Great Clusterfuck

It Wasn't Household Debt That Caused the Great Recession by Heather Boushey

It’s not just that 7.4 million workers lost their job during the years of the Great Recession of 2007-2009 but also that the employment crisis continues to this day. While jobs are no longer being shed at the rate of 20,000 a day, the share of the U.S. population with a job fell to a low of 58.2 percent in November 2010 from a high of 63.4 percent in December 2006, but has only increased by a fraction of a percentage since then, hitting just 58.9 percent in April 2014.

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Their story starts with an accumulation of debt—lots of it. After the Asian financial crisis in 1997, investors were looking for safe havens to park their money. What they wanted were AAA-rated bonds. What they got were mortgage-backed securities that were rated AAA but turned out to be junk. As we all now know—but most of us didn’t know at the time—Wall Street firms in the early 2000s began slicing and dicing and then reassembling mortgage debt into more and more exotic and risky mortgage-backed securities in ways that made them look risk-free. 

But, it wasn’t just that there was more securitization. It was that loans made to riskier borrowers were more likely to be securitized. This both drove the housing bubble and made the consequences of it popping all the worse. Mian and Sufi point out that between 2002 and 2005, the growth in mortgage credit and household incomes became negatively correlated, that is, credit expanded in areas where incomes were declining. This makes no sense: How can you pay back a loan if your income is falling? They point to academic research by Yuliya Demyanyk and Otto Van Hemert showing the profound consequences: By 2006, loans had become so disconnected from prudent business practices that “an unusually large fraction of subprime mortgages originated in 2006 and 2007 [became] delinquent or in foreclosure only months later.” 

As these foreclosures began to pile up, affected households cut back sharply on spending. Thus, the catalyst for Great Recession had begun two years before the dramatic demise of Lehman Brothers. In the second quarter of 2006, the collapse in consumption started with residential investment, which fell by a 17 percent annual rate. Non-residential investment didn’t begin to fall until late in 2008, but by then households had already pared back spending sharply. 

This fallout from the collapse of the housing bubble was amplified by the unequal distribution of net wealth. What Mian and Sufi find is that counties with the largest decline in total net worth—were the ones that cut back most on spending when house prices declined. As housing prices began falling in 2006, in counties where net worth had declined most, consumption fell by almost 20 percent, compared to only five percent for the entire U.S. economy. In contrast, even through 2008, counties that avoided the collapse in net worth saw almost no decline in spending. If debt had been more equally distributed then the decline in consumption would have been less dramatic and the recession would have been less devastating.