It wasn't just residential real estate – corporate loan underwriting standards also fell during the securitization boom that preceded the credit crisis, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York official said Monday. "[D]uring the boom years of securitization, corporate loans that banks securitized at loan origination underperformed similar, unsecuritized loans originated by the same banks. [And evidence suggests] that the performance gap reflects looser underwriting standards applied by banks to loans they securitize," the official, João Santos, a vice president in the Research and Statistics Group, said in a post Did Securitization Lead to Riskier Corporate Lending? on the bank's blog. Santos noted that his views, based on a research study conducted with a colleague, Vitaly Bord, do not necessarily reflect the position of the bank or the Federal Reserve System. Securitized corporate lending showed the same spike as real estate lending, Santos noted, saying, "Prior to 2003, the annual
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