Showing posts with label sub prime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sub prime. Show all posts
12 October 2008
HALF the annual US GDP has disappeared in 2 days
There were $US 6.5 TRILLION in global stock market losses on October 6 and 7 as measured by Standard & Poor's BMI Global, an index of the major markets worldwide. This is HALF the annual US GDP which disappeared - in two days - as purchasing power. October 8 and 9 were as bad or worse. -- The Privateer
19 August 2007
Henry Kaufman in WSJ on the credit crunch, liquidity, and hedge-quant funds
Henry Kaufman has a superb piece on the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal today, August 15, 2007, on the fundamental causes of the credit crunch. Behind the subscriber wall, here, but highly, highly recommended. Henry Kaufman, "Our Risky New Financial Markets," WSJ, August 15, 2007, opinion page.
The blurring of the distinction over time between "liquidity" and "credit availability" is crucial, as is his point about the limitations of the quantitative financial models. I must say, as a corporate finance professor, parts of this look remarkably similar to the problems of Long Term Capital a decade ago - the quant manager saying that there had been three successive days which the models predicted would occur only once every 10,000 years, the belief that the models had successfully hedged whereas the price movements in actual markets indicated otherwise ... combined with, as Kaufman points out, the emergence of financial institutions that are regarded as too big to be allowed to fail (and, a very striking point, his assertion that this very fact is part of what drives consolidation in the financial services industry - as the smaller players face the necessity of being part of an operation too big to fail) and the attendant moral hazard ... the risks are there to be seen.
If, of course, the market will not be allowed to operate, then moral hazard can only be avoided by more stringent regulation, which Kaufman is skeptical will come about.
Some excerpts:
***
The principal structural driver behind this and similar financial tribulations is the massive growth of financial markets, combined with a plethora of new credit instruments. By any measure, current financial activity -- new financing or secondary market trading volume -- dwarfs the past. The outstanding volume of nonfinancial debt now exceeds nominal GDP by $15 trillion, compared with $6 trillion a decade ago. Traditional credit instruments such as stocks, bonds and money-market obligations have been joined by a long and diverse roster of new obligations, many of them extraordinarily complicated. Along with the arcane tranches of mortgages that recently garnered attention are a myriad of financial derivatives, ranging from those traded on exchanges to tailor-made products for the over-the-counter market.
Leading financial institutions have grown rapidly as well. More importantly, they have evolved to become integrated, diversified, global enterprises that bear little resemblance to traditional commercial banks, investment banks or insurance companies. As these giants grow and dominate the market, they carry enormous potential for conflicts of interest -- they simultaneously act as investors of their own massive assets and as dealmakers and consultants on behalf of their clients. And their reach into the financial system is so broad and deep that no central bank is willing to allow the collapse of one of these leviathans. They are deemed "too big to fail."
These structural and institutional changes have, in turn, encouraged a new understanding among market participants of liquidity. In the decades that followed World War II, liquidity was by and large an asset-based concept. For business corporations, it meant the size of cash and very liquid assets, the maturity of receivables, the turnover of inventory, and the relationship of these assets to total liabilities. For households, liquidity primarily meant the maturity of financial assets being held for contingencies along with funds that reliably would be available later in life. In contrast, firms and households today often blur the distinction between liquidity and credit availability. When thinking about liquid assets, present and future, it is now commonplace to think in terms of access to liabilities.
This new mindset has been abetted by the tidal wave of securitization -- the conversion of nonmarketable assets into marketable assets -- that swept across the financial world in recent decades. This flood of marketable assets not only has eroded traditional concepts of liquidity, it has stimulated risk appetites and fostered a belief that credit usually is available at reasonable prices.
***
These two developments -- securitization and the seamless interconnectivity of markets -- have brought intricate quantitative risk modeling to the forefront of financial practices. Securitization generates market prices, while information technology offers the power to quantify pricing and risk relationships. Few recognize, however, that such modeling assumes constancy in market fundamentals. This is because modeling does not adequately account for underlying structural changes when attempting to calculate future risks and prices.
Nor can models take into account the impact of growing financial concentration in the making of markets and in the pricing of securities that are traded infrequently, or that have tailor-made attributes. And what about the risks to financial markets of a major military flare-up, the ravages of a pandemic flu, a terrorist attack that would immobilize computer networks, or even shifts in the broader monetary environment? Do the models quantify these and other profound risks in any meaningful way?
Then there is the question of asset pricing. An essential component of successful risk modeling is accurate pricing of the securities used in the analysis. Here, again, the strictly quantitative approach shows its weaknesses. Accurate pricing is a thorny challenge. In rapidly moving markets, the price of the last trade may be invalid for the next one. The price a dealer is prepared to quote may be no more than an indication of a potential trade. And the price quoted may be valid only for a small quantity of assets, not for the full amount in the investor's portfolio.
***
At the heart of the long-term underlying challenges that face the U.S. financial system is the question of how to enforce discipline. One way is to let competitive forces discipline market participants: The manager who performs well prospers, while those who do not fail. This is the central precept of free market economies. But this approach is compromised by the fact that advanced societies typically do not allow the process to follow through when it comes to very large financial institutions. The fear is that the failure of behemoth financial institutions will pose systemic risks both here and abroad.
Therefore, market discipline falls more heavily on smaller institutions, which in turn motivates them to merge into larger entities protected by the too-big-to-fail umbrella. This dynamic has driven financial concentration and will continue to do so for years to come. As financial concentration increases, it will undermine marketability, trading activity and effective allocation of financial resources. (Ital. added KA)
If competition is not allowed to enforce market discipline, the most viable alternative is increased supervision over financial institutions and markets. In today's markets, there is hardly a clarion call for such measures. On the contrary, the markets oppose it, and politicians voice little if any support. For their part, central bankers do not possess a clear vision of how to proceed toward more effective financial supervision. Their current, circumspect approach seems objectively technical, whereas greater intervention, they fear, would seem intrusive, subjective, even excessive.
What is missing today is a comprehensive framework that pulls together financial-market behavior and economic behavior. The study of economics and finance has become highly specialized and compartmentalized within the academic community. This is, of course, another reflection of the increasingly specialized demands of our complex civilization. Regrettably, today's economics and finance professions have produced no minds with the analytical reach of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman.
The blurring of the distinction over time between "liquidity" and "credit availability" is crucial, as is his point about the limitations of the quantitative financial models. I must say, as a corporate finance professor, parts of this look remarkably similar to the problems of Long Term Capital a decade ago - the quant manager saying that there had been three successive days which the models predicted would occur only once every 10,000 years, the belief that the models had successfully hedged whereas the price movements in actual markets indicated otherwise ... combined with, as Kaufman points out, the emergence of financial institutions that are regarded as too big to be allowed to fail (and, a very striking point, his assertion that this very fact is part of what drives consolidation in the financial services industry - as the smaller players face the necessity of being part of an operation too big to fail) and the attendant moral hazard ... the risks are there to be seen.
If, of course, the market will not be allowed to operate, then moral hazard can only be avoided by more stringent regulation, which Kaufman is skeptical will come about.
Some excerpts:
***
The principal structural driver behind this and similar financial tribulations is the massive growth of financial markets, combined with a plethora of new credit instruments. By any measure, current financial activity -- new financing or secondary market trading volume -- dwarfs the past. The outstanding volume of nonfinancial debt now exceeds nominal GDP by $15 trillion, compared with $6 trillion a decade ago. Traditional credit instruments such as stocks, bonds and money-market obligations have been joined by a long and diverse roster of new obligations, many of them extraordinarily complicated. Along with the arcane tranches of mortgages that recently garnered attention are a myriad of financial derivatives, ranging from those traded on exchanges to tailor-made products for the over-the-counter market.
Leading financial institutions have grown rapidly as well. More importantly, they have evolved to become integrated, diversified, global enterprises that bear little resemblance to traditional commercial banks, investment banks or insurance companies. As these giants grow and dominate the market, they carry enormous potential for conflicts of interest -- they simultaneously act as investors of their own massive assets and as dealmakers and consultants on behalf of their clients. And their reach into the financial system is so broad and deep that no central bank is willing to allow the collapse of one of these leviathans. They are deemed "too big to fail."
These structural and institutional changes have, in turn, encouraged a new understanding among market participants of liquidity. In the decades that followed World War II, liquidity was by and large an asset-based concept. For business corporations, it meant the size of cash and very liquid assets, the maturity of receivables, the turnover of inventory, and the relationship of these assets to total liabilities. For households, liquidity primarily meant the maturity of financial assets being held for contingencies along with funds that reliably would be available later in life. In contrast, firms and households today often blur the distinction between liquidity and credit availability. When thinking about liquid assets, present and future, it is now commonplace to think in terms of access to liabilities.
This new mindset has been abetted by the tidal wave of securitization -- the conversion of nonmarketable assets into marketable assets -- that swept across the financial world in recent decades. This flood of marketable assets not only has eroded traditional concepts of liquidity, it has stimulated risk appetites and fostered a belief that credit usually is available at reasonable prices.
***
These two developments -- securitization and the seamless interconnectivity of markets -- have brought intricate quantitative risk modeling to the forefront of financial practices. Securitization generates market prices, while information technology offers the power to quantify pricing and risk relationships. Few recognize, however, that such modeling assumes constancy in market fundamentals. This is because modeling does not adequately account for underlying structural changes when attempting to calculate future risks and prices.
Nor can models take into account the impact of growing financial concentration in the making of markets and in the pricing of securities that are traded infrequently, or that have tailor-made attributes. And what about the risks to financial markets of a major military flare-up, the ravages of a pandemic flu, a terrorist attack that would immobilize computer networks, or even shifts in the broader monetary environment? Do the models quantify these and other profound risks in any meaningful way?
Then there is the question of asset pricing. An essential component of successful risk modeling is accurate pricing of the securities used in the analysis. Here, again, the strictly quantitative approach shows its weaknesses. Accurate pricing is a thorny challenge. In rapidly moving markets, the price of the last trade may be invalid for the next one. The price a dealer is prepared to quote may be no more than an indication of a potential trade. And the price quoted may be valid only for a small quantity of assets, not for the full amount in the investor's portfolio.
***
At the heart of the long-term underlying challenges that face the U.S. financial system is the question of how to enforce discipline. One way is to let competitive forces discipline market participants: The manager who performs well prospers, while those who do not fail. This is the central precept of free market economies. But this approach is compromised by the fact that advanced societies typically do not allow the process to follow through when it comes to very large financial institutions. The fear is that the failure of behemoth financial institutions will pose systemic risks both here and abroad.
Therefore, market discipline falls more heavily on smaller institutions, which in turn motivates them to merge into larger entities protected by the too-big-to-fail umbrella. This dynamic has driven financial concentration and will continue to do so for years to come. As financial concentration increases, it will undermine marketability, trading activity and effective allocation of financial resources. (Ital. added KA)
If competition is not allowed to enforce market discipline, the most viable alternative is increased supervision over financial institutions and markets. In today's markets, there is hardly a clarion call for such measures. On the contrary, the markets oppose it, and politicians voice little if any support. For their part, central bankers do not possess a clear vision of how to proceed toward more effective financial supervision. Their current, circumspect approach seems objectively technical, whereas greater intervention, they fear, would seem intrusive, subjective, even excessive.
What is missing today is a comprehensive framework that pulls together financial-market behavior and economic behavior. The study of economics and finance has become highly specialized and compartmentalized within the academic community. This is, of course, another reflection of the increasingly specialized demands of our complex civilization. Regrettably, today's economics and finance professions have produced no minds with the analytical reach of Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman.
17 March 2007
Why the subprime bust will spread
By Henry C K Liu
Years ago when the US debt bubble spread over to the housing sector, warnings from many quarters about the systemic danger of subprime mortgages were categorically dismissed by Wall Street cheerleaders as Chicken Little "sky is falling" hysteria. Even weeks before bad news on the housing finance sector was shaping up as a clear and present danger, adamant denial was still loud enough to drown out reason.
Both Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, two top officials in charge of US monetary policy, continue to provide obligatory assurance to the nervous public that the United States' economic fundamentals are sound in the face of a jittery market. Days before being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, shares of the collapsed New Century, a distressed subprime mortgage lender, were recommended by a major Wall Street brokerage firm as a "buy". That firm is now under criminal and regulatory investigation.
On the pages of Asia Times Online over the past two years, I have tried to put forth the rationale for the inevitability of a US housing bubble burst, pointing out reasons that the resultant financial meltdown will be much more widespread and severe than has been generally acknowledged.
On September 14, 2005, I wrote in Greenspan, the Wizard of Bubbleland:
History has shown that the Fed, more often than not, has made wrong decisions based on faulty projection. Greenspan has been rightly criticized for letting a housing price "bubble" develop, equating it to the one that swept technology stocks to stratospheric levels before bursting in 2000. Greenspan argues the Fed's role is to mop up after bubbles burst, since bubbles are hard to spot and deflate safely. But accidents are also difficult to predict, and that difficulty is not a good argument against buying insurance. There is no doubt that there is a price to be paid for every policy action. But the price of prematurely slowing down a debt bubble is infinitely lower than letting the bubble build until it bursts uncontrollably. In finance as in medicine, prevention is preferable to even the best cure. All market participants know pigs lose money. And a monetary pig loses control of the economy.
Alan Greenspan, then Fed chairman, notwithstanding his denial of responsibility in helping through the 1990s to unleash the equity bubble, had this to say in 2004 in hindsight after the bubble burst in 2000: "Instead of trying to contain a putative bubble by drastic actions with largely unpredictable consequences, we chose, as we noted in our mid-1999 congressional testimony, to focus on policies to mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next expansion."
By "the next expansion", Greenspan meant the next bubble, which manifested itself in housing. The mitigating policy was a massive injection of liquidity into the US banking system.
There is a structural reason that the housing bubble replaced the high-tech bubble. Houses cannot be imported like manufactured goods, although much of the content in houses, such as furniture, hardware, windows, kitchen equipment and bath fixtures, is manufactured overseas. Construction jobs cannot be outsourced overseas to take advantage of wage arbitrage. Instead, some non-skilled jobs are filled by low-wage illegal immigrants.
Total outstanding home mortgages in the US in 1999 were US$4.45 trillion, and by 2004 this amount had grown to $7.56 trillion, most of which was absorbed by refinancing of higher home prices at lower interest rates. When Greenspan took over at the Fed in 1987, total outstanding US home mortgages stood only at $1.82 trillion. On his watch, outstanding home mortgages quadrupled. Much of this money has been printed by the Fed, exported through the trade deficit and reimported as debt.
The most popular of all derivative products is the interest-rate swap, which in essence allows participants to make bets on the direction interest rates will take. According to the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), interest-rate swaps accounted for three out of four derivative contracts held by US commercial banks at the end of 1999. The notional value of these swaps totaled almost $25 trillion; 2-3% of that ($500 billion to $750 billion) reflected the banks' true credit risk in these products. Monetary economists have no idea whether notional values are part of the money supply and with what discount ratio. As we now know from experience, creative accounting has legally and illegally transformed debt proceeds as revenue.
The 2005 OCC report "Condition and Performance of Commercial Banks" shows that loan demand in the US grew at 11% in the first quarter of 2005 while core deposits grew at 7%, producing a 4-percentage-point gap. That meant that US banks' loan growth was not fully funded by deposits. The report identified possible risks as: cooling off in housing markets accompanying slower loan growth; past regional housing-price declines lingering; and credit-quality problems in housing spilling over to other loan types. Not a comforting picture.
Derivatives of all kinds weigh heavily on banks' capital structures. But interest-rate swaps can be especially toxic when interest rates rise. And since only a few business economists predicted a jump in rates for the first half of the year when 1999 began while yields in fact rose 25%, these institutions found themselves on the wrong side of an interest-rate gamble by 2000. Moreover, as interest rates rose, US banks' income diminished from interest-rate-related businesses such as mortgage lending. Interest-sensitive sources of income were the revenue disappointment in 2000, as trading was in 1999. The banks' response was to lower credit requirement for loans to increase interest-rate spread.
On Greenspan's 18-year watch, assets of US government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) ballooned 830%, from $346 billion to $2.872 trillion. GSEs are financing entities created by the US Congress to fund subsidized loans to certain groups of borrowers such as middle- and low-income homeowners, farmers and students. Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) surged 670% to $3.55 trillion. Outstanding asset-backed securities (ABSs) exploded from $75 billion to more than $2.7 trillion.
Greenspan presided over the greatest expansion of speculative finance in history, including a trillion-dollar hedge-fund industry, bloated Wall Street-firm balance sheets approaching $2 trillion, a $3.3 trillion repo (repurchase agreement) market, and a global derivatives market with notional values surpassing an unfathomable $220 trillion. Granted, notional values are not true risk exposures. But a swing of 1% in interest rate on a notional value of $220 trillion is $2.2 trillion, about 20% of US gross domestic product.
This practice of borrowing short-term at low interest rates to lend long-term at higher interest rates, known as "carry trade" in bank parlance, when globalized by deregulated cross-border flow of funds eventually led to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when interest-rate and exchange-rate volatility became the new paradigm. Today, there are undeniable signs that the same interest-rate risks have infested the US housing bubble in recent years. And the Fed's traditional gradualism, now revived as "measured pace" in raising the Fed Funds Rate targets in response to rapid asset-price inflation, has had little effect in curbing bank lending to fund rampant speculation.
In 2005, Greenspan repeatedly denied the existence of a national housing bubble by drawing on the conventional wisdom that the US housing market was highly disaggregated by location, which was true enough. Disaggregated markets are normally not exposed to contagion, a term given to the process of distressed deals dragging down healthy deals in the same market as speculator throw good money after bad to try to stem the tide of losses. But the bubble in the housing market was caused by creative housing finance made possible by the emergence of a deregulated global credit market through finance liberalization. The low cost of mortgages lifted all US house prices beyond levels sustainable by household income in otherwise disaggregated markets.
Under cross-border finance liberalization, negative wealth effects from asset-value correction are highly contagious. For example, the Dallas Fed Beige Book released on July 27, 2005, states: "Contacts say real-estate investment is extremely high in part because the district's competitively priced markets are attracting investment capital from more expensive coastal markets." The nationwide proliferation of no-income-verification, interest-only, zero-equity and cash-out loans, while making financial sense in a rising market, is fatally toxic in a falling market, which will hit a speculative boom as surely as the sun will set. Since the money financing this housing bubble is sourced globally, a bursting of the US housing bubble will have dire consequences globally.
Through mortgage-backed securitization, banks now are mere loan intermediaries that assume no long-term risk on the risky loans they make, which are sold as securitized debt of unbundled levels of risk to institutional investors with varying risk appetite commensurate with their varying need for higher returns. But who are institutional investors? They are mostly pension funds that manage the money the US working public depends on for retirement. In other words, the aggregate retirement assets of the working public are exposed to the risk of the same working public defaulting on their house mortgages.
When a homeowner loses his or her home through default of its mortgage, the homeowner will also lose his or her retirement nest egg invested in the securitized mortgage pool, while the banks stay technically solvent. That is the hidden network of linked financial landmines in a housing bubble financed by mortgage-backed securitization to which no one until recently has been paying attention. The bursting of the housing bubble will act as a detonator for a massive pension crisis.
On September 29, 2005, I wrote in The repo time bomb:
Commercial banks profit from using low-interest-rate repo proceeds to finance high-interest-rate "subprime" lending - credit cards, home equity loans, automobile loans etc - to borrowers of high credit risks at double-digit interest rates compounded monthly. To reduce their capital requirement, banks then remove their loans from their balance sheets by selling the CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations) with unbundled risks to a wide range of investors seeking higher returns commensurate with higher risk. In another era, such high-risk/high-interest loan activities were known as loan-sharking. Yet Greenspan is on record as having said that systemic risk is a good tradeoff for unprecedented economic expansion.
Repos are now one of the largest and most active sectors in the US money market. More specifically, banks appear to be actively managing their inventories, to respond to changes in customer demand and the opportunity costs of holding cash, using innovative ways to bypass reserve requirements. Rising customer demand for new loans is fueled by and in turn drives further down falling credit standards and widens interest-rate spread in a vicious cycle of unrestrained credit expansion.
Again, on October 27, 2005, I wrote in How the US money market really works:
When asset prices rise, it reflects a change in the money supply/asset relationship, meaning more money chasing the same number of assets. Thus when asset prices rise, it is not necessarily a healthy sign for the economy. It reflects a troublesome condition in which additional money is not creating correspondingly more assets. It is a fundamental self-deception for economists to view asset-price appreciation as economic growth. A housing bubble is an example of this ...
Money now, especially virtual money, is created quite independently of Fed action, and money creation has become much less sensitive to interest-rate fluctuations. This explains why the measured pace at which the Fed has been raising the Fed funds rate target has little direct or immediate effect on the housing bubble.
On January 11, 2006, I wrote in Of debt, deflation and rotten apples:
In the US, where loan securitization is widespread, banks are tempted to push risky loans by passing on the long-term risk to non-bank investors through debt securitization. Credit-default swaps, a relatively novel form of derivative contract, allow investors to hedge against securitized mortgage pools. This type of contract, known as asset-back securities, has been limited to the corporate bond market, conventional home mortgages, and auto and credit-card loans. Last June [2005], a new standard contract began trading by hedge funds that bets on home-equity securities backed by adjustable-rate loans to subprime borrowers, not as a hedge strategy but as a profit center. When bearish trades are profitable, their bets can easily become self-fulfilling prophesies by kick-starting a downward vicious cycle.
Total outstanding home mortgages in the US in 1999 were $4.45 trillion, and by the end of 2004 this amount grew to $8.13 trillion, most of which was absorbed by refinancing of higher home prices at lower interest rates. When Greenspan took over at the Fed in 1987, total outstanding home mortgages in the US stood only at $1.82 trillion. On his 18-year watch, outstanding home mortgages quadrupled to $8.821 trillion by the end of third-quarter 2005. Much of this money has been printed by the Fed, exported through the trade deficit and re-imported as debt [in the capital account surplus]. Given that new housing units have been about 5% of the US housing stock per year, at the rate of about 2 million units per year, the housing stock increased by 100% over a period of 18 years while outstanding mortgages increased by more than 400%.
The Bank of Japan's zero-interest policy, combined with general asset deflation in the yen economy, has caught the Japanese insurance companies in a financial vise. Both new loan rates and asset values are insufficient to carry previous long-term yields promised to customers. Japan does not have a debtor-friendly bankruptcy law, as the US has. At any rate, insurance companies, like banks, cannot file for bankruptcy in the US. As a regulated sector, insurance companies are governed by an insurance commission in each state, which normally has a reinsurance fund to take care of unit insolvency. The funds are nowhere near sufficient to handle systemic collapse. The same happened to the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp in the 1980s.
The insurance sector in the US will face serious problems as the Federal Reserve again lowers the Fed Funds Rate targets and keeps them near zero for extended periods. Several segments of the insurance sector, such as health insurance and casualty insurance, are already in distress for other reasons. Government-insured pension schemes are under pressure as troubled industrial giants such as General Motors default on their pension obligation, along with the airlines.
In the era of industrial capitalism, a low interest rate was a stimulant. But in this era of finance capitalism flirting fearlessly with debt, lowering rates creates complex problems, especially when most big borrowers routinely hedge their interest-rate exposures. For them, even when short-term rates drop or rise abruptly, the cost remains the same for the duration of the loan term, the only difference being that they pay a different party. While debtors remain solvent, investors in securitized loans go under. Credit derivatives have been the hot source of profit for most finance companies and will be the weapon of massive destruction for the financial system, as Warren Buffet warned.
Again on February 16, 2006, I wrote in The global money and currency markets:
In the United States, when house prices have generally tripled in less than a decade, it is evidence that the value of the dollar has declined by a factor of three in the same time period. Consumer prices have not risen by the same amount because of outsourcing of manufacturing to low-wage economies overseas which also acts as a depressant on domestic wages. Imbalance in the economy appears if wages and earnings have not risen proportional to prices.
A homeowner whose house has increased 300% in market price while his income has risen only 30% has not become richer. He has become a victim of uneven inflation. He may enjoy a one-time joyride with cash-out financing with a new mortgage, but his income cannot sustain the new mortgage payments if interest rates rise, and he will lose his home. And interest rates will rise if his income increases, because that is how the Fed defines inflation. Thus when his income rises, the market price of his home will fall, giving him an incentive to walk away from a big mortgage in which he has little equity tie-up. This can become a systemic problem for the mortgage-backed security sector.
That, dear readers, is why the US subprime mortgage bust will spread and cause severe damage to the global finance system.
---------------------------------------------------
Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment group. His website is at www.henryckliu.com.
Years ago when the US debt bubble spread over to the housing sector, warnings from many quarters about the systemic danger of subprime mortgages were categorically dismissed by Wall Street cheerleaders as Chicken Little "sky is falling" hysteria. Even weeks before bad news on the housing finance sector was shaping up as a clear and present danger, adamant denial was still loud enough to drown out reason.
Both Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, two top officials in charge of US monetary policy, continue to provide obligatory assurance to the nervous public that the United States' economic fundamentals are sound in the face of a jittery market. Days before being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange, shares of the collapsed New Century, a distressed subprime mortgage lender, were recommended by a major Wall Street brokerage firm as a "buy". That firm is now under criminal and regulatory investigation.
On the pages of Asia Times Online over the past two years, I have tried to put forth the rationale for the inevitability of a US housing bubble burst, pointing out reasons that the resultant financial meltdown will be much more widespread and severe than has been generally acknowledged.
On September 14, 2005, I wrote in Greenspan, the Wizard of Bubbleland:
History has shown that the Fed, more often than not, has made wrong decisions based on faulty projection. Greenspan has been rightly criticized for letting a housing price "bubble" develop, equating it to the one that swept technology stocks to stratospheric levels before bursting in 2000. Greenspan argues the Fed's role is to mop up after bubbles burst, since bubbles are hard to spot and deflate safely. But accidents are also difficult to predict, and that difficulty is not a good argument against buying insurance. There is no doubt that there is a price to be paid for every policy action. But the price of prematurely slowing down a debt bubble is infinitely lower than letting the bubble build until it bursts uncontrollably. In finance as in medicine, prevention is preferable to even the best cure. All market participants know pigs lose money. And a monetary pig loses control of the economy.
Alan Greenspan, then Fed chairman, notwithstanding his denial of responsibility in helping through the 1990s to unleash the equity bubble, had this to say in 2004 in hindsight after the bubble burst in 2000: "Instead of trying to contain a putative bubble by drastic actions with largely unpredictable consequences, we chose, as we noted in our mid-1999 congressional testimony, to focus on policies to mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next expansion."
By "the next expansion", Greenspan meant the next bubble, which manifested itself in housing. The mitigating policy was a massive injection of liquidity into the US banking system.
There is a structural reason that the housing bubble replaced the high-tech bubble. Houses cannot be imported like manufactured goods, although much of the content in houses, such as furniture, hardware, windows, kitchen equipment and bath fixtures, is manufactured overseas. Construction jobs cannot be outsourced overseas to take advantage of wage arbitrage. Instead, some non-skilled jobs are filled by low-wage illegal immigrants.
Total outstanding home mortgages in the US in 1999 were US$4.45 trillion, and by 2004 this amount had grown to $7.56 trillion, most of which was absorbed by refinancing of higher home prices at lower interest rates. When Greenspan took over at the Fed in 1987, total outstanding US home mortgages stood only at $1.82 trillion. On his watch, outstanding home mortgages quadrupled. Much of this money has been printed by the Fed, exported through the trade deficit and reimported as debt.
The most popular of all derivative products is the interest-rate swap, which in essence allows participants to make bets on the direction interest rates will take. According to the US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), interest-rate swaps accounted for three out of four derivative contracts held by US commercial banks at the end of 1999. The notional value of these swaps totaled almost $25 trillion; 2-3% of that ($500 billion to $750 billion) reflected the banks' true credit risk in these products. Monetary economists have no idea whether notional values are part of the money supply and with what discount ratio. As we now know from experience, creative accounting has legally and illegally transformed debt proceeds as revenue.
The 2005 OCC report "Condition and Performance of Commercial Banks" shows that loan demand in the US grew at 11% in the first quarter of 2005 while core deposits grew at 7%, producing a 4-percentage-point gap. That meant that US banks' loan growth was not fully funded by deposits. The report identified possible risks as: cooling off in housing markets accompanying slower loan growth; past regional housing-price declines lingering; and credit-quality problems in housing spilling over to other loan types. Not a comforting picture.
Derivatives of all kinds weigh heavily on banks' capital structures. But interest-rate swaps can be especially toxic when interest rates rise. And since only a few business economists predicted a jump in rates for the first half of the year when 1999 began while yields in fact rose 25%, these institutions found themselves on the wrong side of an interest-rate gamble by 2000. Moreover, as interest rates rose, US banks' income diminished from interest-rate-related businesses such as mortgage lending. Interest-sensitive sources of income were the revenue disappointment in 2000, as trading was in 1999. The banks' response was to lower credit requirement for loans to increase interest-rate spread.
On Greenspan's 18-year watch, assets of US government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) ballooned 830%, from $346 billion to $2.872 trillion. GSEs are financing entities created by the US Congress to fund subsidized loans to certain groups of borrowers such as middle- and low-income homeowners, farmers and students. Agency mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) surged 670% to $3.55 trillion. Outstanding asset-backed securities (ABSs) exploded from $75 billion to more than $2.7 trillion.
Greenspan presided over the greatest expansion of speculative finance in history, including a trillion-dollar hedge-fund industry, bloated Wall Street-firm balance sheets approaching $2 trillion, a $3.3 trillion repo (repurchase agreement) market, and a global derivatives market with notional values surpassing an unfathomable $220 trillion. Granted, notional values are not true risk exposures. But a swing of 1% in interest rate on a notional value of $220 trillion is $2.2 trillion, about 20% of US gross domestic product.
This practice of borrowing short-term at low interest rates to lend long-term at higher interest rates, known as "carry trade" in bank parlance, when globalized by deregulated cross-border flow of funds eventually led to the Asian financial crisis of 1997, when interest-rate and exchange-rate volatility became the new paradigm. Today, there are undeniable signs that the same interest-rate risks have infested the US housing bubble in recent years. And the Fed's traditional gradualism, now revived as "measured pace" in raising the Fed Funds Rate targets in response to rapid asset-price inflation, has had little effect in curbing bank lending to fund rampant speculation.
In 2005, Greenspan repeatedly denied the existence of a national housing bubble by drawing on the conventional wisdom that the US housing market was highly disaggregated by location, which was true enough. Disaggregated markets are normally not exposed to contagion, a term given to the process of distressed deals dragging down healthy deals in the same market as speculator throw good money after bad to try to stem the tide of losses. But the bubble in the housing market was caused by creative housing finance made possible by the emergence of a deregulated global credit market through finance liberalization. The low cost of mortgages lifted all US house prices beyond levels sustainable by household income in otherwise disaggregated markets.
Under cross-border finance liberalization, negative wealth effects from asset-value correction are highly contagious. For example, the Dallas Fed Beige Book released on July 27, 2005, states: "Contacts say real-estate investment is extremely high in part because the district's competitively priced markets are attracting investment capital from more expensive coastal markets." The nationwide proliferation of no-income-verification, interest-only, zero-equity and cash-out loans, while making financial sense in a rising market, is fatally toxic in a falling market, which will hit a speculative boom as surely as the sun will set. Since the money financing this housing bubble is sourced globally, a bursting of the US housing bubble will have dire consequences globally.
Through mortgage-backed securitization, banks now are mere loan intermediaries that assume no long-term risk on the risky loans they make, which are sold as securitized debt of unbundled levels of risk to institutional investors with varying risk appetite commensurate with their varying need for higher returns. But who are institutional investors? They are mostly pension funds that manage the money the US working public depends on for retirement. In other words, the aggregate retirement assets of the working public are exposed to the risk of the same working public defaulting on their house mortgages.
When a homeowner loses his or her home through default of its mortgage, the homeowner will also lose his or her retirement nest egg invested in the securitized mortgage pool, while the banks stay technically solvent. That is the hidden network of linked financial landmines in a housing bubble financed by mortgage-backed securitization to which no one until recently has been paying attention. The bursting of the housing bubble will act as a detonator for a massive pension crisis.
On September 29, 2005, I wrote in The repo time bomb:
Commercial banks profit from using low-interest-rate repo proceeds to finance high-interest-rate "subprime" lending - credit cards, home equity loans, automobile loans etc - to borrowers of high credit risks at double-digit interest rates compounded monthly. To reduce their capital requirement, banks then remove their loans from their balance sheets by selling the CMOs (collateralized mortgage obligations) with unbundled risks to a wide range of investors seeking higher returns commensurate with higher risk. In another era, such high-risk/high-interest loan activities were known as loan-sharking. Yet Greenspan is on record as having said that systemic risk is a good tradeoff for unprecedented economic expansion.
Repos are now one of the largest and most active sectors in the US money market. More specifically, banks appear to be actively managing their inventories, to respond to changes in customer demand and the opportunity costs of holding cash, using innovative ways to bypass reserve requirements. Rising customer demand for new loans is fueled by and in turn drives further down falling credit standards and widens interest-rate spread in a vicious cycle of unrestrained credit expansion.
Again, on October 27, 2005, I wrote in How the US money market really works:
When asset prices rise, it reflects a change in the money supply/asset relationship, meaning more money chasing the same number of assets. Thus when asset prices rise, it is not necessarily a healthy sign for the economy. It reflects a troublesome condition in which additional money is not creating correspondingly more assets. It is a fundamental self-deception for economists to view asset-price appreciation as economic growth. A housing bubble is an example of this ...
Money now, especially virtual money, is created quite independently of Fed action, and money creation has become much less sensitive to interest-rate fluctuations. This explains why the measured pace at which the Fed has been raising the Fed funds rate target has little direct or immediate effect on the housing bubble.
On January 11, 2006, I wrote in Of debt, deflation and rotten apples:
In the US, where loan securitization is widespread, banks are tempted to push risky loans by passing on the long-term risk to non-bank investors through debt securitization. Credit-default swaps, a relatively novel form of derivative contract, allow investors to hedge against securitized mortgage pools. This type of contract, known as asset-back securities, has been limited to the corporate bond market, conventional home mortgages, and auto and credit-card loans. Last June [2005], a new standard contract began trading by hedge funds that bets on home-equity securities backed by adjustable-rate loans to subprime borrowers, not as a hedge strategy but as a profit center. When bearish trades are profitable, their bets can easily become self-fulfilling prophesies by kick-starting a downward vicious cycle.
Total outstanding home mortgages in the US in 1999 were $4.45 trillion, and by the end of 2004 this amount grew to $8.13 trillion, most of which was absorbed by refinancing of higher home prices at lower interest rates. When Greenspan took over at the Fed in 1987, total outstanding home mortgages in the US stood only at $1.82 trillion. On his 18-year watch, outstanding home mortgages quadrupled to $8.821 trillion by the end of third-quarter 2005. Much of this money has been printed by the Fed, exported through the trade deficit and re-imported as debt [in the capital account surplus]. Given that new housing units have been about 5% of the US housing stock per year, at the rate of about 2 million units per year, the housing stock increased by 100% over a period of 18 years while outstanding mortgages increased by more than 400%.
The Bank of Japan's zero-interest policy, combined with general asset deflation in the yen economy, has caught the Japanese insurance companies in a financial vise. Both new loan rates and asset values are insufficient to carry previous long-term yields promised to customers. Japan does not have a debtor-friendly bankruptcy law, as the US has. At any rate, insurance companies, like banks, cannot file for bankruptcy in the US. As a regulated sector, insurance companies are governed by an insurance commission in each state, which normally has a reinsurance fund to take care of unit insolvency. The funds are nowhere near sufficient to handle systemic collapse. The same happened to the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp in the 1980s.
The insurance sector in the US will face serious problems as the Federal Reserve again lowers the Fed Funds Rate targets and keeps them near zero for extended periods. Several segments of the insurance sector, such as health insurance and casualty insurance, are already in distress for other reasons. Government-insured pension schemes are under pressure as troubled industrial giants such as General Motors default on their pension obligation, along with the airlines.
In the era of industrial capitalism, a low interest rate was a stimulant. But in this era of finance capitalism flirting fearlessly with debt, lowering rates creates complex problems, especially when most big borrowers routinely hedge their interest-rate exposures. For them, even when short-term rates drop or rise abruptly, the cost remains the same for the duration of the loan term, the only difference being that they pay a different party. While debtors remain solvent, investors in securitized loans go under. Credit derivatives have been the hot source of profit for most finance companies and will be the weapon of massive destruction for the financial system, as Warren Buffet warned.
Again on February 16, 2006, I wrote in The global money and currency markets:
In the United States, when house prices have generally tripled in less than a decade, it is evidence that the value of the dollar has declined by a factor of three in the same time period. Consumer prices have not risen by the same amount because of outsourcing of manufacturing to low-wage economies overseas which also acts as a depressant on domestic wages. Imbalance in the economy appears if wages and earnings have not risen proportional to prices.
A homeowner whose house has increased 300% in market price while his income has risen only 30% has not become richer. He has become a victim of uneven inflation. He may enjoy a one-time joyride with cash-out financing with a new mortgage, but his income cannot sustain the new mortgage payments if interest rates rise, and he will lose his home. And interest rates will rise if his income increases, because that is how the Fed defines inflation. Thus when his income rises, the market price of his home will fall, giving him an incentive to walk away from a big mortgage in which he has little equity tie-up. This can become a systemic problem for the mortgage-backed security sector.
That, dear readers, is why the US subprime mortgage bust will spread and cause severe damage to the global finance system.
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Henry C K Liu is chairman of a New York-based private investment group. His website is at www.henryckliu.com.
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