Bailouts

Jon Stewart Daily Show on Bailout

I am always amazed by Jon Stewart, by the way that he puts perspective on things.  And here is one example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMK5PLVX8M4

Vanity Fair does Iceland

Michael Lewis, whom you may remember wrote the Portfolio Magazine article on the subprime crisis that was part of our Week 5 readings, has turned his attention to the Iceland financial crisis in the April 2009 Vanity Fair (yes, i know it's only barely March...).  Worth a read if anyone's looking for a vaguely class-related distraction from studying.

(hat tip, Freakonomics blog)

Consumer Side of the Sub-Prime Mortgage Industry

Eunjoe, Cleve, Anush and I will be presenting this afternoon on the consumer side of the sub-prime mortgage industry.  We will be discussing the various types of sub-prime loans, what laws govern lending practices, and possible fraud in the appraisal and lending market.  

Here is the link to our presentation. 

Here are some links with useful background information:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1ed1d3e2-f4f3-11dd-9e2e-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

http://www.appraisalfoundation.org/s_appraisal/index.asp

USPAP 2008 - 2009 EDITION:

 http://commerce.appraisalfoundation.org/html/USPAP2008/index.htm

http://www.ofheo.gov/media/news%20releases/HVCCFinalCODE122308.pdf

https://www.namb.org/images/namb/GovernmentAffairs/NAMB_Lawsuit_HVCC%20(Feb%2023,%202009).pdf

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_07/b4119042628146.htm

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19750780/

http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/23/real_estate/financing/appraisalfraud/index.htm

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/04/business/fi-appraise4

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laland/2008/03/cuomo-sees-ramp.html

http://www.searchlightcrusade.net/2007/04/appraisal-fraud-1.html

http://appraisalnewsonline.typepad.com/appraisal_news_for_real_e/home_valuation_code_of_conduct/

Illinois Real Estate Appaiser Licensing Act of 2002: http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs5.asp?ActID=1368&ChapAct=225%26nbsp%3BILCS%26nbsp%3B458%2F&ChapterID=24&ChapterName=PROFESSIONS+AND+OCCUPATIONS&ActName=Real+Estate+Appraiser+Licensing+Act+of+2002.

CA regs guidelines: www.orea.ca.gov/html/fed_regs.shtml

http://www.bis.org/publ/work259.pdf?noframes=1

http://www.fdic.gov/regulations/laws/rules/6500-2515.html
http://www.bis.org/publ/wgpapers/cgfs26lehnert.pdf
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/financial/2007/fil07006a.html
http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_04/12cfr226_04.html
http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/homes/rea19.shtm
http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13062194
http://www.newyorkfed.org/mortgagemaps/
Mortgage Fraud - Sources:

2007 Mortgage Fraud Report (FBI): http://www.fbi.gov/publications/fraud/mortgage_fraud07.htm

Warrant issued for Christopher J. Warren: http://www.examiner.com/x-2965-LA-Fraud-Examiner~y2009m2d10-Arrest-warrant-issued-for-man-who-bragged-of-mortgage-fraud

Arrest warrant for Christopher J. Warren: http://ml-implode.com/info/Arrest-Warrant.pdf

Warren made $275,000 on fraud in a single day: http://www.news10.net/news/story.aspx?storyid=54484&catid=2
Google Cache of Warren's confession (also available in the appendix to
his arrest warrant): http://74.125.95.132/search?q=cache:Szjk5BFVh1gJ:www.triduanum.com/memo.pdf+memo.pdf+site:www.triduanum.com&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=usAmeriquest Lending Practices, via L.A. Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/04/business/fi-ameriquest4
Warren Apprehended After Fleeing the Country: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/12/christopher-warren-fraud-_n_166340.html
Ameriquest Lending Practices: "Workers Say Lender Ran 'Boiler Rooms'",
via L.A. Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2005/feb/04/business/fi-ameriquest4
Ameriquest settles with states for $325 million: http://www.oag.state.tx.us/oagnews/release.php?id=2093

The Ameriquest settlement:  http://www.oag.state.tx.us/newspubs/releases/2006/012306ameriquest.pdf

Update on the Mortgage Affordability Plan

Details are available, as promised.  The WSJ has a through fact sheet here, and overview/article here.  Forbes is skeptical about the unanswered questions, here.

Basically, there are two parts to the plan: (1) refinancing; (2) modifying.

Refinancing, to help 4-5 million homeowners: These details have not changed since my last post.  The program ends in June 2010.

Modifying, to help 3-4 million homeowners, at a cost of $75 billion:

• The plan covers first-lien loans, on principle residences, with unpaid principle up to $729,750.  (Forbes adds that second-lien holders will also be offered incentives to quit their positions, to make the modification of the first-lien more plausible.)
• Lenders must reduce qualified mortgages to payments no greater than 38% of the borrowers income.
• The government will subsidize the difference for reductions in monthly payment down to 31% of the borrowers income.
• Interest rates can be set as low as 2%, and terms as long as 40 years, to reach the 31%-of-income objective.
• Servicers get $1k for each eligible modification, and another $1k per year for three years so long as the workout is successful.
• Mortgage holders get $1500 for modifying while the mortgage is still just at risk of default.
• Borrowers who get their mortgage modified, and stay current on the new payments, can earn $1k per year for five years.
• The loan must have been originated prior to January 2009, and modification is availble through December 2012.
• FreddieMac will audit for compliance.
• See the fact sheet for more details.

After five, years, the interest rates on the modified loans can be increased by 1% per year, up to a ceiling set at the time of modification.  Much like the problem of Ricardian equivalence with deficit spending, I am curious as to whether homeowners will spend the money that the modification saves them, or whether they will store it away to cover future increases.  Of course, if the homeowner is not "saving" any money because they didn't have it to spend in the first place, this is less of a problem.  But, if the plan is not putting money into people's pockets, then it is just a confidence-boosting, property-value-propping measure. 

Is this the best way to spend $75 billion?  Would it be better spent on municipalities?  Tax cuts?  Shares of Citibank?  The Obama Administration has taken an avowedly three-pronged approach to the bailout: credit liquidity + consumer stimulus + foreclosure avoidance = recovery.  They are spending trillions on liquidity, hundreds of billions on stimulus, and only a modest $75 billion on foreclosure avoidance (remember that the program to refinance is costless because the losses to F&F are neutralized by the benefit of fewer foreclosures, in theory).  Is this the right balance?  Ms. Bradshaw has suggested that the cost of righting the economy has gotten larger the more that Washington has spent trying to do the job; this makes me wonder if Japan took measures to prop up homeownership during their lost decade.  The presentation last week suggested that decisive nationalization was largely responsible for their turn around, and as a loyal reader of the Economist, I continue to question whether or not that is the best way for the US to spend its bailout dollars.

Thoughts?

Continental-Illinois

Jeff, Paul, Robert and I are looking forward to telling you all about the rise, fall, rescue and implications of Continental-Illinois Bank, a longtime Chicago institution, which was housed in what is now the Bank of America building on LaSalle and Jackson, next to the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Fed. Until this year, Continental-Illinois was the largest bank bailout in US history.

Here's some background for our presentation:
WSJ Op-Ed FDIC Chairman William Isaac oversaw Continental-Illinois  (2/24/09)

Q&A with Isaac on the Continental-Illinois rescue in 1984 (6/4/84)

Wharton Business School Report on Continental Illinois

"Here Comes Continental" article from Dun's Review (December 1978)

FDIC: Continental-Illinois and "Too Big to Fail"

References for Sweden

SWEDEN!

Carter Bildt, “Sweden’s Crash and Recovery,” http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/28/opinion/edbildt.php

Carter Dougherty, "Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way," http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/23/business/worldbusiness/23krona.html

The Economist, "The Swedish Model," http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/01/the_swedish_model.cfm

Peter Englund, Financial Deregulation in Sweden, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MImg&_imagekey=B6V64-45GSCBT-3H-1&_cdi=5804&_user=5745&_orig=search&_coverDate=05%2F31%2F1990&_sk=999659997&view=c&wchp=dGLzVzz-zSkzV&md5=4dbb3272fcb019634415b90f5c9a53d1&ie=/sdarticle.pdf

O. Emre Ergungor, "On the Resolution of the Financial Crises: The Swedish Experience," http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/POLICYDIS/pdp21.pdf

James K. Jackson, "The U.S. Financial Crisis: Lessons from Sweden,"CRS Report for Congress," http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/110770.pdf

PennyMac: A New Niche Emerges

The NYT has an interesting article today on PennyMac, a company comprised of a number of former Countrywide execs (including former president Stanford Kurland).  PennyMac makes its money by buying delinquent home mortgages from the government (such as its purchase from the FDIC of $560M worth of delinquent residential loans for a price tag of $43.2M) and either foreclosing or refinancing, keeping a piece of what they can collect.

The involvement of former Countrywide execs and their ability to profit from the crisis some claim they had a hand in causing has provoked heated criticism from some, while others, such as individuals who were able to stay in their homes as a result of PennyMac's refinancing option, are just plain grateful.

Thoughts flowing from our discussion of LTCM

On January 23 of this year, the Deal Journal described the situation of bond insurers as "LTCM 2.0" because their dire financial situation threatened banks with tens of billions of dollars in write-downs.  The NY State insurance regulator even said that he was planning to talk to "other parties about possible future capital investments" in MBIA and Ambac.  Apparently, $1 billion would be enough to prop up Ambac, which would only cost the fifteen major banks only $66 million each. 

In October 2007, these same banks negotiated over creating a fund (Master Liquidity Enhancement Conduit, or M-LEC) to prevent a sharp sell-off in securities owned by their SIVs.  This "bad bank" prototype was pilloried for its moral hazard and implicit favoritism towards Wall Street, two criticisms also lodged against the LTCM bailout.  M-LEC was the brainchild of none other than Hank Paulson at the Treasury.  The driving concern was that tight credit and mark-to-market rules would trigger a fire sale of SIV assets, so the M-LEC was supposed to provide a market for the securities, up to $400 billion at one point.  In December of 2007, the banks announced that the plan was "not needed at this time."  Perhaps they were afraid of the perceptions that followed the label of "bailout."  The "private funds plus public instigation" model appears to have been poisoned by events subsequent to LTCM.  It is not clear whether M-LEC would have been a productive move, but it is clear in retrospect that some action could have had real value.

As for those bond insurers, there has been no "bailout" yet.  MBIA just posted a fourth-quarter loss of $1.16 billion.  All of the seven bond insurers with top ratings at the start of the crisis have been downgraded by at least one rating agency (and we know how reliable they are!).  This has hurt municipalities.  NY Governor David Paterson is calling for the Treasury to bailout the municipal bond insurers with $2-3 billion, to return at least one to Aaa status, so that local governments can borrow at lower rates.  We all know how well suppressing market valuations of risk worked in the housing market, but these are crazy days.  TARP will not cover these bond insurers--auto manufacturers, yes; bond insurers, no.  It may be a funciton of limited funds, however, not a perverse textualism.  Barney Frank, always eager to employ government guarantees, has called for a federal agency that would issue bonds backed by the full faith and credit in order to displace the private bond insurance market.  Anecdotally (F&F), this model of intervention seems inferior to the LTCM approach.  Even if the major banks are functionally insolvent, the numbers are at least suggestive that this could be a positive-value investment.  It is not clear why government intervention would be superior, outside the judgment of some congressmen.

The Eurporean Union is more tepid on sweeping government interventions, and has chosen not to "bailout" Eastern Europe.  Slovakia and Slovenia are not the same, apparently, and one suspects that neither are all bond insurers equally meritorious recipitents of public money.  Certainly, the example of LTCM shows that firm-specific action can still count, but the experiences of Lehman and Bear Stearns also show that sometimes it is better to paint with a broad brush.  Much like the partners of LTCM, the countries of Eastern Europe are insulted at the suggestion that they need a bailout, at least some of them anyway.   A "substantial fall" in the value of a country's currency, after all, is not necessarily a "difficulty" that calls for a bailout, at least in the eyes of the Polish Finance Minister.  The citizens of Iceland would probably disagree (Vanity Fair), and so does Hungary, which is calling for expedited access to the Euro zone.  Yet again, we see an effort to find play in the joints of a policy initiative as a means of indirectly bailing out distressed actors.  LTCM could have "just" gotten access to the discount window back in 1998, and it would have been fudging the lines, not a "bailout," right?  (Although, that didn't do much last March for the investment banking community.)

Maybe it would have been better to just nationalize LTCM.  Dramatically different, yes?  But, why didn't tax payers get that eventual profit from the "bailout"?  After all, they're the ones who passed the regulations that made LTCM possible in the first place.  The simple answer seems to be that we weren't looking at a "zombie fund"--unlike the zombie banks of Japan and our own zombies on Wall Street and in Charlotte today.  On the other hand, those zombies were kept from the peace of death by taxpayer injections that were just less successful than the rescue of LTCM.  Bold action, whomever is paying, looks anecdotally to be superior to timidity even with equity stakes.  The Economist demonstrates that timidity hurts equity prices:

Only Bank of America and Citigroup have lost more value than did LTCM, but it took them much, much longer.  The Fed was unaware of the trouble at LTCM until the week prior to its orchestrated "bailout."  As the M-LEC debates show, the Treasury was well-aware of the systemic tremors in the banking industry, but no one acted as swiftly or decisively as Alan Greenspan did in 1998.  (At the time, Greenspan was actually perceived as cautious.)  The Economist, following Krugman's idea of "lemon socialism," calls the current bank rescues "handouts without proper workouts," and notes the parallel to Japan.  The rescue of LTCM was, first and foremost, a workout.  This raises the question, somewhat tongue in cheek, of whether we only get the sense something was really a bailout when it goes terribly.  The biggest quagmires are probably the rescues least deserving of the label "bailout," since we already have words like "waste," "disaster," "debacle," and "incompetence" to describe them.  Crying "bailout" just re-frames the debate in favor of politicans at the expense of the parties that operated in the shadow of government policy all along.

But, are politicians really to blame for today's crisis or LTCM?  If we do Meriwether, Scholes, and Merton the benefit of calling them cogs in the wheel, who is the engine?  If we believe that risk taking produces growth, and that growth benefits everyone, then maybe its those taxpayers who are to blame in the first place.  Well, voters, not tax payers.  But, that is an unsatisfying story.  First, voting is a noisy control mechanism and financial regulation is not usually the most salient issue in elections.  Second, the benefits of growth are not distributed in parallel with the costs of the bailout.  Nevertheless, its useful to think about the social underpinnings of the LTCM crisis.  At the time, the business cycle, while volatile, appeared to be trending inexoribly upward.  The dotcom bust was still in the offing.  Belicose politicians called for increased regulation, but didn't deliver--everyone in Washington knows what Stan O'Neal said: You have to keep dancing.  If the trend is still upward today, its only going to look like it from a long time-horizon.  If the salvation of LTCM was a get-out-regulation-free card for hedgefunds and financial institutions, the time-horizon will make all the difference in deciding whether or not it was a good idea.

Speaking of decisionmaking, six out of twelve people stopped on the street in New York cannot write "one trillion" in numerals:

This is a somewhat more surprising instance of people not even understanding the numbers that dominate their situation.  Setting aside the unsettling questions about the efficacy of a democracy where people cannot conceptualize the amount of their money that is being spent, it is perhaps more plausible that Meriwether would not have recognized the risks that faced him.  The Economist special on the financial crisis (Greed and Fear) made it uncomfortably clear that the tail risks in the modern financial world are larger than logic would suggest they should be.  Perhaps this whole debate over the nature of a bailout boils down to a paradoxical assumption: Humans should understand how to regulate-and-hedge away the risks that they imperfectly understand.  As long as there are errors in risk valuation, there will have to be "bailouts"--not because anyone has made an error, but because they have behaved rationally and not set aside reserves to cover losses that they could not anticipate that they were unable to anticipate.  Some will say we should just "invest between the thirty yard lines," but as Mr. Harmon has already pointed out: how do you know where the thirty yard line is?

Ian Ayres strikes a similar note on the Freakonomics blog, although I am pretty sure he would disagree with my characterization.  Ayres was writing to extol the virtues of hard work and his personal conviction that successful outliers are the product of circumstances, not nature.  He makes his kids get up early for "daddy school," where they do things like publish statistical studies in peer-reviewed journals when they are nine.  Ayres is not blind to the "winner-take-all" nature of our society, however, and he notes that not every little girl would get to live in a "house on the hill" even if they all went to daddy school.  Productive technology has concentrated the benefits of excellence into a smaller and smaller group.  The very best get a disproportionate share of the pie.

Consequently, Ayres rejects the idea that society could subsidize the nation's children with extra hours of school and class on Saturdays and see many more successful people emerge from our public education system.  The suggestion he opposes is a kind of "bail-in" (a term coined by Professor Henderson): pump money into children (mortgages) now because the local government (market) will not make the right investment (loan) in their education (homeownership) and we would all be happier in a world where more people got better (bigger) educations (homes).  Instead of this waste (because it will still just produce "one" winner who will take all), Ayres supports the idea that government should instead "dampen the rat-race incentives to get up before dawn 360 days a year."  But, I don't think he's canceling daddy school.

The relevance, of course, is that people foolishly invest in their own success when a rational appraisal of their chances of greatness would counsel a much lower investment.  Just like we cannot grasp the risk of derivatives, we struggle to understand the benefits of competition.  Rather than promote the greatest possible peaks, whether of financial returns or personal greatness, we should just smooth the curve.  The Post Office might really be the answer after all.  (Go Garrett!)  We could bail-in ourselves by incentivizing away competition for the masses, leaving the few still in daddy school with less need to take large, leveraged risks to capitalize on their investments in personal success. 

In this story, LTCM was that winner who took all, at least for four years.  It was composed of the very brightest financiers, but they were pushed to take every greater risks to maintain their lucrative position at the top of the pile.  Instead of softening the blow from their gambit, the government should have exacerbated the costs of their behavior with criminal sanctions.  That way, in the future, the kids from daddy school won't put the system at so much risk to come out on top.  Workers in Korea have bizzarely overcome the collective action problem to do just this, and taken across-the-board wage cuts to forestall layoffs.  Maybe "bailouts" are just the dark side of our cultural commitment to victory and individualism.

High highs imply low lows, such as the impending threat to law and order as state court systems take a weed whacker to their budgets and court dates and prosecution levels plunge.  Or rising suicide rates.  The starkest difference between the LTCM bailout and the crisis today was that Greenspan's focus was on global capital markets, whereas the Obama Administration appears much more focused on domestic politics.  In the end, I think that LTCM goes to show that not all government intervention is created equally, and that perhaps the greatest benefit of swift action is that it can preempt the involvement of the political branches in our economy.

Context counts, though, and our market today isn't looking so hot (see below).  In 1998, the market context surrounding LTCM was different (see farther below).

Source: dshort.com (http://dshort.com/articles/2009/bear-turns-to-bull.html).  This graph shows that, based on the value of the market on a given fateful day, how much the market declined as a percentage of that starting figure over the following months.  It is interesting to note where our current crisis jumped tracks from JV to Varsity--in October 2008, just before the collapse of Lehman, sale of Merrill, and revelation of AIG's condition.  The period following and surrounding LTCM shows a much different picture:

Note that in an equivalent (homemade) graph, starting from the fateful day and going forward, we actually see positive growth over the next two years.  LTCM did not happen during a recession, as further demonstrated by the next graph:

Even starting from seventeen months before the LTCM bailout, and observing for seventeen more afterward, the trend is positive.  The period immediately surrounding the LTCM bailout saw a drop in the rate of growth, but there are no heavy losses market-wide.

Just for fun, here is a graph starting just prior to the LTCM bailout, and tracking the S&P 500 through today:

Should our use of the term "bailout" be influenced by the state of the private markets?  Or, should that only affect our criteria for success?

Thoughts?

Iceland - Follow up

Following our discussions about Iceland's crisis, here are some interesting articles:

- Iceland's parliament and government have ousted the central bank chief and former prime minister, David Oddsson. By law, the central-bank chief can't be fired and Mr Oddsson declined to step down. Thus, the government drafted a bill that (i) reorganizes the central bank and (ii) requires that its governor have a master's degree in economics. Mr Oddsson, a lawyer, did not meet that requirement. ( http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123567054487684967.html ) A Norwegian economist has been hired as interim governor. However, there is an issue as to whether a foreign citizen can be hired to this position (http://www.icelandreview.com/icelandreview/daily_news/?cat_id=29314&ew_0_a_id=320563). 

- Iceland is trying to raise money by selling some of its ambassadorial residences (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123570510242090561.html)