Please note this automated transcription may contain errors.

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Richard Green: Good evening, everyone. Our guest tonight is amongst the most knowledgeable people I know about mortgages in terms of both breadth and depth Laurie Goodman.

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Richard Green: Laurie had a distinguished if not to say legendary career on Wall Street for number of years before she moved on to run the mortgage research project at the Urban Institute

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Richard Green: That group pitot a mortgage dashboard on a regular basis. That is one of the most useful sources of information. I know you have seen links to the dashboard in class so far this year. And so I'm Laurie. It's a great pleasure to have you with us today.

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Laurie Goodman: Thanks very much for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.

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Richard Green: So I'm

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Richard Green: As I important Laurie, I start by asking all our guests. Talk a little bit about their career and how they got to where they are at the moment. So Laurie, you're going to be no exception. Please tell us how you have arrived, where you are in life at the moment.

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Laurie Goodman: Well,

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Laurie Goodman: I got my PhD at Stanford, actually, and wasn't sure whether I wanted to teach or

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Laurie Goodman: Or or do something on the business side. So I dropped the academic job market happened earlier. I took a job on the app and as an academic and it just wasn't me.

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Laurie Goodman: One big difference between being an academic and being in private industry is that an academia, you spend a lot of time making sure everything is perfect and private industry you spend

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Laurie Goodman: You spend 90 if you can get 90% of your time 90% of the way there and 10% of the time. That's a really good trade off.

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Laurie Goodman: And I decided that being an academic wasn't for me. I moved first I moved to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and I was there about

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Laurie Goodman: Four years and then I moved on to Wall Street basically first doing research on features and options and then from like 1989 on doing research on the mortgage market, and that was truly my passion, it was

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Laurie Goodman: It was really good. I went through a lot of very interesting cycles in the mortgage market and just sort of love the whole love researching mortgages on

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Laurie Goodman: Helping and helping investors, figure out what they were supposed to do with their money what represented the best relative value what policy was going to be, and have that influence the value of the mortgages. I know, and

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Laurie Goodman: Made a lot of impact wine through the great financial crisis and then sort of

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Laurie Goodman: Around 2012 2013 began to feel like, oh my God. What does someone do who's tools to work the kind of hours, you have to work on Wall Street, but too young to retire. So

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Laurie Goodman: My second career was moving to the Urban Institute to form the housing found the housing finance policy center which is essentially

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Laurie Goodman: dedicated to providing data driven analysis of public policy issues sort of during my time on Wall Street. I found that people just didn't have data to make good decisions and

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Laurie Goodman: The hope was that in founding this sector, we would be able to provide good data that underlie decisions. I mean, so everyone's entitled to their own opinion but they're not entitled to their own facts.

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Richard Green: So that's I use that quote about 90 minutes ago. So, you know,

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Richard Green: Keynes keeps coming back at us over and over and over again.

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Richard Green: I can. It is a couple sidebar, but I was reading a paper on the returns to real estate.

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Richard Green: For investments at four colleges in Oxbridge going back to 1900 and Keynes ran investment for King's College from 1925 to 1946 which is when he died and

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Richard Green: The finding of the paper is that real estate returned to those colleges were actually quite disappointing. The interesting thing about canes. The reduced kings calling was a real estate as a

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Richard Green: Share of the portfolio by about two thirds over the time of his management there. So he knew what he was doing. And it's kind of remarkable

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Richard Green: So Laurie. I was going to move on to talking about the housing finance policy center and I'm going to get them to say, but you said doesn't get really intrigued me, which is about finding value.

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Richard Green: In mortgages and that's a lot about what this class is all about. So I want to back up a little bit to your previous career and ask you, how would you go about doing that, how would you determine when it was a good time to buy a mortgage backed security and when you want to get out.

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Laurie Goodman: Um,

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Laurie Goodman: So yeah, basically a combination of sort of looking at his store as where we were historically and then also looking at what could happen going forward.

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Laurie Goodman: And, you know, generally the time that everyone was most in love with any given asset class was sort of generally the worst time to buy

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Laurie Goodman: Because people were sort of are piling in its peak and sort of taking under loved asset classes and trying to figure out if there was something really

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Laurie Goodman: Bad about whether there's something inherently bad about them, or whether they were just unloved because they had just gotten really really hammered. So I don't know if a couple of specific examples would be

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Useful to us.

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Laurie Goodman: But you know, I started. Remember, you know, after the 2008 financial crisis, you know, as badly as bad as Fannie and Freddie securities before private label securities did an order of magnitude worse. I mean, nobody would buy these securities.

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Laurie Goodman: And the way they started structuring the securities changed the structure and pricing speed change. So one of the complaints about the securities is. Oh, um,

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Laurie Goodman: I just have too much extension risk on the securities. So even if they're even if you tell me their credit, good, which I'm not sure I believe

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Laurie Goodman: I'm really worried about the credit risk component. Well we you know we went back and we

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Laurie Goodman: Then by because the securities were structured differently. The extension risk was just much much less. And so we were able to show that to some investors and it turned out to be the home or one of the home run trades, you know, so

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Richard Green: Specifically about why the extension risk. What it was what it was about the structure that may extension risk less of a problem.

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Laurie Goodman: So basically they slowed down the price speed. So I, you know, sort of at the peak just prior to the

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Laurie Goodman: Financial crisis. Some of these non agency jumbo securities were priced at pricing speeds at like 525 or just 525 psi just really, really fast. So if you go from from 525 and then you slow it down to 200 it's

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Laurie Goodman: Tremendous extension risk. Whereas if you start pricing it to 15 you slow it down to 200 that's much less of an effect. So the extension risk was just an order of magnitude lower which basically meant that the

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Laurie Goodman: Shorter classes were just a lot smaller as well. So you were better protected in all respects.

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Laurie Goodman: And actually, interestingly enough, sort of in the wake of covert 19 sort of a similar thing happened. Um,

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Laurie Goodman: Although it wasn't, it wasn't the pricing speeds people became so concerned about the when the Fed intervened and basically you know propped up the agency market.

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Laurie Goodman: Nobody propped up the non agency market. Meanwhile, some of the

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Laurie Goodman: mortgage rate to have a lot of non agency loans and a lot of not agency securities.

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Laurie Goodman: Were were for sellers because they were leveraged entities and the values of the securities went down, which meant they had to sell to keep up with their margin calls

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Laurie Goodman: Which meant the prices went down more because nobody was buying because no one had any excess funds and so it was just a purely liquidity crisis and the values of the non agency.

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Laurie Goodman: Securities and loans just absolutely plummeted, sort of, I think the worst pricing was sort of late April.

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Laurie Goodman: Late March, early April, and then, you know, and then sort of the for sellers were gone, or

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Laurie Goodman: Sort of recovered and we see forbearance. And at that point, prices began to improve. And in fact, improved dramatically since then. But if you've looked at this sort of asset class and said oh my god it's bad. Nobody wants to buy it.

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Laurie Goodman: You would have missed just a fabulous opportunity to purchase it, assuming that you have the funds to do so because

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Laurie Goodman: People were so you know the prices just plummeted to the extent that you could assume really really worst case scenarios in terms of how many borrowers. We're going to default on

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Laurie Goodman: Legacy or how bad forbearance was going to get on new securities and not break these securities and still end up with a very healthy return

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Richard Green: To our friend Chris Mayer about mortgage rates and how you know the value of them just collapsed and it didn't make sense to me because

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Richard Green: If you look at how the private label stuff has been underwritten over the last 10 years it's been so tightly underwritten it's just hard to see a lot of danger there and the legacy stuff was all originated at

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Richard Green: At most recently 13 years ago, which means any problems that that would have had would have been long gone. So I thought that was really a mystery to me.

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Laurie Goodman: And and so that's why you aren't managing a portfolio. No.

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Laurie Goodman: Amount of rationality into the market.

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Richard Green: Yeah yeah so

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Richard Green: That's really interesting. So, but that's it. But those sort of opportunities are exactly i think what students want to hear about that. I tell them about

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Richard Green: Scott Simon's PIMCO trade where he's decided to go very long and Fannie and Freddie securities in 2008 on the grounds that it was very unlikely government was gonna let them fail.

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Richard Green: And at the same time the prepayment there the extension was good. There was no credit risk to the prepayment slowed down a lot.

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Richard Green: Until you know harp came along, which will, we're going to talk about a little later. And so you have these all these mortgages trading at a premium that weren't going to default. And so that was a really good opportunity at the time.

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Richard Green: But let me let me come back now to your what you're up to now, which is the housing finance policy center. So just tell us a little bit of what's it about what will, and you talk to her broadly.

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Richard Green: About the ideas to provide good data to people making decisions about mortgages. Um, but I think that doesn't do justice to it took a little bit about the sort of projects that you have been working on to been running sector.

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Laurie Goodman: So I think our, you know, our biggest focus has actually been credit availability. The credit box got very, very tight in the aftermath of the great financial crisis that is, it was very hard for borrowers who didn't have pristine credit to get a mortgage

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Laurie Goodman: And people started talking about, oh, we only want to make sustainable mortgages. We only want to make good mortgages. Well, if you can tell me what a good mortgages. You're a better person than I

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Laurie Goodman: It seems like every mortgage has some probability of default. There are very few mortgages, where they're very few borrow never default. They're very few borrowers that we're all that will always default

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Laurie Goodman: It's not about making sustainable mortgages about figuring out what probability of default you're prepared to tolerate

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Laurie Goodman: And, you know, so the credit box tight into the fact that we're to the point where we're prepared to tolerate it fairly low probability of default, it's been sort of slowly.

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Laurie Goodman: You know, expanding until cove at 19. At which point, it's tight considerably. But, you know, sort of nothing but still, you're still at the peak, you're still and you know for early 2020 you are taking less than half the credit risk you're taking and sort of

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Laurie Goodman: A period of what I would consider normal friends standards.

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Richard Green: So that's

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Richard Green: That gets into your million missing mortgages, which is a very nice catchy way to put things. Tell us a little bit about how you went about finding if that's the right word those million missing mortgages and the implications of that.

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Laurie Goodman: Yeah, so we actually did that work, a while ago and it was sort of a pain. But we went back and did said okay

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Richard Green: The best work is a pain.

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Yes.

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Laurie Goodman: But you've got more patience for it than I do.

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Laurie Goodman: My short academic career.

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Laurie Goodman: But basically what we did is we went back to a time when we did is we looked at sort of what the credit box look like in terms of

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Laurie Goodman: loan to value ratios and psycho scores.

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Laurie Goodman: During sort during short periods where we are during a period where we thought credit was sort of normal and then we looked at what it is, what it was at any given point in time. So I think we first did this analysis in 2014 when credit was like nearly at its Titus level.

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Laurie Goodman: And we, we said, okay, so how many mortgages, what percentage of mortgages were in this category. This category. This category we assume the top category, basically all the mortgages to hi fi go

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Laurie Goodman: Low LTV borrowers. We're getting made naturally we did it primarily by Psycho and then

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Laurie Goodman: Whereas, by the time you got to the bottom category. They were much older portion were made. So we said, Okay, let's say the top category was constant all those mortgages are being made.

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Laurie Goodman: If we were to go back to the credit condition. If we were to go back to earlier credit conditions, how many loans are missing from the intermediate and bottom categories in terms of psycho scores. Then we made some other adjustments, but that was basically what we did.

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Richard Green: So the other way. The other way you characterize this as you talk about

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Richard Green: A product risk and borrower risk and you you you do a

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Richard Green: A

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Laurie Goodman: Housing credit availability in DEC

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Richard Green: Yeah, yeah. So tell us a little bit about that and what I, what I will do is put a link to show people the picture.

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Laurie Goodman: What caught me. Yeah. So what we did.

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Is

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Laurie Goodman: What we did is, this goes back to what probability of default. Are we prepared to tolerate because I think this is just

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Laurie Goodman: Absolutely critical. So basically, what we did is we did sort of this was actually methodological be fairly straightforward. What we did is we did two giant look up tables, one for 2001 2002 mortgages, one for 2005 2006 mortgages by debt to income ratio loan to value ratio FICO score and

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Laurie Goodman: Whether or not the loan is a risky product.

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Laurie Goodman: That is that, you know, whether it has a short week whether you know loan payment jumps dramatically, or they're having prepaid penalties or it's negative amortization. And so we didn't want to look up tables, one for sort of traditional products and then one for non traditional

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Laurie Goodman: Products with

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Laurie Goodman: With sort of risky features and then for each of the giant look up tables we looked at historical performance of the 2001 2002 data historical performance in the 2005 2006 data waited. The

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Laurie Goodman: Data as a 90% probability. The 2005 2006 data as a 10% probability and came up with what we call the

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Laurie Goodman: The ex ante probability of default for mortgages and every given in any given origination quarter. So for each quarter for each quarter mortgage production we map we mapped it into essentially our for look up tables.

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Laurie Goodman: Traditional products risky products 2005 2006 traditional products risky products and then map and then mapped in

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Laurie Goodman: The probability default. And then we said, Okay, let's say we didn't have it as risky products, we only had traditional products and that differential was essentially our product risk differential

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Laurie Goodman: So the whole service. So the

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Laurie Goodman: And what it does is so in 2001 2002 the ex-ante probability of default with something like 12% it went up to about 17% in 2006 2007 and it's now well less than 6%

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Laurie Goodman: And if you look at the product risk, you find that almost all the increase from 2001 2002 two 2006 2007 was product risk that is borrower characteristics didn't really change that much. It's just that you introduced risky products which expect

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Laurie Goodman: And those risky and those risky products. I had a much higher probability of default and then now there's almost no product risk in the market left

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Richard Green: Right, it's let's remind our students. What are risky products.

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Laurie Goodman: What are some products are sort of subprime mortgages, where the payment is

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Laurie Goodman: Fixed for two or three years and then jumps dramatically. It's negative amortization products were essentially you pay less than the interest rate on the mortgage. So your principal actually grows, the first few years.

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Laurie Goodman: Its interest only mortgage is where you don't pay down any of the principal it's mortgages with hefty prepay penalties were essentially once you get in, you can't get out

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Laurie Goodman: So it's basically the grab bag of products that have what I'll call non traditional features.

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Richard Green: So do you think these products. Let's talk about like a negative and product. You think that's ever an appropriate product for borrowers take off.

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Laurie Goodman: Their answer is there are some subset of borrowers, for whom it is appropriate, but it is a very, very small subset. And so I'm not sure that it should be ever a standardized product sold in the capital markets, but if a bank wants to make a loan to

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Laurie Goodman: A guy who's just finished.

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Laurie Goodman: Medical School. Who's got or who's just finished his internship is about to start practice who's just signed something who doesn't

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Laurie Goodman: Who's expecting to make a lot of those expecting to make a lot of money very quickly. But right now, doesn't

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Laurie Goodman: Doesn't have a whole lot there. There are some system circumstances in which is appropriate, but it's very rare for that for that product. You have to know for certain that that person has a fast growing source of income for instance.

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Laurie Goodman: Yeah, it's a different world. I mean,

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Richard Green: 30 years ago, we used to talk about these things because we thought that we were in an inflationary environment.

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Richard Green: And so tell it was a big problem because if everybody's income was going to go up by 5% a year in nominal terms and you're paying a real interest rate of

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Richard Green: 3%. But that meant that it was 8% it meant that people who actually knew could afford a house couldn't afford the house the DTI was too high at the beauty and the love that. And now we're in a world of basically no inflation and so those products plus sensible.

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Laurie Goodman: Yes, you have to assume that the income is going to rise very, very quickly. And so he said to me.

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Laurie Goodman: Are there a large enough group of borrowers, for whom this makes sense. The answer is probably not. But it could be a niche product, but it's sort of a product that could be in a bank's own portfolio, where they eat their own cookie.

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Richard Green: Right well

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Richard Green: And so that gets to that was a prelude to the next question is, what, what do you think about the impact of Dodd Frank on the mortgage market and the whole has been a positive and negative, neutral, did they get it more or less right if they go too far. They're not go far enough.

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Laurie Goodman: I think Dodd Frank itself has been a huge help. I think the

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Laurie Goodman: The quote you know the qualified withdraw, which basically says, hey, you can't make these non traditional products that have a qualified mortgage was a tremendous help

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Laurie Goodman: Not because it ban the products to begin with because the market had already done that the market already taken action and said we're not going to buy these products.

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Laurie Goodman: Right now, we just don't. Yeah, we're just not sure enough about, you know, given given all that's happened. We're just scared to buy these products. But what it did is it for stalled a rewrite of these products and it just made it much more

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Laurie Goodman: Much more. Not so much made it less economic for banks to offer these products to our borrowers because they've got they've got the liability risk associated with the fact that the borrower said, oh, you said that you know

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Laurie Goodman: You borrow come back and sue.

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So,

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Richard Green: No. So I was thinking I'd be curious about it. I shouldn't say some of us, I think that once you get rid of the toxic products and I'll call them toxic non traditional

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Richard Green: The need for consumer protection beyond that is pretty small, and you

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Richard Green: Don't allow people to be making decisions and so

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Richard Green: Once you've got rid of the complicated exotic toxic, whatever you want to call them products.

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Richard Green: You should allow lenders and borrowers to come to an agreement about what's appropriate underwriting on alone. And when you impose any thing on top of that, I think that may be a step to foreign service protection.

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Laurie Goodman: I would agree with you.

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Laurie Goodman: I mean, I think you got to make sure that the borrower fully understands what they want the loan. They're taking out. But if that happens, um,

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Laurie Goodman: That's what I got a fixed rate self amortizing mortgages. You know what your payment is going to be for the life of the mortgage, it's

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Richard Green: Pretty straightforward product.

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Laurie Goodman: Right, right.

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Laurie Goodman: I know, I know. I agree with that. And so once you've gotten rid of the non traditional products. Um, yeah, I agree there's very little need for consumer protection. I mean, you, you do want to make sure that the borrower.

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Laurie Goodman: One additional restriction, which was not part of Dodd Frank. But implementing Dodd Frank the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau decided that there should be a hard 43 debt to income.

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Laurie Goodman: Limit on mortgages, which is a rule that I know never made any sense to either one of us, because it's like why would you do that that's really stupid because if you can do an over 43 data into mortgage with a lower probability and default. Why wouldn't you make that mortgage instead

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Laurie Goodman: CFP is looks like it's

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Laurie Goodman: finally going to get rid of that 43 debt to income ratio role of. Fortunately, it wasn't that rule wasn't as detrimental as it could have been because they basically said, oh, GSA mortgages aren't aren't subject to this role because of something called the GIC patch.

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Laurie Goodman: They're proposing to essentially get rid of the 43 DTI and get rid of the patch. So it puts both

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Laurie Goodman: Books private label of it puts more mortgages inside conventional mortgages underwritten by the Jesse's and not underwritten by the GI sees at on the same footing. That is private label loans and loans and bank portfolio or now would be on the same footing as Jesse well

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Richard Green: So let's let's now come to where we are right now mortgage market in a time of covert, how have you seen covered influence the market. Do you think it's working well. You think it's working badly. Do you think in some ways it's working well in some ways it's working badly.

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Laurie Goodman: Choice see

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Laurie Goodman: So here's what's working well about the more niche market. So first of all, homeowners were less impacted than the population as a whole. There, by and large, more affluent. The, the toll on the employment.

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Laurie Goodman: Sort of renders have been far more impacted by layoffs than homeowners.

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Laurie Goodman: Homeowners or less on far less apt to be in the most vulnerable industries in general homeowners or less impacted by unemployment, the homeowner unemployment rate is only about 80% of the national average. Historically, anyway, then

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Laurie Goodman: The GIC that FHA, and then and then Congress move very very quickly with forbearance, which basically

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Laurie Goodman: Allow the borrower allowed borrowers who are in trouble to essentially defer payments on their mortgage, which has been very powerful. I think the original thought was 25% of the borrowers would take advantage of it. The actual number has been more like

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Laurie Goodman: Seven to 8% but certainly, you know, that is provided a very important outlet and the fact that everyone moves so quickly is very, very positive.

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Richard Green: Interesting that even of those seven and 8% a bunch of those people are still making them roughly

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Laurie Goodman: About 25% of those are still paying

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Laurie Goodman: It.

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Richard Green: Up but I thought it was worth getting that that little detail.

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Laurie Goodman: And then

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Laurie Goodman: Purchase applicant and because it because

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Laurie Goodman: Because the Fed has East so dramatically and interest rates are at their lowest level ever you've had a huge increase in the number of

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Laurie Goodman: People looking to buy their home looking to buy a home, including first time homebuyer so the NBA purchase application in depth is actually higher than it has been in previous years at the same time.

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Laurie Goodman: Home prices continue to rise. So that's all working really, really well. And of course borrowers home.

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Laurie Goodman: Borrow and of course home prices haven't risen as quickly as interest rates of fall and so more people can afford to buy

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Laurie Goodman: debt to income ratios have come down. That said, here's what's not working the credit box has tightened dramatically. It's much harder for if you've got a sort of middling credit score. It's much harder to get a mortgage than it was before.

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Richard Green: And it was already for to do it.

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Laurie Goodman: Already hard, but it was guys gotten much harder and it's gotten Eve and also hard to refinance your mortgage. So if you have a more if you already have a mortgage with Fannie and Freddie why

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Laurie Goodman: It should be hard, or why you shouldn't be able to get a lower rate on that mortgage is beyond me. The Jesse's already have the risk on your mortgage. Why wouldn't they give you a lower rate and reduce their risk. So that's

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Laurie Goodman: So I think the tightening of the credit box has been very dramatic impacts.

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Laurie Goodman: Minority borrower black and Hispanic borrowers more than it impacts white borrowers because, by and large, black and Hispanic borrowers tend to have lower credit scores and the biggest

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Laurie Goodman: And higher debt to income ratios and the tightening has actually been in the, especially in the credits for dimension, but to a lesser extent in the debt to income.

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Laurie Goodman: Dimension.

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Richard Green: So let's talk about

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Richard Green: I want to pivot, a little bit based on that. That last sentence I know your centers also been doing a lot of work on the block wife homeownership gap and it's very

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Richard Green: Frustrating thing.

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Richard Green: To look out the gap. I believe now is every bit as big as it was maybe even bigger with when the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968. What did you have any thoughts about things we might do to ameliorate this

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Laurie Goodman: Yeah, I mean, it's a very, very difficult issue. But yes, you're right. The gap is every bit as large as not larger. And I think there's a number of things that can be done to ameliorate it

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Laurie Goodman: We actually have a very, very narrow view of credit, we use the credit score from the credit bureaus. Well, guess what. So, um,

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Which was

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Richard Green: A five year old out of them, something like that.

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Laurie Goodman: Yeah, that is it. Yes, and

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Laurie Goodman: That's exactly right. So right now the versions being used for mortgages is the version that was designed in the late, late 90s. So there's not so you know there's so student loan debt isn't isn't there's only one kind of student loan debt. There's no differentiation there.

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Laurie Goodman: Medical medical data has been shown to be extremely unproductive that still in those models, there have been a lot of advances in

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Laurie Goodman: The credit scoring models, none of which are incorporated into the more into the mortgage process. Although Fannie and Freddie have taken some steps on their own. To do so, but

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Laurie Goodman: Not, not as much as they could. But what the main. The biggest thing that's missing from credit scores is actually, you think, well, gee, what's the more predictive of my ability to pay a mortgage than anything else. How about whether or not I paid my rent.

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Laurie Goodman: That is not included in the credit score.

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Laurie Goodman: Because initially they didn't have the information. And now, and it wasn't, including the original models because there is no information the credit bureaus are starting to try to get that information.

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Laurie Goodman: But they have it on so few of the loans that it's not about as powerful as predictors of poor, but if you take, but if you take a mortgage borrower who's

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Laurie Goodman: We've done this exercise where we looked at a mortgage borrowers made two years of on time payments and said, what is the probability of making the next three years. It's really, really high.

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Laurie Goodman: That is like

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Laurie Goodman: 99.5% but if you take a borrower who's missed one payment. The problem is probability and default goes from like point 5% to 5% if he misses two payments, it goes to

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Laurie Goodman: 20% over the next three years. And if he misses three or more. It's like 50% so it just goes up exponentially and you think that, you know, with

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Laurie Goodman: Most people's rent payments, not too dissimilar to what they inquire for their mortgage payment she'd seen the same pattern. So if you have a borrower who either doesn't

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Laurie Goodman: Have a credit score. It was a low credit score because he's a fairly new user of credit, but he has two years of on time mortgage payments that should be a great predictor and we're not using it.

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Richard Green: But one of the one of the stunning things to me is in the presence of eviction moratoria how people are still paying their rent.

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Richard Green: We just did a study of Los Angeles and we basically found there were only two groups of people who were not paying their rent that the rate that they were before. And those are people who

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Richard Green: lost their jobs or people who got coven and everybody else, you had 95% on time rent payment, which is sort of what

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Richard Green: The general on time rent payment rate is. So yeah, I mean, the other thing is I. People talk a lot about moral hazard in the mortgage business and what it's something I worried a lot about and

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Richard Green: Something that really changed my mind about it. What was the financial crisis, as we saw so many people millions and millions of people.

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Richard Green: Who are severely upside down on their houses were even take it even given the credit, credit. So on the rational thing for them to have done would have been to walk away.

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Richard Green: The really rational thing would have been to buy another house first and then walk away.

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Richard Green: And they didn't do it. We basically found right and I remember asking you to do this when we were in DC together.

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Richard Green: Looking at people who are upside down on their houses and conditional on that if they were current where they any more likely to default. The next period, then people were right side up and they were, but I have miniscule amount. And it's like, I mean if

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Richard Green: The trigger happened and then we're going to do it and the others weren't

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Richard Green: And so, you know, I think we are seeing sort of on the business side of things we do see moral hazard is an issue but on the consumer side, it just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.

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Laurie Goodman: And fortunately, you know, that's actually one of the big lessons in my view of the policymakers have absorb this time around, because in

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Laurie Goodman: Sort of 2008 2009 or so concerned about moral hazard. Oh, we got to require a lot of documentation, because we're worried about moral hazard.

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Laurie Goodman: People are just going to take advantage of this time it was forbearance, no questions asked. I mean, we had to attest to the fact that you had hardship, but

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Laurie Goodman: Or could have hardship, but it was a pretty minimal. And in fact, you know, you look at the low number of borrowers taking advantage of for barons, because people who can pay well by and large will pay

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Laurie Goodman: So I mean I but. And to their credit, you know, there was no it was like, oh, that Institute of forbearance policy, there wasn't a oh yeah we got to require the following 27 pieces of documentation first

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Laurie Goodman: I think that was one of the big sort of in my mind, that was the biggest lesson learned from 2008 you

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Richard Green: Know,

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Richard Green: And this is really good that people learned it. So I want to finish with it up.

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Richard Green: Slightly know it's it's considerably different question for the line of questions at

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Richard Green: This point

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Richard Green: It's just I see you've lived in New York City, the New York metropolitan area for a long time.

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Richard Green: And you know there are people who are running off to New York now and we do see people you know that the vacancy rate Manhattan is rate residential vacancy rate has written a levels, probably not seen since the 70s. So there's no data at the moment.

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Richard Green: It's hurting but but longer right are you bullish bearish or neutral of New York.

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Laurie Goodman: That's a hard question. I'm

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Laurie Goodman: Sorry, so I am actually bullish on housing period.

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Laurie Goodman: Everywhere I am less bullish on housing in New York than I am, many other places because I think the fact that people can work from home more so you only have to come in, you know,

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Laurie Goodman: Two days a week or three days a week, means that at the margin, you're prepared to move out of the city, a little bit more quickly or not move back in as quickly

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Laurie Goodman: And in addition, sort of those taxes and people were already moving out of New York, long before covert 19. I mean, I think the

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Laurie Goodman: Changes and the changes in the tax law that went into into effect at the end of 2017 with the lack of with the limits on option of salt, state, local taxes had a huge impact on high tax states. So that's, you know,

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Although Laurie.

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Richard Green: I have to tell you. Listen, dr appt at a difference difference regression. On that note, we have only one year of data, but we have the 2018 IRS migration data and we did difference difference and you can identify the effect of the state level abstractions. There's such variation

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Richard Green: Depending on where and we found nothing

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Richard Green: We found no change in the trend now their husband a trend about migration from New York from a long time, but we saw no acceleration and that trend.

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Laurie Goodman: Oh, interesting.

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Richard Green: Result of that law. But yeah, maybe I can present this at an Arca thing or something but

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Laurie Goodman: I love to see

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Richard Green: Like habit is it was

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Richard Green: One year of data. So, you know, it does take a while for people to actually approve themselves and so on.

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Richard Green: Yeah, but we

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Laurie Goodman: Have very, I thought that these sort of composition of the Exodus might have changed with more higher income tax.

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Richard Green: You know, it's funny in California 2018 we actually saw the opposite, we saw

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Richard Green: People move in and low income people.

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Richard Green: Move out

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Richard Green: And that's because the half the cost of housing is just

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Richard Green: So mean that pushes people out. I have no doubt.

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Richard Green: About that and the other thing I find interesting about, you know, kind of taxes is to to even feel us the slightest blip on with the, I mean that the mortgage interest deduction was basically clawed back by about 90% with the 2017

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Laurie Goodman: Oh, yeah.

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Richard Green: Have you felt that, you know, we had a little earthquake here in Los Angeles on Friday night that earthquake. I felt that a lot more than I felt any impact of the text Korea jack job second house prices.

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Laurie Goodman: Oh yeah, I didn't expect to see any. I mean, sort of the thing about the

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Laurie Goodman: mortgage interest deduction is that a lot of people with sort of low and

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Laurie Goodman: Medium incomes weren't itemizing before and now almost none. And now, of course, none of them are itemizing and hiring somebody how you're hiring people aren't itemizing either, but out of those, but most of the people who, um, but no. The biggest difference in the

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Laurie Goodman: isn't actually

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Laurie Goodman: So the salt the salt tax is far more impactful than than more than the mortgage interest deduction, just in terms of kind of the dollars and cents.

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Laurie Goodman: Yeah, but

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Laurie Goodman: Sort of the people for whom the mortgage interest deduction was perhaps the most meaningful where those who sort of made make around $75,000 a year and yeah didn't. What have you done before and don't do doc now.

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Laurie Goodman: But a huge percentage of them are going to be homeowners anyway in their entire tax bill when their tax bill went down by and large, as a result of this, I know there was no impact and I didn't expect they expect to see what

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Richard Green: Okay, well, Laurie Goodman. Thank you for spending some time with us.

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Richard Green: always appreciate it.

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Richard Green: This was great and

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Richard Green: I look forward to actually I'm going to see you tomorrow.

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Laurie Goodman: Yes.