[Note: Wolf Richter has provided written authorization to the diarist to reproduce his posts in their entirety for the benefit of the Daily Kos community.]
(h/t to Yves at Naked Capitalism)
The Exquisitely Reengineered Frankenstein Housing Monster(Continued below.)
Wolf Richter
Testosterone Pit
Friday, January 31, 2014 at 1:50AMIt’s back, a new and improved contraption, a synthetic structured security that on its polished surface looks like that triple-A rated mortgage-backed toxic waste that helped blow up the banks and your 401(k) in 2008. But this time, it’s different. It’s even worse.
American Homes 4 Rent, a highly leveraged REIT that went public last August with great hoopla and that owns 21,000 single-family homes it bought helter-skelter out of foreclosure since 2012 and is now desperately trying to rent out – well, that Wall Street darling, according to unnamed sources of the New York Times, is planning to hawk securities backed by $500 million of mortgage debt.
But this time, the mortgages aren’t on homes owned by regular folks who lied on their applications about their income and who refinanced the heck out of ever uptick in price to yank out cash. This time, the securities – if you can call them that – are backed by rental payments from single-family homes that are, hopefully, rented out, and will, hopefully, stay rented out.
The usual suspects are lined up to engineer these elegant products, the same ones that were bailed out last time: JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Wells Fargo. The securities are to be sold during the first quarter to investors that have been driven to near insanity by the Fed’s repression of yield on even the riskiest crap – investors who’ve learned to hold their nose and ignore the risks no matter how large just to get a little extra yield...