.
The ability to cheaply quantify the default risk of the underlying high-risk
mortgages and bundle them in standardized debt securities called mortgagebacked securities provided a new source of financing for these mortgages.
Financial innovation didn’t stop there. Financial engineering, the development
of new, sophisticated financial instruments, led to structured credit products
that pay out income streams from a collection of underlying assets, designed to
have particular risk characteristics that appeal to investors with differing preferences.