Here’s the timeline from the early warning signs in 2003 to the collapse of the housing market in late 2006. Keep reading to understand the relationships among interest rates, real estate, and the rest of the economy. Disastrously, this raised monthly payments for those who had interest-only and other subprime loans based on the fed funds rate. Many homeowners who couldn’t afford conventional mortgages took interest-only loans as they provided lower monthly payments. When home prices fells, many found their homes were no longer worth what they paid for them. At the same time, interest rates rose along with the fed funds rate. As a result, these homeowners couldn’t pay their mortgages nor sell their homes for a profit. Their only option was to default. As rates rose, demand slackened. By March 2005, new home sales peaked at 1,431,000. By December 22, 2005, the yield curve for U.S. Treasurys inverted. The Fed was raising the fed funds rate, pushing the two-year Treasury bill yield to 4.40 percent, but yields on longer-term bonds weren’t rising as fast. The seven-year Treasury note yielded just 4.39 percent. This meant that investors were investing more heavily in the long term. The higher demand drove down returns. Why? They believed that a recession could occur in two years. They wanted a higher return on the two-year bill than on the seven-year note to compensate for the difficult investing environment they expected would occur in 2007. Their timing was perfect. By December 30, 2005, the inversion was worse. The two-year Treasury bill returned 4.41 percent, but the yield on the seven-year note had fallen to 4.36 percent. The yield on the ten-year Treasury note had fallen to 4.39 percent. By January 31, 2006, the two-year bill yield rose to 4.54 percent, outpacing the seven-year’s 4.49 percent yield. It fluctuated over the next six months, sending mixed signals. By June 2006, the fed funds rate was 5.25 percent, pushing up short-term rates. On July 17, 2006, the yield curve seriously inverted. The ten-year note yielded 5.07 percent, less than the three-month bill at 5.11 percent. Prices fell, because the unsold inventory was 3.9 million, 38 percent higher than the prior year. At the current rate of sales of 6.3 million a year, it would take 7.5 months to sell that inventory. That was almost double the four-month supply in 2004. Most economists thought it just meant that the housing market was cooling off, though, because interest rates were reasonably low, at 6.4 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. New home permits are issued about six months before construction finishes and the mortgage closes. This means that permits are a leading indicator of new home closes. A slump in permits means that new home closings will continue to be in a slump for the next nine months. No one at the time realized how far subprime mortgages reached into the stock market and the overall economy. At that time, most economists thought that as long as the Federal Reserve dropped interest rates by summer, the housing decline would reverse itself. What they didn’t realize was the sheer magnitude of the subprime mortgage market. It had created a “perfect storm” of bad events. Interest-only loans made a lot of subprime mortgages possible. Homeowners were only paying the interest and never paying down principal. That was fine until the interest rate kicker raised monthly payments. Often the homeowner could no longer afford the payments. As housing prices started to fall, many homeowners found that they could no longer afford to sell the homes either. Mortgage-backed securities repackaged subprime mortgages into investments. That allowed them to be sold to investors. It helped spread the cancer of subprime mortgages throughout the global financial community. The repackaged subprime mortgages were sold to investors through the secondary market. Without it, banks would have had to keep all mortgages on their books. Interest rates rule the housing market, as well as the entire financial community. In order to understand interest rates and the role it plays, know how interest rates are determined and what the relationship between Treasury notes and mortgage rates is, and have a good basic understanding of the Federal Reserve and Treasury notes. Before the crisis, real estate made up almost 10 percent of the economy. When the market collapsed, it took a bite out of the gross domestic product. Although many economists said that the slowdown in real estate would be contained, that was just wishful thinking.
