The Coupon Mortgage: A Luxury Construction Lender’s End Run

Abstract

[Excerpt] The impact of the market failure that has befallen the residential real estate market during the past two years is well-known and self-evident, even if the underlying causes and remedies remain in controversy. Whether the market failure was caused by “predatory lenders,” whose only interest was in “churning product” to generate fees; “speculative developers,” who saw endless demand; “greedy securitizers,” who built a financial house of cards using over-leveraged derivative insurance contracts; “clueless speculators,” who thought the market values of real estate could only increase; or “hapless regulators,” who were under-funded and held in thrall to the industries they oversaw – the bottom line is that there is plenty of blame to go around. As a result of this market failure, primary and secondary market liquidity has slowed to a trickle, significantly reducing institutional and consumer credit for the first time since the late 1940s.