Bailouts Without End

The Fed’s rescue of Bear Stearns and the Treasury Department’s nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in 2008 provoked widespread criticism. Consequently, the Fed and Treasury were very reluctant to approve further bailouts, and they allowed Lehman Brothers to fail in September 2008. Lehman’s collapse triggered a global panic and a meltdown of financial markets around the world. The Fed and Treasury quickly arranged a bailout of AIG, and Congress approved a $700 billion financial rescue bill. Treasury established the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which injected capital into large universal banks, while the Fed provided trillions of dollars of emergency loans and the FDIC established new guarantee programs for bank debts and deposits. In February 2009, federal regulators pledged to provide any further capital that the nineteen largest U.S. banks needed to survive, thereby cementing the “too big to fail” status of U.S. megabanks. The U.K. and other European nations arranged similar bailouts for their universal banks. Meanwhile, thousands of small banks and small businesses failed, millions of people lost their jobs, and millions of families lost their homes during the Great Recession.

Bank size as a source of competitive advantage of Chinese global systemically important banks

During the financial crisis in 2007–2009 banks all around the world suffered liquidity problems and were a subject to a system stability testing. The problems of large financial institutions, such as Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, drew attention to the issue of financial liquidity more than ever in 2007. After the collapse of Lehman Brothers a question was raised about the stability and system security of the largest institutions in the financial system. Credit institutions recognised as systemically important, are distinguished by the enormous size of assets, which creates the risk of being too big to fail or too important to fail. The extent of links with other institutions on the market through various market segments makes them also too connected to fail.

An Urn-Based Nonparametric Modeling of the Dependence between PD and LGD with an Application to Mortgages

We propose an alternative approach to the modeling of the positive dependence between the probability of default and the loss given default in a portfolio of exposures, using a bivariate urn process. The model combines the power of Bayesian nonparametrics and statistical learning, allowing for the elicitation and the exploitation of experts’ judgements, and for the constant update of this information over time, every time new data are available. A real-world application on mortgages is described using the Single Family Loan-Level Dataset by Freddie Mac.

Book Reviews

Sumit Agarwal of National University of Singapore reviews “Last Resort: The Financial Crisis and the Future of Bailouts,” by Eric A. Posner. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Argues that, in responding to the financial crisis that began in 2007, the US government violated the law and was able to gain control over AIG, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) early in the critical stage of the crisis—but it did so in the public interest.”

Republican Home-Owning

Ten years after failing and being rescued by our federal government, our nation’s principal secondary market makers in home mortgage loans – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – remain in federal receivership. The proximate reason for this is that neither Republicans nor Democrats in Congress have been able to find consensus – interparty or intraparty consensus – on what should be done with our home mortgage GSEs post-crisis. The deeper reason is that public – that is to say, citizen – ownership of secondary market makers in home loans is in a certain sense ‘natural’ in any republic, such as our own, where both middle class standing and that standing’s primary indicator – home-owning – are deeply ingrained in the citizenry’s self-ascribed national identity. This truth is yet more compelling when home prices, as they are bound to do anywhere homes are the primary middle class asset, become what I call 'systemically significant' - that is, when they become pervasive determinants both of other prices and of broader macroeconomic wellbeing. I conclude that the only sustainable future for Fannie and Freddie, not to say for the American middle class and our other GSEs (including our student loan GSEs), is to be found in their past. Fannie and Freddie should be forthrightly made citizen-owned once again as Fannie was through our home markets’ healthiest decades.

What, If Anything, Should Replace the QM GSE Patch?

In 2017, approximately 400,000 high debt-to-income mortgages met the definition of the Bureau of Consumer Finance Protection’s Qualified Mortgage rule thanks to an exemption that grants QM status to high-DTI loans guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. This exemption, referred to as the “GSE patch” is set to expire on January 10, 2021, or when the GSEs exit conservatorship, whichever comes first. This sets up an urgent need to determine what, if anything should replace the patch. This article offers three options to that end: 1) preserve the patch; 2) make QM determination based on overall riskiness, as measured by spread to a mortgage lending benchmark rate; or 3) drop the patch. The authors examine each option and recommend Option 2 because it strikes a healthier balance between expanding access to credit and limiting defaults to reasonable levels. Option 2 would eliminate both the DTI cap and the GSE patch while placing the private sector on a more equal footing with the GSEs.

The Board Diversity and Firm Performance: Malaysia Context

The large firms like Enron, WorldCom and Freddie Mac were involved in the crisis and the bankruptcy of corporate frauds and accounting scandals which were lack of effectiveness of their board of directors in those firms. Great board diversity will affect the firm performances in term of return on asset (ROA) and return of equity (ROE). This research used data of 385 samples of annual reports listed companies in Bursa Malaysia for the period of 2014 to 2016 were obtained and examined. The independent variables of board diversities are women in the board, board size, boards’ educational level and the boards’ experiences and control variables; firm size and firm leverage. After controlling the variables, the research shows only female has negatively significant towards ROE. It is because the number of female in board is very small. It also can be concluded that women have no power in board which the needed of them in making decision is low. For the control variables, firm size has positively significant towards ROA and ROE. Then, the firm financial leverage has a negatively significant towards ROA and ROE. For the future research, researchers are recommended for use other variables for board diversity such as board age and board independent and also use a long period of research such as for 5 to 10 years.