculators are overreacting by punishing healthier lenders as well as marginal ones.

"This is now becoming a liquidity crisis," and "it's going to get uglier," Mozilo said on CNBC television.

UPDATE: Here is the interview (hat tip crispy&cole and R)

Part I

Part II

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 03:20:00 PM

CR note for new readers: Tanta posts here occasionally. She is a former bank officer and mortgage lending specialist who is currently on extended medical leave.

Jillysi asked a good question about this odd term “prime conforming” in the comments to an earlier thread, and Dirk van Dijk followed up with a good short explanation. I, who have never been able to leave a good short explanation alone, feel the need to complicate things slightly. Trust me; I have a purpose other than just making things difficult.

In the old days--a few years ago--you would find mortgage people using the term "conforming" in its fullest sense: a loan that conforms in all respects to the requirements of Fannie and Freddie. That includes the maximum loan amount—currently $417,000—but also all the other credit, underwriting, documentation, loan term, etc. requirements of the GSEs. A "nonconforming loan" was one that did not meet GSE requirements in at least one characteristic. It only takes one "fail" out of a long list of requirements to make the loan ineligible for purchase by the GSEs, but of course a loan can fail in more than one way. So the term “nonconforming” in this robust sense does not necessarily indicate the precise degree of deviation, just that there is at least some deviation.

Oldtimers also used the term "conforming balance" to refer to loans that are at or under the maximum loan amount. (This was a useful formulation because the actual conforming loan limit tended to change every year. Wise writers of credit policy did not put the actual current dollar limit in the guidelines or contracts in a hundred different places.) The term for loans over the maximum loan amount is "nonconforming balance" or, more usually, "jumbo." A jumbo loan could have exactly the same credit, product, and documentation characteristics of a conforming balance loan, but be simply too big to go to the GSEs. Or, of course, a jumbo loan could depart from GSE standards in multiple ways. There was a time, certainly, when nearly everyone’s jumbo guidelines were stricter—sometimes much, much stricter—than the GSE’s for things like LTV, FICO, DTI, reserves, and so on. The unsurprising idea here was that if you were lending that much more money, you needed to be that much more cautious. But then a certain housing price bubble came along, and those jumbo loan balances—especially in the conforming to $650,000 range or thereabouts—started to seem more “normal” in certain parts of the country. It therefore began to seem more “normal” that such loans should be offered on the same terms—or even more relaxed terms—than the GSEs use. A very dangerous idea was thus born.

As you can see, once these terms escaped their fairly precise use within the industry, and became more everyday terms in the financial press, they got a little less specific. Dirk is right that in most places the term "conforming" now generally refers specifically to loan balance, not to the long, long list of other requirements a loan must meet to be eligible for purchase by the GSEs. That's actually why you get this odd phrase "prime conforming." (To someone like me, that's an oddly redundant formulation.) "Prime" itself as a credit designation in the mortgage business was traditionally defined as the level of creditworthiness required for loans sold to the GSEs in their standard MBS programs. What happened is that 1) the GSEs started buying some subprime for their portfolios, so you couldn't always assume GSE = prime without carefully specifying that you meant the standard MBS programs, and 2) a huge market opened up for prime-credit loans that don't meet the GSE requirements in some other ways, now generally lumped into the big category called "Alt-A."

The usual story on "Alt-A" by the mortgage industry is that it is prime credit—that's the "A" part of the name—but it is based on some "alternative" way of structuring or qualifying or documenting a loan, the alternative being in reference to GSE standards. The problem this has and continues to create is that there becomes a question of how far off the reservation of GSE standards you can wander before the "Alt" part cancels out the "A" part. This is a question at the loan level, and also at the pool/MBS level.

Probably the big innovation that the GSEs had on the market for mortgage-backed securities, back in the day, was their process of selecting homogenous and uniform loans for their security pools. If you can create a set of rules—underwriting guidelines, product features, appraisal rules, all the way down to very detailed requirements for legal documents, property and title insurance, etc.—and make sure all loans fall within those rules, you can build a security with a fairly high degree of confidence in the assumptions about delinquency, default, prepayment, enforceability of legal rights in the event of foreclosure, and so on. This allowed the agencies to create reliable calculations for the guarantee fee they would need to charge the lenders in order to cover the credit risks of the pools; it also made it possible for various kinds of institutional and depository investors to buy those securities in a market that could establish apples-to-apples prices for them. The regulators of depository institutions had already reviewed the GSE guidelines, as it were, and given their general approval to such standards; the depository didn’t have to wade through a 400-page prospectus for each deal. GSE loans became the vanilla ice cream of the mortgage world.

Of course no one ever claimed that only GSE-style loans were worth making. First, of course, the GSEs by charter were limited to moderately-sized loans, and so there was always a segment of the market—the jumbo market—that was simply outside the GSE sandbox for charter reasons. Also, there have always been all sorts of near misses, one-offs, unique deals, and so on, that are certainly loans worth making, but that just can’t go to the GSEs; banks generally held these in their investment portfolios. Again, although it’s possible that such loans are of weaker credit quality than the GSE standards, it’s also possible that they’re more or less equivalent, if you go to all the trouble of wading through all the variables and risk layers and coming up with a total. The idea of GSE MBS was simply that neither investors nor the GSE’s buy side staff would have to do any “wading,” as an efficiency issue as much as anything else, and that prices for those securities could be set with a lot less fuss. There is of course a huge value to efficiency, if you’re trying to run a trillion-dollar securities market, but it was never intended to be the last word in credit quality.

So the big problem with “Alt-A,” from the beginning to right at the moment, was and is that you have to wade into the weeds. A lot. Much of the cries of outraged innocence we’re hearing lately from some investors stems from the fact that they didn’t wade very deeply into the loans underlying the securities they bought. There are lots of reasons for this; to my mind, the biggest one is that a bunch of people seemed to think that one could invest in Alt-A pools at the same operational cost as GSE MBS. But, of course, that’s missing the whole point. In any case, investors became more and more reliant on the rating agencies, whose job was largely to build models that would take these risk-layered loans and end up slapping some overall credit designation on the pool or the security or a tranche thereof. Many folks, right about now, are taking the rating agencies to the woodshed over some of the assumptions in those models and the rating agencies’ apparent inability to react (downgrade) fast enough when new data on performance catches up with some of these loan products underlying these pools. I can’t argue with the critics of the rating agencies in the specifics. On the other hand, I find myself chuckling a little—in a cynical way—over the underlying problem here. For the rating agencies to become fully effective modelers and predictors of credit risk for Alt-A is, at some level, for them to reinvent a certain wheel that the GSEs invented a generation or more ago on the “conforming” side. In other words, we’re expecting the rating agencies to homogenize the heterogeneous so that bond buyers can trade RMBS without doing all that wading and paying all those analysts and complicating all those VaR models. We want mocha java praline mango on a sugar cone at vanilla levels of efficiency.

Theoretically, that can be done—one can build guidelines and other requirements that standardize the Alt-A world fairly reliably, or at least break it down further into somewhat more homogeneous sub-classes—but I confess to being surprised that anyone thinks the rating agencies are the parties to do it. The GSEs were not simply standardizing other people’s loans: they were the buyer, the one on the hook for the credit guarantees, the party of the big risk kahuna. (So were/are the mortgage insurers, which is why you see a whole lot of overlap between MI and GSE credit guidelines.) I’m not sure what other people expect by asking fee-based rating agencies who are not owners of the risk to get in there and standardize the Alt-A market, but what I expect is not very much. My own view is that being on the hook in the event of default tends to concentrate the mind in ways that making fees off of the volume of securities issued does not. Call me cynical if you want, but I think I’m just making a pretty obvious point about how risk works.

So why, you ask, are not the real risk-owners—the buy-side Wall Street firms and big originators who invest in or securitize Alt-A—making it an efficient and standardized market? Well, because it’s a competitive market. Those who like to complain about the GSEs being “monopolies” like to imply that the more competition in the mortgage marketplace, the better things will be. I have my doubts about some of that for lots of reasons, but I will note that the other side of “monopoly” is homogeneity, efficiency, and transparency to the investor (at least as far as the underlying loans are concerned; I’m not talking about GSE accounting practices here. In fact I have no objection to FASB holding a “monopoly” on accounting standards, to make a related point.) Once “competing” products or loans or security issues enter the marketplace, by definition the things can’t just be more of the same. In a marketplace unprepared to do the analysis, due diligence, and complex price-modeling on these “competing products,” it became, after the dust settled, a fairly predictable question of the highest apparent yield getting the most bids. Anyway, one reliable sign that there’s a bubble going on is not so much the repeated statement that “it’s different this time,” but the repeated habit of using “the same” analytical or due diligence or pricing tools on what is clearly not “the same” precisely because it was marketed to you in the first place as “not the same old same old.” I cannot help offering a general “duh” here to certain institutional investors who have just discovered something that was hidden in plain sight.

This is rather a long way of saying that there are reasons—big, important reasons—why this terminology you’re all being confronted with is so confusing. I suspect most non-experts think that the industry has some secret decoder ring that it uses to make precise statements about what all these terms really refer to, and are endlessly frustrated when people like me keep saying otherwise. But it is, in fact, otherwise. When you look at statistics that show, for instance, that certain kinds of loans accounted for less than five percent of the mortgage market five years ago, but last year may have accounted for a third or a half or even three-quarters, what you are seeing is the development of a “nonstandard” market, one that is becoming big enough to require its own “standard” language, after the fact, as it were. It is not that a bunch of industry insiders sat down at the planning desk back in 2001-2002 and said, “let’s call this stuff “prime conforming” or “Alt-A” or “exotic” or what have you. Someone asked in the comments yesterday what “non-IO” meant. It means a loan that amortizes, as opposed to an IO loan, which does not. But why would anyone use such an odd formulation as “non-IO”? Because before the mania for IO loans, no one even used a label for “amortizing” loans. Outside of a tiny slice of a highly specialized market, they all amortized. Given a limited data set, it was not a useful characteristic to remark on. Nowadays, one of the first questions you have to ask about a loan is whether and how (positively or negatively) it amortizes. If you have never heard the phrase “positive amortization,” now you know why. It had to be made up as the opposite of “negative amortization,” even though it is also a bizarrely redundant term, like “prime conforming.”

At the end of the day, one of the reasons that the regulators are struggling to rein in the industry is, exactly, that they first have to define terms and classes of loans that do not have “traditional” meanings. They are doing what the GSEs had to do back in the 70s and 80s. And the whole process is muddled and manipulated by certain folks who have an interest in things remaining “competitive,” which you can bet is quite often code for “unregulated.” My own view is that the proponents of “efficient markets” and the magical properties of “competition” as such have a fair amount of explaining to do after the last several years. What we are seeing now in the mortgage market can, if you want, be seen as a real-life experiment in what happens when “conformity” becomes a bad word and “alternatives” are always assumed to be good things. Those of us who want to see the “grownups back in charge” aren’t really asking to take the economy back to 1983 or to underwrite every loan to GSE standards; we simply want the risk management and regulatory decisions being made by someone who has enough big-picture grasp on market processes to be able to see through marketing slogans and the psychological enticements of terms like “alternative,” and preferably has either lived through or studied periods of credit crises enough to be hard to fool with fast-talk. I wish I could tell you that I am holding my breath.

Tanta.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 02:18:00 PM

From MarketWatch: New foreclosures at record high

Many more U.S. homeowners were unable to keep up with their mortgage payments in the fourth quarter, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Tuesday, with the rate of homes entering the foreclosure process hitting a record 0.54% and the delinquency rate on U.S. home loans leaping to 4.95% from 4.67% three months earlier.
...
The rise was led by subprime mortgages, where delinquencies increased to 13.33% from 12.56%, and FHA loans, which saw a record-high delinquency rate of 13.46%. Trouble in subprime mortgages, made to borrowers with the riskiest credit, has roiled lenders and the stock market in recent days.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 10:03:00 AM

The National Retail Federation reports: Cold Weather, Slow Housing Market Lead to Lackluster February

According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), retail industry sales for February (which exclude automobiles, gas stations, and restaurants) rose 2.7 percent unadjusted over last year and declined 0.5 percent seasonally adjusted from January.

February retail sales released today by the U.S. Commerce Department show that total retail sales (which include non-general merchandise categories such as autos, gasoline stations and restaurants) increased 0.1 percent from January and increased 3.4 percent unadjusted year-over-year.

"Retailers continue to feel the backlash of the sluggish economy," said NRF Chief Economist Rosalind Wells. "Winter weather and the slowing housing market put a dent in what could have been a solid February for many retailers."

At least the NRF isn't just blaming the weather.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 08:40:00 AM

Press Release: Accredited Pursuing Strategic Options

Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co. (NASDAQ:LEND - News; "Accredited" or "Company") announced today that it is currently exploring various strategic options, including raising additional capital to enhance liquidity and provide the Company with the flexibility to retain or sell originated loans based on an assessment of the best overall return. Accredited's available cash resources have been affected primarily by margin calls under its warehouse and repurchase facilities since January 1, 2007, all of which have been met to date, as well as ongoing loan repurchases. The Company reported that it has paid approximately $190 million in margin calls on its facilities since January 1, 2007. Approximately two-thirds of those margin calls have been received and paid since February 15, 2007.

In addition, Accredited is seeking waivers and extensions of waivers of certain financial and operating covenants under its warehouse and repurchase facilities, including waivers relating to required levels of net income. The Company has been operating under various waivers under these facilities since December 31, 2006. There can be no assurance that the Company will be successful in receiving any of the required waivers.

Accredited also reported that it is pursuing certain cost restructuring initiatives, including further workforce reductions.

The Company continues to evaluate impairment of the goodwill established in its acquisition of Aames Investment Corporation ("Aames") in the fourth quarter of 2006. In light of this evaluation, along with work that must be completed for the Company's year-end audit, it is unlikely that the Company will file its Annual Report on Form 10-K by March 16, 2007 as previously contemplated in its Notification of Late Filing on Form 12b-25 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 1, 2007.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 08:32:00 AM

From the Census Bureau:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $370.5 billion, an increase of 0.1 percent from the previous month and up 3.2 percent from February 2006. Total sales for the December 2006 through February 2007 were up 3.7 percent from the same period a year ago. The December 2006 to January 2007 percent change was unrevised from 0.0 percent.

From MarketWatch: U.S. retail sales rise 0.1% in February on cars, gas

U.S. retail sales stayed soft in February, rising just 0.1% after no gain in January, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Sales were led by a solid 0.9% rise in auto sales and a 1.2% rise in gasoline station sales, which was boosted by higher prices at the pump. Sales were weaker than Wall Street's expectations for 0.2% gains for both overall sales and for sales excluding autos. Sales elsewhere were weak. Sales excluding autos fell 0.1%, the first decline since October. And excluding both cars and gasoline sales, retail sales fell 0.3%, the largest decline since April 2004.

by Calculated Risk on 3/13/2007 01:10:00 AM

Manpower, Inc. reports: Outlook Survey Finds Hint of Restraint in U.S. Hiring Plans for the Second Quarter

"A look at the last three quarters of survey data suggests that employers are shifting into neutral when it comes to hiring," said Jeffrey A. Joerres, Chairman & CEO of Manpower Inc. "Companies expect to coast through the next three months without much growth in the way of staff. It is a subtle change that may not yet be perceived in the job market, however it is a break from the three plus years of nearly unchanged hiring plans."

by Calculated Risk on 3/12/2007 06:19:00 PM

CR Note: To put the title into context, last December during the Toll Brothers conference call, Ivy Zelman asked CEO Bob Toll:

"Which Kool-aid are you drinking?"

From Tanta:

Ivy Zelman and several colleagues at Credit Suisse have put together a very big and highly detailed equity research report called “Mortgage Liquidity du Jour: Underestimated No More,” which unfortunately is not available on the free internet. Although the title may suggest otherwise, the report is not really about mortgage credit issues; it is an attempt to look at the rapidly deteriorating conditions in the mortgage market for their impact on homebuilders, which are the equities Zelman covers. (Sure, CR basically has already done exactly this analysis, but Zelman has the advantage of access to databases and CSFB’s mortgage industry analysts.) The upshot is that Zelman is not drinking the kool aid that the problems are limited to subprime only, or entry-level housing only, or are going to be over any time soon.

First, the report looks at overall recent trends in the large categories of general credit quality (prime, Alt-A, and subprime):

See document here. Just the leads are in this post to let the reader find the text.

The overall share of prime conventional loans . . .

The report then summarizes the current situation of guideline tightening and regulatory changes that are contracting the mortgage market (a familiar list of items to CR readers). It concludes that

[T]ightening liquidity puts current builder backlogs at considerable risk ...

Moving beyond changes in the origination market, the report looks at issues of performance of the current mortgage book for its further impact on new home sales:

We estimate that there are approximately 565,000 homes in the foreclosure process...

Finally, the report turns consideration of this data into a set of projections of the effect on new and existing home sales:

In our base case, we assume that 50% of the subprime market is at risk, . . .

by Calculated Risk on 3/12/2007 03:46:00 PM

From CNNMoney (hat tip Anthony): Countrywide may feel subprime earnings drag

Countrywide told its brokers Friday to stop offering borrowers the option of taking out a mortgage without a down payment ...

UPDATE: From Reuters: Countrywide says subprime turmoil may harm results

Countrywide Financial Corp. ... said on Monday that foreclosures rose to a five-year high and turmoil in the subprime market may hurt earnings ...

The increase in foreclosures is the latest sign of stress in the mortgage lending sector, which is struggling with mounting losses and rising defaults.
...
Countrywide said the foreclosure rate rose to 0.70 percent from January's 0.69 percent and last February's 0.47 percent.

It also said 4.71 percent of loans were at least 30 days past due, the same as in January and up from 4.29 percent last February. The rate matched the second-highest level over the last five years.

And from the Broker's Grapevine (caution should be used when reading these posts): Is Countrywide subprime no longer in business?

I just looked at the matrix. Max CLTV for any score or doc type subprime is 90%.
by Kyle@CreveCor March 12, 2007
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my rep says they got rid of middle management. and cutting reps from 9 to 4. said a 80/20 the first will have a rate of around 10%. hang on ya´ll
by diva for loans March 12, 2007
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I was an AE with them....I was let go as of this morning. From what I understand, about 70% of the outside sales force was fired today. On top of that a lot of the middle management was fired as well. Next step will of course be Ops staff.

Not sure if they´ll stick around or not...but they will be much smaller than before.

by MakinDreams March 12, 2007
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