PrefBlog

There’s an interesting, albeit badly in need of editing, paper by Alessandro Fontana titled The persistent negative CDS-bond basis during the 2007/08 financial crisis:

I study the behavior of the CDS-bond basis – the difference between the CDS and the bond spread – for a sample of investment-graded US firms. I document that, since the onset of the 2007/08 financial crisis it has become persistently negative, and I investigate the role played by the cost of trading the basis and its underlying risks. To exploit the negative basis an arbitrageur must finance the purchase of the underlying bond and buy protection. The idea is that, during the crisis, because of the funding liquidity shortage and the increased risk in the financial sector, which exposes protection buyers to counter-party risk, the negative basis trade is risky. In fact, I find that basis dynamics is driven by economic variables that are proxies for funding liquidity (cost of capital and hair cuts), credit markets liquidity and risk in the inter-bank lending market such as the Libor-OIS spread, the VIX , bid-asks spreads and the OIS-T-Bill spread. Results support the evidence that during stress times asset prices depart form frictionless ideals due to funding liquidity risk faced by financial intermediaries and investors; hence, deviations from parity do not imply presence of arbitrage opportunities.

The Basel Committee continued its attempts to deflect public attention from its incompetence with the release of Pillar 3 disclosure requirements for remuneration. The financial crisis had a lot more to do with tranche retention and the lack of minimum turnover standards for securities designated Available For Sale than any compensation packages.

Econbrowser‘s James Hamilton discusses the 2010 changes in the yield curve in his post Changes in the Yield Curve:

One goal of the Fed’s second round of quantitative easing begun at the start of November was to flatten the yield curve. That obviously didn’t happen, and I discussed some of the reasons why a few weeks ago. A second goal was to increase inflationary expectations, which was achieved.

Even so, all we’ve done is moved back to about where we were a year ago. And a year ago, if you recall, things really weren’t that great.

But at least now we’re moving in the right direction.

The Globe & Mail ran a story on insurance fraud on Monday that I confess I don’t fully understand:

Again, the real money was made through a clinic, by submitting stacks of claims for false treatments under Ontario’s no-fault insurance system that averaged more than $250,000 per accident.
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For an initial fee of $500, any person – not necessarily a doctor – can register as the owner of a clinic, hire practitioners and bill insurers for claims. In order to file those claims, a doctor or registered practitioner’s name, signature, and other billing information is needed, but this is sometimes forged.

Using confidential documents obtained from U.S. investigators, which were then cross-referenced with information gathered from court and corporate searches in Canada, The Globe and Mail has learned that at least one person indicted in the biggest auto insurance crackdown ever seen in the United States has since opened a rehabilitation business in Ontario, operating under the noses of regulators and lawmakers.

I don’t get it. OK, I understand the bit about since the regulators basically allow cost-plus charging of premiums, there’s very little incentive to show any initiative in checking out possible fraud. But honestly, when a clinic you’ve never heard of sends you a bill for $250,000 … don’t you send some clerk to go check them out? Call the practitioners involved? Ask for some back-up? and flag the clinic for a higher rate of spot checks until they’ve been in business for a year? This seems to me to be such a basic part of good business practice that I am astounded it’s not standard, especially considering that cashing a $500 cheque requires a rectal probe.

The Globe published my letter regarding the Mordecai Richler tempest.

The Canadian preferred share market rally continued today on unsurprisingly very low volume, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 15bp and FixedResets up 3bp.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.43%, equivalent to 7.60% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.4x. Long Corporates now yield about 5.4%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread is now about 220bp, with all figures basically unchanged from December 22.

There’s less room at the trough for wind and solar lobbyists:

Investors pulled 931 million euros ($1.2 billion) in the first 10 months, already eclipsing the full-year withdrawals in 2008 when the global financial crisis spooked investors, according to data compiled by Lipper Inc. Last year clean-energy funds captured 1.3 billion euros of new money, Lipper said.
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“The new-energy market and related stocks were significantly impacted by the credit crisis,” Robin Batchelor, manager of the $2.9 billion BlackRock New Energy Fund, said in an e-mail. Reduced demand for energy and “the fact that governments were perceived to have many new worries on their agenda combined to create a difficult environment,” he said. New York-based BlackRock is the world’s largest money manager.
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U.S. investment slumped this year amid investor doubt about government energy policy, while the sovereign debt crisis has limited prospects for economic growth in Europe. Governments in Germany, Spain and Italy cut subsidies for photovoltaic panels.

China continues to push offshore yuan trading:

Hong Kong banks will be allowed to tap the 20 billion yuan ($3 billion) fund from next month should the city’s yuan clearing bank run out of funds set under a quarterly quota.

The Hong Kong Monetary Authority made 10 billion yuan available in October using a swap agreement with China’s central bank after an 8 billion yuan quota proved insufficient. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is allowing the currency to become more readily available beyond China’s borders to reduce reliance on U.S. dollars in trade and finance.

“They’re hurtling toward this now,” said Gavin Parry, managing director of Hong Kong-based Parry International Trading Ltd. “They’re really using Hong Kong as the settlement and clearing hub for offshore deposit and transactions” in yuan, he said.

Hong Kong aims to grow as an offshore center for yuan trading and HKMA Chief Executive Norman Chan said yesterday deposits totaled 280 billion yuan at the end of November, up from 220 billion yuan a month earlier. The city received 130 billion yuan in net trade payments from China in the first 11 months, he told reporters in Hong Kong.

That’s a lot more useful than whimpering about global resolutions to develop a new currency!

Together with the above, dim sum bond issuance is booming:

HSBC Holdings Plc and Standard Chartered Plc, the biggest foreign underwriters of yuan bonds sold in Hong Kong, say sales will double in 2011 as demand outstrips supply and the yuan appreciates.

New issues may increase to a record 80 billion yuan ($12 billion) next year, with as much as 30 billion yuan of sales in the first quarter, according to HSBC, the No. 2 underwriter of so-called dim sum bonds. Standard Chartered, the fourth largest this year, says sales could top as much as 100 billion yuan as Moscow-based United Co. Rusal and BP Plc plan issues. Offerings in 2010 total 40.7 billion yuan, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

The Bank of Canada has released a working paper by Kimberly Beaton, René Lalonde and Stephen Snudden titled The Propagation of U.S. Shocks to Canada: Understanding the Role of Real-Financial Linkages:

This paper examines the transmission of U.S. real and financial shocks to Canada and, in particular, the role of financial frictions in affecting the transmission of these shocks. These questions are addressed within the Bank of Canada’s Global Economy Model (de Resende et al. forthcoming), a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with an active banking sector and a detailed role for financial frictions. We find that U.S. financial shocks, as well as real shocks, have important effects on the Canadian economy. Moreover, financial frictions on both the demand and supply sides of credit amplify the first round impact of all types of U.S. shocks on the U.S. economy, as well as the second round impact on Canada. Real-financial linkages also increase the persistence of the Canadian response to U.S. shocks. We find that the interaction between the endogenous response of commodity prices and U.S. financial frictions plays an important role in the propagation of U.S. shocks to the Canadian economy. Finally, real-financial linkages also help to generate the positive cross correlation between domestic demand in the United States and Canada observed in the data, which is difficult to explain with a model where the transmission of shocks between countries is only based only on trade.

Unsurprisingly enough, it was a sleepy foreshortened day on the Canadian preferred share market, but the rally managed to sputter along, with PerpetualDiscounts gaining 9bp and FixedResets basically flat.

Allied Irish has joined the cortege:

Ireland’s High Court said Allied Irish Banks Plc can be taken over by the government without shareholder approval, as the lender became the fourth bank to fall under state control since 2008.

Finance Minister Brian Lenihan secured approval from the Dublin-based court today to inject 3.7 billion euros ($4.8 billion) into the lender by Dec. 31 and raise its stake to 92 percent from 19 percent, the Finance Ministry said in a statement. Allied Irish, Ireland’s biggest company by market value in 2007, recorded its biggest share price drop in 22 months in Dublin trading. Worth almost 21 billion euros at its peak, the bank’s market value today was 341 million euros.

In Hungarian news:

Fitch cut Hungary’s long term foreign currency credit rating to BBB- with a negative outlook on Thursday, warning that the lack of a coherent medium-term fiscal strategy undermined confidence in the sustainability of public finances.

“The reversal of pension reforms and lack of a coherent medium-term fiscal strategy undermines confidence in the long-term sustainability of the public finances,” it said in a statement.

The Bank of Canada has published a few working papers of note lately … I haven’t gone through them carefully (they’re in a HUGE pile, marked “later”), but the first one is by H. Evren Damar, Césaire A. Meh and Yaz Terajima, titled Leverage, Balance Sheet Size and Wholesale Funding:

Some evidence points to the procyclicality of leverage among financial institutions leading to aggregate volatility. This procyclicality occurs when financial institutions finance their assets with non-equity funding (i.e., debt financed asset expansions). Wholesale funding is an important source of market-based funding that allows some institutions to quickly adjust their leverage. As such, financial institutions that rely on wholesale funding are expected to have higher degrees of leverage procyclicality. Using high frequency balance sheet data for the universe of banks, this study tries to identify (i) if such a positive link exists between the assets and leverage in Canada, (ii) how wholesale funding plays a role for this link, and (iii) market and macroeconomic factors associated with this link. The findings of the empirical analysis suggest that a strong positive link exists between asset growth and leverage growth, and the use to wholesale funding is an important determinant of this relationship. Furthermore, liquidity of several short-term funding markets matters for procyclicality of leverage.

The second one is by Étienne Bordeleau and Christopher Graham, titled The Impact of Liquidity on Bank Profitability:

The recent crisis has underlined the importance of sound bank liquidity management. In response, regulators are devising new liquidity standards with the aim of making the financial system more stable and resilient. In this paper, the authors analyse the impact of liquid asset holdings on bank profitability for a sample of large U.S. and Canadian banks. Results suggest that profitability is improved for banks that hold some liquid assets, however, there is a point at which holding further liquid assets diminishes a banks’ profitability, all else equal. Moreover, empirical evidence also suggests that this relationship varies depending on a bank’s business model and the state of the economy. These results are particularly relevant as policymakers devise new standards establishing an appropriate level of liquidity for banks. While it is generally agreed upon that banks undervalued liquidity prior to the recent financial crisis, one must also consider the tradeoff between resilience to liquidity shocks and the cost of holding lower-yielding liquid assets as the latter may impact banks’ ability to generate revenues, increase capital and extend credit.

OSFI released a final version of the Capital Adequacy Requirements Guidelines A-1 and A for deposit taking institutions.

Volume in the Canadian preferred share market eased off to merely average levels, but the rally spluttered along, with PerpetualDiscounts up 1bp and FixedResets gaining 22bp.

There is an early close on the Toronto Stock Exchange tomorrow, as all the players have to rush home and tell their mommies how hard they work. It is also the last day of trading for settlement in 2009, which is important for tax purposes, so watch the clock as closely as if you worked for a fundco!

Americans are paying their bills:

Loans at least 30 days overdue, a signal of future write- offs, dropped for the 13th consecutive month to 4.38 percent, the lowest since December 2007, Moody’s said today in a report. Loans delinquent 30 to 59 days, the earliest sign of trouble, declined to 1.14 percent, near an all-time low. Write-offs for loans deemed uncollectible, a lagging indicator, fell to 8.58 percent from October’s 8.79 percent.

The drop in new delinquencies bolsters the firm’s “expectation that charge-offs will ultimately break below the 7 percent mark later in 2011,” Jeffrey Hibbs, a Moody’s analyst, wrote in the report.

The S&P / Experian indices show the improvement to be broadly based – and dramatic!

There’s an interesting twist in the Goldman / Greece derivative imbroglio:

The notes show how Greece used swaps to hide its borrowings, according to a March 3 cover page attached to the papers obtained by Bloomberg News.

ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet withheld the documents after the EU and International Monetary Fund led a 110 billion- euro bailout ($144 billion) for Greece. The dossier should be disclosed to stop governments from employing the derivatives in a similar way again and to show how EU authorities acted on information they had on the swaps, according to the suit, filed by Bloomberg Finance LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.

Ha-ha! The notes will show, I’ll bet a nickel, that everybody knew about it and ignored it.

TD is still looking for deals:

Toronto-Dominion’s bid for the auto-finance company “doesn’t really alter” the Toronto-based bank’s appetite for smaller transactions, Chief Executive Officer Edmund Clark said.

“We’re not deal junkies, but we keep saying what we’re looking for,” Clark said yesterday in a telephone interview. “We want $10 billion (in assets) or less deals; tuck-ins that add to our franchise and meet our strategy.”

Towers Perrin reports:

Near-zero equity returns and slight increases in interest rates translated into stable pension funding in November. The Towers Watson Pension Index remained unchanged for the month at 68.3. The index remains down 4.6% for the year.

They have also published Towers Watson–Forbes Insights 2010 Pension Risk Survey:

There is a strong desire on the part of plan sponsors to reduce the risk of their pension plans. Many plans are signifi cantly underfunded in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and their sponsors have experienced the resulting pressure on corporate cash flows. Rather than rushing to seek higher investment returns to close this funding gap, however, the majority of sponsors attach greater importance to reducing risk. The most favored strategy is to seek a better alignment of assets with liabilities — for example, through liability-driven investment programs. Executives expect to increasingly utilize swaps, options and other hedging derivatives to achieve better risk management. More plan sponsors today are setting formal funding policies in place of ad hoc decisions. Over time, lump sum payments and annuity purchases are also expected to be vehicles for settling DB obligations on a wholesale basis.

There is trouble in the state of Denmark:

Denmark says the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s rules will force the country’s lenders to dump top-rated mortgage debt to meet new requirements on holdings and may destroy the world’s third-biggest covered-bond market.

The Nordic country is planning to challenge the rules, published on Dec. 16. and Economy Minister Brian Mikkelsen has already taken Denmark’s grievances to the European Commission.
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Denmark’s lenders, which hold more than half the country’s $490 billion of mortgage bonds, would be forced to sell off holdings to comply with Basel’s 40 percent cap on using the securities as liquid assets, [director of the Association of Danish Mortgage Banks] Arnth Jensen said.
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Denmark’s mortgage bond market is about 1 1/2 times the size of the country’s economy and more than seven times the size of the government bond market, according to the central bank.

The regulation of Money Market Funds is attracting renewed notice:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke said investor speculation over which money market mutual funds are likely to be bailed out by their parent companies during a crisis can undermine the stability of the industry that manages $2.79 trillion.

Bernanke, in a Dec. 9 letter to Anthony J. Carfang, partner in Chicago consulting firm Treasury Strategies, said market developments that reinforce speculation whether money funds may be bailed out are a “concern” and sponsor support should be addressed in the context of planned reforms of the industry.

Carfang in November criticized a proposal by Moody’s Corp. that its ratings of money funds take into account the likelihood of a parent bailout in the event of losses. Bernanke, in the letter, encouraged Carfang to submit his views of the Moody’s proposal to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Carfang has called the Moody’s proposal “fundamentally disruptive,” saying the ratings firm would have no objective way of gauging whether a money manager would prop up a fund in trouble.

Well, no. A credit rating is a prediction about probabilities, inherently subjective on two counts. CRAs are paid to use their judgement; and when they’re wrong, all the backseat drivers can point out they’re being paid by the issuers. That’s the way the game is played.

I woule much prefer explicit credit support, but the industry prefers boxticking; regulators so far have endorsed boxticking, becaue it requires more manpower to check.

The rally in the Canadian preferred share market continued today, on easing but still elevated volume. PerpetualDiscounts gained 31bp, while Fixed Resets were up 25bp.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.42%, equivalent to 7.59% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.4x. Long corporates yields have plumetted to about 5.4% (maybe just a bit over) so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread now stans at about 220bp, a significant widening from the 210bp reported on December 15, as the improvement in tone in the bond market has not been matched by the preferred market.

But big rallies can tend to be sloppy affairs, as the guys running the BMO Long Corporate ETF can tell you:

Click for big

The TD / Chrysler deal got done:

Toronto-Dominion Bank agreed to buy Chrysler Financial Corp. from Cerberus Capital Management LP for $6.3 billion in cash, adding an auto-finance company in its second-largest acquisition.

The purchase includes $5.9 billion in assets and about $400 million in goodwill, Canada’s second-biggest bank said today in a statement. Toronto-Dominion doesn’t intend to issue stock.

and Cerberus investors are relieved:

Cerberus Capital Management LP will recoup about 90 percent of its initial investment in Chrysler after the sale of the automaker’s former lending unit to Toronto-Dominion Bank, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction.

Cerberus will get about 75 cents on the dollar in cash when the sale of Chrysler Financial Corp. closes, said the people, asking not to be identified because the New York-based firm is private. Including about $900 million of assets Cerberus is retaining as part of the deal, the company will be left with a loss of 10 percent on the initial investment in the automaker and its finance arm.

So basically, Chrysler was a finance company with a captive manufacturing arm. I love it.

DBRS commented:

that TD Bank US Holding Company’s (TD Bank US or the Company) ratings, including its Issuer & Senior Debt rating of AA (low), are unaffected by its announced acquisition of Chrysler Financial’s U.S. operations. The trend on all ratings is Stable.

DBRS believes the acquisition of Chrysler Financial will not have a material impact on the earnings and only a modest impact on the capital of the Company’s parent, The Toronto-Dominion Bank (TD; Deposits & Senior Debt rated AA with a Stable trend). Specifically, TD’s Tier 1 capital ratio is expected to decline by 55 to 60 basis points on a pro forma basis from the 12.2% TD reported at October 31, 2010. Consequently, the risk profile for TD remains solid, notwithstanding the execution risk concerns of growing in the auto finance business. DBRS notes that TD continues to have the resources, motivation and ability to support the Company, if needed. As such, there are no rating implications at this time.

Ernst & Young’s in trouble over Repo 105:

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued Ernst & Young LLP, accusing the firm of facilitating a “major accounting fraud” by helping Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. deceive the public about its financial condition.
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The state seeks to recover more than $150 million in fees collected by Ernst & Young for work performed for Lehman from 2001 to 2008, plus investor damages and equitable relief, Cuomo said. He will be sworn in as New York governor on Jan. 1. His successor will be New York Democratic state Senator Eric T. Schneiderman.
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Lehman, once the fourth-largest investment bank, failed in September 2008 because of risky real estate bets and too much debt, which it tried to hide from investors, partly by using so- called Repo 105 trades, according to bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas’s report.
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Responding to the Valukas report in March, Ernst & Young said leverage ratios reported in Lehman’s management discussion and analysis “were the responsibility of management, not the auditor. They are not part of the audited financial statements.”
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Responding to one suit, filed in April on behalf of retirement funds including the Alameda County Employees’ Retirement Association in Oakland, California, Ernst & Young said in court papers that even Valukas “did not find that Lehman’s accounting for the Repo 105 transactions was wrong.”

In his report, Valukas faulted the accounting firm because it “did not evaluate the possibility that Repo 105 transactions were accounting-motivated transactions that lacked a business purpose,” and didn’t take a stand on whether Lehman’s extensive use of the device was “material” and should be reported.

“Financial statements may be materially misleading even when they do not violate GAAP,” he wrote in his report.
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Cuomo, who has powers to bring criminal charges, brought a civil suit against Ernst & Young. Arthur Andersen LLP, the accounting firm that was accused of destroying Enron Corp. documents, was convicted of obstructing justice in 2002 and is now largely defunct.

“Regulators are concerned there will be no competitors left” to audit U.S. companies, [accountant Barry] Epstein said.

The Valukas report and Repo 105 was discussed on PrefBlog on March 12, 2010.

Patrick Jenkins of the Financial Times points out a rather obvious knock-on effect about the obsession with bonuses … obvious, that is, to all but politicians:

Many US and Swiss banks are considering paying higher salaries and lower bonuses to top bankers based in the European Union, mostly in London, to ensure they comply with new instructions from the Committee of European Banking Supervisors (CEBS), the pan-EU regulator, limiting cash pay-outs.

Some European politicians had expected that non-EU banks would apply their rules globally on a voluntary basis.

But one senior European banker said: “Politicians are naïve if they think we will impose EU rules on a global basis. The ironic effect will be another hike in salaries, which is a fixed cost, which rather makes a nonsense of the idea of pay for performance.”

Speaking of banks, there is some thought that Deutsche is playing a moral hazard game:

Deutsche Bank’s core capital ratio, a buffer against possible losses, may fall to the lowest level among eight competitors under new Basel III rules in 2012, even after it raised 10.2 billion euros ($13.4 billion) in a share sale in October, according to Christopher Wheeler, an analyst at Mediobanca SpA.

[CEO Josef] Ackermann, who shunned German government aid during the credit crisis, warned at a Frankfurt conference in September against a “dangerous race to the top” among banks seeking to lift reserves above Basel III requirements years before the rules kick in. Deutsche Bank, the largest German bank, may be able to hold less capital than peers, and borrow more to enhance returns, because its clients are convinced the government would never let it fail, analysts and investors said.
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Deutsche Bank also relies more than competitors on borrowed funds, or leverage, to increase returns. Its assets amounted to 51 times shareholders’ equity on Sept. 30, up from 48 times at the end of 2006, based on International Financial Reporting Standards. Only Brussels-based Dexia SA has higher leverage among Europe’s 15 biggest listed banks. Investment banks’ extensive use of borrowed funds, which can exaggerate risks, was blamed by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke for contributing to the financial crisis.
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Deutsche Bank prefers to use U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which net out derivatives positions, to measure its leverage. By that standard, its assets at the end of September matched its goal of 25 times equity, up from 23 times a year earlier and down from 38 times in mid-2008, company reports show. By comparison, Goldman Sachs assets were 12 times capital at the end of September.

And the Canadian preferred share market was on wheels … again! PerpetualDiscounts were up 34bp and FixedResets gained 26bp. Volume eased off a little, but remains elevated.

TD is rumoured to be close to a Chrysler Financial deal:

Toronto-Dominion Bank is near an agreement to buy Chrysler Financial, the lender once owned by the third-largest U.S. automaker, from Cerberus Capital Management LP, said three people with knowledge of the matter.

Toronto-Dominion may announce a deal as soon as tomorrow morning, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private. Toronto-Dominion and Cerberus had been discussing a price of about $6 billion to $7 billion, other people with knowledge of the situation said earlier this month.

There are also rumours of a French downgrade:

Costs to insure French government debt trebled this year, rising to an all-time high of 105.5 basis points today, according to data provider CMA. Credit default swaps tied to Czech securities gained 1 basis point to 91 and Chilean swaps were little changed at 89 basis points.

The credit default swaps tied to the French bonds imply a rating of Baa1, seven steps below its actual top ranking of Aaa at Moody’s, according to the New York-based firm’s capital markets research group.

Contracts on Portugal imply a B2 rating, 10 levels below its A1 grade, while swaps tied to Spanish bonds trade at Ba3, 11 steps below its Aa1 ranking, data from the Moody’s research group show. Derivatives protecting Belgian debt imply a rating of Ba1, nine steps below its current rating of Aa1.

It took a while, but it looks as if the IIROC case against TD-Burlington, discussed in March, 2008, has finally reached a conclusion. Yawn. What an abysmal waste of time. If somebody’s putting in silly bids just before the close, then you just programme an algorithm to hit it instantly. The way to get rid of incompetent fools in the industry is by encouraging market efficiency and competition, not more rules. Just ensure retail has access to algorithms, that’s all … a “pounce” algorithm (that will hit any bid over a given price, with or without showing an offer at a higher price) in the hands of retail would have nipped this nonsense in the bud admirably. Or, by not doing so, have showed the breach of UMIR to be inconsequential.

The Canadian preferred share market was on fire today, with PerpetualDiscounts rocketting up 73bp and FixedResets gaining 28bp. Volume continued to be on the heavy side. All the entries on the Volume Highlights table were PerpetualDiscounts; all entries on the Performance Highlights table were winners. Nesbitt did very well on the block trading, but was not quite able to shut out the competition from the Volume report.