Tuesday, September 3, 2019

Part 15 of my Housing Affordability at Mercatus

As the series nears a conclusion, I question the notion that homeowners are more leveraged than renters, or that, all things considered, the housing boom was associated with a rise in household liabilities.
The idea that paying $700 in rent is preferable to a $300 mortgage payment comes from the idea that a potential home buyer would be adding a new liability to their household balance sheet. It would involve leverage, and leverage is dangerous.
But this idea is, itself, a product of mental framing. There are assets and liabilities that we explicitly include on balance sheets, like the value of a home and a mortgage, or the market value of a corporation’s future profits. And there are assets and liabilities that we don’t explicitly include, like future rental expenses or the market value of a laborer’s future wages.
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The explicit financial engineering that spread before the financial crisis has taken on a lot of criticism over the past decade.  That financial engineering, ironically, created risks and costs that were more transparent and visible than the implicit financial engineering that has been an unwitting side effect of deleveraging Americans’ explicit balance sheets.
A significant part of corporate financial analysts’ academic training is to properly account for the liability of the rents corporations have committed to paying.  Wouldn’t it be prudent for mortgage regulators to account for this liability also when evaluating the benefits and costs of the lending standards applied to households?

3 comments:

  1. Very thoughtful blogging. It is true renters can doubkle up (and they do in L.A.) but homeowners can usually rent out a room.

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