The rich rule over the poor. The borrower is servant to the lender.

The rich rule over the poor. The borrower is servant to the lender.

The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

The rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender.

debt service coverage reduces the financial risk to investors and translates into lower borrowing costs for the borrower.

When investors make less risky loans, they require a lower risk premium , thereby reducing the cost of borrowing to the borrower.

Incentives for brokers and credit rating agencies have been even more perverse. In the United States, brokers were selling mortgages without checking whether the borrower had the means to repay.

This, of course, is just the story of subprime mortgages in another guise. The result was increased US spending and the descent of measured household savings into negative territory.

Income inequality grew rapidly in the last decade, but consumption inequality did not. The reason easy credit, especially subprime mortgages, which helped those without means to keep up with the Joneses.

Moreover, because there are no subprime mortgages in China and down payments are as high as 50 60 , even a significant fall in housing prices will not seriously damage China s mega banks.

In the old days, when borrowers found it impossible to make their payments, mortgages would be restructured foreclosures were bad for both the borrower and the lender. Securitization made debt restructuring difficult, if not impossible.

Right now is precisely the time to do so, given that the United States has become, without rival, the world s most reckless borrower. The US is draining a whopping 75 of the world s surplus savings.

After the depreciation, the collateral, valued in dollars, is worth less. Loan covenants have likely been broken, and lenders begin demanding that the borrower either put up new collateral or deleverage and repay part of the loan.

For both borrowers and creditors, the risks and costs are enormous. The borrower is cut off from international markets, and essential imports can no longer be purchased, while large scale defaults threaten to plunge creditors into insolvency.

And essentially the same happened with US subprime mortgage lending and with the Spanish banking system in the 2000 s. In both cases, banks took excessive risks in the expectation eventually vindicated that governments would bail them out.

The key to mortgage regulation is the concept of risk weight, a measure that increases with the probability that a borrower will default. For example, a loan to AAA rated Microsoft has a 0 risk weight, meaning that it is virtually risk free.

In the 1990 s, Argentina tied its hands with a dollar pegged currency in order to enhance its credibility as a borrower. The strategy worked too well the large credit inflows that it attracted triggered an inflationary boom that reduced the country s competitiveness.

So there is an upside to today s massive US fiscal and current account deficits. The structure of global imbalances, with the US the big borrower and emerging markets the creditors, presents a rare opportunity to finance a change in governance at the IMF.

Decree 78 2002 ND CP by the Government on credits for the poor and other policy entitlement groups stipulates that for a less than VND 10 million loan, the borrower needs only an application form and land use right certificate without collateral.

Although the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low for a protracted period, the corporate sector did not increase its investment. The recovery was ultimately fueled by so called subprime mortgages home purchase loans extended to borrowers with lower credit ratings.

Regulators primary tool to enforce compliance was their authority to reject non CRA compliant banks requests for new branches or mergers. During the subprime boom, large banks were more likely to want to expand, and thus had greater incentive to comply.

In August 2007, the decision by BNP Paribas to close two of its hedge funds exposed to the subprime sector precipitated a liquidity crisis for all European banks during that summer. This year, BNP s great rival, Société Générale, has been in the spotlight.

If the problem is excess saving, and if uncertainty erodes confidence, a massive injection of liquidity such as the ECB s in response to the subprime crisis may be necessary but not sufficient. A rate cut also may be required to restore confidence.

While financial institutions tried to mitigate risks by bundling subprime mortgages, Fukushima s cooling system was able to cope with either a blackout and an earthquake or a tsunami. But, in both cases, the failure probabilities were correlated, and their joint occurrence led to catastrophe.

Yes, China is paying a price for aggressive economic stimulus undertaken in the depths of the subprime crisis. The banking system funded the bulk of the additional spending, and thus is exposed to any deterioration in credit quality that may have arisen from such efforts.

Such automatic borrower initiated filings, if made legal by Congress, could reduce the household debt overhang without the need for government subsidies. To the extent that the alternative is costly foreclosure proceedings that make borrowers and lenders worse off, this proposal should attract the support of both sides.

The continent shuts down on the assumption that nothing of consequence will happen until everyone returns, suitably tanned, in September. Never mind the subprime crisis of August 2007 or, closer to home, the European monetary crisis of August 1992 the August holiday is a venerable tradition.

But the minute the sub prime crisis subsides, anxieties about SWF s will return. For the emergence of this vast and growing pool of state controlled funds may have implications more far reaching, and certainly more politically sensitive, than the hopefully temporary distress caused by the subprime crisis.

Unfortunately, the Commission composed mostly of elected officials, rather than experts wasted its time in political squabbles. Its members could not agree even on how to define subprime mortgages and calculate how many such mortgages there were in the United States at the time of the crisis.

A transaction involving potatoes happens at one point in time only the buyer parts with her money, the seller parts with his tubers, and that is it. A financial transaction, by contrast, happens over time the borrower gets the money today and promises to repay in a month, year, or decade.

The second adverse effect of deflation is to raise the real interest rate, that is, the difference between the nominal interest rate and the rate of inflation. When prices are rising, the real interest rate is less than the nominal rate since the borrower repays with dollars that are worth less.

Chen Delin said that currently together with the mortgage loan provided by the developer, the mortgage percentage of the borrower can reach 85 90 . If the property price fell by 10 , there would be negative assets (i.e. the market value of the property fell below the level of the total outstanding mortgage loan).

But, with the possible exception of Thailand in 1997, the IMF s long time resident historian, James Boughton, finds little evidence for that view in internal documents. The IMF s Internal Evaluation Office is more directly scathing in its assessment of the Fund s obliviousness to the US subprime crisis as it emerged.

Given the nature of market turmoil, an early warning system for financial tsunamis may be difficult to create but the world needs one today more than ever. Few people foresaw the subprime crisis of 2008, the risk of default in the eurozone, or the current turbulence in financial markets worldwide.

As a result, by 2006, global liquidity amounted to more than twice the value of world GDP. Add to that the American financial sector s untenable subprime and securitization activities, and it is not surprising that the next two years brought the global financial system to the brink of outright collapse.

Philosophically, the debt forgiveness approach rests on the belief that creditors share culpability for defaults with debtors, since they made the bad loans in the first place. As long as the borrower has not misled the lender at the time of taking the loan, the lender bears at least some responsibility for the transaction.

Since the subprime crisis, ultra low interest rates in the rich world have caused emerging market firms to borrow like never before. Some of the debt does not even appear in the official statistics of borrowing countries, because it was often taken on not by domestically based firms, but by their offshore subsidiaries.

Chinese officials faced the risk of a dangerous interplay of political and economic instability. Hit by a second external demand shock in three years first, America s subprime crisis, and now Europe s sovereign debt crisis any outbreak of internal political instability would pose a far greater threat than might otherwise be the case.

The Germans want the ECB to focus only on large systemic banks, and leave smaller savings banks (like those that invested heavily in subprime mortgages) to national authorities. The United Kingdom and Sweden argue that they cannot be made subservient to a central bank of which they are, at best, semi detached members.

The left has dismissed any claim that the CRA played a role in the housing boom by pointing out that it was enacted in 1977, while the subprime boom played out in the early 2000 s. But this ignores the possibility that regulators may have started to enforce the CRA rigorously only later.

After Argentina s unilateral default in 2001, many investors saw more clearly the need to allow explicitly for less drastic alternatives ahead of time, and so incorporated so called collective action clauses into debt contracts. If the borrower runs into trouble, CACs make it possible to restructure debt with the agreement of a substantial majority of creditors (usually around 70 ).

The car loan market underwent a mini boom in 2003 04, but non repayment rates in excess of 50 forced banks to pull back. The difficulty of repossession (where did the borrower park the car?) and sale (the used car market is still in its infancy) meant that most of these bad loans had to be written off.

And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest as with the servant, so with his master as with the maid, so with her mistress as with the buyer, so with the seller as with the lender, so with the borrower as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him.

And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest as with the servant, so with his master as with the maid, so with her mistress as with the buyer, so with the seller as with the lender, so with the borrower as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him.

In practice, their implementation was, until recently, left to national regulators, who applied very different standards. Most important, while state subsidies in all other sectors are forbidden, they are commonly accepted in banking not only explicit subsidies, such as Germany s bailout of several Landesbanks after the American subprime mortgage crisis, but implicit subsidies as well.