text: Meltdown 101: Who owns my mortgage? – The Denver Post
  NEW YORK — When you sit at your kitchen table and write your monthly mortgage check, your signature may be the first stop on a journey that takes your money to the other side of the world.
  How did that happen? The pooling and reselling of mortgages, known as mortgage securitization, has played an outsized role in this financial crisis.
  Here are some questions and answers about mortgage securitization and its effects.
  A: Mortgages are "securitized" when they are pooled together, sliced into pieces and resold as bonds. A mortgage-backed security is a bond whose payments come from the monthly checks for the underlying mortgages.
  Here's a greatly simplified (and hypothetical) mortgage-backed security, as described by Richard J. Rosen, a senior economist and economic adviser at the Chicago Federal Reserve: An issuer has collected 1,000 mortgages, each worth $100,000, each with a 30-year maturity and a fixed interest rate of 6.5 percent. This $100 million pool of mortgages can back 10,000 bonds, each worth $10,000 and paying interest that's slightly less than what the homeowners pay — say 6 percent — after the intermediaries, including the packager, take a cut.
  A: Mortgage-backed securities had historically been a fairly safe investment offering a better return than even safer U.S.
  Treasury debt. With interest rates near historic lows from 2001 to 2004, investors around the world were trying to earn more on their investments. At the time, mortgage-backed securities, which had been heavily promoted abroad by the U.S. government, seemed like a fairly safe option.
  As global investors demanded more mortgage-backed securities, banks began looking for more mortgages to buy, repackage and resell. This was one of the reasons lending standards loosened. By the time it became clear that many home loans had gone to people who wouldn't be able to repay them, the market had grown large enough to shake investors all over the world — from community banks in California to multi-billion-dollar banks in Germany.
  When that happened, investors refused to buy the securities, and the banks that had been selling them were stuck with them. The plunge in their value has contributed to more than $300 billion in write-downs — or reductions in the value of assets — by global banks and brokerages. Stock in the banks with the largest involvement plummeted; the weakest were bought by competitors at steep discounts and the survivors have been less likely to loan money.
  "That reflects a real conscious effort by the government to promote that," he said. "Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would do road shows around the world." The next largest group was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with 16 percent. Commercial banks own another 16 percent.
  A: That depends on what kind of mortgage you have. If you were a good borrower with a fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage for less than $417,000, the chances are excellent that Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac either owns your mortgage or guarantees it. If you have an adjustable-rate mortgage, it's likely held by a bank or another financial institution.