国内有许多“热点问题经济学家”，市场上有什么热点，他们就会立刻出现在那里，并成为那个热点的专家，写出很多分析文章。最近有个很大的热点，却一直还未引发他们的嗅觉，或许是因为相关的资料还不够多，或许是这个热点还只在交易员之间交流，总之没看见多少相关文章，我这里写两句，抛砖引玉。
国外的住房按揭有一种类型，是贷给没多少收入或没什么良好个人资信记录的，在美国叫做sub prime，在澳大利亚叫 low doc，我把它翻译成“次级按揭”。之所以贷给这些人，是因为贷款机构能收取比良好信用等级按揭更高的按揭利息。在房价高涨的时候，由于抵押品价值充足，贷款不会产生问题；但房价下跌时，抵押品价值不再充足，按揭人收入又不高，面临着贷款违约、房子被银行收回的处境，进而引起按揭提供方的坏帐增加，按揭提供方的倒闭案增加、金融市场的系统风险增加。
二月底的股市暴跌，被认为和美国sub prime按揭出问题有关系。
转贴Bloomberg通讯社的文章一篇，有兴趣的朋友可以看下面的原文。
By Bob Ivry
March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Hold on to your assets. The deepest
housing decline in 16 years is about to get worse.
As many as 1.5 million more Americans may lose their homes,
another 100,000 people in housing-related industries could be
fired, and an estimated 100 additional subprime mortgage companies
that lend money to people with bad or limited credit may go under,
according to realtors, economists, analysts and a Federal Reserve
governor. Financial stocks also could extend their declines over
mortgage default worries.
The spring buying season, when more than half of all U.S. home
sales are made, has been so disappointing that the National
Association of Home Builders in Washington now expects purchases to
fall for the sixth consecutive quarter after it predicted a gain
just last month.
``The correction will last another year,'' said Mark Zandi,
chief economist for Moody's Economy.com in West Chester,
Pennsylvania.
A five-year housing boom that ended in 2006 expanded home-
ownership to a record number of U.S. households. Now it has given
way to mounting defaults, failing subprime mortgage companies and
an increasing number of unsold homes.
Last Housing Slump
If this slump follows the same pattern as the last one, in
1991, it will persist for at least another year and may fuel a
recession. New-home sales declined 45 percent from July 1989 to
January 1991 and about 1 percent of all U.S. jobs, or 1.1 million,
were lost in that recession, said Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief
economist of the California Association of Realtors.
This time around, new-home sales have declined 28 percent
since September 2005, hitting a low in January, the last month for
which data is available. And though the national jobless rate is
near a five-year low this month, mortgage-related jobs fell by
almost 2,000 in January alone. At least two dozen of the more than
8,000 mortgage lenders have been forced to close or sell operations
since the start of 2006.
Subprime lenders Ameriquest Mortgage Co. in Irvine,
California; Ownit Mortgage Solutions LLC and WMC Mortgage Corp., a
subsidiary of General Electric Co., in Woodland Hills, California;
Mortgage Lenders Network USA Inc. in Middletown, Connecticut and
Fremont General Corp. together have fired more than 5,600 workers
in the past year.
New Century
New Century Financial Corp., the second-largest subprime
lender, said today it ran out of cash to pay back creditors who are
demanding their money now. The Irvine, California-based company has
lost 90 percent of its market value this year and stopped making
new subprime loans, prompting speculation it will seek bankruptcy
protection. New Century already has cut 300 jobs and its 7,000
remaining employees are waiting to see if the company will survive.
Fremont General, the Brea, California-based lender that is
trying to sell its residential-mortgage unit, was ordered to stop
making subprime loans by the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
last week. Fremont was marketing and extending loans ``in a way
that substantially increased the likelihood of borrower default or
other loss to the bank,'' the FDIC said last week.
Doug Duncan, chief economist of the Washington-based Mortgage
Bankers Association, predicted in January that more than 100 home
lenders may fail this year.
The subprime crisis ``has taken the fuel out of the real
estate market,'' said Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson
Forecast in Los Angeles. ``The market needs new money in order to
appreciate, and all of that money is gone for a very long time. The
regulators are not going to allow it to happen again.''
Higher Rates
Subprime mortgages are given to people who wouldn't qualify
for standard home loans and typically have rates at least 2 or 3
percentage points above safer prime loans. The portion of subprime
loans that financed new mortgages rose to 20 percent last year from
5 percent in 2001, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Subprime loans contributed to a home-ownership rate that
reached a record 69.3 percent of U.S. households in the second
quarter of 2004, up 5.4 percentage points from the same period in
1991, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
``Probably the gain in home ownership over the last four, five
years, is almost entirely due to looser lending standards,'' said
James Fielding, a homebuilding credit analyst at Standard & Poor's
in New York.
Refinancing Option
As home prices steadily gained from 2001 to 2006, homeowners
who fell behind on mortgage payments could sell their homes and pay
off their loans or get better refinancing terms based on the higher
value of their property. Now that home values are declining, many
borrowers won't be able to refinance because they would have to
come up with the difference between their new mortgage and what
their home is now worth.
Defaults may dump more than 500,000 homes on a housing market
already saturated with leftover inventory built during boom times,
New York-based bond research firm CreditSights Inc. said in a March
1 report.
The portion of subprime loans more than 60 days delinquent or
in foreclosure rose to 10 percent as of Dec. 31, from 5.4 percent
in May 2005, the highest in seven years, according data compiled by
Friedman Billings Ramsey Group Inc. of Arlington, Virginia.
Many of the delinquencies came from loans where borrowers
didn't have to provide tax returns or other evidence of income, or
where they financed 100 percent or more of the home's value,
CreditSights analyst David Hendler wrote in a March 5 report. Other
defaults came on adjustable-rate mortgages with artificially low
introductory ``teaser'' rates, sometimes with ``option'' payment
plans that allowed borrowers to defer interest.
`Beginning of the Wave'
Banks ought to be concerned about such loans and are likely to
see more missed payments and foreclosures as consumers with weak
credit histories begin to face higher monthly mortgage payments,
Federal Reserve Governor Susan Bies said last week.
``What we're seeing in this narrow segment is the beginning of
the wave,'' Bies said. ``This is not the end, this is the
beginning.''
About 1.5 million U.S. homeowners out of a total of 80 million
will lose their homes through foreclosure, University of
California-Berkeley economist Ken Rosen said last week.
``The subprime borrowers paid too much for their homes, and
all of a sudden, they'll see their house value drop by 10 to 15
percent,'' Rosen said.
Borrowers at Risk
The Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, North Carolina,
said in a December study that as many as 2.2 million borrowers are
at risk of losing their homes, at a potential cost of $164 billion,
from subprime mortgages originated from 1998 through 2006.
The number of U.S. foreclosures rose 42 percent to 1.2 million
last year from 2005, according to Irvine, California-based
RealtyTrac, while delinquencies in the last three months of 2006
rose to the highest level in four years, the Federal Reserve said.
Housing and related industries, which account for about 23
percent of the U.S. economy -- including makers of everything from
copper pipes to kitchen cabinets -- fired about 100,000 workers
last year. The total will be higher this year, according to Amal
Bendimerad of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard
University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
By the end of this year, job cuts at companies including
Benton Harbor, Michigan-based Whirlpool Corp., Masco Corp. of
Taylor, Michigan, and St. Louis-based Emerson Electric Co. may
exceed the fallout from the 1991 housing slump, said Paul Puryear,
managing director at St. Petersburg, Florida-based Raymond James &
Associates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't give data for
housing-related job losses.
`Fallout'
``The fallout in the early 1990s was much worse than what
we've seen so far, but this downturn is not over,'' Puryear said.
``The full impact hasn't hit yet.''
U.S. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank,
a Massachusetts Democrat, said he may propose legislation to reign
in ``inappropriate'' lending, and a House subcommittee is scheduled
to consider subprime lending and foreclosures March 27.
``The standards got loosened so much, and there's always the
pressure to make money that there was pressure to maybe make the
questionable loans that shouldn't have been made,'' said Ohio
Representative Paul Gillmor, the subcommittee's top Republican, in
a March 9 interview. ``The major problem has been the overall
deterioration in credit standards by lenders that's exacerbated by
those who are unscrupulous.''
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says mortgage fraud is
``pervasive and growing'' and the incidence of such fraud has
almost doubled in the past three years.
`Unscrupulous Individuals'
``There has been an increase in unscrupulous individuals in
the market,'' said Arthur Prieston, chairman of the Prieston Group,
a San Francisco-based company that investigates mortgage fraud.
``There's an unfair assumption of a connection between subprime
failure and fraud. But there is a connection between early default
and fraud.''
Mortgage fraud is committed when a borrower misrepresents
himself or his finances to a lender. Some of that fraud involved
speculators. They drove up prices during the boom by ordering new
homes with the intent of selling them immediately after taking
possession.
That ``flipping'' inflated demand and put the speculators in
competition with the homebuilders, propelling the median U.S. home
price to $276,000 last June from $177,000 in February 2001.
``A lot of the housing bubble was speculation,'' said Mike
Inselmann of the Houston-based research firm Metrostudy.
Cancellations
When home prices got so high that speculators could no longer
turn a profit, they canceled their contracts and walked away from
their down payments.
Cancellation rates for new homes have surged to almost 40
percent of home contracts, Margaret Whelan, a New York-based
analyst at UBS AG, said in a report on March 2.
That forced the top five U.S. homebuilders -- D.R. Horton
Inc., Pulte Homes Inc., Lennar Corp., Centex Corp. and Toll
Brothers Inc. -- to write off a combined $1.47 billion on abandoned
land in the fourth quarter of 2006.
On top of that, new home sales plunged 17 percent last year
from 2005, the biggest decline since 1990, according to the
Chicago-based National Association of Home Builders. Existing home
sales fell 8.4 percent in 2006 from a record in 2005, according to
the National Association of Realtors.
Donald Tomnitz, D.R. Horton's chief executive officer, said
last week that his Fort Worth, Texas-based company would miss its
projections for this year and that ``2007 is going to suck, all 12
months of the calendar year.''
Financial Stocks
Concern that the housing slump and defaults in the subprime
mortgage industry will affect earnings at the largest banks and
lenders has hurt financial stocks. They are the worst performers in
the Standard & Poor's 500 Index since the benchmark reached a six-
year high on Feb. 20. The group lost 5.6 percent, outpacing the
broader index's 3.9 percent drop.
Investment banks including Merrill Lynch & Co., Deutsche Bank
AG and Morgan Stanley have spent more than $4 billion over the past
year to buy home-loan companies as add-ons to their mortgage-bond
trading businesses. They needed loans to repackage into securities
to sell to investors. Demand for higher yields led them into the
subprime market. As that business flourished, financial firms
either invested in subprime lenders of bought them.
The number of U.S. financial institutions in the mortgage
business jumped 16 percent to 8,848 in the past four years,
according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination
Council.
`Too Early to Tell'
``It's a little too early to tell how it shakes out for
investment banks,'' said Andrew Davidson, president of New York-
based Andrew Davidson & Co., which advises fixed-income investors
on mortgage bonds. ``If it turns out that they have large losses,
the investment banks tend not to be very forgiving and usually
terminate businesses that haven't worked for them.''
Dale Westhoff, a senior managing director at New York-based
Bear Stearns Cos., the largest underwriter of mortgage bonds, said
last week that failing subprime lenders ``are going to be absorbed
very quickly.''
``Hedge funds and private equity are going to play a very
important role in buying distressed assets,'' Westhoff said.
In contrast to the 1991 housing skid, worker productivity is
increasing, consumer confidence is expanding, interest rates remain
within 1 percentage point of the 40-year low and the jobless rate
fell to a five-year low last month. Last month, 7.4 million new and
existing homes were sold, more than twice the 1991 bottom.
Optimists
And real estate people tend to be the world's most optimistic,
said Bryce Bowman, director of development for Randolph Equities
LLC in Chicago.
``There's a lot of capital chasing real estate and that has
not ceased with this bust,'' Bowman said. ``Developers have stopped
building crazy speculative housing developments and are burning off
their inventory, so we're excited about the end of '07, and we want
to be ready to go when business picks up in '08.''
--With reporting by Kathleen M. Howley in Boston, Dan Levy in San
Francisco, James Tyson and Alison Vekshin in Washington, Brian
Louis in Chicago and Jody Shenn, Bradley Keoun, Michael Tsang,
Christine Harper, Yalman Onaran, Anthony Massucci, Sharon L.
Crenson and Jenny Strasburg in New York. Editor: Urban