Weekend edition: Merrill Lynch and a guy who admits killing an underworld hitman

All my favourite blogs are in a rut this weekend. The finance blogs are all Lehman all the time. The political ones are all Sarah Palin all the time. Both are serious issues but on which I can add little original thought.

I have actually bothered to read a Lehman 10K cover to cover once. I understood only marginally more when I finished than when I started - so my ability to add value is thin. [Then again almost nobody actually understands the brokers.]

Given my lack of ability to add to the real issues I thought I would do something different – something highly tangential but topical – only because it involves a failing broker and this is the weekend of failing brokers. It also gives me a wonderfully salacious title. The title is only deserved because Merrill Lynch lent to a dodgy organisation which in turn lent to the underworld. It failed to do due diligence and it may have failed to perfect security.

Failing Australian brokers

When brokers fail there are losses for people who have financed the broker with bonds etc – and these losses are generally not transmitted systematically. And then there are losses to counterparties who are just trading with the broker in the ordinary course of running their investments or running their businesses. Those losses are much more systematically dangerous because they make people scared to deal with all brokers and potentially with counterparties to brokers and hence can cause systemic problems.

Australia recently had some very large problems at very small brokers. These brokers are much smaller than Wall Street behemoths – so whilst they might provide some dry-run tests of the problem – they are just worth reading about because they are so colourful.

First however I am going to start with a diversion – the Melbourne gangland wars

The Melbourne Gangland wars

Melbourne – the second largest city in Australia - recently had the colourful spectator sport of pretty well the entire crime establishment murdering each other in a tit-for-tat professional hit style.

Given that (almost) all the victims were underworld characters when the murder trials happened at the end it was hard to get people to take them seriously. As far as most Melbournians were concerned if the underworld wants to remove each other why should anyone want to stop it?

One of the more interesting characters from the gangland wars was Mick Gatto – a former heavyweight boxer who was named as enforcer at various legal inquiries. He has convictions for burglary, assaulting police, racketeering, possessing firearms, and obtaining financial advantage by deception. Most Wall Street brokers wouldn't want him to marry their daughter.

Mick Gatto shot Andrew Veniamin who was an underworld hitman. He was arrested and the prosecutors over-reached charging him with first degree. Gatto convinced the jury that if he hadn’t shot Veniamin, then Veniamin would have shot him. It was self defence he cried and the jury agreed. Given that everyone even remotely involved seemed to get murdered the jury was probably right.

Mick Gatto’s private business has a title that if it were a Government department you would consider Orwellian. It is Arbitrations and Mediations Pty Ltd.

Mick Gatto would be fearsome when arbitrating any dispute

Opes Prime

Now having got this far I thought I should introduce the stockbroker. The broker was called Opes Prime. Opes did a really neat trick of allowing a little more leverage than most stock brokers, accepting small caps as collateral and allowing a very much wider range of shorting than most stock brokers.

Opes used documentation loosely based on US Prime Brokerage documentation to deal with its clients. In Australia most brokers hold their clients shares in a custody arrangement called CHESS in the clients names. The shares cannot be repledged. Some margin lenders (notably Leveraged Equities) provide securitised margin loans where the repledging of the shares looks legally difficult. Opes however provided loans provided you pledged your shares to them and granted them permission to repledge those shares. Read that twice – it is startling – but it is in fact not different from a lot of margin accounts provided by brokers globally.

When Opes went bust the clients discovered that they did not own the shares. Opes didn’t own them either because they had been repledged to ANZ Bank (an large Australian bank) and a firm most readers of this blog will be familiar with – Merrill Lynch.

Merrill Lynch and ANZ took the collateral that was pledged to them and sold it to recover most their loans (it may have been all their loans in the case of Merrills). Opes had over a billion dollars in debt to these institutions, 500 million of which was to Merrills.

There were people with $1 million in stock at Opes and with loans of $100 thousand and they lost everything.

Opes was an ugly story – it hardly reflects well on Merrill or ANZ. Both ANZ and Merrills are being sued for aiding and abetting a fraud. It really matters who you lend a half a billion to these days...

It is also potentially going to get VERY ugly for Merrill Lynch. There is quite a deal of evidence that neither ANZ or Merrill Lynch properly perfected security over collateral that they sold in satisfaction of their loans to Opes Prime. They are getting sued by the liquidator with the aim or removing their status as secured creditors. If Merrills loses this they probably lose a quarter of a billion. ANZ looks to want to settle so there is a real case here.

Tying the two parts of this post together

I started with the Melbourne underworld and their grotesque series of murders – and I wound up with Merrill Lynch and ANZ. I need a pretty good segway here.

So here goes. It turns out that one of the big client group of Opes were – as the press phrased it

business people if you very loosely used the term ‘business people’.

What were they doing? I don’t know – what do such business peopled do in a market with a broker that will allow them to short anything and doesn't ask too many questions about insider trading? You can fill your own details in.

And where did the OPES money go? After all they didn’t piss it against the wall with mindless speculation as per Lehman. They lent it on margin – but most margin loans should be collectable by selling stock (so a broker needs to be pretty incompetent to lose it).

But they did lose it – hundreds of millions of dollars worth of it.

Somehow the rumour is that it went to Singapore (and then presumably on into the financial netherworld). And then Mick Gatto – remember him – the guy that killed Andrew Veniamin got on the plane (first class I gather) and flew to Singapore to chase it. He was doing it on behalf of the above mentioned "business people" who were now clients of Mediations and Arbitrations – a firm that promises to "make problems disappear".

Here is a picture of Mick on the chairs in the Singapore Airlines lounge in Singapore. I have sat on those chairs myself.

And here is the press link to explain his visit.

I have no idea who he was chasing but what we know is that Merrill Lynch (possibly without perfecting their security) funded a dodgy stockbroker who in turn funded rather suspect people in Australia, and then lost their money and somewhat annoyed a real life Dexter – a guy who admitted killing an underworld hitman.

David Einhorn went after Lehman Brothers and won. But in the scheme of things David Einhorn is a wimp. At least Mick Gatto wasn't after them. Lehman never annoyed Mick Gatto and Merrill probably did.

=============

Now this is a serious investment blog - and I should answer the question on everyone's lips: "was there contagion?" The answer was YES. The other brokers with similar financing structures in Australia got into terrible trouble. Chimera hit the wall. Tricom is in diabolical trouble. The spectacular flame out of even a small broker causes contagion.

And that should worry everyone this week.

John Hempton

Funny – it is working!

At the end of an atrocious day I am going to be contrarian.

The Frannie bailout is working.

No – it can’t save Lehman.

And companies that have to roll over billions of dollars of debt in the next few years are all problematic.

But then there was no reason why injection of money into Frannie should have solved Lehman’s problems. Lehman has to find its own money or fail or be bailed out (at effectively total loss to shareholders).

All a Frannie bailout could do is make conventional mortgages – the stuff that Frannie issued and insured – cheaper. Any other claim for the Frannie bailout is a stretch.

And on the limited thing that it is doing the evidence so far looks good. Here is the yield of Fannie Mae perfect coupons – note the spectacular drop in the last few days.

Note the 5.16% current yield versus the approximately 6% this measure seemd stuck at before the legislation and the 5.7ish numbers before the weekend.

The 1.7 billion Pimco one-day gain is the same story.

Frannie Mortgages have got much cheaper in a few days.

That should flow through to retail mortgage rates far more effectively than any of the recent Fed cuts. It probably won't solve the housing problems but it will ameliorate them. Any other a-priori claim for the bailout was optimism over analysis. And you can claim the bailout is a failure by setting up and demolishing a straw man. But an objective look says this bailout is by-and-large succeeding at its modest aims.

John Hempton

Mortgage insurers and the bailout

One investor I respect was terribly surprised that the mortgage insurers fell on the Frannie bailout.

In my “Do you believe in magic post” I suggested that the mortgage insurers continue to write business only because of the continued goodwill of the GSEs. And the GSEs only do that because they hope the premiums on new business will allow the mortgage insurers to run ahead of the losses on the old business.

There has been a change of control of the GSEs. And the new management have no incentive to hide the losses of the old management by feeding premium to potential insolvent mortgage insurers.

I have no idea what the conservators will do to the mortgage insurers. But the change in management of the GSEs is unlikely to be positive though it may be neutral.

John Hempton

This blog’s evolving view on Fannie Mae

I was once short Fannie Mae understanding (well before their regulator) of the extent of the scam in their derivative accounting. I even managed to quantify it. [Funnily enough executives who I thought up to their neck in that scam are still in senior positions at Fannie. Will the conservator please sack them for cause. If they leave with big packages I will be disappointed.]

The stock however didn’t fall out of bed – and whilst we made money – it was hardly worth the stress.

When I first looked at Fannie for this blog my predisposition was to go long. However I would not do that without analysis – so I had a go at doing the analysis.

The first post – Fannie Mae Part I – detailed the revenue and pre-provision profit potential of the company. That was really the “upside case” and it was considerable. I got quite a lot of emails from short sellers who thought I was insane. They were right I might add.

Fannie Mae Part IA detailed my views about the way Fannie was feeding business to insolvent mortgage insurers to keep them solvent. It was bearish because the mortgage insurers provide protection for Fannie on a large number of high loan-to-valuation mortgages and if the mortgage insurers were rubbery then Fannie also was.

The next post was a plea to help model Fannie Mae’s losses. The range of numbers in the marketplace was huge – and the analysis behind those numbers was thin. It was however thin for a reason as the modelling post makes clear. My plea for help fell on deaf ears. This blog has 1000 daily visits but nobody could provide me a decent model of Fannie’s losses.

Fannie Mae Part II discussed whether Fannie Mae was insolvent or profoundly insolvent. I thought that mattered then and it matters now. If Fannie Mae is correctly reserved now I figure the stock is worth more than $8 even after the bail out. It is however not correctly reserved – and the extent of shortfall is the critical factor for the value of Fannie Mae and for the risk to Federal Government from this bailout. I figured if the shortfall were 80 billion then Fannie Mae was “borderline profoundly insolvent”.

Fannie Mae Part III gave up altogether and produced what I think remains a rubbery estimate of Fannie Mae losses above trend. The number was $64 billion – but there is some Alt-A and I should include trend losses. If you do that you get something close to $80 billion. I concluded – much to my surprise as follows:

My a-priori expectation was that Fannie was going to be better than that. If you had put a gun at my head and asked me would I prefer be long or short I would have said long.

Now I would say short.

I have no position and it is likely to stay that way. But for once I do not think the shorts are grotesquely overstating their case.

That call was good – but not strong enough. I should have shorted the stock.

After the fix was in and the legislation was in place to guarantee Fannie Mae I was perplexed that Fannie Mae spreads did not drop. In this post I made one of the best observations I have made on this blog – but I did not hammer it home because I thought the spreads were so irrational they would drop shortly. I said:

Monday, August 18, 2008
Foreigners selling Fannie and Freddie debt
I wrote here about what seemed to be the irrationally wide spread on Fannie and Freddie debt. We are after the Paulson plan. The US Government has promised it stands behind these entities. But the spreads still widen.
Widening spreads will cause the end - because Fannie and Freddie need to borrow humungous piles of money.
Now Naked Capitalism has a nice post on foreigners selling Fannie and Freddie debt. That seems irrational to me - but it is still happening - and that is not good news for the GSEs.

I expressed my opinion about the irrationality here.

Even then I did not think that the Bush administration would step in and socialise the problem.
The Bush administration is hardly characterised by decisive well considered action. There is an election coming – why not just palm it off on the next guy?

I "missunderestimated" them. Paulson is his own man and whilst George Bush didn’t think it was a bailout Paulson knew better.

I think the bailout was the right thing to do – expressed here. And I am surprised it is so generous (expressed here).

The question will now come down entirely to the “known unknown” – which is how big are the credit losses. I think my estimate here is the best so far anywhere in the market – and I barely think it worth the place in the Blogger computer server. Nobody knows. If they are bigger than about 80 billion the Government will probably wear some losses. If they are less than 80 billion the preferred will probably retain some value. If they are less than 40 billion the common will be a good buy. Unfotunately I come out about 80 billion. That will make the government whole but leave everyone else very distressed. Freddie Mac being worse than Fannie Mae will wind up costing the government money.

I hope this series has helped people. It helped me to write it.

Finally - this bail-out is only worth doing if the spreads on agency debt falls. Funnily enough it still is not - see this post from Naked Capitalism. That looks strange to me. But I have given up disbelieving things because they look strange.



John Hempton

Some quick analysis of what the Frannie bailout means

There is plenty of analysis on the web – and I have read my regular blogs – so I thought I might do something different. Warning this is a long post – and it is coming straight off the typewriter – so there are certain to be errors and misunderstandings. You are getting the fast-version analysis – and my slow version may wind up far more nuanced. I expect to be corrected - and will keep the comments as a rolling update...

I might have a go at working out whether there is any value left in Fannie stock or preferreds. This is by definition heavily speculative and not the sort of thing I would trade on. This is super-rough.

I am also only doing it for Fannie as I have not thought much about the numbers for Freddie other than that everything is substantially worse for Freddie.

The first surprise

The bailout looks more generous for the common than I would have expected and it is fairly generous to the preferred. The government has given Fannie (and Freddie):

· a large line of credit – effectively a guarantee they would remain liquid at least whilst the facility remains – to 2009, and

· a put option on preferred stock whenever its book value goes negative (in other words the right to put preferred only when strictly necessary – effectively a guarantee backed by $100 billion that they will remain solvent

· The most explicit statement yet that the Federal Government stands behind these entities – but with the liquidity support limited to 2009 and the capital support limited to 100 billion for now

In exchange Fannie has given the government

• one billion dollars, paid in preferred stock, not cash
  
  
• 80% of the common equity
  
  
• an indeterminate annual fee which can be paid in preferreds
  
  
• A change in regulation which will force Fannie’s owned portfolio to reduce over time to $250 billion
  
  

That is it for now.

Well that looks generous to me. There is NOTHING here that wipes out the preferred (though its dividend gets suspended pending repayment of government monies). There is nothing here that wipes out the common (yet).

This is Mr Paulson who argued that Bear Stearn shareholders should receive a low price in the bailout not a high price. I cannot see why for instance the warrants were not for 95% of the common or 99% of the common except that maybe they felt for some reason that they needed to get the GSE management on board. [Hint journalists - there is a story there... they gave the GSEs a generous deal to get them aboard and the strategy was different to Paulson's low price strategy... now find the "source" and you got the front page.]

My view: if the government is going to back-stop the risk it should take the upside. It took a lot of it – but by no means all. Then again - maybe there is not much upside.

I know this is a radical suggestion that this is generous because the view around the traps is that the “bailout” knifes the preferreds. Their rating got cut into the Cs. That is funny – apart from a billion dollar sign up fee nothing so far has been put senior to the preferreds and they have a government guarantee for senior capital and senior liquidity. Its not a bad deal at all for the preferreds.

Whether the preferreds ultimately get paid anything of course will depend on the ultimate losses – but we will get to that later in this post.

The reduction in Fannie earnings power

The second big issue is one that almost nobody has much commented on – which is that the owned portfolio of Fannie Mae will shrink over many years to about 250 billion. In the past most of the earnings power of Fannie Mae has not come from the guarantee book – but from the owned book. [See Fannie Mae part 1.] This will reduce the underlying earnings power of Fannie from say 10.5 billion pre-tax to say 4-5 billion. But at a 10% reduction rate for the owned book (after an increase this year) it will take a long time to get there. This “earnings power” is contingent on Fannie being able to issue debt at reasonable spreads – say 30-40bps – on Treasuries. This has not been the case for some time and because the guarantee has not been made explicit it might not even be obvious now…

An upper value for Fannie Mae common

This calculation of earnings power give an upper value for Fannie stock post the bailout. If the “end earnings power” is say 4.5 billion pre-tax then the upper value of the stock is say 45 billion – and that is presuming all the losses have been absorbed. The government now owns 80% of the stock for nominal consideration so the upper value of the currently listed stock is say 11 billion.

If everything thus goes perfectly from here – one day the currently listed stock will be worth 11 billion. That is after all losses have been absorbed, repaid by earnings etc and presuming not further dilution. [I think there will be further dilution - see below...] 11 billion is a somewhere-over-the-rainbow upper value. Given the market cap at close Friday was 7 billion the common holders are getting crushed – but they are not getting crushed by the bailout as such – they are getting crushed by the future losses. And the future losses were there before the bailout!

The common may eventually get crushed by an event-of-default on the preferred to – as I will discuss below.

So how big are the losses in the book

The losses in the traditional mortgage book are the 64 billion (or 250 billion or 40 billion) dollar question. Nobody knows. I had a go at estimating them in Fannie Mae Part III. I got $64 billion but until now I have avoided talking about the $64 billion dollar question. Them big numbers – and they are over the background losses. Lets just plumb for an 80 billion dollar loss number as my (reasonable but speculative) baseline. That assumes a little more on the non-standard mortgages in Fannie's books.

The “fair value” of Fannie assets at the end of the last quarter was negative 5 billion dollars – see Fannie Mae’s Fair Value Balance Sheet as reproduced below.

The Fair Value balance sheet contained a mere 40 billion odd in provisions.

The “Fair Value” of the common – if you believe my highly speculative $80 billion loss estimate – is negative 45 billion. You probably should add straight away another negative $1 billion because the Government took $1 billion up front in the form of a preferred. So call it negative 46 billion. There are some FAS 159 adjustments to this too – so the real negative equity is probably minus 52 billion.

Over the next 5 years (and I will get back to why five years later) the earnings power pre-provision is likely to be something in the order 45 billion. [Why – a little less than 5 times 10 billion – I said this was rough.] So in five years the fair-value of Fannie’s book will be approximately say negative 10 billion. The Fed’s will still have some money in Fannie but not a lot in the scheme of things.

It will need to issue preferreds to the Treasury over time as per the agreement – because the GAAP Book Value of Fannie will approach the Fair Value Accounts and will go negative. But at the end of five years book value attributable to the common will be approximately -10 billion and the Treasury will be looking at losses in the 10 billion range… Even that will be recovered as the underlying earnings power is not going away....

The Treasury will take a big bath on this if

• The spreads on Fannie Mae debt do not dramatically drop. The reason is that unless the spreads drop Fannie have no earnings power and hence little ability to earn the money needed to pay the Treasury back, or
  
  
• The losses are substantially higher than 80 billion.

Both of these are speculative propositions – but I will note in my baseline case the Federal Government roughly breaks even on the Fannie Mae bailout. [Freddie Mac starts in a considerably worse position than Fannie Mae – so on my base-line case the Government will lose considerable money on Freddie Mac.]

Why is five years important?

Five years is important because of the terms of the preferreds. The preferred stock has a standard form – dividends can be suspended for five years without an event of default. The “bailout” suspends the preferred dividend – and none of the preferred holders can file to stop this (yet). They will be able to file in five years and in lieu of their accumulated dividends my guess is that they wind up owning a large part of what is left of the common.

Now note that my baseline case has the government just squeaking most of its money out in five years. Indeed it it might be a bit worse because I have not figured in the extra cost of the government money (at 10% not treasuries plus 30bps).

So there is no way on the baseline case that in five years Fannie will have enough capital to pay back the accumulated interest on the preferred. The preferreds will have a formal event of default and so the rating on them (in the Cs) is correct.

By the end of 5 years there will be something like 35 billion in preferreds outstanding (including accumulated interest). [Again this number is rough…]

The formal event of default will result in the preferreds winding up with common stock. If all the preferreds got converted to common stock the GAAP book value of Fannie would go from say minus 10 billion to plus 25 billion. Within a couple of years (seven years from now) it would get back to some kind of normal capitalisation.

The preferreds however will not own all the common stock. The government is going to want to keep some of its stake and the existing common shareholder probably won’t be wiped out either. Its going to be some form of structured arrangement partly because the government will still own some senior preferreds. My guess is that the preferreds wind up owning say half of it – and the government gets some extra warrants as well. The dilution of the existing common by say 95-98% will then be complete. This does leave the existing common looking very sick indeed. If they do not trade below a dollar quite quickly they are worth a short! That said - if losses are way below base-line in five years the common will look fine.

If the preferreds get half of the new company they will have a value of say half of 45 billion in 10 years. They should trade – in my base case – about 25c in the dollar now. They were trading at about 50c in the dollar a few days ago. My guess is that they will trade below that - but I think they will be fun purchasing at say 10c in the dollar. [Again this is first draft and I won't trade off this analysis until I have had more time to think aout it...]

Nonetheless the preferreds are not gone entirely.

Freddie Mac looks far more problematic for the Government. It’s really stuffed. The government takes a bath there most probably.

J

The Reality Based Community and Frannie

Warning: this post is speculative - we have no idea of the structure of the bailout - and I could completely misunderstand what is happeing.

Brad de Long can’t understand why a Frannie bailout needs to happen now.

Funnily enough nor can I except that it does. I didn’t think Paulson would act this fast – and I don’t know what he will do with the preferreds – but thinking about it the action is sensible. [I was considering buying preferreds – so I have little ability here to claim prescience…]

Let’s lay out the argument

• When Paulson got his permission to bail out Fannie and Freddie and made all the reassuring noises he made I thought that Fannie and Freddie debt spreads would drop to 30bps. They didn’t and I thought that was weird. Really weird. I blogged about it here.
  
  
• We should take the world as it is – not as we think it should be and observe that the debts are rolling over at spreads more like 130bps. This is reality and I for one am a proud member of the “reality based community”.
  
  
• There is almost 2 trillion Frannie debt rolling over at a high rate (several hundred billion a quarter). The government effectively guarantees that debt but a perverse market was forcing issue of that debt at 130bps more than Treasuries.
  
  
• If the spread on the debt remained at 130bps then Frannie were doomed. I did the maths in Fannie Mae series.
  
  
• In particular I estimated the earnings power of Fannie Mae at about 10 billion per annum. Fannie has something near a trillion in debt. If the spread is 100bps higher than it should be with the government guarantee then almost all of that earnings potential will be wasted as excess spreads on the nearly a trillion in debt. If the spread remained at 130bps over treasuries then Fannie had nearly no earnings power. No earnings power meant insolvency was inevitable because losses in the book might be something around 80 billion (see Fannie Mae Part III). As there was no earnings power it was inevitable that the government was going to bail them out sooner or later. I blogged here and here about how widening spreads could spell doom for Frannie. I must confess I did not think the spreads would remain wide (as I thought they were irrational) but they have.
  
  
• The Government might have solved this problem by explicitly guaranteeing the debt and leaving the private ownership in place. But that looks silly to me. I would have thought the implicit guarantee was enough – but 130bps tell me it wasn’t.
  
  
• Given this the government was eventually going to have to pay the Frannie senior debt. Over the next couple of years then Frannie was effectively going to raise over a trillion dollars in US government debt – but at spreads 100bps or more higher than necessary. The cost to the Federal government of delay is thus more than 10-20 billion annually over the life of that debt. If the debt had five year maturities on average then the cost just of delay could edge 100 billion.
  
  
• Moreover delay delayed the date at which the implicit government guarantee finally drove down mortgage rates – and hence increased the disruption in housing market.
  
  

The logical thing for the government to do in that circumstance is not delay. [The alternative is to cross your fingers and hope that the debt spreads on Frannie debt dropped to 30bps on their own accord.]

My understanding of US politics (erroneous it seems) suggested to me that this administration would not want to explicitly socialise the problem. Moreover many decisions of this administration are best described by delay and crossed fingers. So I am staggered by rapid logical action. But so be it and for once I think a Bush administration action is sensible.

But I am more staggered that the market forced the action. I thought that the market would see the implicit guarantee for what it was and trade Frannie senior debt at low spreads. But reality has the ability to get in the way of many things. This is just another example.

Being in government sucks. Sometimes you need to make hard decisions that are ideologically anathema. This must really pain the Republicans. But in this instance reality got in the way of ideology.

There is a second hard decision – which is what to do with the preferred. Any solution that leaves the preferreds as senior to the Government capital would indicate that the Republicans have dumped ideology entirely. I am not sure that they should wipe out the preferreds – but I would have a jaundiced view of any deal which substantially pays the preferreds before the government makes a reasonable profit on the capital that they are putting it risk.

John Hempton

Getting it wrong again! Phoney and Fraudy edition

If the details of the Fannie plan as rumoured are correct (including serious impairment to GSE Preferreds) then I might have been a day early covering my WestAmerica Bancorp.

Ouch. They say on Wall Street that you can't go broke taking a profit - but I think that is wrong. You take plenty of losses and taking small profits is not an antidote to the losses. I missed what could be a big profit. [Monday will tell...]

I had no position in the stock or preferred of the GSEs but was leaning towards buying preferreds on the basis that whilst the GSEs were probably insolvent they were not massively insolvent. [Fortunately I did not ever actually buy any stock.] I covered Fannie quite carefully in Part I, Part 1A, Part II, and Part III. It was enough to realise how little I knew and enough to keep me out of that game.

===

Having got it wrong on WestAmerica you should probably ignore anything I say on the follow up - which is what does this massive move mean to the rest of the financials.

So far no details on the plan so I have no opinion.

But so far the cost of mortgage funding has remained high because of high spreads on all mortgage lenders. If the new Fannie and Freddie have better access to money at government rates and hence can lend at lower rates then it is good for everyone else's back book but not good for prospective margins... It would benefit those with bad back books (WaMu, Wachovia) and hurt those few who are still firing on all cylinders.

If the new Fannie and Freddie (sometimes called Phoney and Fraudy) do not have such access then there will be hell to pay at the banks with capital shortage.

A few banks are going to take huge losses on their GSE preferred stock if the rumours are correct.

Yours in contrition for error



John Hempton

The problem with blogging: WestAmerica Bancorp

One of my early posts was on WestAmerica Bancorp. It’s a smallish – and traditionally very well run bank in the Central Valley.

It didn’t grow into the mortgage mess – and if you look geographically at its exposures it seemed to do better than average.

Some parts of the central valley are much uglier than in my original post (see Merced). Some are not.

In my original post my case against WestAmerica came down to a few things:

• Price – it is very expensive by any reasonable comparable
• It has zero growth – indeed was slowly shrinking
• It had a large securities portfolio that produced low quality earnings

I was not down on this company. I thought it well managed – but was inevitably suffering a little – as much as anything because rampaging competitors were happy to steal its term deposit base by increasing the price they will pay. I was down on the stock…

Well the low quality earnings in the securities portfolio has begun to cause problems. The bank owns a pile of GSE preferred stock – which it has taken some losses on and which it will probably take more losses on. But this is inconvenient rather than threatening. It might derail the buy-back and indeed the buyback rate is not rapid.

Since I wrote the original article the short interest in the stock has gone from under 5% to 20%. It’s a darn crowded trade for a bank that nobody much had ever heard of. A fair bit of that increase in short interest I can attribute to my blog readership. I have certainly got the odd email. I suspect a 20% short interest in this little and not liquid financial tells you that the shorts are getting too aggressive here. I have removed my short for a small profit. I just don’t like the trade being that crowded. It means when the stock pops it might pop irrationally hard.

The short case is pretty strong – but I have been in crowded shorts before and I don’t like it. To the extent that my blog made the short more crowded I regret my posting. It makes it harder for me to profit from what is just a difficult overpriced situation.

And a 20% short in this company – something that is merely expensive – suggests that too many hedge funds are partying like it is 2006 in reverse. Short first – ask questions later.

I am not going to get long this. The short case is fundamentally right – it is just that the short is crowded.

But getting long crowded shorts when the shorts are wrong is absolutely delightful. Ambac anyone?

Weekend edition: A call for the beauty disadvantaged

Mt Isa is a mining town in remote North West Queensland Australia. Its hot and dry and (kindly) a cultural backwater. It also has a severe drought of ladies and the children suffer from lead poisoning. The ratio of single blokes to single ladies exceeds 5 to 1. If you took out the hookers it would probably be much worse.

The mayor in the tradition of small town mayors took it upon himself to rectify this situation with a call for the “beauty disadvantaged” to move to Mt Isa. You know what he thinks of his constituents when he says this:

Quite often you will see walking down the street a lass who is not so attractive with a wide smile on her face. Whether it is recollection of something previous or anticipation for the next evening, there is a degree of happiness.

Whatever – beauty is skin deep and sometimes the ugly ducklings can thrive in a portfolio. So – at least as regards to stocks – consider this a call for the beauty disadvantaged. Interesting suggestions will be examined.

The only problem of course is an observation that a single nurse in Mt Isa made regarding the Mayor’s comments. She said: “around here the odds are good, unfortunately often the goods are odd”.

I expect that to apply in most instances to the stocks too!

Bank customer service – some follow up

Felix Salmon has made the correct observation about bank customer service and private banks. His analysis:

Big retail banks tend to look at their high net worth clients and see lots of profits. So they try to pamper those clients as much as they can, with personalized service and dedicated phone numbers and, very often, lots of salespeople pushing some kind of equity derivative or other.

But their org chart, their IT system, their DNA -- it's still Big Retail Bank. If a private-banking client phones up and asks for something they can call up on their computer, then no problem. But ask for something which might be slightly different -- and you run into a brick wall.

In a real private bank, one which is built upwards from a rich client base rather than being built by skimming off the richest clients of a much broader client base, such things are much less likely to happen. In a real private bank, the client has a private banker -- a human being with first-hand knowledge of his client and the ability and authority to make things happen.

Well eventually National Australia Bank has promised precisely what Felix Salmon suggested should have happened in the first place. I wonder a little if being the writer of a well read financial blog had something to do with it. But if people have found NAB private bank helpful please mention it in the comments and I will publish. A good turn is a good turn and should be acknowledged.

More generally I have received a bit of email about bad bank customer service. Several pieces were about Royal Bank of Scotland. RBOS has done well over 100 acquisitions – and getting customer service right throughout that is difficult. However Fred Goodwin (who I think is a truly dreadful CEO) has one genuine claim-to-fame – which is that he meets his post-acquisition cost targets. He might do this at the expense of customer service – but at least he does it.

I got a general comment that regional banks (especially small town banks) are better than big city banks. They are just helpful. However its friendly but not that much fun when a staff member at a regional branch of Chase spends 15 minutes trying to solve a problem on an internal phone centre number. I guess it works – and keeps the customer happy – but it is not great customer service.

I have one email about good customer service at Fifth Third. That meets my preconceptions. I have blogged about Fifth Third here and here. However there was a comment contrary to this on Seeking Alpha when I wrote about Fifth Third there.

Finally I received a few emails about banks with financial problems solving them by cutting back on staff and hence annoying customers. I have no corroboration so I will not publish names. Mostly you could guess - and if you want to email me I am very happy.

John Hempton

PS. I also received one negative comment about Danske's merger with Sampo in Finland. That surprises me. I have held out Danske as a bank that does this particularly well. Annecdotes contrary to my thinking are much appreciated.