Home loans, securitization, subprime mortgage crisis. A critical essay in retrospection

From the end of the Nineties up until the subprime mortgage crisis in August 2007, the home loan market experienced an authentic boom. The banks, given the promising scenario, created increasingly variegated products to meet growing market requirements, while at the same time endeavouring to attract more clients by offering reduced costs. Italy's economic growth, though modest, kept insolvency rates low and profits high for the whole banking system. The 2007 financial crisis, which continued into 2008 with disastrous results both for the United States and for Europe, put a sudden end to the growth of home loans sales. It also had grave repercussions on financial markets, with considerable consequences on the interbank market's interest rates. This volume follows the events described above, attempting to show interaction between the growth of the Italian real estate market and that of home loans before the crisis, followed by the slump in real estate and the reduction of home loans granted, in the wake of the financial tsunami.