Analyzing the Effects of CFPB Oversight

Andreas Fuster, Matthew Plosser, and James Vickery



The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), created in 2011, is a key element of post-crisis U.S. financial regulation, as well as the subject of intense debate. While some have praised the agency, citing the benefits of consumer financial protection, others argue that its activities involve high compliance costs, increase uncertainty and legal risk, and ultimately reduce the availability of financial services for consumers. We present new evidence on whether the CFPB’s supervisory and enforcement activities have significantly affected the supply of mortgage credit, or had other effects on bank risk-taking and profitability.

How Is Technology Changing the Mortgage Market?

Andreas Fuster, Matthew Plosser, and James Vickery




The adoption of new technologies is transforming the mortgage industry. For instance, borrowers can now obtain a mortgage entirely online, and lenders use increasingly sophisticated methods to verify borrower income and assets. In a recent staff report, we present evidence suggesting that technology is reducing frictions in mortgage lending, such as reducing the time it takes to originate a mortgage, and increasing the elasticity of mortgage supply. These benefits do not seem to come at the cost of less careful screening of borrowers.

Just Released: New York Fed Press Briefing Highlights Changes in Home Equity and How It’s Used

Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw



At a press briefing this morning, economists at the New York Fed focused on the evolution of housing wealth and its use as collateral. Their comments came in connection with the Center for Microeconomic Data’s release of its Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the first quarter of this year. The briefing opened with remarks from Director of Research Beverly Hirtle, who described the importance of housing wealth and how it has evolved since 2000. Bank economists then explored the data on housing wealth more deeply in this presentation, which includes three parts: (1) an overview of recent developments on household balance sheets, with a focus on housing values and mortgage debt; (2) a discussion of how housing wealth has changed over time and how it is distributed across households; and (3) facts on the changing nature of how households have used their home equity.

Landing a Jumbo Is Getting Easier

Andreas Fuster, James Vickery, and Akhtar Shah



The United States relies heavily on securitization for funding residential mortgages. But for institutional reasons, large mortgages, or “jumbos,” are more difficult to securitize, and are instead usually held as whole loans by banks. How does this structure affect the pricing and availability of jumbo mortgages? In this post we show that the supply of jumbo mortgages has improved in recent years as banks have become more willing to take on mortgage credit risk on their own balance sheets.

Just Released: Great Recession’s Impact Lingers in Hardest-Hit Regions

Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joelle Scally, and Wilbert van der Klaauw



The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data today released our Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2017. Along with this report, we have posted an update of state-level data on balances and delinquencies for 2017. Overall aggregate debt balances increased again, with growth in all types of balances except for home equity lines of credit. In our post on the first quarter of 2017 we reported that overall balances had surpassed their peak set in the third quarter of 2008—the result of a slow but steady climb from several years of sharp deleveraging during the Great Recession.

Did Import Competition Boost Household Debt Demand?

Jean-Noel Barrot, Erik Loualiche, Matthew Plosser, and Julien Sauvagnat



In the years preceding the Great Recession, the United States experienced a dramatic rise in household debt and an unprecedented increase in import competition. In a recent staff report, we outline a link between these two seemingly unrelated phenomena. We argue that the displacement of workers exposed to import competition fueled their demand for mortgage credit, which left many households more vulnerable to the eventual downturn in the housing market.

At the New York Fed: The Appropriate Government Role in U.S. Mortgage Markets

W. Scott Frame and Joseph Tracy

While the U.S. mortgage finance system was at the center of the recent financial crisis, it remains largely untouched by legislative reforms. At the center of these conversations are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both of which were placed into federal conservatorship in September 2008. Now, nearly nine years later, the fate of these two government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) and the prospect of related changes to the mortgage finance system are once again a focus of policy discussion. In this post, we summarize the main themes of a recent New York Fed workshop where policymakers, academics, and practitioners gathered to consider the future structure of the U.S. housing finance system.

Just Released: Bank Loan Performance Under the Magnifying Glass

James Vickery and April Meehl



The New York Fed’s recently released Quarterly Trends for Consolidated U.S. Banking Organizations (QT report) confirms that bank loan portfolios look a lot healthier than they did just a few years ago, reflecting the sustained economic recovery from the Great Recession. In this post, we sharpen the focus to look at bank loan performance in more detail, using more disaggregated charts added to the QT report this quarter.

Being Up Front about the FHA’s Up-Front Mortgage Insurance Premiums

W. Scott Frame, Kristopher Gerardi, and Joseph Tracy



The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) played a significant role in maintaining mortgage credit availability following the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis and through the Great Recession. Not surprisingly, the FHA’s expansion during a period of falling home prices and deteriorating economic conditions resulted in material losses to its mortgage insurance fund arising from mortgage defaults and foreclosures. These losses, in turn, have generated increased policy interest in the design of the FHA mortgage insurance program. In this post we analyze how the cost of FHA insurance is shared between mortgage defaulters and non-defaulters and find that non-defaulters pay a disproportionate share. Although the ten-year cumulative default rate for our sample of FHA mortgages is 26 percent, defaulters only pay 17 percent of total mortgage insurance premiums. We discuss changes to the FHA mortgage insurance pricing that would shift more of the premium cost to defaulters.

Houses as ATMs No Longer

Andreas Fuster, Eilidh Geddes, and Andrew Haughwout



Housing equity is the primary form of collateral that households use for borrowing. This makes it a potentially important source of consumption funding, especially for younger households. In a previous post we showed that owner’s equity in residential real estate has finally, thanks to increasing home prices, rebounded to and essentially re-attained its 2005 peak level. Yet in spite of a gain of more than $7 trillion in housing equity since 2012, so far homeowners haven’t been tapping this equity at anything like the pace we witnessed during the housing boom that ended in 2006. In this post, we analyze the changes in equity withdrawal.