Mortgage-Backed Securities and the Financial Crisis of 2008: A Post Mortem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Ospina ◽  
Harald Uhlig
Author(s):  
Solomon Y. Deku ◽  
Alper Kara ◽  
Nodirbek Karimov

AbstractWe assess the value of frequent issuers to investors in securitization markets by examining the initial yield spread of 6132 European mortgage-backed securities (MBS), covering a 20-year period between 1999 and 2018. We find that frequent issuers have certification value, and it increases as the credit cycle approaches its peak, as lending standards loosen, and information asymmetries in securitization markets increase. Investors value frequent issuers more favourably on riskier, difficult to evaluate MBS. We find that after the great financial crisis (GFC), investors began to attribute more value to frequent issuers, regardless of MBS credit quality. We also find that in the pre-crisis period, investors required higher yields to compensate for perceived rating shopping, which is not observed after the GFC. Finally, we show that investors expect higher yields on deals closed by subsidiaries of foreign banks.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. Anna

Taking the murder of Greek HIV+ and queer activist Zak Kostopoulos as its starting point – an exercise of necropolitical power in broad daylight – this article explores the work of drag queens in Greece and their aesthetic/political choices. It interprets their performances as tactics of survival and resistance and as creative responses to queer trauma. The role of queerfeminist spaces, cultural events and collectives also is examined as a response to the increasing right-wing turn in the country’s political scene – itself the result of the financial crisis of 2008. It imports José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentifications and counterpublics, Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics into the Greek/Balkan context and analyses the particular configurations and intersections of sexualities, genders, statehood, race, class and religion in Greece. It then examines disidentifications and counterpublics as empowering practices of community forming, offering glimpses of a queer Balkan counterpublics and the tools employed towards its making (humour, parody, reclaiming, disidentification, mourning and embodied pleasures).


2017 ◽  
Vol 82 (5) ◽  
pp. 879-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Fligstein ◽  
Jonah Stuart Brundage ◽  
Michael Schultz

One of the puzzles about the financial crisis of 2008 is why regulators, particularly the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), were so slow to recognize the impending collapse of the financial system and its broader consequences for the economy. We use theory from the literature on culture, cognition, and framing to explain this puzzle. Consistent with recent work on “positive asymmetry,” we show how the FOMC generally interpreted discomforting facts in a positive light, marginalizing and normalizing anomalous information. We argue that all frames limit what can be understood, but the content of frames matters for how facts are identified and explained. We provide evidence that the Federal Reserve’s primary frame for making sense of the economy was macroeconomic theory. The content of macroeconomics made it difficult for the FOMC to connect events into a narrative reflecting the links between foreclosures in the housing market, the financial instruments used to package the mortgages into securities, and the threats to the larger economy. We conclude with implications for the sociological literatures on framing and cognition and for decision-making in future crises.


2012 ◽  
pp. 40-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristiano do Nascimento ◽  
Márcia Maria dos Santos Bortolocci Espejo ◽  
Simone Bernardes Voese ◽  
Elisete Dahmer Pfitscher

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágúst Þór Árnason

In June 2010, nearly two years after the world-wide financial crisis of 2008 hit Iceland, the Icelandic Parliament passed an act on a Constitutional Assembly. Even if no one has succeeded to show any direct connections between the financial crisis and the provisions and the function of the constitution of 1944, loud voices did claim that Icelanders were fortunately faced with a “constitutional moment” and, subsequently, an opportunity to change the nation’s political as well as economic life; something people were ethically obligated to make use of. With no better justified or defined reasons for such an all-inclusive revision, however, it is a worth-while undertaking to take a closer look at the notion of a constitutional moment, and see if that can help us to understand why the Republic of Iceland should abolish its founding constitution without a preceding thorough analysis of its functional failures.


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