The idea, in the wake of the savings-and-loans disaster, was to spread risk outward from those immediately involved in lending to mortgage borrowers and to attract investors by turning mortgages into securities that offered a wide range of yield-risk profiles. And it worked. In 1980, 67 percent of American mortgages had been held directly on the balance sheets of depository banks. By the end of the 1990s, the risks involved in America’s system of long-term, fixed interest, easy repayment mortgages were securitized and spread across a much wider segment of the financial system than had been the
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