Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act - AMTPA

A law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1982 that effectively opened up the mortgage market. Prior to the passage of the Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act, many states had laws on the books restricting the type of mortgages that lenders could offer other than the vanilla fixed-rate mortgage that your grandpa always advised you to stick with, advice that always seemed to come in the middle of your birthday parties ("But Pop Pop...I'm only 6. I don't have a morch-gage.")

The AMTPA preempted those state laws and made more exotic mortgages available nationwide. This included things like adjustable-rate mortgages (where the interest rate you pay fluctuates according to changes in overall interest rates) and balloon payment mortgages (where monthly payments are kept low by tacking a single large payment sometime down the road).

The law gave consumers and lenders more flexibility, possibly leading to more access to home ownership. However, later critics (we're talking a couple decades later at this point) would blame these more unconventional mortgage structures for fueling the housing bubble of the mid 2000s, which ultimately led to financial crisis of 2007-2008.