Mortgage to rent in as bad a shape as the mortgage market

I think Ciaran Lynch hit the nail on the head when he said the ‘mortgage to rent’ scheme risks ‘becoming a flop‘. The issue here comes down to the creditors treatment of borrowers.

We have already posted a letter from Pepper showing how they are willing to do write-downs for customers. This is there for anybody to see, it isn’t here-say or rumour. In that case the loans of GE Money (a sub-prime lender) were sold to another company at a big loss.

The buyer of the loan buys it for say, 36c on the Euro meaning a loan for €100,000 is purchased for €36,000. What happens next is that they write to the borrower and say ‘hey borrower, if you pay me €50,000 and make all of your payments then we’ll call it quits’.  Meaning the borrower gets a €50,000 debt write off for either paying their loan or selling up.

This is a strong incentive to do the right thing, and it …

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AIB debt writedowns? What does it mean?

The Irish Times carried an article that stated that AIB would write down some mortgage debt. What does this mean though and who will be the beneficiary?

To begin with, the write-downs should be no surprise, that is what the provisions AIB have been putting aside for several years are for, in fact, to date it’s almost like they weren’t playing fairly because they were booking provisions but not actually using them for what they were for.

Secondly, there are 33,000 AIB mortgages with problems, of these about 10,000 are ‘unsustainable’ and for those mortgages there will be losses booked – that is the ‘writedowns’ they are talking about in the main, but on the end of whatever solution comes out of if the person may not be the owner of the home.

Several solutions are things like ‘split mortgages’ which require no writedown, others will be ‘mortgage to rent’ which will, because in that process the ownership will change and that means crystallizing the loss. How many of the 10,000 will come out …

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Debt relief without moral hazard.

I put on my thinking caps last week and drafted a paper called ‘Designing a Debt Relief programme with minimal moral hazard to address the Irish household debt overhang‘.

We were every happy with the write up it got in the Sunday Independent via Carol Hunt.

There is far too much talk of ‘moral hazard’ in the public debate to date, instead we should be also considering ‘separating equilibrium’ (which is kind of the opposite of moral hazard – it’s the ‘pain’ that comes with moral hazard ‘gain’).

To do this you have to create a programme which works within some of the parameters of the existing laws (new legislation must still take account of what exists before it), look at the operational aspects of the scheme (how it functions in real life), design a general algorithm of the process and most importantly have an ‘incentive alignment’ which means that neither party voluntarily makes an action to the intentional detriment of …

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Debt forgiveness: An outline of how it would work (if I was in charge)

If I made the debt forgiveness rules… If I could make the rules surrounding debt forgiveness they would be something like this:

1. you can only seek application for debt forgiveness via the bank and not on your own. This may sound odd but doing this helps pre-qualify the case and remove moral hazard. If you go in on your own in early days then no meaningful engagement will have occurred and your credit history isn’t shot [which is a fair outcome to getting debt relief].

Banks (via the Mortgage Arrears Resolution Process) are also in an idea position to know when a loan is unsustainable. This is further described in S.39 of The 2011 Code of Conduct on Mortgage Arrears

Where ‘unsustainable’ is defined as per the Expert Group Definition. Which is where you go 18 months into arrears or after a 5yr Deferred interest scheme doesn’t work . It is important to remember that banks are legally obliged to be in contact with borrowers and attempting to find work …

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Why a borrower bailout is not likely

The EBS is on the block and there have been countless headlines regarding the idea that debts might get written down by Wilbur Ross if the Cardinal Capital group (who he is backing) are the successful bidder. I have said that I doubt this will happen and will set out why in this post.

EBS carried out a PCAR (prudential capital assessment requirement) test in March 2010, it showed that they required €875 million in funding to come up to scratch. Thus far they received €100m in cash from the state and a further €250m in a promissory note leaving a gap of €525m to fill. The bids being touted are in the region of €550m meaning that whoever buys in is effectively bridging the gap and paying a small premium as well.

Take a look at a balance sheet and you’ll see that no matter what happens, that in the end assets=liabilities. That is an accounting identity, in our example we have a hypothetical bank which has assets and liabilities worth (for example sake) €100 million Euro.

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An ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure – banks need to change how they deal with arrears

Currently banks are not interested in dealing with customers who ‘might go into arrears’, they tend to brush them off – instead focusing on the people who are already in actual trouble. This doesn’t seem rational to me from a business perspective – and this approach would fail any standard test of common sense – if you knew a storm was coming would you carry an umbrella? If you knew and were warned in advance that it was going to be a blazing hot day would you get some sun-cream? Oddly the Irish mortgage lenders defy logic when it comes to knowing that certain clients are going to fall into arrears, and this is going to ruin thousands of credit histories that could otherwise be maintained. Credit aversion might be the name of the day now, but these same consumers may feel differently in five years time.

Any credit crisis we have encountered on individual levels has always had …

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