Mortgage Financing in the Housing Boom and Bust

This chapter traces the rapid evolution of mortgage financing from boom to bust and explores two crucial questions surrounding the market's rise and fall. First, why did the lending boom occur in the size and form that it did? Second, why has the foreclosure crisis been both cataclysmic and heterogeneous across geography and loan types? The chapter is organized as follows. Section 4.2 presents a broad set of descriptive statistics and facts regarding the rise and fall of the subprime mortgage market. Section 4.3 addresses the question of why there was a lending boom of this sort. Section 4.4 discusses the "prolonged" foreclosure crisis that prompted a number of policy responses by the government. The chapter concludes with a broad perspective on the future of mortgage finance and lessons learned from the last tumultuous decade.