Tag Archives: minority lending

The Importance of Mortgage Data

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Senate Bill 2155 is looking like it will be enacted and reduce the amount of data collected pursuant to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The Federal Reserve Bulletin includes a report that demonstrates just how useful that data is, Residential Mortgage Lending in 2016: Evidence from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Data. Key findings of the report include,

1. The number of mortgage originations in 2016 rose 13 percent, to 8.4 million from 7.4 million in 2015. For loans secured by one- to four-family properties, growth was strong in both home-purchase originations—which increased to 4.0 million from 3.7 million in 2015—and refinance originations—which increased to 3.8 million from 3.2 million in 2015.

2. Black and Hispanic white borrowers increased their share of home-purchase loans for one- to four-family, owner-occupied, site-built properties in 2016, the third consecutive annual rise for both groups. The HMDA data indicate that 6.0 percent of such loans went to black borrowers, up from 5.5 percent in 2015, while 8.8 percent went to Hispanic white borrowers, up from 8.3 percent in 2015. The share of home-purchase loans to low- or moderate-income (LMI) borrowers decreased to 26 percent in 2016 from 28 percent in 2015.

3. The average value of home-purchase loans rose 3.2 percent in 2016, to $257,000, with similar increases for loans made to borrowers of different racial and ethnic groups. The average value of home-purchase loans to Hispanic white borrowers remained well below the 2006 peak, while the averages for Asian, black, and non-Hispanic white borrowers were all above their 2006–07 peaks.

4. Black and Hispanic white borrowers continued to be much more likely to use nonconventional loans (that is, loans with mortgage insurance from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) or guarantees from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), the Farm Service Agency (FSA), or the Rural Housing Service (RHS)) than conventional loans compared with other racial and ethnic groups. In 2016, among home-purchase borrowers, 69 percent of blacks and 60 percent of Hispanic whites took out a no-conventional loan, whereas about 35 percent of non-Hispanic whites and just 16 percent of Asians did so.

5. The share of mortgages originated by non-depository, independent mortgage companies has increased sharply in recent years. In 2016, this group of lenders accounted for 53 percent of first-lien owner-occupant home-purchase loans, up from 50 percent in 2015. Independent mortgage companies also originated 52 percent of first-lien owner–occupant refinance loans, an increase from 48 percent in 2015. For the first time since at least 1995, non-depository, independent mortgage companies accounted for a majority of each of these types of loans. (2-3)

 It is important that HMDA data continue to provide a reliable overview of the mortgage market so that changes in the market can be identified and policies can be modified to respond to them. It remains to be seen just how much Senate Bill 2155 will reduce the usefulness of HMDA data. Time will tell.

The Community Reinvestment Act: Guilty of What?

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Ray Brescia recently posted the final version of The Community Reinvestment Act: Guilty, but not as Charged to SSRN. The article wades into a seemingly technical debate that has extraordinary political and ideological implications: did misguided liberal policies push financial institutions to engage in the risky lending practices that led to the financial crisis. I never gave this argument much credit because the supposed chain of causation seemed too attenuated to me. Nonetheless, the debate has had legs among some policy analysts. The article generally agrees with my own — admittedly impressionistic — views of the matter. It also argues that the CRA needs to be modernized to reflect how mortgage credit is extended in the 21st century. The abstract reads,

Since its passage in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has charged federal bank regulators with “encourag[ing]” certain financial institutions “to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with safe and sound” banking practices. Even before the CRA became law – and ever since – it has become a flashpoint. Depending on your perspective, this simple and somewhat soft directive has led some to charge that it imposes unfair burdens on financial institutions and helped to fuel the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007 and the financial crisis that followed. According to this argument, the CRA forced banks to make risky loans to less-than creditworthy borrowers. Others defend the CRA, arguing that it had little to do with the riskiest subprime lending at the heart of the crisis.

Research into the relationship between the mortgage crisis and the CRA generally vindicates those in the camp that believe the CRA had little to do with the risky lending that fueled these crises. At the same time, recent research by the National Bureau of Economic Research attempts to show that the CRA led to riskier lending, particularly in the period 2004-2006, when the mortgage market was overheated.

This paper reviews this and other existing research on the subject of the impact of the CRA on subprime lending to assess the role the CRA played in the mortgage crisis of 2007 and the financial crisis that followed. This paper also takes the analysis a step further, and asks what role the CRA played in failing to prevent these crises, particularly their impact on low- and moderate-income communities: i.e., the very communities the law was designed to protect. Based on a review of the best existing evidence, the initial verdict of not guilty – that the CRA did not cause the financial crisis, as some argue – still holds up on appeal. At the same time, as more fully described in this piece, an appreciation for the weaknesses inherent in the law’s structure, when combined with an understanding of the manner in which it was enforced by regulators, lead one to a different conclusion; although the CRA did not cause the crisis, it failed to prevent the very harms it was designed to prevent from befalling the very communities it is supposed to protect.

The defects in the CRA that emerge from this review, in total, suggest not that the CRA was too strong, but, rather, too weak. They also point to important reforms that should be put in place to strengthen and fine-tune the CRA to ensure that it can meet its important goal: ensuring that financial institutions meet the needs of low- and moderate-income communities, communities for which access to capital and banking services on fair terms is a necessary condition for economic development, let alone economic survival. Such reforms could include expanding the scope of the CRA to cover more financial institutions, creating a private right of action that would grant private and public litigants an opportunity to enforce the law through the courts, and having regulators enforce the CRA in such a way that will put more pressure on banks to modify more underwater mortgages.

I doubt that this article will be the final word on this topic, both because the existing empirical work seems inconclusive and also because the topic is one that has important ideological implications for the right and the left (‘government caused the financial crisis’ versus ‘corporate greed run amok caused the crisis’). Nonetheless, this article provides a thorough critique of one of the leading empirical studies of the topic.