The seemingly nebulous world of scratch-and-dent mortgage securities and transactions backed by reperforming loans continued to grow quietly during the booming MBS market of 2002. According to Inside MBS and ABS data, some $17.1 billion of reperforming mortgage securitizations were issued last year, along with $8.1 billion in scratch-and-dent transactions. Although both categories are sometimes called scratch-and-dent, the rating agencies generally restrict use of that term to