EVERYBODY OUT OF THE RISK POOL?

摘要

What do Enron Corp., the mom-and-apple-pie home mortgage market, and the gritty business of lending to people with bad credit have in common? Explosive growth, fueled by a much-lauded innovation―structured finance―that lets businesses pass along their credit risks to others. The $7 trillion Wall Street industry packages companies' streams of future revenues―everything from credit-card to mortgage payments to natural-gas sales―as securities and sells them to investors. Structured finance, or securi-tization, has become the grease that keeps capital markets spinning. It helped fund the boom in corporate finance through the 1990s and the steady growth in consumer credit and home-ownership that have kept the economy afloat in recent months.