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Begin New Search Topic Financial Crisis Author Charles Thomas

1. Asymmetric Information and the Death of ABS CDOs

Author:
Daniel O. Beltran, Larry Cordell, and Charles Thomas
Publication Date:
03-2013
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
A key feature of the 2007 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has practically ceased. And where trade has occurred, it appears that market prices are well below their intrinsic values. This seems especially true for those securities where the payoff streams are particularly complex, for example, structured finance ABS CDOs. One explanation for this is that information about these securities' intrinsic values since the crisis has been asymmetric, with current holders having better information than potential buyers. We first characterize the information asymmetries that were present in the structured finance ABS CDO market. Because many of the CDO dealers had partially or fully integrated the pipeline from mortgage originations through CDO issuance, they had informational advantages over potential buyers that could well have disrupted trading in CDOs as the crisis took hold in August of 2007. Using a "workhorse" model for pricing securities under asymmetric information and a novel dataset for the intrinsic values of ABS CDOs, we show how the resulting adverse selection problem could explain why the bulk of these securities either trade at significant discounts to their intrinsic values or do not trade at all.
Topic:
Security, Economics, Financial Crisis, and Fiscal Policy
Political Geography:
Global Focus

2. Foreign Exposure to Asset-Backed Securities of U.S. Origin

Author:
Daniel O. Beltran, Laurie Pounder, and Charles Thomas
Publication Date:
08-2008
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System
Abstract:
The financial turmoil which began in August 2007 originated, in part, because investors reassessed the quality of the assets underlying many asset-backed securities (ABS), particularly U.S. mortgages. The prominence of European banks in the early stages of the turmoil created the perception that foreigners held an outsized share of risky U.S. securities and prompted questions of why Europeans were so exposed. This paper evaluates that perception by quantifying foreign exposure to ABS with U.S. underlying collateral. Using the latest survey data on foreign portfolio holdings of U.S. securities, we find that the ultimate losses that foreigners could incur arising from U.S. underlying assets are small relative to most scale variables, although initial total mark-to-market losses are estimated to be significantly larger. Among other reasons for this difference between ultimate and initial losses, we demonstrate that the securitization chain can amplify mark-to-market price declines in the presence of uncertainty or illiquidity. Finally, we show that, relative to the size of the market, foreigners’ holdings of U.S. mortgage-backed securities do not appear to be elevated compared with their holdings of other U.S. assets.
Topic:
Economics, Financial Crisis, Financial Markets, and Mortgages
Political Geography:
United States and North America