Kass: Subprime's Siren Call

In light of the recent adverse loan experience and bad publicity, most originators are avoiding these loans like the plague. Today, no mortgage lending officer at any bank or thrift will dare stretch lending standards to home buyers, as the mandate of tightened loan-to-values and higher FICO scores are, increasingly, the directive from financial companies' management.

Moreover, the fixed income market has a diminished appetite for packaged subprime loans and a diminished appetite for any collateralized product that includes subprime loans. It is unlikely that the institutional investors will hunger for this product for some time to come and originators will be faced with the hard reality that subprime loans will face more limited demand in the primary and secondary markets.

With financial intermediaries turning off the mortgage loan spigot, first-time homebuyers and trade-up buyers -- who already are pressed by the lack of affordability (home prices divided by household incomes) -- will have markedly reduced access to the residential real estate markets. As a result, the cyclical decline in housing will be forced into another down leg, just at a time when inventories of unsold homes remain elevated and the volume of ARM resets peaks (in third-quarter 2007). As a consequence, the gradual decline in home prices seen over the last 12 months runs the risk of becoming a full-fledged waterfall slide.