Archive for the ‘Credit Default Swaps’ Category

On Our Rotten Financial System

Posted by Karl Denninger

So today Goldman will come before the Senate Permanent Committee on Investigations – with Lloyd himself, along with “Fabulous Fab” on the witness panel.

Blankfein’s prepared testimony makes some interesting claims:

“We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market, and we certainly did not bet against our clients,” Blankfein says in prepared remarks released by the company. “Rather, we believe that we managed our risk as our shareholders and our regulators would expect.”

Uh, Lloyd, are you sure?

Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who leads the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, released documents that he said showed the company “put its own interest and profit ahead of the interests of its clients,” a conflict he called on Congress to end. Lloyd Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chairman and chief executive officer, will dispute that assertion and argue the firm was merely managing its own risk.

Yep. 

It’s amusing how Goldman claims it “lost money” on some of these deals.

So what?

The question is not whether there were residual pieces of trash that Goldman wound up (unwillingly) eating when they couldn’t sell them.  The question is whether or not Goldman (and everyone else) should have had the ability to put these deals together in the first place, and how it came to be that trillions of dollars of alleged “AAA” paper was better suited for use in the men’s bathroom stalls!

Levin said:

“This market is not free until it is free of self-dealing and until it is free of conflict of interest,” Levin, 75, said at a press briefing yesterday. “It is not free until it ends the gambling operation that results in gambling debts that the public ends up paying.”

That can’t happen until we see handcuffs Senator. 

“The SEC and the courts will resolve the legal question of whether Goldman’s actions broke the law,” Levin said. “The question for us is whether Goldman’s actions in 2007 were appropriate and whether we should act, legislatively, to bar similar actions in the future.”

17 pages Senator.  They’re called “Glass Steagall”, and that law absolutely barred the conduct that led to and caused this crisis.

Let’s be frank: Creating these sorts of toxic deals is, for these institutions, simply a reach for fees.  They don’t care if they perform so long as they don’t get stuck with the trash.  A particular transaction was even referenced as “one shi&&y deal” by Goldman employees, according to some internal emails:

“Boy that timberwo[l]f was one shi**y deal,” Montag, who is now Bank of America Corp.’s president of global banking and markets, said in a June 22, 2007, e-mail to Daniel Sparks, who ran Goldman Sachs’s mortgage business at the time, according to the panel’s statement. Within five months of Timberwolf’s debut, the CDO had lost 80 percent of its value, and it was liquidated in 2008, according to the panel.

The CDO was among securities that Goldman Sachs sold to clients after deciding the New York-based firm needed to reduce its mortgage holdings, Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who leads the panel, said in the statement. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and six other current and former executives will testify tomorrow in front of the panel about practices in mortgage securities markets before they collapsed.

And of course such conduct, and the people who commit it, aren’t fired.  Mr. Montag is now Bank of America’s president of Global Banking and Markets.  “Market discipline” doesn’t, it appears, extend to forcing people to eat their own cooking and when they sell things they know smell like dead fish to clients, it’s all ok.

Perhaps it is under the law, but whether it should be is another matter.

It is often argued that if we don’t permit this sort of “innovation” that our economy and businesses will suffer.  Really?  Who suffers?  Wall Street?  Can we reasonably have an economy where 1/3rd of all profits made in the nation are “earned” by asset-stripping other people?  That’s what even the good deals do – they turn over a part of the transactional flow of some business to the wall street banks, which then keep it for themselves. 

The bad deals, like this one referenced, are even worse in that they siphon off fees from someone who later loses all their money!

This is not restricted to Goldman, by the way.  Indeed, let’s examine another deal that the government was intimately involved in, this first reported by Zerohedge in the form of the Fannie Mae Preferred offering that was foisted on the market just weeks before the firm blew up.

The underwriters, who coincidentally received 3.15% of $2 billion, or $63 million bucks, include Merrill Lynch (now absorbed), Citibank (rescued), Morgan Stanley, UBS (who has a running spat with the IRS about assisting Americans in illegally evading taxes) and Wachovia (which collapsed in a ball of fire that was contained only by forced marriage to Wells Fargo.) 

Why was this deal so insanely toxic?  It was issued on May 19th of 2008, and paid exactly one coupon before Fannie was absorbed into conservatorship. 

And unlike the “sophisticated investors” who bought CDOs and other similar trash from the big banks, this deal was bought by literal widows and orphans, along with community banks.

I would argue that it should have never been brought to the market in the first place, as before it was offered I had opined (in public in fact) that Fannie and Freddie were both insolvent.

Indeed, on March 8th of 2008 I called out the games in a letter written to President Bush and others in which I said (among other things):

Mr. Bernanke and The Fed have lowered the Fed Funds Target from 5.25% to 3% over the last few months and the “slosh”, or free funds available in the Fed Banking System, has nearly doubled over that time. Yet this additional liquidity has done nothing to address the problem and won’t because the issue is not one of inadequate liquidity; rather it is a desperate move to hide the fact that a significant number of financial institutions in our nation are, if forced to mark all their paper to the market and recognize their exposure to off balance sheet vehicles, insolvent.

At the root of the matter, Mr. President, is a lack of trust caused by the intentional acts of these institutions, and lack of regulatory enforcement by both the Federal Reserve and other agencies such as the OTS and OCC.

We have fixed exactly nothing since then.  We have only papered over the insolvencies with government fiat currency, claiming they’re “loans” – and they are in a sense – they’re forced purchases of bankrupt companies by the taxpayer which we are now liable for.

Wall Street created this monster with the full knowledge and permission of the government. 

Despite laws prohibiting executives from signing off on fraudulent financial statements – that is, any financial statement that does not make a full and fair exposition of the firm’s financial position (Sarbanes-Oxley) these executives have not been prosecuted.  “I didn’t know” is not a defense under Sarbox – if you’re in the executive suite of a public firm you have an affirmative duty to know. 

So why have not the former CEOs of Bear Stearns and Lehman been indicted?  Why have not the CEOs of the other big banks that failed, all of whom proclaimed that everything was fine right up until they blew sky high? 

As for all these hinky deals that the big banks did, if this crisis has taught us one thing it is that if there’s a way to game a rule or regulation it will be gamed.  So long as these firms can find a way to play “heads we win, tails taxpayers lose” they will do so.  So long as they can effectively force companies to forfeit 30% of every dollar of GDP produced in this nation to them, they will do so.

So long as firms with access to federal assistance of any sort, whether it be The Fed window, overnight repo loans from or by firms with Fed Clearing access, or the privilege of deposit-taking and fractional loan-making exists, these firms will leverage government-provided backstops to their own benefit for the purpose of fee extraction. 

These fees do not benefit society as a whole.  They are in fact a tax on top of all other taxes that firms and thus individuals pay.  This burden is, today, roughly 30% of GDP, and our nation and its economy simply cannot afford to redirect this vast amount of wealth to a handful of rich and powerful people on Wall Street, whether their acts are founded in illegal conduct or not.

17 pages Senator.  That’s all it takes.

Reinstate Glass-Steagall and force all these banks to spin off the parts of their organizations that are in conflict.  All institutions that want access to any sort of public safety net, whether it be Fed Discount loans or FDIC insurance may not trade in or on the securities and insurance markets – OTC or otherwise – period.

Force all instruments onto a public exchange, including all CDS, without exception.  This immediately forces nightly margin supervision which prevents the sort of detonations that happened with AIG and others, and absolutely bars contagion, as no firm can maintain a position that it cannot back with capital.

It is often said that if we do this firms will “flee” to other nations that don’t have such restrictions.  No they won’t – not if we refuse to grant them access to our securities markets and the firms in them unless they comport with these rules worldwide no matter where they are headquartered. 

America is a vast economy.  Yes, China is growing, but we’re still a plurality of world GDP. 

Firms will threaten Senator, but if the law is crafted such that if they want access to our markets in any form or fashion they must comply worldwide with separation of function and exchange clearing, they will comply.

Yes, they’ll make “less money”, and that’s their argument against such changes. 

But let’s be frank – every dollar Wall Street “makes” it in fact extracts.  That is, Wall Street creates nothing.  It siphons off capital from other production – that’s all it can do, since it creates not one car, television, or cellular phone.  Indeed, every dollar of fees extracted by Wall Street and every dollar of interest paid to those firms is one dollar that cannot be returned to the economy in the form of innovation for the production of goods and services.

The essential functions of clearing payments and matching those who wish to loan capital with those who wish to borrow it is ministerial.  All the hinky deals alleged to “spread risk” have now been proved to do no such thing, but instead are complex simply so as to be difficult to understand and thus easy to intentionally misprice. 

That mispricing is fraud Senator, whether it can be legally labeled as such or not, and until we put a stop to it we will continue to have these bouts of crisis, each worse than the last.

Our government and society cannot withstand another banking system attack run, and it is imperative that The Senate, along with prosecutors, put a stop to it both through legislation and prosecution.

We have one last chance to stop it.  If we do not at this time do so, and another ”market failure” occurs, our economy and even our political system – that is, our society and republican form of government – will fall.

Those are the stakes, and the question before you now is whether the bribery that is rampant in Washington (although we call it “lobbying”) will win, or whether you will rise to the occasion and uphold the oath of office that you, along with every other member of Congress, took before being seated.

Oh, The Off-Balance Sheet Lies Are International?

Posted by Karl Denninger

The Swaps That Swallowed Your Town

By Gretchen Morgenson

AS more details surface about how derivatives helped Greece and perhaps other countries mask their debt loads, let’s not forget that the wonders of these complex products aren’t on display only overseas. Across our very own country, municipalities, school districts, sewer systems and other tax-exempt debt issuers are ensnared in the derivatives mess.

Like the credit default swaps that hid Greece’s obligations, the instruments weighing on our municipalities were brought to us by the creative minds of Wall Street. The rocket scientists crafting the products got backup from swap advisers, a group of conflicted promoters who consulted municipalities and other issuers. Both of these camps peddled swaps as a way for tax-exempt debt issuers to reduce their financing costs.

Now, however, the promised benefits of these swaps have mutated into enormous, and sometimes smothering, expenses. Making matters worse, issuers who want out of the arrangements — swap contracts typically run for 30 years — must pay up in order to escape.

That’s right. Issuers are essentially paying twice for flawed deals that bestowed great riches on the bankers and advisers who sold them. Taxpayers should be outraged, but to be angry you have to be informed — and few taxpayers may even know that the complicated arrangements exist.

Here’s how municipal swaps worked (in theory): Say an issuer needed to raise money and prevailing rates for fixed-rate debt were 5 percent. A swap allowed issuers to reduce the interest rate they paid on their debt to, say, 4.5 percent, while still paying what was effectively a fixed rate.

Nothing wrong with that, right?

Sales presentations for these instruments, no surprise, accentuated the positives in them. “Derivative products are unique in the history of financial innovation,” gushed a pitch from Citigroup in November 2007 about a deal entered into by the Florida Keys Aqueduct Authority. Another selling point: “Swaps have become widely accepted by the rating agencies as an appropriate financial tool.” And, the presentation said, they can be easily unwound (for a fee, of course).

But these arrangements were riddled with risks, as issuers are finding out. The swaps were structured to generate a stream of income to the issuer — like your hometown — that was tethered to a variable interest rate. Variable rates can rise or fall wildly if economic circumstances change. Banks that executed the swaps received fixed payments from the issuers.

The contracts, however, assumed that economic and financial circumstances would be relatively stable and that interest rates used in the deals would stay in a narrow range. The exact opposite occurred: the financial system went into a tailspin two years ago, and rates plummeted. The auction-rate securities market, used by issuers to set their interest payments to bondholders, froze up. As a result, these rates rose.

For municipalities, that meant they were stuck with contracts that forced them to pay out a much higher interest rate than they were receiving in return. Sure, the rate plunge was unforeseen, but it was not an impossibility. And the impact of such a possible decline was rarely highlighted in sales presentations, municipal experts say.

Another aspect to these swaps’ designs made them especially ill-suited for municipal issuers. Almost all tax-exempt debt is structured so that after 10 years, it can be called or retired by the city, school district or highway authority that floated it. But by locking in the swap for 30 years, the municipality or school district is essentially giving up the option to call its debt and issue lower-cost bonds, without penalty, if interest rates have declined.

Imagine a homeowner who has a mortgage allowing her to refinance without a penalty if interest rates drop, as many do. Then she inexplicably agrees to give up that opportunity and not be compensated for doing so. Well, some towns did exactly that when they signed derivatives contracts that locked them in for 30 years.

Then there are the counterparty risks associated with municipal swaps. If the banks in the midst of these deals falter, the municipality is at peril, because getting out of a contract with a failed bank is also costly. For example, closing out swaps in which Lehman Brothers was the counterparty cost various New York State debt issuers $12 million, according to state filings.

Termination fees also kick in when a municipal issuer wants out of its swap agreement. They can be significant.

New York State provides a good example. An Oct. 30, 2009, filing describing its swaps shows that for the most recent fiscal year, April 2008 to March 2009, the state paid $103 million to terminate roughly $2 billion worth of swaps — more than a quarter of which resulted from the Lehman bankruptcy in September 2008.

(You can find this report online at bit.ly/cS8ZFV.)

As of Nov. 30, 2009, New York had $3.74 billion worth of swaps outstanding. Even so, New York doesn’t have as much of a problem with swaps as other jurisdictions. Still, New York could have spent that $103 million on many other things that the state needs.

The prime example, of course, of a swap-imperiled issuer is Jefferson County, Ala. Its swaps were supposed to lower the county’s costs, but instead they wound up increasing its indebtedness. Groaning under a $3 billion debt load, the county is facing the possibility of bankruptcy.

Critics of swaps hope that increased taxpayer awareness of these souring deals will force municipalities to think twice. “When municipalities enter into these swaps they end up paying more and receiving much less,” said Andy Kalotay, an expert in fixed income.

Why is that? One reason, Mr. Kalotay said, is the use of swap advisers.

“The basic problem is the swap adviser gets paid only if there is a transaction — an unbelievable conflict of interest,” he said. “It’s the adviser who is supposed to protect you, but the swap adviser has a vested interest in seeing something happen.”

WHAT is especially maddening to many in the municipal securities market is that issuers are now relying on the same investment banks that put them into swaps-embedded debt to restructure their obligations. According to those who travel this world, issuers are afraid to upset their relationships with their bankers and are not holding them accountable for placing them in these costly trades.

“We need transparency where Wall Street discloses not only the risks but also calculates the potential costs associated with those risks,” said Joseph Fichera, chief executive at Saber Partners, an advisory firm. “If you just ask issuers to disclose, even in a footnote, the maximum possible loss or gain from the swap they probably wouldn’t do it. And if they did that, then investors and taxpayers would know what the risks are, in plain English.”

Mr. Fichera is right. At this intersection of two huge and extremely opaque arenas — the municipal debt market and derivatives trading — sunlight is sorely needed.

Smoking Swap Guns Are Beginning to Litter EuroLand, Sovereign Debt Buyer Beware!

Submitted by Reggie Middleton

There are broad indications hinting that Italy and Greece are not the only countries that have used SWAP agreements to manipulate its budget and deficit figures. France and Portugal may be two other European economies which have resorted to similar manipulations in the past in order to qualify as part of single currency member nations (Euro Zone). Below is a small subset of the research that I have been gathering as I construct a global sovereign default model. This model is very comprehensive and thus far has indicated that quite a few (as in more than two or three) nations of significance have an 90% probability of defaulting on their debt in the near to medium term. More on this later, now let’s dig into what we have found that looks like gross manipulation of the numbers in order to hide debt in several European countries. Here’s a quick quiz. What well known (in name only) Italian American has a significant chunk of the European Union Sovereign nations apparently modeled their financial engineering from?

Charles Ponzi (March 3, 1882 – January 18, 1949) was an Italian swindler, who is considered one of the greatest swindlers in American history. His aliases include Charles Ponei, Charles P. Bianchi, Carl and Carlo. The term “Ponzi scheme” is a widely known description of any scam that pays early investors returns from the investments of later investors. He promised clients a 50% profit within 45 days, or 100% profit within 90 days, by buying discounted postal reply coupons in other countries and redeeming them at face value in the United States as a form ofarbitrage.^[1][2] Ponzi was probably inspired by the scheme of William F. Miller, a Brooklyn bookkeeper who in 1899 used the same scheme to take in $1 million.^[3]

I think I’ll call it the Pan-European Ponzi. Conspiracy theorists are going to love this post.

Like Italy (see below), Portugal has also been known for years to take advantage of derivatives contracts to dress up its budget numbers in the late 1990s. In a recent press article (Debt Deals Haunt Europe) Deutsche Bank’s spokesman Roland Weichert commented that the bank has executed currency swaps on behalf of Portugal between 1998 and 2003. He also said that Deutsche Bank’s business with Portugal included “completely normal currency swaps” and other business activity, which he declined to discuss in detail. He also added that the currency swaps on behalf of Portugal were within the “framework of sovereign-debt management,” and the trades weren’t intended to hide Portugal’s national debt position (yeah okay!).

Though the Portuguese finance ministry declined to comment on whether Portugal has used currency swaps such as those used by Greece, it said Portugal only uses financial instruments that comply with European Union rules. Thus, if the use of these instruments complied with European Union rules, then there is nothing wrong with them, right??!! The word “if” is probably one of the most abused words in the English language. As my lawyer use to tell me as I once abused the word, “If Grandma had balls, she’d be Grandpa, wouldn’t she?”

The French 

In 1997, the French government received an upfront payment of £4.7 billion ($7.1 billion) for assuming the pension liabilities for France Telecom workers in return. This quick cash injection helped bring down France’s deficit, helping the country to meet the pre-condition to join the Euro zone. You may reference the Laurent_Paul_and Christophe_Schalck_study for a background on the deal. I don’t necessarily concur with their conclusions, but it does provide some info

For the record and according to the doc referenced above, according to the State balance sheet for 2006, total pension liabilities of civil servants have been estimated at 941 billion €, i.e. 53% of annual GDP in France.  An attempt to reform all special schemes in 1995 collapsed because of severe strikes on the railways. Sounds awfully Hellenic in nature, doesn’t it??? I, for one, believe that Greece is getting a bad rap, and not becaue it is being falsely accused but because it is just a lot sloppier at covering up its shenanigans than its European neighbors.

Now, back to France. A transaction similar to the France Telecomm deal took place in 2006 with La Poste which still employs 200,000 civil servants, but is now facing the same evolution as France Telecom in 1997. But an important difference with France Telecom is the obvious insufficiency of the lump sum paid by the postal company (2 billion €) compared to the amount of pension liabilities transferred (70 billion € at the end of 2006). This low amount is explained by the weak financial position of the company. Thus, the balance of the transaction is guaranteed by 1) additional contributions by the postal company which will be paid until 2010, the scheduled year of the complete liberalization of the
postal services; and 2) the annual contribution by the State Budget the amount of which should progressively increase, from 0.5 billion € in 2006 to 2 billion € in 2020. 

Click to enlarge

As you can see, the French government has accepted 301 billion euros of pension liabilities for 16.2 billion dollars of upfont payments. Who want’s to bet if these liabilities are drastically underfunded? Either cut Greece some slack or jump into France’s ass. We shouldn’t have it both ways!

As public entities replace the public company for the payment of pensions and the collection of contributions, the tax burden can be increased significantly: around 0.1% of GDP each for the EDF-GDF, France Telecom and La Poste transactions. Overall, transfers of pension liabilities
implemented since 1997 have supposedly increased the French tax burden by 0.3% of GDP.

Is France the only one doing this? You know the answer to that question.

The Greeks (again)…

According to people familiar with the matter interviewed by China Securities Journal, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. did as many as 12 swaps for Greece from 1998 to 2001, while Credit Suisse was also involved with Athens, crafting a currency swap for Greece in the same time frame.

Under its “off-market” swap in 2001, Goldman agreed to convert yen and dollars into euros at an artificially favorable rate in the future. This helped Greece to use that “low favorable rate” when it recorded its debt in the European accounts-pushing down the country’s reported debt load.

Moreover, in exchange for the good deal on rates, Greece had to pay Goldman (the amount wasn’t revealed). And since the payment would count against Greece’s deficit, Goldman and Greece came up with another twist: Goldman effectively loaned Greece the money for the payment, and Greece repaid that loan over time. And the two sides structured the loan as another kind of swap. So, the deal didn’t add to Greece’s debt under EU rules. Consequently, Greece’s total debt as a percentage of GDP fell from 105.3% to 103.7%, and its 2001 deficit was reduced by a tenth of a percentage point in GDP terms, according to people close to Goldman.

Another action that smacks of Hellenic manipulation, at least to the staff of BoomBustBlog:  for years it apparently and simply omitted large portions of its military-equipment spending from its deficit calculations. Though, European regulators eventually prevailed on Greece to count everything and as a result, in 2004, there was a massive revision of Greek deficit figures from 2000 (a budget deficit of 2.0% of GDP in 2000 to beyond the 3% deficit limit in 2004), by then Greece had already gained entrance to the euro. As in my trying to prepare for the coming sovereign debt crisis, timing is everything, isn’t it???

The Italians

As discussed in a recent ZeroHedge article, a 1996 Italian currency swap, arranged by J.P. Morgan, allowed Italy to receive large payments upfront that helped keep its deficit in line, with the downside of greater payments later.

In addition, to curbing their current deficits, countries are now using these swap agreements to push off their loan liabilities (related to swap agreements) to a later date through securitization, and Greece is one such example. 

Under the 2001 deal brokered by Goldman, Greece swapped dollar- and yen-denominated debt for Euros at below-market exchange rates. The result was that the country got paid €1 billion ($1.35 billion) upfront on the swap in exchange for an obligation to buy the swaps back later. In 2005, this obligation was in turn securitized as part of a 20-year debt issue, further pushing off the day of reckoning.

Moreover, one of the key reasons why such manipulations continued is the apparent ignorance of the EU’s Eurostat, which knew enough about these deals to tighten the rules governing their accounting-albeit only after they had served their purpose – the Ponzi! When Italy’s then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi miraculously achieved a four-percentage-point improvement in Italy’s budget deficit in time to usher the country into the common currency, Italy’s use of accounting gimmicks was widely discussed, and then promptly ignored. As at that time, everyone was only too eager to look the other way in the drive to get the single currency up and running.

It wasn’t until 2008-a decade after the deals became popular-that Eurostat was able to revise its rules to push countries to include swaps in their debt and deficit calculations. Still, till date too little is known about countries’ continued exposure to the deals that are already out there.

Overall, though there is less evidence to support that there are more such swap deals that happened during the late 90′s till early part of this decade, the data below showing a sharp decline in interest payments as a percentage of GDP particularly for Belgium (apart from Greece and Italy), hints that there are considerably more of these deals to be discovred. The questions is, will they be discovered before or after the respective sovereign issues record debt to the suckers sovereign fxed income investors.

Notice the extremely supercalifragilisticexpealidocious reductions Belgium, Greece and Italy have made in their interest payments from 1993 to 2000 in this graphic made pre-2000. If one didn’t know better, one would have thought theses countries actually used magic to make such reductions. Hell, Italy practicaly cut their debt service (projected, of course) in half. It really makes one wonder. I’m just saying…

According to DERIVATIVES AND PUBLIC DEBT MANAGEMENT by Gustavo Piga, “The political stakes of the 1997 budget package were enormous. Therefore, it was no surprise that many countries were accused of ‘creative window-dressing’ in their budget through the use of accounting tricks to reach the desired goal. One contentious item was interest expenditure, which is the interest expense that governments sustain to finance their deficit and roll over their debt. Interest expenditure represents a high percentage of public spending and GDP in the European Union. It is highly variable over time, especially when compared to other components of the budget. Because of its relevance and because it is subject only to minimal scrutiny during budget law discussions (and many times even after its realization during the fiscal year), interest expenditure is an ideal target for reaching fiscal stabilization goals without incurring excessive political protest or opposition”.

Oh, do you mean like this??? 

1. Can China Control the “Side-Effects” of its Stimulus-Led Growth? Let’s Look at the Facts - Explains the potential fallout of the excessive fiscal stimulus in China. While not European, it is quite likely to kick off the daisy chain effect.
2.  The Coming Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis - introduces the crisis and identified it as a pan-European problem, not a localized one.
3. What Country is Next in the Coming Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis? - illustrates the potential for the domino effect
4. The Pan-European Sovereign Debt Crisis: If I Were to Short Any Country, What Country Would That Be.. - attempts to illustrate the highly interdependent weaknesses in Europe’s sovereign nations can effect even the perceived “stronger” nations.
5. The Coming Pan-European Soverign Debt Crisis, Pt 4: The Spread to Western European Countries
6. The Depression is Already Here for Some Members of Europe, and It Just Might Be Contagious!
7. The Beginning of the Endgame is Coming???
8. I Think It’s Confirmed, Greece Will Be the First Domino to Fall

You Had Better Cage The Monster CONgress (AIG/GS/CDS)

Posted by Karl Denninger

I’ve been writing about this now over a year in regard to the mess that became of AIG, their “financial products” unit, and what I believe is culpability not only of certain financial parties but more importantly our regulators of these firms.

Now The NY Times has published a new article that makes clear that my clarion call for major changes in these areas of the market were not only spot-on, but are even more necessary today than they were back then.

A.I.G. had long insured complex mortgage securities owned by Goldman and other firms against possible defaults. With the housing crisis deepening, A.I.G., once the world’s biggest insurer, had already paid Goldman $2 billion to cover losses the bank said it might suffer.

A.I.G. executives wanted some of its money back, insisting that Goldman — like a homeowner overestimating the damages in a storm to get a bigger insurance payment — had inflated the potential losses. Goldman countered that it was owed even more, while also resisting consulting with third parties to help estimate a value for the securities.

Read that carefully.  The NY Times is making this sound like AIG had insured losses against securities Goldman was holding.  That’s what insurance is, right?

Here’s the problem: Goldman didn’t own the securities.

In addition to offering to cancel its own contracts, Goldman offered to buy all of the insurance A.I.G. had written for several other banks at severely distressed prices, according to three people briefed on the discussions.

Negotiating with Goldman to void the A.I.G. insurance was especially difficult, Federal Reserve Board documents show, because the firm did not own the underlying bonds. As a result, Goldman had little incentive to compromise.

Now do you see the outrage in these so-called “protection devices”?

They aren’t.  They were raw bets.  Very highly-leveraged gambling instruments that had a very low cost at origination – a cost all out of proportion to their eventual potential return.

We do not let “just anyone” buy insurance.  You must have an insurable interest.  That is, I can’t buy fire insurance on your house.  If I could, I might – and so might 20 of my best friends.  We might even target those homes we think might have fires.  We could even bribe the folks doing a controlled burn nearby to be a little less careful than they ordinarily would.  Or, in the extreme case, one of us might just set a fire on purpose!

None of this is allowed in the insurance marketplace because it creates too many incentives for people to set fires and otherwise cause calamities, whether through outright unlawful conduct or helping along “a series of unfortunate events.”

In the regulated options, futures and stock markets we have controls on this sort of thing as well.  To short a stock (legally) you have to be able to borrow it.  That is, someone who owns it must lend it to you first (perhaps in exchange for money.)  As more people short the cache of people willing to lend out that stock for free will evaporate, and you’ll have to start paying up for the privilege of borrowing it.  This is a natural check and balance on placing negative bets via shorting.

Buying PUTs or transacting in the futures market has costs too.  Those regulated markets have defined margin requirements and they are enforced – nightly.  The cost of buying a PUT includes something for the guy who sells it to you, as he is going to hedge his bet by being short the stock.  Thus, as the number of PUT buyers increases the premium demanded rises – precipitously so as the demand for those PUTs goes up.  Finally, buying a PUT doesn’t come with the right to demand anything more from the seller – his margin requirements are enforced by the exchange and you don’t get to hold the money. 

These OTC CDS contracts had another insidious feature: They apparently included a clause that not only would a downgrade of the security trigger margin requirements but so would a downgrade of AIG. 

The terms, described by several A.I.G. trading partners, stated that A.I.G. would post payments under two or three circumstances: if mortgage bonds were downgraded, if they were deemed to have lost value, or if A.I.G.’s own credit rating was downgraded.

The perversity of incentives here is that if you can demand that your counterparty hand over more and more “margin” to you it is possible to actually force a downgrade by your actions and thus cause even more margin to have to be posted!  This, of course, harms the firm’s liquidity and makes a further downgrade more likely. 

Rinse and repeat to destruction – which, incidentally, is exactly what happened.

This is dramatically different than the regulated markets, where valuations are determined by the market, not by one of the parties at interest and the margin requirement is fixed by the deficiency (if any) against the final strike price and the market’s price – the person who happens to be short gets no benefit (or harm) due to his or her credit rating.  If you’re underwater, you post margin.  If not, you don’t, but in neither case does the person on the other side of the trade get to hold the margin funds!  He gets your money only when he closes his position or the option expires (if it’s in the money.)

These “synthetics” (such as the Abacus CDOs) are an outrage on their face.  These are not created from the purchase of actual physical asset (e.g. a mortgage security) but rather by someone writing a credit-default swap against a reference.  These are then bundled up and sold.  When a credit-default swap is then written against a synthetic CDO it is equivalent to writing a gambling contract on a gambling contract as nobody in the chain owns an actual physical asset (such as a loan)!

The simple fact of the matter is that “naked” CDS exposures need to be prohibited right now.  They never should have been allowed and not a damn thing has changed.  Purely synthetic instruments need to be traded on an exchange in each and every case as a means of preventing chicanery, where margin can be enforced transparently on a nightly basis by a neutral third party in the middle of all transactions – the nominal buyer for every seller, and seller for every buyer.  This third party (the exchange), having no skin in the game either way, will not permit the abuses that are too easily committed when you have over-the-counter transactions of this type.

The article referenced makes a decent case that AIG didn’t fall off the cliff, it was pushed.  There are even allegations raised of collusive conduct which, if true, add an even more serious angle to this entire story.

But at the end of the day the problem boils down to the same basic facts I have been harping on since the beginning:

• Writing “insurance” on something the purchaser doesn’t own isn’t insurance, it’s a gambling contract.

• When such gambling contracts stack up to a great degree there are huge incentives for someone to commit financial arson.  Whether they did or did not is a matter for debate, but that the incentives exist to structure deals in a way that are easily detonated so you can profit from them as exposure increases is not open to debate.  Such incentive does absolutely exist – and we must eradicate it.

• To prevent fraud and gaming of the system, such contracts must be on a regulated exchange where each buyer and seller deals with a neutral third party (the exchange itself) that is responsible for nightly margining, trade reporting, open interest and bid/offer maintenance.  These facts must be exposed at all times to the public so that the market operates in a transparent fashion and neither side of the transaction can be “pushed”.

• The exposure of these contracts on said exchange will also prevent disasters like AIG from occurring, as the fact that they are short “X” will become instantly visible to everyone, including their regulators.  The precise exposure they are taking on will thus be known at all times.

• We must bar backstopped entities (such as banks and insurance companies) from trading in or creating synthetic instruments such as this in the first place.  These are not hedges as by definition there are no actual hard assets behind them.  The argument that they are created to fill a demand from the market is true but irrelevant – the fact remains that with no actual hard asset acquisition behind them they serve no fundamental credit intermediation purpose which is the purview of banks and insurance companies – they are, instead, pure speculative instruments.  Let the hedge funds, operating without any sort of financial backstop, create these all they want – and trade them on a regulated exchange – but keep the banks and insurance companies out of it.

We have not neutered this monster in the slightest.  Indeed, the latest rabble in the market with regard to Greece, Spain and Portugal is, not surprisingly, about (once again) credit default swaps blowing out.

And again I ask – who wrote those CDS naked on these nations to people who didn’t actually hold underlying positions in the bonds without them being traded on a central exchange, and why, after 2008 and 2009, do we still let that crap go on?

An Introspective Look At The Future Of America

By Craig Harris
earthblog.news@gmail.com

As we close out 2009 and look forward into 2010 and beyond, this has been a year of near financial catastrophe and monumental change, none of which benefited America or ordinary Americans. Late in 2008 and throughout 2009, events have happened in the US which would have been labeled unfathomable just a few short years ago, and yet already these monumental changes are expected to be filed into the memory hole and Americans are expected to believe nothing has changed.

As we exit the year, we are told the US is a laissez-faire free market economy and yet the US government is now the largest owner of housing in the US as well as the owner of last resort for some of the largest and completely insolvent US corporations. The Federal Reserve, a privately and anonymously owned and controlled corporation chartered with issuing the nations currency, were given the green light by themselves to transfer to themselves and their shareholders the people’s wealth in the form of their future labor. The FED balance sheet has ballooned to become a junk bond warehouse as they overtly and covertly buy their own debt, immune from any sort of oversight, regulation or auditing and operating above the law. Along with that, increasingly coercive brute force measures are now routinely necessary to manage and manipulate so called “free market” asset prices which are cheerled by so called “financial news media” whose board members and management are all the same people who transferred the people’s wealth to themselves. The corporate media party line idea of a “free market US economy” now seems like a distant memory and it all feels like systemic fraud, corruption, malfeasance and organized crime at the very highest levels.

During 2009 we have seen the continued collapse of American industry amid wave after wave of layoffs. The corrupt corporate media cartel likes to trot out a group of FED sponsored shills who call themselves “professors” to call this a “jobless recovery” although it’s difficult to imagine a recovery where American industry has collapsed and is now owned by the government. US cities both large and small have been decimated by the loss of the US manufacturing base. Detroit now resembles a third world country with a 50% unemployment rate. Ransacked, foreclosed houses go for a dollar apparently because no one who has a choice is willing to own property or live there. The US has an officially stated unemployment rate of ten percent and a real unemployment rate of over 20 percent. Wall Street may have recovered due to a direct injection of capital from the future labor of the people, but there has been no action taken whatsoever to improve the situation of the average citizen as the disconnect between the ruling Oligarchs and Wall Street, the real economy and the lives of ordinary Americans continues to widen. The people’s bailout money, which represents the future labor of Americans, went directly into the pockets of the people who created the crisis in the first place because they are in the enviable position of being “too big to fail”. Interestingly, or sadly, the same people and institutions responsible for and who profited from the catastrophe are still in charge and have handed even more power and control to themselves. Although there has been talk in Washington of “too big to fail” being undesirable, the result of the post collapse policies have resulted in ever fewer, ever larger players with more power and control and instead of being “too big to fail” now wield so much money and power that they demonstrate wholesale ownership of the entire US political body.

Due to the post collapse monetary and fiscal policies, the people have now been saddled up with an unpayable level of debt. The cause of the near total collapse of the financial system was too much debt and the “solution” has has been even more debt piled on to the original debt. During the year, the Dallas FED estimated the financial obligations of the US government at 99 trillion dollars. The head of the TARP program estimated the bailout cost at 24 trillion dollars. Totaled together the US has in the neighborhood of 120 trillion dollars of current and future obligations on an annual revenue of around 2 trillion dollars which is falling due to high unemployment, higher state and local taxes and fees and lower wages. Cutting that down to size, imagine earning 200,000 a year and having a debt of 12 million dollars. In short, the US dollar has become a token of an unpayable debt and thus the anchor of the entire global financial system is a ponzi fraud. It becomes impossible to compute the value of anything as measured in a fraudulent currency that represents an unpayable debt.

The banking system is not lending money because it’s still insolvent. The people, having lost over 5 trillion dollars in the real estate bust are also collectively insolvent. Many US states and cities are bankrupt or near bankrupt. One in nine Americans subsist on food stamps. Even as a college education has become unaffordable to most Americans, college graduates now find themselves jobless. One in seven households now have their adult children living back at home due to the inability to find a job. The homeless population is growing and tent cities sprouted up across America during 2009. The estimated homeless population in LA alone is 40,000 people a night. People in the US if they have a job are working longer and harder to make the same income. Wages have remained stagnant and the real cost of living continues to spiral ever higher for ordinary Americans. The new man in charge, elected on a platform of “change”, has delivered his change in the form of change=no change, or how do you like your change now?

By any metric you choose, whether it’s the median home costing half the median income even at artificially low interest rates, to the ballooning cost of insurance, healthcare, education or anything else people spend their money on, the US is experiencing a rapid decline in the standard of living for ordinary Americans and an emerging ultra rich ultra powerful shadow oligarch rule amid a generalized and widespread financial and social decay. The US population is becoming a nation of voiceless serfs with fewer and fewer remaining civil and property rights and a rapidly decaying standard of living, the antitheses of everything America is said to represent and strive for.

The hypocrisy and fraud of the oligarch rule corporate media story line is now nearly impossible for an educated, informed adult to digest. As Jim Grant pointed out recently, according to Section 19 of the Coinage Act of 1792, the penalty prescribed for any official who fraudulently debased the people’s money is death, yet in 2009 debasing the people’s money resulted in a “man of the year” award from the self serving corporate media who will be next in line for a bailout from the people for their good service to the new oligarch rule. This organized crime, this theft, occurring right out in the open, may explain why employees of the largest US financial institution are now not allowed to gather in groups larger than 12 outside and their executives are carrying firearms. In an affront to the intelligence and sensibility of any citizen of this planet, the new US president expanded a war he was elected to end and started a new frontier in Pakistan, for that he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The people who were awarded hundreds of billions of dollars of the people’s money because they lost all their money are skimming millions and billions off the top for themselves and their associates in what they call “bonuses”. 2009 has been a year of egregious assault on the American public by the people in charge.

The “people’s representatives” as they like to be called, no longer represent the people at all but instead solely represent and pledge allegiance to the special interests and corporate lobbyists who have bought and paid for their votes, along with the media oligarchs who control who sits in the seats. Regardless of whether they call themselves Democrats or Republicans, they are a group of self important, self serving, morally bankrupt, corrupt, clueless buffoons and criminals running unchecked by a complicit corporate media.

Every American should be ashamed, embarrassed and sad that their country has been bought and sold to an organized criminal enterprise which includes the entire political body and the media. The only thing the “people’s representatives” have in common is contempt for the people they are ostensibly representing. It is revolting for any American to watch these cretins heaping praise Ben Bernanke at the congressional theater of the absurd. His institution has already debased the dollar by 95% and failed miserably in every mandate they had since they took over in 1913. If any American has managed to retain or save any money, he can now put it on deposit in their banking system and earn a negative real return (a loss of his purchasing power) while at the same time the banks will take his deposit and loan it to his brother at 30% interest. So Mr Bernanke the money printer has control over the largest legal loan sharking operation ever concocted and it is funded by the America people, against the America people.

During 2009, the leadership has taken actions which benefit the corporations and special interests who own them, while showing nothing but wanton disregard for the millions of citizens whose lives their sponsors have destroyed. What we are headed towards in the US if we are not there already, is a Straussian society of ultra rich, ultra powerful oligarchs and a serfish powerless population with no middle class to speak of. The US president De Jour is, and from here on out will be a yes man, subservient to the ultra powerful too big to fail oligarchs who control the money and power and are responsible for putting him in the drivers seat. This is not compatible whatsoever with prosperity, democracy or anything else the US still holds itself out as. Here at the end of 2009, the United States has morphed into a bankrupt fascist oligarchy which owns the military machine as a policy enforcement tool, the entire political body and the media. It isn’t going to fix itself because the fraud, corruption and malfeasance is systemic. It meets every definition of organized crime and it’s all happening right out in the open.

In my way of thinking, this is not at all unlike the breakdown of the Soviet Union where for a period of time a sort of mafia of oligarchs weilded the wealth and power, carved up the remaining wealth of the country among themselves and had their way with the country amid a climate of manufactured fear, chaos and decay. The key point being that the people in control are out to make money and increase their power at the expense of the citizens. Mr Orwell said “the purpose of power is power” and that statement needs to be well understood. These megalomaniac, sociopathic aspirations of ever more power and control by an elitist group of criminals come at the expense of America and future Americans. It doesn’t matter whatsoever to the oligarchs because they have property waiting in Croatia. When the remaining wealth has been extracted from America, they will all pull out and the citizens will be left with a rusted out bankrupt hull. I believe the circumstances for this eventuality have already been created, just not yet realized due to the enormous size of the economy and the momentum it has. In other words, I believe it’s collapsing as fast as it can although living through it seems like slow motion. When viewed from the future in a historical context however, I think it will have seemed fairly rapid.

The financial markets have deteriorated into a Las Vegas casino atmosphere where the the only consistent winners are the house and the too big to fail entities trading on foreknowledge and inside information shared freely between the treasury and the few remaining large trading houses. The entire system is bankrupt, fraudulent, corrupt and irretrievably broken. The anchor of the global financial system, the US dollar, has become the worlds largest ponzi scheme and the remaining 95% of the worlds population would like a new, viable standard. At this point however, despite any action the FED may or may not take, the US debt is far too large to ever be repaid. It is questionable if the interest payments will even be serviceable if interest rates were to rise, and the only reason interest rates are low is because the FED is using brute force. At this time the only way out without a complete collapse is to inflate away the debt, thus turning a deflationary collapse into a long period of inflationary decay and declining standard of living.

I have been of the opinion that what we saw in October 2008 was a collapse of the global fiat financial system which was more or less expected due to the collapse of the real estate bubble. I have reminded my subscribers that when I was forecasting a drop in real estate prices of as much as 50% during the heyday of the mania, that sounded unfathomable. What I believe is in store for our future sounds nearly as unfathomable now as that idea did back then. I believe the reason it sounds unfathomable is due to the constant barrage of lies, misinformation and propaganda from the tight knit corporate media oligarchy which has essentially merged with the new power structure of the US in a corrupt, overt form of fascism that would make Mussolini blush or Goebbels the propagandist nod in approval.

Over a period of decades and with one FED induced serial bubble after another, the financial system finally reached an unsustainable level of debt and leverage in 2008. When the FED started raising interest rates, when the real estate bubble burst, it involved so much debt and leverage that the whole system failed, pricing models and risk models failed, and the banking system quickly became insolvent.

I believe we have already had a systemic collapse, and the only thing the FED can do now is alter the look and feel of the collapse and to manage the allocation of the remaining wealth. In the end, whether by deflationary collapse or inflationary decay, the result of the collapse will feel the same to the US general population regardless of the interim path taken.

If the FED had done nothing, the whole system would have quickly degenerated into a deflationary collapse and failure of the financial system due to insolvency. The course the FED chose however is the one myself and many others predicted beforehand…the FED chose to solve the problem of too much debt by creating even more debt by taking the unprecedented action of buying it’s own debt under euphemisms like “quantitative easing” and “debt monetization” and also covert buying to artificially force negative real return rates of interest. Through this course of action, the FED so far has been able to turn what would have been a rapid deflationary collapse into a decaying inflationary depression which is euphemistically called “a recession that is now over” by the six people who control 96% of the global media and attempt to pass off propaganda as “news” to a woefully mis informed, dumbed down and apathetic general public.

Going forward, If the FED doesn’t buy enough of their own debt, then interest rates on the long end would rise and the risk becomes a deflationary collapse into insolvency for the FED and it’s banking system. If interest rates remain effectively at zero on the short end and artificially suppressed by quantitative easing on the long end, then the real estate market can recover and the banks can regain solvency. If interest rates rise as the free markets would argue for however, then the real estate market sinks even further, the US dollar rises, and greater insolvency of the banks follows. The higher interest rates go, the thinner the knife edge gets and the FED would quickly find itself staring into another October 2008 collapse kind of situation. On the other hand, if by buying enough of their own debt they can keep short and long term interest rates down, then the free money percolates through the banking system, puts pressure on the dollar, lifts commodity and real estate prices and pulls out of the collapse via inflating away the debt so long as they can avoid run away hyperinflation in the process. This is the path we have traveled throughout 2009.

The key point is that the FED has had the option of doing two things…creating even more debt in order to save itself and the banking system, or do nothing and watch themselves collapse into a mass of failure, loss of power and control, insolvency and domino style bankruptcy and default. They have chosen the expected course, which is to increase the debt and print money, which is the way they save themselves and their banking system. In short, given a choice between saving the people and saving themselves after a collapse, they have taken the expected course which is to attempt to save themselves. What else would you expect? If they had wanted to save the people they would have taken the peoples bailout money and handed it to them in the form of a check. Instead they handed it to the banks.

Although they have been somewhat successful in reducing the insolvency of the banking system, they have effectively created a giant wealth transfer mechanism whereby all the money that disappeared in the collapse was re created out of thin air and given to the banks and wall street. I think of it as a sort of shell game. The money disappeared from Mom and Pop’s 401k and re appeared on the balance sheets of the banks via freshly created new money (debt). As a result, we have something still called “free market capitalism” which is not free market capitalism at all. We have emerged from this crisis with a sort of financial oligarchy where a few entities who control all the wealth and power also control politics and media. Understanding this will help to understand issues like “healthcare reform” which will involve you paying more and getting less, with the primary beneficiaries being the oligarchies who control health care and insurance.

The one major point I have to make at this time is throughout 2009, there was no action taken that put the average citizen in a better position, but instead during the course of the year there was a gigantic wealth transfer from the citizens to the banking system, effectively orchestrated by the so called “people’s representatives” who are in fact, all owned by the banking system and Wall Street with half a dozen or so oligarchies and lobbyists in a public display of fraud, malfeasance and corruption that sets a new historical precedent.

I have been and remain of the opinion that the ultimate “solution” to this crisis will be for the entities who now control the wealth and power to accumulate even more wealth and power via a global central bank and global currency which now for the first time in public has been discussed on and off throughout 2009 and described as the New World Order by such luminaries as Henry Kissinger. So looking out beyond 2010, I see a new global reserve currency emerging and a global central bank which will effectively also be a global governing authority where the heads of state effectively report to the group of central bankers and their anonymous shareholders who effectively control the money, power and politicians on a global scale. When the global currency is introduced, only then do I expect a sort of collapse of the US dollar versus this global currency. In this way, the world can carry on while the former global reserve currency called the US dollar will be free to depreciate to a level where solvency is regained and the now unpayable US debt is inflated away to the point where it can be repaid in depreciated dollars. US citizens will experience a continued decay as the US becomes to resemble more and more, a third world country. Detroit is already there. The corporate media won’t show it to you but if you do a youtube search on Detroit what you see will shock you.

My view of the world tends to be the long view. Throughout 2009 I have been positioned and trading in in various hard assets including but not limited to gold silver, back month crude oil, Soybeans, raw land and Americana. I own and trade some Chinese shares but no US equities or bonds. I have lost confidence in the US leadership. I have lost confidence in the fairness of the “system” where some elite entities are free to keep the profits and nationalize their losses. I have opted to opt out by embarking on a long term effort to transfer more and more capital “off wall street” and their organized crime ring they call the banking system, and instead investing in things without fraudulent or impaired balance sheets. At some point in the future, I want to be short US 10 and 30 year bonds because it is nonsensical to me that anyone would be willing to loan a bankrupt country money for 30 years at an interest rate of 4% or so. The only reason this situation exists today is due to the FED monetizing debt and attempting to manipulate the long end using brute force.

So as we head off into 2010, I see a lot of uncertainty in the short term. If interest rates rise and the US dollar gets stronger, by mid year I would expect a repeat of October 2008. What I expect to happen over the longer term however is that the FED will ultimately print enough money to attempt to slowly inflate the debt away to a manageable amount amid a generalized and severe decay in terms of the standard of living for Average Americans. At some point along the line, I expect the world reserve currency role to be moved into a global currency and for the US dollar to be allowed to float against it without the benefits associated with the world currency role, and for the US standard of living to continue to decline and eventually decay into a societal collapse followed by something different. I expect China to emerge as the dominant economic power in the world and to purchase a large amount of US assets. Somewhere along the line I also expect the Nobel Peace Prize recipient to bomb Iran because he will be ordered to do so by the people who control the money.

Personally, based on what I see coming over the long term I have elected to forego city life and have embarked on a long term project in the picturesque Appalachian foothills in an effort to increase my degree of self sufficiency and insulate myself from the continued decay and declining standard of living sweeping the country. My long view for the US is high inflation which will not show up in the government’s fraudulent statistics, along with a declining standard of living, increasing decay and ultimately leading to chaos, societal and government collapse in the US within a decade or two, maybe sooner.

I would like to end by quoting Marc Faber with one of the most compelling quotes of 2009. I find this quote compelling because the price of anything as measured by a fraudulent standard is meaningless. To me, it is a gift to be able to still exchange US dollars for anything with real value.

“I would buy every three months some gold and not worry so much about the price because the weight stays the same”