In the 1980s innovation was added to the traditional old bond. A bond was basically a promise (from government or corporation) to make interest payments on borrowed money, and, to eventually pay back the borrowed money. For generations, financial markets traded bonds in this way. Given that a bond was an income in a way based on borrowed money, Wall Street, in the late 1980s decided to create “bond-like” financial products from other debt-based income like credit cards, student loans, and most importantly in this case, home mortgages. The “mortgage bond” was created and became a financial product that was bought and sold by Wall Street investment banks. The mortgage bond would collect many home mortgages, purchased from lenders, and …show more content…
They enticed these customers by creating a new type of mortgage- variable rate, with low to zero initial interest rates, which later reset to higher levels. A large number of Americans took on these mortgages not realizing the real estate trap they were getting themselves in caused by their own actions. In the 2000s, as the mortgages became lower quality, Wall Street’s mortgage bond became even riskier. This should have made them more difficult to sell to investors because it would affect their ratings since riskier products should have lower ratings. However, the conflict was between Wall Street and the rating agencies since it’s Wall Street who pays these agencies. Likely because of this conflict, rating agencies assigned surprisingly high ratings for these ever risky mortgage bonds. Despite the boom in mortgage bonds, Wall Streets desire for more profits grew and led them to focus on the low ratings of the bottom (riskiest) tranches of the mortgage bonds. They came up with the clever idea to package the hundreds of different mortgage bonds together and on the principle of diversification, they could convince rating agencies to give them higher ratings as a whole. Instead of holding on to the mortgages and collecting monthly payments, local lenders started selling mortgages off to other financial institutions who packaged hundreds of mortgages
JP Morgan bundled subprime mortgages into securities and marketed them as for sale as investments. Investors that bought the securities being offered by JP Morgan because they thought they were relatively safe is what led to the housing bubble. When hundreds of thousands of homeowners defaulted on their mortgages because they could not afford to make their payment, the value of the securities plummeted leaving investors with huge losses. This conduct of bundling toxic loans into securities and misleading investors contributed to the financial crisis of 2008 (USDOJ, 2005). JP Morgan's unethical behavior left many families homeless and caused taxpayers billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts of the financial industry.
Pay options were also available allowing the borrowers to choose lower payments and the balance of what you should pay and what you actually paid was added to the loan to have a negative amortization. The introductory low rates were called Teaser Rates. The goal was to make home ownership more affordable for more people. Michael Francis and other brokers in Wall Street knew that some of these loans are bad loans but they didn’t cared because they transferred all these loans to whoever wanted to buy them such as pension funds. They are just the intermediary or the pipeline. These pension funds could only buy AAA mortgage loan. The investors wanted to sell their loans to the pension funds but they needed to be rated AAA by these agencies. Their job was to evaluate the risk of the securities. What was the ethical issue here with the agencies? The riskier BBB looked as good as the triple AAA and they looked much safer than they used to be and they started to look more like a AAA security. So AAA requirement got lower as the market got smart. Moodies, S&P, and Fitch are the three rating agencies. They didn’t give price but based on their ratings they got priced. The suggestion is that these agencies would come with the investment bankers. The business was getting more competitive so you just wanted to get more business or more business than the other agencies. When Anne Arundel was asked if standards lower she
In the movie the big short, Lewis Ranieri, who is a banker of the Wall Street, created an idea that companies packed thousands of mortgage all bundled together to sell, which is the AAA credit-rating bond, and can obtain high yields with low risk because everyone should pay for their mortgage. The concept of Lewis Ranieri is called mortgage-backed securities (MBS). However, the demand of buying MBS is more than MBS supply. Therefore, when the risk of MBS is high, Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is a way to change subprime loans to high- rating bonds and it can be sold again. Although CDO is full of subprime loans, it still can get AAA rating because
The responsibilities of the mortgage brokers to the borrowers, lenders, and investors were to promote the subprime mortgages to these groups of people in order for them to take out a loan. Although they did fulfill their responsibilities of promoting and having people sign up for it, they mishandled on how people should be granted for a mortgage loan. These brokers were to desperate about earning huge amount of money due to the expanding market that they ignored the proper precaution that they should have taken when they
The private label mortgage securitization collected a series of assets – most of them are high-yield junk bonds, mortgage securities, credit-default swap with varying degrees of risk. The securitization of subprime mortgages was attractive to investors due to high interest rates and high return features. More and more financial institutions started to sell private label mortgage securitization, including banks, insurance companies and so on. In 2006, the CDO market ranged from $0.5 trillion to $2 trillion (boundless. Com). Also, by 2007, about 70% of subprime borrowers used hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs).
Mortgage-backed securities are investments packaged by financial institutions for the secondary mortgage market. Investors are able to pay for shares in a bundle of mortgages, and they receive a yield when the mortgages are repaid. These investments tend to be used in a similar fashion as the 10 year treasury bond, and their rates move in tandem. Basically, if the 10 year bond is dropping, mortgage rates tend to do so as well--and vice versa.
In the 1980s, investments banks such as Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, JP Morgan, and Morgan Stanley started selling mortgage bonds. Mortgage bonds were a collection of thousands of home mortgages, purchased from lenders, and their associated income streams (monthly payment). To address the fact that some homeowners often refinance their debt when interest rates are low which prematurely pays off the debt, mortgage bonds were stacked into layers called ‘tranches’. The lowest tranche represented mortgages to be paid off early, and the highest layer was the last mortgages to be paid off.
The secondary mortgage market was on the up-rise when Michael Lewis accepted a job at Salomon Brother’s. The secondary mortgage market was the selling of bonds, with a promise to be paid back with mortgage loans. The lender, whomever that
Before the 1970s the banking was not a business that you went into to make money. That was until Louis Ranieri came around. Louis Ranieri had one idea that changed the housing market forever. His plan was to have a mortgage back security. A mortgage back security is an assist based security backed by a mortgage. For example, if you use your mortgage to start a business, your business is backed by that mortgage. The average mortgage loan has a fixed rate loan and takes thirty years to pay off, but then he thought to bundle them all together. They thought these would still be less risky because who would not pay their mortgage. They were doing hundreds of million dollars in mortgage bonds a year, but that all changed when they ran out of mortgages to put into the bonds. If there were no bonds then there was nothing left to make money, and the banking world was going to back to the way it was. Rather than letting that happen, the banks made a loan called a subprime loan.
In the early-2000s, Moody’s, one of the leading credit rating agencies in the world, evaluated thousands of bonds backed by so-called “subprime” residential mortgages—home loans made to those with both low incomes and poor credit scores. When housing prices began to fall in 2006, the value of these bonds disintegrated, and Moody’s was compelled to downgrade them significantly. In late 2008, several commercial banks, investment banks, and mortgage lenders that had been
The problem was everyone who qualified for a mortgage already had one. Lenders knew if they sold a mortgage to a person that defaults the lender gets the house, and houses were always increasing in value in that market, that would be a valuable asset to sell. To keep up with the demand from investors, lenders started selling mortgages to borrowers who wouldn’t have qualified before because of the risk for default. These mortgages are called sub-prime mortgages and lenders started creating tons of them. In the unregulated market, lenders employed predatory tactics to get more borrowers with attractive offers such as no money down, no credit history required, even no proof of income. People never would have qualified before were now buying large houses, and the lenders sold their mortgages to Investment bankers. The investors packed subprime mortgages in with prime mortgages so credit agencies would still give a AAA rating. The rating Agencies who had a conflict of interest by receiving payments from the investment banks, had no liability if their credit ratings were correct or not. They turned a blind eye to the risky CDOs and kept giving AAA ratings. This worked for a while and everyone was happy including the new homeowners. The housing market became hyper inflated with more homeowners than ever. Wall Street continued to sell their CDO’s which were ticking time bombs. The subprime mortgages began
The banks then created a new idea—linking investors to homeowners through mortgages. Ordinarily, a mortgage broker would connect a house-buying family to a mortgage lender, who would then supply them with a mortgage. In this system, everyone is happy—the mortgage broker earns a handsome commission, the mortgage lender earns a new mortgage, and the family is now a homeowner in a market of increasing housing prices.
One of the first indications of the late 2000 financial crisis that led to downward spiral known as the “Recession” was the subprime mortgages; known as the “mortgage mess”. A few years earlier the substantial boom of the housing market led to the uprising of mortgage loans. Because interest rates were low, investors took advantage of the low rates to buy homes that they could in return ‘flip’ (reselling) and homeowners bought homes that they typically wouldn’t have been able to afford. High interest rates usually keep people from borrowing money because it limits the amount available to use for an investment. But the creation of the subprime mortgage
The book starts by talking about the “bond” and how it is used to make interested payments on borrowed money and then gets paid back in the long-term. In the late 1980’s Wall Street had released that is could create products like credit cared, and home mortgages which were very similar in comparison to bonds themselves. The introduction of mortgage bonds allowed the beginning of home mortgages that is a huge part of the financial crisis of 2008. Within the 1990’s mortgage bonds were created that were a much higher risk; these mortgages are called “subprime.” Due to this addition to the market the risks people were taking on became something that they would not realize. Their actions would soon create the housing bubble that occurred and created this financial crisis years and years later.
In real estate, there are two mortgage theories that are determined by jurisdiction. In title theory states, the title of real estate remains with the lender until the loan is paid in full. The lender owns the property and can reclaim it, should the purchaser default on the loan, by use of a non-judicial foreclosure process called a power of sale foreclosure. In lien theory states, the title remains with the purchaser and the lender places a lien on the property. This means there is an encumbrance on the property for the life of the loan. The lien is lifted once obligations have been met. When obligations towards the loan are not met, a judicial foreclosure can be initiated. (Findlaw, n.d.)