Vintage

Categories: Marketing

Version. What flavor was it? What was the nose, the finish?

Yes, mortgage traders treat series of mortgage backed securities like they are fine wines...or cardboard box screwtop ones. Mortgages are issued over long periods of time, and most last 30-ish years, to boot.

In different eras, mortgages carried different levels of scrutiny, restriction, tension. So in the 2011-ish era, post-mortgage crisis, you can bet that anyone who received a mortgage was extremely well vetted as having good credit, the ability to pay, real backing, etc. In the 2004-2006 era, kinda the opposite.

So when you're assaying a group of 1,800 mortgage units with, give or take, $300,000 remaining in principal, the vintage matters. It sorta reflects the era in a very strange, semi-American-Dreamy kind of way.

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Finance: What is Collateralized Mortgage...65 Views

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Finance a la shmoop what is a collateralized mortgage obligation or

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CMO all right people well this is a GMO and this is a CMO yeah it's a bunch of

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mortgages in one investment vehicle pot like mortgage Stone Soup not nearly as [Mortgage stones in a bowl of soup]

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exciting is that that man-eating plant over there

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so yeah just a bunch of mortgages that are packaged together when banks and

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big fat indexed bond fund because these groups of mortgages while they pay

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interest ie the interest comes from the people who are actually paying off their

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mortgages so why would you collateralize a mortgage obligation anyway answer risk

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by packaging lots and lots of mortgages together the theory was that well as a [CMO boxes on a conveyor belt]

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whole they would create a much less volatile environment than the former

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alternative of having tens of thousands of individual mortgages many of which at

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any given time were you know in do rest as people were dead beating and not [Man playing video games]

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paying what they promised to pay back right well collateralizing this group

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meant simply placing all of them into one investment vehicle that could be

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Street being Wall Street where greed is good until it's not abused the notion of [Boxing gloves punch collateralized]

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collateralized mortgages and actually applied the notion of collateral against

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them pledging as collateral the equity in these mortgages or packages of

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mortgages and then borrowing against them so it's like leverage on leverage,

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highly volatile and this is sort of like the brilliant idea of the fraternity [Man walking along]

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social chairman sending the pledges to get graham crackers marshmallows and

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chocolate when he sees his you know couch is on fire yeah like why wouldn't [People carrying snacks and a couch on fire appears]

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he just put it out like what was he imbibing there all right well in fact

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this is more or less what happened in the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and 9 and

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it was helium inside of the couch that exploded in the form of many of these [Helium explodes on a couch]

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mortgages becoming insolvent and as one mortgage went bad

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well it caused a chain reaction of panic up and down the economic food chain

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which resulted in the near bankruptcy of the United States financial system

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basically the people who pulled together these CMOS forgot what the O stands for [Man walking along the street and plant eats him]

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oh dear, oh my

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