ìThe Ownership Society:îMortgage Securitization and the Metropolitan Landscape Since the 1960s.

[摘要] ;;The Ownership Society” examines the residential mortgage system in the United States from the 1960s through the 1980s, focusing on questions of policymaking and political economy at the local, state, and national levels. Under the New Deal home finance system, highly regulated, government-supported thrift institutions and banks originated and retained mortgages within legally circumscribed regions. For the financial elites who controlled these institutions, mortgages created a set of economic and political imperatives grounded in the financial viability of local real estate markets and the specificities of place. Confronted with credit crunches in the mortgage market during the late 1960s, a coalition of finance executives and Johnson Administration policymakers searched for new sources of capital for mortgages. The efforts of these growth liberals culminated in the 1968 Housing and Urban Development Act. This legislation created a new financial instrument called the ;;mortgage-backed security” (MBS) and charged federal housing agencies and government-sponsored, privately owned corporations with generating the MBS market. MBSs transformed concrete, illiquid mortgages into abstract, liquid securities that represented investments in neither specific mortgages nor local real estate markets but rather massive pools of mortgages from across the country. Created, sustained, and guaranteed by the federal government, MBSs subsumed local circuits of capital, dominated by place-bound financial institutions—most importantly thrifts—into national and international circuits of capital, dominated by Wall Street financiers. Government mortgage corporations redirected capital from slow-growth regions, particularly the Rust Belt, to high-growth regions, especially in the Sun Belt. In places such as Los Angeles and Houston, mortgage securitization fueled speculative homebuilding booms on the metropolitan periphery. Meanwhile, volatile interest rates during the 1970s and 1980s along with financial deregulation and industry consolidation devastated the local thrift industry. Grassroots homeowner groups fought the decline of federally regulated financial localism. However, policymakers increasingly saw the MBS market as the future of home finance. By the end of the 1980s, the MBS market had displaced the New Deal system as the dominant source of mortgage capital in the U.S. Securitization significantly increased systemic risk and volatility within the mortgage market, ultimately leading to the Crash of 2008.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] urban history

[关键词] U.S. history;urban history;policy history;History (General);Humanities;History