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Report
Insurance Companies and the Growth of Corporate Loans' Securitization
Insurance companies nonupled their CLO investments in the post-crisis period. This growth has far outpaced that of loans and bonds and is characterized by a strong preference for mezzanine tranches over triple-A tranches. Conditional on capital charges, insurance companies invest more in bonds and CLO tranches with higher yields. Importantly, they prefer CLO tranches because these carry higher yields relative to bonds. Preferences increased following the 2010 capital regulatory reform, resulting in insurance companies holding 40 percent of outstanding mezzanine tranches. Insurance companies ...
Discussion Paper
Insurance Companies and the Growth of Corporate Loan Securitization
Collateralized loan obligation (CLO) issuances in the United States increased by a factor of thirteen between 2009 and 2019, with the volume of outstanding CLOs more than doubling to approach $647 billion by the end of that period. While researchers and policy makers have been investigating the impact of this growth on the cost and riskiness of corporate loans and the potential implications for financial stability, less attention has been paid to the drivers of this phenomenon. In this post, which is based on our recent paper, we shed light on the role that insurance companies have played in ...
Report
Peas in a pod? Comparing the U.S. and Danish mortgage finance systems
Like the United States, Denmark relies heavily on capital markets for funding residential mortgages, and the Danish covered bond market bears a number of similarities to U.S. agency securitization. In this paper we describe the key features of the Danish mortgage finance system and compare and contrast it to the U.S. system. We also note characteristics of the Danish model that may be of interest as the United States considers further mortgage finance reform. In particular, the Danish system includes features that mitigate refinancing frictions during periods of falling home prices, and ...
Report
COVID Response: The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, resulting in higher spreads on ABS and briefly halting the issuance of some ABS. On March 23, 2020, the Federal Reserve established the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) to support the flow of credit to consumers and businesses by re-enabling the issuance of ABS. In this paper, we describe how TALF works, how much it was used, and its effect on the issuance and spreads of TALF-eligible securities relative to those of TALF-ineligible securities. We find that both the introduction of TALF and its ...
Journal Article
Credit risk transfer, informed markets, and securitization
Mortgage-backed securities (MBS) funded the U.S. housing bubble, while the ensuing bust resulted in systemic risk and the global financial crisis of 2007-09. In the run-up to the crisis, MBS pricing failed to reveal the growing credit risk. This article draws lessons from this failure that could inform the use of credit risk transfers (CRTs) to price credit risk. The author concludes that the CRT market, as currently constituted, could have appropriately priced and revealed credit risk during the bubble years because it met three key requirements: 1) transparency, through the full provision ...
Working Paper
Unconventional Monetary Policy and Risk-Taking: Evidence from Agency Mortgage REITs
We study how the Federal Reserve's quantitative easing (QE) influenced the behavior of Agency mortgage real estate investment trusts (REITs)?a set of institutions identified by the Financial Stability Oversight Council as posing systemic risk. We document that Agency mortgage REITs: [i] equity prices reacted to QE announcements and in a manner consistent with their business prospects; [ii] grew markedly during QE2 and receded during QE3 in relation to the Federal Reserve's Agency MBS purchase activity; and [iii] increased their leverage during QE3. Our findings are consistent with ...
Report
Credit risk transfer and de facto GSE reform
We summarize and evaluate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?s credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, which have been used since 2013 to shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private sector investors. We argue that the CRT programs have been successful in reducing the exposure of the federal government to mortgage credit risk without disrupting the liquidity or stability of mortgage secondary markets. In the process, the programs have created a new financial market for pricing and trading mortgage credit risk, which has grown in size and liquidity over time. The CRT ...
Working Paper
The Effect of Large Investors on Asset Quality: Evidence from Subprime Mortgage Securities
The government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac?the dominant investors in subprime mortgage-backed securities before the 2008 crisis?substantively affected collateral composition in this market. Mortgages included in securities designed for the GSEs performed better than those backing other securities in the same deals, holding observable risk constant. Consistent with the transmission of private information, these effects are concentrated in low-documentation loans and for issuers that were highly dependent on the GSEs and were corporate affiliates of the mortgage ...
Journal Article
Peas in a pod? Comparing the U.S. and Danish mortgage finance systems
Like the United States, Denmark relies heavily on capital markets for funding residential mortgages, and its covered bond market bears a number of similarities to U.S. agency securitization. This article describes the key features of the Danish mortgage finance system and compares and contrasts them with those of the U.S. system. In addition, it highlights characteristics of the Danish model that may be of interest as the United States considers further mortgage finance reform. In particular, the Danish system includes features that mitigate refinancing frictions during periods of falling ...
Journal Article
Credit risk transfer and de facto GSE reform
The Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac credit risk transfer (CRT) programs, now in their fifth year, shift a portion of credit risk on more than $1.8 trillion of mortgages to private-sector investors. This study summarizes and evaluates the CRT programs, finding that they have been successful in reducing the exposure of the government-sponsored enterprises and the federal government to mortgage credit risk without disrupting the liquidity or stability of mortgage secondary markets. The programs have also created a new financial market for pricing and trading mortgage credit risk, which has grown in ...