At 10,000 people, it was the biggest ever SFVegas—the annual gathering for the structured-finance industry. The last time it boomed like this was 2006 and 2007. Mortgage bonds were selling like crazy, and this crowd was flying high.
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Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better—including corporate loans and consumer credit-card debt, lease payments on cars, airplanes and golf carts, and payments to data centers. Once dominated by bonds backed by home mortgages, deals now reach into nearly every cranny of the economy.
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Sales of securitized debt have been surging since the Covid-19 pandemic, when the Fed lowered rates and investors were awash with cash and looking for investments, Flanagan said. “Everything is going to end up here,” he said. That includes debt backed by money tied to artificial intelligence, solar energy and even payments from plastic-surgery patients. Bonds backed by leases on data centers and fiber-optic networks—which power companies’ AI operations—hit $4 billion in the first two months of this year, equivalent to one-third of total issuance in 2024, according to Finsight.