Mortgage Industry of The United States - Mortgage Lenders

Mortgage Lenders

Mortgage lending is a major sector finance in the United States, and many of the guidelines that loans must meet are suited to satisfy investors and mortgage insurers. Mortgages are commercial paper and can be conveyed and assigned freely to other holders. In the U.S., the Federal government created several programs, or government sponsored entities, to foster mortgage lending, construction and encourage home ownership. These programs include the Government National Mortgage Association (known as Ginnie Mae), the Federal National Mortgage Association (known as Fannie Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (known as Freddie Mac). These programs work by offering a guarantee on the mortgage payments of certain conforming loans. These loans are then securitized and issued at a slightly lower interest rate to investors, and are known as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). After securitization these are sometimes called "agency paper" or "agency bonds". Whether or not a loan is conforming depends on the size and set of a guidelines which are implemented in an automated underwriting system. Non-conforming mortgage loans which cannot be sold to Fannie or Freddie are either "jumbo" or "subprime", and can also be packaged into mortgage-backed securities. Some companies, called correspondent lenders, sell all or most of their closed loans to these investors, accepting some risks for issuing them. They often offer niche loans at higher prices that the investor does not wish to originate.

Securitization allows the banks to quickly relend the money to other borrowers (including in the form of mortgages) and thereby to create more mortgages than the banks could with the amount they have on deposit. This in turn allows the public to use these mortgages to purchase homes, something the government wishes to encourage. Investors in conforming loans, meanwhile, gain low-risk income at a higher interest rate (essentially the mortgage rate, minus the cuts of the bank and GSE) than they could gain from most other bonds. Securitization has grown rapidly in the last 10 years as a result of the wider dissemination of technology in the mortgage lending world. For borrowers with superior credit, government loans and ideal profiles, this securitization keeps rates almost artificially low, since the pools of funds used to create new loans can be refreshed more quickly than in years past, allowing for more rapid outflow of capital from investors to borrowers without as many personal business ties as in the past.

The increased amount of lending led (among other factors) to the United States housing bubble of 2000-2006. The growth of lightly regulated derivative instruments based on mortgage-backed securities, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, is widely reported as a major causative factor behind the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis. As a result of the housing bubble, many banks, including Fannie Mae, established tighter lending guidelines making it much more difficult to obtain a loan.