Wells Fargo Listed Among Top Subprime Loan Makers

The bank is one of 25 mortgage originators a report blames as the biggest players in the mortgage and financial mess.

By NEAL ST. ANTHONY, Star Tribune

Last update: May 6, 2009 - 9:35 PM

Wells Fargo, the nation's largest mortgage company, was the eighth-largest maker of subprime mortgages in recent years and among the 25 biggest players in the subprime market that imploded in 2007 and 2008, spurring the government to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. banks, according to a nonprofit research group.

The Center for Public Integrity, using data from lender filings made under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, listed among top subprime lenders Countrywide Financial Corp., Ameriquest Mortgage Co., New Century Financial Corp., Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and WMC Mortgage Corp., a unit of General Electric. They were among "enablers that bankrolled the type of lending that has threatened the financial system," the center said.

The center reviewed government data on nearly 7.2 million high-interest or subprime loans made from 2005 through 2007, from the peak to the collapse of the subprime boom. The center said the top 25 originators of such loans accounted for nearly $1 trillion of the $1.38 trillion in subprime loans made during that period.

The center, a nonprofit, independent, research and news agency founded in 1990, specializes in investigative reports that affect the public purse.

In a prepared statement Wednesday, Wells Fargo dismissed the research report.

"This is a simplistic and very misleading study and we disagree totally with its conclusions about our company." Wells Fargo said. "We are proud of our responsible lending and [loan-servicing] principles and how we support the communities we serve. Only a very small percentage of Wells Fargo's lending from 2005 through 2007 was in subprime and those loans were made responsibly. We continue to lend responsibly and service millions of customer loans.''

The San Francisco-based bank said 93 percent "of our mortgage customers were on time with their payments last year, performance consistently better than the industry average."

The center's study found that large U.S. and European banks poured huge sums into the subprime lending market amid high demand for high-yield, high-risk bonds backed by home mortgages. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Credit Suisse/First Boston and Goldman Sachs -- made huge profits while their executives collected seven-figure bonuses until the bottom fell out of the real estate market.

Wells Fargo accepted $25 billion in federal funds last fall, although its chairman has maintained that it was forced to do so and that federal regulators have made matters worse. Meanwhile, federal regulators are expected to name Wells Fargo as one of the large bank holding companies that needs to raise additional capital to protect against future losses in its mortgage and other loan portfolios.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting sources familiar with the so-called "stress tests,'' reported Wednesday that Wells Fargo is expected to need $15 billion more capital, while Bank of America is expected to need to raise $34 billion.

In December, Wells Fargo bought flagging Wachovia Corp, itself a big subprime lender, for about $15 billion in stock.

Wells Fargo stock, which topped $39 per share in September 2007, fell to $8 amid the financial market decline that bottomed in March. It has rebounded to close at $26.84 Wednesday, up $3.57 or 15 percent.

A second piece in the Public Integrity package documents how Congress ignored warning signals in the aftermath of financial deregulation of a decade ago that permitted the consolidation of banking and Wall Street through huge financial conglomerates, the booming subprime industry and warnings from critics of a bust at the intersection of promiscuous loans by government-insured lenders and short-term-driven Wall Street profiteers.

Congress also failed in 2005 to reign in the ballooning subprime-loan securitizations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage wholesalers and insurers taken over by the taxpayers last year amid huge losses, the report said.

Glenn Wilson, Minnesota commerce commissioner who has been a mortgage banker, and other critics have said that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the only regulator empowered to oversee the entire financial system, failed to crack down on the proliferation of products such as "no-documentation" loans and confusing adjustable-rate products that were identified early on as growing problems that could lead to heavy default rates.

Greenspan focused on keeping interest rates low. His successor, Ben Bernanke, who took over in late 2006, outlawed many of the practices, but it was too late.

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Featured comment

re: posted by saltie on May 7, 09 at 7:32 am
"...the government then REQUIRED lenders to have up to 10% of their mortgage portfolios invested in? And now, some of the very same persons … read more who created this mortgage disaster (Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, in particular) get to sit on the sidelines now, point fingers and deny their culpability and articles that obfuscate the full story can be written to futher gin up anti-business sentiment." - Why is it that so many people can't comprehend the fact that the sub-prime mortgages that caused the problems are not the same as the CRA loans that the government was promoting? And it was Phil Gramm and the Gramm/Leach/Bliley Act that created the problem by deregulating banks and allowing them to make sub-prime loans where it was illegal before. The majority of the bad sub-prime loans were made by private mortgage banks, not CRA covered banks. CRA covered banks were less likey to make the bad sub-prime ARMs. But brokers saw that they could make more money from the sub-prime loans, so they were pushing people who would have qualified for CRA loans into the more risky sub-prime ARMs.

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Wells Fargo, the nation's largest mortgage company, was the eighth-largest maker of subprime mortgages in recent years and among the 25 biggest players in the subprime market that imploded in 2007 and 2008, spurring the government to inject hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. banks, according to a nonprofit research group.

The Center for Public Integrity, using data from lender filings made under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, listed among top subprime lenders Countrywide Financial Corp., Ameriquest Mortgage Co., New Century Financial Corp., Wells Fargo, J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup and WMC Mortgage Corp., a unit of General Electric. They were among "enablers that bankrolled the type of lending that has threatened the financial system," the center said.

The center reviewed government data on nearly 7.2 million high-interest or subprime loans made from 2005 through 2007, from the peak to the collapse of the subprime boom. The center said the top 25 originators of such loans accounted for nearly $1 trillion of the $1.38 trillion in subprime loans made during that period.

The center, a nonprofit, independent, research and news agency founded in 1990, specializes in investigative reports that affect the public purse.

In a prepared statement Wednesday, Wells Fargo dismissed the research report.

"This is a simplistic and very misleading study and we disagree totally with its conclusions about our company." Wells Fargo said. "We are proud of our responsible lending and [loan-servicing] principles and how we support the communities we serve. Only a very small percentage of Wells Fargo's lending from 2005 through 2007 was in subprime and those loans were made responsibly. We continue to lend responsibly and service millions of customer loans.''

The San Francisco-based bank said 93 percent "of our mortgage customers were on time with their payments last year, performance consistently better than the industry average."

The center's study found that large U.S. and European banks poured huge sums into the subprime lending market amid high demand for high-yield, high-risk bonds backed by home mortgages. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Credit Suisse/First Boston and Goldman Sachs -- made huge profits while their executives collected seven-figure bonuses until the bottom fell out of the real estate market.

Wells Fargo accepted $25 billion in federal funds last fall, although its chairman has maintained that it was forced to do so and that federal regulators have made matters worse. Meanwhile, federal regulators are expected to name Wells Fargo as one of the large bank holding companies that needs to raise additional capital to protect against future losses in its mortgage and other loan portfolios.

The Wall Street Journal, quoting sources familiar with the so-called "stress tests,'' reported Wednesday that Wells Fargo is expected to need $15 billion more capital, while Bank of America is expected to need to raise $34 billion.

In December, Wells Fargo bought flagging Wachovia Corp, itself a big subprime lender, for about $15 billion in stock.

Wells Fargo stock, which topped $39 per share in September 2007, fell to $8 amid the financial market decline that bottomed in March. It has rebounded to close at $26.84 Wednesday, up $3.57 or 15 percent.

A second piece in the Public Integrity package documents how Congress ignored warning signals in the aftermath of financial deregulation of a decade ago that permitted the consolidation of banking and Wall Street through huge financial conglomerates, the booming subprime industry and warnings from critics of a bust at the intersection of promiscuous loans by government-insured lenders and short-term-driven Wall Street profiteers.

Congress also failed in 2005 to reign in the ballooning subprime-loan securitizations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage wholesalers and insurers taken over by the taxpayers last year amid huge losses, the report said.

Neal St. Anthony • 612-673-7144


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