I have been asked by many people about the "subprime meltdown". The questions seem to be centered on why or how this could happen. In order to answer this question one has to understand how most subprime and for that matter prime lending happens.
When mortgages started the premise was simple. A bank accepted deposits from their customers. The bank would then loan a portion of all their deposits. They would need more and more deposits to be able to make more and more loans. Eventually this changed.
Mortgage banks are not banks at all. New Century and most other mortgage lenders use a different model to lend. About 10 years ago some very sophisticated individuals invented the mortgage backed security. The mortgage backed security is a complicated underwriting that is done by wall street pros. The underwriting is called a traunch. A lender or a group of lenders will pool all of their mortgages of a particular type. they will ask wall street, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Credit Suisse etc. to traunch the loans. Eventually this traunch will have a name like B&C a- 4th quarter series 1. After the traunch many investors will puchase the mortgage backed securities like stock. This creates capital for the lender.
In order to lend money they don't have, these lenders aquire warehouse lines of credit to make the loans. These credit lines are very short term, anywhere from 30 to 60 days. If the loan is not sold by the mortgage bank to a larged investor, the warehouse lender will charge fines for the money being out longer than the agreeded to time. for this reason many lenders will pre-negotiate the loan terms with the final holding company before the completion of the transaction. Because the secutiry needs to perform at a certain level the big investors have included provisions in their contracts that require the smaller lender to buy back a loan if it's not performing. Usually the lender is on the hook for 1 year.
In December Merril Lynch had many loans with Early Payment Default of Delinquency. Most of these were 80/20 stated loans. They became concerned and asked several companies to buy back the loans. Those companies did not have the required capital so they closed and declared barnkruptcy. This caused several of the large companies to review their pipelines of loans. The natural over reaction was to ask companies to buy back loans. These companies also stopped buying loans. This in turn left companies with loans on their warehouse lines of credit. When the warehouse lines came due the companies were ot able to sell the loans to clear the warehouse lines. This has lead to warehouse lines not lending anymore money. Therefore a company like New Century no longer has money to lend plus they are charged with buybacks plus their warehouse lines want their lines cleared. That is a recepie for disaster. I was recently told that the combined warehouse lending community is currentl holding 4 billion worth of debt that the secondary market is not buying. The only question is who's next to fail.