How a train driver can service five million dollars of property on $2,000 a week of positive cash flow comes through the magic of cross-collateralised residential mortgages, where Australian banks allow the unrealised capital gain of one property to secure financing to purchase another property. This unrealised capital gain substitutes for what normally would be a cash deposit. This house of cards is described by LF Economics as a “classic mortgage ponzi finance model”. When the housing market moves south, this unrealised capital gain will rapidly become a loss, and the whole portfolio will become undone. The similarities to underestimation of the probability of default correlation in Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs), which led to the Global Financial Crisis, are striking.
