Q&A: Mortgage lending rules

FSA (英國的「金管會」)在一份關於改革房貸制度的研究文件中提到：「我們注意到，輕鬆可得的貸款對某些族群，例如首次購屋者，不盡然是好事。寬鬆供給的貸款是，藉由導致房價大幅上升，致使首次購屋者因無力承擔而退出市場的因素之一。」

我們台灣的金管會，什麼時候才能摸摸良心，告訴馬英九和吳敦義這個顯而易見、不容抹滅的事實？請他們停止用納稅人的錢，供應各種低利貸款？

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Q&A: Mortgage lending rules
By Ian Pollock
Personal finance reporter, BBC News


The chief City regulator, the Financial Services Authority (FSA), has moved a step closer towards tighter regulation of mortgage lending.

By the summer of 2013 it wants new rules to be in place to prevent a return of the reckless lending seen in the middle of the last decade.

This will involve much closer scrutiny of a borrower's ability to repay.

The riskiest loans, worth more than the current value of the property being bought, will be banned outright.

Lenders will have to assume in their calculations that interest rates are higher than they are now when decide how much to lend.

The FSA says: "We are concerned that, as money returns to the market, firms will come under increasing pressure to consider riskier lending and will focus more on market share than maintaining lending standards.

"We need to learn the lessons of the past and act to stop poor lending practices re-emerging in the future," the FSA adds.

Who will all this affect?

At the moment, very few people. Strict mortgage rationing, due to a lack of funds, has been in force since 2008 anyway. So home sales have been roughly halved since then. The slightest blemish on a credit score can see an application for a mortgage being turned down. So, the FSA estimates that just 2.5% of current new borrowers would be affected by the more stringent lending rules it is proposing. And, assuming they are not watered down in some way as a result of the continuing consultation, they will not come into effect until 2013 at the earliest.
So what is this all about then?

This is all about stopping a new boom in mortgage lending, and house prices, in the future if lenders start lending too much money to home buyers who cannot really afford to repay their loans. That is what happened in the middle years of the last decade. Were it not for the extraordinarily low level of interest rates we have been experiencing, the FSA fears that tens, or even hundreds, of thousands more borrowers would now be in arrears and facing repossession.

Even if the boom conditions seen a few years ago returned, the new approach laid down by the FSA would, on its estimate, restrict lending to about 11% of prospective borrowers.
Sounds like not much will change for most people?

Not quite. Firstly, the widespread use of so-called self-certified mortgages (known to some as liars' mortgages) are now ruled out. They accounted for a very high proportion of new lending a few years ago. People will no longer be able to claim - with no evidence - that their income is big enough to justify a mortgage loan when in reality it is not.

For other applicants, even if lenders find they have more money to lend, they will have to scrutinise the finances of their borrowers much more thoroughly, to show they really can afford to re-pay. And lenders will have to assume that interest rates are noticeably higher than they are today.

Will my mortgage deal be renewed?

If you took out a mortgage a few years ago on rather optimistic assumptions, your lenders will not be forced to dump you if, as a brand new borrower, you might not pass the new lending criteria.

Whether you get the same deal is another matter though. If the value of your home has fallen in the meantime, any new mortgage may be much more expensive than it was before.

Will my interest-only mortgage be affected?

Yes, if you want to renew it in its current form. A new part of the FSA's continuing consultation proposes telling lenders to assess the affordability of interest-only loans as if the borrower were taking out a more expensive repayment mortgage. So in the future, if you have an interest-only loan, and want to re-new it, you may have to show that your finances are sufficiently robust, or that you have other "credible" sources of cash to pay off the mortgage in due course.
I would like to buy my first home, but cannot obtain a mortgage.

Will this help me?

In the long run yes, because it may help suppress artificial house price booms that lock out first-time buyers. The FSA puts the matter very clearly in its consultation document:

"Easy mortgage credit availability is not necessarily a force for good for groups such as first-time buyers. The easy supply of credit was a factor which, by generating significant house price appreciation, contributed to the declining role of first-time buyers within the market, squeezed by affordability problems."

'Occupy' is a response to economic permafrost

BBC 的記者觀察到，參與「佔領」("Occupy") 活動的人，並沒有特定的族群特徵：有中產階級、有學生、有帶著小孩的媽嗎、當然也有失業者。他們沒有共同的訴求：問 50 個人他們要什麼，會得到 50 個答案。

這些人唯一的共通點，和以往參與街頭抗議活動的人不同，是他們不認為政治能夠解決問題。他們反而認為政治正是造成這一切問題的源頭。不管是哪一黨，基本上都是同一群人。因為他們不相信政治，他們不透過政治管道(如：民主選舉)尋求解決方案，他們也不冀求政黨(如英國的工黨或美國的民主黨)執行他們的訴求，他們直接走上街頭！

台灣參與「佔領」活動的人會比歐美國家少那麼多，也許是因為大多數的人都還以為統獨的訴求和藍綠的差異，比自己的生活重要；沒發現到其實不論是藍綠，都是同樣一批人：同一批有錢人。

馬英九提出的房價「實價」課稅方案雖然沒什麼內容，執政三年以後跟著蔡英文起舞更反映出其不願影響既得利益者的心態，蔡英文所提出的漸進式方案卻也和馬英九的「633」一樣無法在一個任期內完成，可預期一定會無疾而終。在維護既得利益者這方面，馬英九、蔡英文、藍、綠是沒有任何差別的。

什麼時候我們認清楚藍綠和統獨其實是同一群既得利益者人的不同面向，什麼時候我們得到自由。

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'Occupy' is a response to economic permafrost

16 October 2011 Last updated at 10:27 GMT
Paul Mason
Economics editor, Newsnight

In February I wrote a blog called "Twenty Reasons Why It's Kicking Off Everywhere". With the global Occupy protests yesterday it is still looking quite accurate. But it's now clear there is a 21st reason. And a 22nd. We've had nine months of political paralysis. And people have begun to feel the economic permafrost setting in.

I went down to Paternoster Square to observe the first few hours of the London protest. The police sealed off the square, which is private property, so the protesters squatted the steps of St Paul's Cathedral. They had a big, sit-down general assembly and then broke into small circles, cross-legged, then got back together and decided to stay the night. At that point there were around 2,000 people.

Who were they? This is not yet as demographically wide as the indignado camps in Madrid or Syntagma were when they first started. Nor is it as "mainstream" as Occupy Wall street - yet. Not a single mainstream British politician attempted to appear at the protest; not a single MP, not a single famous author or film-maker. Helen John, the Greenham Common veteran, spoke, as did Peter Tatchell, but the biggest response - indeed it was a rock-star like response - was for Julian Assange. He was acclaimed by 9/10ths of the crowd and barracked in ribald language by the others.

Of the people I met: lots of student occupation activists from last winter; veteran leftists and veteran anarchists going back to the days of Saltley Gate; people involved in NGOs; an Oxbridge professor of computer science; a large smattering of "Anonymous" people - with their Guy Fawkes masks - who've become the new pole of attraction for the deep "autonomist" movement. Some women with their babies. And - the biggest group - just ordinary people.

Though the place was swarming with media, including a hilarious spoof of a Fox News reporter wearing a flak jacket, the main complaint is that the media is ignoring them and does not understand them. This latter point I think is largely true.

Even in America, where the protests are bigger and have a bigger penumbra of liberal celebrities and writers to give them salience, the initial response to Occupy Wall Street was to ask: what does this mean for the Democrats? Will Obama's ratings improve?

It's a pointless question. Most people involved in such protests have switched off from mainstream politics: they believe it's a rich-person's club and totally impenetrable to reason or pressure. In Britain they have no intention of "raising demands" on Labour in opposition.
In fact they revel in their diversity; it was true in Syntagma and it is true at St Paul's - if you ask 50 people why they're here and what they want you will get 50 answers.

Powerful signal worldwide

But these protests are a powerful signal worldwide. Their mere existence shows that people are determined to "think globally" about routes out of this crisis - at a time when economics is driving politicians down the route of national solutions. However marginalised they are politically - and in some countries, above all America and Greece, they have broken out of marginalisation - it is still a fact: in 1931, as the remnants of Globalisation 1.0 collapsed, there were no mass international protests against austerity. There were plenty of national, and indeed nationalist ones.

The protesters yesterday stuck a spoof street sign saying "Tahrir Square, London, EC4M". This was not Tahrir - but it obeyed the same impulse to occupy physical space.

The impulse, I believe, is being driven by two things: first it is - as I wrote in the 20 reasons - a meme. It is an effective action that is transmitting itself independent of any democratic structures and party political hierarchies: if you camp somewhere, the press turn up and you can get an instant hit of wellbeing by, however briefly and tenuously, living the dream of a communal, negotiated existence.

Second, because this communal, negotiated, networked life already exists in people's heads as a result of the rapid adoption of social networks and networked lifestyles. As Manuel Castells, one of the first sociologists of the internet, said: the more autonomous and rebellious a person's attitudes are, the more they use the internet; the more they use the internet, the more autonomous their lifestyle becomes.

Something has been going on between the left earphone and the right earphone of this generation that represents a profound change in attitude. I am still struggling to get my own head around it (I'm trying to write a book about it but the events keep happening too fast).
What is absolutely clear however, is what they are determined to do: it's much bigger than any single-issue campaign or cause. They mean to limit the power of finance capital and build a more equal society, while rejecting the hierarchical methods of the parties that once claimed to do so.

In this sense the movement is a kind of replacement social democracy; a mirror image of the besuited young people who populate the think tanks of Labour, the SPD, the US Democrats etc.
Occupy Everywhere, then, is the kind of movement you get when people start to believe mainstream politicians have lost their principles, or are trapped by vested interests, or are all crooked.

That's the answer to the question "what". The answer to why now? Basically we are in danger of a global stagnation - it was HSBC's economics team that described it as a permafrost. It poses the question "who pays for the banking crisis" very acutely. And large numbers of people are now realising it is going to be them, and more painfully, their children. As in Greece, in that circumstance, for every protester camped in the freezing dawn there may be many more quietly fuming in their living rooms who feel the same way.