Loans were then packaged into securities that proved complex, opaque, and unwieldy; for example, when defaults became widespread, the legal agreements underlying the securitizations made reasonable modifications of troubled  BIS central bankers’ speeches  3  mortgages difficult. Rating agencies’ ratings of asset-backed securities were revealed to be subject to conflicts of interest and faulty models.
At the end of the chain were investors who often relied mainly on ratings and did not make distinctions among AAA-rated securities. Even if the ultimate investors wanted to do their own credit analysis, the information needed to do so was often difficult or impossible to obtain.