Archive for the ‘Sub-Prime!’ Category

Willem Buiter's Prescription

Friday, December 21st, 2007

Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics has authored Lessons from the 2007 Financial Crisis, published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research.

The paper includes one thoroughly delicious quote that shows the author understands the nature of regulation:

Because Sarbanes-Oxley compliance is mainly a matter of box-ticking (like most realworld compliance, especially compliance originating in the USA), it has not materially improved the informational value of accounting or the protection offered to investors.

All in all, the essay is extremely good … I may not agree with all of it, but the man makes some good points and has some well-founded opinions. I’ll present some quotes from the essay with my own thoughts … but the full document is well worth reading.

There is a long section on the credit rating agencies. Mr. Buiter states as problems:

  • Any model of credit risk will have flaws and these flaws may be exploited by issuers. Even honest models won’t work particularly well during black swan events.
  • Only default risk is rated – not market risk and not liquidity risk
  • agencies are conflicted, in that:
    • they are paid by the issuers
    • they sell advisory services to their rating service clients
    • the complexity of some instruments results in designer and issuer working with the same model … possibly one designed by the issuer

To Mr. Buiter’s credit, he does not attempt to solve the first two problems with rhetoric:

There is no obvious solution other than ‘try harder and don’t pretend to know more than you know’ for the first problem. The second problem requires better education of the investing public.

His third problem, which has three facets, has a five part solution:

  • Reputational concerns
  • Remove the CRA’s quasi-regulatory role
  • Make the CRAs one-product firms
  • End payment by issuer
  • Increase competition

I don’t have a major problem with the idea of removing the CRAs’ quasi-regulatory role (their ratings are a factor in determining the credit conversion factor that converts the total value of the loan to risk-weighted assets), but Mr. Buiter is not clear on what is to replace the current system.

It seems clear that a loan to IBM is safer than a loan to Joe’s Barbershop; it also seems clear that this difference should have an effect on the measured risk profile of the bank. I suggest that the CRAs have a very good track record in assessing these risks – and yes, I am including the subprime & Enron debacles when reviewing their record.

The thing about risk, you see, is that it’s risky.

With respect to his third proposition, making the CRAs one-product firms … how is he going to enforce this and why would he want to? Yesterday we saw extremely poor performance by the CIBC preferred issues. I will suggest that some portion of this, at least, was due to stockbrokers telling their clients that CIBC was a relatively poor credit (relative to other banks, and relative to their financial position last year at this time) and exposure to it should be minimized. In such a case, the stockbroker is acting as a Credit Rating Agency.

In the absence of a regulatory role for CRAs, how is one to differentiate between a one-product-by-regulation firm and … anybody else?

His proposal for ending issuer payment is so convoluted I will reproduce it in full, to avoid charges of mockery by misquotation:

Payment by the buyer (the investors) is desirable but subject to a ‘collective action’ or ‘free rider’ problem. One solution would be to have the ratings paid for by a representative body for the (corporate) investor side of the market. This could be financed through a levy on the firms in the industry. Paying the levy could be made mandatory for all firms in a regulated industry. Conceivably, the security issuers could also be asked to contribute. Conflict of interest is avoided as long as no individual issuer pays for his own ratings. This would leave some free rider problems, but should permit a less perverse incentivised rating process to get off the ground. I don’t think it would be necessary (or even make sense) to socialise the rating process, say by creating a state-financed (or even industryfinanced) body with official and exclusive powers to provide the ratings.

Frankly, I don’t understand why his proposed solution, involving mandatory payments by firms in the industry, is different from the socialization he decries. There may also be some conflict with his proposal to emphasize reputational concerns and competition … how do I go about getting some of the lolly? Can I just declare to the central body that I am a credit rater, that will be $500,000 please?

Reputational concerns and competition currently work along the lines of … some firms are better regarded by investors than others. I, for instance, have greater respect for Fitch and Moody’s than for S&P and DBRS … give me my choice of any two ratings on a bond, and you know which ones I’ll pay attention to! How would this be reflected in such a centralized system?

In the end, I have to reiterate my familiar refrain: Credit Ratings are Advice. Take it, leave it, your choice. So far, the Bank of Canada has said it best:

investors should not lose sight of the fact that one can delegate tasks but not accountability.

After reviewing the macroeconomic situation he makes further proposals, including:

if a financial institution borrows short and lends long, if it borrows liquid (during normal times, but with the risk of occasional illiquidity in its usual funding channels) and lends illiquid, and if banks are substantially exposed to it, then it should be regulated like a bank, even if it says ‘Hedge Fund’ on the letterhead. The rules should aggressively chase the unceasing attempts, through institutional and instrument innovation, to avoid regulation.

I disagree with this, particularly with the implicit belief that rules exist in order that they be followed. The weak point of the argument here is “if banks are substantially exposed to it“. It does seem likely that there has been far too much contagion in the past crisis, but regulating the universe is not the proper answer. What should be done is to improve the capital requirement rules and force the banks to make a more substantial capital provision for their riskier assets – such as Mr. Buiter implies is a good description for their hedge fund exposure.

If the risk weights applied to, for instance, the provision of a global liquidity line to a SIV have been shown to be inadequate (and this has not been documented, although I suspect that it is the case) … increase the risk weight of the line! Currently it’s at a flat 10% … I suggest that a tiering be considered, so that a bank with $10-billion of tier 1 capital can extend such a line for $10-billion at the 10% rate, but the next ten billion is charged at a 20% rate, etc.

Ensuring that everything is regulated is poor policy. Let us ensure that the core of the financial system – the banks, who have access to lines provided by the central banks – is secure, and then let people play around on the edges to their, and their investors’, hearts’ content.

The main problem with the arrangement [separating bank supervision functions from liquidity provision functions] is that it puts the information about individual banks in a different agency (the FSA) from the agency with the liquid financial resources to provide short-term assistance to a troubled bank (the Bank of England). This happened when the Bank lost banking sector supervision and regulatory responsibility on being made operationally independent for monetary policy by Gordon Brown in 1997. It’s clear this separation of information and resources does not work.

This issue was discussed on December 5.

Liquidity can vanish today, because market participants with surplus liquidity fear that both they themselves and their potential counterparties will be illiquid in the future (say, three months from now), when the loans would have to be repaid. A credible commitment by the Central Bank to provide liquidity in the future (three months from now) would solve the problem, but it is apparent that the required credibility simply does not exist. Therefore, the only time-consistent solution, in the absence of a credible commitment mechanism, is to intervene today at a three-month maturity.

One lesson – that Canadian non-bank ABCP investors will be happy to explain thoroughly – from the current crisis is that liquidity risk is different from credit risk. Traditionally, LIBOR spreads are explained in terms of credit risk – I suggest that liquidity risk is the operational concern and that liquidity hoarding is its sympton. I remember on anecdote from the Panic of 1907 … a banker complained to J.P. Morgan that his liquid assets had been eroded to 18% … Morgan gave him the what-for, telling him that liquid assets were held precisely for such circumstances.

If a bank’s afraid to make three-month interbank loans because it might have its credit lines drawn on in the intervening time, then part of the problem is that it has too many lines – a problem that would be addressed by higher capital charges.

To address the point, however, I have no problem with, for instance, a regular three month term facility, to be financed with treasury bills as a neutralizer.

Capitalism, based on greed, private property rights and decentralised decision making, is both cyclical and subject to bouts of financial manic-depressive illness. There is no economy-wide auctioneer, no enforcer of systemic ‘transversality conditions’ to rule out periodic explosive bubble behaviour of asset prices in speculative
markets. It’s unfortunate, but we have to live with it. The last time humanity tried to do away with these excesses of capitalism, we got central planning, and we all know now how well that worked. Hayek and Keynes were both right.

Hear, hear!

All in all, a fine article.

Canadian ABCP : Almost, But Can't Pay

Saturday, December 15th, 2007

The National Post has reported:

A group of investors and financial institutions trying to find a way to restructure $33-billion of seized-up asset-backed commercial paper has failed to meet a key deadline for a proposal, setting the stage for a potential legal showdown between frustrated noteholders and investment dealers.

However, in the four months since the strategy was hammered out, credit markets worldwide have deteriorated to the point that many observers worry the new notes may prove just as illiquid as the ABCP they will replace.

Sources close to the negotiations said that the Bank of Canada has been pushing the major domestic banks to play a role in the restructuring by supporting the new longer term notes that would replace the ABCP by creating a market and sharing some of the risk. The banks have also been asked to support collateral calls that could be triggered under the terms of the underlying assets. However, they have yet to agree.

The liquidity thing is a valid concern for the investors, but I don’t see why anybody else cares. I’ve been predicting that – presuming that the paper comes out as advertised, with at least the senior tranche consisting of AAA floating rate paper – that the dealers would make out like bandits, 70-bid, par-offered. I can see no compelling reason why the banks should agree, for instance, to call a continuous two-way market with a 50 cent spread, 5-million up. Unless they’re paid.

The banks have been asked to support collateral calls that could be triggered by the underlying assets? Why should they? Who’s paying them?

I suspect that the investors are still living in a never-never land of zero default risk and easy trades that always win. Perhaps six more months of pain is in order.

Update, 2007-12-17: TD has announced:

“TD is willing to consider measures that support attempts to resolve liquidity issues in the financial markets. However, our position has been that it would not be in the best interest of TD shareholders to assume incremental risk for activities in which we were not involved,” said Ed Clark, President and CEO, TD Bank Financial Group.
    Following on comments made during its third and fourth quarter of 2007 earnings conference calls, TD Bank Financial Group further reiterated that it does not have any exposure to non-bank sponsored Asset Backed Commercial Paper (ABCP) products covered by the Montreal Accord. This includes holdings within TD Mutual Funds and other money market funds managed by TD Asset Management Inc. TD also noted that it did not distribute any related products to customers through its systems.
    The Bank noted that markets for TDBFG-sponsored asset backed commercial paper (ABCP) have continued to perform satisfactorily.

Seems perfectly reasonable to me!

US Subprime Mess : Fagin, not Little Nell

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

I have long been irritated by the incessant sound of violins in the background when many (politicians, especially) talk about US Foreclosures. There are far too many people who feel the defaulters are poor-but-honest Dickensian characters, ruthlessly exploited by a predatory financial system.

Dickensian, perhaps, but Fagin is a more accurate model than Little Nell.

Fitch Ratings has added to research on this topic with a small but thorough examination of 45 files from early defaulters on some RMBS of vintage 2006. The conclusions?

Fitch believes that poor underwriting quality and fraud may account for as much as one-quarter of the underperformance of recent vintage subprime RMBS.

Fitch recognizes that, even in good quality pools, there will be some loans that default. However, when some pools of subprime mortgages have very high projected default rates, it is important to understand the impact that loans originated with poor underwriting practices and fraud can have. Moreover, Fitch intends to utilize the insights from its review to improve the RMBS rating process. Fitch believes that conducting a more extensive originator review process, including incorporating a direct review by Fitch of mortgage origination files, can enhance the accuracy of ratings and mitigate risk to RMBS investors. Fitch will be publishing its proposed criteria enhancements shortly. Additionally, a more robust system of representation and warranty repurchases may be desirable.

Characteristics by percentage of the 45 files reviewed included (loans may appear in more than one finding):

66% Occupancy fraud (stated owner occupied — never occupied), based on information provided by borrower or field inspector
51% Property value or condition issues — Materially different from original appraisal, or original appraisal contained conflicting information or items outside of typically accepted parameters
48% First Time Homebuyer — Some applications indicated no other property, but credit report showed mortgage information
44% Payment Shock (defined as greater than 100% increase) — Some greater than 200% increase
44% Questionable stated income or employment — Often in conflict with information on credit report and indicated to be outside “reasonableness” test
22% Hawk Alert — Fraud alert noted on credit report
18% Credit Report — Questionable ownership of accounts (name or social security numbers do not match)
17% Seller Concessions (outside allowed parameters)
16% Credit Report — Based on “authorized” user accounts
16% Strawbuyer/Flip scheme indicated based on evidence in servicing file
16% Identity theft indicated
10% Signature fraud indicated
6% Non-arms length transaction indicated

Update From a Countrywide investor presentation – with hat-tips to Naked Capitalism, WSJ Marketbeat blog & Peridot Capitalist – comes the table:

Reason for Foreclosure Percentage
Curtailment of Income 58.3%
Illness/Medical 13.2%
Divorce 8.4%
Investment/Unable to Sell 6.1%
Low Regard for Prop. Ownership 5.5%
Death 3.6%
Payment Adjustment 1.4%
Other 3.5%

which certainly provides food for thought, not to mention fodder for a thousand masters’ theses. Want to meet a cute grad student? Default on your mortgage!

The reasons given in the table apply, so says Countrywide, to the 80.3% of cases where the cause of foreclosure is known; they do not indicate how they know this. Countrywide also claims that there is “very little deviation between full doc and stated income” … but read that like a lawyer! It’s not at all clear what that sentence means!

It should also be noted that the two studies do not even claim to be studying the same thing; and that the Countrywide data is “Based on Foreclosure data from Countrywide’s Servicing Portfolio” … which could include conforming mortgages. Sixty percent of their “production” (which is presumably related, somehow, to the composition of their Servicing Portfolio) is agency-eligible (see page 18 of PDF).

Very interesting to note as well that one of the conclusions (page 31 of PDF) is that portfolio limits on the GSEs must be lifted, and loan limits for Fannie, Freddie & FHA be increased in order to bring back liquidity.

Update, 2008-2-12: Econbrowser‘s James Hamilton brings to my attention a Fed Research paper by Gerardi, Shapiro & Willen dated December 3, 2007: Subprime Outcomes: Risky Mortgages, Homeownership Experiences, and Foreclosures:

This paper provides the first rigorous assessment of the homeownership experiences of subprime borrowers. We consider homeowners who used subprime mortgages to buy their homes, and estimate how often these borrowers end up in foreclosure. In order to evaluate these issues, we analyze homeownership experiences in Massachusetts over the 1989–2007 period using a competing risks, proportional hazard framework. We present two main findings. First, homeownerships that begin with a subprime purchase mortgage end up in foreclosure almost 20 percent of the time, or more than 6 times as often as experiences that begin with prime purchase mortgages. Second, house price appreciation plays a dominant role in generating foreclosures. In fact, we attribute most of the dramatic rise in Massachusetts foreclosures during 2006 and 2007 to the decline in house prices that began in the summer of 2005.

Update, 2008-2-13: And, in fact, a lot of Americans are underwater on their mortgages:

Thirty-nine percent of people who purchased a home two years ago already owe more than they can sell it for, according to a Feb. 12 report from Zillow.com, a real estate data service. Only 3.2 percent who bought five years ago are in that situation, the report said.

Almost half of the borrowers who took out subprime mortgages in the last two years won’t have any equity left if home prices drop an additional 10 percent, New York-based UBS AG analysts led by Laurie Goodman wrote in a report yesterday.

Excellent Article on Canadian ABCP

Saturday, November 17th, 2007

The Globe and Mail astonished me this morning with a superb, balanced report on the August 2007 Canadian ABCP Collapse. They have even eased up on their concentration on the Credit Rating Agencies.

The article sticks to its knitting, focussing on real, live, actual journalism. Not rewriting press releases, not using a press card as soapbox for some strange idea or another; just plain old getting out there and asking questions. It’s a shame that in exchange for this access, they (presumably) had to ease up on tough questions like: ‘What made you think you had the skills to invest $100-million dollars?’, but hopefully shareholders will attend to that aspect of the matter.

In line with this, they do not offer any prescriptions to “fix” the system, but there are some interesting snippets in ‘Chapter 10 : Learning Lessons’:

“We don’t understand what’s going on in our markets any more and we feel we can’t trust anyone,” said Dwayne Lo, comptroller of First Quantum Minerals Ltd.

Good for you, Mr. Lo! You have now passed the first test in becoming a portfolio manager.

The blame for the lack of transparency rests on many shoulders. Investors didn’t ask, sellers didn’t tell, and regulators who focus on traditional stocks and bonds didn’t push either side of the market to have an honest conversation about risk.

It’s not clear why the Globe feels regulators should be involved, but we’ll let that pass. They make the point elsewhere that ABCP conduits inter alia can have some strange things in them; investors should be looking for a good level of credit enhancement; and, perhaps most importantly, credit risk is not the only risk in the marketplace.

Anyway, I recommend this article to anybody with an interest in August’s events.

David Einhorn vs. the Credit Rating Agencies

Friday, November 16th, 2007

Naked Capitalism provides a summary of a a fascinating speech by David Einhorn regarding the credit rating agencies.

He wants the agencies to lose their exemption from Regulation FD, thereby ensuring that any information that the agencies see becomes public information.

He claims that each type of bond a different rating scale is used with a different “idealized default rate”, and that ratings are assigned to individual securities relative to their idealized rates. Thus, he says, “an A rate muni has the same chance of default as a AA/AA- rated corporate and a AA+ rated CDO. When municipal bonds default the expected recovery rate is 90% compared to 50% on corporates and CDOs”. I have started digging into this and found idealized structured finance default rates (figure 27, page 30 of the pdf). I’m continuing to check this statement.

He also made a good point about “mark to make believe”. Ellington management, a large hedge fund participant in the mortgage business, suspended redemptions because it couldn’t determine the value of its assets. Apparently they owned a lot of “20/90” bonds, so called because they’re 20 bid, 90 offered. They got roasted in the media. The brokerages own similar assets, but instead of saying they could not prepare their quarterly financials, they moved the assets to Level 3 “Mark to make believe” under FASB 157, and assigned them their best guess of fair value.

He has many critiques of the business … and an ad for his forthcoming book! Read the whole speech, it’s very well done.

Update, 2007-11-19: Thanks to Accrued Interest in the comments for putting me on the right track – I found the Moody’s study, dated 2002Moody’s US Municipal Bond Scale:

Like the bond markets themselves, Moody’s rating approach to municipal issuers has been quite distinct from its approach to corporate issuers. In order to satisfy the needs of highly risk averse municipal investors, Moody’s credit opinions about US municipalities have, since their inception in the early years of the past century, been expressed on the municipal bond rating scale, which is distinct from the corporate bond rating scale used for corporations, non-US governmental issuers, and structured finance securities.

Just for fun, I started looking up “Brookfield” – I know that’s the name of several rated municipalities, I see the name all the time when looking up a certain well known corporation – and, right beside the list of possibles, I see a link to The U.S. Municipal Bond Rating Scale: Mapping to the Global Rating Scale and Assigning Global Scale Ratings to Municipal Oblications dated March 2007:

In recent years, the lines separating the U.S. municipal market from other global markets have become increasingly blurred as growing numbers of “crossover” buyers invest in municipal bonds for various reasons. The market overlap is caused partly by U.S. municipalities issuing more debt in the taxable market, and partly by global investors who may not be subject to U.S. income taxes but are nevertheless purchasing municipal bonds for portfolio diversification and other purposes not linked to the debt’s tax-exempt status.

In response to these developments, and in an effort to provide greater transparency about the meaning of our ratings, Moody’s has spent the past five years refining our analytical approach for expressing the relationship between the U.S. municipal scale and the global rating scale.

If it was a secret, they don’t appear to have kept it very well!

S&P to Time the Markets?

Friday, November 9th, 2007

It’s a short line in a short presentation … but it carries a lot of implications:

First, what can we do differently in the future? Self-reflection is the key. It is now clear that some of the assumptions we made with respect to rating U.S. RMBS backed by subprime mortgages were insufficient to stand up to what actually happened. In addition, some have questioned whether our detailed analytical processes led us to wait too long to react to data that suggested a deviation from the expected trends. So we are focusing on getting in place the data, analytics, and processes to enhance our ability to anticipate future trends and process information even more quickly. [emphasis added – JH]

This is a little bit scary. I’ve done a lot of quantitative modelling – my entire professional career has been spent doing quantitative modelling – and I can tell you two things:

  • Quantitative models do not do well when there is a trend change. This is because there is a lot more noise than signal in the market-place; a quant system will pick up the first one, two, three standard deviations as an exception that will revert before it changes the figure it takes as a base.
  • Ain’t nobody can predict a trend change with reproducible accuracy. At best, you can pick up on the stress on the system implied by your data and assign a probability to the idea that it’s a trend change … e.g., when housing prices decline by 2% in a quarter, there might be a 25% chance that it’s a trend change as opposed to a 75% chance that it’s just noise. Which is not to say that estimating the chances of a change in trend is not useful; but which does mean that assigning a lot of weight to the idea that house prices will continue to decline by 2%/quarter over the medium term is quite aggressive

I will have to see how S&P fleshes out this idea – and how much disclosure they make of their future projections as part of the credit rating process.

With respect to projecting trend changes, lets look at one of the more respective organizations in the business – the National Bureau of Economic Research. How well do they do in determining trend changes? As they say:

On November 26, 2001, the committee determined that the peak of economic activity had occurred in March of that year. For a discussion of the committee’s reasoning and the underlying evidence, see http://www.nber.org/cycles/november2001. The March 2001 peak marked the end of the expansion that began in March 1991, an expansion that lasted exactly 10 years and was the longest in the NBER’s chronology. On July 16, 2003, the committee determined that a trough in economic activity occurred in November 2001. The committee’s announcement of the trough is at http://www.nber.org/cycles/july2003. The trough marks the end of the recession that began in March 2001.

So it took the NBER over a year and a half to look at all the data and determine where the bottom was. And S&P – under pressure by thousands of bozos who could have predicted the credit crunch ever-so-much-better, except that nobody asked them to – is going to try and predict the future?

It’s a scary thought – I hope that the implementation of the plans outlined in the S&P presentation is very, very restrained.

Canadian ABCP : Massive Downgrade for Apsley Trust

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

On October 17, DBRS placed Apsley Trust under Credit Review Negative:

Approximately 7% ($1.8 billion by funding amount) of the CDO transactions in the Affected Trusts under the Montreal Accord consist of U.S. residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS); however, 49% of these CDO transactions, or approximately $900 million, is held by Apsley, consisting of a $400 million transaction and a $500 million transaction, each fully funded (unleveraged).

The $400 million transaction synthetically references pools of 2005 and 2006 vintage U.S. non-prime residential mortgages. In accordance with our CDO rating methodology, DBRS has relied in the past on ratings from other major rating agencies as inputs to our model. Over the past several months, the reference entities for these U.S. RMBS transactions have been downgraded several times. Until now, all of the $1.8 billion CDO exposure to U.S. residential mortgages in the Affected Trusts met all of the minimum requirements for a AAA rating. Recently, however, one rating agency took the largest single-day rating action yet with respect to the U.S. non-prime residential mortgage market when it downgraded 2,187 U.S. RMBS bonds on October 11, 2007.

The result was that Apsley’s $400 million U.S. non-prime residential transaction experienced rating downgrades for almost half of the underlying credits, with an average cut of four rating levels for each security being downgraded. DBRS is currently analyzing the full effect of these rating actions and has subsequently placed Apsley Trust Under Review with Negative Implications. Based on the current ratings of the underlying bonds, DBRS believes that the $500 million transaction held by Apsley continues to be AAA but is monitoring it closely; additional downgrades or losses in the underlying bonds could result in significant downgrades in that transaction as well. DBRS is also reviewing the practice of using other rating agencies’ ratings in its ratings of structured finance transactions.

The remaining transactions in Apsley consist of $1.5 billion of leveraged super-senior transactions that reference corporate obligations. These transactions continue to be rated AAA from a probability of default perspective and continue to perform well. As of today, DBRS does not expect that these transactions will suffer losses and considers them to be strong from a credit and ratings migration perspective.

Today, the other shoe dropped:

DBRS has today downgraded the ratings of Apsley Trust (Apsley) Class A, Series A from R-1 (high) Under Review with Negative Implications to R-4 Under Review with Developing Implications; Class E, Series A from R-1 (high) Under Review with Negative Implications to R-4 Under Review with Developing Implications; Class FRN, Series A from AAA Under Review with Negative Implications to BB Under Review with Developing Implications.

At inception the portfolio of 80 reference obligations consisted of 50% BBB and 50% BBB (low) obligations as rated by DBRS and other Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations (NRSROs).

Recent negative rating actions taken by other rating agencies in the U.S. RMBS sector affected 36 of the 80 obligors referenced in the Transaction with an average rating cut of four rating levels. The cumulative effect of the downgrades to the credits referenced by the Transaction has been to push the attachment point to maintain a AAA rating through the current actual attachment point of the Transaction. The Transaction can therefore no longer maintain a AAA rating. In addition, due to observed slowdowns in prepayment speeds, DBRS has revised its term assumption in respect of the Transaction to seven years.

DBRS generally rates ABCP at the rating level of the lowest rated transaction funded by the ABCP. As the six other CDO transactions funded by Apsley remain AAA, the Transaction is now the lowest-rated transaction and its rating will therefore determine the highest-possible rating for Apsley overall.

Using the DBRS CDO Toolbox and applying the current ratings of the reference obligations and a revised assumption as to the term of the reference portfolio, a long-term rating of BB has been assigned to the Transaction by DBRS. The DBRS Long-Term to Short Term Mapping Table indicates that a rating of R-4 is appropriate for ABCP that is funding a BB rated transaction.

As mentioned above, in addition to the Transaction, there is another $500 million CDO transaction funded by Apsley that is 100% exposed to U.S. non-prime RMBS. This transaction has retained a sufficient stability cushion above the attachment point to maintain a AAA rating at this time. However, considering the speed at which the Transaction lost its stability cushion above AAA, future rating actions of similar size and severity by other NRSROs may cause the $500 million U.S. non-prime RMBS transaction to suffer a similar deterioration. As a result, DBRS continues to monitor this transaction closely. Additional downgrades or losses in the underlying bonds could result in a significant downgrade of this transaction. If a downgrade of this transaction below the BB range were to occur, further rating action in regard to Apsley would become necessary.

The five remaining CDO transactions representing $1.5 billion of funding by Apsley reference corporate obligations. These transactions continue to be rated AAA from a probability of default perspective and continue to perform well. DBRS does not expect that these transactions will suffer losses and considers them to be strong from a credit and ratings migration perspective.

Wow. That was fast!

Update, 2007-11-6: It is interesting to note from The Information Memorandum for Apsley Trust that:

Apsley Trust™ (the “Trust”) is a trust established under the laws of the Province of Ontario pursuant to a settlement deed made as of November 24, 2005 between Metcalfe & Mansfield Alternative Investments V Corp. in its capacity as trustee (collectively with its successors and assigns in such capacity, the “Issuer Trustee”; any reference to the Trust herein includes the Issuer Trustee acting in its fiduciary capacity as Issuer Trustee) and Metcalfe & Mansfield Capital Corporation, as settlor.  The office of the Issuer Trustee for administering the activities of Apsley Trust™ is located at 141 Adelaide Street West, Suite 330, Toronto, Ontario M5H 3L5.

and from an August press release that:

Metcalfe & Mansfield Capital Corporation is a subsidiary of Quanto Financial Corporation, a private Canadian financial institution with offices in Montreal, Toronto and Calgary and representatives in Vancouver and Winnipeg. The principal shareholders of Quanto Financial Corporation are National Bank Financial, Deutsche Bank Canada and Redfern Equity Capital Partners.

The announcement of inauguration of Apsley Trust includes the paragraph:

Metcalfe & Mansfield Alternative Investments V Corp. is the Issuer Trustee of Apsley Trust. The Issuer Trustee is independent from the Issuers, the Financial Services Agent, the Administrative Agent, the Indenture Trustee, and other service providers to the Trust.

… but frankly, I don’t know what that means.

Update #2, 2007-11-6: The unnamed rating agency with the mass downgrade on October 11 was Moody’s. I briefly discussed the downgrade at the time.

Update #3, 2007-11-6: Accrued Interest has produced a simple example illustrating the volatility of CDO quality. More discussion has been referenced here.

Where Did the Risk Go? – An Early Attack on the Ratings Agencies

Tuesday, November 6th, 2007

I’ve run across an extremely interesting paper, Where Did the Risk Go? How Misapplied Bond Ratings Cause Mortgage Backed Securities and Collateralized Debt Obligation Market Disruptions, written by Joseph R. Mason, an associate professor at Drexel University who has been mentioned here before in connection with his testimony to Congress, and Joshua Rosner, Managing Director of Graham Fisher & Company, a firm that provides “Independent research for institutional investors in financial service assets”.

The primary recommendation for public policy is:

Significant increases in public access to performance reports, CDO and RMBS product standardization, and CDO and RMBS securities ownership registration can help decrease the existing over-reliance on ratings agency inputs to rate and ultimately value the securities and reducing the valuation errors inherent in “marked-to-model” (rather than marked-to-market) portfolios. SEC Regulation AB was a (late) start for ABS and RMBS. Overall, however, the U.S. economy needs an efficient public CDO market that allows transparent openmarket pricing of market risk and outside research into new securities and funding arrangements.

This is a principle with which I can whole-heartedly agree … although I will not guarantee  sweet accord when the details are hammered out! There should be no regulatory restrictions on the flow of information … it should be possible to publish all deal information without fear of adverse regulatory repercussions, but there is often some confusion on this point. The regulators should first make it plain that, while selling the investment to a non-qualified investor may be improper, publishing the advice is encouraged.

After that, let the market and the Prudent Man Rule do its work. I think it would be fairly easy to argue that a Prudent Man would review available information prior to making an investment. At which point we get into further problems … how much review is enough?

Consider a plain and ordinary S&P 500 Index Fund. How much of the fund material do you have to read before you can purchase some on behalf of a client? Do you have to read through and understand the annual reports of all 500 companies?

I suggest that the archetypal Prudent Man need only

  • understand what the S&P 500 is attempting to do, and
  • verify that the vehicle will track it ‘reasonably’ well, and
  • do so at a realistic cost

… but there will be legitimate disagreement over even this simple exposition! My continued vocal support for the primacy of the Prudent Man Rule should not be taken to imply that I believe it will be simple and unambiguous.

Bank of England Discusses Role of Credit Rating Agencies

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

Geez, I was just locking up when I saw a story on Bloomberg – BOE Says Intervention May Be Required Over Credit Ratings. The third paragraph is considerably less emphatic than the first:

Credit-rating firms should face “public sector intervention” if they don’t overhaul the way they grade so-called structured debt products and provide more information to investors, the Bank of England said.

“These actions might occur voluntarily in the light of recent market experience,” the Bank of England said in the report. “Without this market evolution, there might be a case for public sector intervention to specify and encourage higher and common standards of assessment and disclosure.”

The BoE news release doesn’t mention the agencies; but I’ll include some quick snippets from the actual report:

Some end-investors and fund managers may have mistakenly assumed that the credit ratings of these products provided information on other risks. Many of these instruments are ‘buyand hold’ securities for which there is not always a readily available secondary market. A single rating does not capture adequately all of the risks inherent in these products — for example, liquidity risk — as reflected in the differential pricing of products within a similar ratings band.

The controversial stuff is in box 6 on page 56 of the report. Five suggestions for possible improvements are made – and I’m not going to comment on them now. However, these suggestions are inspired by a false premise:

These suggestions aim to facilitate a more sophisticated use of credit ratings by investors.

To which – as one last sally before switching off – I’ll say:

  • If a more sophisticated use of credit ratings by investors is desired, then it would appear more appropriate to concentrate any regulatory action on such investors. Yank a few licenses for imprudent conduct such as unsophisticated use of credit ratings, for instance. Make it clear that CEO’s who play at being Portfolio Managers with shareholder money are civilly liable if found negligent or reckless.
  • investors – taken as a group, with plenty of exceptions – do not want to use credit ratings in a more sophisticated way. They want one number that doesn’t need to be thought about in order to offload their responsibilities

Update, 2007-10-25: I must admit to some confusion regarding one of the Bank’s recommendations:

In moving forward, there are several areas in which further work is needed by market participants and the authorities in the United Kingdom and internationally to restore confidence in the financial system

The smooth functioning of markets in complex instruments depends on clarity about their content and construction. As discussed in Box 6 on page 56, rating agencies should support this process by clarifying the information available to investors on the risks inherent in products and the uncertainties around their ratings assessments. Recent events have demonstrated to investors the dangers of using ratings as a mechanical input to their risk assessment.

Why is it the ratings agencies’ job to clarify “the information available to investors on the risks inherent in products”? Just coming up with an assessment of credit risk is a pretty big job, and quite enough for one army of specialists. There is a very real danger here that the current fad for blaming the ratings agencies will lead to a situation in which they are held accountable for making market recommendations. That’s the job of investors! And if there are “risks inherent in products”, these are supposed to be disclosed in the prospectus – you know, around page 400, along with risks of meteorites wiping out head office.

Fans of the Black Swan model of Nassim Taleb will be gratified by the Bank’s note that:

It is striking that a market as small as US sub-prime RMBS, with a size of around $700 billion, had such pervasive effects on much deeper and more liquid markets, such as the asset-backed securities (ABS) markets (with a size of $10.7 trillion).

I prefer to think of financial markets as a chaotic system … which might be criticized as mere definitional quibbling, but even fat-tailed distributions strike me as being too deterministic. The universe is an unfriendly place; there is no telling which part of it is going to swoop down and kick you next.

Update, 2007-10-26: I became so interested in Box 2 of the report, Valuing sub-prime RMBS that I had to create a post dealing specifically with the issue! Default probabilities for lower grade retail credits are highly correlated – responding as they do to broader economic conditions – and the degree of correlation has important implications for pricing the various tranches of RMBS.

Super-Conduit = Vulture?

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

In previous posts, I’ve speculated that the MLEC Super-Conduit proposed by Treasury and a consortium of major banks is intended to operate as a Vulture Fund.

It would appear from posts in Naked Capitalism (SIV Rescue Plan : From Smoke and Mirrors to Jawboning) and Accrued Interest (Yeah, but who’s going to fund it kid? You?) that my use of the term has been misunderstood; possibly because I’ve mis-used it.

The term “vulture fund” has been taken to mean that I am suggesting Super-Conduit will be, or should be, buying lower quality assets; below AA in Naked Capitalism’s parlance, which is not what I had intended to suggest. It is my suggestion that Super-Conduit will seek to buy wonderful assets from distressed SIVs.

A recent publicly disclosed version of such a scenario is the Amaranth / Citadel deal, in which Amaranth realized sufficient losses on energy trades that it couldn’t finance them any more and was forced – that’s the key word, forced – to sell … with unfortunate results:

Transferring the investments would prevent further losses and decreased its loans but the deal was done “at a price that resulted in additional significant losses,” it added.

Right now, we have SIVs like Cheyne Finance and Rhinebridge defaulting. Defaulting!

They are doing this because, in the case of Rhinebridge:

The company suffered “a rapid decline in the portfolio value,” Fitch said. “The manager has determined that the market value of the remaining assets within the portfolio may be insufficient to meet the amount of outstanding senior liabilities.”

SIVs worldwide have been forced to sell about $75 billion of assets in the past two months to repay maturing debt as investors balked at buying securities linked to money-losing subprime mortgages. SIVs have different operating states to protect investors and allow the fund time to recover from a market slump. Enforcement is typically the last state, and is irreversible.

The assets in Rhinebridge’s portfolio are worth 63 percent of their $1 billion face value, having fallen $69 million in three days, S&P said. S&P also cut its ratings on the company’s debt to D for default. 

In other words, it’s a market value assessment, rather than a credit assessment, of the underlying assets  that is causing the problems. And we know that, for instance, prices of AAA paper have declined to ludicrous levels:

Briefly, let me give you a few examples of events that I [William C. Dudley, Executive Vice-President, New York Fed] never expected to see—ever:

  1. AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities selling at 85 or 90 cents on the dollar,

So here’s the scenario, with what I propose is a plausible scenario for an ideal situation for the MLEC’s sponsors.

  • SIV formed, purchases $100 of assets
  • These assets are financed with $90 of ABCP and $10 of Mezzanine/Capital notes (Ratio taken from reported structure of Golden Key Ltd.
  • Market Price of assets declines to $90
  • Super-Conduit offers $80 cash and $10 mezzanine notes for the assets (maybe less! Whatever they can get away with)
  • SIV sells the Super-Conduit mezzanine notes for $10 and pays off its ABCP senior note-holders
  • SIVs junior noteholders are wiped out
  • Super-Conduit’s senior noteholders are better secured than SIV’s senior noteholders were
  • Super-Conduit’s sponsors make an enormous whack of money when the AAA securities they bought for $90 matures at par

This argument relies on:

  • The AAA assets are actually unimpaired; they’re just trading at horribly low prices
  • The SIV is in a position of having to make a forced sale anyway
  • Super-Conduit is the only player with sufficient financial heft to go after these deals with a reasonable chance of actually holding the assets until maturity

Well, I think it’s a reasonable argument! It seems more reasonable to me than having Super-Conduit buy assets from healthy and well-capitalized SIVs, anyway! In short, my speculation as to motivations is that this is a money-making scheme (for the sponsoring banks) that will keep the ABCP market in existence (for the Treasury) on a better capitalized basis (for ABCP investors).

I think there’s a big whack of money going begging for a sponsor that can finance the assets long-term.

Right? Wrong? I haven’t seen it discussed elsewhere … only the implication that the $100 of paper trading at $90 is going to purchased by the Super-Conduit for $100 for various nefarious and manipulative purposes – which doesn’t make sense to me.