Securitisation

The password of a new concept of finance that has been dominating since the ¿90s is widely known as securitisation: a technique through which loans are packaged together and then transferred to autonomous special purpose vehicles (SPV) which, in turn, issue asset-backed securities (ABS). These securities, submitted to the rating agencies' evaluation, give rise to a variety of classes of risk and can be issued to a wide audience composed of international investors. In this book, it has been analyzed that securitisation deals, theoretically conceived as instruments of risk management, were used in an aggressive way in order to maximize short-term profit, but with weak valuation of medium and long-term effects. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that securitisation deals had a relevant impact both in provoking and fomenting the recent financial crisis. Due to the increased risk appetite by financial institutions in the years preceding the crisis, securitisation operations contributed to disseminate a situation of uncertainty with a generalized mistrust in the financial markets and in the solvency of financial intermediaries, causing the crisis to reach the global level.