Category Archives: Credit markets

Guest Post: The 10 Most Systemically Risky Financial Firms in the US

Yves here. As we noted in January,

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is trying to duck the assignment given the Financial Stability Oversight Council under the Dodd Frank legislation, namely, that of identifying “systemically important” financial institutions….The Treasury devised a list of banks it subjected to stress tests; conceptually, how is this process any different?

I’m pleased to see four professors from New York University’s Stern School take up this task. And they end their analysis with a rebuke:

This is the easy part for the Financial Security Oversight Council. The tough part is to then design efficient regulation that discourages the build up of excessive risk.

By Viral Acharya, Thomas F. Cooley, Robert Engle, and Matthew Richardson. Cross posted from VoxEU.

As part of the US policy response to the global crisis, the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Act calls for regulators to identify systemically risky financial firms – the sort that took the US financial crisis global. But how to identify these firms remains unclear. Some claim the task is impossible. This column begs to differ and names the 10 most systemically risky financial firms in the US.

NYT’s Joe Nocera Defends Failure to Bring Wall Street Execs to Justice

Aargh, it is frustrating to see how quickly establishment-serving shallow arguments become conventional wisdom. We get a big dose of this line of thinking from the New York Times’ Joe Nocera in an article titled, “Biggest Fish Face Little Risk of Being Caught.”

Now you can’t disagree with the conclusion: no major banking industry figure is going to be brought to justice. But the explanation he offers is incomplete and misleading, and serves to misdirect the public from more fundamental and more troubling causes.

Banks Pushing Back Hard on Inadequate Mortgage “Settlement” Trial Balloon

No sooner have the preliminary outlines of an inadequate settlement of mortgage servicing abuses been leaked, but the banking industry is engaged in a full court press to stop it.

The astonishing part is that the banking industry continues to maintain that it really didn’t do anything wrong, all it did was make some technical errors. That so grossly understates the degree of its recklessness and malfeasance as to be beyond relief.

It’s no surprise that the so-called Foreclosure Task Force which spent a mere eight weeks reviewing servicer activities and didn’t find much. The timeframe of its exam assured that it would not verify servicer records and accounts against borrower experience and records. It is almost certain that they also did not look at how servicer software credited payments and charges, when there is widespread evidence of violations of agreements with borrowers and RESPA.

And to the extent they looked at “improprieties” in foreclosure documents, it’s a given that they did not go beyond robosigning, when that is arguably the least significant form of malfeasance. There is ample evidence of fraud to cover for the failure to convey notes to securitization trusts, ranging from the misuse of lost note affidavits to document fabrication (bogus allonges being the most common fix).

In addition, pooling and servicing agreements also have specific provisions as to level and procedures for charging certain fees. Yet studies have determined that a specific servicer will apply the same charges across all borrowers and investors, irrespective of the requirements of particular securitizations. So it’s blindingly obvious that this exam was cursory, looking at one or two points of failure in a slapdash fashion and completely ignoring other issues that are at least as important.

Gillian Tett on Losses at Central Banks

Is the old Gillian Tett back? The one-time Financial Times capital market editor has taken to writing less frequently (understandable now that she has head the US operation) and less intrepidly (much of her commentary was prescient, particularly on my pet topic, collateralized debt obligations).

But her latest piece sounds a wee warning, and it’s one we’ve commented on as well, namely, that central banks are vulnerable to losses, and just like the banks they mind, may need a rescue by taxpayers if the err badly enough.

Her object lesson is the Swiss National Bank. Unlike most central banks, the SNB is quite transparent, and publishes periodic statements of the value of its assets on a mark to market basis. The usually conservative SNB made a uncharacteristically aggressive move last year, intervening in currency markets in an effort to suppress the value of its levitating franc.

Even though the locals applauded the move, the central bank was outgunned by currency traders and threw in the towel mid year. As the swissie continued to rise, the bank showed losses at the end of 2010 of SFr 21 billion. The only saving grace was that the gains on the bank’s hefty gold positions exceeded the damage. But that does not reassure its shareholders, who have become accustomed to annual payments out of bank “profits”, and are concerned that the profits this year will be too meager for them to enjoy their customary level of income.

Mortgage Fraud Whitewash: $20 Billion “Get Out of Jail Free” Settlement Floated

American leadership is reliable in one respect: it consistently undershoots my already low expectations.

Or maybe I have it backwards because I keep forgetting who the authorities are really serving, and it clearly isn’t you and me. As we will discuss below, the latest scam is that the banking regulators are finalizing a mortgage “breakdown” settlement, and they’ve evidently decided to let the industry off the hook for a mere $20 billion.

In Saudi Arabia, the royal family has just offered $36 billion worth of concessions in an effort to placate an increasingly unruly public (this appears to be in addition to pledges to spend $400 billion on education, health care, and infrastructure by 2014). This is in a country with a population just under 26 million, including over 5 million non-nationals who presumably aren’t eligible.

Now you can easily pooh pooh this comparison, since Saudi Arabia is an autocratic country desperately throwing around money to buy off dissidents, right? But this is the kind of money a leadership group will shell out when pressed to defend an existing order. And the US was very quick to hand out funds right, left, and center during the financial crisis. It’s continuing to do so now in less obvious ways, by continued life support for the mortgage market through Fannie and Freddie, the Fed’s super low interest rates and QE2, and non-monetary measures, most important its refusal to make any sort of serious investigation into what happened in the crisis and prosecute key actors.

Daniel Pennell: MERS Counsel Calls Me

By Daniel Pennell, a systems expert who has testified before the Virginia House of Representatives on MERS

I wonder if solar flares or something in the ether is prompting officials under attack to have unusually open conversations with people in the opposition. We’ve just had Governor Walker speak to “David Koch”, and I had a mini version of the same experience with MERS’ general counsel, except in my case, I was the recipient of the phone call. But the underlying assumptions of MERS and the Wisconsin executive were similar, in that each is confident of support from powerful allies.

Given that I am a vocal MERS critic, though testimony I have given, opinion pieces I have written and the work on legislation I have done over the last year decrying the legal standing and operational sloppiness of MERS, I was more than a little taken aback to get a call from Richard Anderson of the MERS legal team yesterday.

Bill Fleckenstein and Dylan Ratigan Discuss Commodities and “Individually Smart, Collectively Stupid” Regulators

This is a particularly crisp and straightforward discussion between money manager Bill Fleckenstein and Dylan Ratigan about central bank actions and commodities inflation. Enjoy!

MERS Endgame Nearing? One County Seeks Over $22 Million for Unpaid Recording Fees

Plank after plank of the mortgage recording company MERS’ business model has come under attack. To date, the results do not look good for the embattled company.

MERS has repeatedly insisted that its operations are legal. It would be more accurate to say that insufficient attention was paid to legal issues when the firm was created and the permissibility of its operations were under the radar and hence in a legal grey area for many years. Now that they have been challenged in court, MERS has had to retreat from many positions it took in public. Despite its protestations that everything it did was kosher, the database firm has now retreated from one of its widespread practices, of allowing foreclosures to be made in the name of MERS, after a number of state supreme courts and Federal bankruptcy courts issued rulings to the contrary.

Not surprisingly, MERS has the look of a company in trouble.

Wisconsin’s Walker Joins Government Asset Giveaway Club (and is Rahm Soon to Follow?)

Mike Konczal (thanks to ed at ginandtacos) reported earlier today on the latest release of a movie coming to states and cities all over the US, namely the sale of state and local government assets to alleviate pressures on strained budgets.

For those new to this concept, the term of art is the anodyne “infrastructure sales” and the company that more or less invented this lucrative business is Macquarie Bank of Australia (known down under as “the millionaires factory”), although US firms clearly intend to exploit the once in a lifetime opportunity presented by widespread state and municipal budget distress and downgrades.

The problem, of course, is that these deals put important public resources paid for by taxes (or even worse, financed by bonds and thus potentially not even yet fully paid for) in the hands of private investors. They then earn their returns by charging user fees of various sorts. The public must rely on the new owners for reinvestment and maintenance, and depending on how the deal is negotiated, may have ceded control as far as fee increases are concerned. This is tantamount to selling the family china only to have to rent it back in order to eat dinner.

Haldane Unto the Breach

We remarked before that attempts to nobble Mervyn King would soon bring other UK bank reformers out of the woodwork, and we have a confirming sighting today, via a puzzled tweet from @EconOfContempt: Strange op-ed by Andrew Haldane in the FT. No one is really pushing the argument that he’s trying to shoot down EoC […]

Further Discussion of Krugman on Mervyn King, Greenspan, and Bernanke

Paul Krugman was kind enough to link to me with respect to a Guardian article pointing to his criticism of the fiscal stance, and arguably more important, the political role that the Bank of England governor Mervyn King is taking. However, Krugman said I was in error in claiming he never criticized Greenspan for compromising Fed independence.

As an aside, I’m taking King’s side a bit more than I might otherwise. Yes, I agree fully with Krugman that austerity is a bad idea in the UK and pretty much anywhere still in a hangover after the global financial crisis. But there seems to be a lot of opportunism in the broadsides against King. He is the only central banker that has stood firm against the bad practices of the major dealer banks. And his dim view is reportedly widely shared among Bank of England staff. My sense (which UK readers confirm) is that the piling on seems unduly aggressive, and looks to be an effort to discredit King in order to weaken him (and as much as possible, the Bank) as a reformer.

I’m still going to quibble a bit. The NC remark in question about Krugman was: “And he’s said nothing about the “political” Greenspan and Bernanke.”

Bernanke Blames the Global Financial Crisis on China

They must put something in the water at the Fed, certainly the Board of Governors and the New York Fed. Everyone there, or at least pretty much everyone who gets presented to the media, seems to have an advanced form of mental illness, namely, an pronounced inability to admit error. While many in public life suffer from this particular affliction, it appears pervasive at the Fed. Examples abound including an overt ones like an article attempting to bolster the party line that no one, and hence certainly not the central bank, could have seen the housing bubble coming, or subtler ones, like a long paper on the shadow banking system that I did not bother to shred because doing it right would have tried reader patience Among other things, it endeavored to present the shadow banking system as virtuous (a necessary position since the Fed bailed it out) because it was all tied to securtization and hence credit intermediation. That framing conveniently omits the role of credit default swaps and how they multiplied the worst credit risks well beyond real economy exposure levels and concentrated them in highly geared financial firms.

Another example of the “it is never the Fed’s fault” disease reared its ugly head in the context of the G20 meetings.