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According to TIME calculations, U.S. banks hold $153 billion in residential mortgage bonds that used to have AAA ratings but have since been downgraded. The calculations are based on numbers from the International Monetary Fund, Fitch Ratings and New York University professor Nouriel Roubini. (Treasury and Federal Reserve officials declined to provide their estimates.) To get those selling, the Fed offers some attractive financing, but it hasn't made those details public and the financing is expected to be considerably less favorable than the FDIC rates. Treasury officials insist they have formulas worked out but are waiting to reveal details...
That leaves the commercial mortgage-backed securities and other asset-backed securities that were once AAA-rated but have since been downgraded. Those toxic assets will be sold, Treasury hopes, by at least five still untested public-private investment funds that will be created through open bidding among investment banks. Those assets, according to TIME's calculations, amount to about $37 billion on banks' books...
...assets that the government hopes to get off the balance sheets of banks. Will that be enough to nurse our nation's biggest banks and financial markets back to health? It's not clear. The plan leaves out tens of billions of dollars in bonds that were never AAA-rated and were hard to sell even in good times. The plan triggered a strongly positive stock-market reaction on Monday, when the Dow Jones industrials soared nearly 500 points. On Tuesday the market slipped 1.5%, as doubts about a speedy bank recovery began to take shape...
...There are other credit enhancement techniques which securitzers have employed to improve the credit rating of ABS. Because individual AAA-rated loans are, by themselves, in the minority, in order to create AAA-rated ABS, a securitizer would bundle loans of different ratings and place those same loans into different investment classes, known as tranches. Although the individual loans that comprise the tranches remain disproportionately below AAA-rated, because of how tranches work, they will receive different credit ratings, some AAA-rated...
...Under TALF, the Fed will only finance AAA-rated ABS. Investors are not given an incentive to purchase the riskier tranches. The result is that securitizers would have to keep the riskier tranches on their own balance sheet. And, given banks recent experience with this approach, it is unlikely that they will be eager to do so again. However, in the event a bank wishes to act as a securitizer, they will have no choice...