Advanced finance

Lesson 5: Securitisation

Introduction
What is a bail out?
Securitization

Documents:

  • China: It's not just Tibet
  • History of Tibet and China
  • Brunei gets ready for when the oil and gas run out
  • Is it still possible to avoid a world depression?


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    General structure and use of a SIV

     

     

    Introduction

    In order to understand what is a bond created by securitization of initial financial products, we must ask ourselves: "who will pay the interests and principal of the securitized bond?"

    • In a simple financial contract, the issuer/borrower-of-money is also the signatory, the agent who has the legal obligation to make the future payments specified in the contract.

    • In a financial product which is the result of a "securitization" process (also called "packaging", "repackaging", "bundling", etc.), the future payments will come from other assets. This is why securitized financial products are also known as Asset Backed Securities (ABS). These other assets, "backing the securitization", can be primary loans (for instance mortgage loans), but they can also be any other thing that is expected to produce cash flows in the future, like future sales, future tolls, future anything... And usually the agent who proceeded to the securitization is no longer responsible for the good execution of the contract.

    To make a securitization of "primary assets" held in the balance sheet of a financial institution, a Structured Investment Vehicle (SIV) is created (see picture on top of page). The SIV issues new bonds (the asset-backed securities), to raise cash, and the cash is used to buy the "primary assets" (which are also the backing assets).

    Reading this chapter, it will become clear that "securitized" bonds are not much different from equity (leaving aside the notion of ownership): they are securities providing future unsure cash flows, related to some venture.

     

    What is a bail out?

    Since the present "subprime crisis" in the United States leads to many bail outs of large financial firms (like Bear Stearns in mid march 2008), we insert a brief subchapter on bail outs.

    What leads to the situation where a bail out is being considered?

    Answer: a forecast bankruptcy.

    A firm, be it industrial, commercial or financial, is in a state of bankruptcy when it cannot make cash payments that are due now. That is, the firm ran out of cash and for a variety of reasons cannot get or raise short term cash, and yet desperately needs it.

    A firm is a dynamic entity, by which we mean "an entity evolving over time", with various processes going on:

    • operations: labor and materials consumed, products manufactured and sold, investments, issues of securities, etc.
    • these operations correspond to transactions with flows of value (remember a transaction entails two flows: one leaving and one entering the firm)
    • these flows can be
      • goods and services
      • financial products
      • cash

    The record of movements of value (in and out) over a period of time [t1, t2] is called the income statement of the firm during that period. (This cursory description does not purports to explain accounting in detail, but to give the reader a bird's eye view of accounting and of cash. For a detailed presentation of accounting we invite the reader to go to our introductory course in accounting and finance.)

    At any date t it is possible to establish a balance sheet: it is the list of all the assets the firm owns, and all the liabilities the firm has. By its very construction, the assets and liabilities sides of a balance sheet must be equal. One item is very important on the asset side, it is the cash.


    Balance sheet of an industrial firm, the assets are presented from most liquid (at the bottom) to least liquid (at the top)

    Above is presented the balance sheet of an industrial firm, but for any firm (industrial, commercial, or financial) the notion of liquidity is the same.

    At any time t, the firm must have enough liquidity to make the payments due at time t.

    Cash budget: it is a short term forecast of the cash outlays and cash inflows.

    In the above example, if the firm has 100 (thousand euros) at time t0 and is forecasting the five flows shown above (three outlays and two receipts), we see that it will not be able to make the third payment, because it requires a cash outlay of 70 but there will only be 40 in the till.

    In this case, either the firm can obtain more cash, one way or another, or it cannot. There are several ways to obtain more cash:

    • plain short term or long term borrowing
    • new equity (but this usually takes time)
    • turn some short term financial securities, held in the assets, into cash
    • bring some debtor paper to the bank as guarantee for a short term loan
    • panic sale of a part of the stock

    At any rate the firm needs cash.

    The interesting point here is that cash is only a sign that the firm is healthy, that the community trusts it. And the impossibility to get more cash is the sign that the firm is not longer trusted, has no more credit.

     

    Bankruptcy

    If the firm can definitely not find the cash needed, it is bankrupt. Formally, it "files for banruptcy", that is it warns the business authorities from which it depends that it cannot make a payment due. (In the United State, there is a similar procedure where the firm "goes under the protection of chapter 11", which means that the firm asks for a temporary freeze of all its liabilities to creditors.) The authorities study the situation and may decide either of the following:

    1. ask the creditors to postpone their demands, and "give some time" to the firm to get a chance to reorganize. In essence, it asks creditors to give short term credit to the firm
    2. look for a new investor with a plan to modify the operations of the firm, and also inject some money. Usually such an investor (in French, "un repreneur") gets big help for the authorities, in exchange for commitments, which he may or may not, later on, actually fulfill.
    3. dismantle the firm, sell its assets and refund the creditors according to a priority list, which usually goes like this:
      • first: the tax department
      • second: the employees
      • third: the trade creditors
      • fourth: the long term lenders
      • and finally, whatever is left goes to the stock holders. Sometimes the owners, or the top managers, are able to illegally withdraw (for example with the participation of the judges in charge of managing the bankruptcy) some of the assets, typically stocks of goods, valued at a low price, and set up discreetly a new firm that will make confortable profits selling spare parts to captive clients of the old firm.
    4. organize a bail out, which is a variation on the second case.

     

     

    In a bail out, who pays what to whom?

    In a bail out, new investors bring "fresh money" to the firm in difficulty. This can be done, technically, via the purchase of new bonds or new shares of stock issued by the firm (which can be a plain acquisition). Anyhow, in practice the new investors usually become the new controlling owners of the firm. The previous owners are left with a small percentage of the new capital.

    This happened for instance to the owners of Bear Stearns. At the beginning of March 2008, Bear Stearns had a market value of $10 billion, or equivalently was worth a bit more than $80 a share, but on March 16, 2008, JP Morgan Chase bought Bear Stearns for $236 million, that is $2 a share, which made the old shareholders angry. In fact, on monday March 24, JPMorgan was mentioning the possibility to raise the price it paid to $10 per share. Would it be necessay to some, this shows that we are quite outside the concepts of "financial markets", "supply and demand", "price formation", etc. (And the SEC is investigating suspicious transactions around the deal.)

    Source: morningstar

     

    With which money?

    JP Morgan Chase gave value to the old owners of Bear Stearns. The operation was done via a stock swap, that is the old owners, instead of receiving cash, received shares of JP Morgan Chase.

    But JP Morgan Chase also injected money into its new acquisition to help it face its forthcoming payments due. For this purpose, the Federal Reserve lent $30 billion to JP Morgan Chase to cover losses from Bear Stearns' investments in mortgage-backed securities and more exotic investment paper.

    Example of exotic paper: you are a stock market player and you sell, at time t, for some cash, to another agent the right to buy from you, at time T (later than t) some stock S at a price E. You do that because you think that, at time T, the market price of S will be less than E, and therefore the other agent will not exercise its right. But if you turn out to be wrong, and at time T the price of S is higher than E, you are in trouble: you will have to buy S on the market and sell it to the other agent at price E.

    The financial contract you sold to the other agent is called a call option. It is a derivative (S is the underlying asset, E the exercise price, T the exercise date) and it is not considered particularly exotic yet. When we study options, we shall make use of the functions

    • S(t) = market value of S at time t, as a function of t.
    • Vt, T, E (S(t)) = value of the call option, with exercise price E, at time t, prior to T, as a function of the spot price of the underlying.

    Usually professional agents who sell such derivatives cover themselves by buying, at the same time t, similar products, for instance a call option at a price E' a little higher than E. Therefore if things go bad, the loss will be limited.

     

    The bail out of Bear Stearns by JPMorgan (which hides the bail out of JPMorgan by the Fed, like the finger hides the Concord obelisk) made the political, financial and academic communities express reserves:

     

    With which money (con'd)?

    It is important to understand that a banking system (each bank, and primarily the central bank) can create money.

    The European Central Bank creates €100 billion of new central bank money by adding an entry €100 billion on the asset side of its balance sheet, and adding €100 billion of credit to the banks creditors to it.

    -->

    Illlustration: general principle of money creation by the central bank

    Then, the secondary banks, having more reserves at the central bank, can in turn create money in the usual way.

     

    Here is the "consolidated balance sheet of the Eurosystem":

    Source: https://www.ecb.int/press/pr/wfs/2008/html/fs080318.en.html

     

    More information can be found on the site of the ECB. Here is the aggreaget related balance sheet of all euro financial institutions (excluding the Eurosystem):

    Aggregate balance sheet of euro area financial institutions, excluding the Eurosystem
    January 2008          
    Billions of euros          
             
    Assets     Liabilities    
             
    Loans to euro area residents 17 110,7   Currency in circulation 0,0  
    Securities (except shares) 3 973,0   Deposits of euro area residents 15 187,5  
    Money market funds 98,3   Money market funds 833,5  
    Shares 1 315,1   Debt issued 4 689,4  
    External assets 5 093,4   Capital & reserves 1 701,1  
    Fixed assets 206,3   External liabilities 4 790,4  
    Remaining assets 2 306,7   Remaining liabilities 2 901,6  
             
    Total 30 103,5   Total 30 103,5  
             

    Source: https://www.ecb.int/stats/money/aggregates/bsheets/html/outstanding_amounts_2008-01.en.html

     

    Some famous past bail outs

    In 1998, the Fed organized the bail out of LTCM. It required the participating banks to put up front $3.6 billion into the fund. In the end the losses incurred by all the players were about $4 billion. Extract from wikipedia's article on LTCM:

    Goldman Sachs, AIG and Berkshire Hathaway offered then to buy out the fund's partners for $250 million, to inject $4 billion and to operate LTCM within Goldman Sachs's own trading. The offer was rejected and the same day the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bail out of $3.625 billion by the major creditors to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets. The contributions from the various institutions were as follows: [2] [3]
  • $300 million: Bankers Trust, Barclays, Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J.P.Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, UBS
  • $125 million: Société Générale
  • $100 million: Lehman Brothers, Paribas
  • Bear Stearns declined to participate.
  • In return, the participating banks got a 90% share in the fund and a promise that a supervisory board would be established.

    The fear was that there would be a chain reaction as the company liquidated its securities to cover its debt, leading to a drop in prices, which would force other companies to liquidate their own debt creating a vicious cycle.

    In the 1980's the United States bailed out a part of its Savings and Loans financial institutions.

    It also bailed out, with public money, the Continental Illinois National Bank, and the auto manufacturer Chrysler.

    March 24, 2008, the Fed and the federal government of the United States are considering buying back the entire bad mortgage-backed bonds, a radical solution which would cost between $2 and 3 trillions, but may be the best way to avoid a general collapse of the US financial markets.

     

    What is the debate/controversy about bail outs?

    Public money is used to save private interests.

    When the private interests ventures are profitable the profits do not accrue to the community at large. But when the ventures go bust and public money is used to bail them out, the community at large uses its resources to save the private interests.

    Notice that "the resources of the community" is not exactly what common sense suggests. It is not "money belonging to the communitiy" that is used here instead of elsewhere - not quite.

    First of all, money is created (or removed) at will by the monetary authorities. Secondly, it is not an allocation of money here instead of there.

    But it is new liabilities of the community at large created to help the private interests face the liabilities which they could no longer handle alone.

     

    Should the central banks "save" failing financial institutions? In which cases?

    The real question is: "What are the opions? And what are the consequences of each of them?"

    In theory, the monetary authorities step in (like the Fed did when it lent $30 billion to JPMorgan a few days ago) when the alternative is dire consequences for the whole community.

    Indeed, to let Bear Stearns default for good on its liabilities would create a domino effect. Many other institutions would have to withstand the default from Bear Stearns. This would lead many banks and financial institutions to bankruptcy. And in the end it would probably let the whole US financial system auto-destroy itself.

     

    What are the alternatives?

    The question is not so much: "Should the Fed have stepped in or not?" Indeed the alternative now is unacceptable.

    The question is: "What should the Fed require from the financial institutions when things go well?"

    There should be, say the advocates of alternative methods, a sort of insurance system much more important and stringent than today's system, requiring all the financial institutions to participate in a bail out fund of one sort or another.

    Others just claim: "The financial system should be much more regulated", "It should be a public institution under the democratic control of the people".

     

    Ideas to think:

    It is the view of the teacher that, in each monetary zone, the authorities should let exist in parallel a regulated financial system and a free financial system.

    It would be understood that the free financial system would never be bailed out.

    The present problem with bail outs is that, in western countries, many modest people who put their savings or their credit account in big reputable banks (like Crédit Lyonnais) weren't aware that they actually took part in a casino-free-for-all binge and that their savings were at risk.

    It is because the Amercian S&L financed themselves on the free financial markets that they ended up, in the early eighties, needing a big bail out.

    In France "le livret A" paid much less than safe rates offered on the free market, but it never needed a bail out. And it efficiently served to finance housing construction.

    French Livret A

     

    Securitization (Levinson, chapter 5)

    "Plain vanilla" bonds are the simplest kind of financial contract structuring the borrowing and refund of money from B to A (B is the borrower and A is the lender). They present the advantage for A and for B that all the dates and amount of future payments of interest and the final redeeming are specified at the issuance of the bond, and aside from the risk that B defaults there is no other randomness.

    A bond produced by the process called securitisation is another type of financial contract. It is called an asset-backed security because the future payments to the lender will come from a stream of income the issuer expects to receive in the future from other assets. These are not specified with fixed dates and amounts like those of a plain vanilla bond.

    Most often the issuer of the ABS is not ultimately responsible for the good payments to the lender. The lender's future incomes depends on how the backing assets will perform. These future cash flows show a large degree of randomness: they may last less than initially expected, or they may last longer.

    We will see that when we construct an elaborate collection of bonds from the future cash flows of the ABS, like we did in the process of constructing STRIPS, we produce bonds with quite different characteristics in terms of yield and risk.

    ABS are sold with either fixed rates of interest or with floating rates. They come into two big categories:

    • Morgage-backed securities: the backing assets are first mortgages on residential property.
    • Non-mortgage securities: the backing assets are other things than mortgages.

     

    In the United States, mortgage-backed securities account for approximately 75% of the ABS outstanding. In the 25% non-mortgage category we find: auto loans, credit-card loans, home-equity loans, manufactured housing loans, students loans, equipment loans, and others.

    Below are statistics for the total US bond market:

    Outstanding U.S. Bond Market Debt              
    $ Billions                                  
                                     
              Mortgage   Corporate   Federal Agency              
        Municipal   Treasury2   Related3   Debt1   Securities   Money Markets4   Asset-Backed1   Total  
    1996   1 261,6   3 459,7   2 486,1   2 126,5   925,8   1 393,9   404,4   12 058,0  
    1997   1 348,5   3 456,8   2 680,2   2 359,0   1 022,6   1 692,8   535,8   13 095,7  
    1998   1 402,7   3 355,5   2 955,2   2 708,5   1 300,6   1 977,8   731,5   14 431,8  
    1999   1 457,2   3 281,0   3 334,2   3 046,5   1 620,0   2 338,8   900,8   15 978,5  
    2000   1 480,7   2 966,9   3 565,8   3 358,4   1 854,6   2 662,6   1 071,8   16 960,8  
    2001   1 603,5   2 967,5   4 127,6   3 836,4   2 149,6   2 587,2   1 281,1   18 552,9  
    2002   1 762,9   3 204,9   4 686,4   4 099,5   2 292,8   2 545,7   1 543,3   20 135,5  
    2003   1 900,5   3 574,9   5 238,6   4 458,4   2 636,7   2 519,9   1 693,7   22 022,7  
    2004   2 031,0   3 943,6   5 455,8   4 785,1   2 745,1   2 904,2   1 827,8   23 692,6  
    2005   2 225,9   4 165,8   5 915,6   4 960,0   2 613,8   3 433,7   1 955,2   25 270,0  
    2006   2 403,2   4 322,9   6 492,4   5 365,0   2 660,1   4 008,8   2 130,4   27 382,8  
    2007   2 617,4   4 516,8   7 210,3   5 825,4   2 946,3   4 140,2   2 472,4   29 728,8  
                                     
    1 The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association estimates.
    2 Interest bearing marketable public debt.
    3 Includes GNMA, FNMA, and FHLMC mortgage-backed securities and CMOs and private-label MBS/CMOs.
    4 Includes commercial paper, bankers acceptances, and large time deposits. Beginning in 2006, bankers' acceptance are excluded.
    5 Denotes break in series due to the inclusion of additional  data on private-label MBS/CMOs.
    Sources: U.S. Department of Treasury, Federal Reserve System, Federal Agencies, Thomson Financial, Bloomberg, https://www.sifma.org/research/pdf/Overall_Outstanding.pdf

    The column "Mortgage Related" includes the ABS backed by mortages. The column "Asset-Backed" comprises the ABS resting on other assets than mortgages.

     

    Securitization process

    "Securitization is the process by which individual assets, which on their own may be difficult to sell or even to attach a value to, are aggregated into securities that can be sold in the financial markets." (Levinson, p. 95)

    In many cases, investors in an asset-backed trust benefit from certain guarantees. Governments frequently guarantee part or all of the payment fon residential mortgages to encourage housing construction.

     

    Why securitize?

    1. It enables a lending firm to specialize into the lending to a particular type of borrowers (eg: mobile home owners, certain types of credit card holders, etc.), focus on lending and not bother with the management of the payments.

    2. Selling assets allows the issuers to change their risk profile. Let's take the unusual example of securitization by a singer of future proceeds from a new record. Among the risks facing a recording artist, for example, is the possibility that changing tastes will result in fewer sales of his or her albums. By securitizing certain recordings, the artist can receive a specified amount of revenue immediately. David Bowie did it. The artist might lose the opportunity to reap huge profits from a release that turns out to be a hit, but also sheds the risk that he or she will fall from popular favour and experience declining sales. If the artist so desires, it may even be possible to structure the transaction so that, should a record sell more than a specified number of copies, he or she receives a portion of the windfall profit.

      It is important to notice that this "securitization process" is nothing more than a plain old issue and selling of securities, of which the payments of cash flows to the investor rest on future events and are unsure. In a slightly different setting, it is called "equity" of a firm, and we shall study at length the issue of shares of stock, or shares of equity of firms, in a later lesson.

      Notice that "securitization" has nothing magic about it. It is not exactly an innovation of the last 25 years. What is true is that the deregulation of the last 25 years made the issue of ABS easier. But they are very close to equity. Remember also that all financial and monetary processes have sprung up spontaneously over the past centuries. Nothing will ever prevent two people, A and B, from agreeing on a contract whereby A lends now some value to B, and B signs and gives right now to A a document promising to pay back some value in the future to A. This document, as we know, is a financial product. It is also the origin of modern money.

      Finally the possibilities offered by present day computers and telecommunications will make the appearance of such contracts, outside the realm of official currencies, more and more frequent. It is the belief of the teacher that we shall see private entities create new moneys and solve better than governments the problem of the trustworthiness of these moneys. Governments of big countries are trying to fight these developments but it is a hopeless fight.


    3. Issuers may wish to reduce their need for capital. Take the case of a bank that is required by regulators to maintain capital according to the size and type of its assets. When the bank extends a loan, the loan's market value appears as an asset on its balance sheet, and the bank must then set aside the appropriate amount of capital to cover potential declines in the value of that asset. The institution may find that having much of its capital tied up in this way limits opportunities to use that capital for purposes that may generate better returns for shareholders, such as financing new investment or acquiring other firms. Securitizing the assets allows the bank to remove them in whole or in part from its balance sheet, thereby freeing up capital for other uses. The bank will no longer receive the interest payments on the loans, but it also has shed the risk that the loans will not be serviced in a timely manner. It can either return the unneeded capital to shareholders or use it to build up parts of the business, such as the origination of loans that are to be securitized, which may enable it to earn better returns for shareholders.

    4. The sale of securitized assets creates publicly available prices.

     

    Source: Levinson, p98

     

    Mortgage-backed securities

    Fannie Mae

    The Danes are credited with the invention of mortgage-backed bonds to finance entities, themselves financing housing.

    In France, the first government sponsored initiative to help housing construction is the "Loi Loucheur" of 1928. The public circuits of money to finance housing, in France, have unfortunately quickly become very opaque and served to finance political parties. Not devoid of humour, the main Parisian such agency is called the "Office Public d'Aménagement et de Construction de Paris" (OPAC).

    "Fannie Mae" is the endearing nickname Americans give to a financial institution whose official name is "Federal National Mortgage Association" (FNMA).

    It was created, as a federal agency, in 1938 in order to create a secondary market in mortgages. "The primary mortgage market involved the decision by a private company, known as the originator, to lend to a home buyer. When it purchased such a loan from the originator in the secondary market, Fannie Mae made it possible for the originator to make yet more loans, providing a substantial impetus to the housing market. With Fannie Mae as a model, private-sector entities began to purchase individual mortgages in secondary-market transactions as early as 1949, and US government regulators formally permitted thrift institutions to buy and sell mortgages in 1957." (Levinson, p.99)

    In 1968, Fannie Mae was rechartered by Congress as a shareholder-owned company, funded solely with private capital raised from investors on Wall Street and around the world.

    Fannie Mae                      
    Balance sheet 2004                      
    ($ billions)                        
                             
    Assets       Liabilities              
                             
    Mortgage loans       Capital 38,9            
    Loans held for investment 389,7   Debts              
    Loans held for sale 11,7     Long-term 632,8            
    Investments in securities       Short-term 320,3            
    Available for sale 532,1   Other   28,9            
    Trading   35,3                    
    Other   52,1                    
                             
    Total   1 020,9   Total   1 020,9            
                             
                             
    Book of business data                      
    Mortgage portfolio (1) 917,2                    
    Fannie Mae MBS                        
    held by third parties (2) 1 408,0                    
    Total   2 325,3                    
                             
    (1) Unpaid principal balance of mortgage loans and mortgage-related securities held in our portfolio        
    (2) Unpaid principal balance of Fannie Mae MBS held by third-party investors. The principal balance of resecuritized Fannie Mae MBS is included only once.
                             

    From its outset, Fannie Mae established standard procedures to be used in originating the mortgages it would buy, including methods of valuing property, rules for assessing individual borrowers' creditworthiness, and rules relating mortgage eligibility to income. It also set rules to govern servicing, the collection of interest and principal payments from borrowers, which most often was handled by the originator. Such standards eventually smoothed the development of mortgage-backed securites: although each mortgage backing a particular security would be different in detail, investors could be assured that every individual mortgage complied with the same general standards.

     

    Pass-through certificates

    Initially, Fannie Mae used government money to purchase mortgages from lenders that had originated them, with the interest payments on the mortgages serving to repay the government. Then, in the 1960's, investment bankers hit upon and idea for tapping private investment by turning mortgages into securities, rather than buying and selling individual mortgages. These new securities were called pass-through certificates, so named because the principal and interest due monthly from the mortgagors of the loans backing the security would be passed directly to the investors. Pass-throughs, first issued in 1970, were the first modern asset-backed securities.

     

    CMBS

    Commercial mortgage-backed securities: the backing securities may be mortgages for apartment buildings, housing for elderly, retail developments, warehouses, hotels, office buildings and other sorts of structures. (See Levinson, p. 100, for details.)

     

    REMICs

    Real Estate Mortgage Investment Conduit: a legal device, conceived in 1986, to ensure that the income produced by a mortgage-backed security is taxable to the investors who have purchased the securities, but not to the trust that nominally owns the underlying mortgages and collects the payments from individual mortgagors. Many mortgage-backed securities in the United States are now issued through REMICs.

     

    US agency securities

    Several entities sponsored by the US government are authorised to promote secondary markets for mortgage-backed securities.

     

    Fannie Maes

    Name given to the securities issued by Fannie Mae

     

    Other similar agencies

    Ginnie Mae: Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA). It is a split off from Fannie Mae in 1968, and benefits from stronger government guarantees.

    Freddie Mac: Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC).

    Farmer Mac: Federal Agriculture Mortgage Credit Corporation (FAMCC).

     

    Non-mortgage securities

    • Credit-card securities. Credit cards are recorded as loans in the assets of banks, and can be securitized
    • Home equity loans. Equity loans are "second liens" loans to finance houses (coming after mortgages in terms of priority if the house must be sold and lenders refunded).
    • Automotive loans
    • Mobile homes
    • Student loans
    • CDO. Collateralized debt obligations. CDOs are securities representing ownership of corporate loans
    • Assorted others. Example: Walt Disney Co has successfully securitized the anticipated revenue from groups of films

     

    Asset-backed commercial paper

    Assets supporting medium-term and long-term paper can also be used to back commercial paper.

     

    Structured finance

    Once a ABS has been created, it can be "stripped" like STRIPS do for Treasuries. The best known are CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations).

    To create structured securities, the issuer divides the securities backed by a pool into sections, called tranches or classes, with different characteristics.

    One CMO created from a mortgage-backed security, for example, might consist of all principal and interest payments received during the first three years.

    A second tranche might consists of payments received in years 4 to 7, and so on.

    The last tranche bears the evocative name of "toxic waste".

     

    Like STRIPS, CMOs main role is to guarantee the liquidiy of markets with products adjusted to any kind of risks the investor is looking for.

     

    Documents:

  • China: It's not just Tibet (Business Week, March 17, 2008)
  • History of Tibet and China (Le Monde, March 22, 2008 in French)
  • Brunei gets ready for when the oil and gas run out (The Economist, March 19, 2008)
  • Is there still a possibility to avoid a world depression? (by Jean-Hervé Lorenzi, Le Monde, March 20, 2008)


  • Go to lesson 6