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moneybox: Commentary about business and finance.

Inside the Liar's LoanHow the mortgage industry nurtured deceit.

By Mark Gimein
Posted Thursday, April 24, 2008, at 11:25 AM ET

Is your mortgage misleading?

Here's the narrative we've heard about the mortgage meltdown: miscalculation and unfounded optimism, clueless investors, cash-strapped home buyers clobbered by rate resets.

But there's one piece of the mortgage-meltdown tale that virtually every article or television program dances around without ever quite confronting. It's the simplest aspect of the crisis to understand and also the most troubling, because it's not about complicated financial dealings and can't be fixed with bailouts. It's about an astounding breakdown of social norms.

It's the story of the liar's loan.

The term is mortgage-industry slang for what's more formally called a "stated income" mortgage—a mortgage that a lender gives without checking tax returns, employment history, or pretty much anything else. Many of the loans that are in trouble now, or will be in trouble soon, fall into this category. But the term gives only the barest hint of the pervasive failure involved.

The original idea of the stated income mortgage was that it would benefit salespeople who work on commission, people who own their own businesses, and others for whom predicting next year's income isn't just a matter of looking at last year's.

At the height of the mortgage boom, however, especially in pricey markets, the liar's loan became a routine way of doing business; for some lenders—both smaller ones like IndyMac and WMC as well as big ones like Countrywide and Washington Mutual—it was the main way. In 2006 in some parts of the country, these loans made up as much as half of new mortgages, for both subprime borrowers and for homebuyers with high credit scores.

Under ordinary circumstances, we think of lying as something that a few people do. But the nickname "liar's loan" is stunningly apt. The vast majority of the people who took these loans out exaggerated at least a little. Most lied a lot. And it's likely that most of the liar's loans—including those given to people with excellent credit histories—will go bad.

Think about that for a second. Imagine a city center where running red lights isn't something that the occasional drunken driver or road-rage victim does, but where everybody does it all the time. That's a lot like the mortgage market in big swaths of the country one or two years ago.

Of all the problems in mortgage world, the liar's-loan crash was the most foreseeable. Knowledgeable observers were already sounding the alarm in 2005. But it wasn't until the next year—as lenders were furiously writing ever more such loans—that the hard data started coming in, confirming what everybody who'd stepped into a mortgage broker's office knew.

In 2006, a man named Steven Krystofiak gave a statement in a Federal Reserve hearing on mortgage regulation, representing an organization called the Mortgage Brokers Association for Responsible Lending. The organization had compared a sample of 100 stated income mortgage applications to IRS records.

More than 90 of the applications overstated the borrower's income at least a little. More strikingly, more than three out of five overstated it by at least 50 percent. This isn't a few people fibbing a little. This was the whole system breaking down.

If you lie about your income as much as most borrowers did, you'll wind up with payments that take half or more of your paycheck, a setup for quick foreclosure. Did this concern the lenders who were writing these loans? It boggles the mind to think that they could have been unaware. And yet they continued to write loans under the same terms, racking up supersize loans—and charging customers a little bit more in interest for what amounted to the privilege of lying.

How could they? If you've been following the mortgage story at all, you know the answer: They could take a few hundred or even several thousand of the loans, put them together into a "mortgage-backed security," sell them to investors, and, presto, they were no longer Countrywide's or Washington Mutual's or IndyMac's problem.

The consequences are predictably depressing. A blogger named Michael Shedlock has done some terrific work tracking the performance of these kinds of loans. Shedlock analyzed one particular bundle of loans from Washington Mutual consisting of 1,765 mortgages from around May 2007, a total of $519 million in loans.