Crypto-Backed Mortgages Are as Crazy as They Sound
It’s only risk piled on top of risk, at a particularly risky time.
Now buying houses.
Photographer: ROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/Getty Images
If you entered a contest to see who could design a financial instrument to lose the most money the fastest, you would struggle to come up with a better idea than taking home mortgages backed by crypto, slicing them into mortgage-backed securities and selling them at the moment the global financial system is being bludgeoned by pandemic, war and Jerome Powell.
And yet here we are: Bloomberg News reports the hot new thing in finance is the nouveau crypto riche putting up their expensive digital assets as collateral to buy expensive houses using a more-or-less traditional mortgage, but with no dead-tree dollars down. The brainchild of a company called Milo Credit — based in America’s Crypto Capital, Miami — this offering goes a little further than what we’ve seen so far, which has included the use of crypto for home down-payments and apartment deposits and the occasional crib selling as an NFT.