What Is A Mortgage Worth - Road to the Middle Class

And the biggest problem right now is to figure a correct value for the great big ugly mortgage assets on the balance sheets of our beloved financial institutions.

That’s the big problem because, until we all feel confidence in the value of the banks’ assets, we really don’t know whether the banks are solvent or not. And nobody wants to have exposure with an institution that might be insolvent.

In a sensible article in VOX, economist Daniel Gros takes a stab at answering this question.

The important fact to understand, Gros states, is that US mortages are “no recourse” loans and that homeowners in conseqeunce have a “virtual put option.”

With a �€�no recourse�€™ mortgage, the debtor effectively receives a virtual put option to �€�sell�€™ to the mortgage-issuer the house at the amount of the loan still outstanding. Mortgage lenders are �€�short�€™ this option, but this is not recognised in the balance sheets. In most cases, the balance sheets of the banks report mortgages at face value �€“ at least for all those mortgages on which payments are still ongoing.

This fact is implicitly understood by modern homeowners. The understanding is communicated in the popular term “jingle mail.” If things turn south and you can’t make the payments on your home mortgage you can always pull up the moving truck and mail the keys to the bank, which gets a nice jingly package in the mail next morning.

The question for Gros is: what is the value of the jingle mail option? It turns out that it’s bigger than you think.

Applying the usual Black-Scholes formula to a typical subprime loan with an LTV ratio of 100% yields the result that the value of the put option embedded in the �€�no recourse�€™ feature is 26.8% of the loan, even in the low volatility case. For a conforming loan (a loan that could be insured by Fannie or Freddie) with a loan to value ratio of 80%, the value of the put option would still be close to 14% (still in the low volatility case).

Oh goodie. The Black-Scholes formula. That last reared its ugly head in the tech-startup stock options meltdown.

So the moment that a bank issues a subprime loan it ought to book the loan on its balance sheet at 26.8 percent less than face value. And even with a conforming loan where the homeowner has put down a 20 percent down payment, the bank ought to book the loan at 14 percent less than the face value of the loan.

You can see that this would make a huge difference. We simply wouldn’t be in the current liquidity crisis if the rules that Gros proposes had been followed. Of course, we wouldn’t have had the massive credit bubble either, because if the bank has to book a loan at 20 percent off face value then the multiplier effect of high leverage doesn’t apply any more.

Well, ok Dems. OK Barney Frank. OK Sen. Chris Dodd and the Friends of Angelo. Here’s the answer!

Ahem. Of course, you realize that the lovely stealth social program of sluicing mortgage money at inner-city voters would get caught in the meat-grinder if this rule were enforced upon the banks and Fannie and Freddie. And that would never do.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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