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Finance and capital markets
Course: Finance and capital markets > Unit 10
Lesson 3: Credit crisis- The housing price conundrum
- Housing price conundrum (part 2)
- Housing price conundrum (part 3)
- Housing conundrum (part 4)
- Mortgage-backed securities I
- Mortgage-backed securities II
- Mortgage-backed securities III
- Collateralized debt obligation (CDO)
- Credit default swaps
- Credit default swaps 2
- Wealth destruction 1
- Wealth destruction 2
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Mortgage-backed securities III
More on mortgage-backed securities. Created by Sal Khan.
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- AtKhan seems to think that the net effect of 20% of people defaulting with a 50% recovery rate will lead to only a 10% decrease in returns. This is confusing because I did a crude calculation (assuming all defaults happen at end of year and defaulters pay interest until they default), and I got that at the end of the first year you would have 100M from house sales, 100M from interest and 800M owed to you. 5:47
In other words, it seems that the return would at best 0%. Am I mistaken?(6 votes)- I think the math is actually a little more complicated and the new rate of return will actually be less than 9% but not 0%.
If all $1B of loans are being repaid, then the return is $100M per year and you'll get $100 back (or 10%) on your $1000 share.
If 20% of the loans default and there is zero recovery, the stock just lost $200M in assets and only $800M is now being repaid. Thus the return is $80 (8%) on your $1000 share.
If 20% of the loans default and there is 50% recovery, the asset lost only $100M; however, only $800M is now being repaid just like in the previous example. The $100M recovered does not generate any income because those debts were retired when the properties were sold. Until this $100M cash-on-hand is re-invested the return is $80 (8%) on your $1000 share.(9 votes)
- I like this series of videos. But why don't we explore these banking operations further by making a series on how things like insurance, stocks, government bonds originated and developed? The picture we are getting is of a system that already became very complex. Why not show historically how new operations were developed? I am sure you could make it very interesting.(4 votes)
- the money don't add up. home owners borrowed the $1B from the investment bank, whom then creates and sold shares of special entities for $1.1B. From the flow of money, the investment banks already got return on investment. When home owner foreclose on the loan, investment banks takes ownership of the house; which in essence a FREE house. So, why we need to bailout the banks during the housing crisis? I don't notice the investments banks losing any money.
NOTE: the stock holders don't own the houses.(1 vote)- The banks did lose a lot of money. If you lend $1 million and then you get back a house that you can only sell for $500,000, you lost money. That doesn't mean they should or shouldn't be bailed out, of course.(3 votes)
- Is the recovery percentage always the same regardless of when the borrower defaults on the loan? For example, if I default on a $1 million home loan after having made payments for many years, taking the remaining principal down to say $600,000 is the recovery percentage still 50% if the bank sells my home for $500,000. Or would it be 90%, the $400,000 I had already paid off plus the $500,000 the bank got for selling my home? Or something else entirely?(2 votes)
- The recovery percentage in your example would be 500/600.
Normally you do not see recovery percentages like that because if the bank can sell it for $500, a more patient seller might be able to sell it for more, and therefore the owner is unlikely to default rather than just sell the property. But it could happen.(2 votes)
- Do we have an option to short on these MBS investment ?(2 votes)
- Shorting asset-backed securities is done using Credit Default Swaps.(2 votes)
- What is a Special Purpose Entity? Is it the bank and the investment bank?(1 vote)
- A special purpose entity is founded by a bank or an investment bank to isolate the financial risk. So the bank can transfer Assets to this SPE i.e. the Mortgages. The SPE then just fulfills the purpose of transforming these MBS into different tranches (senior, mezzanine, equity) to split the risk. These splitted financial products are called collateralized debt obligations (CDO's).
This video explains quite well how it works at2:30
https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-finance/derivative-securities/CDO-tutorial/v/collateralized-debt-obligation--cdo(1 vote)
- So as I understand the chain of causes/events... Values of Houses decreased drastically ---> Values of the Mortgage Notes decreased drastically ---> Values of Mortgage Backed Securities decreased drastically ---> Values of the Investments from Institutional Investors (mutual funds, pension funds, banks other companies, etc.) decreased drastically ---> Danger/Fear that entire Financial System would collapse ---> Infusion of Money from Gov't (the "bailout") into the Companies selling the Mortgage backed Securities to essentially Replace the Value Lost in the securities and the subsequent values of investments by others.... is that about right? If that's more-or-less true, what I don't understand is if the values of the securities were "restored" for the Mortgage Backed Security institutions by this bailout, why weren't the values of the original securities (i.e., the initial mortgages) also "restored" (i.e., any difference in value of the loan minus the value of the "under-water" houses, essentially made up by this bailout cash)? It would kinda be like the bailout monies being infused into the entire system/chain at the start, with the initial securities rather than in the middle of the system, no? Or am i totally missing something?(1 vote)
- How does the owner of MBS get those 10% per year. In the form of dividend or some other way? That means that the owner of MBS will get 100% of his investment in 10 years, but how does he get any profit out of it, because MBS is worth 0 after 10 years? Thank you for your answer.(1 vote)
- Can you please tell if the following scenario happened or could it have happened or is there a banking regulation that prevents it from happening ?
"say , $1b worth loans are sold by commercial banks to investment banks ... now if the same $1b is again used to get the same type of loans and again sold to same investment bank as another bunch of loans .... and so on .... this is like an infinite loop where banks can profit !! "(1 vote)- This is precisely what happened in the lead up to the housing crisis. The bank effectively had no risk from housing loans. The more loans they issued, the faster the loan sales, higher the fees earned by the bank, and better the bonuses. So loan officers had no incentive to do thorough credit checks. The Dodd-Frank act is supposed to put a break in this process by enforcing loan credit checking standards on banks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodd%E2%80%93Frank_Wall_Street_Reform_and_Consumer_Protection_Act#Title_XIV_.E2.80.93_Mortgage_Reform_and_Anti-Predatory_Lending_Act(1 vote)
- Why don't the banks which give out the loans just create the SPE themselves?(1 vote)
- Because this task requires a different skillset than originating the mortgages. The bank may have two divisions, an investment bank side and a commercial bank side, and the people that work for each side have defined expertise in what they do.(1 vote)
Video transcript
Welcome back to my series
of presentations on mortgage-backed securities. So let's review what we've
already gone over. So I've already drawn here-- I
actually prepared ahead of time-- so I've already drawn
here kind of what we've already talked about. So we start with borrowers
who need to buy houses. Each of them borrowed
$1 million. Actually let me write
that down. Let me change the
color of my pen. Where'd my pen go? OK. So each of these people
borrowed $1 million. OK. Each of them borrowed $1 million
and there were 1,000 of them, right? So $1 million times 1,000. That's $1 billion that
they needed. And they said that they would
pay 10% a year on that money that they borrowed. So that's 10% for each of them
is $100,000 and then as we said, there's 1,000 borrowers. So they're going to put in
$100 million, right? 100,000 times 1,000
is 100 million. So just to simplify. Keep it in your mind. $1 million
goes to a bunch of borrowers, goes to 1,000
borrowers, to be specific. And then each year, those
borrowers are going to give the special purpose entity--
this is just a corporation designed to kind of structure
these mortgage-backed securities-- they're going to
give 10% of the billion, or $100 million back into this. And then we said, OK, well where
does that money for this special purpose entity, or for
this corporation, come from? Well it comes from the investors
in the actual mortgage-backed securities. And just to be clear, so
the asset within this entity are the loans. The loans are the main asset
that's inside of the special purpose entity. And the loans are just the right
on these 10% payments. And so money came from when the
owners of each of these mortgage-backed securities--
each, let's say, paid $1,000 for the mortgage-backed
securities. And in return, they're going
to get 10% on their money. So each security cost $1,000. And then they're going to
they're going to get $100 back per month. And we said there are a million
of these securities, so $1,000 times 1 million,
that's where the $1 billion comes from. My thing's been acting up. That's where the $1 billion
comes from. And that essentially is
lent to the borrowers. And these guys will get 10%. Now one thing I want you to keep
in mind is, they get 10% only if every one of these
borrowers pays their loans, never defaults, never
pre-pays. Pre-paying a mortgage is just
saying, I sold the house. I don't need the mortgage
anymore, so I just pay it off. So it's only 10%, indefinitely,
if all of the borrowers pay all the money
and never default or anything like that. So this 10% is kind of
in an ideal world. Well everyone knows that it's
not going to be exactly 10%. Some percentage of these
borrowers are going to default on their mortgage. Some of them are going
to pay ahead of time. And actually that's what the
buyer of the mortgage-backed security should try
to figure out. And all sorts of buyers are
going to have all sorts of different assumptions. And this is what you probably
read some articles about, these hedge funds with these
computer models to value their mortgage-backed securities. And that's what those
computer models do. They try to look at historical
data and figure out, OK, for a given population pool in a given
part of the country, what percentage of
them are able to pay off their mortgage? What percentage of them default
on their mortgage? And when they default, what
is kind of the recovery? Say they default on a $1 million
mortgage, and then the special purpose entity would
get control of that house. And then if that house is sold
for $500,000 because the property value went down, then
the recovery would be 50%. So that's all of the things that
someone needs to factor in when they figure out what
will be the real return. 10% is if everyone pays. So let's make some very simple
assumptions for ourselves. Let's say we are thinking
about investing in a mortgage-backed security and we
want to gauge for ourselves what we think the return
is going to be. Well let's say we know that this
pool of borrowers that-- my pen keeps not working--
that 20% will default. We're not going to worry about
pre-payment rates and all things like that. Let's say 20% are going
to default. Of these 1,000 borrowers, 200 of
them are just going to lose their job or whatever. They can't afford a
mortgage anymore. And of those 20% that default,
we have a 50% recovery. So that means borrower X
defaulted on his loan. And then when we go and get
the property-- because the loan was secured by the
property-- when we auction off the property, we only
get $500,000 for it. So we get a 50% recovery. 50% of the original
value of the loan. So if 20% default and then
there's a 50% recovery, then on average you're going to get
10% of the loan is worthless. And I'm going to make
some kind of handwaving assumptions here. But you can assume
statistically, and since this is a large number of borrowers--
it's 1,000, right? If there's only one borrower
it would be hard to kind of gauge when he defaults,
if he defaults at all. We would just know that
there is a 20% chance. But when there's a large number
of borrowers, you can kind of do the math and say,
OK, on average 200 of these guys are going to default, and
instead of actually getting 10%, since 10% of the loans are
going to be worthless, I'm going to get 10% less
than this 10%. So I'm going to get 9%. So this is based on the
model that we just constructed, right? This is the model that
we constructed. This is a much simpler model
than what most people use. But based on the model that we
just constructed, I think the real return we're going to get
on this mortgage-backed security is 9%. If there was another investor
who assumed a 50% default rate, but with a higher
recovery, he or she would have a different kind of expected
return from this security. So why is this even useful? Well think about it. Before, in the case we did in
the first video, when someone just borrows from the bank,
the bank has very specific lending requirements. They have their own model. So there's a whole class of
borrowers that they might have not been able to service. Right? There might be people with
really good credit scores, really good incomes, who don't
have a down payment. And if they don't meet what the
bank's requirements are, they would never get a loan. But there are probably some
investors out there that would say, you know what? For the right interest rate and
for the right assumptions in my model, I'm willing to give
anybody a loan, as long as I'm compensated
for it enough. And this is what this
mortgage-backed security market allows. It allows-- let's say this group
of borrowers-- let's say this pool of borrowers right
here actually didn't-- This pool of borrowers
actually aren't the traditional-- they don't have
25% down and they don't have kind of the traditional
requirements to get a normal mortgage-- but if I pool a bunch
of people who don't have those traditional requirements,
but they're good in other ways-- they have a
high income or high credit score-- I can go through this
alternate mechanism to find investors that are willing
to loan them money. So essentially, from the
borrower's point of view, it allows more access to loan
funding that they would have otherwise not been able to. And from an investor point of
view, it allows another place for me to invest in. Maybe I feel that the computer
models that I have are really good at predicting things like
default rates, and recovery rates, and what a
loan is worth. And I feel that I can, in some
ways, be a better loan officer than the banks. And this would be an attractive
place for me to invest in. It also might just have a risk
reward characteristic that doesn't exist in the market
already, and it allows you to diversify into one other
asset class. So that's the value that it has across the entire spectrum. Now in the next presentation I'm
going to show how you can, I guess, further complicate this
even more, so that you can open up the investment
to even a larger group of investors. Because you can think about it
right now, there's probably some people who say, OK, I
already said, some people will do these models and try to make
their own assumptions and say, OK, this is going
to give me 9% a year. But there's a whole bunch of
people who are going to say this is just too complicated
for me. This seems risky. I don't have any fancy models. I only like to invest
in things where I know I get my money. Very highly rated debt
is where I'm going to invest my money. And there's another group of
people who say, OK, 9%, that's nice and everything, but I'm
a hotshot, I'm a gambler. 9% isn't the type of
returns I want. I want to take more risk
and more return. And so there should be
something, maybe, for those people as well. So that's what we're going to
show you in the presentation on collateralized debt
obligations. See you soon.