NOTHING IS THREATENING THE U.S. FINANCIAL MARKETS, and indeed the U.S. economy, as much at the relentless rise in home foreclosures.
The overhang of foreclosed homes for sale is pummeling home prices and laying waste to entire neighborhoods. In the process, consumer spending has suffered mightily and deepened the recession as Americans have seen the value of their most important assets, their homes, plummet in value.
Likewise, some $1.5 trillion of securities backed by subprime and similar mortgages have continued to decline in value, destroying the capital of many major banks and other financial institutions faster than the government has been able to replenish it under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Yet, Uncle Sam's attempts to stem the tide of foreclosures and arrest the baleful fall in home prices have been, in a word, pathetic. The latest effort -- the proposal floated last week by the Treasury Department to exhort banks to offer super-low 4.5% mortgages -- was a step in the right direction. But in extending support to buyers of homes, it completely ignores the agonies of the roughly 50 million families that already have mortgages. As a result, it does little to halt the surge in foreclosures. Some 2.85 million home owners are likely to default this year, rising to as many as 4 million next year, according to Moody's Economy.com.
That's why Barron's is proposing sweeping action. First and foremost, the government should make that same 4.5% mortgage rate, the lowest in decades, available to all American homeowners through refinancings. Banks and other lenders would write the loans and then sell them to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the secondary-market giants that were nationalized in early September.
The new rates, and lower monthly payments, would be especially helpful for homeowners with negative equity (they owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth). Such underwater borrowers -- prime candidates for default -- account for about $2 trillion of the $11 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt outstanding.
Meanwhile, the government must help "modify" the most troublesome group of mortgages -- the roughly $500 billion of subprime and Alt-A mortgages that are in arrears and headed toward foreclosure. The government should facilitate extending the amortization periods from 30 years to as long as 40 years, cutting rates to 4.5% or lower and, on some loans, reducing principal balances.
Ambitious as all this is, it could probably be accomplished for $100 billion. That's a relatively small sum in the context of this year's bailouts, and it would excise the very tumor that triggered the global financial meltdown last year. The key: smart use of Fannie and Freddie, which up to now have been vastly underutilized.
Is this proposal utopian? Not really. We've talked to experts, from Economy.com's Mark Zandi to former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, who in an op-ed piece in the New York Times early this year astutely warned of an impending mortgage-default tsunami. We've also borrowed from imaginative mortgage-relief ideas put forward by the likes of R. Glenn Hubbard and Chris Mayer of the Columbia Business School, long-time market strategist Edward Yardeni and the chief of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Sheila Bair.
The FDIC leader was turned down by Treasury when she sought $25 billion of the government's $700 billion TARP plan to provide a federal guarantee and loss-sharing on approximately two million modified home mortgages. But Bair's idea clearly had merit.
TO MAKE OUR PLAN WORK, the Federal Reserve would have to create a special funding facility for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac so that they could effectively borrow at Treasury rates. Currently, the two organizations are borrowing at a significant spread over Treasury rates.
That higher borrowing cost was the result of Treasury's refusal during the nationalization to "explicitly"
