Art De Vany notes that Pricing Mortgage Securities When Nobody Knows Anything is a lot like pricing movies when nobody knows anything — and that’s a problem he thinks he’s solved:
Everyone will admit that nobody really knows what the mortgages or the securities derived from them are worth. The market is illiquid to an extreme. The proposed bail out makes it rational to wait to unload them to see what the seller can get later. So, the plans being discussed to reinject liquidity to the market are having the opposite effect. It is making the market go away until mortgage holders can see what the Treasury will pay for them later.As William Goldman famously said of movies, nobody knows anything when it comes to predicting what a movie will earn when it finally reaches the market. I showed in my book, Hollywood Economics, that the way to solve the problem of unpredictable results is to set the price later when you do know. How is that done? Well, to use the movies as an example, you make contingent contracts that pay based on the revenues a movie earns after it is released. Virtually all the industry’s contracts follow this principle, which I call the Option Principle. Designing option-like contracts lets you pay when you do know.
It is easy to apply the Pay When You Know option principle to these distressed mortages and their derivatives. Let every holder of these instruments sell call options on their value. Make the options at least 5 years (preferably 10 years) before they expire so that they do not expire before there is time for a return of liquidity to the market. This would give time for the housing market to recover as well. The option would contain several strike points so that investors with different expectations, risk preferences, and current asset positions can choose to cash in at lower strike points for a quick return while others choose to wait for higher returns. At each strike point, the option would pay a percentage of the value of the asset.
The option would be designed so that the buyer earns a share of the future value of the mortgage security if it rises. The option would be of no value and would not be exercised if the value of the mortgage security fails to exceed the first, lower strike price. The homeowner also should receive a share of the future appreciation. This would give all the parties to the mortgage a share in the future appreciation. Had options of this sort been issued at the initial purchase of the home, the speculative aspect would have been properly separated from the homeowner aspect and this whole mess would not have happened. The homeowner/speculator would have sold all or some of the risk of future appreciation to the market.
I think it makes perfect sense for homeowners to sell off some of the upside risk, but homeowners aren’t the most sophisticated financiers around — not that the sophisticated financiers have made such a fine showing lately.