securitization
securitization, the practice of pooling together various types of debt instruments (assets) such as mortgages and other consumer loans and selling them as bonds to investors. A bond compiled in this way is generally referred to as an asset-backed security (ABS) or collateralized debt obligation (CDO). If the pool of debt instruments consists primarily of mortgages, the bond is referred to as a mortgage-backed security (MBS). The holders of such securities are entitled to the receipt of principal and interest payments on the debts underlying them.
Securitization provides lenders with liquidity and is an effective means of diversifying their portfolios to reduce risk. The large pool of debt instruments that are securitized are divided and sold in smaller chunks called tranches, with each tranch representing a claim to a portion of the receipts from the underlying debt instruments. Tranching gives smaller investors the opportunity to purchase such instruments and enables lenders to raise more money by selling them to a broader market.
ABSs often consist of a rather large and complex set of different debt instruments, such as mortgages, credit card debt, auto loans, and so on. For an investor who buys a chunk of such a security, the complexity of the mixture can make it difficult to assess the security’s riskiness.
Much of the growth in subprime lending that occured in the 1990s in the United States was funded by the securitization of mortgages into MBSs. A significant portion of the mortgages that were securitized during this period consisted of subprime mortgages, which were extended to households with poor credit histories.
The financial crisis of 2007–08 and the ensuing Great Recession dealt a severe blow to the mortgage-securitization market. As defaults on subprime mortgages surged, MBSs that were backed by subprime mortgages suddenly became worthless. To provide critical liquidity to the financial markets, the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the United States, began buying MBSs from investors through a series of quantitative easing (QE) operations.
As financial markets slowly recovered, banks and other financial institutions started to use securitization again as a means of making money from their expanding portfolios of new mortgages and refinances. Nevertheless, the Federal Reserve continued to buy MBSs from the market for several years after the recovery to ensure sufficient liquidity.