Optimal mortgage loan securitization and the subprime crisis

Abstract

We analyze the process of mortgage loan securitization that has been a root cause of the current subprime mortgage crisis (SMC). In particular, we solve an optimal securitization problem for banks that has the cash outflow rate for financing a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) and the bank’s investment in MBSs as controls. In our case, the associated Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation (HJBE) has a smooth solution when the optimal controls are computed via a power utility function. Finally, we analyze this optimization problem and its connections with the SMC