Scrabbling to save the monolines

Martin Vander Weyer on the next thing to cause heartburn in the financial markets. 

The current market crisis sometimes feels like a Scrabble championship between financial pundits, in which most of us hesitate to challenge dubious words and strange jumbles of letters for fear of showing ignorance. First came ‘subprime’, which we learned to define as a category of mortgage borrowers so uncreditworthy they cannot even afford the hyphen the Spectator’s learned sub-editors would prefer to insert between the ‘sub’ and the ‘prime’. Then came a rash of acronyms encapsulating both the science of subprime lending and the alchemy of securitisation by which its poison has been spread around the world.

‘Nina’, for example, refers to ‘No Income No Asset’ mortgages granted without any financial information about the borrower except possibly his own undocumented assertion that he actually has a job with a salary. ‘Ninja’ is an even more exciting lending proposition: it stands for ‘No Income No Job No Asset’.