Natural Expectations and Home Equity Extraction

In this paper we show that long-run expectations about future housing prices of both households and, especially, financial intermediaries had a large impact on households' indebtedness during the recent boom in U.S. housing prices. We introduce the theory of natural expectations in a collateralized credit market model populated by households and banks and find: (1) that mild variations in long-run forecasts of housing prices result in large differences in the amount of home equity extracted during the boom; and (2) that the equilibrium level of debt and the interest rate are particularly sensitive to financial intermediaries' naturalness.