Category Archives: Business – 2008-10 Financial Crisis

Losing the grip on AIG

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resign The business blogosphere was abuzz yesterday over publication of AIG executive Jake DeSantis’ remarkable resignation letter to AIG CEO, Ed Liddy.

But what was even more remarkable was the reaction of some commentators that makes abundantly clear that common sense often evaporates in the face of big money.

DeSantis is a longtime AIG executive who worked for one of AIG’s profitable units. When AIG was going down the tubes last year because of losses incurred in the company’s untethered CDS trading unit, DeSantis agreed to stay on at a nominal salary and continue making profits in his unit in return for a substantial, but not over-market, bonus.

Such arrangements are not unusual for financially-troubled companies and might very well have been arranged even had AIG gone into a chapter 11 reorganization rather than become the subject of an ill-advised government bailout. In short, it’s a good thing for creditors of AIG — including now U.S. taxpayers — that the company retain people such as DeSantis who might make the company profitable and valuable again.

Or course, we all know what happened when AIG disclosed publicly that it had made the bonus payments to DeSantis and other AIG executives. They were demonized in a manner that has not been seen since Enron.

DeSantis’ resignation letter lays this all out and notes the indisputable hypocrisy of AIG executives and government officials who knew about these compensation arrangements, but who flamed the public uproar rather than provide the quite simple and reasonable explanation for the bonuses.

I mean really. Who could argue that DeSantis and the other similarly-situated AIG executives were treated in an abominable manner?

Well, up to the plate steps one Brian Montopoli, a CBSNews.com political reporter, who establishes beyond any doubt that he needs to remain a political, rather than business, reporter:

Mr. DeSantis is not a plumber. He is a Wall Street executive who has made millions of dollars. And it’s safe to assume that most plumbers don’t believe he has gotten a bad deal, AIG scandal notwithstanding.

In essence, Montopoli reasons that other people are working just as hard as DeSantis and they would gladly trade places with him if they could have made as much scratch as he has earned over the years. Given that DeSantis made a lot of money while he was at AIG, Montopoli thinks he is "tone deaf" for pointing out the injustice of being unfairly demonized and cheated out of the compensation that was promised to him in return for staying on at AIG under extremely difficult circumstances.

In short, those evil capitalist roaders deserve most of our scorn and they should just shut the hell up.

In the face of such addled reasoning, it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start by pointing out that Montopoli ignores the rather important fact that no one has stopped him or anyone else from attempting to compete with DeSantis in his area of business and make just as much money as he has over the years. The reality is that there are relatively few people who do what DeSantis does well. That’s why he commands a larger salary than most of us.

The fact that DeSantis makes more money than we do doesn’t mean that it’s OK to screw him out of his compensation or that he shouldn’t be heard to set the record straight when such an injustice takes place.

Getting a Grip on AIG

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aig-logo.pngGeez. I leave the country for ten days on a European trip and, upon my return, the entire U.S. body politic appears to be going batshit over a couple hundred million dollars of performance bonuses that the now-thoroughly Enronized American International Group paid to its employees.

What on earth is going on here?

Well, Michael Lewis pretty well nails the dynamic in this Bloomberg.com article:

To the political process, all big numbers look alike; above a certain number the money becomes purely symbolic. The general public has no ability to feel the relative weight of 173 billion and 165 million. You can generate as much political action and public anger over millions as you can over billions. Maybe more: the larger the number the more abstract it becomes and, therefore, the easier to ignore.  .   .   .

Of course, the 173 billion that Lewis refers to in the foregoing passage is the amount that the federal government funneled through AIG to Goldman Sachs and various other big AIG creditors.

Meanwhile, Goldman is feeling some of the shrapnel from the AIG-bonus explosion and has disclosed publicly for the first time the details of why it would not have really been damaged all that much by an AIG bankruptcy.

When the U.S. Treasury started throwing money at AIG in September, Goldman had already gathered from AIG $7.5 billion of collateral against insurance that AIG had written on a $20 billion portfolio of debt securities.

Moreover, Goldman arranged $2.5 billion in primarily credit derivative hedges on AIG because Goldman was betting that the value of the securities portfolio was substantially lower than AIG’s was betting.

Finally, Goldman received another $2.5 billion of collateral from AIG between September and the end of last year and the Fed transferred another $5.6 billion to Goldman to purchase the AIG-insured securities for the Maiden Lane III bail-out entity.

Meanwhile, Goldman continues to extract additional collateral on about $6 billion of securities that did not qualify for Maiden Lane III.

None of the foregoing is particularly surprising. Goldman is one of the world’s largest trading entitles and AIG is one of the world’s largest insurers, so it is inevitable that their affairs are going to be intertwined.

When the federal government caved to fears of a global financial calamity and bailed AIG out, Goldman secured its position in regard to AIG in a manner that was consistent with Goldman’s best interests. As Joe Weisenthal points out, it really doesn’t make any sense to get angry at Goldman for taking advantage of the federal government’s bad financial decisions.

So, let’s lay off the AIG bonuses — in the big scheme of things, they are innocuous. Similarly, let’s not hyperventilate over Goldman and various other AIG creditors taking advantage of the federal government’s dubious investment in AIG. If we are honest, then most of us would admit that we would have done the same thing had we been in the creditors’ position.

But let’s do start insisting that our representatives get out of the way and allow the market to force these creditors to endure the true cost of the risk that they took in entering into contractual relationships with AIG.

Until that risk of loss is properly allocated, investment capital is going to remain on the sidelines, particularly while the government continues to make ill-advised investments that postpones and distorts such allocation.

It’s already been an expensive lesson, but one that might well be worth the cost if the counterproductive nature of the governmental actions in regard to AIG comes to be better understood.

The Goldman Sachs Bailout

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Why do most pundits continue to characterize the billions of dollars that the federal government has loaned to AIG over the past six months as “the AIG bailout?”

As this WSJ weekend article and this subsequent Bloomberg article note, the funds that the Fed and the Treasury have loaned to AIG really bailout out Goldman Sachs and a number of other prominent banks, including some of Europe’s largest.

Thus, shouldn’t we be calling this the “Goldman Sachs bailout?”

By now, we all know what happened. AIG sold credit default swaps that provided the buyer of the CDS with insurance against default on bonds and other credit instruments that the buyers held.

However, insurance is only as good as the financial capacity of the insurer to pay claims on that insurance.

So, when it became apparent last summer that AIG had seriously blown the assessment of its risk in issuing CDS, the level of the credit risk that AIG had insured was well beyond its ability to pay potential claims on the CDS.

That’s not good news for a trust-based business.

Consequently, when bond defaults started hemorrhaging through the mortgage markets, the buyers of AIG’s CDS — namely Goldman and the Euro banks — had a similar problem to AIG’s. They had failed to assess the risk of doing business with their insurer accurately and they were facing huge losses on their CDS claims.

Well, under normal circumstances, that shouldn’t have been any big deal to anyone other than parties involved. AIG would have been floundered into chapter 11.

Goldman and the other big creditors would have assessed whether it made sense to reorganize the company or simply liquidate its constituent parts. The creditors would have converted their debt to equity in a new AIG or taken a haircut on their claims in return for receiving a portion of AIG’s liquidation proceeds.

Everyone would have licked their wounds and the profitable parts of AIG’s business would have emerged from bankruptcy with new owners highly incentivized to generate value for their ownership interest.

That’s the way markets have sorted out such errors in judgment for generations.

However, as we all know, that’s not what has happened this time. Instead, after stirring up a climate of fear, the federal government — led by supposedly free-market oriented Republicans — paid Goldman and the Euro banks full price for the unsecured claims that they would otherwise be asserting against AIG in a chapter 11 case.

And the new Democratic administration doesn’t appear to have any better understanding of what to do now that it is clear that the prior Administration’s gambit has failed miserably.

It really is not rocket science. Larry Ribstein concurs.

The Financial Times’ William Buiter summarizes the lesson that we all should learn from this:

The logic of collective action teaches us that a small group of interested parties, each with much at stake, will run rings around large numbers of interested parties each one of which has much less at stake individually, even though their aggregate stake may well be larger.

The organized lobbying bulldozer of Wall Street sweeps the floor with the US tax payer anytime.The modalities of the bailout by the Fed of the AIG counterparties is a textbook example of the logic of collective action at work.

It is scandalous: unfair, inefficient, expensive and unnecessary.

Insightful thoughts to close the week

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Lightbulb White Writing in 1951 about popular attitudes toward income inequality in "The Ethics of Redistribution," Bertrand de Jouvenel observed the following (H/T WSJ):

The film-star or the crooner is not grudged the income that is grudged to the oil magnate, because the people appreciate the entertainer’s accomplishment and not the entrepreneur’s, and because the former’s personality is liked and the latter’s is not. They feel that consumption of the entertainer’s income is itself an entertainment, while the capitalist’s is not, and somehow think that what the entertainer enjoys is deliberately given by them while the capitalist’s income is somehow filched from them.

In arguably the best financial blog post to date in 2009, the Epicurean Dealmaker analyzes the skewed dynamics that led to the Merrill Lynch high-level executive bonus pool and observes, among other things:

It would not be outlandish to consider the Merrill executives’ bonus pool as the latest and largest campaign gift toward Mr. [Andrew] Cuomo’s 2010 gubernatorial run.

Meanwhile, Andrew Morris wrote the following in a letter to the WSJ editor (H/T Don Boudreaux):

At first, when I read your headline “States give gambling a closer look” (Mar. 3) I thought you were reporting on yet another “stimulus” or “bailout” bill in which politicians played games of chance with taxpayers’ money. Hardly news — just another “dog bites man” story.

Then I realized it was just a story about allowing ordinary people to risk their own money  –  now that’s a “man bites dog” story!

Along the same lines, the WSJ’s Notable and Quotable series provided the following excerpt from Friedrich A. Hayek’s "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960) on the illusory nature of progressive taxation and large increases in governmental spending:

Not only is the revenue derived from the high rates levied on large incomes, particularly in the highest brackets, so small compared with the total revenue as to make hardly any difference to the burden borne by the rest; but for a long time . . . it was not the poorest who benefited from it but entirely the better-off working class and the lower strata of the middle class who provided the largest number of voters.

It would probably be true, on the other hand, to say that the illusion that by means of progressive taxation the burden can be shifted substantially onto the shoulders of the wealthy has been the chief reason why taxation has increased as fast as it has done and that, under the influence of this illusion, the masses have come to accept a much heavier load than they would have done otherwise. The only major result of the policy has been the severe limitation of the incomes that could be earned by the most successful and thereby gratification of the envy of the less-well-off.

And Jason Kottke noted the technological irony of the week:

Now you can go to the iTunes Store to buy the Kindle app from Amazon that lets you read ebooks made for the Kindle device on the iPhone.

Finally, legendary Houston trial lawyer Joe Jamail passes along this anecdote about the late, great Houston criminal defense lawyer, Percy Foreman:

In the early 1980s, Jamail represented his courtroom idol, Houston criminal defense attorney Percy Foreman, whose neck was injured when his car was rear-ended by a commercial truck. On direct examination, Foreman testified that he had not experienced any neck problems before the accident, and that he was entitled to $75,000 for lost income due to the injury.

But on cross-examination, the defense revealed that Foreman had been hospitalized nine times for neck problems prior to this accident.

“The jury looked at me, expecting me to give them an answer,” says Jamail. “So I told them that Percy had been a great lawyer throughout his life, but that he was now just an old man and was growing senile.”

At that moment, Foreman jumped up and yelled out across the courtroom, “You goddamned son of a bitch!”

“See what I mean,” Jamail immediately told jurors. “He doesn’t even know where he is right now.”

The jury awarded Foreman the sum of $75,004. Jamail says he never figured out why the extra $4.

The Price of Progress

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As noted here last fall, one of the key dynamics that is delaying the recovery of financial markets is the resistance of many societal forces to allow the markets to allocate the risk of loss among the various investors in failed businesses.

Inasmuch as private capital will not invest in even a potentially viable business until that company’s financial condition is likely to reward such an investment, the liquidation of unviable companies is an essential part of the process that has allowed market-based economies to generate the most wealth and jobs throughout modern history.

Despite the foregoing, the beneficial aspects of liquidating unprofitable businesses remains often unappreciated. A scene from the 1991 Norman Jewison film "Other’s People Money" illustrates this truth wonderfully, first as Gregory Peck’s character demonizes the forces of liquidation and then as Danny DeVito’s "Larry the Liquidator" shatters the myths upon which such demonizing rests. Enjoy.

Greed in perspective

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In market economies, people who create jobs and wealth often generate great wealth personally. During periods of market unrest, those wealthy folks are often demonized as being greedy.

During a period of economic malaise in1979, the late Milton Friedman counsels Phil Donahue on the vacuity of demonizing greed. Enjoy.

Stanford blows up

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stanford Well, that certainly didn’t take long, now did it?

As noted here this past Sunday, R. Allen Stanford’s Stanford Financial Group has been well-known around Houston as a smoke-and-mirrors investment outfit for quite awhile. Joe Weisenthal over at Clusterstock has the best overview of Stanford’s collapse, while Felix Salmon does a good job of summarizing the SEC complaint and asking the right questions about the principals of the firm. The Chron’s Kristen Hays and Tom Fowler provide the local angle here.

Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s business columnist Loren Steffy bemoans the fact that government regulators — who have been investigating Stanford for at least the past four years — were again behind the knowledge curve in protecting investors from Stanford’s apparent investment fraud.

However, Steffy’s expectations are simply misplaced. A government regulatory body will rarely be as effective or efficient as the information marketplace in preventing or mitigating investment fraud loss. Had the investors in Stanford relied on Houston’s information market in deciding on whether to invest in the company, they wouldn’t have needed the "protection" of government regulation.

Houston’s Madoff?

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Stanford cover page The mainstream media has finally begun to notice the unusual circumstances surrounding R. Allen Stanford and his Houston-based investment firm, Stanford Financial Group (the latest Chronicle story is here).

Although the firm characterized the various investigations as "routine" in news reports, believe me — it’s never "routine" when the FBI starts nosing around. This is doubtful to end well for Stanford and its investors.

But what’s most remarkable about all this is how long it has taken for the media and regulators to catch on to Stanford. It took blogger Alex Dalmody less than 30 minutes to size up the situation, and it didn’t take Felix Salmon (update here) much longer.

Meanwhile, this Business Week article reports that the SEC has been investigating Stanford for the past three years!

Interestingly, I’ve asked dozens of folks in Houston investment community about Stanford over the years and have never once heard one vouch that an investment in the firm would be a good idea except as an absolute flyer. Nevertheless, I cannot recall even one media article over the years examining how Stanford was supposedly paying its lucrative returns to investors. Sure, the firm advertised well and contributed money to a number of powerful politicians. But I kept hearing from competent investment folks — exactly how is the firm paying those kinds of returns on CD’s again? And then there was that whole false association thing with the late Leland Stanford of Stanford University. How could anyone really take this outfit seriously?

Well, as recent news reports indicate, apparently about 30,000 investors did just that.

Now, it appears that many of these investors are from Central and South America, so maybe those investors didn’t have ready access to the information about Stanford that was available in Houston. But the important point here is that — as with Bernard Madoff — no regulatory agency is ever going to do a better job than the information market in preventing or mitigating fraud loss. I mean really, can you imagine how an investor who bought a Stanford CD during the past three years is feeling toward the SEC right now?

Thinking that the government can prevent a slick con man from fleecing investors is about as rational as investing one’s life savings with Stanford Financial Group.

Interesting historical perspectives

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history mattersCato Unbound points us to a couple of articles that provide insightful observations on two of the crises that are swirling around us these days.

First, William Niskanen cautions us regarding the fear-mongering that supporters of the Obama Administration’s fiscal stimulus plan are using to justify emergency passage of the plan:

This is the fifth time in my adult life that the president has asked for or asserted unprecedented authority on an expedited basis with little or no congressional review. Each of the prior occasions turned out to be a disaster. [.  .  .]

The only coherence in this plan is political, not whether it is an effective or efficient method to stimulate the economy.   .   .  .  Again, as in the four prior episodes, there is every reason not to rush to approve a program of such magnitude.

The primary reason for the current financial crisis is that many banks cannot evaluate their own solvency or that of their current or potential counter-parties, primarily because of the difficulty of valuing mortgage-backed securities and other complex derivatives, and neither TARP nor the fiscal stimulus plan addresses this problem.

Our political system, unfortunately, is strongly biased to try to protect people against the effects of a crisis without addressing the causes of the crisis. To Congress: Slow down. Make sure you understand the causes of the financial crisis and the potential solutions before you burden your children and your grandchildren with another trillion dollars of federal debt.

Your present course is best described as fiscal child abuse.

Meanwhile, as Texans continue to watch nervously to the south as the Mexican government teeters on the brink of losing control of large sectors of the country to drug kingpins, Dale Gieringer reminds us that the main cause of this crisis — U.S. drug prohibition — is the result of dubious public policy:

This week marks the centennial of a fateful landmark in U.S. history, the nation’s first drug prohibition law.  On February 9, 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, barring the importation of opium for smoking as of April 1.  Thus began a hundred-year crusade that has unleashed unprecedented crime, violence and corruption around the world —a war with no victory in sight.

Long accustomed to federal drug control, most Americans are unaware that there was once a time when people were free to buy any drug, including opium, cocaine, and cannabis, at the pharmacy.  In that bygone era, drug-related crime and violence were largely unknown, and drug use was not a major public concern. [.  .  .]

Early 20th-century Americans would be astounded to see what a problem drugs have become since the establishment of drug prohibition. Every year, two million Americans are arrested and 400,000 imprisoned for drug offenses that did not exist in their time.  Drug laws are now the number-one source of crime in the U.S., with one-half of the entire adult population having violated them.

Long gone are the days when Americans were free to keep opium in their closet; today, even gravely suffering patients are denied pain-killing narcotics by their doctors out of fear of federal prosecution. While smoking opium has faded from the scene, the country is now rife with more potent and lethal narcotics, which are widely sold on the illegal market. 

Seen in retrospect, drug prohibition ranks as one of the great man-made disasters of the 20th century. .  .  .

Sound thoughts to start the week

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the_thinker Felix Salmon:

It may or may not be true that we would have avoided much of this crisis had credit default swaps never been invented. I suspect it’s not true, and that the CDS market, in allowing people to short the credit market, actually helped at the margin to stop the credit bubble from expanding. But even if it is true, that doesn’t mean that the solution is to ban or unwind the CDS market which now exists. It was foolish to sell protection too cheaply on risky debt; it was sensible to buy that protection when it was cheap. So let’s not punish the sensible people and bail out the foolish ones by abrogating those contracts.

Peter Gordon:

"Animal spirits", Keynes’ view of capitalists, reeks of detachment and some condescension. Trouble is no one really knows how to incite the barnyard or rattle the cage. The past six months of ad hoccery have not helped and I am pessimistic about the next chapter, guessing that whatever comes out of the Washington sausage factory will do more harm than good. Bad times do breed bad policy. And there is now very little sympathy for getting the taxman (and the politician) out of the way.

Gordon again:

There are some very smart people who claim that desperate measures are called for. But desperate measures can also make matters worse. Printing money to finance questionable projects that enrich lobbyists, empower bureaucrats and entrench politicians is surely not a promising signal to investors here or abroad.