Secondary Mortgage Market

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:

    A man may be defeated by his own secondary successes.
    Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)

    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)

    I respect not his labors, his farm where everything has its price, who would carry the landscape, who would carry his God, to market, if he could get anything for him; who goes to market for his god as it is; on whose farm nothing grows free, whose fields bear no crops, whose meadows no flowers, whose trees no fruit, but dollars; who loves not the beauty of his fruits, whose fruits are not ripe for him till they are turned to dollars. Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)