Orsakade Fannie Mae och Freddie Mac finanskrisen?
22 okt 2011, kl 23:29
bergh in Samhälle och politik

Tesen att de statliga bolagen Fannie Mae och Freddie Mac orsakade bostadsbubblan i USA (och därmed också finanskrisen) genom fördelningspolitiskt motiverad utlåning till låginkomsttagare utan tillräckliga marginaler i sin privatekonomi, dyker upp ganska ofta – bl a i boken Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon av Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner.

Tesen får mothugg av Jeff Madrick och Frank Partnoy när boken recenseras i the New York Review of Books:

The book boldly and passionately asserts that the risk-taking of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac was a major element in causing the housing bubble. In particular, the authors blame the crisis on the goals set by the Clinton administration in the early 1990s to make lending “affordable” to more middle- and low-income home buyers.

Deras motargument:

This bold claim, however, is not substantiated by persuasive analysis or by any hard evidence in the book. The GSEs did generate large losses, but their bad investments in housing loans followed rather than led the crisis; most of those investments involved purchases or guarantees made well after the subprime and housing bubbles had been expanded by private loans and were almost about to burst. Even then, the GSEs’ overall purchases and guarantees were much less risky than Wall Street’s: their default rates were one fourth to one fifth those of Wall Street and other private financial firms, a fact not made clear by the authors.

Madrick och Partnoy är trots allt positivt inställda till boken, och tillstår att både Mae & Mac agerade oförnuftigt. Deras nyanseringen känns dock rimlig: Även om Mae och Mac bidrog till problemen på bostadsmarknaden, var det ju främst andra faktorer (som den sannolikt bitvis olagliga värdepapperiseringen av lånen), som gjorde att dessa problem spred sig i hela det finansiella systemet.

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