HSBC’s Mortgage Lending Decisions and the Big Melt

It isn’t often that the American financial system, and its world counterpart, has a near- death experience. The last time was the 1930s. Beginning in 2007 and extending through 2009, American and global financial systems failed, melted down, and were rescued only by concerted central bank interventions in all the major industrial countries. The United States directly invested about 1 trillion dollars in U. S. financial institutions, and guaran-teed an estimated $ 14 trillion dollars in private debt. The complete history of this period has not been written. Many causes, involving many different actors, have been identified. Some have likened the big melt to a “ perfect storm” where a number of storm systems just happened to combine to form a much larger, lethal storm. But one cause was the failure of decision- making models, both the model builders and the financial man-agers who relied on those models. One of the major players in this crisis was HSBC Holdings PLC, the third largest bank in the world based on market value, and the largest bank in Europe. In the financial meltdown of 2008— 2009, HSBC joined the other major money center banks in a collective failure. HSBC weathered the turmoil in the financial markets better than most of its rivals, mainly because it had profited from continuing growth in Asia, where it generates about 65 percent of its pretax profit. But the company’s stock prices have fallen by half from their pre- crisis high, and HSBC had to shed over 6,000 employees, close over a thousand branches worldwide, and write off its mortgage generating unit in the United States called Household International. Senior managers at HSBC had observed the incredible rise in U. S. home prices in the period 1990— 2000, and closely followed the subprime mortgage market which drove home sales ever higher in the