IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgif/1010.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Could asymmetric information alone have caused the collapse of private-label securitization?

Author

Abstract

A key feature of the 2007-2008 financial crisis is that for some classes of securities trade has ceased. And where trade does occur, it appears that market prices are well below what one might believe to be the intrinsic value for that class of security. This seems to be especially true for those securities where the payoff streams are particularly complex (for example, CDOs). One explanation for this is that information about these securities' intrinsic values is asymmetric, with the current holders having better information than potential buyers. We show how the resulting adverse selection problem can help explain why more complex securities trade at significant discounts to their intrinsic values or do not trade at all. To examine whether asymmetric information alone would suffice to shut down portions of the asset-backed securities (ABS) market, we append a simple \"workhorse\" model for pricing securities under asymmetric information into a Monte Carlo simulation that generates hypothetical securities backed by residential mortgages. We conduct a type of \"stress test\" on the ABS by making the distribution of payoffs to the underlying loans worse, and find that the intrinsic values of the securities further down the securitization chain become dispersed in such a way that the market for them may shut down under asymmetric information. We then consider the role for government intervention, and compare the effectiveness of different policies that aim to unclog these markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Daniel O. Beltran & Charles P. Thomas, 2010. "Could asymmetric information alone have caused the collapse of private-label securitization?," International Finance Discussion Papers 1010, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
  • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgif:1010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2010/1010/default.htm
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/ifdp/2010/1010/ifdp1010.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nourzad, Farrokh & Hunter, William & Szczesniak, Katherine, 2020. "Securitization of revolving debt and its determinants," The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 240-246.
    2. Bachar FAKHRY, 2016. "A Literature Review of the Efficient Market Hypothesis," Turkish Economic Review, KSP Journals, vol. 3(3), pages 431-442, September.
    3. Jonathan Swarbrick, 2019. "Lending Standards, Productivity and Credit Crunches," Staff Working Papers 19-25, Bank of Canada.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Securities;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedgif:1010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.