The Empire 186

De Economist bericht:

'American mortgages
Bleak houses
NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

America's riskiest mortgages are set to pop. Where will the shrapnel land?
LAST March, ResMAE, a mortgage lender catering to risky borrowers, cut the ribbon on its new headquarters in Brea, California. The sprawling, 135,000-square-foot building dwarfed the company's 458 local employees. But it fitted the firm's outsized ambitions. Less than a year later the company, rather than its ribbon, was facing the chop. This week it said it had filed for bankruptcy and was selling its assets for a diminutive $19m.
ResMAE is one of over 20 casualties among America's “subprime” mortgage lenders, which serve borrowers with spotty credit histories at higher interest rates. This end of the market took on $605 billion of new mortgages last year, more than a fifth of the total. But as interest rates have climbed, these loans have soured and the shares of bigger subprime lenders, such as Countrywide Financial and IndyMac, have sagged.
Does the rot run deeper? That fear ran down a few spines on February 7th, when HSBC, Europe's biggest bank, revealed that bad loans at its American subprime mortgage division were 20% higher than expected. The same week New Century, the second-biggest such lender in America, projected a big drop in loans this year because of poor market conditions.
They are not the only ones exposed to America's home-loan blues. Citigroup peddles mortgages to risky borrowers through CitiFinancial, its consumer-finance arm. Subprime lenders have also been scooped up by investment banks, including Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Deutsche Bank, in recent months. Notably absent are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America's government-sponsored mortgage giants. Both were set up for people who dreamt of homeownership, but could not afford it. They also have the best data on borrowers, including those rejected for loans in the past. Perhaps they knew something others did not.
Indeed, the woes of the subprime lender are mostly self-inflicted. After interest rates turned up in 2004, mortgage-makers could no longer count on custom from homeowners looking to switch to new mortgages at cheaper rates. Saddled with expensive lending platforms, mortgage-writers were desperate for a new source of revenues. They found two: riskier borrowers and riskier products.'

Lees verder: http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8706627