securitisation

bearface

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I watched the evan davis programme the other night about the banks and the current situation etc. In it he described securitisation and how it enabled banks to package their assets (ie mortgages etc) and sell them on, meaning they didn't have to worry about them. This ability to liquidate assets allowed them to use the money from their sale to pay off some of their own debt, borrow more, issue more loans, package them and sell them off, etc in a ongoing cycle. The guy from northern rock described it as a 'conveyor belt of money'. This is all very well so long as people buying the packaged 'assets' understand the risk they are taking on from the products but they didn't as for whatever reason the ratings agencies weren't doing their job properly, no one understood the products but they were made out to be AAA.

Now the thing that struck me is that this allowed the banks to issue credit to people/businesses etc they wouldn't usually go anywhere near... as IB's like lehman brothers were confident in their own ability to package all this **** up and make it look like gold. They effectively weren't taking on the risk themselves they were passing it on and as they could get any old rubbish rated AAA.

If this is the case could it not be that the subprime debt is the most obvious place for where people will start to default? Could there not be a whole host of other debt, sold on as safe, which was only issued because it could be sold on so essentially the people issuing it didn't have to worry about it and they could make any old crap look good because of the ineptitude/greed/whatever of the ratings agencies? Because it seems that there could be a huge amount of credit that could have been issued on very dodgy foundations because of this ability for it to be packaged up and sold on that could be yet to fail on us?

Or have these securities now been properly assessed? Or is there a load of defaults waiting to work their way through the system? The current downturn will make things worse... I'm probably missing something and look forward to someone pointing it out but if i might be right things could go very bleak indeed if there are more AAA securities out there that aren't AAA at all .....
 
they would have rated a cow.

Theres a good animation knocking about somewhere...
 
ARM mortgages could be the next to hit the headlines when interest rates reset.
 
This was coming to light in February of last year, if not before.

but how deeply infected are we.... what proportion of banks and other institutions 'assets' are in potentially dodgy securities? Have the securities been properly assessed yet?

Could it not be that as more defaults happen the more junk is uncovered and the more institutions with supposedly safe balance sheets go bust? The government can't bail out everyone, more so it can't guarantee everyones deposits even though it promises to do so... once the public realise won't this realise to a run on the banks and financial meltdown?!
 
To the large extent investment/commercial banks and other companies have written off, or are at least aware of, bad debt; trillions of dollars of the complex debt packages thought up by the quants on Wall Street have been dissolved. The reason your Lehmans and Morgan Stanleys were in the sh!t is because their books were filled with CDOs and other 'toxic' securities - Goldman Sachs for one was relatively early in seeing the risk of a collapse, and was therefore quicker to offload their balance sheets before the poop hit the fan. Their assets-to-debt ratio is far better than that of banks such as Lehman who were hit hardest by the credit crisis.

But bearface in all fairness you are a good 12 months behind the times, the 'financial meltdown' you speak of isn't going to happen. There's a very tough 5 years ahead of the banks, and one or two more frights are in store (as Poborsky says interest rates are going to play a big role in what happens), but in terms of the failures of the Standard & Poor's and Moodys of this world, the damage has been done, PROVIDING that changes are made to ensure that in the future the companies responsible for rating instruments are not paid by those who stand to profit from their AAA rating.
 
the dodgy assets still in circulation belong to the taxpayer now anyway (TALF + TARP + bailout).

Any more that are uncovered will end up being owned by the public, either directly or indirectly ("Bad Bank" etc..). More money will be printed / quantitatave easing until the debt has been inflated away.

Just another perspective.
 
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