Some years ago, we decided to cover up a small indoor swimming pool (don’t ask) in our home in Bethesda, Md., and turn it into a sunroom. The cost was about $25,000 and, although I tend to be averse to debt, we applied for a home equity loan to pay for the renovation. We had, by my reckoning, a couple of hundred thousand dollars of equity in the house, perhaps a bit more. So we asked Bank of America, our mortgage holder, for a home equity line of credit for $25,000.
No problem, said the banker who called me back. We’re giving you $250,000. Assuming that an extra zero had been added to the loan amount by mistake, I told him we’d asked for $25,000. Yes, the banker said, but we’ve qualified you for $250,000, and so the line of credit will be $250,000. You’re under no obligation to use it, he added, unnecessarily.
Is this predatory lending? Carelessness? Rational behavior? Or some mix of all three?
Regardless, we know now that banks across the country were acting the same way–throwing money at some people (like us) who didn’t want it and at others who would soon prove unable to pay it back. I’ve read and thought a lot about how and why this happened; my three favorite accounts are Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, the radio broadcast The Giant Pool of Money by Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson, of NPR’s Planet Money fame and a paper and podcast from economist Russ Roberts of EconTalk called “Gambling with Other People’s Money: How Perverted Incentives Created the Financial Crisis. All are eye-opening and fascinating–I kid you not.
The housing meltdown is, needless to say, still with us today. It’s the single biggest reason why millions of Americans are unemployed, people aren’t spending and the economy remains choppy, at best. It’s also a cause of what, at the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, looks to me like an erosion of moral values, as many thousands of borrowers simply refuse to pay what they owe.
Under the headline Debts Rise and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity, The Times reports today that delinquency rates on home equity loans are soaring, in part because people choose not to pay them back: [click to continue…]
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