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Chapter 1: Why is the Fed considering loosening mortgage regulations?
When it comes to getting a mortgage, there are banks and non-banks that make loans. Does it matter? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. In Denver, I'm Amy Scott, in for Kai Risdahl. It's Tuesday, February 17th. Good to have you with us. We're going to start with a different kind of Fed story than usual.
Typically, we talk about the central bank in terms of where interest rates might be headed.
Chapter 2: How did the 2008 housing market crash affect mortgage lending?
But the Federal Reserve regulates banks, too. And in a speech yesterday, a top Fed official said the central bank is rethinking some regulations affecting mortgages. The changes would encourage banks to make more home loans. And as Marketplace's Sabree Beneshor reports, that could make it easier for the rest of us to get mortgages. After the 2008 crash, banks bolted out of the mortgage business.
Before the Great Recession, about 70 percent of loans were originated by banks. Now it's only about 30 percent.
Tomasz Piskorski is a professor of finance at Columbia Business School. One reason was they got burned so bad by the home loans they made. Another reason, according to Piskorski's research, was regulation drove them out.
It accounts for about 60% of that migration.
Specifically, new rules said banks had to set aside a bunch of money in reserve as a kind of safety cushion should things go bad. A lot of banks felt it was too much money, so they just didn't want to deal with it.
A lot of this activity has moved to the unregulated sector to the non-banks. Non-banks like fintech companies.
That's not necessarily a problem, he says, but it does mean banks aren't out there swimming in the sea of competition to give you a home loan. And proposed Biden-era rules would have tightened those regulations even more. Yesterday, the Fed said, let's maybe not. So here's what they want to do. One, a reduction in
and the amount of capital that banks will have to hold against loans that they hold on their portfolio.
Jim Parrott is a non-resident fellow at the Urban Institute and a former senior advisor in the Obama White House. Banks right now have to hold a certain size safety cushion of capital for all of their loans.
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Chapter 3: What are the proposed changes to capital reserves for banks?
And just last week, the FDA refused to review Moderna's new mRNA flu vaccine. And Marketplace's Samantha Fields reports the consequences could be long-lasting. Developing new vaccines is extremely expensive, and Amish Adalja at Johns Hopkins University says it takes years.
This is sometimes a decades-long process or even longer, and there are many failures. Even once a company does have success... Vaccines have never been a major moneymaker for pharmaceutical companies.
That's why investment and support from the federal government is so critical for vaccine research and development.
Many companies are dependent on that money, and they are also dependent upon the fact that they have access to a market in the United States...
Now both are in question, and Michael Osterholm at the University of Minnesota says the regulatory environment for vaccine approvals is shifting too.
Vaccine companies need to have one set of rules to play by. If they're constantly changing, the companies will decide that doing business here just doesn't make financial sense.
That is already happening. Moderna now says it's no longer planning to invest in new late-stage vaccine trials. And Jason Schwartz at Yale is worried that other companies are also making early-stage decisions about whether to prioritize vaccine research at all.
Earlier-stage decisions may not make headlines, but they ultimately will set back vaccine R&D in ways that we'll continue to see for decades.
At Geovax, a small biotech company in Georgia, CEO David Dodd says they're not moving away from vaccines, but... We may be setting priorities that are different than what we had in the past.
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Chapter 4: How might easing mortgage regulations impact homebuyers?
And Texas continues to lead in both of those categories.
He expects people to continue to move to Texas in droves.
All those people have to sleep somewhere at night, we say, and so they need housing of some form.
The Houston metro area specifically will continue to be a bright spot, says Chris Bolio with the Greater Houston Builders Association. There is a skeptical optimism. Skeptical, because even with strong demand, you can't escape headwinds.
I think tariffs, I think immigration, I think the amount of governmental oversight cost associated with development and with construction, they are all big red flags.
But there are red flags builders are getting used to. And in Atlanta, another southern real estate market, Wayne Hyatt with the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association, says companies there haven't been able to build as quickly as they'd like.
Our biggest struggle is bringing a developed lot to the public and bringing a developed lot that is priced where the consumer can afford it.
He says new regulations like energy and building codes have made construction more costly without adding to home values. Further north, Dawn Crandall with the Home Builders Association of Michigan says new single family permits there are still lagging behind the level of new housing needed.
In construction, time is money. So when you have those delays, it costs more. So it's looking at lot size requirements. It's looking at streamlining the process.
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Chapter 5: What challenges are vaccine makers facing due to funding cuts?
Yeah. I think it's refreshing just to, because everything's like a streaming service now. Yeah. It's like, and you have to like pay different subscriptions to just to see like different movies.
Saving money on subscriptions is one reason video stores are getting more customers. And across town at for-profit video store Cinephile, strategically located right next to an independent movie theater, owner Sebastian Matthews says his business is picking up too.
What we've seen is folks with a lot of fatigue with the streaming services, either with price increases or things going in and out of rights so that they can't watch stuff that they expect to be there.
Matthews says a growing number of collectors are also purchasing physical media.
For a long time, our rental business... represented about 75% of the business and 25% were people purchasing. And now that number is closer to 50-50.
Customers are often snapping up rare or obscure titles, he says. Those titles are the bread and butter of Lunch Meat VHS, a North Carolina-based retailer. Like this 1980s gem, Splatter University. At Splatter U, it's not whether you pass or fail, but whether you live or die.
Lunch Meat VHS is run by Josh Schaefer, who also publishes an occasional magazine of the same name about everything videotape.
This is stuff that's not on disc officially anywhere. Stuff that was shot on videotape, beta, VHS, quarter inch.
Schaefer buys the rights to videotape-only films, B-movies mostly, and produces reprints. Nostalgia is a big motivating factor for his customer base.
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