英語翻譯
Many moons ago,Michael Milken,the director of low-grade bond research at Drexel,Burnham and Lambert,observed that investment in the corporate debt markets often reflected a “herd instinct”—that is,investors stuck solely to investment-grade securities as a pack.This herd instinct,according to him,was flawed in several ways.His attribution to the instinct of investors as herd-like was made while he advocated the use of “junk bonds” as a debt instrument.Encouraging investors to look at qualitative considerations—such as man- agement’s ability and its vision of the future rather than sticking to the size,historical record,and industry position of the company—he was successful in fueling the growth of the junk bond market.
A similar event occurred in the early part of the twenty-first century,when the housing boom and economic recovery encouraged a heavy spiraling in subprime mortgage lending.This increase saw a parallel increase in the securities offered through a pooling of such subprime mortgage loans through the process of “securitization.” Investors moved from buying pooled mortgage loans—securitized and sold on the backing of the full faith and credit of government and quasigovernment agencies—to what is referred to as “non-agency transactions”:ones where the willing investor undertakes the risk of the underlying mortgage loan.Such a transaction consisted of the issuance of securities out of a pool of mortgage loans without any backing of governmental funds.The contagion gripped the financial markets,and the herd instinct manifested itself in a situation where investors jumped in significant numbers to take advantage of the booming housing market that prevailed in the early years of the new millennium.Capital markets engaged in technological innovations for the riskier category of investors—something like a “diverse maturity mortgage product,” which led to pooling of mortgage loans with varied credit ratings into securities.Many conditions conducive to subprime lending and securitization of such loans induced investors to take the risk of investing in such loans.But the expectations contained in these risks did not materialize.And fears grew of a looming economic crisis that might result from numerous delinquencies for such loans—not just in the United States but all over the world.