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This was over ten years ago, and I've been out of the financial sector for a long time, and was in the non-profit sector ever after. But when my former firm got into securitization in a big way, I was assigned to design a "credit card receivable asset backed security."
They are generally much more complex than mortgage backed securities. I was pretty amazed that they worked at all, because they didn't seem to make sense in terms of the Bankruptcy Code because the card company had an obligation to "take back" non-performing credit card accounts, which screwed up the "true sale" requirements. Although I've been out of the loop for a while, I would guess the "take back" requirements are really fucking with the card companies and banks as the economy tanks and people are defaulting and being late on card payments, going bankrupt etc. I'd be really curious to see how things evolved after I left. I read recently that basically no one can sell any of these securities at this point.
One of the (many) dirty little secrets of the entire exotic security creation business is that the complexity arises because everyone is allowed to copy everyone else's work, which means that the documents that create the securities get every more complex. There is no copyright on a contract, and contracts have to be disclosed to the public through the SEC. So if you get assigned to create, say, a credit card receivable security, you just go to the SEC website, download some other company's documents, and start tinkering away. If their document got blessed by the SEC and IRS, then you can assume yours will probably get blessed to. The documents just grow and grow as companies keep building on each other's examples. I had the distinct impression that no one quite understood what the documents actually said.
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