Essay On Short Selling

In the movie the big short, Lewis Ranieri, who is a banker of the Wall Street, created an idea that companies packed thousands of mortgage all bundled together to sell, which is the AAA credit-rating bond, and can obtain high yields with low risk because everyone should pay for their mortgage. The concept of Lewis Ranieri is called mortgage-backed securities (MBS). However, the demand of buying MBS is more than MBS supply. Therefore, when the risk of MBS is high, Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) is a way to change subprime loans to high- rating bonds and it can be sold again. Although CDO is full of subprime loans, it still can get AAA rating because

The world’s financial system was almost brought down in 2008 by the collapse of Lehman Brothers that was a major international investment bank at that time. The government sponsored these banks’ bailouts that were funded by tax money in order to restore the industry. Before the crisis, banks were lending irresponsible mortgages to subprime borrowers who had poor credit histories. These mortgages were purchased by banks and packaged into low-risk securities known as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). CDOs were divided into tranches by its default risk. The ratings of those risks were determined by rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s. However, those agencies were paid by banks and created an environment in which agencies were being generous to ratings since banks were their major clients.

The private label mortgage securitization collected a series of assets – most of them are high-yield junk bonds, mortgage securities, credit-default swap with varying degrees of risk. The securitization of subprime mortgages was attractive to investors due to high interest rates and high return features. More and more financial institutions started to sell private label mortgage securitization, including banks, insurance companies and so on. In 2006, the CDO market ranged from $0.5 trillion to $2 trillion (boundless. Com). Also, by 2007, about 70% of subprime borrowers used hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs).

The secondary mortgage market was on the up-rise when Michael Lewis accepted a job at Salomon Brother’s. The secondary mortgage market was the selling of bonds, with a promise to be paid back with mortgage loans. The lender, whomever that

Over the past two-to-three decade, Wall Street has been known to be articulate in the usage of short and distort market manipulation. Short and distort is relative to short selling, the only difference is that short selling is a less publicized yet more-sinical version. Short and distort is as legal as a pump and dump, uses a bear market to manipulate stocks and misinforms investors. Similar to the pump and dump tactic, money hungry scoundrels buy stock and issue false statements that produce the stocks price to skyrocket through the charts for individual benefits rather than the company 's benefit ( Rayman, 1). Applbaum once argued that marketing can be seen as a particular set of cultural practices that surfaced in reaction

Second, the credit rating agencies gave out generous ratings to bonds, which are essentially worthless, to satisfy their customers` needs. For instance, when Mark Baum, a hedge fund manager, went to Standard and Poor`s Agency to question them

"The Wall Street Journal" found that the current bond yields were 0.20. These bonds are issued by the US government. In view of the fact that Fannie Mae Securities is a mortgage-backed securities issued by FNMA. We have observed that Fannie Mae and Treasury yields are somewhat different because FNMA Personal Securities and Treasury bonds are issued by the US government. Therefore, we note that there should be some difference between the two rates. As a result, Fannie Mae gets money from investors and financial institutions and sells their mortgages.

Before the 1970s the banking was not a business that you went into to make money. That was until Louis Ranieri came around. Louis Ranieri had one idea that changed the housing market forever. His plan was to have a mortgage back security. A mortgage back security is an assist based security backed by a mortgage. For example, if you use your mortgage to start a business, your business is backed by that mortgage. The average mortgage loan has a fixed rate loan and takes thirty years to pay off, but then he thought to bundle them all together. They thought these would still be less risky because who would not pay their mortgage. They were doing hundreds of million dollars in mortgage bonds a year, but that all changed when they ran out of mortgages to put into the bonds. If there were no bonds then there was nothing left to make money, and the banking world was going to back to the way it was. Rather than letting that happen, the banks made a loan called a subprime loan.

In the early-2000s, Moody’s, one of the leading credit rating agencies in the world, evaluated thousands of bonds backed by so-called “subprime” residential mortgages—home loans made to those with both low incomes and poor credit scores. When housing prices began to fall in 2006, the value of these bonds disintegrated, and Moody’s was compelled to downgrade them significantly. In late 2008, several commercial banks, investment banks, and mortgage lenders that had been

In the new system, an investment banker buys the mortgage from the lender, borrowing millions of dollars to buy thousands of mortgages, and every month he gets payments from homeowners for each of the mortgages. The banker then consolidates all the mortgages and splits the final product into three sections: safe, okay, and risky mortgages, which make up a collateralized debt obligation (CDO). As homeowners pay their mortgages, money flows into each of the sections, with the safe filling first and the risky filling last, contributing to their respective names. Credit agencies stamp the top two safer mortgages with a triple A or triple B rating, which are then be sold to investors who want a safe mortgage, while the risky slice is sold to hedge funds who want a risky investment. The bankers make millions, pay back their loans, and investors also make a worthwhile investment. So pleased are the investors, however, that they want more. Unfortunately, back at the beginning of the cycle, the mortgage broker can no longer find qualified mortgagers

One of the first indications of the late 2000 financial crisis that led to downward spiral known as the “Recession” was the subprime mortgages; known as the “mortgage mess”. A few years earlier the substantial boom of the housing market led to the uprising of mortgage loans. Because interest rates were low, investors took advantage of the low rates to buy homes that they could in return ‘flip’ (reselling) and homeowners bought homes that they typically wouldn’t have been able to afford. High interest rates usually keep people from borrowing money because it limits the amount available to use for an investment. But the creation of the subprime mortgage

The book starts by talking about the “bond” and how it is used to make interested payments on borrowed money and then gets paid back in the long-term. In the late 1980’s Wall Street had released that is could create products like credit cared, and home mortgages which were very similar in comparison to bonds themselves. The introduction of mortgage bonds allowed the beginning of home mortgages that is a huge part of the financial crisis of 2008. Within the 1990’s mortgage bonds were created that were a much higher risk; these mortgages are called “subprime.” Due to this addition to the market the risks people were taking on became something that they would not realize. Their actions would soon create the housing bubble that occurred and created this financial crisis years and years later.

1) Short selling a certain amount index fund, for the case is the QQQ, an ETF which tracks on NASDAQ.

You also need to understand how they were short, and how they were funding their short position).

Collateralised Debt Obligations, short for CDOs, is an important part of asset securitisation. CDOs provided more liquidity in the economy which was a popular financial innovation. It is an innovative financial product that repackages different debts into a new portfolio. In CDOs, investment bank gathered a series of assets from the fixed-income market, such as mortgage-backed securities, credit-default swaps, and high-yield bonds. Once the CDO has created by the investment bank, it would distribute the cash flows from those mentioned assets to investors in the CDO. CDOs pool all the cash flows from its collection of assets together and divided into rated tranches or slices, in order to satisfy the needs of different risk preferences of investors. Suppose there are three basic tranches, safe, good enough and risky. When money comes in, the top one will be filled in first. It