The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later

by ilene - September 15th, 2009 12:20 pm

The Continuing Disaster of Wall Street, One Year Later

Courtesy of Robert Reich at Robert Reich’s Blog

As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President is trying to breathe new life into financial reform. He’s using the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of the Street, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout, to summon the political will for change. Yet the prospects seem dubious. As with health care reform, he has stood on the sidelines for months and allowed vested interests to frame the debate. Nor has he come up with a sufficiently bold or coherent set of reforms likely to change the way the Street does business, even if enacted.

Let’s be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach’s chief financial officer.

The only difference now is that the Street’s biggest banks know for sure they’ll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour — which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.

Meanwhile, the banks’ gigantic pile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more jobless Americans can’t pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forget any new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can’t get loans. Even credit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.

The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders they’ve even revived the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payments – guaranteed no matter how the employee performs. Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its record pre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattest quarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion to compensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldman employee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course, top executives and traders will pocket much more.

Every other big bank feels it has to match Goldman’s pay packages if…

Tags: Banks, derivatives, health care reform, Obama, Robert Reich, Wall Street

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What is the Main Cause of Residential Foreclosures?

by ilene - September 11th, 2009 12:46 pm

Welcome George!

What is the Main Cause of Residential Foreclosures?

Courtesy of Washington’s Blog

The foreclosure problem in American is not just subprime mortgages. True, banks have been holding on to their foreclosed properties for months, but now they’re getting ready to release them onto the market, which could depress prices for existing homeowners, further driving them underwater. But that’s not what I’m talking about.

There are huge tidal waves of defaults on option arm, alt-a, and other types of loans coming (see this and this).

But even that is arguably not the main problem.

Perhaps the biggest problem is that the crash in real estate and rising unemployment together form a negative feedback loop. As McClatchy and the Associated Press note, foreclosures rise as jobs and income drop.

As former chief IMF economist Simon Johnson points out, there is a vicious cycle also exists between unemployment and property foreclosures:

Unemployment is always a lagging indicator, and given the record low number of average hours worked, it will turn around especially slowly this time. Until then, people will continue to lose their jobs and wages will remain flat, and any small rebound in housing prices is unlikely to help more than a few people refinance their way out of unaffordable mortgages. So unless the other part of the equation – monthly payments – changes, the number of foreclosures should just continue to rise.

Indeed, the Washington Post notes:

The country’s growing unemployment is overtaking subprime mortgages as the main driver of foreclosures, according to bankers and economists, threatening to send even higher the number of borrowers who will lose their homes and making the foreclosure crisis far more complicated to unwind.

And see this.

Some economists give 5% as the magic number: when unemployment declines to 5%, then unemployment will no longer be such a huge contributor to foreclosures.

But Moody’s forecasts that unemployment will not go back down to 5% until 2014.

Similarly, the the chief economist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - Martin Regalia - "thinks that it could be five years before the U.S. economy generates enough jobs to overcome those lost and to employ the new workers entering the labor force", according to McClatchy.

Indeed, unemployment could be a problem for many years to come.

Tags: alt-a, Banks, foreclosure, huge tidal waves of defaults, negative feedback loop, option arm, Residential Foreclosures, Simon Johnson, subprime mortgages, unemployment

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Feds in a Box - Unwinding May Not Be So easy

by ilene - September 10th, 2009 7:58 pm

Feds in a Box - Unwinding May Not Be So easy

unwinding Courtesy of Chris Martenson

One of the key questions is, "Can the Fed ever unwind all of the positions it has taken on from failed banks and Wall Street firms?"

This is an important question, because if the answer is "No, at least not precisely when they wish to do it," then it raises the risk that all that hot money will prove immune to efforts to recall it and it will whiz around creating all sorts of monetary trouble.

fed's punch bowl Now that the Fed has declared that the recession has ended and green shoots are everywhere, the next obvious part of this journey will have to be the unwinding of the massive amounts of stimulus and thin-air money that has been injected into the system.

Certainly after watching the risk-money out-chasing junker stocks well up off their lows, we can surmise that the speculative animal juices are flowing again and that the Fed might want to consider taking away the punchbowl.

Instead, today the Fed bought another $18.8 billion net ($32.4 billion gross) in agency mortgage-backed securities, which represents the exchange of thin-air money for GSE MBS paper.

So far, all that we know about is that the Fed is talking about how to take the punchbowl away but that bankers are warning the Fed to "go slow."

Fed Tries to Prepare Markets for End of Securities Purchases

Sept. 3 (Bloomberg) — The Federal Reserve is trying to prepare investors for an end to its housing-debt purchases, while keeping interest rates near zero, reflecting an economy pulling out of a recession with little momentum.

Federal Open Market Committee members discussed extending the end date of the agency and mortgage-backed bond programs, minutes of the group’s Aug. 11-12 meeting showed yesterday. The move would be aimed at avoiding disruptions in housing credit at a time when recovery prospects are clouded by rising unemployment and slowing wage gains, analysts said.

While the economy is projected to expand this quarter, central bankers had “particular” concern about the job market, signaling that the FOMC may need to see a peak in the unemployment rate before it begins withdrawing monetary stimulus. Some policy makers saw dangers of “substantial” declines in the inflation rate, yesterday’s report showed.

“They need to see labor markets improve and inflation stabilize, and not fall, before they even have a serious discussion about increasing interest rates,” said Michael Feroli, an…

Tags: assets decline, Banks, Fed, Fed's thin-air money program, financial industry, monetary stimulus, quantitative easing, unwinding positions

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Fed President Hoenig: Still Need To Address The Debt Issue

by ilene - September 6th, 2009 7:29 pm

Fed President Hoenig: Still Need To Address The Debt Issue

Courtesy of Tom Lindmark at But Then What

Throughout the recession one of the more outspoken members of the Fed has been Thomas Hoenig, the President of the Kansas City Fed. Refreshingly, he continues to speak his mind and not shy from the harder issues that most in government prefer not to address.

In a speech that was given to the Kansas Association of Bankers a month ago but just released today, he had this to say:

The U.S. economy appears to be reviving from a nasty recession, but too little has been done to resolve the underlying problem of too much debt, a Federal Reserve official says.

In a speech given a month ago, but released to the public on Saturday, Kansas City Fed President Thomas Hoenig said massive amounts of public and private debt are putting tremendous pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low, potentially sowing the seeds of inflation or further economic imbalances.

Hoenig, considered one of the Fed’s leading advocates for low-inflation policies, said the Fed has tried too hard to boost growth in the past by keeping rates low. But low rates only encouraged more debt, and fueled an increase in the money supply that has eroded purchasing power.

Sustainable growth can’t be achieved that way, he said.

The federal government has taken on much more debt in an effort to stimulate the economy, he said. Consumer debt remains bloated. And the biggest banks are still overleveraged by about $5 trillion, he said.

The way out of the swamp will be tricky, he said.

“As we become more confident that we are at the bottom of the recession and are moving into recovery, we must become more resolute in systematically reducing our balance sheet and raising interest rates,” Hoenig told the annual meeting of the Kansas Bankers Association on Aug. 6.

Well, it remains to be seen if there is any resolve to move away from a debt fueled economy towards one that is more grounded in fundamentals. It all sounds good, however, there is no magic wand that can be waved over the economy to cause that to happen. The adjustments he calls for require years to put into place and it’s problematic at best as to whether the public has the patience and will to go through the suffering that would be required.

I think it more likely that we are going…

Tags: Banks, growth, Interest Rates, stimulate economy, Thomas Hoenig

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The International Bank Rule That Almost Destroyed The World

by ilene - September 3rd, 2009 2:21 pm

The International Bank Rule That Almost Destroyed The World

Courtesy of John Carney at Clusterstock

Martin Jacomb gets to the heart of one of the least understood aspects of the bubble that broke the banks: why banks bought and held so much securitized debt.

Under one now-discredited theory, banks made so many toxic mortgage because they could securitize them and offload the risk to others. But this doesn’t explain very well why the banks wound up with so much of the toxic securities on their balance sheet. Banks owned almost half of all the securitized mortgages that were produced during the bubble.

Jacomb’s FT op-ed today explains why this happened: because the capital reserve requirements rewarded turning loans into securities and more or less paid banks to hold them. In short, the rules told banks that the securities were safer and banks behaved as though they were. (Whether the rule or something else convinced the banks they were safe is another matter.)

From Jacomb:

In fact, at the heart of the present catastrophe was a singular regulatory error: the failure of the Basle international rules to impose weighty capital requirements on the super senior tranche of securitised mortgage obligations held in banks’ trading books. It was there that vast quantities of the toxic stuff accumulated. Because these securities could be held with minimal capital backing, banks thought it was all right to do so, and some built up gigantic portfolios. When these holdings turned out to be unsaleable except at a huge loss, the disaster was exposed.

People tend to let their eyes glaze over when they hear about Basel rules, assuming they are way too complicated to even bother understanding. That’s too bad. Because it’s actually quite easy to see what happened.

Under the international Basel capital requirements, a well-capitalized bank was required to hold $4 for every $100 in individual mortgages —a 4% reserve requirement. But if it held the securitized the AAA and AA tranches, the bank only had to hold $1.60 in capital. That’s a huge incentive to trade in a loan for a mortgage backed security.

But the capital regulations did more than just create incentives to own mortgage backed securities. They allowed banks to dramatically grow their balance sheets. The lower reserve requirement allowed banks to buy even more securities than it could make loans. A bank with $4 billion in reserve could hold $100 billion in loans. But that…

Tags: Banks, Financial Services, Martin Jacomb, Mortgages, regulation, securitized debt

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Floyd Norris Laughs At Citigroup’s Ridiculous Press Release

by ilene - August 31st, 2009 6:49 pm

Floyd Norris Laughs At Citigroup’s Ridiculous Press Release (C)

Courtesy of John Carney at Clusterstock

Tags: Banks, Citi, deal, Financial Services, Floyd Norris

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Chris Flowers: One Hit Wonder?

by ilene - August 31st, 2009 11:10 am

On the bright side, maybe there’s a high level government job waiting for him.

Chris Flowers: One Hit Wonder?

Water lillies, flowers - the business insider Courtesy of John Carney at Clusterstock

These days it is a pretty sure bet that Chris Flowers regrets telling investors in his private equity funds that "every single investment" would make money. His largest fund is said to be down between 60% and 70%, and some secondary market buyers assign shares in it no value at all.

William Cohan has an extraordinary piece in Fortune on the rise and fall of Flowers, the former Goldman Sachs wonderboy (once the youngest partner ever) who became one of the biggest names in banking by buying Japan’s Shinsei bank for $1 billion in 2000 and IPOing it four years later for $10 billion. But these days his reputation is under fire as the banking system tries to recover from the ruinous 2008.

"He did one great assisted transaction in Japan," one unnamed banker tells Cohan, "and off that he raised $7 billion. The great failing in private equity is to assume that you can repeat the past. I think he just assumed, for instance, he could repeat Shinsei over in Germany. Big mistake."

That person is referring to the $1.5 billion tender offer Flowers big fund made to acquire 24.9% of Hypo Real Estate Holding, a Munich-based commercial real estate lender. Flowers paid a 25% premium to where the shares were trading before the deal was announced. Just four months later Hypo had to turn to the German government for assistance. The German government ended up owning 90% of Hypo, drastically diluting Flowers’ stake. These days his investment in the bank has probably dropped in value by 87%.

But what may have hurt Flowers’s reputation even more than his investment losses is the role he played in Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch. Flowers, while at Goldman Sachs, had helped put together the merger of NationsBank and Bank of America. In early 2008, when Merrill looked to raise capital, Flowers poured through its books but concluded the asking price was too high. But when the crisis hit on September 11, Flowers found himself back at Merrill as an adviser to Bank of America.

Flowers issued a "fairness opinion" on the deal, endorsing the 70% premium Bank of America paid for the shares of Merrill Lynch. He was repeatedly invoked in the press conference announcing the deal. Ken Lewis, Bank of America’s CEO,…

Tags: Bank of America, Banks, Chris Flowers, Financial Crisis, Financial Services, Merrill Lynch, Wall Street

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Now much too big to fail

by ilene - August 30th, 2009 4:17 pm

Now much too big to fail

Courtesy of Tim Iacono at The Mess That Greenspan Made

A report by David Cho in today’s Washington Post tells of the great advances now being made in restoring the banking sector and financial markets to their pre-2008 glory.

Banks ‘Too Big to Fail’ Have Grown Even Bigger

When the credit crisis struck last year, federal regulators pumped tens of billions of dollars into the nation’s leading financial institutions because the banks were so big that officials feared their failure would ruin the entire financial system.

Today, the biggest of those banks are even bigger.

The crisis may be turning out very well for many of the behemoths that dominate U.S. finance. A series of federally arranged mergers safely landed troubled banks on the decks of more stable firms. And it allowed the survivors to emerge from the turmoil with strengthened market positions, giving them even greater control over consumer lending and more potential to profit.

J.P. Morgan Chase, an amalgam of some of Wall Street’s most storied institutions, now holds more than $1 of every $10 on deposit in this country. So does Bank of America, scarred by its acquisition of Merrill Lynch and partly government-owned as a result of the crisis, as does Wells Fargo, the biggest West Coast bank. Those three banks, plus government-rescued and -owned Citigroup, now issue one of every two mortgages and about two of every three credit cards, federal data show.

Now that’s a sweet deal - boost your market share in originating what are essentially "no-risk" loans because, either wards of the state Fannie Mae and FreddieMac will buy the loans or you’ll get bailed out if things again go awry.

If you’re a big bank, what’s not to like about that?

It seems that the lines between the U.S. Government, the Federal Reserve, and the nation’s largest banks are becoming even more irreparably blurred.

A year after the near-collapse of the financial system last September, the federal response has redefined how Americans get mortgages, student loans and other kinds of credit and has made a national spectacle of executive pay. But no consequence of the crisis alarms top regulators more than having banks that were already too big to fail grow even larger and more interconnected.

"It is at the top of the list of things that need to be fixed," said Sheila C. Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "It fed the crisis, and it has gotten worse…

Tags: Bank of America, Banks, consumers public policy, debt, Federal government, JP Morgan, too-big-to-fail, Wells Fargo

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Greater Than One in Four FDIC Insured Institutions are Unprofitable; Bank Problem List at 15 Year High

by ilene - August 29th, 2009 8:50 pm

Greater Than One in Four FDIC Insured Institutions are Unprofitable; Bank Problem List at 15 Year High

banks Courtesy of Mish

The second quarter 2009 Quarterly Banking Profile has some interesting charts and facts that inquiring minds will be interested in.

Insured Institution Performance

Higher Loss Provisions Lead to a $3.7 Billion Net Loss

More Than One in Four Institutions Are Unprofitable

Charge-Offs and Noncurrent Loans Continue to Rise

Net Interest Margins Show Modest Improvement

Industry Assets Decline by $238 Billion

The Industry Posts a Net Loss for the Quarter

The Industry Posts a Net Loss for the Quarter

Burdened by costs associated with rising levels of troubled loans and falling asset values, FDIC-insured commercial banks and savings institutions reported an aggregate net loss of $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2009. Increased expenses for bad loans were chiefly responsible for the industry’s loss. Insured institutions added $66.9 billion in loan-loss provisions to their reserves during the quarter, an increase of $16.5 billion (32.8 percent) compared to the second quarter of 2008. Quarterly earnings were also adversely affected by writedowns of asset-backed commercial paper, and by higher assessments for deposit insurance.

Almost two out of every three institutions (64.4 percent) reported lower quarterly earnings than a year ago, and more than one in four (28.3 percent) reported a net loss for the quarter. A year ago, the industry reported a quarterly profit of $4.7 billion, and fewer than one in five institutions (18 percent) were unprofitable. The average return on assets (ROA) was -0.11 percent, compared to 0.14 percent in the second quarter of 2008.

Net Charge-Off Rate Sets a Quarterly Record

Net charge-offs continued to rise, propelling the quarterly net charge-off rate to a record high. Insured institutions charged-off $48.9 billion in the second quarter, compared to $26.4 billion a year earlier. The annualized net charge-off rate in the second quarter was 2.55 percent, eclipsing the previous quarterly record of 1.95 percent reached in the fourth quarter of 2008.

The $22.5 billion (85.3 percent) year-over-year increase in net charge-offs was led by loans to commercial and industrial (C&I) borrowers, which increased by $5.3 billion (165.0 percent). Net charge-offs of credit card loans were $4.6 billion (84.5 percent) higher than a year earlier, and the annualized net charge-off rate on credit card loans reached a record 9.95 percent in the second quarter. Net charge-offs of real estate construction and development loans were up by $4.2 billion (117.0 percent), and charge-offs of loans secured by 1-4…

Tags: assets decline, bank losses, bank problem list, Banks, excessive debt, FDIC, Federal Reserve, insolvent, Mish, quarterly banking profile, unable to lend

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The credibility of farmers, priests and prostitutes – and bankers?

by ilene - August 29th, 2009 2:51 pm

First, welcome to Michael Pettis. Michael is a professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, where he specializes in Chinese financial markets. He is also Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Second, this is an excellent article that provides insight into the thoughts of the Chinese people. - Ilene

The credibility of farmers, priests and prostitutes – and bankers?

chinese prostitute - credibility high Courtesy of Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets

Three weeks ago China Daily published a pretty funny article about a recent survey on credibility that had taken place in China. According to the article,

At a time when shamelessness is pervasive, we are often at loss as to who can be trusted. The five most trustworthy groups, according to a survey by the Research Center of the Xiaokang Magazine, are farmers, religious workers, sex workers, soldiers and students.

A list like this is at the same time surprising and embarrassing. The sex business is illegal and thus underground in this country. The sex workers’ unexpected prominence on this list of honor, based on an online poll of more than 3,000 people, is indeed unusual.

It took the pollsters aback that people like scientists and teachers were ranked way below, and government functionaries, too, scored hardly better. Yet given the constant feed of scandals involving the country’s elite, this is not bad at all. At least they have not slid into the least credible category, which consists of real estate developers, secretaries, agents, entertainers and directors.

I am not sure what secretaries have done to get themselves such poor rankings (could they mean party secretaries?), and I am not sure what kind of directors they mean (movie directors? managing directors?) but not everyone found this survey funny. Last week a columnist in the People’s Daily had this to say about the same survey:

In recent years, China has already paid a high price for the prevailing credibility crisis. The annual losses caused by bad debts have reportedly amounted to about 180 billion yuan, and the direct economic losses induced by contract fraud each year is also up to 5.5 billion yuan. Besides, shoddy and fake products contribute to another great loss involving at least 200 billion yuan. Generally, credibility crisis would cost China as much as 600 billion yuan every year.

The shortage of credibility is not only seen in the market transactions, but in the officialdom as well. Corruption in any form is about to erode the…

Tags: bank failures, bankers, Banks, CHINA, Chinese economists, Economy, excess liquidity, Financial Crisis, Hyman Minsky, liquidity, loans, money-market rates, prostitutes, risks, teachers

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