Ryan
Lewie Ranieri rose up from a lowly mail room job at ex-Wall Street titan Salomon Brothers all the way to the boardroom. Upon being asked to run the newly created mortgage bond department (a move he saw as a slap in the face., Ranieri proceeded to make said department not only the most profitable one at Salomon, but for a time, the most profitable on all of Wall Street. His unique insight was that consumer mortgages could be bundled together in pools of homogeneous risk (say, 30 year mortgages with $110,000 outstanding at 12% interest. that investors of all kinds would feel comfortable buying into.
As the book “Liar’s Poker” tells it, Ranieri generated billions of dollars for Salomon and is often credited with jump-starting the entire mortgage securities market.
