Company: MITN
Filing Date: 2025-11-07
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001628280-25-050624
Chunk: 204

Company: AG Mortgage Investment Trust, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-11-07
Form: 10-Q
Item: Part I, Item 1
Chunk 204
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 mortgage loans or real estate securities and cash as collateral to secure our financing arrangements. Should the fair value of our mortgage loans or real estate securities pledged as collateral decrease (as a result of rising interest rates, changes in prepayment speeds, widening of credit spreads or otherwise), we will likely be subject to margin calls for additional collateral from our financing counterparties. Should the fair value of our mortgage loans or real estate securities decrease materially and suddenly, margin calls will likely increase causing an adverse change to our liquidity position which could result in substantial losses. In addition, we cannot be assured that we will always be able to roll our financing arrangements at their scheduled maturities, which could cause material additional harm to our liquidity position and result in substantial losses. Further, should funding conditions tighten as they did in 2007-2008, 2009 and more recently in March 2020, our financing arrangement counterparties may increase our margin requirements on new financings, including repurchase transactions that we roll at maturity with the same counterparty. This would require us to post additional collateral and would reduce our ability to use leverage and could potentially cause us to incur substantial losses.

77

Liquidity risk – derivatives

The terms of our interest rate swaps require us to post collateral in the form of cash or Agency RMBS to our counterparties to satisfy two types of margin requirements: variation margin and initial margin.

We and our swap counterparties are both required to post variation margin to each other depending upon the daily moves in prevailing benchmark interest rates. The amount of this variation margin is derived from the mark to market valuation of our swaps. Hence, as our swaps lose value in a falling interest rate environment, we are required to post additional variation margin to our counterparties on a daily basis; conversely, as our swaps gain value in a rising interest rate environment, we are able to recall variation margin from our counterparties. By recalling variation margin from our swaps counterparties, we are able to partially mitigate the liquidity risk created by margin calls on our repurchase transactions during periods of rising interest rates.

Initial margin works differently. Collateral posted to meet initial margin requirements is intended to create a safety buffer to benefit our counterparties if we were to default on our payment obligations under the terms of the swaps and our counterparties were forced to unwind the swap. Initial margin on our centrally cleared trades varies from day to day depending upon various factors, including the absolute level of interest rates and the implied volatility of interest rates. There is a distinctly positive correlation between initial margin