Kirata
Posts: 15477
Joined: 2/11/2006 From: USA Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: mnottertail Except that real estate implosions were not unique to the United States. So, the cause and effect has not been demonstrated necessarily, and sufficiently. Except that bad loans are bad loans. So if the implosion of real estate values hadn't happened when it did, the problem would have grown even bigger. Knowing that the loans they made were about to be bundled, sliced up, and sold off made lenders more likely to relax their underwriting standards, according to a report released Tuesday by the Joint Forum, a consortium of government financial regulators from the U.S., Europe and Asia. Banks and financial companies that originated loans like home mortgages, credit cards and personal loans were considerably more exacting when originating loans they knew they'd hold onto. Private securitization of home and commercial mortgages -- the bundling and packaging of loans, which are then sliced into securities for sale to investors -- grew tenfold from 2000 to 2005, reaching a peak of over $1.5 trillion in 2006, the report notes. The regulators' findings come from a report on special purpose entities, which are legal vehicles set up to finance assets and liabilities. They are heavily used for securitization deals, like those involving mortgage-backed securities. With investors gobbling these up during the boom, and securitization feeding lenders' hunger for ever-growing profits, loans were increasingly made for the purpose of eventual sale and securitization -- making the immediate risk of a bad loan nearly zero. And so a flood of loans -- made without proper underwriting -- were sold into the marketplace, resulting in the subprime crisis, the global credit crunch and the recession. Reference K.
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