Creation Science, oil drilling, naked shorts and constitutionally protected stock fraud

I once – unfairly perhaps – questioned what passes as mainstream conservative thinking as anti-scientific. The real target was greenhouse gas denial where the debate has gone (a) the greenhouse effect is not real to (b) yes – it is but it not caused by humans and then it will go to (c) but we can’t do anything about it anyway. I figured (fairly) that if you deny the science you wind up getting counted out of the debate. The “conservative” line was a fast-track to irrelevancy.

The reason why my criticism was unfair was that I used “creation science”, a realm of pure science denial, as a club to beat conservatives with. And I was rightly pulled up.

However I had what was – in my view – a market test of whether creation science was garbage. And that was that there were plenty of oil companies spending cumulatively billions of dollars on oil exploration using methods of finding oil (eg fossils of seeds and weeds) that were consistent with evolution and inconsistent with creation science. However I could find nobody who spent even a few million drilling for oil based on creation science.

This blog however corrects its mistakes. There is a serious oil company that does drill based on biblical texts and creation science. I was plain wrong.

So I give you one of the promotional websites of an oil company (Zion Oil and Gas) with a market cap of about $100 million.

www.OilInIsrael.net

And – just because these things should not go to waste – I give you one of their many YouTube promotional videos. In that video they got to ring a stock exchange opening bell. Creation Science is – it seems – at the heart of American Capitalism.

This ungodly liberal with his own creation myth (evolution) stands corrected.

John

PS. Don’t bother looking – you can’t short the stock. There are no securities available to borrow – and naked short selling – that just isn’t allowed.

If you need to know who is behind this then Mother Jones started the work, and Richard Bartholomew nailed it. It turns out that it is promoted in religious publications by the well known preacher and Christian Zionist Hal Lindsey who does not dislcose his family's substantial holdings.

I will refrain from again making a case for naked shorting because I can't see any real social benefit in aggressive hedge fund managers sharing when Hal Lindsey fleeces his flock. We can keep the losses in the fundamentalist family without any major social detriment.

And on this - I pity the SEC. If the promoters hold the belief in oil in Israel as true religious belief it will be very hard for the SEC to go after them. Even if this is as transparent a scam as Mother Jones thinks it will be hard to prove. Did the Founding Fathers mean to constitutionally protect stock fraud?

Request to BondInvestor from the comments

Can the person who comments under the name BondInvestor please contact me through the email on the blog.

Thanks in advance.

John

Brad DeLong and the fairy tale of Wall Street

This is a great read from Brad DeLong: A_Wall_Street_Fairy_Tale

I think it is also wrong in a solvency sense but spot on in a liquidity sense.

The Federal Government will lose big money on AIG - but the money lost - after all asset sales - is unlikely to exceed $300 billion. Huge money - but only about 6 months of pre-tax, pre-provision profits for the global financial market. And AIG insured the GLOBAL financial market.

An AIG failure would have made the crisis more difficult - but it fundamentally did not change what happened. The losses were HUGE - but the deepest part of the crisis was about liquidity. Nobody trusted any wholesale financed financial institution and they would have all failed without government support. With liquidity support (which has been forthcoming) the pre-tax, pre-provision profits are bailing out the banks.

If AIG had been let fail the losses would have been larger - but not critically so - and the government support would have been required for longer. But it would not have fundamentally changed the world.

John

PS. Huge losses are still to come - but so are vastly increasing pre-tax, pre-provision profits.

Mr Krugman and Mr Ferguson: a suggested interpretation (very long and ultra wonkish)

This post has an ultra-wonkish warning. Unless you enjoy graduate macroeconomics (soemthing I have never formally done) then you will probably not get many of the short-hand arguments in this post. For that I am sorry.

The main purpose of the post is to provide a basis for discussion amongst button-down modelling macro-economists.

I have just finished reading the blog exchange between Paul Krugman (the Nobel Prize winning economist) and the Niall Ferguson (the historian). As I consider myself a passable economist and a second rate historian this had me enthralled. Moreover, it had me reaching back into the dim recesses of my economics degree for a model. I have one which I will outline below.

The debate is about the meaning of recent kick up in long term interest rates. Mr Ferguson suggesting that it indicates that serious inflation is afoot – or else that the government will shortly have difficulty funding its debt. Mr Krugman has different interpretations – essentially coming down to the stimulus working. For Mr Krugman (the most famous torch bearer for academically rigorous Keynsianism) this debate is central to his world view.

The model needs to deal with the crisis as it is. It needs to be consistent with the facts on the ground of the crisis. It needs to include some kind of difference between real and nominal interest rates (that is some kind of measure of inflationary expectations). And it needs to build into it some kind of rationality for participants in the bond market – otherwise we are assuming away any meaning for the long term interest rate kick up.

It does not need to include a foreign sector or exchange rates because – well – this crisis is remarkably not driven by currency.

The model here – and several of the lemmas – come from Ted Sieper who showed me them during an undergraduate macroeconomics course in 1991. I figure Ted only invented some of it though I do not know who to credit beyond that. Some of it I invented.

I have titled this blog post “a suggested interpretation” after JR Hick’s classic 1937 paper because – well – I use an ISLM model. However it is a very-non-standard ISLM model so I will beg you sit with me through the introduction. I have not written out an ISLM model (or any other macro model) since 1992 – so if this is a little laboured it is because my macroeconomics is rusty. Moreover this model is presented at first away from the zero bound for nominal interest rates. I did not think about the zero bound much when I first looked at this sort of model – because (frankly) it was 1991 and the Great Depression and liquidity traps were an artefact of history. I build in the zero bound in the second part of this note – and that is where the really interesting observations start.

Let’s start.

A standard IS/LM model puts nominal interest rates (i) on the vertical axis and real income (Y) on the horizontal axis. I am going to change it up front (following Sieper) and put both nominal interest rates (i) and real interest rates (r) on the vertical axis and the log of the price level (log p) on the horizontal axis. Distances between nominal and real rates (that is vertical distances) measure expected inflation. For example if expected inflation is 5%, nominal rates are 8% then real rates are 3%.

Distances on the horizontal axis are changes in prices which is the whole point of putting logarithms of the price level on the horizontal axis.

You have to get the axis trick right from the beginning because the rest of my model will not make any sense without it. So just to hammer it home here are the labelled axes. Please do not think this is a standard ISLM model because you will not get anything that follows without noticing this.

Ok, now I am going to put in a Phelps-Friedman supply function. There is a natural level of income (Y) which is a function of real wages (w/p). There is a level of real wages which clears the labour market. However we assume [under most circumstance] that nominal wages (w) are more sticky than the price level (p) at least in the short run. If there is unexpected inflation then the price level is too high, real wages are lower than the “natural level” and there is “excess” employment. If the price level is too low then real wages will be too high – and there will be some unemployment. However as the wages and prices adjust to natural levels we wind up with the natural rate of employment.

Now lets detail an IS curve. In traditional fashion it is a curve which plots equilibrium in the goods market. The demand for goods (again traditionally) is consumption + investment. The supply is income. Consumption (C) is a function of income (Y) which is in turn a function of real wages. Investment (Y) is simply a function of the real interest rate. So here is my IS curve.

Now in the long run my real wage is the market clearing wage and income is fixed. (It’s that Phelps Friedman supply function). That says that Consumption is also fixed and hence the interest rate is fixed at a Wicksellian real interest rate.

The Long Run IS curve is thus horizontal at the Wicksellian Natural Interest Rate (r*). This is pictured below.

This long run curve is labelled IS(L,0) because it is the long run curve in period 0.

It’s a bit strange having a horizontal IS curve – but let us live with that.

Now let’s consider the short run IS curve. In the short run we assume that nominal wages (w) are fixed, but that prices change.

If we increased prices a little we (by assumption above) drop real wages and hence raise income. Both sides of IS curve rise – because consumption also rises with income. But because the marginal propensity to consume is less than one the left hand side would not rise as much as the right hand side. Therefore there would be an imbalance. To get balance back into the goods market (ie to be on the IS Curve) we would need to raise investment. That happens when real rates fall. So – in the short run if we increase prices we have to reduce real interest rates to keep equilibrium in the goods market. The IS curve in the short run thus slopes down. [Thank god for that!]

This is pictured below – with the now usual nomenclature is the long and short run IS curves.

Ok – having got more or less traditional looking IS curves (despite the eclectic choice of axes) let us have a look at Money Market Equilibrium (ie the LM curve). An LM curve would typically have real money demand being equal to real money supply. Money demand (L) is negatively related to nominal interest rates (i) as they represent the cost of holding money and positively related to income (Y). Income – as usual – is a function of the real wage.

Real money supply is just the nominal money supply (m) divided by the price level (p).

Let’s represent that in equation form:

_{As before we consider the shape of a long run and then a short run LM curve.}

In the long run Y is determined (it’s the natural rate). Then as you increase the price level you reduce the real money supply. To get equilibrium in the money market you would also need to reduce the real money demand which you can do by increasing interest rates. The long run LM curve is thus upward sloping. (Again thank God for that.)

Just to rub that in I have drawn another picture.

Now a short run LM curve has another effect when prices rise. Prices rising drive down real wages and up income. This increases money demand – so to get equilibrium in the money market nominal rates would need to rise even further. The short run LM curve is thus steeper than the long run LM curve. I have pictured this below.

Now lets look at a long-run normal time equilibria. Assume that inflation is 5% and always expected to be 5%. As it is a long run equilibria we only need to consider the long run curves. Here is how it will look.

What we have is the LM curve shifting right by 5% per period. The gap between the nominal and real interest rates is 5%. The actual inflation equals the expected inflation.

We can put the short run curves on this – and they look as follows:

OK – now lets model a simple monetary shock. Suppose that there is a sudden and permanent increase in the rate of growth of money supply. We would then expect to be at a long term equilibria say 7% out – and moving out by 7% per year.

We have a new LM curve in period 1 which is to the right of the old one. I have drawn it below and labelled it LM(L,1*) being the shocked curve in period 1.

As we now expect more inflation the gap between nominal interest rates and real interest rates must be larger (that gap is after all inflationary expectations). The new equilibrium will have a sustained 7% gap between nominal and real interest rates. The inflationary expectations will have to equal the realised inflation to that point – so the two lines measured in blue in the above diagram should be of equal length.

Note that the inflationary shock has driven up nominal interest rates in the short run and down real interest rates. The fall in real interest rates causes an increase in income. Monetary change increases short run income. This is entirely consistent with the 80s observed data on monetary “surprises”. When there was a monetary surprise of increased money supply it was associated with increases in nominal interest rates.

I think this is a minimal IS LM model with a reasonable distinction between nominal and real interest rates and a reasonable model of a rational bond market.

Now I need to make an observation which was first made to me by Ted Sieper. I have here a model with rational expectations, a Phelps Friedman expectations determined supply curve and whoa – monetary policy has economic effects. One guy called Robert Lucas Jnr won a Nobel Prize and in part his citation referred to his (definitely faulty) proof that such a thing was impossible. That is the famous so-called “Policy Irrelevance Proposition” (PIP). Well here is the counter example. And if you go look at any proof of the PIP you will find that they either assumed no distinction between nominal and real interest rates or they assumed a vertical LM curve. No – I am not kidding. One of Lucas’s most famous results is bunkum based on faulty maths.

And I do not mean to harp on about it but Lucas’s faulty result poisoned what I think is a very productive well in macroeconomics. Lucas “proved” that rational expectations and an expectations adjusted vertical supply curve made monetary policy irrelevant. However when you looked out the window central banks were clearly using monetary policy to some effect – hence everyone concluded that rational expectations is a bad modelling tool and dumped it.

But the Lucas proof was faulty. There was no reason to dump rational expectations due to the lack of correlation between central bank action and Lucas’s theory. And we have lost the use of a very neat – and quite natural assumption in many macro models.

I need to say this because – as a simplifying assumption I am arguing in this post that the bond market is more or less rational when it is repricing the long end of the curve. [If the argument between Krugman and Ferguson comes down to one side arguing the bond market is wrong or irrational then we are truly lost…] So can all the Keynsians out there not get really annoyed when I use a rational expectations hypothesis – please… Just accept that Lucas's result is wrong...

Moreover – and it is important to observe this – monetary policy again becomes irrelevant whenever the LM curve is vertical. And guess what – the LM curve becomes vertical at the zero bound to inflation – and so we have the standard (but usually faulty) result. But I guess I should model that more formally… as in this model unfortunately the curve becomes horizontal… it does not matter how far or fast prices are falling – nominal rates don’t go below zero…

Embedding the zero bound in this model

It is commonly observed that nominal interest rates cannot rationally stay below zero. The LM curves I drew in the models above have some very strange properties at the zero bound.

I quite purposely did not have any of my curves (IS or LM) above touch the zero nominal interest rate point – but lets do it now. Here is the long run inflationary equibria curve from above redrawn with the short run LM curve actually touching zero. The rates can’t go below zero – so it does not matter how far prices fall you can’t get negative nominal interest rates… the LM curves go horizontal when nominal interest rates hit zero.

If we are being formal (dotting i’s, crossing t’s, button down macro modelling as Mr Krugman advocates every now and again) we should note that there is – in the short run – some point on this LM curve whereby price levels can’t go any lower without there being deflation. Of course that point is dependent on the previously stable level of inflation – a point that would be moving right every period. Sorry I am getting little beyond my ability to do simple sketches. But I suspect the LM Curve has a period in which it is vertical to the zero until it just becomes as drawn above. Can we ignore this until someone comes up with a better modelling idea?

Now lets seriously shock the IS curve – the sort of shock that makes the zero bound operational – which is for instance what might happen if the banking system collapses…

Ok – now here we are – and its pretty clear that fiscal policy is just effective – because it moves the IS curve right. A move of the IS curve to the right means less deflation is necessary and real wages are less out of kilt.

Monetary policy only has an effect through changing inflationary expectations. If you can induce inflationary expectations then you will need to find a gap between the IS curve and the LM curve such that the gap equals the inflationary expectations. Do that and you will wind up with a very sharply negative real rate of interest.

And you can get there only by say inducing 5% continuous inflationary expectations.

However there is a real problem here – which is that you need to induce inflationary expectations in an environment of falling nominal wages and falling prices – which is tricky to say the least.

You can do it by credibly promising to be reckless (Krugman, Hempton helicopter post). But you can’t do it by being responsible.

Then there is the question as to how reckless you need to promise to be…

If the IS curve has any reasonable slope you need to be massively reckless credibly.

If you do only small changes in money supply then you remain stuck at the zero bound – you do not credibly induce inflation and hence the monetary policy is irrelevant.

Strange result – policy irrelevance holds for small but not big changes in money conditions… and it holds ONLY if you change expectations…

Short summary…

At this point I am coming out at Krugman’s side of the argument – and I think if we model multiple periods we are firmly on Krugman’s side as the yield curve flattens above zero – which is what happened last week.

If anyone wants to do the rest of buttoning this down I will be a keen critic. However the PhD in economics did not ever beckon. I am doing the funds management thing instead...

Oh and if one of those button-down macro-modelling economists can do it thoroughly I would love to put in an external sector. I am trying to understand Spain.

John

Post script: I dug up a copy of Ted Sieper's original paper. I have put it up here.

In defence of naked short selling – or why the crackdown on a phoney problem is costing taxpayers at least a billion dollars

Brief synopsis: a misguided government policy driven by fraudsters in the stock market is making the market less efficient at a cost to taxpayers of at least a billion dollars.

This post has two start points – a start point for people unfamiliar with the basic operation of short selling and risk arbitrage – and a start point for most my readership (who seem to be hedge fund managers).

Start point for readers without a financial market background

There are readers that do not know what short selling is – and what naked short selling (allegedly) is. So to help readers out – imagine I think for some reason a particular stock will go down – and I want to bet that it goes down. Then there is a mechanism by which I can make that bet. I can “borrow” the shares (say some shares in Citigroup). Then I sell those shares in the market (selling what I do not own – and have only borrowed). If the shares go down I can buy identical shares back in the market and return the identical shares. Rather than aim to “buy low and sell high” I just reverse the order – I aim to “sell high and buy low”. As an ordinary shareholder I can stuff up by “buying low and selling lower”. As a short seller I can stuff up by “selling high and buying (back) higher”.

When I buy back the shares (either at a profit or loss) I close out the transaction by returning them to the person I have borrowed them from. At all times my account is collateralised so the risk to my broker is minimal. [The risk to me unfortunately is not.]

Naked short selling is a much promoted – but in my view almost entirely fictional problem – whereby people do the short selling but without actually borrowing a share first. When they do so they will inevitably fail to deliver the shares to the exchange on the due date. The existence of fails is – at least according to the proponents of the “naked short selling hypothesis” proof that there is a major problem. But fails have happened since time immemorial (including in highly liquid markets such as Treasuries). There is usually a requirement to post cash collateral if you fail to deliver the actual security – and historically a small fine from the exchange (increasing over time).

Still some people have argued that a collateralised fail-to-deliver in a financial market has the ability through price manipulation of a stock to bring a business to its knees. Sorry – but generally the business does not care who owns the stock or what is going on the stock market unless the business is weak and needs capital. [This is the corollary of the old Wall Street truism: “the stock doesn’t know you own it”.]

Most short selling is mere speculation – but sometimes it involves arbitrage. Arbitrage is kind of useful and goes on all the time in financial markets. For instance if Company A agrees to buy Company B for stock the price should converge – over time – on the agreed stock swap deal. But if for some reason it does not arbitragers could buy company B’s stock and shortsell company A. When the Company B stock converts into company A shares they could just deliver the new Company A shares in satisfaction of their short-sale agreement. This allows the holders of company B to sell their shares at full price whilst the details of the takeover are sorted out. Arbitrage is the process which makes financial markets more efficient – it makes it so there is one price which means markets treat people more fairly. Arbitrage is by-and-large a good thing. Perfect arbitrages rarely (if ever) have substantial profit for the arbitrageurs. Indeed at best you are picking up pennies. Efficient markets reduce the profits of market participants at least on a per-transaction basis. That is usually a good thing if the public doesn’t want to subsidize sophisticated money market types.

Start Point for people with decent financial market knowledge

“Naked short selling issue” was a phoney issue – promoted by flim flams, stock promoters and other market slime-bags invented a problem which did not exist but helped them to promote their stock or justify the failure of their own businesses. The idea was that “miscreant” short sellers sold stock that they did not own in order to drive down the stock price and drive the company out of business. Bloomberg (and others) have taken the idea seriously. Gary Weiss has done a great job on his blog of exposing the slime-bag proponents of the imaginary naked short selling problem for what they are (which is usually crooks).

The story was that selling stock you did not own was producing “counterfeit shares”. I have yet to see mischievous naked short selling of any real business – though I have seen some fails-to-deliver (that is not actually being able to borrow the stock on the delivery date) remedied a few days later and with all obligations to the exchange cash collateralised over the interim period. There were plenty of “fails” but no real naked short selling “problem”. Hard to borrow stocks did fail regularly – but I assure you – and I have been doing this for years – when there were fails to deliver my broker called my short back and hey – presto – a few days later I had settled. If there was a “counterfeit share” it was cash collateralised and it was cancelled a few days later (in exchange for the cash collateral). The person who purchased the share from me got all the economic benefit of owning that share – and a full voting share was delivered to them within a modest time.

Fails to deliver now are – with electronic settlement – a far lesser and far quicker remedied problem than they were in the days of paper certificates. And with the speed at which they are settled – and the ability to demand cash collateral when a party fails to deliver they cause no economic problem at all.

Nonetheless the SEC took the slime-bag stock promoters seriously – at one stage issuing subpoenas to journalists who called the slime-bags for what they were. Journalists who got subpoenas – and who have considerably more demonstrated competence than the SEC include Herb Greenberg (unfortunately no longer a journalist) and Joe Nocera (New York Times).

Nonetheless in response to the well-promoted bogus threat of “naked short selling” the SEC radically tightened the delivery rules for stock. Now you have to locate a borrow before you actually short the stock (rather than having to locate a borrow before you deliver the stock) and if you can’t maintain a borrow you must cover the stock immediately – rather than fail (and pay fail-fees) for a couple of days.

Well and good you might say – but you would be wrong.

At the moment there is a well publicised arbitrage in Citigroup stock. There are four classes of Citigroup Preferred Shares which – on tendering to Citigroup – convert to common equity. And – surprise – you can buy Citigroup cheaper if you buy those preferred shares rather than buy the common. As of last night it was 18% cheaper to buy the Citigroup preferred than the common. So – with seemingly free money on the table we at Bronte Capital decided to short sell Citigroup common and buy the preferreds. An 18% return over about a month looks pretty darn good for a pure arbitrage. (So good it should not exist… its billion dollar bills on the sidewalk.)

But alas there is a problem. This deal is large - $20 billion – and as a result Citigroup common has become modestly difficult to borrow. You can’t short-sell the Citigroup common with certainty because you might not be able to borrow the shares and hence you might be forced to buy it in. And if you buy it in before you get the new (and identical) shares from tendering your preferred you could get “squeezed”. You will be forced to buy back your Citigroup stock at the same time as the other arbitragers (who have also been called on their borrowed stock) and you will pay a high price.

After paying a high price to borrow the stock you will receive your (now unhedged) new Citigroup shares at the same time as the other arbitragers (most of whom will be sellers) and – inevitably you will sell the shares then too as your plan was not to “own” Citibank. You will sell at the same time as the other arbitragers (presumably at a low price).

In the old days it would be easy. You would simply fail to deliver your Citigroup common for a few days whilst the new shares were delivered to you – and then you would deliver the new shares.

What was a perfect arbitrage has become an imperfect one.

So what you say – why should arbitragers like us at Bronte Capital be given a free ride? Well – hey we were not being given any ride – but now we are. Currently we are earning 18% on face value in a month for taking this risk – in the old days the price would have equilibrated almost instantly and people like me would not be making that money.

And that money comes from somewhere. Largely the difficulty in equilibrating the price through arbitrage makes it harder for Citigroup to raise the capital it wants. It has thus made that capital more expensive (by the bulk of our expected profits on the arbitrage).

Alas – even if you do not own any Citigroup you should be worried by this. The government is and remains the biggest holder of Citigroup stock – and when Citigroup has to pay more to raise private sector equity capital that “more” is effectively “less” for the existing shareholders. That is less for you the taxpayer.

So – in pursuing the bogus issue of naked short selling not only has the SEC diverted resources from its real job (which is chasing the real crims in the financial market such as Madoff) but it has imposed significant and real costs on the taxpayer and made it harder and more expensive for banks to raise capital in a financial crisis.

But – I should not complain. It has put a reasonable risk arbitrage our way – and I hope to report back that – thanks to the SEC crackdown on a bogus issue our clients are just that little bit richer.

Nonetheless I will know a commentator who really gets it when they defend modest levels of cash collateralised fails to deliver as a normal part of a normally functioning financial market. Naked short selling is good for markets, good for taxpayers and good for capitalism.

Quantifying the loss to taxpayers

Consider who bears this loss? There is 18% discount for buying the common over the preferred. To anyone who swaps preferred for common there is an 18% profit. As this is a 20 billion deal this profit is 18% of 20 billion or $3.6 billion.

The market is a zero sum game – that $3.6 billion is paid by someone. Well that someone is two groups. The first group is the existing preferred shareholders who should have got more for their shares. The other someone is Citigroup who get a less good price for the shares they are issuing. The incidence is hard to determine but given the recent history of squeezing shorts on preferred conversions is obvious enough that Citigroup bears at least half of the incidence.

As half of the loss is born by Citigroup who gets to issue the shares at a price that is too low. That is the loss is borne by Citigroup shareholders.

The cost to the taxpayer – well 18% of 20 billion raised is 3.6 billion. Just over half of Citigroup is owned by the taxpayer – and more than a half of that arbitrage profit comes from the issuing company (Citigroup). The cost to the taxpayer – a neat gift to hedge fund operators – is at least a billion dollar.

These days I guess that is small change. Either way – as a recipient of this gift I wish to thank the slime-bag proponents of the naked short selling hogwash.

John

Correction. I have been emailed to say that Joe Nocera did not get a subpoena.

Correction 2 - in the comments - if you account for the borrow cost on Citi the profits to the arb are originally about half (now well under half) of the profits indicated in this post. [We put it on with a wider spread than this. And the spread has narrowed for a few days. Also the borrow cost has been rising.] That just reallocates the profits to prime brokers - who really deserve it anyway.

The current borrow rate on Citigroup is just over 100%. We may take the trade off when the numbers make no sense any more.

PPS. The spread narrowed and the borrow rate on the Citi remained high. We covered this for a small profit. Trivial really. The biggest profit is being made by the prime brokers who get to lend out the shares.

How brilliantly run is Freddie Mac?

Nobody writes anything positive about either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac (the GSEs) lately. However believing that credit should go where credit is due I would remedy that.

Freddie Mac – more than almost anyone in the market got the recent interest rate shift right. That matters because (if you have not noticed) by far the biggest thing that has happened in financial markets in the last few weeks is a very rapid rise in long bond interest rates. And Freddie Mac is very exposed if they get their hedging wrong.

Given that the risks of Freddie’s exposure lie mainly with taxpayers this is something that should be celebrated.

So I am celebrating it.

Background

The GSEs own lots of 30 year fixed rate mortgages. Nearly a trillion dollars worth each (Freddie is smaller).

Those assets become less valuable as interest rates rise. If rates for instance went up to 8% then there would be very substantial losses from holding a trillion dollars 30 year 5.5 percent fixed rate mortgages.

The GSEs can reduce this risk by either selling some of their owned mortgages or by changing their funding mix so they have fewer short term borrowings and more long term fixed rate borrowings.

Unfortunately as the GSEs remove their risk of rising rates they reduce their profits. After all it is very profitable for a GSE to borrow short (at rates close to zero) and lend at above 5% in new well collateralised fixed rate mortgages. Or it would be profitable until rates rose.

Until the end of the first quarter the GSEs were lending very large amounts funded largely short term. Freddie in particular noted (complained?) in their first quarter SEC filings that they were being pressured by regulators to grow their balance sheet to make funding available to the housing market.

And so they grew their balance sheet funded largely short term. The incremental business was highly profitable but carried a large risk of interest rate rises. (Fully hedged Freddie noted that the business was at best marginally profitable.)

When I read the Freddie quarterly SEC filings I looked at this interest rate risk – and thought – oops – here the taxpayer goes again.

But it was not to be. During April (reported in monthly data) Freddie turned on a dime and started selling mortgages, reducing their floating rate funding and increasing their fixed rate funding. They did this just before interest rates spiked.

Freddie Mac got it right.

You can see this in this monthly series. Note that the mortgage portfolio shrunk at an annualised rate of 50.9 percent – the fastest I can remember and probably the fastest ever. Moreover almost all this shrink was in long-dated fixed rate mortgages.

Freddie’s fixed rate debt increased from 582 to 603 billion – with an even larger reduction in floating rate debt.

There are plenty of people in privately run financials who wished they traded that well. All those people carted out by the sudden shift in interest rates for instance.

I know there is revulsion at paying high salaries to executives at financial institutions that have received government bail outs. But someone at Freddie Mac deserves a big bonus – a really big one.

Memo to Senator Dodd: don’t complain too much about it when the bonus gets paid.

John

PS. Fannie Mae’s portfolio moves were in the right direction but nowhere near the scale of Freddie Mac. I hope and expect that the bonuses will be smaller at Fannie Mae.

A question about appropriate ethical standards for lawyers

Warning - This post comes with my usual - I am not a lawyer - caveat.  I am not asking about the legal duties of lawyers in the US - rather about the ethical standards that should apply to them.  

I once put on my blog – without comment – a letter to clients written by Francesco Rusciano of the Ponta Negra fund.

I did not think it made sense because the stated returns were not possible with the strategy described.  I asked my readers for their views.  Bluntly, on just reading two of their letters I thought fraud was a fair guess and so did a fair number of my readers.

That was only marginally interesting to me – this financial market is riddled with fraud and Ponta Negra was only small.  What was interesting to me was that Ponta Negra was housed in the same office, shared a phone number and marketing agent with Paradigm Global – a fund of hedge funds owned by Hunter and James Biden.  Hunter and James are the Vice President’s son and brother respectively.  

Since then Ponta Negra has been closed by a Federal Judge, and is facing civil charges.  Francesco Rusciano is facing wire fraud charges.  The SEC and Federal Prosecutors are alleging a fraud that I could only guess at.  The Biden’s lawyer has stated that Ponta Negra were subtenants.  I have summarised the issues surrounding Paradigm Global in this post.

That however is not my purpose today.  When I wrote the original post I received threatening letters from Ponta Negra’s lawyers.  Douglas R Hirsch, a partner at Sadis Goldberg asked me to destroy all documents I had from Ponta Negra and “certify in an affidavit” that I had done so.  This was only a few weeks before charges were laid against Ponta Negra – and almost certainly whilst investigations were ongoing.  

Now if Ponta Negra’s lawyers did not have any reason to suspect that investigations were going on into Ponta Negra then I guess the request I got was not obstruction of justice.  But this would mean that Douglas Hirsch is hopelessly naïve – because the letters looked prima-facie suspect.  Besides Douglas Hirsch read the letters on my blog and thought that I was alleging fraud – which means he thought that I thought the letters were suspect.

So (at a minimum) a lawyer asked me to destroy a document that he thought might be evidence in something he thought that I thought was a crime.

Even if he thought that there was no investigation and that no crime existed doesn’t that constitute an ethical lapse?  

John

Do you or did you ever have friends in the FDIC?

"Here in my hand is a list of 205 communists in the blogosphere and the mainstream media."

Well – no actually – but I have a long list of people who – on the record – supported the confiscation of Washington Mutual.

Washington Mutual – by far the biggest bank confiscation in US history – happened during the AIG/Lehman week.  It was confiscated despite being liquid and adequately capitalised at the time.  Sheila Bair – the head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp (FDIC) did the deed – and in my opinion it was not her finest hour. 

Washington Mutual was given to JP Morgan who did not need to honour all of WaMu’s debts.  Debt holders – who would normally have expected to recover most or all of their investment were wiped out. 

After this – and until very recently – no major US bank could raise any debt without a government guarantee.  After all – if the government could wipe you out why would you ever invest in low risk margin debt?

The confiscation of Washington Mutual thus forced the entire system onto the government guarantee tit.  The cost to taxpayers is thus potentially enormous.

Now at the time the confiscation looked justified to many because they assumed that Washington Mutual was insolvent no matter what their accounts said.  JP Morgan – the acquirer – obliged this view by writing down the value of WaMu’s assets by about 20 billion.  This write-down also justified the action by Sheila Bair.  I said at the time that Sheila Bair was acting improperly despite this – and I said later that JPM was lying. 

However if JPM was telling the truth – and Sheila Bair had a decent basis for believing them – then this was not arbitrary confiscation – though it was confiscation without appeal.  It would be costly for the system – and it might have been justified. 

Alas the facts have a neat way of outing the incompetence of Sheila Bair.   JPMorgan is now confessing that almost all of the charges taken when Washington Mutual was confiscated will be reversed through their P&L.  Washington Mutual was never insolvent and should never have been confiscated.  [Hat tip – Felix Salmon.]

Sheila Bair – a Republican appointee no less – confiscated without compensation and without right of appeal valuable private property.  I have argued repeatedly that she should resign – but now my basic thesis is proven her position is totally untenable.

A huge number of people supported her at the time.  These are people who supported the confiscation of private property without appeal.  Usually such people are called communists.  The alternative explanation is that these people are just dopes.

Actually I know a lot of these people and they are not dopes.  [Using McCarthyist logic therefore they must be communists.]

But they are not Communists either.  Instead they were dopes on this occasion.  Panics – be them financial or political do that.  They turn thinking – even iconoclastic people like high profile bloggers – into dopes.

Now Washington Mutual was in fact very easy to add up.  It was obviously solvent if you ran the numbers properly – but people find it quite difficult to run the numbers on banks.  This applies to senior government officials too.  And that explains why financial crises happen.  People thought there was no risk in financial assets that were obviously risky during 2005 and 2006 and even into 2007.  Thereafter they thought that financial assets that were most likely safe were (near) worthless.  Government officials seemingly arbitrarily confiscating assets into the height of the crisis just added to that fear.  A preferred stock is worthless if the government steals the underlying collateral (as I found out to my cost in the WaMu case). 

After the confiscation of WaMu we needed not only to judge the solvency of banks (something which I think I am capable of doing) but also to judge the behaviour of individual officials in crisis (which I am not capable of doing).

The irrational fear in markets was not unlike the irrational fear that other manias (eg Joe McCarthy) engendered.  That doesn’t make the fear less real or less destructive.

I thought at the time that Sheila Bair’s resignation would heal that wound– and would be the single best thing that the government could do to ease the financial crisis.  Her resignation would break the nexus between fear in the market and the fear of seemingly arbitrary confiscation by government officials.

That nexus is broken now through repeated and consistent subsidy at huge potential cost to the taxpayers.  The government – through repeated capital injections and guarantees – has managed to convince most people that American banks are safe.

It would have been cheaper for Sheila Bair just to resign.

However – the immediate and pressing need for Sheila Bair to resign as a matter of policy has past.  The market is no longer outright afraid of arbitrary government confiscation of financial assets though they might have some fear about government intervening in Detroit’s bankruptcy. 

But whilst the time for Sheila Bair’s resignation as a matter of national priority is past, the time for her resignation for proven incompetence has just begun.

 

 

 

John

 

Goodbye to the Sole True Hero (Sol Trujillo goes back to San Diego)

I am an outsider (an Australian) who keenly observes the ways of American CEOs.  As a group they have not covered themselves with glory – fat cats – overpaid and led their companies to ruin.  But they have their strengths and their weaknesses.  Mostly I like to focus on their strengths.

The strength of American CEOs is to a large extent an artefact of the strength of the US economy.  The US has a bigger and more homogeneous market than anywhere else on the planet (China included).  It has a decent swathe of entrepreneurs – and in almost every industry there is – as a result – fierce competition.  Competition is usually good for consumers – but rarely as nice for shareholders or managers.  It destroys bad businesses and it punishes bad management.  Competition breeds stronger businesses and stronger management.  It kills the weak and toughens the survivors.

The best American CEOs are – as a rule – the survivors from this competitive grind.  They are toughened – and in my opinion they are on balance the best senior executives in the world.  I am as a rule a fan of American management.

But not entirely.  Corporate governance in America sucks.  Only in America is it standard to combine the job of CEO and Chairman of the board – making the CEO answerable to nobody.  Only in America are boards so stacked with scratch-my-back-on-compensation buddies to make CEOs breathtakingly rich.  [Unfortunately America is exporting that cultural trait to the rest of the world.]  Moreover the pay of CEOs (often 100 times average) and the perks (private jets and exclusive golf clubs) have bred a CEO culture that is overweening and arrogant – and simply tone-deaf when it comes to many issues.  Only in America could a bunch of CEOs take private jets to Washington to beg for taxpayer dollars.

So I have a piece of advice to offer boards when searching for a new CEO.  

If you are a business which is struggling with fierce competition from numerous and new directions – and where your response to that threat will determine your future –then your default position should be to hire an American.  That is what they are generally good at.

If your business problems are not fierce competition but dealing with complex competing interests and government regulators in a way that creates win-win outcomes then do not hire an American.  You run the risk of alienating your target groups with arrogance and private jets.

There are exceptions – a few CEOs – especially in drug industries but also in IT – have created truly inclusive work places in which talent is catered for as individuals, and thrives.  Google springs to mind. 

Also there are the obvious non-American ruthlessly competitive CEOs who seem to meet any competitive threat with overwhelming force and tactical brilliance (Rupert Murdoch stands out).  

But despite the obvious exceptions the stereotype rings true because it has a basis in reality.  That really is how the modal American CEO is.  

Sol Trujillo – the bad American CEO

Telstra is the dominant Australian phone company – the now privatised former government owned monopoly.  It still owns the twisted copper pair of wires that goes into every home and now carries an increasing variety (and speed) of traditional telephony, voice over IP, internet and entertainment.  How it extracts value from that monopoly position will be the ultimate determinant of Telstra’s long term position.

That however requires continuous and careful negotiation with government as the monopoly is (justifiably) regulated to ensure appropriate contractual arrangements with a host of other parties that want access to the copper loop.  If you want the CEO to do that you don’t hire the stereotypical American Imperial Overlord.

Alas that is what Telstra did.  His name was Sol Trujillo – and almost immediately the wags noticed the self-centeredness of the man and dubbed him the Sole True Hero.  He proceeded over several years to alienate governments of both political persuasions with bombast and dodgy lawsuits.  He hired cronies who were equally tone deaf.

And he singularly failed to improve the competitive position of the company in the competitive business.

In other words Sol Trujillo was everything bad about American CEOs with few of the redeeming features.  He was a failure.

He departed Australia early – and there was no love lost.  When told of his departure the Prime Minister (Kevin Rudd) responded with a single word – “adios”.

Sol Trujillo says that word proves his assertion that his difficulties in Australia was because of racism.  Well say what you will about our Prime Minister but he is not a racist.  He speaks a few Asian languages – including Mandarin fluently.  His daughter has married a Chinese man.  He is empathetic to other cultures and has indeed immersed himself in them.  

Sol is grasping at straws to justify his failure – a failure rewarded, in American imperial CEO style, with cumulative pay above AUD30 million.

So – lest I be accused of racism I will give him a more appropriate farewell.  

Adieu.  

John

PS.  Yes - I agree that Kevin Rudd's comment was a lapse.  But racism is not the explanation for the total failure of Sol Trujillo.

Japan, Korea, Detroit and banker bonuses

It surprises me how few people followed up the logic from my Japan and Korean banking collapse post. 

Japan and Korea had very similar industrial structures.  You can get into a lather describing differences between Keiretsu and Chaebol – but if you look at the heavy industry and government support and how the finance worked it was all very similar.

When the system broke down in Japan there was never any great recession – but there was never a recovery.  Growth just slowed to anaemic levels and stayed slow for two decades – the lost period.  However the average Japanese person doesn’t have a lot to be unhappy about.  Real wages stayed high, employment, whilst more difficult than in the boom years, remained fairly easy to obtain.  You would describe the situation as malaise – not failure.  The people who think it was a failure are largely people who played the Japanese stock market – which forever looked really cheap, only to get significantly cheaper.  It is my class (stock-investing capitalists) who think of Japan as a failure.

Korea by contrast had a true banking collapse.  The banks were not only insolvent but illiquid.  They could not lend – and several Chaebol crashed and burnt.  Even quite large modern companies (Hynix for example) failed.  Indeed it is only the strongest of the Chaebol that got through (notably Samsung).  

But the Korean experience was considerably worse for Mr and Mrs Soon (and their average Korean family) than it was for Mr and Mrs Watanabe (and their average Japanese family).  In Korea there was a five fold increase in unemployment (admittedly from very low levels) and a very large increase in small business insolvency.  

Korea’s advantage was that it recovered.  

I argued that the problem in Japan was their ability to keep zombie corporations (not zombie banks) alive for decades.  Japan has a “Rip-Van-Winkle” industrial legacy to go along with its absolutely brilliant modern technology industries.  This old industry sucks resources which would better be used by the modern industry.  It makes sense to keep the old industries alive during a deep recession because the resources would otherwise be unemployed.  It makes no sense to keep them alive long term as you wake up 30 years later (as per Rip-Van-Winkle) and lo – you still have the old industrial structure.  

Translate this to America – and the standout yesterday industries are Detroit and mortgage broking.  The US at peak had about 500 thousand mortgage brokers or one per sixty mortgages outstanding.  This was insane – and it has changed.  Detroit also (politely) looks as if it will employ about two thirds as many people (or less) after the bad bits of Chrysler and GM are closed as part of the bankruptcy process.  

I also argued that the problem with Korea was that the banks became totally illiquid and hence were unable to lend at all.  This mattered because not only inefficient Chaebol died – but plenty of good stuff suffered the same fate.  A banking system that cannot lend is indiscriminate about who it kills.  It will result in the death of dodgy businesses – but will also kill perfectly fine businesses that need cash for short term requirements.  

If you want to avoid the really deep malaise that was Korea then keep the banks liquid.  Then at least they will lend to the more worthy borrowers – and whilst industry will die banks can be selective about who they kill.

Killing Detroit whilst bailing out fat-cat bankers is politically unpopular.  If you want to see a justifiably upset victim have a look at this letter from a Dodge dealer.  I don’t think the political sentiment in the letter is accurate – but it is perfectly understandable.  

Likewise there is no end of complaint about bailing out banks so they can continue to pay million dollar bonuses – and the political sentiment in those complaints is accurate and entirely understandable.

So let me say I agree with the unpopular.  I think the Obama administration is right to let Detroit file bankruptcy and to bail out banks.  I know this is unpopular – I just think the outcomes will be better that way.  I am very impressed by an Administration that does things that are so politically offensive but probably ultimately the right thing to do.  That doesn't make the political pill any easier to swallow.

John