Subprime and the crisis

Financeaddict comments on a St. Louis Fed study:

Their research asks whether there’s evidence that lenders changed their behavior to meet CRA, Fannie or Freddie-mandated goals by:

• making more subprime loans than they otherwise would have?
• lending to riskier borrowers than they otherwise would have?
• charging risky borrowers less than they otherwise would have?

…If the banks were strongly influenced by their desire to meet affordable housing targets then they should have made more of the kind of loans that would qualify and less of the kind of loans that would not qualify. These relative changes should show up as anomalies in an otherwise continuous data pattern, but the researchers’ examinations of 722,157 securitized subprime mortgages made in California and Florida from 2004-2006 found no evidence of this. The same held true for the other two research questions. Hernández-Murillo, Ghent and Owyang did not find that lenders gave lower (i.e. better) prices to borrowers falling inside the threshold vs. those falling outside. Nor did they find evidence that lenders lent more often to qualifying riskier borrowers (those who would go on to be seriously delinquent within the first two years after receiving the loan) than they did to riskier borrowers whose loans would not qualify.
So, to recap, the subprime story went something like this: foolish borrowers borrowed and foolish lenders lent. The evidence appears to show that lenders did not change their behavior in order to hit the affordable housing targets that the government imposed on them. While the government’s programs to encourage affordable housing may have other flaws they did not, at any rate, directly cause the subprime crisis. Myth busted.