FHFA studies the evolution of mortgage risk

Federal Issues FHFA Mortgages Consumer Finance Fannie Mae Freddie Mac

On May 20, FHFA released a comprehensive dataset on ways mortgage risk has evolved over time. The revised staff working paper, “A Quarter Century of Mortgage Risk,” provides an account of the evolution of default risk for newly originated home mortgages over the past 25 years. As FHFA explained in its press release, reviewing a comprehensive dataset containing “aggregated results using more than 200 million purchase-money and refinance mortgages from 1990 to 2019” has led researchers to “challenge some long-held assumptions about the impetus of the 2008 financial crisis.” Key findings presented in the working paper include: (i) new data shows that increased mortgage risk in the 1990s “was a precursor to the market failing in 2008,” whereas “previous research could not identify the fact that a refinance boom from 2000-2003 masked the mortgage risk accumulation”; (ii) prior to the 2008 financial crisis, “mortgage risk accumulated across the full spectrum of borrowers, not just those with low credit scores as some have previously asserted”; (iii) “[m]ortgage rate spreads between ‘not risky loans’ and ‘very risky loans’” tightened for portfolio and private-label securities mortgages in the mid-2000s—an indication of expanded credit supply directly prior to the Great Recession; and (iv) during the current era, “sustained house price appreciation is leading mortgage risk to increase.”