Mortgage REITs: Does Doubling the Leverage Make Them a Good Investment?

Having recently passed the four-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers collapse, it’s tempting to believe that our economy and capital markets have learned from their mistakes. Nevertheless, every now and then Wall Street reminds us that it has “fallen off the wagon,” and reverted back to scary old ways of the bad old days. One of those old tricks is to add unnecessary leverage to assets that may not be safe to begin with.