Bubble Market Psychology - Part 3

Bailouts and False Hopes

One of the more interesting phenomena observed during the bubble was the perpetuation of denial with rumors of homeowner bailouts. Many homeowners held out hope that if they could just keep current on their mortgage long enough, the government would come to their rescue in the form of a mandated bailout program. Part of this fantasy was not just that people could keep their homes, but that they could keep living their lifestyle as they did during the bubble. What few seemed to realize was any government bailout program would be designed to benefit the lenders by keeping borrowers in a perpetual state of indentured servitude. With all their money going toward debt service payments, little was going to be left over for living a life.

All of these plans had benefits and drawbacks. One of the first problems was to clearly define who should be “bailed out.” The thought of bailing out speculators was not palatable to anyone except perhaps the speculators themselves, but with regular families behaving like speculators, separating the wheat from the chaff was not an easy task. If a family exaggerated their income to obtain more house than they could afford in hopes of capturing appreciation, did they deserve a bailout? The credit crisis that popped the Great Housing Bubble was one of solvency, and there was no way to effectively restructure payments when a borrower could not afford to pay the interest on the debt, and this was a very common circumstance. None of the bailout programs did much for those with stated-income (liar) loans, negative amortization loans, and others who are unable to make the payments, and since this was a significant portion of the housing inventory, none of these plans had any real hope of stopping the fall of prices in the housing market.

Bubble Market Psychology - Part 2

Psychological Stages of a Bubble

Once a bubble starts to form, it will go through several identifiable stages: enthusiasm, greed, denial, fear, capitulation, and despair. Each of these stages is characterized by different speculator emotional states and different resulting behaviors. There are outside forces that also act on the market in predictable ways in each one of these stages. Most often, these outside factors serve to reinforce the market’s herd behavior and exacerbate changes in price.

Precipitating Factor

There is often a precipitating factor causing the initial price rally that pushes prices above their supported fundamental values. A bubble rally is usually kicked off by some exogenous event, but it may occur simply because prices have been rising and investors take notice, or it can be merely the result of a lack of investor fear and the widespread belief prices cannot go down. [1] In a typical market, there is a significant selloff when prices exceed fundamental valuations. This selloff is a natural reaction to inflated prices as a decline to fundamental valuations is normal and expected. Many seasoned market observers will “sell short” here to profit from the initially inflated values caused during the take-off stage. However, in a financial mania, this sell off is short-lived, and it traps many who are bearish on asset pricing on the wrong side of the trade. This “short squeeze” may prompt a feverish activity of buying as short sellers cover their positions before their losses get too great. A short squeeze may act as a precipitating factor. In a securities market, a precipitating factor may be a very large order hitting the trading floor, and in a real estate market it may be a dramatic lowering of interest rates as it was in the Great Housing Bubble. Regardless of its cause, the initial price rise has the potential to spark sufficient interest to prompt further buying and set a series of events in motion which repeat with a remarkable consistency. Market bubbles can be found in all financial markets and on multiple timeframes.

Bubble Market Psychology - Part 1

Bubble Market Psychology

Financial markets are driven by fear and greed: two basic human emotions. Rationality and careful analysis are not responsible for, or predictive of, current or future price levels in markets exhibiting bubble pricing as the emotions of buyers and sellers takes over. [1] The psychology of speculation drives bubble markets, and because of the nature of fear and greed, most speculators are doomed to lose their money. In contrast, true investors are not subject to the emotional cycles of the speculator, and they are more able to make rational decisions based on fundamental valuations. Of course, many investors also miss the excitement of a runaway price rally in a speculative bubble. The Great Housing Bubble was inflated by people trading houses. Residential real estate took on the character of a commodity, and it became subject to the same chaotic price gyrations as a speculative commodities market. This behavior was caused by lenders who provided the financing terms which enabled speculators to use mortgages as option contracts with the risk of loss being transferred to the lenders.

With any loss, an individual must go through a grieving process. Since markets are the collective actions of these individuals, markets experience the same psychological stages which are apparent in the price action. Efficient markets theory attempts to explain market price action through the collective action of rational market participants. This theory fails to explain the irrational behavior exhibited in bubble markets. Behavioral finance theory seeks to explain irrational exuberance. The price action in a bubble has other impacts on the beliefs and behaviors of individuals and society as a whole. These beliefs and behaviors may become pathological in nature leading to suffering and social problems. As with any form of mass hardship, there are calls for government action which lead to proposals for bailouts and false hopes among the populace.

The Housing Bubble - Part 3

The Bubble Bursts

When a bubble in a financial market pops, it does not explode in spectacular fashion like a soap bubble; it is more comparable to a breached levee which releases water slowly at first. [1] Once the financial levee is ruptured, the equity reservoir loses money at increasing rates. It washes away the imagined wealth of homeowners who bought late in the rally or used home equity lines of credit to fuel consumer spending until the reservoir is nearly empty and the torrent turns to a trickle. Ultimately, the causes of failure are examined, the financial levee is repaired, and the reservoir again holds value, but not until the dreams and equity of many homeowners are washed away.

Denial runs deep in the financial markets. The vast majority of participants either wants or needs prices to steadily increase. Any facts or opinions that run counter to the idea of ever increasing prices must be quelled in order to prevent a catastrophic collapse of prices due to panic selling. One of the more glaring examples of this phenomenon was the slow leak of information regarding the debacle in the housing market. In February and March of 2007 as the subprime lending implosion became front page news, market bulls were presented with a major public relations problem. It was imperative for the bulls to convince buyers the damage from subprime lending was “contained” and would not “spill over” into other borrower categories and ultimately into the overall economy. [ii] The supposition was that the widespread use of exotic loans was not the problem; it was the practice of giving these loans to those with low credit scores. In other words, it was not the loans, it was the borrowers. This was wrong. It was not the borrowers; it was the loans. Exotic loans were given to people of all credit backgrounds. Subprime borrowers where the first to show distress, but the Alt-A and Prime borrowers had the same problems and experienced the same outcome.

The Housing Bubble - Part 2

The Housing Bubble

Affordability Limits

Affordability is a measure of people’s ability to raise money to obtain real estate. It is often represented as an index that compares the cost to finance a median house price to the percentage of the general population with the income to support this house price. For instance, in Orange County, California, in 2006, only 2.4% of the population earned enough money to afford a median priced home. When affordability drops below 50%, there is a problem in housing; when it drops to 2.4% there is either a severe shortage of housing, or a housing price bubble. Most often, it is the latter.

The Housing Bubble - Part 1

The Housing Bubble

Prices went up a large amount during the Great Housing Bubble, but what makes this price increase a bubble? To answer this question it is necessary to accurately measure price levels and review historic measures of affordability to establish these price levels are not sustainable. [1] Measuring house prices is not a simple task, and there are many methods market watchers use to evaluate market prices. These include the median, the average cost per square foot, and the S&P/Case-Shiller indices. Price levels in financial markets represent the collective result of individual actions. There are techniques to measure the actions of the individual market participants and their impact on house prices. These measures are debt-to-income ratios and price-to-income ratios.  The amount of debt people are willing to take on compared to the income they have available is their debt-to-income ratio. The amount of money people are able to put toward the purchase of residential real estate compared to their income is their price-to-income ratio. These ratios are important because they show how much people are borrowing and spending from their earnings to acquire real estate. When these ratios break with historic patterns, they signify a housing bubble.

There is a point where people are not able to bid up prices any higher because they do not have the savings or the borrowing power to pay more. This affordability limit determines where bubble rallies end; however, this limit is not predetermined or in a fixed location. The purpose of exotic financing programs is to expand this limit and bring more customers to the market and generate fees for the lenders. Unfortunately, these products have continually proven to be unstable, and the high default rates and lender losses inevitably lead to a contraction of credit known as a credit crunch. Interest-only and negative amortization loans created the housing rally and their elimination due to borrower default created the housing crash.  As mentioned previously, the housing bubble was a credit bubble.

The Credit Bubble - Part 2

The Credit Bubble

Visualizing the Bubble

With a huge influx of capital into the secondary mortgage market when the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in 2001-2004, the industry was under tremendous pressure to deliver more loans to hungry investors seeking higher yields. This caused the already-low loan standards to be all but eliminated. All of the worst “innovations” in the lending industry occurred during this period: Negative Amortization loans, Stated-Income loans (Liar Loans,) NINJA loans (no income, no job, no assets,) 100% financing, FICO scores under 500, and one-day-out-of-bankruptcy loans among others. The joke was if borrowers could “fog a mirror” or if they “had a pulse,” they could get a loan for as much as they wanted to buy a house. It is not hard to envision the impact this had on house prices.

Imagine a room with 100 people representing the pool of subprime borrowers. These are new entrants to the market. They were previously unable to buy due to bad credit, lack of savings, and other reasons. All of them are told they are going to bid on an asset that never goes down in value, and they will be given the ability to borrow unlimited funds (stated-income “liar loans”) The only caveat is the borrowed money must be paid back when the asset is sold (not that they care, they already have bad credit). Imagine what happens?