Sub Prime credit crises in a nutshell

High-Risk Customer: Gee, I’d like to buy a house, but I haven’t saved any money for a down payment and I don’t think I can afford the monthly payments. Can you help me? Mortgage Broker: Sure! Since the value of your house will always go up, we don’t need down payments anymore!
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Mortgage Broker: And we can give you a really, really low interest rate for a few years. We’ll raise it later, okay?
High-Risk Customer: Sure. Ummm…there’s one other thing — my employer is a real prick and might not verify my employment. Would that be a problem?
Mortgage Broker: Nope — we can get you a special “Liar’s Loan” and you can verify your own employment and income!
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High-Risk Customer: You guys are awesome! You’re really willing to work with guys like me.
Mortgage Broker: Well, we don’t actually lend you the money. A bank will do that. So we don’t really care if you repay the loan. We still get our commission.
High-Risk Customer: Wow! Let’s get started!
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A Few Weeks Later, at the Bank…


Banker: I’d better get rid of these crappy mortgage loans. They’re starting to stink up my office. Thankfully, the really smart guys in New York will buy them and perform their financial magic! I’ll call them right away!
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Let’s See What the Smart Guys are Doing…


Investment Banker Boss: Phew! We’d better get rid of these shitty mortgages before they start attracting flies.
Investment Banker Underling: But who would buy this crap, boss?
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Investment Banker Boss: I’ve got it! First we’ll create a new security and use these crappy mortgages as collateral. We’ll call it a CDO (or maybe a CMO). We can sell that CDO to investors and promise to pay them back as soon as the mortgages are paid off.
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Investment Banker Underling: But crap is crap, isn’t it, boss? I don’t get it.
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Investment Banker Boss: Sure! Individually, these are pretty crappy loans, but if we pool them together, only some of them will go bad — certainly not all of them. And since housing prices always go up, we really have very little to worry about.
Investment Banker Underling: I still don’t get it.
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Investment Banker Boss: The new CDO will work like this: it’ll be made up of three slices or tranches and we’ll call them:
• The Good
• The Not-So-Good
• The Ugly
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Investment Banker Boss: If some of the mortgages fail, as surely some might, we’ll promise to pay investors holding the “Good” tranche first. We’ll pay the “Not-So-Good” investors second, and the “Ugly” investors last.
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Investment Banker Underling: I’m starting to get it. And because the “Good” investors have the least risk, we’ll pay them a lower interest rate than the other guys, right? The “Not-So-Goods” will get a better interest rate and the “Ugly” guys will get a nice fat interest rate.
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Investment Banker Boss: Exactly. But wait — it gets better. We’ll buy bond insurance for the “Good” tranche. If we do that, the rating agencies will give it a really good rating, in the AAA to A range. They’ll likely give the “Not-So-Good” tranche a BBB to B rating. We won’t even bother asking them to rate the “Ugly” tranche.
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Investment Banker Underling: So you’ve managed to create AAA and BBB securities out of a pile of stinky, risky mortgage loans. Boss, you’re a genius!
Investment Banker Boss: Yes, I know.
Investment Banker Underling: Okay, now who are we going to sell the three tranches to?
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Investment Banker Boss: The assholes at the SEC won’t let us sell this stuff to widows and orphans, so we’ll sell them to our sophisticated institutional clients.
Investment Banker Underling: Like who?
Investment Banker Boss: Like insurance companies, banks, small towns in Norway, school boards in Kansas — anyone looking for a high-quality, safe investment.
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Investment Banker Underling: But surely nobody would buy the “Ugly” tranche, would they?
Investment Banker Boss: Of course not — nobody’s that stupid! We’ll keep that piece and pay ourselves a handsome interest rate.
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Investment Banker Underling: This is all great, but since we’re only using the smelly mortgages as collateral on an entirely new security, we haven’t really gotten rid of them. Don’t we have to show them on our balance sheet?
Investment Banker Boss: No, of course not! The guys who write the accounting rules allow us to set up a shell company in the Cayman Islands to take ownership of the mortgages. The crap goes on their balance sheet, not ours. The fancy name for this is “Special Purpose Vehicle”, or SPV.
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Investment Banker Underling: That’s great, but why would they let us do that? Aren’t we just moving our own crap around?
Investment Banker Boss: Sure, but we’ve convinced them that it’s vitally important to the health of the U.S. financial system that investors not know about these complex transactions and what’s behind them.

Collecting and the objectives

Yesterdays post was about your reaction to taking that first call because your car finance loan was in arrears. This one is a bit of insight from the collector who will be calling you.
First off, your details are going to be in the auto dialer at the car finance company, I mentioned this yesterday. Now this person will usually be in a call center of the car finance company, have targets and hate his or her job and be speaking to people trying to weasel out of paying for their car loan all day. Not a good start for you eh?

So first off the call is placed by the car finance company auto dialer, then your details will appear on their screen when you answer the call. If you don’t answer the call then it will usually try the other numbers on file for you in quick succession, each waiting for the call to be answered or not as the case may be. As soon as the call is live your details will appear on the screen of the caller. Sometimes, odd things happen here, for instance if the car finance organisation use a predictive dialer and the call center is busy, you might actually not get anybody on the line immediately. There's a marked delay between you answering the call and somebody actually talking to you, then you know their busy!

The car finance employee calling you doesn’t have enough time to read all the comments on your file, if any. This is why they always seem to have the same introduction - security questions, statement of balance and can you pay the balance now. This is so you have to take time to respond which enables a sort of catch-up period for the collector to look at some key details while your answering them.

So, the collector’s objective - Well it used to be something like:
1. What’s the problem for the payment arrears.
2. What’s the solution to stop this happening again?
3. Can they pay now and clear the arrears on your car finance.

This is usually why you get asked why you haven't made the payment to your car finance. There’s some real obvious NO NO's here, the collector isn't looking for: Uhm, couldn’t be bothered about my car finance, I'm busy call me back later type of replies, there looking to get you off their queue. There’s nothing personal about the call, you will be one of perhaps hundreds of people this person is going to have to try and speak to about their car finance before they can go home, or more than likely, go to the pub to release the stress of all the car finance people in arrears.

So the car finance collector needs a result and you need a result. You do need to agree and stick with an arrangement to pay. Getting abusive or argumentative will get you nowhere. Your offhand comments will be noted and the next time you are called, you can bet your house on the fact that you will get a harder time if you’re not going to at least sound responsive to this person. You need to at least give the impression that you care about the loan and that you do want to resolve it, this way there’s a note on your account about how receptive you were and how you had a good attitude to sorting the problem out.

The obvious solution to solve the arrears, is to pay on time and if you do forget to pay, you try and get your account back up to date as soon as possible.