Since the birth of banking, banks have been at the forefront of risk distribution through diversification and hedging. In the U.S., banks started to sell mortgage-backed debt obligations to investors in the 1960s. The idea was to distribute risk outside the balance sheet of banks, which would make more funds available for lending. This is essentially the point, when ‘shadow banking’ was born. In the 1990s, diversification and hedging took a big leap forward when the credit default swap, CDS, was developed. In it, the risk of a loan is offset by a third party to which the bank—or, more generally, the issuer of a loan—pays a fee for the insurance. This new system of risk distribution through diversification and hedging was elevated to a new level after the derivatives team at J.P. Morgan invented a sort of shell-company, or SPV (“Special Purpose Vehicle”), to carry certain bank loans off the bank’s balance sheet. An SPV bundled risky loans and sold them on to investors according to calculated risk tranches, which investors then received interest income based on the riskiness of each tranche in their possession. The construct was called Bistro (“Broad index secured trust offering”). Further innovations included the synthetic collateralized debt obligation, or CDO. It was standardized, a more general version of the Bistro, and it could be constructed from not just CDS and other derivatives, but also from different debt securities, such as mortgages.
The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more
No comments:
Post a Comment