Banks and other financial institutions have sold loans among themselves for over 100 years. Even though this market has existed for many years, it grew slowly until the early 1980s when it entered a period of spectacular growth, largely due to expansion in highly leveraged transaction (HLT) loans to finance leveraged buyouts (LBOs) and mergers and acquisitions (M&As). With the decline in LBOs and M&As in the late 1980s after the stock market crash of 1987, the volume of loan sales fell to approximately $10 billion in 1990. However, since then the volume of loan sales has expanded rapidly, especially as M&A
