Quotes About Mortgage-backed securities

Instead of 6.7 million, the actual number was probably closer to 18 million, and, including Alt-A loans and loans backing PMBS, at least 31 million. Most of the missing subprime loans were on the balance sheets of Fannie and Freddie, which were hiding the numbers of subprime loans they had acquired to meet the affordable-housing goals.

I've got a huge, huge position in mortgage-backed securities. I started accumulating them in 2009, when the market was really down and things were really scary.

Goldman Sachs and other investment banks understood the ensuing problem so well that they began betting against the very mortgage-backed securities they were underwriting!

Ever heard of collateralized debt obligations? Mortgage-backed securities? Non-bank asset-backed commercial paper? What about income trusts? Or even mutual funds?

And to whom were these bundles of unrecognizably mashed-up mortgages ultimately sold? Quite often, to you and me. Our pension funds, municipalities, and money-market accounts were made up largely of these "mortgage-backed securities.

In my first meeting with Vladimir Putin in the spring of 2001, he complained that Russia was burdened by Soviet-era debt. At that point, oil ws selling for $26 per barrel. By the time I saw Putin at the APEC summit in Sydney in September 2007 oil had reached $71--on its way to $137 in the summer of 2008. He leaned back in his chair and asked how were Russia's mortgage-backed securities doing.

The Fed is normally very profitable, since we typically earn a higher interest rate on our Treasury and mortgage-backed securities than we pay on the bank reserves that finance our holdings

And in 2006, just before the financial system began to collapse, an analyst from Standard & Poor's, a credit-rating agency that consistently and knowingly gave the highest ratings to near-worthless mortgage-backed securities, said in an internal e-mail, "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters.

agencies began to downgrade scores of RMBS CDOs (short for 'residential mortgage-backed security collateralized debt obligations', the very term testifying to the over-complex nature of these products).

then resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) and sold them on to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more return on their capital. Repackaged as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A rated investment-grade securities.

If nobody can sell mortgage-backed securities based on trillions of dollars of unpayable instruments, there's a lot less risk in the overall system.

The major driver of economics is the equilibrium approach, which has taken various forms over the years. General equilibrium is the statement that all the different parts of the economy influence each other, even if it's remote, like mortgage-backed securities and their demands on automobiles.