The LA Times has an interesting piece on what is frequently called jingle mail:
Bankers and housing market analysts are warning of a chilling new trend in the mortgage world: Homeowners voluntarily defaulting on their loans even though they can actually afford to make the payments.
It’s known colloquially as “walking away,” or more jocularly as “jingle mail,” from the sound your house keys supposedly make when you mail them back to your bank.
It’s a way of saying that Americans are beginning to apply a cold financial calculation to home ownership: When a home’s value has fallen below what is owed on its mortgage, they feel it makes no sense to keep up the payments.
“That is going on, clearly, and there’s lots of evidence of that in the market,” Don Truslow, senior executive vice president of Wachovia Bank, said in a conference call with investors last month. A few weeks earlier, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson had waggled a stern finger at homeowners contemplating walking away from affordable mortgages: Do that, and you’re no better than a “speculator,” he said.
Elsewhere, media reports and Internet postings are rife with stories about the trend and a supposed sea change in American attitudes toward debt. But there’s a major problem with all this talk about the phenomenon of solvent homeowners “walking away”: There doesn’t appear to be any hard evidence that it’s actually happening.
Is the rhetoric about the crash of the housing market as overblown and overheated as the housing market itself once was?
mikkel
No John it’s worse. The key word is “solvent.” The argument is that walking away is a myth because people can’t afford to pay, not that they choose not to. Most people still have their heads up their asses about how bad things are.
mikkel
Er I didn’t state that clearly. “Walking away” implies that someone can pay but chooses not to. The people that say it’s a myth say there is no evidence that the people going into foreclosure can pay. So by debunking the myth, it shows that things are actually worse in a way than if it was true.
rachel
What about that Jose Canseco thing?
Janet Strange
Key quote form the article:
Behold again, how the Right “takes responsibility” for their actions. (I know, this is about mortgage lenders, not Republicans per se, but how many mortgage lenders do you think vote for Democrats?)
JR
I believe this is the bankers and hi-fi guys trying to blame the borrowers. See, if these people “walking away” really DID have the money to pay, then it was not poor lending standards or come-on salesmanship that caused the fiasco.
Whocoodanode this would happen? That’s the story they want.
MattF
Tanta at Calculated Risk has been saying this for quite some time now. And she’s an actual, you know, expert in the subject of mortgages and real estate.
mikesdak
I suppose it depends on the definition of “can afford to make payments”. I read of a theoretical scenario where a person walks away from a burdensome mortgage and buys another,cheaper house before the walkaway wrecks his credit.
The bankers who are yelling about this are trying to scare people off before it actually starts happening, but it seems to me all they’re doing is drawing attention to it.
As for being “no better than a speculator”, that’s a pretty thin argument when the speculators are being bailed out by Paulson’s buddies at the Fed while the homeowner is struggling to pay the mortgage and keep food on the table.
VidaLoca
Slightly OT, but only slightly — several people here, Tim among them I believe, have commented about what an excellent program they think “This American Life” on NPR is.
TAL (with support from Calculated Risk) did an hour-long segment on the housing/debt crisis this week, focusing on interviews with some of the bankers/brokers/investors who brought it into being. Interesting stuff — hearing the more senior, more “knowledgeable” people speak now about their regrets, “in my gut I knew it was wrong”. Hearing the more junior people who were making upwards of $1M/yr right out of college, partying their nights away with B-list celebrities. Plus a good, historical, non-expert-level description of how the whole thing worked and how it blew up.
Good stuff, particularly for someone like me whose eyes glaze over at mention of the “dismal science.”
More here: The Giant Pool of Money
Walker
Crash, no. Jingle mail, maybe. No one argues that people are not being foreclosed on left and right. Tanta at CR has just been unconvinced that a large number of people are actually walking away (as opposed to trying to keep the house).
b. hussein canuckistani
I like that “no better than a speculator” line. I love the way Republicans chide the little people for their lack of moral fiber.
If speculating is so bad, why isn’t the government acting against big time real estate speculation? Why aren’t irresponsible financiers like, say, the execs at Bear Stearns being perp-walked out of their mansions?
CJ
This reminds me very much of a recent interview I heard on NPR with a rather polished lobbyist of the insurance industry talking about the “rash” of insurance fraud that was being caused by the housing bust. Instead of jingle mail, the lobbyist was arguing that people would burn their houses down to collect the insurance to get out of trouble. Unfortunately, he didn’t have any statistics or any other evidence to back him up aside from allegations of a few suspicious fires. He did not even state that there were more suspicious fires now than in the past.
CJ
Walker
What Kevin Drum said:
r€nato
I think that’s exactly right. Speculators are going to walk, particularly if they had 0 down mortgages.
People who bought homes at the height of the bubble, on the other hand, I would think they would do their damndest to hold on to their homes, even if they are upside-down PLUS carrying one of those awful option ARMs/neg am loans.
Moving is not an easy task; you don’t do it just because you’re upside-down a little. One would have to be way upside-down or extremely mobile or both to contemplate just mailing in the keys.
I think most jingle-mailers will turn out to have been RE speculators who got caught with their pants down.
Scott H
Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson had waggled a stern finger at homeowners contemplating walking away from affordable mortgages: Do that, and you’re no better than a “speculator,” he said.
And by “speculator” Paulson means nearly everybody he knows. People he doesn’t know? Suckers!
Hank needs to learn to aim that waggin’ finger.
JGabriel
CJ:
There’s been a minor rash of arson in PA recently. Heard about it from family there, where it was covered on the local news.
Anyway, I personally speculated about whether it was related to the housing bust, and while they allowed that it might be a factor, they also said that it hadn’t been mentioned in the reports – and that as far as they knew, PA hadn’t been hit that hard by the housing crash.
Which correlates with your skepticism. Even if there is an upward tick in arson, there may be other causes such as local fraud – one is hard pressed to tie the cause to the housing bust if such an uptick is happening even where the housing market isn’t especially bad, relatively speaking.
.
RSA
Another oddity is the longstanding Republican plan for privatizing Social Security and putting that money in the stock market, which would seem to put every one of us in the position of being “no better than a speculator.”
carsick
I’d guess Jingle Mail is sent by upside down investors (not homeowners) who are incorporated. The corporation gets the hit. I’d also guess it happens in certain areas of the country…primarily new developments, not existing neighborhoods.
D-Chance.
No, it’s not so bad. The only difference is that all the new subdivisions being built locally are now selling McMansions in the mid 180s where they were getting into the 220s just a couple of years ago. If you are looking to buy a house because you want a HOME to call your own, this is a great time. Low prices, low mortgage rates. If you’re speculating and just want to buy up a house now in order to flip it next year… well, maybe not so much. The housing “bust” isn’t so much a bust for home ownership as it is a bust for those who saw houses as the next penny stock or beanie baby or rare baseball card.
Blue Buddha
This is most likely what is happening. Corporations and “house flippers” are the type who would just walk away from a property. Someone who lives in the house they mortgaged are more likely to stay there until the local sheriff drags them out screaming.
New developments in the exurbs have turned into slums, where once glorious McMansions, some not even completed, have been stripped of copper wiring, marked with graffiti, and turned into ganghouses and “shooting galleries”. A neighborhood that has been established for sometime may have a few empty houses here and there, but they are nowhere near to the point of a ghost town. Yet more karmic justice for idiots in tank-like SUVs who wanted to get away from “the scary brown people” in inner cities.
kwAwk
This is the key paragraph in the LA Times article that explains what the mortage companies and bankers are really trying to do:
“If it’s correct that there’s a change in behavior, all the default and credit risk models will have to be recalibrated,” Gabriel said. But he added: “I have not seen one shred of data that conclusively or systematically speaks to that point.” On the contrary, analyses of the most troubled segments of the mortgage markets suggest that the problem is still rooted in borrowers’ financial distress rather than their cynicism.”
The mortgage industry has traditionally been a prosperous yet unsexy industry that offered average returns. The whole Sub-Prime crisis sprang out of an effort to get higher returns in the industry and make it sexier, but with more risk, which led to poor lending practices and thus the Sub-Prime crisis.
Now all of these mortgage companies faced with their mess and faced with losing all of the extra profits the Sub-Prime mortgage bubble brought with it, is trying to use this as an excuse to restate their risk models to say that the mortgage industy is more risky, thus they deserve higher profits and should be able to charge higher interest rates on their mortgages to everybody and thus make up for the lost income they won’t get from Sub-Prime anymore.
In order to do this, they need to be able to attribute a risk increase on a new trend of irresponsible borrowers as opposed to taking responsibility for the present mess as being the effects of poor lending practices which would thus warrant a return to the old un-sexy responsible business practices.
kwAwk
To take the notion a bit futher, they are trying to follow the same path the oil companies have taken over the past 7 years.
In 2000 we were a world where oil was a long term environmental concern with the prospect of running out some number of decades from now.
However, in the last 7 years we have somehow become a world where oil is in such short supply that we face the imminent danger of having supply greatly exceed demand. This has allowed the oil industry to raise oil prices to record rates in a short time period and raise profits to levels never seen before.
Just think of all the goofy right wingers who constantly say that oil prices are so high because we haven’t built any refineries in 25 years. This in spite of the fact that the CEOs of the oil industries have testified under oath that they don’t want any refineries. And ofcourse there is the pesky fact that a shortage of refineries should cause the price of oil to go down since the demand for crude oil would be less than supply.
The bankers want a piece of the action by manipulating people’s perceptions of their industry.
Fledermaus
Of course they’ve been getting all sorts of tax breaks during the last 15 years to do just that. Funny how they never got around to building them – maybe they need even more tax breaks.