Small Down Payments on Homes Lead to High Leverage in Housing

MSNBC reports:

Buying a home used to require a sizable down payment: in 1976, the average for a first-time buyer was eighteen per cent. By contrast, a National Association of Realtors study of first-time buyers between mid-2005 and mid-2006 found that almost half put down nothing at all, and that the median down payment was just two per cent. If you earn eighty thousand a year, no one will lend you four hundred thousand dollars to buy stocks, but plenty of people were willing to lend you that money to buy a house. As long as home prices were rising, all this leverage seemed like a good thing: it let people buy homes that they couldn’t otherwise afford, and maximized their return on investment. But, with home prices sinking — in the final quarter of 2007, they were down almost 9 percent from the year before—the downside has become clear: as many as fifteen million homeowners now owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth. Homeownership isn’t building wealth for these people; it’s locking them into indentured servitude.

Nothing like Fannie Mae promoting homeownership with 4% down,that's why having Congressmen on the pad like Barnie Frank(Democrat-Fannie Mae)is so important to Fannie.