The secondary mortgage market is the market for the sale of securities or bonds collateralized by the value of mortgage loans. The mortgage lender, commercial banks, or specialized firm will group together many loans and sell grouped loans as securities called collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs). The risk of the individual loans is reduced by that aggregation process.
These securities are collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), also known as mortgage-backed securities (MBS). The CMOs are sometimes further grouped in other CDOs. Mortgage delinquencies, defaults, and decreased real estate values can make these CDOs difficult to evaluate. This happened to BNP Paribas in August, 2007, causing the central banks to intervene with liquidity.
Famous quotes containing the words secondary, mortgage and/or market:
“Scientific reason, with its strict conscience, its lack of prejudice, and its determination to question every result again the moment it might lead to the least intellectual advantage, does in an area of secondary interest what we ought to be doing with the basic questions of life.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)
“We are playing with fire when we skip the years of three, four, and five to hurry children into being age six.... Every child has a right to his fifth year of life, his fourth year, his third year. He has a right to live each year with joy and self-fulfillment. No one should ever claim the power to make a child mortgage his today for the sake of tomorrow.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“the old palaces, the wallets of the tourists,
the Common Market or the smart cafés,
the boulevards in the graceful evening,
the cliff-hangers, the scientists,
and the little shops raising their prices
mean nothing to me.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)