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The Devil's Derivatives
book

The Devil's Derivatives

by Nicholas Dunbar
July 2011
Intermediate to advanced
304 pages
8h 11m
English
Harvard Business Review Press
Content preview from The Devil's Derivatives

CHAPTER SIX

Burning Down the Housing Market

Thanks to government sponsorship (Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) and the deregulation of lending, subprime securitization produced bonds that were ideal for repackaging into CDOs. Soon, there was so much demand for CDOs that sourcing subprime mortgages was a bottleneck slowing down profits. Dealers cleared the bottleneck by inventing CDS bets on subprime bonds that could be bundled into CDOs instead of mortgage bonds. For the dealers to balance out these bets, they needed insurance companies like AIG to buy default swaps on the safest pieces of their deals, and they needed hedge funds like Paulson & Co. to bet against subprime. As the U.S. housing bubble began to burst in late 2006, the dealers bet against ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781422143162