Mortgage news was dominated by two items this week:

• President George W. Bush signed the mortgage relief bill, designed to help troubled home owners stave off foreclosure
• A prominent home price index reported a 15.8% decline for the year ending May 31, 2008, the biggest year-over-year decline so far

On the surface, the first would seem to be a highlight, and the second a lowlight, of the week’s mortgage and housing news. Reading between the lines, though, reveals that the first item may not be as good as it’s been reported, but the second item may not be as bad.

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With all the mortgage news coming out these days, it is important for new home buyers to distinguish between stories which primarily affect existing home owners and borrowers, and those which will impact future buyers.

As an example of the range of stories over the past week:

• Existing home sales suffered a setback in June, after showing signs of growth in May 
• The long-awaited housing bill continued to inch toward passage
• 30-year mortgage rates took their biggest jump of 2008
• Oil prices took a welcome drop from their recent all-time high

New home buyers should have a different take on these stories than the angles widely reported by the media.

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It was an ugly headline, even by the standards of the mortgage crisis:

• “US foreclosure filings surge 53 percent in June“

Looking a little closer though, it turns out the numbers aren’t nearly as bad as that Associated Press headline would suggest. Another example of the media piling on with a negative spin was a story suggesting that loan modification programs were simply extending mortgage pain.

Meanwhile, there were two positive signs for the mortgage market:

• Mortgage application activity rose for the second consecutive week
• Mortgage rates eased a bit in early July, after rising significantly in June

In large part, the conclusion drawn from the above depends on whether one is taking a forward-looking or backward-looking view of the market.

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Mortgage news this week painted a picture of a variety of ways people are attempting to cope with the mortgage slump:

• While the housing bill continues to meander its way through Congress, it apparently was not an urgent enough issue to get done before Congress adjourned for its Fourth of July recess
• Hope Now, a mortgage industry alliance, reported that it helped 170,000 homeowners avoid foreclosure in the month of May
• Further evidence that falling behind on a mortgage need not be permanent was seen in the fact that more that 40,000 borrowers who had been behind on their mortgages caught up in May
• The week ending June 27 offered a small sign of broader resiliency in the mortgage market, as mortgage application volume recovered slightly from the year-to-date low set during the prior week

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Recently-released data on home sales sent mixed signals to prospective buyers:

• The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 major markets showed a 14.4% year-over-year decline through the end of March, 2008
• The U.S. Commerce Department reported that the number of new home sales increased 3.3% in the month of April  

While conflicting signals on housing might give home buyers reason to pause, two other developments might spur them to action:

• Revised GDP data strengthened the earlier indication that the U.S. economy avoided slipping into recession in the first quarter of 2008
• Mortgage rates broke out of a month-long holding pattern and showed hints of a possible upward trend

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Talk about poetic justice — one of the primary culprits in the derailing of the mortgage industry was the packaging and marketing of mortgage loans as mortgage-backed securities. These were classified as safe by many investment ratings firms but as it turned out few investors had any idea of what they were really buying — until their investments went belly up. This confusion allowed lenders to make increasingly risky and imprudent loans as long as they could be sold. And now Lewis Ranieri, credited by many for the creation of mortgage-backed securities, is himself in hot water over these investments. His own company, Franklin Bank, is in serious trouble, with tumbling asset values, non-performing loans, and disclosure and audit issues that prompted an SEC inquiry and forced at least one senior manager into early retirement.

If the guy who created the system can’t deal with it you know it’s time for a do-over. The problem with the current system is that the originators of mortgages have been able to offload a large part of their risk onto unsuspecting investors, in some cases by bundling less desirable riskier loans together with solid projects and selling the whole thing as a safe investment. Well, now investors are skittish (fool me once….) and sometimes even loans once considered “no-brainers” are impossible to get done these days. For example, a borrower moved into town with a nice chunk of cash and found the perfect home. He offered to put 50% down but needed a no-doc loan because he hadn’t found a job yet. The guy has perfect credit and enough money in the bank to keep going for two years even without a job. No lender will touch this deal. However if this guy had a job, a credit score as low as 580, and only 5% down he could probably get an FHA mortgage. That’s because the risk isn’t born by the lender, it’s born by….drum roll please…US! Taxpayers and insurers will bear the brunt of the fallout if this loan goes bad, so lenders are more than willing to make this loan. Yet I know if it was my own money which loan I’d feel safer doing…