US to nearly break even on TARP?

Is anyone paying attention to the facts? Do voters' attention spans extend back two years? Can academic economists learn from actual events?

The main costs from TARP will come from bailing out the auto companies and insurer AIG, not banks.

NYTimes: Even as voters rage and candidates put up ads against government bailouts, the reviled mother of them all — the $700 billion lifeline to banks, insurance and auto companies — will expire after Sunday at a fraction of that cost and could conceivably earn taxpayers a profit.

... The Treasury never tapped the full $700 billion. It committed $470 billion and to date has disbursed $387 billion, mostly to hundreds of banks and later to A.I.G., to the auto industry — Chrysler, General Motors, the G.M. financing company and suppliers — and to what is, so far, an unsuccessful effort to help homeowners avoid foreclosures.

When Mr. Obama took office, the financial system remained so weak that his first budget indicated the Treasury might need another $750 billion for TARP. The administration soon dropped that idea as Mr. Geithner overhauled the rescue program and the banking system stabilized. Still, by mid-2009, the administration projected that TARP could lose $341 billion, a figure that reflected new commitments to A.I.G. and the auto industry.

The Congressional Budget Office, which had a slightly higher loss estimate initially, in August reduced that to $66 billion.

Now Treasury reckons that taxpayers will lose less than $50 billion at worst, but at best could break even or even make money. Its best-case scenarios, however, assume that A.I.G. and the auto companies will remain profitable and that Treasury will get a good price as it sells its corporate shares in coming years.

“We’d have to be very lucky to have both A.I.G. and the auto companies pay us back in full,” Mr. Elliott said.

... By any measure, TARP’s final tally will be less than even its advocates expected amid the crisis. But the program remains a big loser politically.

See this post from September 2008, during the heat of the TARP debate:

... The following false conundrum has been stated recently by numerous analysts, including Paul Krugman: "if Treasury wants to recapitalize banks it has to overpay for toxic assets, to the detriment of taxpayers; if it wants to pay fair prices for the assets then banks won't benefit." There is no conundrum if markets, at this instant in time, are systematically underpricing mortgage assets.

When the Internet bubble burst in the early years of this century, investors were so gun shy and under so much pressure that they would not pay even rationally justifiable prices for stakes in technology companies. Smart investors who were willing to put capital at risk could buy assets at fire sale prices and made huge profits. This is nothing more than fear and herd mentality at work. If herd thinking can lead to overpricing of assets, why not underpricing immediately following a collapse?

Markets overshoot on both the up- and the down-side!

These points are obvious to any trader... it's the academics with equilibrium intuitions who are struggling to understand!

... To understand, it helps to have seen the collapse of a financial bubble firsthand. If you haven't (as, I suspect is the case with most academic economists), you are likely to cling to the idea that the market price of an asset is a good forecast of its actual value. However, this is completely wrong in the wake of a collapse. (And, certainly, the predictive power of the market price cannot hold at all times -- it is likely to be most wrong at the peak and in the aftermath of a bubble.)

Money talks

In an earlier post 100 cents on the dollar I discussed the controversial AIG bailout, summarizing a WSJ narrative as follows:

IF AIG (credit rating) Downgrade,
THEN collateral provisions trigger in derivatives (CDS) contracts,
THEN AIG bankruptcy,
THEN systemic meltdown.

So the AIG counterparties played chicken with the Fed and got 100 cents on the dollar for $60 billion in derivatives contracts. Paid for by you and me and our kids :-/

If I have any of this wrong, experts please correct me -- I'm just trying to understand how the world works.

A reader with considerable expertise weighs in with the following analysis of the events of late 2008. While this person has more expertise on this matter than anyone I know, he may not be completely unbiased, considering his employer ;-)

Steve - I do think you have it wrong. The plot line is false, but it is also imbued with plenty of facts - so explanation is difficult.

Quick summary: An AIG bankruptcy filing did not hinge on the resolution of these contracts, thus there could not have been a game of chicken.

Details (greatly simplied but still quite wordy): This story is set in November of 2008, but to understand it we have to go back two months earlier - to September. In September 2008 the clearing price of mortgage-backed securities implied a high rate of mortgage default with low recovery on foreclosed property - a decline in real estate values such as never seen before. Observers were still debating whether prices were correctly forecasting widespread defaults or whether prices were merely depressed due to illiquidity. For institutions levered to real estate the distinction was very important because it meant the difference between short-term liquidity problems and long run insolvency which would force bankruptcy.

To understand liquidity problems, we need to understand collateral. In order to minimize credit risk to each other, financial institutions ask for collateral from each other. As trades slowly move up or down in value, cash and securities flow between institutions so that everyone owes each other approximately nothing and the effects of a sudden bankruptcy are much smaller than they otherwise would be. Having collateral in hand means not having to worry about why your counterparty's trades are marking down so low - you are 100% insured by the collateral and if prices rebound you'll just give it back. And if your counterparty goes bankrupt you won't take a loss. Lehman was long real estate and, due to falling prices and having to post collateral, come September they ran out of cash. Regulators shopped them to other banks whose traders pored over Lehman's books and concluded "the company is insolvent, not just illiquid" so "goodnight Lehman Bros".

AIG was in the same boat as Lehman however AIG is an insurance company - this opened up three problems. (1) Banks are usually regulated by federal entities like the Fed and the SEC, so they all fit into similar frameworks nationwide. However insurance companies are only regulated by states. States are not particularly great at regulating because they are small and every state does things differently. (As a side note for fans of health care reform, regulating insurance companies at the federal level and creating national competition is the single most important reform needed. Lack of this in the so-called reform bills is proof that the legislation is all about creating health care entitlement without any real reform.) You can't just call in JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs to tell you what to do here because a bank can't really analyze an insurance company over a weekend. (2) Next, the ratings agencies had assigned AIG their highest rating, AAA, meaning that people who didn't want to do a lot of their own credit analysis, but didn't want to take any risk of default, were the sort of people who bought AIG bonds - that is to say, AIG bonds were largely being held in accounts that were presumed to be taking no risk by their owners. If you go back to news stories from September 2008 you will find many shrill voices invoking the spectre of systemic melt-down, but those voices tend to come from holders of AIG bonds, not random investors worried about "the system". (3) As an insurance company the general public was very broadly exposed to AIG in pensions, annuities, home insurance, etc... and these people aren't holding any collateral at all, but would account for a lot of votes at the polls come November. So, because of these three complications, the same politicians who let Lehman go under decided, at about the same time, to bail out AIG.

Now, there are lots of ways to do a bailout. This very same month, the largest financial entities in the world, Fannie and Freddie, were bailed out - and basically by the federal government saying "we simply guarantee all the debts and obligations of Fannie and Freddie". (Note that, in the end, the agency bailout is where the "taxpayer" will take almost all his lumps. But the politicians don't talk about this too much because Washington spent decades exempting Fannie and Freddie from any meaningful regulation and encouraging them, via various acts of congress, to facilitate mortgage loans to people who probably couldn't afford homes, but would make U.S. home ownership "more diverse".) In the case of AIG the bailout took the form of an $85 billion loan. It is important to remember at this point the debate over whether real estate securities were down because a bunch of mortage defaults were coming or just because nobody wanted to own the bonds. The politicians were still hoping for the latter and hoping that a loan would tide AIG through its illiquid period and into a time when the securities recovered. The TARP legislation was debated this same month, and the original intent of TARP was to buy these securities, thus creating a market for them, and a recovery in their prices. (In the end, however, TARP was not used in this way. It was used to invest in banks, for which no legislation was required anyway, and auto companies - which was probably illegal.) The TARP debate informs us that in September the politicians were not believing the market-implied rate of mortgage default. So, AIG used its bailout money to keep collateral flowing on its real estate positions. The thinking on this was that it stopped the counterparties from closing out the trades and thus "locking in the loss".

Now let's move forward to November 2008, the subject of this post. By November those debating that real estate securities were down due to illiquidity rather than coming defaults had given up their argument. A wave of defaults was coming and everyone finally realized that a lot of people who took out sub-prime mortgages always had the intention of defaulting because they didn't want to own a home so much as speculate on real estate going up. Back at AIG, their positions had continued to go against them and it became pretty obvious that AIG was insolvent, not just illiquid, and a more aggressive bailout was going to be needed if they were not to declare bankruptcy. But now if AIG goes bankrupt the government is in for a loss too since it has made all these loans. So "in for a penny in for a pound" the feds decide to up the bailout. Among many issues to be sorted out in the fresh bailout is that AIG still has all these real estate positions which keep bleeding money and, since AIG made the wrong calls on this all along, the feds decide to close out all of these positions.

At this point, the "unlimited bailout" decision has been made, and the discussion over mopping up these positions is a sidebar, not super important at the time (but it will become very politically sensitive a year later). The feds would like to save a few bucks by negotiating the close-out on these trades with the banks. However, because all the banks are holding lots of collateral, and some of them are even insured against AIG defaulting, they expect to be paid in full just like everyone else exposed to AIG. The feds aren't calling PIMCO and asking them to take 80 cents for their AIG bonds, they are calling retirees and asking them to take 80 cents for their pension annuities, and the aren't calling up auto insurance holders and asking them to take 80 cents for fender-bender repairs. Further, the insured banks wouldn't take a loss even if AIG went bankrupt unless you buy the end-of-the-world systemic melt-down scenario. But, even if you believe that, why aren't all of AIG's creditors being asked to contribute? Indeed, why not everyone in the world, since all benefit from there being no global melt-down. The banks are not the primary beneficiaries of the bailout, the bondholders are - bondholders have no collateral. In essence, there is nothing for the fed to negotiate, so they abandon the effort.

So, back to Steve's question. AIG was going to go bankrupt without a bailout, and negotiating 80 cents on the dollar for its real estate positions would not have changed that either way - so no game of chicken. For political reasons, the decision was made to bail them out. The banks were not asked to pay a disproportionate amount towards that bailout, and intelligent minds can debate whether or not they should have, but the case is far from clear. Lastly, I will add that I am unconvinced that letting AIG go bankrupt would have created a systemic meltdown, but it is clear why those involved in the bailout would say that. It is human nature that when you make a convenient but unpopular choice, your first defense is likely to be that you didn't really have a choice. The choice to bailout AIG was convenient and unpopular, but I don't agree that it would have led to systemic meltdown, and the historical arguments on my side are quite strong. Panics happen every 10 to 20 years and it is never the end of the world.

The value of trust

In no-arb efficient market fairy tale land, investors are assumed to be able to value a company by simply looking at its balance sheet, researching its market and business model and projecting into the future. Sound difficult? Why, yes, it's almost impossible to do, and even after a lengthy research project executed by a team of brilliant analysts there is a huge remaining uncertainty.

So what happens in the real world? Well, we apes with limited cognitive power and limited information rely on simple heuristics -- rules of thumb -- to guess what will happen in the future. That is, we say "Robert Rubin seems like a smart, careful guy, and top management at Citi must know what they are doing, and surely the market knows what it's doing, so, yeah, $40 a share seems ok with me..."

Of course, after a while we might notice some data suggesting that the leadership at Citi has been dishonest ("we are adequately capitalized" -- CEO Vikram Pandit) and ignorant of their own business operations ("what's a SIV?" -- Chairman Robert Rubin, November, 2007), and suddenly decide that NO, they DON'T KNOW WHAT THEY ARE DOING.

Yikes!: as reported on this blog, Rubin comments from November 2007.

[SIV = Structured Investment Vehicle = (roughly, see link) CDO]

"I think the problem with this SIV issue is that it's been substantially misunderstood in the press," said Rubin, who has a considerable personal stake in the fate of Citigroup. The banking firm paid him $17.3 million last year.

"The banks appear to be in fine shape," he said. "That's not a problem."

The SIV issue isn't critical for the economy, he insisted.

"It's massively less important that it's been presented," Rubin said. "It's been presented as a sort of centerpiece of what's going on. I just don't think that's right."

The cost of the evaporation of trust? $200 billion dollars in lost market capitalization in the last year. The real reason Citi melted down is that people no longer trust their senior management to meet future obligations. This senior management was left in place in Treasury's latest sweetheart deal.

Tell me an efficient market story that explains Citi's recent history and I'll sell you a slightly devalued "Nobel Prize" in financial economics along with the Brooklyn bridge. (Click below for larger image.)



Thanks to Mark Thoma for links to the articles quoted below.

Bronte Capital:

...due to the losses and the lack of risk control people stopped believing in Citigroup – and hence Citigroup dies without a bailout. It was however pretty easy to stop believing in Citigroup because nobody (at least nobody normal) can understand their accounts. I can not understand them and I am a pretty sophisticated bank analyst. I know people I think are better than me – and they can’t understand Citigroup either. So Citigroup was always a “trust us” thing and now we do not trust.

The cause of the crisis

This is a wholesale funding crisis and the cause of the crisis is plain. It is lies told by financial institutions. Financial institutions sold AAA rated paper which they almost certainly – deep in their bowels – knew was crap. They sold it to people who provide wholesale funding.

Now they need to roll their own debt. The people who would normally wholesale fund them are the same people who have had a large dose of defaulting AAAs. They no longer believe. It is “fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you”. As I have put it the lies that destroyed Bear Stearns were not told by short sellers. They were told by Bear Stearns.

Now the problem is that no matter how many times Pandit says that Citigroup is well capitalised nobody will believe him. In answer to the Brad DeLong question – the company told lies about its mortgage book – which compounded the lies about the dodgy CDO product they sold. The lies about the mortgage book totalled $20 billion on say $43 billion of optimistically valued assets – and those lies reduced the value of Citigroup by $200 billion because they removed the trust in Citigroup.

It is one of those ironic things that when financial institutions lied in 2006 the market seemed to believe them. When they tell the truth now, nobody will listen.

Robert Rubin racks his brain about how he would have done things differently. Well one thing he would have done differently is get Citigroup to remove the culture of obfuscation – the culture that allowed it to be perceived as if it were lying even when it was telling the truth. The problem is that even Robert Rubin doesn’t have enough uncashed integrity to save Citigroup. Even Robert Rubin.

The US government is now selling systemic risk insurance.

Finally, System-Risk Insurance, by Laurence Kotlikoff and Perry Mehrling, FT

As we advocated two months back (Bagehot plus RFC: The Right Financial Fix), Uncle Sam is finally starting to sell systematic risk insurance on high-grade securities in exchange for preferred stock. This is a critical function for the U.S. government; Uncle Sam is the only player capable of hedging systemic risk because he’s the only player capable of taking actions that keep the overall economic system on the right course.

The real question now is whether the U.S. government will begin selling system-risk insurance on a routine basis and, thereby, help refloat trillions of dollars in high-grade mortgage-related securities owned by banks and other financial institutions - institutions that are in desperate need of more capital to support new lending.

Writing one-off insurance deals with a few large players, like Citigroup, is not the same as standing ready to write system-risk insurance to all players that issue conforming high-grade paper - something that’s needed to support ongoing securitization of such obligations. We stress the word “conforming,” because it’s vital for the government to begin stipulating which securities are “safe” under normal conditions and which are “toxic” and, thus, no longer to be held by financial intermediaries.

Like any insurance underwriter, Uncle Sam needs not only to know and approve what he’s insuring; he also needs to make sure there are appropriate deductibles and co-insurance provisions to limit moral hazard on the part of the insured. The moral hazard in this case is that financial institutions try to pass off low-grade loans as high-grade.

The weekend deal with Citigroup is instructive in clarifying the nature of the insurance the government should sell on an ongoing basis. The deal to support $306bn of Citigroup’s mortgage-related securities puts a floor under the value of the best such securities at about 90 cents on the dollar. This deal represents the first use of the insurance capability authorized by Section 102 of the TARP.

[90 cents on the dollar? WTF!?! Incompetent management is left in place while the taxpayer foots the bill. Why not bail out Detroit while we're at it? Note: this is clarified by a commenter -- it's 90% of current market value, not face value.]

The structure of the deal is convoluted, so it takes some probing to see precisely what insurance is being sold and for what price. We are told that Citigroup itself is on the hook for the first loss of $29bn (plus whatever loss reserves are already on its books) on the cash flows due on the $306bn in mortgages. This amounts to roughly a 10 percent deductible.

Any losses beyond $29bn will be shared by the government (90 per cent) and Citigroup (10 per cent). This is the co-insurance (co-pay) element. This insurance runs for the next 10 years, and Citigroup is paying a one-time $7bn premium for it, using preferred stock.

Fear and loathing of the plutocracy

Did Paulson and Treasury deliberately overpay for shares in Goldman and eight other banks? What did taxpayers get for their $125 billion, versus what Buffet got for his $5 billion Goldman investment just a few weeks earlier? See Black-Scholes analysis here.

Will banks like Citi pay out bonuses using bailout funds? Citi plans to distribute $26 billion after receiving $25 billion from you and me. Will the public let them get away with it? Given the tremendous value destruction they've caused, on Wall Street and beyond, how can top executives at these companies justify any bonus compensation for themselves?

After leaving the Clinton administration, how did Rahm Emanuel make $16 million in two years (at Wasserstein Perella) with no prior business experience? Did you really think Obama was going to be a radical left president?

Michael Lewis, Bloomberg commentary:

It may still take awhile before Wall Street finally accepts that it won't get paid.

At the moment, as their bony fingers fondle the new taxpayer loot, the firms appear to believe that they might still fool the public into thinking that bonus money isn't taxpayer money.

``We've responded appropriately to the attorney general's request for information about 2008 bonus pools,'' a Citigroup Inc. spokeswoman told Bloomberg News recently, ``and confirmed that we will not use TARP funds for compensation.'' But as the Bloomberg report noted, ``she declined to elaborate.''

As well she might! For if the Citigroup spokeswoman had elaborated she would have needed to say something like this: ``We're still trying to figure out how the $25 billion we've already taken of taxpayers' money has nothing to do with the $26 billion we're planning to hand out to our highly paid employees in 2008 (up 4 percent from 2007!). But it's a tricky problem because, when you think about it, it's all the same money.''

...If you are one of those people currently sitting inside a big Wall Street firm praying for some kind of bonus it may already have dawned on you that you need to rethink your approach. It's no longer any use to hint darkly that they had better fork over serious sticks or you'll bolt for Morgan Stanley. There's no point even in thinking up clever ways to make profits for your firm: who cares how much money you bring into Goldman Sachs if the U.S. Congress doesn't allow Goldman Sachs to pay bonuses?

The moment your firm accepted taxpayer money, you lost control of your money machine. ...

More from Michael Lewis at Portfolio Magazine (via Paul Kedrosky).


Figure from earlier post: Is the finance boom over?

AIG watch

Treasury is setting up a special vehicle to buy up (face value) $70 billion in "troubled" CDOs insured by AIG CDS. At 50 cents on the dollar they intend to spend $30 billion in taxpayer dollars and $5 billion of AIG's money. This should reduce the collateral calls on AIG, although it's not clear that all the entities holding AIG CDS actually own the referenced CDO. Who at Treasury did the calculation to confirm that the ultimate value of the CDOs in question is over 50 percent of face value? If I'm holding the CDO and corresponding CDS contract, and I'm confident that the government is behind AIG, why should I sell at a 50 percent loss?

Kashkari remarks on TARP.

WSJ: ...The government's initial intervention was driven by concern that AIG's failure to meet it obligations in the credit default swap market would create a global financial meltdown. ...

Under the revised deal, AIG is expected to transfer the troubled holdings into two separate entities.

The first such vehicle is to be capitalized with $30 billion from the government and $5 billion from AIG. That money will be used to acquire the underlying securities with a face value of $70 billion that AIG agreed to insure with the credit default swaps. These securities, known as collateralized debt obligations, are thinly traded investments that include pools of loans. The vehicle will seek to acquire the securities from their trading partners on the CDS contracts for about 50 cents on the dollar.

The securities in question don't account for all of AIG's credit default swap exposure but are connected to the most troubled assets. The government may be betting that its involvement will encourage AIG's trading partners to sell the securities tied to the CDS contracts to the new entity.

Once it holds the securities, AIG could cancel the credit default swaps and take possession of the collateral it had posted to back the contracts. The total collateral at stake is about $30 billion.

It may also have some unintended consequences across the markets. For the plan to work, AIG's trading partners -- the banks and financial institutions that are on the other side of its credit-default-swap contracts -- may have to agree to any changes in the terms of their agreements with AIG.

Lessons from Japan

It took the Japanese two decades to recover from their 80's-90's bubble. This Times article discusses the similarities and differences between their crisis and ours. (Our current crisis is also affecting them -- the Nikkei is down 11 percent as I type this.)

I first posted the graph above in 2005.

NYTimes: ...The similarities with Japan are striking. Like the United States today, Japan in the early 1990s faced a banking and real estate crisis that undermined the entire economy and required large government intervention. Some of Japan’s most venerated financial institutions collapsed as snowballing losses from failed business and property loans plunged the nation’s financial system into paralysis.

But the differences are also pointed and revealing. The United States reacted far more quickly than Japan, committing taxpayer funds just over a year after the subprime mortgage problems surfaced in summer of 2007. Japan took nearly eight years to pass a sweeping bailout, a delay that contributed to a long economic slump that Japanese call their “lost decade.”

“Japanese government and financial institutions realized there was a problem, but they tried to cover it up,” said Junichi Ujiie, chairman of Nomura Holdings, Japan’s largest investment bank. “The United States has done in months what Japan took years to do.”

...Most of the government officials, business leaders and economists interviewed praised America’s plan to spend $700 billion buying troubled mortgage-related assets from banks. But they also said they expected that Washington would soon have to put together another huge bailout package, this time to recapitalize American banks, especially with the International Monetary Fund now estimating total bank losses from the subprime mortgage crisis to reach $1.4 trillion.

On the other hand, another lesson from Japan is that the American bailout may end up costing taxpayers far less than $700 billion or whatever the final figure may be. Japanese regulators were eventually able to recover all but $100 billion of the $450 billion spent by selling off the troubled loans and bank stocks later, after the economy had rebounded.

October CDS auctions and helicopter Ben

How do CDS contracts get settled after a credit event? We've had several recently, which means upcoming auctions (see also here). Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac auctions were October 6 (yesterday), Lehman is October 10, and Washington Mutual is scheduled for October 23.

Since Treasury is guaranteeing the GSE debt, October 6 was probably not as much of a problem as the Lehman auction will be in a few days. Many firms are scrambling for or hoarding cash and probably don't know the size of their obligation. At the auction, one has to determine the value of the bonds before deciding the value of each CDS contract. That means first an auction of Lehman debt, presumably worth only a fraction of its face value (but exactly how much?), and then a settlement of contracts. If most of the contracts are offsetting they can be canceled then and there, but the suspicion is that many CDS counterparties (perhaps, especially, hedge funds?) were writing naked contracts, which means they would have to come up with the money on the spot. For detailed discussion see here. Related post at naked capitalism.

If Treasury wants to stabilize markets and perhaps avoid more collapses, it could start on 10/10 by buying up some of Lehman's debt with its $700B war chest. Will they make an appearance? It's estimated that Lehman was involved in hundreds of billions in CDS contracts (notional). This is a very delicate moment since no one is going to want Lehman debt and therefore the market value will be very low. I can imagine a lot of smart guys who wrote CDS contracts hedged their Lehman exposure against some other (imperfectly but highly) correlated index or debt. Since those entities used in the hedge will not be simultaneously marked to market on 10/10, what was, at the time, a reasonable hedge will turn into a disaster. Note, I think the auction only covers contracts that reference Lehman -- that is, which protect one of the counterparties from a Lehman default on its debt. The auction won't resolve the problem that arises in other contracts if Lehman was actually one of the counterparties. To the extent that these exposures are canceled they would be "glued" together at the appropriate reference auction, but it's possible Lehman had some naked exposure as well.


Thinking about this more broadly, freezing of credit markets means that the effective money supply is shrinking even as central banks cut interest rates. Helicopter Ben Bernanke has always said that in an emergency the Fed had numerous tools available to inject liquidity into the markets, and today it was announced they would enter the paralyzed short term commercial paper market which is crucial to the functioning of ordinary businesses.

Helicopter speech: ...The financial distress of debtors can, in turn, increase the fragility of the nation's financial system--for example, by leading to a rapid increase in the share of bank loans that are delinquent or in default. Japan in recent years has certainly faced the problem of "debt-deflation"--the deflation-induced, ever-increasing real value of debts. Closer to home, massive financial problems, including defaults, bankruptcies, and bank failures, were endemic in America's worst encounter with deflation, in the years 1930-33--a period in which (as I mentioned) the U.S. price level fell about 10 percent per year.

Beyond its adverse effects in financial markets and on borrowers, the zero bound on the nominal interest rate raises another concern--the limitation that it places on conventional monetary policy. Under normal conditions, the Fed and most other central banks implement policy by setting a target for a short-term interest rate--the overnight federal funds rate in the United States--and enforcing that target by buying and selling securities in open capital markets. When the short-term interest rate hits zero, the central bank can no longer ease policy by lowering its usual interest-rate target.5

Because central banks conventionally conduct monetary policy by manipulating the short-term nominal interest rate, some observers have concluded that when that key rate stands at or near zero, the central bank has "run out of ammunition"--that is, it no longer has the power to expand aggregate demand and hence economic activity. It is true that once the policy rate has been driven down to zero, a central bank can no longer use its traditional means of stimulating aggregate demand and thus will be operating in less familiar territory. ...

However, a principal message of my talk today is that a central bank whose accustomed policy rate has been forced down to zero has most definitely not run out of ammunition. As I will discuss, a central bank, either alone or in cooperation with other parts of the government, retains considerable power to expand aggregate demand and economic activity even when its accustomed policy rate is at zero.

Buffet on the credit crisis

Charlie Rose interview

Skeptics will claim he is talking his own book, with the recent GS and GE investments. But I agree with most of it. Buffet says that if he could take a 1 percent stake in the bailout (investing $7 billion), he would. He thinks the bailout will make money investing in distressed mortgage securities at current market prices.

"I love to buy distressed assets... I just don't have $700B to do it with." (At about 13-14 minutes into the hour long interview.)

Bubble logic: "Innovators, Imitators and then the Idiots" (20 minutes)

"Confidence in markets and institutions is like oxygen... when you have it you don't think about it... but you can't go 5 minutes without it." (24 minutes)

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas!" (takes a shot at quants at 27 minutes)

Upper income people should pay more taxes (basically endorses Obama's tax plan) (42 minutes)

"It is terrible that income from investments (capital gains) should be taxed less than income from labor." (against regressive taxes) (44 minutes)

"If AIG had to unwind their derivatives book, it would have hit every institution in the world." (50 minutes)

"The Fed structured the AIG deal very well. They are very likely to get their money back or more." (51 minutes)

Simple question, complex answer

A former physicist (but non-financier) writes:

I have a question, and who better to ask than you. ...something isn't adding up.

I keep hearing that mortgage defaults are what is bringing down many financial institutions, and the the default rate in some particularly bad mortgage pools is up to 50%. Because housing prices are down about 20%, financial institutions can still regain 80% of the value of those loans, no? Actually the real value is probably a bit better, as most loans will be partially paid off. At any rate, doesn't this imply that even in the worst loan pools, there is only a total 10% loss. And most financial institutions will have some higher quality loan pools also, and stocks, etc. So the total effect is going to be smaller than 10%, unless financial institutions were all constructing some sort of horrible options based high risk bets on housing prices, but I doubt this would happen except in some risky hedge funds.

Is this reasoning correct? If so, I don't understand how our system can be so fragile that a few percent drop would bring everyone down. Of course everyone holding a share of these funds will have a small portfolio dip, but this happens every few years anyway.

Your calculations are reasonably correct (see comments for more detail). So why the crisis?

1) Leverage. Many I-banks had 30:1 ratios, so a small movement in value of a subcomponent of their portfolio could wipe them out. It's like a guy who puts 10% down on his house, who can lose everything if the price goes down by 10%. Of course this only matters if he is forced to sell, or, in the bank case, if shareholders and counterparties start losing confidence. This is happening simultaneously in financial markets due to the second factor...

2) Complexity. No one knows who is holding what, who has sold insurance (credit default swaps) to other parties and is on the hook, etc. So trust is gone and credit markets are paralyzed -- no muni bond issuance, no short term loans to businesses, no car loans, etc.

The efficient functioning of our economy is built on trust -- I have to trust that the grocer will give me food in exchange for a dollar bill, that I can get my money out of the bank, that my employer will pay me at the end of the month, that its customers will pay it, etc.

We are nearing a dangerous point. Confidence, once destroyed, is very hard to rebuild.

Relative to the size of our economy, the amount of money involved is not that great. If we had perfect information we could solve the whole problem with about $1 trillion. (About the cost of the Iraq war; not bad for a bubble that involved housing -- our most valuable asset.)

Meltdown links

1) Leonard Lopate interview with Economist editor Greg Ip, formerly of the WSJ. (Scroll down the page to Financial Crisis: What Happens Next?). This is the best 12 minute summary of the current situation I have yet heard. Ip is consistently good at explaining this complicated subject in an accessible manner. If you have a friend who is confused about the credit crisis, have them listen to this interview. (Avoid Terri Gross and pals on this one... ;-)

I have been listening to Leonard Lopate's show for some time and I can tell his grasp of finance has increased dramatically in the last year or so (his strength is interviewing artists, writers, etc.). It's yet another example of high-g at work. He knew almost nothing a year ago but now asks occasional perceptive questions. (But of course it doesn't matter how smart our next President is!)

2) Mark Thoma discusses the pros and cons of mark to market accounting. To me it's rather obvious that M2M accounting is exacerbating this crisis. It has introduced a very significant nonlinearity, both on the upside (bubble), and now in the collapse. If the market for mortgage assets has failed it is crazy to use it as a barometer for value. More discussion at WSJ.

3) This NYTimes Op-Ed written by a former theoretical physicist discusses agent-based simulation, behavioral economics and phase transitions -- yes, in an Op-Ed! (Thanks again to reader STS for the pointer.)

Why no bailout?

Representatives in Congress received thousands of phone calls and emails from constituents against the bailout, which some wags have characterized as "no banker left behind" :-)

We can trace this popular reaction against CEOs and Wall St. to growing income and wealth inequality. Ordinary people no longer feel they have a stake in the system. Their reaction may be irrational (even the poorest American has a big stake in the continued functioning of the economy), but it was certainly predictable.

Next spring, unlike last year, less than half of the Harvard graduating class will take jobs in finance. I guess that signals a top in the market 8-/


Related posts:

financier pay

all about the benjamins

a reallocation of human capital

a new class war

non-residential net worth

working class millionaires

Complexity illustrated: Lehman WAS too connected to fail

This WSJ article illustrates what I discussed more abstractly in this earlier post Notional vs net: complexity is our enemy. The story claims that by allowing Lehman to fail, Treasury and the Fed triggered the final stage of the crisis that got us to where we are today. I've included my figures from the earlier post here.

...in an age where markets, banks and investors are linked through a web of complex and opaque financial relationships, the pain of letting a large institution go has proved almost overwhelming.

In hindsight, some critics say the systemic crisis that has emerged since the Lehman collapse could have been avoided if the government had stepped in.

The Fed had been pushing Wall Street firms for months to set up a new clearinghouse for credit-default swaps. The idea was to provide a more orderly settlement of trades in this opaque, diffuse market with a staggering $55 trillion in notional value, and, among other things, make the market less vulnerable if a major dealer failed. But that hadn't gotten off the ground. As a result, nobody knew exactly which firms had made trades with Lehman and for what amounts. On Monday, those trades would be stuck in limbo. In a last-ditch effort to ease the problem, New York Fed staff worked with Lehman officials and the firm's major trading partners to figure out which firms were on opposite sides of trades with Lehman and cancel them out. If, for example, two of Lehman's trading partners had made opposite bets on the debt of General Motors Corp., they could cancel their trades with Lehman and face each other directly instead.

This figure shows three trades which almost cancel. Remove one of the counterparties and you have chaos instead of hedges. In a last ditch effort, after letting Lehman fail, Treasury tried to cancel these trades out manually -- good luck! Why did we not have a central exchange in place earlier?


Oops, there goes AIG! (Big issuer of CDS insurance.)

The reaction was most evident in the massive credit-default-swap market, where the cost of insurance against bond defaults shot up Monday in its largest one-day rise ever. In the U.S., the average cost of five-year insurance on $10 million in debt rose to $194,000 from $152,000 Friday, according to the Markit CDX index.

When the cost of default insurance rises, that generates losses for sellers of insurance, such as banks, hedge funds and insurance companies. At the same time, those sellers must put up extra cash as collateral to guarantee they will be able to make good on their obligations. On Monday alone, sellers of insurance had to find some $140 billion to make such margin calls, estimates asset-management firm Bridgewater Associates. As investors scrambled to get the cash, they were forced to sell whatever they could -- a liquidation that hit financial markets around the world. ...AIG was one of the biggest sellers in the default insurance market, with contracts outstanding on more than $400 billion in bonds.

To make matters worse, actual trading in the CDS market declined to a trickle as players tried to assess how much of their money was tied up in Lehman. The bankruptcy meant that many hedge funds and banks that were on the profitable side of a trade with Lehman were now out of luck because they couldn't collect their money.

...At around 7 a.m. Tuesday in New York, the market got its first jolt of how bad the day was going to be: In London, the British Bankers' Association reported a huge rise in the London interbank offered rate, a benchmark that is supposed to reflect banks' borrowing costs. In its sharpest spike ever, overnight dollar Libor had risen to 6.44% from 3.11%. But even at those rates, banks were balking at lending to one another.

Who was next after AIG? Time for a bailout!

...Goldman, Paulson's former employer, had up to $20B of CDS exposure to AIG. The current head of Goldman was the only Wall St. executive invited to the meetings between AIG and the government. Conflict of interest for soon to be King Henry Paulson?

Clawbacks, fake alpha and tail risk

Earlier this year I wrote a post Fake alpha, compensation and tail risk in finance:

...current banking and money management compensation schemes create incentives for taking on tail risk... and disguising it as alpha. The proposed solution: holdbacks or clawbacks of bonus money... When will shareholders smarten up and enforce this kind of compensation scheme on management at public firms?

The classic example is writing naked (unhedged) insurance policies covering rare events and pocketing the fees as alpha. You trade tail risk for cash, and hope things don't blow up until you are out the door. It's agency risk on steroids.

This NYTimes article describes, in detail, a perfect example of this phenomenon in the case of AIG. AIG, a global insurance company with over 100k employees, was brought down by a tiny unit in London that traded credit default swaps (CDS).

Once it became clear that AIG was in trouble, Treasury and the Fed had to step in because AIG was too connected to fail. In fact, the article states that Goldman, Paulson's former employer, had up to $20B of CDS exposure to AIG. The current head of Goldman was the only Wall St. executive invited to the meetings between AIG and the government. Conflict of interest for soon to be King Henry Paulson?

Joseph Cassano, the former head of AIG's London credit derivatives unit, is perhaps the first (although probably not the last) poster boy for clawbacks in the credit crisis. Total compensation for his unit of 377 employees averaged over $1 million per employee in recent years. I would guess that means Cassano took home easily in the tens and perhaps over 100 million dollars in the last few years. Will taxpayers get back any of that compensation?

“It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm of reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions.”

— Joseph J. Cassano, a former A.I.G. executive, August 2007

NYTimes ...Although America’s housing collapse is often cited as having caused the crisis, the system was vulnerable because of intricate financial contracts known as credit derivatives, which insure debt holders against default. They are fashioned privately and beyond the ken of regulators — sometimes even beyond the understanding of executives peddling them.

Originally intended to diminish risk and spread prosperity, these inventions instead magnified the impact of bad mortgages like the ones that felled Bear Stearns and Lehman and now threaten the entire economy.

In the case of A.I.G., the virus exploded from a freewheeling little 377-person unit in London, and flourished in a climate of opulent pay, lax oversight and blind faith in financial risk models. It nearly decimated one of the world’s most admired companies, a seemingly sturdy insurer with a trillion-dollar balance sheet, 116,000 employees and operations in 130 countries.

“It is beyond shocking that this small operation could blow up the holding company,” said Robert Arvanitis, chief executive of Risk Finance Advisors in Westport, Conn. “They found a quick way to make a fast buck on derivatives based on A.I.G.’s solid credit rating and strong balance sheet. But it all got out of control.”

...The insurance giant’s London unit was known as A.I.G. Financial Products, or A.I.G.F.P. It was run with almost complete autonomy, and with an iron hand, by Joseph J. Cassano, according to current and former A.I.G. employees.

...These insurance products were known as “credit default swaps,” or C.D.S.’s in Wall Street argot, and the London unit used them to turn itself into a cash register.

The unit’s revenue rose to $3.26 billion in 2005 from $737 million in 1999. Operating income at the unit also grew, rising to 17.5 percent of A.I.G.’s overall operating income in 2005, compared with 4.2 percent in 1999.

Profit margins on the business were enormous. In 2002, operating income was 44 percent of revenue; in 2005, it reached 83 percent.

Mr. Cassano and his colleagues minted tidy fortunes during these high-cotton years. Since 2001, compensation at the small unit ranged from $423 million to $616 million each year, according to corporate filings. That meant that on average each person in the unit made more than $1 million a year.

Update: from the Pelosi bailout legislation summary -- good luck implementing this!

New restrictions on CEO and executive compensation for participating companies:

* No multi-million dollar golden parachutes
* Limits CEO compensation that encourages unnecessary risk-taking
* Recovers bonuses paid based on promised gains that later turn out to be false or inaccurate

CDOs, auctions and price discovery

How is Treasury going to buy up CDOs and other mortgage backed securities? What is the price discovery mechanism? I've heard discussion of a reverse auction process, in which the government offers a price and owners of the assets decide whether to accept the bid.

But this makes the problem sound much easier than it is. There are no simple or uniform categories for these securities -- no two are exactly alike. I imagine Treasury is going to have to do a lot of homework before each auction, perhaps aided by some sophisticated professionals (Bill Gross of PIMCO recently offered his team's services). Data on each security is available from ratings agencies like S&P and Moody's but presumably one would supplement this with additional information. After some initial analysis Treasury could set a conservative bound (i.e., using pessimistic estimates of future default rates and home prices) on the value of each security in units of the original face value (this one is worth at least 25 cents on the dollar, this is one, 45 cents, etc.). Then, they can publish a list of securities in a particular value category (without, of course, giving out the actual value estimate) and conduct a reverse auction covering all the assets on the list.

If they can get the assets below the value estimate, great for taxpayers like you and me. If banks (hedge funds? pension funds? foreign banks? who is really holding all this stuff?) won't sell at prices below the bound, and the auction heads above that price, Treasury should start demanding warrants or equity stakes on some sliding scale. In other words, the bid keeps getting higher, but at some point Treasury starts asking for not only the particular CDO but some additional warrants or stock. (This could also be done on a sliding scale from the beginning of the auction -- Treasury gets an additional x percent of the bid in warrants, where x increases with price.) The equity stake is compensation for the government for having to having to overpay for the security. At this price there is an (expected) flow of funds from taxpayers to recapitalize the seller, but at least we are getting equity in return. It is claimed that there is a range of values (roughly 20 percent of current market prices) over which the seller would be getting more at auction than the market is currently offering, but the government is still getting a good deal on the asset (expects to make money even under conservative assumptions).

Will it work? Who knows, but at least it may restore some confidence to credit markets.

Here are some old posts that really get into the nitty gritty of what is inside a typical CDO. You'll see that I've been covering credit securities since 2005 :-)

anatomy of a cdo

deep inside the subprime crisis

mackenzie on the credit crisis

gaussian copula and credit derivatives

Here's a recent NYTimes article that gives a peek into the complexity of structured finance.

NYTimes: ...Consider the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7, a $1.3 billion drop in the sea of risky loans. Here’s how it worked:

As the credit bubble grew in 2006, Bear Stearns, then one of the leading mortgage traders on Wall Street, bought 2,871 mortgages from lenders like the Countrywide Financial Corporation.

The mortgages, with an average size of about $450,000, were Alt-A loans — the kind often referred to as liar loans, because lenders made them without the usual documentation to verify borrowers’ incomes or savings. Nearly 60 percent of the loans were made in California, Florida and Arizona, where home prices rose — and subsequently fell — faster than almost anywhere else in the country.

Bear Stearns bundled the loans into 37 different kinds of bonds, ranked by varying levels of risk, for sale to investment banks, hedge funds and insurance companies.

If any of the mortgages went bad — and, it turned out, many did — the bonds at the bottom of the pecking order would suffer losses first, followed by the next lowest, and so on up the chain. By one measure, the Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust 2006-7 has performed well: It has suffered losses of about 1.6 percent. Of those loans, 778 have been paid off or moved through the foreclosure process.

But by many other measures, it’s a toxic portfolio. Of the 2,093 loans that remain, 23 percent are delinquent or in foreclosure, according to Bloomberg News data. Initially rated triple-A, the most senior of the securities were downgraded to near junk bond status last week. Valuing mortgage bonds, even the safest variety, requires guesstimates: How many homeowners will fall behind on their mortgages? If the bank forecloses, what will the homes sell for? Investments like the Bear Stearns securities are almost certain to lose value as long as home prices keep falling.

“Under the current circumstances it’s likely that you are going to take a loss on these loans,” said Chandrajit Bhattacharya, a mortgage strategist at Credit Suisse, the investment bank.

The Bear Stearns bonds are just one example of the kind of assets the government could buy, and they are by no means the most complicated of the lot. Wall Street took bonds like those of Bear Stearns and bundled and rebundled them into even trickier investments known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s

“No two pieces of paper are the same,” said Mr. Feltus of Pioneer Investments.

On Wall Street, many of these C.D.O.’s have been selling for pennies on the dollar, if they are selling at all. In July, Merrill Lynch, struggling to bolster its finances, sold $31 billion of tricky mortgage-linked investments for 22 cents on the dollar. Last November, Citadel, a large hedge fund in Chicago, bought $3 billion of mortgage securities and other investments for 27 cents on the dollar.

But Citigroup, the financial giant, values similar investments on its books at 61 cents on the dollar. Citigroup says its C.D.O.’s are relatively high quality because they were created before lending standards weakened in 2006.

A big challenge for Treasury officials will be deciding whether to buy the troubled investments near the values at which the banks hold them on their books. That would help minimize losses for financial institutions. Driving a hard bargain, however, would protect taxpayers.

Mortgage securities oversold by 15-25 percent

Below are some quotes which support the view that mortgage assets are currently undervalued by the market. Yes, the market is inefficient -- it overpriced the assets at the peak of the bubble (greed), and is currently underpricing them (fear). Both Buffet and ex-Merrill banker Ricciardi below think the mispricing is about 15-25 percent. That is, the "fear premium" currently demanded by the market is 15-25 percent below a conservative guess as to what the assets are really worth. This is the margin that can be used to recapitalize banks, perhaps without costing the taxpayer any money, simply by providing a rational buyer of last resort and injecting some confidence into the market. Note to traders: yes, this is obvious. Note to academic economists: this is yet another market failure -- but of an unprecedented scale and complexity.

(Actually, 15-25 percent is not bad, and just shows that credit markets are generally more rational and data driven than equities. During the Internet bubble and collapse you had mispricings of hundreds of percent, even an order of magnitude.)

Warren Buffet interview from CNBC:

Government intervention necessary to restore confidence in the market.

If I didn't think the government was going to act, I would not be doing anything this week. I might be trying to undo things this week. I am, to some extent, betting on the fact that the government will do the rational thing here and act promptly.

Mispricing is about 15-20 percent:

...all the major institutions in the world trying to deleverage. And we want them to deleverage, but they're trying to deleverage at the same time. Well, if huge institutions are trying to deleverage, you need someone in the world that's willing to leverage up. And there's no one that can leverage up except the United States government. And what they're talking about is leveraging up to the tune of 700 billion, to in effect, offset the deleveraging that's going on through all the financial institutions. And I might add, if they do it right, and I think they will do it reasonably right, they won't do it perfectly right, I think they'll make a lot of money. Because if they don't -- they shouldn't buy these debt instruments at what the institutions paid. They shouldn't buy them at what they're carrying, what the carrying value is, necessarily. They should buy them at the kind of prices that are available in the market. People who are buying these instruments in the market are expecting to make 15 to 20 percent on those instruments. If the government makes anything over its cost of borrowing, this deal will come out with a profit. And I would bet it will come out with a profit, actually.

Christopher Ricciardi, former head of Merrill's structured credit business, in an open letter to Paulson. Note his comments illustrate the role that psychology, or animal spirits (Keynes), plays in the market.

The securitization market worked exceptionally well for decades and was the financing tool of choice for large and small institutions alike. As investments, performance for securitized assets typically exceeded corporate and Treasury bond investments for decades.

Where securitization went wrong in recent years was with subprime mortgages. These securitizations performed disastrously, causing people to mistakenly question the practice of securitization itself.

Decades of historical data were ignored, with the subprime experience exclusively driving market perceptions: The entire securitization market was effectively shut down, and this explains the depth and persistence of the ongoing credit crisis.

Government purchases of illiquid mortgage assets from the system will cost taxpayers significant sums and expose them to downside risk, without addressing this fundamental issue. Billions of dollars held by all the major institutional bond managers, hedge funds and distressed funds are already available to purchase mortgage assets.

However, in the absence of a way to finance the purchase of these assets, such funds must bid at prices which represent an attractive absolute return acceptable to their investors (15% to 25% typically), resulting in typical transaction terms that have significantly impeded the sale of mortgage securities to these funds. If these funds could finance their purchases, especially under efficient financing terms, they would still require similar returns, but would be able to buy many more assets, and bid higher prices for the assets.

Our financial system needs the capital markets and the natural power of securitization to get a jumpstart from the government. I propose using the powers granted to Treasury to create “vehicles that are authorized…to purchase troubled assets and issue obligations” under currently contemplated legislation to more efficiently address the crisis and establish a program which we might call the Federal Bond Insurance Corporation (”FBIC”), as an alternative to simply having the government directly purchase assets.

Comment re: behavioral economics. The preceding housing bubble and the current crisis are very good examples of why economics is, at a fundamental level, the study of ape psychology. On the planet Vulcan, Mr. Spock and other rational, super-smart traders and investors would have cleared this market already. But we don't live on Vulcan. Anyone who wants to model the economy based on rational agents who can process infinite amounts of information without being subject to fear, bounded cognition, herd mentality, etc. is crazy.

When the conventional wisdom is that house prices never go down (people believed this just a couple years ago), you risk little of your reputation or self-image by investing in housing. When the conventional wisdom is that all mortgage backed securities are toxic, you must be extremely independent and strong willed to risk buying in, even if metrics suggest the market is oversold. This is simple psychology. Very few people can resist conventional wisdom, even when it's wrong.

The time to buy is when there is blood in the streets

As I mentioned in my previous post on the mortgage bailout, it seems clear that Bernanke and Paulson both think that mortgage backed securities are undervalued at current market prices (my scenario (1) in the previous post). Bernanke refers to the difference between "hold to maturity" and "fire sale" prices in his congressional testimony.

Many commentators are trying to wrap their heads around this difference. To understand, it helps to have seen the collapse of a financial bubble firsthand. If you haven't (as I suspect is the case with most academic economists), you are likely to cling to the idea that the market price of an asset is a good forecast of its actual value. However, this is completely wrong in the wake of a collapse. (And, certainly, the predictive power of the market price cannot hold at all times -- it is likely to be most wrong at the peak and in the aftermath of a bubble.)

The following false conundrum has been stated recently by numerous analysts, including Paul Krugman: "if Treasury wants to recapitalize banks it has to overpay for toxic assets, to the detriment of taxpayers; if it wants to pay fair prices for the assets then banks won't benefit." There is no conundrum if markets, at this instant in time, are systematically underpricing mortgage assets.

When the Internet bubble burst in the early years of this century, investors were so gun shy and under so much pressure that they would not pay even rationally justifiable prices for stakes in technology companies. Smart investors who were willing to put capital at risk bought assets at fire sale prices and made huge profits. This is nothing more than fear and herd mentality at work. If herd thinking can lead to overpricing of assets, why not underpricing immediately following a collapse?

Markets overshoot on both the up- and the down-side!

These points are obvious to any trader... it's the academics with equilibrium intuitions who are struggling to understand! Note as I mentioned in the earlier post, the "hold to maturity value" can only be modeled using probability distributions for defaults, price movements, interest rates, etc. But I've been told many times by people in the industry that current market prices imply massive default rates which are unrealistically high.

WSJ has the best summary.

Related discussion: Paul Krugman , more Krugman , Economist's View , Brad Setser.

WSJ: ...Uncertainty in housing markets and the economy are forcing financial institutions to mark mortgage securities at fire-sale prices, rather than their value if held to maturity, effectively creating a vicious circle of more write-downs that further depress asset values, Mr. Bernanke explained.

Mr. Bernanke said the Treasury plan should have taxpayers buy the assets and hold them at close to their maturity value. Removing the assets, he said, would bring liquidity back to markets, unfreeze credit markets, reduce uncertainty and allow banks to attract private capital.

...In subsequent questioning, Mr. Bernanke distinguished between, on the one hand, “fire sale prices,” the ones that prevail “when you sell into an illiquid market” and, on the other, the prices that holders think the assets are really worth, sometimes described as “fundamental” values or “hold-to-maturity” value.

“The holders have a view of what they think it’s worth. It’s hard for outsiders to know,” Mr. Bernanke said. The point of an auction is to reveal those prices. “If you have an appropriate auction mechanism… what you’ll do is restart this market,” he added.

Paulson, while seeking maximum flexibility, said the Treasury is considering doing auctions one asset class at a time. He said the aim to bring “bright people” to work on the challenge of designing market mechanisms.

Update: Krugman admits he agrees with me on this point, although he still doesn't like the plan:

Krugman NYT blog: ...Just to be fair, it’s possible, maybe even probable, that mortgage-related paper is being sold too cheaply.

I don't really like the plan either, but at least the earlier argument based on the pricing conundrum is now understood to be sloppy. I just read that Paulson will cave on the populist CEO compensation limit. As usual, bounded rationality (limited brainpower) is at work here. The taxpayers would be benifited much more by Treasury taking an equity stake or warrants in banks that are being bailed out. They should have made Paulson cave on that -- the compensation issue is just symbolic.

The devil in the details

As we all know, the devil is always in the details. The proposed legislation will put $700B in the hands of Treasury to buy distressed assets in an attempt to unfreeze credit markets. This gives the current and future Treasury Secretary incredible financial and discretionary power. Let's put aside issues of corruption and abuse of power and assume a benevolent, public spirited, intelligent person in charge. I make this assumption not because it is realistic, but in order to proceed to the question: How, exactly, will this work?

First, let's differentiate between CDOs and CMOs (Collateralized Debt / Mortgage Obligations), which are securities that entitle the holder to future cash flows from bundles or tranches of mortgages, and CDS (Credit Default Swaps) which are derivative contracts which allow two parties to bet on defaults. CDS can be used for pure speculation, or to spread out the risk associated with CDOs. I will discuss CDOs and CDS separately below, although it should be obvious that both markets are interconnected and, at this time, highly problematic. (In fact there are even synthetic CDOs which are built out of CDS, which make things yet more complicated...)


CDOs:

There are two possible world states that we have to differentiate between. Keep in mind that CDOs are currently highly illiquid, due to seizing up of markets, so in many cases there may not be any market price.

1) CDOs are oversold. In this scenario markets, due to extremely high risk premia and, well, fear, are underpricing CDOs and, effectively, overestimating future default rates on mortgages. To decide whether they believe this, Treasury must use its own models with its own forward looking projections.

IF actual future default rates turn out to be lower than implied values backed out from current market prices, then Treasury (and the US taxpayer) stand to make a lot of money by assuming the role of a rational buyer of last resort. (Which is not to say there won't be losses; there must be as home prices will end lower than in the period when most of these mortgages were written. But how much of this is in previous writedowns?) In this scenario, many banks are challenged by (short term) cash flow issues and mark to market accounting, which forces them to carry their securities on the books at the current (undervalued, oversold) market valuation, but do ultimately have positive net asset value.

(Note: cash flow insolvency is not the same as balance sheet insolvency!)

2) CDO market prices are fair. In this case many institutions will fail without massive infusions to their balance sheet. But Treasury should not buy securities at higher than fair value (if at all possible); instead they should take equity stakes in insolvent companies on behalf of the taxpayer, so that there is some upside participation. In the worst case Treasury should assume control and supervise an orderly liquidation. Note again that an institution can face short term cash flow problems (be unable to service debt) even if the long term value of their net assets is positive.


Even if we start out in case (1) we will end up in case (2) as the situation normalizes and other actors bring capital into play. There is an estimated $500B in distressed assets funds that will participate if valuations are favorable. I just heard on CNBC that Treasury may use a reverse auction model (starting at very low bids), in which case the banks themselves will get to decide whether they are desperate enough to accept a bid. Probably a good strategy.

Deciding between case (1) and (2) (ultimately, on a CDO by CDO basis) is going to depend crucially on models and future forecasts of home prices, interest rates, prepayment rates and foreclosure rates. Geeks rule!

In any event, Treasury will be acting like a giant hedge / private equity fund for the next few years. Do they have the human capital? Hopefully their returns will be good :-)


CDS:

I'm more at a loss here. Will Treasury get involved with CDS? There are going to be some huge losers (AIG?).

When Treasury tries to evaluate the (balance sheet) solvency of a particular firm, won't they have to price out that firm's entire CDS book?

Will this market automatically function properly if the CDO market becomes liquid again and counterparty confidence is restored?


Miscellaneous questions:

Do we really trust Treasury to do the right thing? Are there any checks and balances? Would those get in the way of decisive action?

What about foreign banks like Deutsche Bank, Credit-Suisse, etc.?


Naked Capitalism has a negative take on the plan. They suggest that Paulson is not being straight with the public and intends to buy assets at a high price, with the only goal of recapitalizing (his friends at big) banks. I don't necessarily agree with the reasoning given below, but it is worth thinking about.

Nakedcapitalism: ...Yet as we discussed, the plan makes no sense unless the Orwellian "fair market prices" means "above market prices." The point is not to free up illiquid assets. Illiquid assets (private equity, even the now derided CDOs were never intended to be traded, but pose no problem if they do not need to be marked at a large loss and/or the institution is not at risk of a run). Confirmation of our view came from a reader by e-mail:

I worked at [Wall Street firm you've heard of], but now I handle financial services for [a Congressman], and I was on the conference call that Paulson, Bernanke and the House Democratic Leadership held for all the members yesterday afternoon. It's supposed to be members only, but there's no way to enforce that if it's a conference call, and you may have already heard from other staff who were listening in.

Anyway, I wanted to let you know that, behind closed doors, Paulson describes the plan differently. He explicitly says that it will buy assets at above market prices (although he still claims that they are undervalued) because the holders won't sell at market prices. Anna Eshoo pressed him on how the government can compel the holders to sell, and he basically dodged the question. I think that's because he didn't want to admit that the government would just keep offering more and more.

[Paulson's statements are all internally consistent if he believes we are in state (1) described above: current market prices, due to fear and sky high risk premia, are too low and fair prices based on reasonable models of future behavior would be higher --steve]

I don't think that our leadership has been very good during this negotiation (or really, during any showdowns with this administration) at forcing the administration to own their position. If Paulson wants this plan, then he needs to sell it to the public, and if he sells a different plan to the public (the nonsense buying-at-market-price plan) then we should pass that. I'd rather see the government act as a market maker for the assets to get them transferred over to private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds and other willing holders. And if we need to recapitalize these companies, it seems like the cheapest way for the taxpayer is to go in and buy up the distressed debt and then convert that to equity.

On the other hand I've heard in other quarters that the proposed legislation allows Treasury to more or less compel firms to sell distressed assets. Which is it -- they'll have to overpay to pry the assets loose, or they've given themselves draconian powers to seize them?