It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt -- especially mortgage debt

TO BE NOTED: From the WSJ:

"By STEVEN GJERSTAD and VERNON L. SMITH

Bubbles have been frequent in economic history, and they occur in the laboratories of experimental economics under conditions which -- when first studied in the 1980s -- were considered so transparent that bubbles would not be observed.

We economists were wrong: Even when traders in an asset market know the value of the asset, bubbles form dependably. Bubbles can arise when some agents buy not on fundamental value, but on price trend or momentum. If momentum traders have more liquidity, they can sustain a bubble longer.

But what sparks bubbles? Why does one large asset bubble -- like our dot-com bubble -- do no damage to the financial system while another one leads to its collapse? Key characteristics of housing markets -- momentum trading, liquidity, price-tier movements, and high-margin purchases -- combine to provide a fairly complete, simple description of the housing bubble collapse, and how it engulfed the financial system and then the wider economy.

In just the past 40 years there were two other housing bubbles, with peaks in 1979 and 1989, but the largest one in U.S. history started in 1997, probably sparked by rising household income that began in 1992 combined with the elimination in 1997 of taxes on residential capital gains up to $500,000. Rising values in an asset market draw investor attention; the early stages of the housing bubble had this usual, self-reinforcing feature.

The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve decided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counteract the downturn. When the Fed increased liquidity, money naturally flowed to the fastest expanding sector. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations aggressively pursued the goal of expanding homeownership, so credit standards eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages used rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and income. Rating agencies accepted the hypothesis of ever rising home values, gave large portions of each security issue an investment-grade rating, and investors gobbled them up.

But housing expenditures in the U.S. and most of the developed world have historically taken about 30% of household income. If housing prices more than double in a seven-year period without a commensurate increase in income, eventually something has to give. When subprime lending, the interest-only adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), and the negative-equity option ARM were no longer able to sustain the flow of new buyers, the inevitable crash could no longer be delayed.

The price decline started in 2006. Then policies designed to promote the American dream instead produced a nightmare. Trillions of dollars of mortgages, written to buyers with slender equity, started a wave of delinquencies and defaults. Borrowers' losses were limited to their small down payments; hence, the lion's share of the losses was transmitted into the financial system and it collapsed.

During the 1976-79 and 1986-89 housing price bubbles, the effective federal-funds interest rate was rising while housing prices rose: The Federal Reserve, "leaning against the wind," helped mitigate the bubbles. In January 2001, however, after four years with average inflation-adjusted house price increases of 7.2% per year (about 6% above trend for the past 80 years), the Fed started to decrease the fed-funds rate. By December 2001, the rate had been reduced to its lowest level since 1962. In 2002 the average fed-funds rate was lower than in any year since the 1958 recession. In 2003 and 2004 the average fed-funds rates were lower than in any year since 1955 when the rate series began.

Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan originations increased an average of 56% per year for three years -- from $1.05 trillion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!

By the time the Federal Reserve began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the Case-Shiller 20-city composite index had increased 15.4% during the previous 12 months. Yet the housing portion of the CPI for those same 12 months rose only 2.4%.

How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-ownership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased from 19.0 to 20.2, so the change had little effect on measured inflation: The CPI underestimated inflation by about 0.1 percentage point per year during this period. Between 1999 and 2006, the price-to-rent ratio shot up from 20.8 to 32.3.

With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidly increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the index. In 2004 alone, the price-rent ratio increased 12.3%. Inflation for that year was underestimated by 2.9 percentage points (since "owners' equivalent rent" is about 23% of the CPI). If home-ownership costs were included in the CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.

With nominal interest rates around 6% and inflation around 6%, the real interest rate was near zero, so household borrowing took off. As measured by the Case-Shiller 10 city index, the accumulated inflation in home-ownership costs between January 1999 and June 2006 was 151%, but the CPI measured a mere 23% increase. As the Federal Reserve monitored inflation in the early part of this decade, home-price increases were no longer visible in the CPI, so the lax monetary policy continued. Even after the Fed began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the average rate remained low and the bubble continued to inflate for two more years.

The unraveling of the bubble is in many ways the most fascinating part of the story, and the most painful reality we are now experiencing. The median price of existing homes had fallen from $230,000 in July to $217,300 in November 2006. By the beginning of 2007, in 17 of the 20 cities in the Case-Shiller index, prices were falling. Serious price declines had not yet begun, but the warning signs were there for alert observers.

Kate Kelly, writing in this newspaper (Dec. 14, 2007), tells the story of how Goldman Sachs avoided the fate of many of the other investment banks that packaged mortgages into securities. Goldman loaded up on the Markit ABX index of credit default swaps between early December 2006 and late February 2007, as their price dropped from 97.70 on Dec. 4 to under 64 by Feb. 27. But the market was not yet in free-fall: The insurance on AAA-rated parts of the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) remained inexpensive. By mid-summer 2007, concern spread to the AAA-rated tranches of MBS.

At the end of February 2007, the cost of $10 million of insurance on the AAA-rated portion of a mortgage-backed security was still only $68,000 plus a $9,000 annual premium. Housing-market conditions deteriorated further in the first half of 2007. Case-Shiller tiered price sequences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Miami all show serious declines by the summer of 2007. Prices in the low-price tier in San Francisco were down almost 13% from their peak by July 2007; in San Diego they were off 10% by July 2007. Startling developments began to unfold that month. Between July 9 and Aug. 3, 2007, the cost of insuring AAA MBS tranches went from $50,000 upfront plus a $9,000 annual premium for $10 million of insurance to over $900,000 upfront (plus the annual premium).

Once the cost of insuring new mortgage-backed securities skyrocketed, mortgage financing from MBS rapidly declined. Subprime originations plummeted from $160 billion in the third quarter of 2006 to $28 billion in the third quarter of 2007. Mortgage-backed security issuance fell comparably, from $483 billion in all of 2006 to only $30.7 billion in the third quarter of 2007. Other measures of new loan originations were falling at the same time. The liquidity that generated the housing market bubble was evaporating.

Trouble quickly spread from the cost of insuring mortgage-backed securities to problems with credit markets generally, as the spread between short-term U.S. Treasury debt and the LIBOR rate increased to 2.40% from 0.44% between Aug. 8 and Aug. 20, 2007. Since U.S. Treasury debt is generally considered secure, but a bank's loans to another bank carry some risk of default, the spread between these rates serves as an indicator of perceived risk in financial markets.

In one city after another, prices of homes in the low-price tier appreciated the most and then fell the most; prices in the high-priced tier appreciated least and fell the least. The price index graphs for Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Miami show that in all of these cities, prices in the low-price tier have fallen between 50% and 57%. Moreover, housing prices have continually declined in every market in the Case-Shiller index. According to First American CoreLogic, 10.5 million households had negative or near negative equity in December 2008. When housing prices turned down, many borrowers with low income and few assets other than their slender home equity faced foreclosure. The remaining losses had to be absorbed by the financial system. Consequently, the financial system has suffered a blow unlike anything since the Great Depression, and the source is the weak financial position of the people holding declining assets.

Earlier, during the downturn in the equities market between December 1999 and September 2002, approximately $10 trillion of equity was erased. But a measure of financial system performance, the Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods BKX index of financial firms, fell less than 6% during that period. In the current downturn, the value of residential real estate has fallen by approximately $3 trillion, but the BKX index has now fallen 75% from its peak of January 2007. The financial sector has been devastated in this crisis, whereas it was almost completely unaffected by the downturn in the equities market early in this decade.

How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastate the financial system?

In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the assets outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbed by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were often, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin. In some of the cities hit hardest, borrowers who purchased in the low-price tier at the peak of the bubble have seen their home value decline 50% or more. Over the past 18 months as housing prices have fallen, millions of homes became worth less than the loans on them, huge losses have been transmitted to lending institutions, investment banks, investors in mortgage-backed securities, sellers of credit default swaps, and the insurer of last resort, the U.S. Treasury.

In an important paper in 1983, Ben Bernanke argued that during the Depression, severe damage to the financial system impeded its ability to perform its economic role of lending to households for durable goods consumption and to firms for production and trade. We are seeing this process playing out now as loan funds for automobile purchases have withered. Auto sales fell 41% between February 2008 and February 2009. Retail and labor markets too are now part of the collateral damage from the housing debacle. Housing peaked in early 2006. Losses from the mortgage market began to infect the financial system in 2006; asset prices in that sector began to decline at the end of 2006. Meanwhile, equities and the broader economy were performing well, but as the financial sector deteriorated, its problems blindsided the rest of the economy.

The events of the past 10 years have an eerie similarity to the period leading up to the Great Depression. Total mortgage debt outstanding increased from $9.35 billion in 1920 to $29.44 billion in 1929. In 1920, residential mortgage debt was 10.2% of household wealth; by 1929, it was 27.2% of household wealth.

The Great Depression has been attributed to excessive speculation on Wall Street, especially between the spring of 1927 and the fall of 1929. Had the difficulties of the banking system been caused by losses on brokers' loans for margin purchases in 1929, the results should have been felt in the banks immediately after the stock market crash. But the banking system did not show serious strains until the fall of 1930.

Bank earnings reached a record $729 million in 1929. Yet bank exposures to real estate were substantial; as the decline in real estate prices accelerated, foreclosures wiped out banks by the thousands. Had the mounting difficulties of the banks and the final collapse of the banking system in the "Bank Holiday" in March 1933 been caused by contraction of the money supply, as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued, then the massive injections of liquidity over the past 18 months should have averted the collapse of the financial market during this current crisis.

The causes of the Great Depression need more study, but the claims that losses on stock-market speculation and a monetary contraction caused the decline of the banking system both seem inadequate. It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt -- especially mortgage debt -- that was transmitted into the financial sector during a sharp downturn.

What we've offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr. Bernanke's analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we're witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

Mr. Gjerstad is a visiting research associate at Chapman University. Mr. Smith is a professor of economics at Chapman University and the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics."

"insiders described as a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers"

From The NY TIMES, a post by PETER S. GOODMAN and GRETCHEN MORGENSON:


“We hope to do to this industry what Wal-Mart did to theirs, Starbucks did to theirs, Costco did to theirs and Lowe’s-Home Depot did to their industry. And I think if we’ve done our job, five years from now you’re not going to call us a bank.”

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Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

“It was just disheartening,” said Sherri Zaback, a mortgage screener for Washington Mutual. “Just spit it out and get it done. That’s they wanted us to do. Garbage in, garbage out.”

The Reckoning

Mortgage Factory

Articles in this series have explored the causes of the financial crisis.

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Washington Mutual ‘Power of Yes’ Ad via YouTube

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Rise and Fall

PUSH TO GROW Former employees say that with Kerry Killinger in charge, WaMu became a loan factory, ignoring borrowers’ incomes.

— Kerry K. Killinger, chief executive of Washington Mutual, 2003

SAN DIEGO — As a supervisor at a Washington Mutual mortgage processing center, John D. Parsons was accustomed to seeing baby sitters claiming salaries worthy of college presidents, and schoolteachers with incomes rivaling stockbrokers’. He rarely questioned them( NEGLIGENCE ). A real estate frenzy was under way and WaMu, as his bank was known, was all about saying yes.

Yet even by WaMu’s relaxed standards, one mortgage four years ago raised eyebrows. The borrower was claiming a six-figure income and an unusual profession: mariachi singer.

Mr. Parsons could not verify the singer’s income, so he had him photographed in front of his home dressed in his mariachi outfit. The photo went into a WaMu file. Approved( NEGLIGENCE ).

“I’d lie if I said every piece of documentation was properly signed and dated,” said Mr. Parsons, speaking through wire-reinforced glass at a California prison near here, where he is serving 16 months for theft after his fourth arrest — all involving drugs( NOT THIS ).

While Mr. Parsons, whose incarceration is not related to his work for WaMu, oversaw a team screening mortgage applications, he was snorting methamphetamine daily, he said.

“In our world, it was tolerated,” said Sherri Zaback, who worked for Mr. Parsons and recalls seeing drug paraphernalia on his desk. “Everybody said, ‘He gets the job done.’ ”

At WaMu, getting the job done meant lending money to nearly anyone who asked for it( NEGLIGENCE ) — the force behind the bank’s meteoric rise and its precipitous collapse this year in the biggest bank failure in American history.

On a financial landscape littered with wreckage, WaMu, a Seattle-based bank that opened branches at a clip worthy of a fast-food chain, stands out as a singularly brazen case of lax lending( HUMAN AGENCY EXPLANATION ). By the first half of this year, the value of its bad loans had reached $11.5 billion, nearly tripling from $4.2 billion a year earlier.

Interviews with two dozen former employees, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and appraisers reveal the relentless pressure to churn out loans that produced such results. While that sample may not fully represent a bank with tens of thousands of people, it does reflect the views of employees in WaMu mortgage operations in California, Florida, Illinois and Texas.

Their accounts are consistent with those of 89 other former employees who are confidential witnesses in a class action filed against WaMu in federal court in Seattle by former shareholders( GOOD ).

According to these accounts, pressure to keep lending emanated from the top, where executives profited from the swift expansion( FIDUCIARY MISMANAGEMENT ) — not least, Kerry K. Killinger, who was WaMu’s chief executive from 1990 until he was forced out in September.

Between 2001 and 2007, Mr. Killinger received compensation of $88 million, according to the Corporate Library, a research firm. He declined to respond to a list of questions, and his spokesman said he was unavailable for an interview.

During Mr. Killinger’s tenure, WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers’ incomes and assets( NEGLIGENCE ), according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system of dubious legality( ILLEGALITY ) that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients( FIDUCIARY MISMANAGEMENT ).

WaMu gave mortgage brokers handsome commissions( COLLUSION ) for selling the riskiest loans, which carried higher fees, bolstering profits and ultimately the compensation of the bank’s executives. WaMu pressured( FRAUD ) appraisers to provide inflated property values( FRAUD ) that made loans appear less risky, enabling Wall Street to bundle them more easily for sale to investors( FRAUD ).

“It was the Wild West,” said Steven M. Knobel, a founder of an appraisal company, Mitchell, Maxwell & Jackson, that did business with WaMu until 2007. “If you were alive, they would give you a loan. Actually, I think if you were dead, they would still give you a loan( FRAUD ).”

JPMorgan Chase, which bought WaMu for $1.9 billion in September and received $25 billion a few weeks later as part of the taxpayer bailout( GREAT ) of the financial services industry, declined to make former WaMu executives available for interviews.

JPMorgan also declined to comment on WaMu’s operations before it bought the company. “It is a different era for our customers and for the company,” a spokesman said.

For those who placed their faith and money in WaMu, the bank’s implosion came as a shock( YES IT DID ).

“I never had a clue about the amount of off-the-cliff activity that was going on at Washington Mutual, and I was in constant contact with the company( OF COURSE AVERAGE CITIZENS CAN DETERMINE A BANK'S SOLVENCY. RIGHT. ),” said Vincent Au, president of Avalon Partners, an investment firm. “There were people at WaMu that orchestrated nothing more than a sham or charade( FRAUD ). These people broke every fundamental rule of running a company( FIDUCIARY MISMANAGEMENT ).”

‘Like a Sweatshop’

Some WaMu employees who worked for the bank during the boom now have regrets.

“It was a disgrace,” said Dana Zweibel, a former financial representative at a WaMu branch in Tampa, Fla. “We were giving loans to people that never should have had loans( NEGLIGENCE ).”

If Ms. Zweibel doubted whether customers could pay, supervisors directed her to keep selling( NEGLIGENCE ), she said.

“We were told from up above that that’s not our concern,” she said. “Our concern is just to write the loan( FIDUCIARY MISMANAGEMENT ).”

The ultimate supervisor at WaMu was Mr. Killinger, who joined the company in 1983 and became chief executive in 1990. He inherited a bank that was founded in 1889 and had survived the Depression and the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s.

An investment analyst by training, he was attuned to Wall Street’s hunger for growth. Between late 1996 and early 2002, he transformed WaMu into the nation’s sixth-largest bank through a series of acquisitions.

A crucial deal came in 1999, with the purchase of Long Beach Financial, a California lender specializing in subprime mortgages( HERE WE GO ), loans extended to borrowers with troubled credit.

WaMu underscored its eagerness to lend with an advertising campaign introduced during the 2003 Academy Awards: “The Power of Yes.” No mere advertising pitch, this was also the mantra inside the bank, underwriters said.

“WaMu came out with that slogan, and that was what we had to live by,” Ms. Zaback said. “We joked about it a lot.” A file would get marked problematic and then somehow get approved. “We’d say: ‘O.K.! The power of yes.’ ”( HIGHLY COMICAL FOR YOUR SHAREHOLDERS )

Revenue at WaMu’s home-lending unit swelled from $707 million in 2002 to almost $2 billion the following year, when the “The Power of Yes” campaign started.

Between 2000 and 2003, WaMu’s retail branches grew 70 percent, reaching 2,200 across 38 states, as the bank used an image of cheeky irreverence to attract new customers. In offbeat television ads, casually dressed WaMu employees ridiculed staid bankers in suits( WITH ETHICS ).

Branches were pushed to increase lending. “It was just disgusting,” said Ms. Zweibel, the Tampa representative. “They wanted you to spend time, while you’re running teller transactions and opening checking accounts, selling people loans.”

Employees in Tampa who fell short were ordered to drive to a WaMu office in Sarasota, an hour away. There, they sat in a phone bank with 20 other people, calling customers to push home equity loans.

“The regional manager would be over your shoulder, listening to every word,” Ms. Zweibel recalled. “They treated us like we were in a sweatshop( YOU WERE ).”

On the other end of the country, at WaMu’s San Diego processing office, Ms. Zaback’s job was to take loan applications from branches in Southern California and make sure they passed muster. Most of the loans she said she handled merely required borrowers( NEGLIGENCE ) to provide an address and Social Security number, and to state their income and assets.

She ran applications through WaMu’s computer system for approval. If she needed more information, she had to consult with a loan officer — which she described as an unpleasant experience. “They would be furious,” Ms. Zaback said. “They would put it on you, that they weren’t going to get paid if you stood in the way( NEGLIGENCE ).”

On one loan application in 2005, a borrower identified himself as a gardener and listed his monthly income at $12,000, Ms. Zaback recalled. She could not verify his business license, so she took the file to her boss, Mr. Parsons.

He used the mariachi singer as inspiration: a photo of the borrower’s truck emblazoned with the name of his landscaping business went into the file. Approved.

Mr. Parsons, who worked for WaMu in San Diego from about 2002 through 2005, said his supervisors constantly praised his performance. “My numbers were through the roof,” he said.

On another occasion, Ms. Zaback asked a loan officer for verification of an applicant’s assets. The officer sent a letter from a bank showing a balance of about $150,000 in the borrower’s account, she recalled. But when Ms. Zaback called the bank to confirm, she was told the balance was only $5,000.

The loan officer yelled at her, Ms. Zaback recalled. “She said, ‘We don’t call the bank to verify( FRAUD ).’ ” Ms. Zaback said she told Mr. Parsons that she no longer wanted to work with that loan officer, but he replied: “Too bad.”

Shortly thereafter, Mr. Parsons disappeared from the office. Ms. Zaback later learned of his arrest for burglary and drug possession( NOT FOR THIS ).

The sheer workload at WaMu ensured that loan reviews were limited. Ms. Zaback’s office had 108 people, and several hundred new files a day. She was required to process at least 10 files daily.

“I’d typically spend a maximum of 35 minutes per file,” she said. “It was just disheartening. Just spit it out and get it done. That’s what they wanted us to do. Garbage in, and garbage out.”

Referral Fees for Loans

WaMu’s boiler room culture flourished in Southern California, where housing prices rose so rapidly during the bubble that creative financing( FRAUD ) was needed to attract buyers.

To that end, WaMu embraced so-called option ARMs, adjustable rate mortgages that enticed borrowers with a selection of low initial rates and allowed them to decide how much to pay each month( FRAUD ). But people who opted for minimum payments were underpaying the interest due and adding to their principal, eventually causing loan payments to balloon( FIDUCIARY MISMANAGEMENT ).

Customers were often left with the impression( LIED TO ) that low payments would continue long term, according to former WaMu sales agents( IT'S THEIR JOB TO MAKE THE INVESTMENT CLEAR TO THE CLIENT ).

For WaMu, variable-rate loans — option ARMs, in particular — were especially attractive because they carried higher fees( YES ) than other loans, and allowed WaMu to book profits( LIE ) on interest payments that borrowers deferred. Because WaMu was selling many of its loans to investors( FRAUD ), it did not worry about defaults: by the time loans went bad, they were often in other hands.

WaMu’s adjustable-rate mortgages expanded from about one-fourth of new home loans in 2003 to 70 percent by 2006. In 2005 and 2006 — when WaMu pushed option ARMs most aggressively — Mr. Killinger received pay of $19 million and $24 million respectively.

The ARM Loan Niche

WaMu’s retail mortgage office in Downey, Calif., specialized in selling option ARMs to Latino customers who spoke little English and depended on advice from real estate brokers( FRAUD ), according to a former sales agent who requested anonymity because he was still in the mortgage business.

According to that agent, WaMu turned real estate agents into a pipeline for loan applications by enabling them to collect “referral fees”( YES ) for clients who became WaMu borrowers.

Buyers were typically oblivious( NEGLIGENCE ) to agents’ fees, the agent said, and agents rarely explained the loan terms( FRAUD ).

“Their Realtor was their trusted friend,” the agent said. “The Realtors would sell them on a minimum payment, and that was an outright lie( FINALLY ).”

According to the agent, the strategy was the brainchild of Thomas Ramirez, who oversaw a sales team of about 20 agents at the Downey branch during the first half of this decade, and now works for Wells Fargo.

Mr. Ramirez confirmed that he and his team enabled real estate agents to collect commissions, but he maintained that the fees were fully disclosed.

“I don’t think the bank would have let us do the program if it was bad( IT OBVIOUSLY WAS ),” Mr. Ramirez said.

Mr. Ramirez’s team sold nearly $1 billion worth of loans in 2004, he said. His performance made him a perennial member of WaMu’s President’s Club, which brought big bonuses and recognition at an awards ceremony typically hosted by Mr. Killinger in tropical venues like Hawaii.

Mr. Ramirez’s success prompted WaMu to populate a neighboring building in Downey with loan processors, underwriters and appraisers who worked for him. The fees proved so enticing that real estate agents arrived in Downey from all over Southern California, bearing six and seven loan applications at a time, the former agent said.

WaMu banned referral fees in 2006, fearing they could be construed as illegal payments( THEY WERE ) from the bank to agents. But the bank allowed Mr. Ramirez’s team to continue using the referral fees, the agent said.

Forced Out With Millions

By 2005, the word was out that WaMu would accept applications with a mere statement of the borrower’s income and assets — often with no documentation required — so long as credit scores were adequate, according to Ms. Zaback and other underwriters.

“We had a flier that said, ‘A thin file is a good file( FRAUD ),’ ” recalled Michele Culbertson, a wholesale sales agent with WaMu.

Martine Lado, an agent in the Irvine, Calif., office, said she coached brokers to leave parts of applications blank( FRAUD ) to avoid prompting verification if the borrower’s job or income was sketchy.

“We were looking for people who understood how to do loans at WaMu,” Ms. Lado said.

Top producers became heroes. Craig Clark, called the “king of the option ARM” by colleagues, closed loans totaling about $1 billion in 2005, according to four of his former coworkers, a tally he amassed in part by challenging anyone who doubted him.

“He was a bulldozer when it came to getting his stuff done,” said Lisa Alvarez, who worked in the Irvine office from 2003 to 2006.

Christine Crocker, who managed WaMu’s wholesale underwriting division in Irvine, recalled one mortgage to an elderly couple from a broker on Mr. Clark’s team.

With a fixed income of about $3,200 a month, the couple needed a fixed-rate loan. But their broker earned a commission of three percentage points by arranging an option ARM for them, and did so by listing their income as $7,000 a month( FRAUD ). Soon, their payment jumped from roughly $1,000 a month to about $3,000, causing them to fall behind.

Mr. Clark, who now works for JPMorgan, referred calls to a company spokesman, who provided no further details.

In 2006, WaMu slowed option ARM lending. But earlier, ill-considered loans had already begun hurting its results. In 2007, it recorded a $67 million loss and shut down its subprime lending unit( GOOD WORK ).

By the time shareholders joined WaMu for its annual meeting in Seattle last April, WaMu had posted a first-quarter loss of $1.14 billion and increased its loan loss reserve to $3.5 billion. Its stock had lost more than half its value in the previous two months. Anger was in the air.

Some shareholders were irate that Mr. Killinger and other executives were excluding mortgage losses from the computation of their bonuses. Others were enraged that WaMu turned down an $8-a-share takeover bid from JPMorgan.

“Calm down and have a little faith,” Mr. Killinger told the crowd. “We will get through this.”

WaMu asked shareholders to approve a $7 billion investment by Texas Pacific Group, a private equity firm, and other unnamed investors. David Bonderman, a founder of Texas Pacific and a former WaMu director, declined to comment.

Hostile shareholders argued that the deal would dilute their holdings, but Mr. Killinger forced it through, saying WaMu desperately needed new capital.

Weeks later, with WaMu in tatters, directors stripped Mr. Killinger of his board chairmanship. And the bank began including mortgage losses when calculating executive bonuses.

In September, Mr. Killinger was forced to retire. Later that month, with WaMu buckling under roughly $180 billion in mortgage-related loans, regulators seized the bank and sold it to JPMorgan for $1.9 billion, a fraction of the $40 billion valuation the stock market gave WaMu at its peak.

Billions that investors had plowed into WaMu were wiped out, as were prospects for many of the bank’s 50,000 employees. But Mr. Killinger still had his millions, rankling laid-off workers and shareholders alike.

“Kerry has made over $100 million over his tenure based on the aggressiveness that sunk the company,” said Mr. Au, the money manager. “How does he justify taking that money?”

In June, Mr. Au sent an e-mail message to the company asking executives to return some of their pay. He says he has not heard back."

Maybe now my number two cause of this crisis, namely Fraud, Negligence, Fiduciary Misconduct, and Collusion, will start becoming apparent to people. We need to investigate and prosecute and sue the perpetrators of these crimes. In the S & L Crisis, far too many people were let off the hook, and that became a lesson for financial criminals, who populate this crisis from top to bottom. We can't afford another round of letting people avoid the penalties for what they've done. Stop blaming the investments, and start blaming the people involved.

"was “in some sense,” i.e. to some extent, the fault of excessively risky lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. "

I'm having a hard time following this debate because I seem to agree with everyone about something. Lawrence H. White on Cato Unbound:

"Brad DeLong rejects “the claim that the crash in the mortgage market was in some sense( I SAY IN SOME SMALL SENSE ) the fault of excessively risky lending by the GSEs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which pulled( I DON'T AGREE WITH THE IDEA OF PULLING ) the private sector along behind them,” based on the observation that “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac lost market share as all the loans that have now gone bad were made.” Presumably “all the loans that have now gone bad” refers to the nonprime and ARM loans made between 2004 and 2007. He concludes that there must have been “a reduction in demand for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s products” and that “the dominant feature of the mortgage market in the 2000s was not an expansion of supply by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pushing their implicit government guarantee past the limits of prudence( THAT WAS THE ENTIRE PROBLEM, NOT JUST HERE ).”

Professor DeLong presents his argument as an application of the logic of supply and demand. But supply and demand curves deal with prices and quantities, not prices and market shares. In a booming market, a declining market share is consistent with a growing contribution to supply (a continuing rightward shift in the firm’s supply curve). His unlabeled chart of market shares, moreover, appears to depict total mortgage market shares, whereas the claim in question is about “excessively risky lending” rather than total mortgage lending.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in fact expanding their quantities of nonprime mortgages vigorously from late 2004 to 2007. After parsing the GSEs’ financial statements, Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute finds that:

From 2005 to 2007, Fannie and Freddie bought approximately $1 trillion in subprime and Alt-A loans, amounting to about 40 percent of their mortgage purchases during that period. ( THAT'S BAD )

The GSEs thus importantly contributed to the overall supply of nonprime mortgage financing, prompting ( I DON'T AGREE ) mortgage brokers to originate more nonprime mortgages. The increased ability to sell nonprime mortgages to the GSEs and their competitors encouraged mortgage originators to dig deeper into the barrel of applicants to accept more of those previously considered non-creditworthy( THEIR DIGGING DEEPER IS THEIR OWN FAULT. PERIOD. ).

Wallison and Charles Calomiris add that:

Although a large share of the subprime loans now causing a crisis in the international financial markets are so-called private label securities — issued by banks and securitizers other than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — the two GSEs became the biggest buyers of the AAA tranches of these subprime pools in 2005-07. Without their commitment to purchase the AAA tranches of these securitizations, it is unlikely( NOT GOOD ENOUGH. A COUNTERFACTUAL ) that the pools could have been formed and marketed around the world. Accordingly( I'M SORRY. THIS DOESN'T FOLLOW ), not only did the GSEs destroy their own financial condition with their excessive purchases of subprime loans in the three-year period from 2005 to 2007, but they also played a major role in weakening or destroying the solvency and stability of other financial institutions and investors in the United States and abroad.

As to total mortgage lending from 2000 to 2005, below is a chart released in 2006 [pdf] by James B. Lockhart III, then Director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, Fannie and Freddie’s regulator. It shows the steady expansion in their quantities of mortgage-backed securities outstanding through 2005:

Regarding their total portfolios, Lockhart notes:

Fannie Mae’s mortgage assets grew from about $124 billion in 1990 to $905 billion in 2004, and then declined to about $727 billion last year. That’s equivalent to average annual growth of more than 13 percent over the 15-year period. . . . Freddie Mac’s mortgage portfolio grew 26 percent per annum from less than $22 billion at year-end 1990 to $710 billion in 2005. In contrast, the residential mortgage market grew at an average rate of 8.5 percent.

Except for 2004 in the case of Fannie Mae, it is clear that this pattern is not consistent with “a reduction in demand for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s products” dominating over increases in supply. Quantities supplied increased. They especially increased for nonprime products( AGREED ).

It is thus reasonable to think that the crash in the mortgage market was “in some sense,” i.e. to some extent, the fault of excessively risky lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Whether or not we call it “the dominant feature of the mortgage market in the 2000s” (emphasis added), it is safe to say that it was an important feature. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac did push the lending financed by their implicit government guarantee “past the limits of prudence.”( IT WAS A SMALL PUSH. FINE. )

THE IMPORTANT ASPECT WAS THE IMPLICIT GUARANTEE. THE REST OF THE STORY IS ABOUT FRAUD AND IDIOTIC LENDING. NOTHING REALLY RIDES ON FOCUSING ON THIS ONE ASPECT OF THE CRISIS. WE REALLY CAN ALL AGREE ON THIS IF WE THINK ABOUT IT WITHOUT SOME UNSTATED AGENDA.