31/12/2013: Negative equity and entrepreneurship: new evidence

Since the beginning of the crisis, I have written about and presented on the topic of negative equity and its adverse effects on economy and society.

Some of the earlier links on this topic can be found here:
http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2010/06/15062010-negative-equity-1.html
http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2010/06/economics-15062010-negative-equity-2.html
http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2010/06/economics-15062010-negative-equity-3.html

One significant adverse effect of negative equity relates to the impact it has (via investment constraints) on entrepreneurship: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2010/01/economics-15012010-negative-equity.html

This month, NBER published yet another study on the above topic, covering the issue of property values impact on collateral availability for entrepreneurial activities.

The study, "Housing Collateral and Entrepreneurship" (NBER Working Paper No. w19680) by Martin Schmalz, David Alexandre Spaer and David Thesmar "shows that collateral constraints restrict entrepreneurial activity. Our empirical strategy uses variations in local house prices as shocks to the value of collateral available to individuals owning a house and controls for local demand shocks by comparing entrepreneurial activity of homeowners and renters operating in the same region. We find that an increase in collateral value leads to a higher probability of becoming an entrepreneur."

What is novel to the study results and is also extremely important from economic policy point of view is that "Conditional on entry, entrepreneurs with access to more valuable collateral create larger firms and more value added, and are more likely to survive, even in the long run."

Now, keep in mind - Ireland's politicians and both the previous and current Government officials have been consistently claiming that negative equity only matters when households need to move from their current location to a new residence. In contrast, I have asserted from the start of the crisis that the adverse effects of negative equity are present not only in the context of households moving locations, but also for the households that are staying in their current location and that some of the effects are completely independent from the ability of the households to fund their current mortgages.

Link to the study: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2360948

16/10/2011: Negative Equity and Debt Restructuring

This is unedited version of my article in Irish Mail on Sunday (October 16):

This week, we finally learned the official figure for what it would cost to address one of the biggest problems facing this country.

According to the Keane Report - or the Inter-Departmental Mortgage Arrears Working Group Report - writing off negative equity for all Irish mortgages will cost “in the region of €14 billion”. Doing the same just for mortgages taken out between 2006 and 2008 would require some €10 billion.

These numbers are truly staggering, not because of they are so high, but the opposite: because they contrast the State’s unwillingness to help ordinary Irish families caught in the gravest economic crisis we have ever faced with the relatively low cost it would take to do so.

Let me explain.

Firstly, the figure of €14billion itself is a gross overestimate of the true cost of dealing with negative equity. This is because this figure appears to include not just owner-occupiers but also people with buy-to-let loans in his sums.

Secondly, the real amount required to get rid of negative equity where it matters most – for ordinary first-time buyers - is lower still. For example the scheme could be set up in a sliding scale based on value of house compared to average house prices. This would reduce the final cost of the scheme and help those who need it most - moderate income and younger-age households.

In other words, a realistic and effective debt cancellation scheme can be priced at closer to €6-8 billion instead of the €10-14 billion estimated in the report.

In its simplest form it would work like this: say you bought a house for €300,000, with a mortgage of €250,000, and it is now worth just €150,000. The government, or the bank using the recapitalisation funds they have received, would pay off the €100,000 difference.

By doing this your monthly payments would be less, and you could now sell up to pay off the debt or move house, and in the meantime the extra money you have to spend could go back into the economy.

The scheme could even be set up so that write downs would be smaller on houses with above average values so as to prioritise young and low-earning families. In the above example, if the house was purchased for, say €500,000 and is no worth half that amount, the bank would write-off, say, €200,000, leaving the household with residual negative equity of €50,000. This would still improve affordability, but will also cut the overall cost of the scheme.

So why did the report completely rule this out? It was very clear on this topic: “a blanket debt or negative equity forgiveness scheme would not be an effective use of State resources and would not solve the problem,’ it says.

But it goes further, claiming that “the primary driver of mortgage arrears is affordability, not negative equity. While a write-down of negative equity would help mortgage holders in arrears, in many cases it is unlikely to create an affordable mortgage”.

I believe this rejection betrays the overall lack of understanding by our senior civil service officials of the problems we face.

The Irish economy is suffering primarily from three things. The biggest is excessive household debt.

While this would be bad enough, it is exacerbated by two additional factors. The cost of the government’s policy of bailing out our banks, which is being paid for with higher taxes on ordinary working households. And the rising cost of mortgagesdue to aggressive drive by Irish banks to improve their profit margins at the expense of the most vulnerable mortgage holders - those with adjustable rate mortgages who cannot protest. Both contribute to mortgages defaults.

By saying that cancelling negative equity will not be a magic bullet solution to the problem of the defaulting mortgages, the report is simply referencing the smaller problem of mortgage affordability to evade addressing the effects of the much larger crisis facing us.

Negative equity is the single most egregious and damaging segment of the debt problem faced by Irish families.

It is the most egregious because it was caused not by reckless borrowing, but by reckless lending by the banks - actively supported at the time by the Irish Government.

The problem of negative equity is the result of state policy in the first place, and it is up to the state to rectify it.

And contrary to the assertion of the report and Government claims, we do have the funds to deal with negative equity. Freeing these funds to help ordinary families is just a matter of priorities for the Government and the state-controlled banks.

To-date, the Irish Government has injected €63 billion worth of taxpayers’ funds into Irish banks.

Various other commitments, and the banks’ own state-guaranteed borrowings from the Central Bank bring the total cost of keeping our banking sector working to a gross figure of about €125 billion.

Yet while they have saved the banks, all of these measures have acted to increase, rather than reduce, the level of debt being carried by the households of this country.

In addition to their own household borrowings like credit cards or credit union loans, mortgages-holders are now in effect liable both for banks’ debts and their losses on property development and investment.

In contrast, even at Keane’s upper estimates, the cost of paying off negative equity liabilities for household mortgages would require just one ninth of the funds we have made available to the banks.

Last July the Government injected some €19 billion worth of capital into Irish banks. This capital is provided to cover potential future losses on loans. This included €9.5 billion, which was the estimated worst-case scenario for losses on residential mortgages. It also included another €8.9 billion to cover remaining expected losses on commercial property.

If some of these funds were used instead to restructure negative equity mortgages on family homes it would do two things for the banks.

Firstly, because the banks would now have securities as valuable as the mortgages they have given, a mortgage default would not be such a threat in terms of losses. This then reduces the bank’s need for further capital.

Secondly, the writedown of the mortgages will prevent defaults in the first place, at least for some families.

This implies that prioritising how that money is used to help mortgages rather than losses on commercial property loans, will be a more effective way to improve their balance sheets.

And it’s not like the money is not there. Our banking system currently has surplus capital available. Since August this year, our ‘pillar’ banks, instead of helping the struggling households, have used taxpayers funds to quietly buy high-yield Irish Government bonds.

Some €3 billion worth of Government debt was bought by the banks using our money in order to beef up their own profits. Don’t tell us that the banks cannot afford negative equity restructuring when they clearly can afford buying junk bonds in the markets to book higher profits.

And the farcical nature of Irish government responses to the mortgages and personal debt crises continues.

The Keane report ruled out increasing tax relief on mortgage interest finance for first time buyers during the boom, 2004-2008. Why? Because the estimated cost each year would have been €120 million.

Yet, come November, the very same state will pay in full the unguaranteed and unsecured €737 million debt of the bankrupt zombie Anglo. Between Anglo and INBS, the state has also committed to repaying in full €2.4 billion more of similar bonds in 2012.

Instead of repaying un-guaranteed bondholders, the Government should use the funds available to the banks to cancel commercial property-related losses on banks books, freeing the capital injected for this purpose in July this year to restructure negative equity mortgages.

Earlier this year, I proposed that Irish Government impose an obligatory restructuring of all mortgages to achieve a maximum Loan-to-Value ratio of 110%.

This would reduce the problem of ‘moral hazard’ because households with greater borrowings will still be left with more debt than their more prudent counterparts. But it would also reduce the overall debt burden faced by our families, freeing them to return to active economic and social life, helping to restart the Irish economy. Based on the Keane Report’s own estimates of the cost of such a scheme we have more than enough money to make this choice.

All we need is the will - the will to free hundreds of thousands of Irish families from the negative equity jail that was built by reckless banks which lent the money with explicit approval of the previous Governments.

Economics 21/06/2010: Innovation economy - Irish Banks' Style

Corrected version: hat tip to Mack

One must commend the Sindo team for putting forward series of articles this weekend on negative equity. One linked here refers my statement, contained in a series of posts on the subject I published here, here and here.

Now, in a farcical move, the Irish banks are apparently working on a scheme to allow negative equity homeowners to roll their mortgage in excess of the value of the house into a new mortgage (details are here, alongside some good analysis). Now, suppose you have a LTV 80% (at origination) mortgage for €400K on a property bought in 2006 and in 4 years since your family has grown in size. You weren't reckless then - borrowing only 80% of the value of the house, and you are not greedy now - requiring just an extra bedroom for those additions to the family. Below are summary estimates of the deal the banks are working out for you as we speak:
In other words, were you to fall for the trap being set up by the banks under the guise of 'We are doing our bit to help people in trouble', you will be either pushed into a 162% LTV ratio 30 year mortgage (good luck getting out of this level of debt with an asset in surplus value) or you'd have to pony up €197,400 for the privilege of seeing your mortgage shrink by €36,000 (the difference between what remains on your mortgage today and the mortgage you'll be taking out under the deal.

This deal is, in short, a pure hogwash for the majority of people in negative equity. The farce will be when, following the deal release into the market, our Government and its paid-for 'analysts' start cooing over the great rescue package for the hardest hit families... Watch their lips.

Of course another amazing thing here is that after all the talk about barring 100% mortgages, the new product will push more vulnerable households into mortgages multiples of the 100% leveraging. Happy times are just around the corner folks.

At 4% annual growth in house prices, the new mortgage will yield a break-even between the debt and the asset value by the end of 2023, not factoring in the costs of repayment. The old deal, were the household to continue with the existent mortgage, would have recovered by the end 2020. Hmmm... looks like our real estate brokers are just a month or so away from a rush of purchasers into the market with this kind of 'new products engineering' courtesy of the Irish banks.

But pardon me for asking. The same homeowners who are about to be offered this 'new deal' by the banks are also providing cost-free rescue to the banks themselves, their management and bond holders, while subsidizing shareholders and developers. 'Mortgage holders' from the development end of business have non-recourse loans worth tens and hundreds of millions. They are being offered a full write-off with virtually no consequences. Households in negative equity are being asked to pay for that, plus to engage in reckless financial engineering projects. Am I getting something wrong here, folks?

Economics 15/06/2010: Negative equity 3

Here is the third and last post in the series on negative equity based on my TCD speech (see here).

Rising negative equity has implications for financial stability:

Domestic mortgage lending by the major banks represents over x5 times their core Tier 1 capital in the UK and roughly 10 times in Ireland. Even post disposal of its assets (assuming rosy valuations), AIB’s multiple will be over x11 of its risk-weighted assets. BofI – x7-8. And these are the better ones of the Irish banking lot. In addition, around 40% of all outstanding UK mortgage debt has been used to back securities.

Large losses on these mortgage loans and associated securities can erode banks’ capital positions, affecting both lenders’ willingness and ability to lend and, in extreme cases, their solvency.

Both of the above effects can have implications for aggregate demand and the supply capacity of the economy, highlighting the interdependency of financial stability and monetary policy. Again, in the case of Ireland, the two effects are reinforced by the large exposure of the Exchequer to banks balancesheets and to the property markets.

The defining feature of the materialised losses, and their associated economic effects, is the value of debt at risk (loss given default) and the coincidence of that with the probability of default.

Rising negative equity has implications for loans default probabilities:

In economic literature, negative equity is a necessary condition for default to occur since borrowers with positive equity can sell their house and use part of the proceeds to pay off their mortgage. Transaction costs (high in Ireland) and transaction lags (also extremely long in Ireland) act to further increase this effect. For example, a household with positive equity of ca 10% will still trigger a partial default on the mortgage if it takes a year to close the sale (8% funding opportunity cost per annum) and if closing costs add up to 2% of the sale price.

However, negative equity is not a sufficient condition for default to occur, as discussed in “Negative Equity and Foreclosure: Theory and Evidence” by C. Foote, K. Gerardi and P. Willen (June 05, 2008, FRB Boston Policy Discussion Paper No 08-03). Similarly, in the UK, May and Tudela (2005) find no evidence that negative equity increased the likelihood of a household experiencing mortgage payments problems between 1994 and 2002, although their sample does extend over a lengthy period of robust economic growth and rising incomes. The latter two aspects of the sample are not present in today’s Ireland.

But, as Heldebrandt, Kawar and Waldron (2009) highlight, “if a household is experiencing difficulties meeting their mortgage payments, negative equity can increase the probability of default by reducing the household’s ability to make payments by preventing equity withdrawals.” Benito (2007) found that households are more likely to withdraw equity from their homes if they have experienced a financial shock. Negative equity can affect a household’s ability to do that because of credit constraints.

Furthermore, negative equity can increase the probability of default by reducing household’s willingness to make mortgage payments, since defaulting can reduce the debt burden of the household. In Ireland, despite our anachronistic bankruptcy laws, this option is still available for anyone willing to emigrate. You might as well call this www.book-your-one-way-ticket.ie effect, as households leaving Ireland fleeing bankruptcy will have:

1. a very strong incentive to emigrate; and
2. a very strong incentive never to return for the fear of debt jail.

Negative equity may significantly increase the probability of default of buy-to-let mortgages over and above that of owner-occupiers as costs of defaulting on a buy-to-let mortgage may be lower because defaulting does not lead to loss of residence. In addition, buy-to-let mortgages are, at least in some cases, registered via businesses, implying no recourse on family homes and wealth.

Overall, available economic evidence does suggest that negative equity plays a significant role in mortgage defaults:

• Coles (1992) presents results from a 1991 survey of lenders in which a high LTV ratio was frequently noted as an important characteristic of borrowers falling behind in meeting their mortgage payments.
• Brookes, Dicks & Pradhan (1994) and Whitley, Windram & Cox (2004) find that a reduction in the aggregate housing equity in the UK was associated with an increase in arrears.

Overall, Heldebrandt, Kawar and Waldron (2009) conclude that “evidence suggests that the level of household defaults, and the impact of negative equity on financial stability, is likely to depend on conditions in the broader macroeconomic environment”. And Ireland is at a clear disadvantage since the combined macroeconomic shocks (decline in GDP/GNP, rising unemployment and contraction in private sector credit) are much more severe here.

Rising negative equity has implications for the size of the expected banks losses:

When bank borrowers face negative equity, as probability of default and the value-at-risk in default rise, banks have an incentive to stave off the actual mortgage default. To do this, banks engage in:

• Renegotiations of covenants (loans extension, provision of a grace period, interest only repayments etc)
• In extreme cases – joint equity ownership in asset (though banks will usually engage in this type of transactions under regulatory duress)
  

All of these measures aim to put the borrower into a position to eventually repay the loan in full.

However, in cases where default in unavoidable, the loss to be realised by the bank on any given loan depends on the recovery that can be achieved if the borrower defaults. Negative equity, or positive equity that does not exceed the sum of the cost of carrying the loan during the sale, plus the cost of sale, will imply a net loss on the default. From the bank point of view, the problem is not in the actual level of individual defaults, but in the combined level (aggregate) of negative equity net of costs and recovery values.

Such net losses impact not only the actual mortgage book, but also securitised pools that can be held off balance sheet, as current negative equity puts at risk future revenue against which the book is securitised. The end result on mortgage backed securities side is to reduce the value of MBS asset and, as Heldebrandt, Kawar and Waldron (2009) point out this can induce a second order effect of changing risk perceptions and investors’ sentiment “regardless of the actual performance of any given portfolio of loans”.

Both types of losses lead the banks to record write downs on their mortgage books and securities held. If these are large enough, banks’ capital ratios will be reduced.

In the case of Ireland the problem is compounded as the banks are actively delaying recognition of losses on negative equity. These delays mean that banks are likely to pay elevated costs of external funding over longer period of time. In addition, these delays lead to losses compression – the situation where banks recognize significantly larger volumes of impaired assets later in the crisis cycle. Bunching together losses creates a much more dramatic investors’ loss of confidence in the bank.

In addition, negative equity-driven impairments, plus delayed recognition of such impairments lead to suboptimally high demand for capital from the banks. If this coincides with the period of severe credit crunch, monetary policy aimed at increasing economy-wide liquidity flows can become ineffective, as banks park added liquidity on their balance sheets, creating a liquidity trap. This is evident throughout the crisis, but by all possible monetary policy metrics, it is much more prevalent in Ireland, where even today credit available to the private sector continues to contract. Irish banks are hoarding liquidity and are raising lending margins to offset expected, but undisclosed writedowns. This problem is compounded by Nama which induces greater uncertainty onto banks balance sheets through its hardly transparent or timely operations.

Negative equity and generational asset gap:

In Ireland, the problem of negative equity is further compounded by the generational spread of negative equity to predominantly younger, more productive and more mobile (absent negative equity) households. These households today face higher probability of unemployment (thanks to our unions-instituted and supported ‘last in – first out’ labour market policies). They also much deeper extent of the negative equity because of higher cost of financing their original mortgages and entering the housing market.

The generational effects of negative equity are compounded by geographic distribution of the phenomena – with younger households being more likely to reside in the areas of excess supply of new housing, with poor access to alternate jobs, should they experience unemployment.

Finally, it is the younger households that are subject to twin effects of higher probability (and deeper extent) of negative equity and depleted savings (due to high cost of entry into the housing market). This implies that it is the very same households which have the greatest incentive to engage in precautionary savings motive.


So traditionally, economies grow by:

• encouraging the young to acquire new assets (invest and save); and
• encouraging the old to consume (divest out of savings).

With negative equity, Nama and pressured banks margins, Ireland is:

• forcing the better (more productive today and in the future) young to emigrate;
• keeping the remaining young deep in the negative equity (neither capable of investing in the future, nor of moving to find a lost job today);
• underwriting - at the expense of younger, tax paying generations - continued excessive provision of pensions to retired public sector workers;
  
• forcing younger families to cut deeper and deeper into their children education budgets and own training and education funds in order to assure they continue paying on the asset that will never have net positive return on investment; and
• incentivising the old to remain in their highly priced (if only rapidly losing value) homes backed by slacked consumption due to inability to monetize their pensions savings.

In what economics book is this scenario better than any moral hazard problem that can be incurred in the short run by reforming our bankruptcy system to an American-styled 'restart' button?

Economics 15/06/2010: Negative equity 2

This is the second post of three consecutive posts on the effects of negative equity in Ireland.

Negative equity can lead to a reduction in consumer spending, collateral & credit

This can take place via four main pathways:

1. Housing equity can be used as collateral to obtain a secured loan on more favourable terms than a loan which is unsecured. This channel for lower cost financing is cancelled out by the negative equity.
2. Falling collateral values may also affect the cost of servicing existing mortgages if borrowers have to refinance at higher interest rates when their existing deals expire (eg when exiting temporarily fixed-rate or tracker mortgages). That would reduce income available for consumption, which may further reduce demand.
3. Households on adjustable rate mortgages are facing additional pressure of higher banks margins. Since vintages of many ARMs are coincident with 2005-2007 period, negative equity has direct and significant impact on them. Nama exacerbates this impact by forcing banks to up their margins on performing loans, pushing more and more households into not just negative equity, but virtual insolvency.
4. Fourth, falling values of housing equity also reduce the resources that homeowners have available to draw on to sustain their spending in the event of an unexpected loss of income (eg due to redundancy, illness or a birth of a child). By reducing the value of housing equity, falling house prices may lead some homeowners to seek to rebuild their balances of precautionary saving at the expense of consumer spending and investment.
   

Note that precautionary savings are held in highly liquid demand deposits – a fact that I will use below. In general, households with high amounts of housing equity may not respond much to falling house prices, because their demand for precautionary savings balances may already be satisfied through their positive net worth balances on the house. Households with low or negative equity have an asymmetrically stronger incentive to save in a form of short-term deposits.

Rising negative equity can also result in a reduced supply of credit to the economy as a whole:

Negative equity can raise the loss that lenders would incur in the event of default (loss given default) and the probability of a loss. That can make banks less willing or able to supply credit to households and firms.

Per Benford and Nier (2007) Basel II regulations, which require banks to hold more capital against existing loans when their anticipated loss given default rises, can reinforce that.

If credit is more costly or difficult to obtain, households and firms are likely to borrow less, leading to lower demand through lower consumer spending and investment. This, in turn, can lead to reduced business investment.

Expectation hypothesis suggests that negative equity effects on willingness to borrow and lend can extend beyond those immediately impacted as other households anticipate their own asset value decline toward negative equity.

Blanchflower and Oswald (1998) paper showed that a reduction in credit availability may also have some effect on the supply capacity of the economy by reducing working capital for smaller businesses and the capital available for small business start-ups. In addition, a recent (June 2009) paper “Reduced entrepreneurship: Household wealth and entrepreneurship: is there a link?” by Silvia Magri, Banca d’Italia, published by the Bank of Italy (Working paper Number 719 - June 2009) shows that negative house equity can result in reduced entrepreneurship, as many new businesses are launched on the back of borrowing secured against primary residencies or other real estate assets.

Rising negative equity can also result in a reduced household mobility:

Negative equity can affect household mobility by discouraging or restricting households from moving house. Two fathers of behavioural economics, Tversky and Kahneman (1991) argued that households may be reluctant to move because they would not wish to realise a loss on their house. Notice, that our so-called ‘smart’ politicians often claim that negative equity is never a problem unless someone wants to move. Actually, it is a problem even if someone does not want to move, but has to move because of their changed employment or family circumstances.

Tatch (2009) shows that a household in negative equity would be unable to move if they were unable to repay their existing mortgage and meet any down payment requirements for a new mortgage on a different house. This is even more pronounced in Ireland due to the nature of Irish bankruptcy laws.

Hanley (1998) shows that the effect of negative equity on mobility were quantitatively significant during the early 1990s in the UK. The paper estimates that of those in negative equity in the early 1990s, twice as many would have moved had they not been in negative equity. The paper argues that reduced household mobility leads to a reduction in the supply capacity of the economy by increasing structural unemployment and reducing productivity.

Reduced household mobility implies a reduction in the number of households moving home. This can have adverse implications for tax receipts, spending on housing market services and certain types of durable goods as highlighted in Benito and Wood (2005). So as negative equity increases, tax revenues and economic activity in the housing sector and associated white goods sectors falls.

15/06/2010: Negative equity 1

Yesterday, I gave a speech at the Infinity Conference in TCD on the issue of negative equity (see newspaper report here). The following three posts (for the reasons of readers' sanity) reproduce the full speech.

What effects can negative equity have in the case of Ireland?

I did a troll of the literature on negative equity and below I summarize the main findings, relating some to the case of Ireland.

Broadly-speaking there are three dimensions through which negative equity can have an effect on Irish economy:

1. Macroeconomic channels via negative equity impact on aggregate supply and demand;
2. Monetary channels which lead to negative equity impacting adversely banks balance sheets and increasing the cost of default and probability of default for mortgage holders; and
3. Growth channels, which relate to the adverse effects of current negative equity on future demand and investment, and directly on growth.

Here are more detailed explanations of these channels.

Why the problem of negative equity is likely to be greater in Ireland than in the UK

A forthcoming paper “House Price Shocks and Household Indebtedness in the United Kingdom” by Richard F. Disney (University of Nottingham), Sarah Bridges (University of Nottingham) and John Gathergood (affiliation unknown), to be published in Economica, Vol. 77, Issue 307, pp. 472-496, July 2010, used UK household panel data to explore the link between changes in house prices and household indebtedness. The study showed that borrowing-constrained by a lack of housing equity households make greater use of higher cost, higher risk unsecured debt (e.g. credit cards or personal loans). Crucially, when house prices revert to growth, “such households are more likely to refinance and to increase their indebtedness relative to unconstrained households”.

These effects – present in the case of the UK – are likely to be more pronounced in the case of Ireland, because Irish households which find themselves in negative equity today experience much severe deterioration in their net worth base due to the following factors:

• Majority of Irish households have been forced to front-load property taxes into their purchase costs and often mortgages. Thus average LTVs are more likely to be higher here in Ireland, for more recent mortgages vintages, than they were in the UK.
• Ireland has experienced a much more severe contraction in house values than the UK to date.
• Because of significantly higher entry-level taxes, younger buyers in Ireland had to be subsidized more heavily by their parents than their UK counterparts, implying that once true levels of indebtedness are factored in, real mortgages and debts held against a given property of more recent purchase vintage might be higher than those recorded on the official mortgage books.
  

In many cases – we do not know how many, but anecdotal evidence suggests quite a few – credit unions and building societies, as well as non-mortgage banks were engaged as sources of top up loans to younger buyers, implying that once again the true extent of house purchase-related debt in Ireland, for younger households, might be higher than official records on mortgages suggest.

Another recent study, titled “The Economics and Estimation of Negative Equity” by Tomas Hellebrandt, Sandhya Kawar and Matt Waldron (all Bank of England) published in Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin 2009 Q2 looked at the effects and extent of negative equity between Autumn of 2007 and the Spring of 2009. Over that period of time, nominal house prices fell by around 20% in the UK, suggesting that negative equity impacted around 7%-11% of UK owner-occupier mortgage holders by the Spring of 2009.

By now, in Ireland:

• house prices fell down ca50% already (accounting for the swings in terms of premium to discount on asking prices – by closer to 55%),
• vintage of many purchases was much closer to the peak valuations, so
  

for Ireland, estimated negative equity impact is now around 35-40% of the mortgage holders.

Extent of negative equity here is compounded by:

1. High entry costs into the homeownership (100+% mortgages due to stamp duty costs and poor quality of real estate stock);
2. Lax lending – cross-lending by banks and credit unions and building societies;
3. Hidden nature of some of borrowing – parents’ top ups etc;
4. Coincident borrowing – with younger households being more likely to engage in borrowing for a mortgage, while borrowing for car purchase etc.
   

BofI, which holds ca 25% of all mortgages in the country (about 190,000) has reported that of these, more than 20% were already in negative equity (over 40,000) around the beginning of 2010.

The aforementioned Bank of England paper provides a good starting point for outlining the set of adverse impacts that negative equity can have on the Irish economy.

Negative equity can have implications for monetary policy:

A rising incidence of negative equity is often associated with weak aggregate demand as households in negative equity are more likely to cut their expenditures across two channels:

• due to reduced marginal propensity to consume out of wealth; and
• due to increased marginal propensity to save.

The direction of causation is not always obvious, implying a possibility of feedback loops – as households experience (or even anticipate) negative equity, they start reducing their borrowing against depreciating assets, the effect of which is amplified by the banks reduced willingness to lend against such assets. In addition, households rationally interpret these declines in today’s wealth as declines in future wealth, implying greater exposure to pensions under-provision in the future, plus greater exposure to the risk of sudden collapse in earnings (due to, say, unemployment or long term illness). As the result, these households tend to reduce their consumption today and in the future.

The reduced consumption leads to a loss of revenue to the exchequer and thus to additional pressures on future public pensions and benefits provision. This, in turn, leads households to further tighten their belts and attempt to compensate for the risk of reduced future benefits by lowering consumption exposures today.

Negative equity tends to become more prevalent when house prices fall, which usually reflects weak demand for housing, since housing supply is fixed in the short term. In the case of Ireland, this is compounded by the fact that we have severe oversupply of properties in the market. Demand effect, therefore, reinforces supply effect. Once again, in Ireland there is one more additional channel of induced market uncertainty due to Nama operations.

Weak housing demand often coincides with weak consumer demand in general, due to

1. reduced availability of credit to consumers and potential home buyers; and
2. precautionary savings as households respond to decline in their nominal wealth.

If negative equity leads to a further contraction in the availability of credit to both households and firms, as in Ireland – exacerbated in the case of Ireland by Nama – second order effects reinforce first order effects.

Lastly, as negative equity in Ireland is coincident with construction sector bust, we have twin effects of decreased households’ mobility and increased unemployment. This once more reinforces the uncertainty levels in the markets for housing, implying that risk-adjusted negative equity becomes even more pronounced here.

Economics 15/01/2010: Negative equity & entrepreneurship

There is an interesting piece of research relating to the issue of negative equity that sheds some light on potentially disastrous effects on the economy from our current crisis in house prices.

First, a quick synopsis of the paper (available here):

“In the absence of any correlation between wealth and entrepreneurial talent, initial net wealth should have an explanatory power in the decision to become an entrepreneur only for households that are financially constrained; its importance should decrease with wealth.”

In other words, if you believe that higher starting wealth does not make for a better entrepreneur further, then only households that have no capacity to borrow – no assets to borrow against – or that have insufficient income to take on the risk of becoming an entrepreneur should be constrained in their pursuit of entrepreneurship by wealth considerations. This means that as household wealth increases, the constraint of wealth on ability to take up entrepreneurship falls.

The paper tests this theoretical predictions for the Italy, showing that: “…household's initial wealth is indeed important in the decision to become an entrepreneur and its effect is lower for the richest households.” (Point 1)

“Furthermore, the effect of net wealth is stronger when legal enforcement of the loan contract is weaker...” Which, of course means that as the regulators, government, or lenders fail to enforce lending contracts, such lax enforcement increases the role that initial wealth plays in constraining entrepreneurship, making it harder for assets-poorer households to pursue business opportunities. (Point 2)

“Finally, conditional on becoming entrepreneurs, initial household wealth does not significantly affect the size of the business.” So that once a person becomes entrepreneur, the levels of their initial asset holdings do not act to determine the rate of their success in business. (Point 3)

“In summary, it seems that imperfections in capital markets can induce people to accumulate assets in order to facilitate the decision to become entrepreneurs.”

And so now, to interpreting these results for Ireland.

Majority of our households rely on house equity to act as their main life-cycle asset. As house equity is being destroyed by the negative equity, two things happen to household financial position:

1. Net wealth declines directly with increase in negative equity; and
2. Net future wealth declines directly with the gap between rental value of the property and the mortgage cost (in effect, people in negative equity are paying more for their property than it is worth, thus reducing disposable income available for other savings and investments.
   

So on the net, the twin effects of negative equity in Ireland have so far (during this crisis) meant that as property prices declined by ca 40-50% already, while rents have fallen over 15%, Irish households worst affected by the negative equity (home buyers in 2006-2007) have seen combined effect of falling wealth to the tune of 49-58%.

That is a serious chunk of wealth being destroyed, implying some adverse effects on future entrepreneurship rates. Since the rates of success in entrepreneurship do not suffer from initial wealth effects, we can assume that entrepreneurs lost due to negative equity are of average type. Which means some serious losses to the economy over the years to come.

But wait, there is more: Point 1 clearly suggests that the adverse impact of negative equity will be felt more by those would be entrepreneurs who come from lower wealth-holding groups of Irish population. No, not exactly the poor (although them as well), but from:

• Traditionally assets-poor younger households – so Ireland is now foregoing higher future rates of entrepreneurship from younger generations (also, incidentally, most adversely impacted by rising unemployment);
• Traditionally mortgages-heavy families – so Ireland is now potentially cutting into its business potential when it comes to families, thus adversely impacting future population growth rates as well;
• Lower middle class would-be-entrepreneurs – so that Irish society is now running a greater risk of reducing social class mobility, as entrepreneurship is often the only ticket out of lower middle class;
• And yes – the poor would-be-entrepreneurs: people who like many of our best business leaders today came from the poorer family backgrounds.
  

Points 2 & 3 go straight to NAMA. As NAMA in effect simply means a bailout clause for bankers, it undermines enforceability of lending contracts – for bankers directly, for developers indirectly via NAMA holiday clauses, and for households also indirectly via political manipulation of lending going on behind the scenes. Which means that overall, Ireland is moving, thanks to NAMA, toward a society where entrepreneurship will be even more polarized into the domain of the better-off. Yet another obstruction on that social mobility ladder that business ownership entails.

So here you go, to all those (like some of our economics commentators) who say that negative equity only matters when people want to move, I’d say – read real evidence, folks.

Economics 04/01/2010: Daily points

Minister Brian Lenihan's statement today - available here - deserves reading. Irrespective of one's disagreements with his policies, Brian Lenihan deserves our best wishes for speediest and fullest recovery and his family deserve our praise for the way they handled the public aspects of such a very private matter. Minister's statement today only re-enforces the sense of dignity and respect which he has projected to the entire nation at this time of a serious threat to his health. Let us hope that his treatment, that begins this week, will be swift and fully effective and that he will be as comfortable in the process of treatment as possible.


Now, onto few interesting issues I cam across in today's press:


A rather humorous mention of Ireland in a Kenyan newspaper (here).

A quote from the Economist reproduced in the paper:
"If we are to generate the sort of sustained and genuine boom that will deliver Vision 2030, we must move away from outdated practices. We must imagine success beyond beacons and title deeds. We must understand that we live in a world where success now comes from the contents of your head, not the soil on which you stand. We must make banks and financial institutions the handmaidens of development, not the brides. We must invest in knowledge, innovation and science. ...Our future lies in making and doing things better than others, not in building a cheap-credit economy in which property is the key asset. Let us learn that lesson before we find ourselves sharing a bad Irish joke."

Here is an interesting observation: over the weekend, Mr Cowen stated that the Government has no intention to help resolve the problem of negative equity. This is exactly the 'bad Irish joke' that the Business Daily Africa is talking about. Negative equity undermines returns to human capital by locking people in specific locations regardless of whether they can obtain a job suited to their qualifications or not. Thus, negative equity acts to undermine:

• incentives for skills acquisition, upskilling and mobility;
• returns to human capital investments to individuals and the economy at large; and
• the potential rate of growth for our economy.

Sadly, Mr Cowen does not seem to understand that this threat is far more severe and harder to deal with than the threats to our banks. One can replace Irish banks or sell them to the highest bidders. One can replace liquidity from the bond holders with alternative sources of financing. All within 2-3 years if not earlier.

But one cannot reverse long term structural unemployment that will be the outcome of the negative equity - often, even after generations pass.


There is an interesting essay on Seeking Alpha (here) discussing some evidence that the 2000s was a lost decade in the US and that this trend is going to continue into the new decade. The second chart, plotting real S&P500 against payroll population ratio to total population is a telling one.


The EU Observer (here) has a story on the French courts striking down the new Carbon Tax as imposing an arbitrarily unfair burden on consumers, while letting industry off the hook. Is there a case for Ireland's courts to protect consumers? Tall order. In the case of the Irish CO2 tax, we, consumers, will pay the full load through:

1. paying directly at the pump and through VRT, and
2. paying indirectly through energy charges set by regulators for semi-state monopolies running our energy sector,
   
3. through higher charges at the airports and on public transport, also set by unaccountable regulators, and
4. at a later date - through incineration surcharges that will be inevitable given the conditions of the contract between the Poolbeg operators and Dublin City.

Here is a telling quote: "Socialist Party grandee Segolene Royal cheered the ruling, calling the law 'ecologically ineffective and socially unjust.' The Greens for their part back the principle of a carbon tax but welcomed the ruling, believing Mr Sarkozy's version of such a tax inegalitarian."

It wouldn't be the job of the Irish Green Party to make sure that our own carbon tax is effective, egalitarian and socially just. But what about the economic logic? Ireland spent 2009 solidly in pursuit of improved cost competitiveness as businesses and the Government cut employment costs. Now, we just managed to hike up the cost of doing business in this country and reduce our ability to accept lower wages by raising a new tax. Anyone to notice a grand contradiction?