Down payments are the bedrock of the housing market. Large down payments preserve home ownership, reduce volatility in the market, and reduce the risk to our financial system. The only people who oppose them are realtors and originate-to-sell lenders who see down payments as an impediment to profits and left-wing housing advocates who see down payments as a barrier to putting unqualified borrowers into houses. Down payments preserve home ownership because people who’ve put down large down payments rarely default. In purely economics terms, people shouldn’t consider sunk costs like down payments in their decision making. However, homeowners do. People [Read More...]

The good news in the mainstream media is that delinquency rates are down year-over-year. Of course, they ignore the fact that delinquencies have flatlined since the settlement agreement in February 2012 because that fact doesn’t fit with their optimism bias. The delinquency rate is a national average, so it doesn’t reflect where the delinquencies have declined and what segments of the loan market are recovering. The assumption most casual observers make is that delinquencies are concentrated in poorer subprime areas and the more affluent prime areas like Coastal California are relatively free from mortgage delinquency problems. Nothing could be further [Read More...]