Business World: Payback
Bailout has been a busy word in the last two weeks. But lending so solvent institutions won't go under for lack of short-term liquidity is very different than bailing out insolvent institutions from their bad decisions. In any case, we've made peace with a financial system that lives a little closer to the edge on liquidity than it would if there weren't a Federal Reserve. Whether the alternative would be a more stable world, with as much growth, is uncertain. But there's no doubt that the system has been conditioned to expect a general subsidy to risktaking by way of the Fed's willingness to provide cheap money in an emergency.</br></br>Everybody talks about moral hazard. A wisp of memory came to mind last week. Then-Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines visited The Journal years ago and entertained himself by mocking editorial writers who assume that establishing that a policy is economically inefficient is enough to establish that it's unwise.</br></br>He yukked it up quite a bit, in fact, noting that voters are perfectly entitled to assert values other than those of the market, namely that homeownership is a social blessing and should be encouraged with subsidies. And so we've done with tax subsidies, lending subsidies and a concerted set of policies by Bill Clinton's HUD to move low-income people out of rental units and into homes they own. His goal, which was achieved, was to lift the homeownership rate from 64.2% to 67.5% of households.</br></br>But a home financed by a mortgage is not just an asset. It's also a liability. We owe thanks to Carolina Katz Reid, then a graduate student at University of Washington, for a 2004 study of what she dubbed the "low income homeownership boom." She considered a simple question -- "whether or not low-income households benefit from owning a home." Her discoveries are bracing:</br></br>Of low-income households from a nationally representative sample who became homeowners between 1977 and 1993, fully 36% returned to renting in two years, and 53% in five years. Suggesting their sojourn among the homeowning was not a happy one, few returned to homeownership in later years.