Lanterna Rally

Author: Frank J. Fabozzi

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

The U.S. mortgage market, estimated at roughly $3.7 trillion, easily exceeds the values of the U.S. government bond market. Daily trading alone runs in the billions of dollars, and the value of mortgage-backed securities now outstanding is more than $1 trillion. The vastness of this market has inspired a variety of financial innovations, both in the design of mortgages and in the securities that derive from them. These innovations--adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) and mortgage-backed securities (MBSs), which include passthroughs, collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs), stripped MBSs, and so forth--have been a great success, created a large and growing industry, and demonstrated how financial engineering can redirect cash flows from a pool of assets to more closely satisfy the asset/liability needs of different classes of institutional investors. MBSs have proven to be a useful model for other forms of asset securitizations such as securities based on auto loans and credit card receivables. Mortgage-backed securities provide many useful benefits to both issuers and investors, but they are among the most complex of securities and appear in many interesting puzzling forms. Success in issuing, trading, and investing in MBSs requires a thorough understanding of their pricing and management of prepayment risks, and Professors Fabozzi and Modigliani have made an important contribution to that understanding in this important new book, . In this state-of-the-art treatment, Frank Fabozzi and Franco Modigliani offer the first book to systematically address the complex subject of mortgages and mortgage-backed securities without being unduly mathematical. Beginning with the basic mortgage, theauthors explain the development of the secondary mortgage market. They show how the market has been transformed from total dependence on local deposits to a market with a broad base of investors in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The business of mortgage origination, servicing, insurance, mortgage pooling, and the historical origins of securitization are fully described. The authors take the reader through the procedure for pricing traditional bonds to the complex process of valuing a variety of mortgage-backed securities. Because the borrower/homeowner has an option to prepay part or all of the mortgage at any time, yields and prices on these instruments can vary dramatically. The conventions used in this market for estimating prepayments are discussed and critically evaluated, as are the factors that affect prepayments. Fabozzi and Modigliani provide a review of the fundamental principles used in valuing fixed-income securities, then extend them to the various frames of analysis used in determining values for MBSs. This book fills an important need for mortgage bankers, institutional investors, and other financial professionals who need to understand the mortgage market and its complex instruments.