Search Results
Speech
Opening remarks at The Spread between Primary and Secondary Mortgage Rates: Recent Trends and Prospects Workshop
Remarks at The Spread between Primary and Secondary Mortgage Rates: Recent Trends and Prospects Workshop, New York City.
Working Paper
Did the Federal Reserve's MBS purchase program lower mortgage rates?
We employ empirical pricing models for mortgage-backed security (MBS) yields and for mortgage rates to measure deviations from normal market functioning in order to assess how the Federal Reserve MBS purchase program--a 16 month program announced on November 25, 2008 and completed on March 31, 2010--affected risk premiums that were embedded in mortgage and swap markets. Our pricing models suggest that the announcement of the program, which signaled strong and credible government backing for mortgage markets in particular and for the financial system more generally, reduced mortgage rates by ...
Journal Article
Bridging the information gap between capital markets investors and CDFIs
Proceedings of the Conference on the Secondary Market for Community Development Loans The problem of efficiently matching buyer and seller is both ancient and ubiquitous. It is, of course, the source of the concepts of brokerage and intermediation. The situation in which sellers are small, traditional and local and buyers large, sophisticated, and national or, indeed, global, is an especially difficult one to get right?especially from the perspective of the sellers. But it is also the situation in which modern technology may be most useful. This ancient dilemma resembles the problem of ...
Report
A new look at second liens
We use data from credit reports and deed records to better understand the extent to which second liens contributed to the housing crisis by allowing buyers to purchase homes with small down-payments. At the top of the housing market, second liens were quite prevalent: As many as 45 percent of home purchases in coastal markets and bubble locations involved a piggyback second lien. Owner-occupants were more likely to use piggyback second liens than were investors. Second liens in the form of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) were originated to relatively high-quality borrowers, and ...