The Securitization Market and the Credit Crisis

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.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) explains the old system of lending and the new securitization process. Matt Demon narrates how the home buyers repaid their loans to lenders, and consequently, the lenders sold the loans to the investment banks which combined the mortgage loans with other credit loans creating a collateral debt obligation a complex derivative. The collateral debt obligation sold to investors who paid the rating agency to evaluate the CDO's. The home buyers were now paying investors through this

Unfortunately, the mortgages would take a turn for the worst; thus, resulting in investment funds lost and the inability to repay the loans that they borrowed from the banks (Isidore, 2008). Left with nothing, the banks were forced to declare the loans as unrecoverable, reduce the bank’s reserve, and limit their ability to generate new loans (Isidore, 2008). These actions destroy the economy because both businesses and buyers need loans to pay for investment expenditures and finance consumption (Isidore, 2008). An early problem was “ mortgage-backed security”. According to AP Economics 19 edition, “ Mortgage- backed securities are bonds backed by mortgage payments”(Brue). In order to create mortgage- backed securities, lenders begin by creating mortgage loans (Brue). When they do, the lenders combine hundreds of loans into one and sell them off as bonds; basically selling the right to regain all future payments (Brue). In the end, banks receive an individual payment for the bond. Bond buyers recover the mortgage payments as the gain on the investment (Brue). As first, it seemed like a good decision on the bank’s party because it moved any future default risk on those mortgages to the buyer’s bond (Brue). Unfortunately, they fail to realize that they had lent the significant amount of money they got from investment funds to selling bonds (Brue). Moreover, the banks bought huge amounts of

Securitization history can be traced back to 18th century, but the first examples of mortgage-backed securities can be found in 19th century in United States, that are the farm railroad mortgage bonds of the 1860s. After the Great Depression, the government took several initiatives to increase the supply of funds for mortgages loans. Their aim was to support the primary market first, and then the secondary market. In 1934, the Housing Act was enacted and FHA (the Federal Housing Administration) is created by the U.S. federal government. The FHA developed the fixed-rate mortgage, which is an alternative of balloon payment mortgage. In 1938, the federal government also created Fannie Mae, a government-sponsored corporation, in order to create a liquid secondary market of mortgages.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 the SEC’s mission has been to protect investors and win back the trust of the public in capital markets. In efforts to combat fraud and preventing another financial crisis, the SEC has grown their staff and is working on revamping their technological capabilities. For the last 3 years we have seen aggressive enforcement, strategic reforms and new regulations with in the division.

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.

Many factors such as the U.S. Sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit crunch, decline in investments, higher unemployment rates, terror attacks, and the housing bubble caused the great recession of 2007 to 2009. The resulting loss of wealth led to severe cutbacks in consumer spending. This loss, combined with the craziness of the financial market led to the collapse and business investments. As consumer spending and business investments went down massive job loss followed. The largest indicator of economic activity is the real gross domestic indicator (GDP). The recession had a loss of business and consumer confidence. Spending declined and millions of jobs were lost. This resulted in a downward shift in the GDP, and a severe increase in unemployment

Mortgage-backed securities were bonds that were secured by home and other real estate loans. They were created when a number of these loans, usually with similar characteristics, were pooled together. As part of the housing and credit booms, the amount of financial agreements called mortgage-backed securities, which derive their value from mortgage payments and housing prices, greatly increased (Subprime mortgage crisis). Pools of loans were sold to federal government agencies like Ginnie Mae or a government sponsored-enterprise such as Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Securitization was the process of taking an illiquid asset, or group of assets, and through financial engineering, transforming them into a security. A typical example of securitization

Because of their size, they were able to buy these from banks to allow banks to have funds available to continue lending (Conners and Gwartney 63). This is where the problem begins for the housing industry. Lenders began writing loans to borrowers without thoroughly checking their credit ratings and accepting a lower down payment because the mortgage would be passed on to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for them to hold (Conners and Gwartney 64).

Before 1938, depository institutions made home loans with their deposits and held the liquidity risk, the market risk, and the credit risk on their portfolios. Yet, the baneful results of the Great Depression led the US government agency to intervene in the mortgage market so as to beget home mortgage lending (Dodd, 2007). A corollary of the new legislation was the creation of Fannie Mae in 1938; as a

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 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.

In relation to the increase in house’s price, the rise of financial agreements such as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) encouraged investors to invest in the U.S housing market (Krugman, 2009). When housing price declined in the U.S, many financial institutions that borrowed and invested in subprime mortgage reported losses. In addition, the fall of housing price resulted in default and foreclosure and that began to exhaust consumer’s wealth and

companies, and others now entered an environment where they could compete freely on the domestic credit market. The deregulation quickly made its impact, as lending increasing by a massive 136 percent (73 percent in real terms), and institutions previously hit directly by the regulations were now free to expand, and they did. Between 1986 and 1990, banks expanded by 174 percent and mortgage institutions by 167 percent. However, finance and insurance companies went from thriving under the regulations to losing market shares rapidly, and the finance companies that originally were involved in – and benefitted – from activities such as leasing, factoring, and credit cards into direct lending under the regulation, now lost the superior amount of freedom that they had over banks. With banks entering the market, the finance companies was pushed into higher-risk markets, and since they no longer were able to receive deposits nor to issue bonds, they now had to be financed by direct borrowing in banks or by issuing what Englund refers to as marknadsbevis. Marknadsbevis can be likened to non-callable bonds and were normally guaranteed by banks, which indirectly exposed the banks to extra credit risk (Eklund, “The Swedish Banking Crisis”). Although, it should be noted that Sweden – who between 1985 and 1990 had a current account deficit-to-GDP ratio of 1.1 percent – experienced less overheating than Finland – who had a corresponding figure of 2.9 percent – during the latter part of the

Collateralised Debt Obligations, short for CDOs, is an important part of asset securitisation. CDOs provided more liquidity in the economy which was a popular financial innovation. It is an innovative financial product that repackages different debts into a new portfolio. In CDOs, investment bank gathered a series of assets from the fixed-income market, such as mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, and high-yield bonds. Once the CDO has created by the investment bank, it would distribute the cash flows from those mentioned assets to investors in the CDO. CDOs pool all the cash flows from its collection of assets together and divided into rated tranches or slices, in order to satisfy the needs of different risk preferences of investors. Suppose there are three basic tranches, safe, good enough and risky. When money comes in, the top one will be filled in first. It