Category: Market Action

The question of whether the functions of Central Bank and Bank Regulator should be combined or not has been often discussed on PrefBlog. Elsewhere, too, like Frankfurt, with remarks by Ms. Gertrude Tumpel-Gugerell of the ECB:

The main position at that time, which remains valid today, is that there is no optimal arrangement for the organisation of supervision at the national level. All organisational models – sectoral supervision, supervision by objectives, supervision in a single authority – can in principle work well or fail depending on circumstances. However, regardless of the model, it is important that there exists a very close and smooth interplay between the central banking and the supervisory function.
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Provision of Emergency Liquidity Assistance is a clear point in case where central banks need supervisory information for decision-making. In this field, I believe that an important step forward is represented by the recent MoU on financial stability arrangement signed by the EU central banks, supervisors and ministries of finance in June 2008.

Finally, referring more to the supervisory domain but still linked to the central bank interest, the turmoil has evidenced the need for strengthening the macro-prudential dimension of regulation and supervision. This means the regulatory and supervisory requirements should be able to ensure adequate capital and liquidity buffers throughout the economic cycle. In this regard, the actual impact of the new capital adequacy regime under of Basel II will have to be monitored very closely.

Very bureaucratic! There isn’t the slightest hint of a recommendation in these remarks!

Lehman reported today:

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., reporting the biggest loss in its 158-year history, said it will sell a majority stake in its asset-management unit, spin off commercial real-estate holdings and cut the dividend in an effort to shore up capital and regain investor confidence.

There is little risk I can see that Lehman will flame out with the frightening speed of Bear Stearns – they have access to the discount window:

The program instituted in the aftermath of the Bear Stearns debacle, the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, could be used for funding while officials, regulators and executives find alternative sources of cash, Fed watchers said.

“The PDCF could be used to keep Lehman operating until a broader solution was found,” said Brian Sack, a former Fed research manager who’s now senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers LLC in Washington. “The challenge is figuring out what the broader solution is.”

Lehman can borrow overnight from the central bank, with escalating costs if it keeps using the program. Because it’s a stopgap, speculation may mount that the government will again intervene to prevent a large financial company from failing, after the Bear Stearns rescue and takeovers of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Speaking of Fannie & Freddie, repercussions on the US preferred share market have been severe:

Prices of fixed-rate preferred stock fell an average of 9 cents to 71.5 cents on the dollar this week, according to Merrill Lynch & Co. index data, the biggest two-day drop in more than a decade. The 11 percent decline compares with a 1.4 percent drop in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index over the same time.
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Sales of preferred securities in the U.S. have risen 48 percent this year to about $44 billion from more than $30 billion in the same period of 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The average yield as measured by the Merrill index has risen to 10.1 percent from 8.8 percent on Sept. 5 and 7.9 percent at the end of last year.

Accrued Interest surveys the wreckage and recommends buying mortgage-backeds, while Fannie Mae has announced a $7-billion 2-year issue of its own debt (which, as Accrued Interest pointed out, had a lot taken up by central banks) … and at the same time, Vivendi has cancelled an offering of $846-million 7-years. And another US banking company slashed its common dividend:

Synovus Financial Corp., owner of 35 banks in the Southeastern U.S., will cut 650 jobs, or about 9 percent of its staff, and reduce the dividend by 65 percent to preserve capital depleted by mortgage losses.

The bank will record $15 million in costs for the two-year plan in 2008 and another $6 million later, and expects it will add $75 million in annual pretax earnings, the Columbus, Georgia- based Synovus said today in a statement. The quarterly payout was lowered to 6 cents a share.

All this excitement leaves little time for regulatory grandstanding, but some of them manage it:

Bank of America Corp. will buy back $4.5 billion of auction-rate securities to settle a nationwide probe led by Massachusetts Secretary of State William Galvin into its sales and marketing of the failed debt.

Bank of America, one of the largest underwriters of the securities, will offer to redeem the securities from its customers between Oct. 1 and Dec. 31, it said in a statement today. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank said it expects to record a pretax charge of about $275 million in connection with the buybacks.

Nothing like a little extortion to spice up a regulator’s life, eh?

“Liquidity” has often been mentioned in this blog – there was a story on Bloomberg today highlighting its importance in the day-to-day mechanics of bond trading:

Trading in the corporate bond market has fallen a third after averaging $26 billion a day in the first eight months of 2007, according to Federal Reserve data on primary dealers.
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The biggest bond dealers, including JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Citigroup Inc., aren’t committing as much cash to boost corporate-bond trading. That’s because they’re shoring up their capital after the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market spurred about $511.4 billion of writedowns and losses.

While corporate-bond trading is shrinking, average daily trading in government securities has risen to about $584 billion this year from $560 billion in the same period of 2007, Fed data show.

The decline in corporate-debt trading, known in market parlance as illiquidity, is prompting fund managers to demand higher compensation to buy new bonds, driving up borrowing costs for companies, including American Express Co. and Verizon Communications Inc., and reducing returns on existing securities.

PerpetualDiscounts moved solidly upward on a moderately busy day. Royal Bank issues took the spotlight, with high volume and strong performance.

There were twenty-four other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

In the wake of the Fannie & Freddie rescue comes the news that CDSs on Treasuries are rising:

Contracts on U.S. government debt increased 3.5 basis points to a record 18 basis points, up from 6 basis points in April, according to CMA Datavision prices for five-year credit-default swaps at 4 p.m. in London. Credit-default swaps on German government bonds cost 8 basis points and Japanese bonds 16.5 basis points.

I’m not sure what constitutes a “credit event” under these swaps.

The article makes another point that is being lost amidst the hand-wringing:

The U.S. budget deficit will grow next year to $438 billion, the Congressional Budget Office said today, making it harder for President George W. Bush’s successor to either cut taxes or increase spending.

The CBO Report states:

CBO expects the deficit to rise from 1.2 percent of GDP in 2007 to 2.9 percent this year (see Summary Table 1). The significant expansion in the deficit is the result of a substantial increase in spending and a halt in the growth of tax revenues. In 2008, CBO estimates, federal spending will be 8.3 percent higher than in 2007; at the same time, total revenues will probably be less than they were in 2007.

The CBO Report Web-Page has links to various tables and supporting/extracted data … and even to the CBO Director’s Blog! Geez, you know, my respect for American institutions has been monotonically increasing for the last twenty years, at least. They do things so well there! Too bad their politics is so … um … well, what with the deficit being up so much, maybe it’s time to cut taxes again!

Anyway … my point is: even if Poole’s estimate of $300-billion in Fannie/Freddie costs is correct, that’s still less than a bad year’s deficit. Armageddon is only one year closer. As I have said before, the US will eventually hit the wall on debt, just the way Canada hit the wall in 1994. Hitting the wall caused Canadians fiscal pain, but we got out from under the monster and are now pillars of fiscal rectitude – even with “What debt?” Harper in command. Old what-debt’s policies are indicative of a weakening of resolve, but I wouldn’t have expected 1994’s dose of reality to last more than 20 years anyway; but the point is that the US will eventually hit the wall, raise taxes, cut spending, get their house in order and move on.

I was pleased when Treasury took my advice regarding the structuring of the GSE rescue, but they didn’t follow my instructions of September 5:

I continue to feel that nothing should happen until the GSEs either fall below their regulatory minimum capital (a la IndyMac), or become unable to finance themselves in a normal commercial manner (a la Bear Stearns).
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Any GSE bail-out will be politically divisive enough; to take action before the last minute will simply exacerbate the attention paid to side issues while increasing the potential for future moral hazard without providing a solution that is necessarily any more effective.

Instead, they went ahead when it was still possible to argue the companies could survive on a stand-alone basis. So now the squabbling over side issues has started:

Senator Jim Bunning said Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, by rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is acting like China’s finance minister and both Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke should step down.
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“We no longer have a free market in the United States, we have a government controlled free market,” Bunning said in an interview. Paulson, a former chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc., “is acting like the minister of finance in China.”

So now we’re headed for twenty years’ worth of idealogical bickering, instead of concentrating on what constitutes – or should constitute – 90% of government business: What’s gonna work best?

Naked Capitalism reprints an opinion piece by Ken Rogoff:

If central banks are faced with a massive hit to their balance sheets, it will not necessarily be the end of the world. It has happened before – for example, during the financial crises of the 1990s. But history suggests that fixing a central bank’s balance sheet is never pleasant. Faced with credit losses, a central bank can either dig its way out through inflation or await recapitalisation by taxpayers. Both solutions are extremely traumatic.

Raging inflation causes all kinds of distortions and inefficiencies. (And don’t think central banks have ruled out the inflation tax. In fact, inflation has spiked during the past year, conveniently facilitating a necessary correction in the real price of houses.) Taxpayer bailouts, on the other hand, are seldom smooth and inevitably compromise central bank independence.

Well, there is one other solution, technically. If you want to spend money you can:

• Tax it
• Print it
• Borrow it

After a period of massive expansion during which the financial services sector nearly doubled in size, some retrenchment is natural and normal. The sub-prime mortgage loan problem triggered a drop in some financial institutions’ key lines of business, particularly their opaque but extremely profitable derivatives businesses. Some shrinkage of the industry is inevitable. Central banks have to start fostering consolidation, rather than indiscriminately extending credit.

Quite true – as was first stated by Bagehot. As the turmoil decreases, the central banks should be tightening the screws, with the “penalty rate” on discount-window (including the new menagerie of special facilities) becoming more penalizing. I don’t think we’re there yet … but I suggest that bank investors should be keeping a sharp eye on their ratios and favouring banks that have, or a building up, large war chests for acquisitions in the coming buyers’ market.

As it is, shareholders are being punished in the usual fashion – huge dilution, unrealized capital losses, lower dividend expectations – and it’s only a matter of degree. It seems to me that Lehmann shareholders aren’t exchanging high-fives about putting one over the authorities:

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. fell as much as 43 percent in New York trading after talks about a capital infusion from Korea Development Bank ended. The Wall Street firm is continuing to negotiate with other potential investors, a person briefed on the matter said.
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The lack of a deal “is depressing shareholders and infuriating insiders,” said Richard Bove, an analyst at Ladenburg Thalmann & Co., in a report today. The bank “refuses to take what it believes are fire-sale prices for its key assets,” he said.

In the Everything Bad Always Happens at the Worst Time Department, we have issuer-side damage estimates from the Auction Rate Securities mess:

The collapse of the market for auction-rate bonds put New York state in the same position as millions of homeowners whose adjustable-rate mortgages reset: It wanted to refinance.

The state had $4 billion in debt with interest rates, set in periodic auctions, that soared as high as 14.2 percent after bidders vanished in February. That was more than triple the January average. The cost to taxpayers rose even more when the state’s first option, replacing auction-rate debt with variable- rate bonds, wasn’t available for the full amount.

Taxpayers and not-for-profit institutions across the U.S. are on the hook for the same kinds of fees and added interest as New York. The bill for replacing the $166 billion in auction- rate debt may top $7 billion, not counting extra interest, based on New York’s expenses. Most of that money is going to the same banks that created and controlled the auction market.

“It’s unfortunate that borrowing costs will rise at the very time the state plans to increase bond sales and the budget is under stress,” said Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission in New York, a business-funded group that monitors state and city fiscal issues.

PerpetualDiscounts were down a tad on the day, but nobody noticed since Energy & Materials equities got slaughtered. The fund is doing quite well, solidly positive on the month to date and handsomely outperforming CPD … which I use as a handy external benchmark.

There were nineteen other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

Assiduous Readers will remember that on September 5 I noted a paper regarding foreign exchange rate prediction – there is another paper on VoxEU today titled Where are commodity prices headed next? Look at exchange rates by Chen, Rogoff & Rossi:

Figure 2 shows the rate of growth of the IMF global commodity price index (the US dollar price index of over 40 exchange-traded primary commodities, weighted according to world export earnings) since 1994. It has indeed been highly positive in the past 5 years, resulting in the high price levels shown in Figure 1. Our forecast based on the exchange rates, labelled “Model Forecast”, is strikingly close to the actual realisation. Indeed, we find that such forecasts of future commodity prices are significantly better than forecasts that rely on traditional statistical models, such as an auto-regression or a random walk.
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This forecasting success of commodity currencies is no deus ex machina but has a sound and intuitive economic basis. It follows naturally from the fact that exchange rates are asset prices that embody expectations of future movements in macroeconomic fundamentals, specifically ones that will directly affect the exchange rates. For commodity currencies, global commodity prices matter to their exchange rate values.

I am hesitant to criticize anything by Rogoff (for whom I have great respect) in the field of FX (his speciality) … but as stated in this very brief article, the mechanism sounds a little circular. ‘We can’t predict FX rates, but we can use them to predict commodity prices, because they’re moved by predictions of commodity prices which predict FX rates’.

The best stab I can make – as a complete non-specialist, understand, and looking at no actual numbers whatsoever – is that FX rates might be driven by foreign takeovers of producers by other producers (a mechanism often seen in Canada over the past few years) who might have a better handle on balance of risks (impending shortages and lengthy order books) than might the general public. But this mechanism is not investigated in the paper.

Top credit market story of the day was, of course, the fallout from the Fannie/Freddie takeover. Mortgage Backed Securities gapped in big-time which generated a lot of duration buying, which caused Treasuries to rally.

Fixed-Reset issues celebrated their ascension to respectability (by which I mean, of course, incorporation into the HIMIPref™ database) by losing money. PerpetualDiscounts had a good day.

There were sixteen other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

James Hamilton of Econbrowser passes on a debunking of Shadowstats … I confess, I have not examined the issues raised very closely, but this is the sort of thing I like to see. The internet has offered looney-tunes a pulpit, which is generally a bad thing; on the other hand, it makes this kind of thinking more visible and susceptible to criticism.

You can tell where my sympathies lie, despite my professed ignorance regarding this particular issue! Assiduous Readers will remember the forecast of the end of the world last February, narrowly averted when it was shown that Armageddonists can’t read balance sheets or do arithmetic.

Accrued Interest reviews the GSE situation and sets up a straw-man proposal:

What if the Treasury agreed to guaranty the principal (not the interest) on a preferred stock offering.
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The preferreds would be callable after 5 years, with the call becoming automatic if the GSEs share price reaches some milestone. The idea would be that if the GSEs are able to issue common equity, then they would be forced to call the tax-payer backed preferred and issue their own securities of some variety.

The Treasury could charge some fee in exchange for the guaranty.
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Here are the advantages of such a plan. First, it could be implemented right away, allowing for stability in the mortgage market and likely a decline in mortgage lending rates. Second, its probably a cheaper plan for tax payers when compared with other options.
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Unfortunately, this kind of solution has a number of problems. First, it creates all kinds of moral hazard, as common equity holders wind up benefiting from the tax payers risk.
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Second, this plan doesn’t move us any closer to a more permanent solution to the problem of macro risk and the GSEs.

Well, I don’t like the plan either! I continue to feel that nothing should happen until the GSEs either fall below their regulatory minimum capital (a la IndyMac), or become unable to finance themselves in a normal commercial manner (a la Bear Stearns). Then Treasury steps in and backstops a rights issue of senior preferred shares convertible into common at a dollar, possibly with a provision that no dividend be paid on the existing and suddenly junior preferreds until some specified capital ratios are met.

Any GSE bail-out will be politically divisive enough; to take action before the last minute will simply exacerbate the attention paid to side issues while increasing the potential for future moral hazard without providing a solution that is necessarily any more effective.

And what to do now? Start drafting legislation that turns the GSEs into regular banks. And start weaning the American mortgage market off fully open mortgages with a 30-year term. That’s the root of the problem.

But stay tuned! After the markets closed, the WSJ said Treasury is Close to Finalizing Plan to Backstop Fannie, Freddie. There are no details, but speculation is rampant on, for instance, Accrued Interest, Bloomberg and Dealbreaker.

Jian Wang of the Dallas Fed writes an interesting review on VoxEU: Understanding exchange rates as asset prices and comes to a conclusion that is consistent with my understanding of the FX markets and markets in general:

In a seminal paper, Richard Meese and Kenneth Rogoff (1983) found that economic fundamentals – such as the money supply, trade balance and national income – were of little use in forecasting exchange rates, at least over short to medium time horizons. They compared existing models to an alternative in which fundamentals are excluded and any exchange rate changes are purely random. They found the “random walk” model to be just as good.
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We argue that exchange rate movements may be driven by both a permanent long-term trend and some transitory noise. These noisy terms can drive exchange rates away from their long-run levels in the short run. As time passes, exchange rates gradually move back to their long-run levels, exhibiting long-horizon predictability. In several models, such as the monetary model and the Taylor rule model in Engel and West (2005), the short-term noise is related to a fundamental that isn’t observable – the risk premium for holding a currency, for example.

Not much price action today, on reasonable volume. All eyes were on the stock market!

There were seventeen other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

I posted a little while ago about Central Banks and the Eligibility Premium … today there was a dramatic illustration (maybe!) about the suddenly enormous importance of access to central bank lending facilities in a Bloomberg story on European bank risk:

The Frankfurt-based central bank will cut 12 percent from the value of asset-backed securities it accepts as collateral, ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said at a press conference today, an increase from as little as 2 percent previously. Hard- to-value assets will have an additional premium of 5 percent, Trichet said. Unsecured bank bonds will have a 5 percent haircut. The new rules apply from Feb. 1, 2009.
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Credit-default swaps on the Markit iTraxx Financial index of subordinated debt of 25 European banks and insurers climbed 9 basis points to 174, the highest since April 1, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices at 3:02 p.m. in London.

I am by no means convinced that this is direct cause and effect; and I am by no means convinced that the CDS market has any connection with reality; but both possibilities are subject to discussion!

Moody’s has discovered another CPDO programming error:

Moody’s Investors Service said it may cut the ratings of 854 million euros ($1.2 billion) of constant proportion debt obligations after disclosing a second error in the way it assesses the securities.

Moody’s review was “prompted by the identification of a coding error in a model used for monitoring CPDOs,” the New York-based firm said in a statement today. Moody’s will probably downgrade the affected CPDOs by one or two levels, it said.

Their last whoopsee was discussed on PrefBlog on May 21. CPDOs in general have been introduced to Assiduous Readers in connection with disputes over credit quality.

Pity poor Lehman! I confess I haven’t been following the story very closely as it twists in the wind, but given that its Price/Book Ratio is reported as 0.49 with an Enterprise Value of NEGATIVE 210-billion [a misprint?], my suspicion is that it has a lot of highly illiquid assets that investors are assigning a value far below the value management thinks they’re worth. So … they’re going to try to spin them off:

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. may shift about $32 billion of commercial mortgages and real estate to a new company that will be spun off in a move similar to the good-bank-bad-bank model used in the 1980s banking crisis, two people briefed on the discussions said.

The bad bank, nicknamed Spinco for now, would have about $8 billion of equity coming from Lehman, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the plan is one of several under consideration. Spinco would borrow the remaining $24 billion from Lehman or outside investors.
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Korea Development Bank has been in discussions to buy a 25 percent stake in Lehman for $6 billion, according to the people familiar with the talks. That would replace most of the capital Lehman would put into the bad bank.

The OSC has a survey on product suitability (hat tip: Financial Webring Forum). Assiduous Readers now have their long desired chance to tell the regulators that investments should be sold to the public only if they go up. The committee has indicated that anonymous submissions will not only be read, but actually be taken seriously.

Sadly, there is no corresponding survey regarding Advisor Suitability. Force publication of composite performance – publish it on the regulatory website, disk storage of all that data is cheap enough – and most problems disappear instantly.

On a happier note, I’ve decided I like commodity crashes better than financial crises:

The Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index fell 2.5 percent to 12,814.14 in Toronto. Canada’s equity benchmark, which derives about two-thirds of its value from energy, materials and financial stocks, has fallen 7 percent in three days and is 15 percent below its June 18 record.

Even after today’s slight loss, PerpetualDiscounts are up 25bp on the month-to-date, a lack of correlation much more to my tastes than was the case during the dark days of July.

There were seventeen other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

The Bank of Canada held the overnight rate steady at 3.00%:

Global inflationary pressures remain elevated, with potential implications for import prices and the dynamics of inflation in Canada. While total CPI inflation has moved above 3 per cent, core inflation has stayed at 1.5 per cent as expected. The temporary factors affecting both of these measures should dissipate over the coming quarters, and the Bank continues to expect that total and core inflation will converge on 2 per cent in the second half of 2009. However, the recent decline in both spot and futures prices for energy means that the spike in total CPI inflation expected between now and the first quarter of 2009 will be lower than projected in July.

Although an argument can be made for a rate cut, it is not clear and compelling. Most of the world’s central banks are tightening or are thinking about it – just today, there are updates on the Fed, the BoE and Indonesia); I don’t think the BoC will swim against the tide without a clear and compelling reason.

The collapse of Ospraie’s flagship hedge fund was mentioned yesterday; there are some rumours that natural gas brought it down while others finger copper.

The Clear Channel LBO debt might be clearing:

Banks led by Deutsche Bank AG are seeking to sell $980 million of Clear Channel Communications Inc. bonds in the biggest sale of leveraged buyout debt since March.

The 10.75 percent, eight-year notes are scheduled to price early next week, said a person familiar with the transaction, who declined to be identified because terms aren’t set. The debt helped to finance the radio-station operator’s buyout by Bain Capital Partners LLC and Thomas H. Lee Partners LP.

… and, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, Blackrock is setting up another vulture fund:

BlackRock Inc., the biggest publicly traded U.S. asset manager, is seeking as much as $3 billion for a fund to buy loans that banks are selling for losses, said two investors with knowledge of the matter.

BlackRock Credit Investors II will invest in leveraged- buyout loans that banks are trying to unload after the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market drove investors away from all but the safest securities, the investors said. Last year, New York- based BlackRock raised $3 billion for its first such fund.

As all Assiduous Readers know, one of my macro-economic fears is that regulators will make all but the most plain-vanilla securities too risky to sell to the usual recipients of their back-dated largesse. This may be happening with municipalities and interest rate swaps:

JPMorgan Chase & Co., under investigation in a federal antitrust probe of derivative sales in the $2.6 trillion municipal bond market, will stop marketing products such as interest-rate swaps to municipalities, a spokeswoman said.

The bank will still arrange derivatives for non-profit organizations and sell commodity derivatives to municipalities, said JPMorgan spokeswoman Kristin Lemkau. Derivatives are contracts whose value is derived from tradeable securities, or linked to future changes in lending costs.

Geez, when the rules change on a backdated basis, people don’t want to play anymore, eh?

Another solid up-day for the PerpetualDiscounts.

There were twenty other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

The most interesting news items of the day got their own posts (TD Capital to Issue Asset-Backed Tier 1 Paper, Swiss Bank Regulator to Impose Assets-to-Capital Multiple Cap, New Issue: TD Fixed-Reset 5.00%+196bp) so there ain’t much left to report!

Ambac got permission to set up a new bond insurer. After all, you can’t just let Buffet get his own way all the time!

PrefBlog’s “Whoopsee!” Department reminds me to link to a Bloomberg story about a hedge fund:

Ospraie Management LLC, the investment firm run by Dwight Anderson, will close its biggest hedge fund after it fell 38.6 percent this year because of losing wagers on commodity stocks, according to a letter to investors.

The Ospraie Fund lost 26.7 percent in August, after a “substantial sell-off in a number of our energy, mining and resource equity holdings,” Anderson, 41, wrote in the letter today.

I don’t know, particularly, why so many of these things are called “Hedge” funds … most of the ones I’ve seen are really “highly leveraged macro-bet” funds. But perhaps I’m just bitter, what with not being able to find funding for my own idea … a hedge fund, really hedge, trading preferred shares could, I am quite confident, make good money for non-taxable investors.

PerpetualDiscounts performed well on a slow day.

There were ten other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

The Bank of China has cut its GSE holdings by 25%, according to a Financial Times piece passed on by Naked Capitalism:

The sale by China’s fourth largest commercial bank, which reduced its holdings of so-called agency debt by $4.6bn, is a sign of nervousness among foreign buyers of Fannie and Freddie’s bonds and guaranteed securities.

However, MBS spreads have narrowed over the past month:

The difference between yields on Fannie Mae’s current-coupon 30-year fixed-rate bonds and 10-year government notes narrowed 10 basis points this week to 197 basis points, data compiled by Bloomberg show, reducing the cost of new home loans. The spread fell from 215 basis points on Aug. 18, the widest since March, when the gap set a 22-year high of 238 basis points.

The MCDX index (of credit default swaps on US Munis; briefly mentioned May 23; aspersions were cast May 7) is being circled by vultures. Accrued Interest suggests a spread trade against corporates, but:

I think at some point, arbitragers will put this trade on, and it will expose a lack of deep liquidity in the contract. Talking to various traders, it looks like much of the trading in the MCDX has been macro hedgers, not betting on munis in particular, but using municipals as a means of hedging against a disaster event.

I’m not entirely convinced of the goodness of this hedge. Sure, there’s a positive carry. But there’s a big size-mismatch, which can be thought of as an enormous – infinite, actually, until you actually put some capital into the deal – duration mismatch. And I must say, I’m rather surprised that Accrued Interest did not pass on, or take a stab at estimating, the basis for this trade (which is to say, the spread vs. cash bonds). In the corporate arena, the basis is negative as often as not; with all the auction rate failures I would not be in the least bit surprised to learn that the basis is bigger … but I won’t go too far out on that limb, because Munis are easier to margin (I think; based simply on their risk-weight for banks).

Anyway, why would I want to sell protection? Why wouldn’t I just buy cash bonds?

If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Accrued Interest has such a great long weekend planned that he listened, first idly, then more seriously to one of the salesmen cowboys and wrote the post to help organize his thoughts. I note that according to Bloomberg, 5-year Munis yield 2.87%, while 5-Year AAA Banking & Finance paper yields 4.91%. AI states that the MCDX contract trades at 86.25bp and CDX IG [Corporate Investment Grade] at 144bp. Hmm… I’m going to have to think about this over the weekend myself, and try to figure out what the tax effects are doing!

It is perhaps not coincidental that this opinion was published on the same day that Jefferson County managed to stave off default for another month.

And another US bank went bust:

Integrity Bank, with $1.1 billion in assets and $974 million in deposits, was shuttered by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Regions Financial Corp., Alabama’s biggest bank, will assume all deposits from Integrity, which was run by Integrity Bancshares Inc. The failed bank’s five offices will open on Sept. 2 as branches of Regions, the FDIC said.
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Regions will buy about $34.4 million in assets and will pay the FDIC a premium of 1.01 percent to assume the failed bank’s deposits, the FDIC said. The FDIC estimates the cost of the Integrity failure to its deposit-insurance fund will be $250 million to $300 million.

And that’s another month done! Twenty trading days and PerpetualDiscounts were down on only four of them, returning a total of +3.91%. The total return index is now back to just below where it was on June 26 … but is still 4.90% below its May 30 level, which puts things in perspective a bit.

The weighted average pre-tax bid-YTW is 6.11%, equivalent to 8.55% interest at the standard 1.4x equivalency factor. Long Corporates were down on the month, with significant widening against Canadas; they now yield about 6.20%, so the pre-tax interest equivalent spread is now 235bp … still pretty wide!

The fund did quite well on the month. I have a back of an envelope calculation indicating that the portfolio’s gross return (before fees and expenses) was comfortably in excess of 5.50%, so I’m pretty happy about that. Turnover was a little in excess of 100% – take that, passive advocates! Commissions are significant, but market impact and spread costs can be … negative.

There were twenty other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

Nothing happened today.

There were thirty-two other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.

Yesterday, Citigroup was reported to have advised that Fannie & Freddie aren’t dead yet. Today it was Merrill’s turn:

Merrill Lynch & Co. analysts said a bailout of the mortgage-finance companies is “premature” because losses won’t cause capital to deplete for several quarters.
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The market may be premature in expecting a rescue is imminent because the companies may not need to raise more capital to meet current requirements, the analysts said.

It’s not clear that Fannie and Freddie “need a capital injection,” [Kenneth] Bruce and [Cyrus] Lowe said in two separate reports. Still “policy makers may be forced by the controversy playing out in the market to consider various options to stabilize” the companies.
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The two mortgage-finance companies “will likely be plagued by poor visibility into the future of credit losses and the uncertainty surrounding the possible public policy actions that could jeopardize shareholders,” the analysts wrote. “Risks of further contraction in the mortgage market are as unpalatable as a high-profile bail-out.”

Both stocks are rated “underperform” at Merrill, the reports said.

Fannie & Freddie sold some more money market paper today:

Investors have been watching the debt sales for any “tell- tale” signs that Washington-based Fannie and McLean, Virginia- based Freddie can’t fund themselves, UBS AG analysts in New York including William O’Donnell wrote in a report. Today’s spreads were wide enough to attract demand, yet narrow enough to dim speculation that the government-sponsored enterprises will be forced to turn to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson for support.
…
Fannie sold $1 billion of three-month notes at a yield of 2.58 percent, the company said.
…
Freddie raised $1 billion of one-month debt at a yield of 2.28 percent, or 66 basis points more than Treasuries and 18 basis points less than one-month Libor, separate data shows.
…
Fannie also sold $1 billion of six-month debt today at a yield of 2.87 percent, about 93 basis points above Treasury bills

Geez, I wish that reporters would learn some of the jargon of the trade! I was all excited about the “short term notes” headline – indicating a 1-5 year term – only to find out it was money-market paper.

Assiduous Reader prefhound noted in yesterday’s comments:

You noted the other day that they needed to rollover about $120B of debt in the next 35 days. This looks to be about 7.5% of their combined debt of $1.6T, which seems an odd calendar concentration. Their recent tendency to go short term (in response to market conditions?) could make rollovers get bigger quite quickly.

Some long overdue poking around in Fannie Mae’s website uncovered their Monthly Summary Archive, which includes their Summary for July 2008. According to Table 7 of this summary, FNM has slightly under $273-billion in money market issuance outstanding and $573-billion in bonds, for a total of $846-billion. The ratio of Money-Market to Bonds outstanding has increased from 1:3.7 in July 2007 to 1:2.0 in July 2008, which is kind of interesting. It might be analytically important; it might be a cause for concern; it might not be. It is certainly something that should be understood before plunking money down on the table, however!

Anyway, if we say that one-quarter of the MM paper outstanding needs to be rolled every month (which assumes an average 4-month initial term; I have no idea how accurate this assumption might be), we arrive at required gross issuance of $68-billion monthly in MM paper simply to refinance the programme.

Bond issuance has totalled $190-billion year-to-date (compared to $194-billion for all of 2007!). If we assume that the YTD rate is representative, this comes to monthly gross issuance of $16-billion bonds.

The total comes to $84-billion to be financed monthly, which makes the figure of $120-billion in the five weeks to September 30 that I passed on in the August 25 report look at least halfway credible.

This level of dependence upon the wholesale market has been blamed for (among other things) the Northern Rock debacle; the Economist has dealt with the subject:

Start with liquidity, the obvious gap in the regulatory firewall. Liquidity risk is barely mentioned in the Basel 2 accord, largely because capital and liquidity were seen as separate (if entwined). The Basel rulemakers are due to issue an updated set of liquidity standards later this year, but devising a sensible regime is no easy task. “Liquidity risk is a kind of catastrophic risk—you either have it or you don’t,” says a senior regulator.

Authoritative references to the Northern Rock fiasco may be found in my post Earth to Regulators: Keep Out!.

Now, I don’t want anybody running out and shorting Fannie Mae because I’ve pointed out that they have an awful lot of short term financing to roll! I will simply point out that a rational investor will understand the nature and vulnerability of their funding mismatch – if any – prior to plunking money down on the table. I will stress yet again that I do not have a view on the investment merits of Fannie Mae preferreds; I’m simply pointing out the various considerations that never make it into the press due to the number of syllables in the words required to explain them.

Scared enough yet? Bloomberg reported a Moody’s press release on prime-Jumbo loans, inter alia:

The performance of mortgage pools in Jumbo transactions from 2006 and 2007 has also weakened relative to that of prior years. While the absolute level of delinquencies remains low in comparison to other RMBS segments, Jumbo delinquencies are building more quickly in recent months.

Moody’s had previously identified some recent-vintage Jumbo transactions that were at risk of downgrade based upon the performance data available at the beginning of 2008. Given the continued performance deterioration in the Jumbo sector, Moody’s is currently reviewing all Jumbo transactions that were originated in 2006 and 2007 .

Second lien pools, a much smaller proportion of RMBS issuance in comparison to first liens, have also experienced extreme poor performance. Moody’s expects 2005 vintage subprime closed-end second (CES) pools to lose 17% on average, 2006 vintage pools to lose 42% on average, and 2007 pools to lose 45% on average. However, given the wide range of deal characteristics and pool performance among transactions, Moody’s expectations for any given transactions can vary significantly.

Prime CES pools have experienced far lower losses than have subprime ones, although, like in every other RMBS sector, 2006 and 2007 vintage delinquencies and losses have been increasing. On average, Moody’s expects 2005 vintage prime CES pools to lose about 6% of their original balance, 2006 vintage pools to lose about 13%, and 2007 vintage pools to lose about 17%.

The performance of recent vintages of home equity line of credit (HELOC) pools has also weakened significantly. Moody’s projects that pool losses on 2005 vintage HELOC transactions will average about 9%, while 2006 vintage transactions will on average lose around 24% and 2007 vintage around 26%.

PerpetualDiscounts were off a bit today, with reasonable volume but a much higher than usual number of big blocks. The average YTW is 6.13%, equivalent to 8.58% interest at the standard conversion factor of 1.4x. Given that long corporates yield about 6.18%, this represents a spread of 240bp; still quite high by historical standards.

There were twenty-three other index-included $25-pv-equivalent issues trading over 10,000 shares today.