The majority of lenders lend money which they don’t actually have. Nowadays, strictly speaking, they can’t lend money they don’t have, but they can lend money which isn’t entirely their own. They lend what is called securitised money. Securitised money is the name given to money which is borrowed from elsewhere and then passed on to the borrower. This money is normally sourced from what are called the money markets. Lending companies will borrow huge amounts of money at a time from these money markets, in some cases many millions at a time. These amounts of money are referred to as a tranch of money.

Once that tranch of money has been lent to borrowers, they then set about borrowing more but what has already been lent is known as a lending book. That lending book has a value to institutional investors. Institutional investors are people such as pension companies or large investors who want to own loans lent to others that are going to be repaid but don’t want to go through the hassle of actually lending it in the first place and dealing with the end user. Lending books depending on their quality can have quite a high value.

It is the quality of these lending books that plays such an important role as to why we have a credit crunch at all. Ideally, a lending company would obtain a tranch of money for lending at a set rate. They would then lend this money to their borrowers at a percentage higher than that, and would therefore be making a profit. However, there are two significant possibilities which can ruin this ideal situation. The first is if the secondary lender lends poor quality money to the public. That is to say that some or all of that money has not been paid back and so is not effectively there to lend. The other possibility is if the money being distributed by the primary lenders, the distributors of the tranches of money, runs out.

Both these events have taken place in the US. Secondary lenders have lent to poorer quality borrowers and as such have ended up with bad debts and in addition primarily because of the first situation the lenders that lend the huge sums to the secondary lenders have pulled out of the market. This has left the secondary lenders with no means to raise more money to lend but also they are finding it increasingly harder to sell on their mortgage books, once completed, as they carry such bad paying customers and are deemed poor quality lending books. Poor quality lending books carry a lower value to institutional investors due to the fact that they could lose money.

This whole situation has affected the UK in so much as some of our major lenders use securitised lending as their main source of business and even though in the UK we are very much more conservative in our lending practises the international money markets still don’t want to lend the amounts they once use to.

The situation in the US is causing untold damage to the money lending industry in the UK and there is no doubt that many corporations could be destroyed by it. This may seem a world away from Joe Public, but as lenders tighten their belts on lending requirements in order to keep a high quality lending book, we will continue to find it more difficult to borrow money.

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