Ponder this as you sip your Sunday morning coffee: Mortgage bankers think "something really bad is going to happen." That's the view of Jeff Lebowitz, the founder of Mortech, which conducts research for the mortgage industry. The Chester, Conn., company's study queried 330 mortgage banking executives before the war in Iraq and found them increasingly and persistently pessimistic, even during this boom time.
How booming? Two weeks ago, Lebowitz delivered his assessment to a mortgage industry meeting, a trade group announced that the number of applications to refinance home loans had shot up astronomically, again, to a new record.
"Even though business has been good for three years, there has been a deterioration in confidence," Lebowitz said. "We've seen a steady decline of lenders who think that business is going to grow and grow profitably.... We have not seen that level of distress in their attitudes before."
Even as Lebowitz released his study earlier this month, the mortgage business was digesting a growing chorus of utterances, including one from Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, that America's long-running refi madness was about over.
