By the mid-2000s the markets couldn’t get enough of these securities, which was a problem because the banks and brokers writing these very profitable mortgages were running out of good borrowers to whom they could lend. The later batches of these securities were therefore increasingly made up of NINJA (no income, no job, no assets) mortgages collateralized by the eBay earnings or bar tips of the new mortgagers, or by purely fabricated income statements and robo-signed paperwork. Because the new mortgages coming in were of such dubious quality, the issuers of these securities increasingly didn’t want to hold any of this dubious risk on their own books and wanted them moved off-book.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 94