Bear Stearns

  • 03 Apr 2013 at 6:21 PM

Bear Stearns RMBS Ruling Good News For Banks, Except Maybe Bank Of America

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A while back Bear Stearns sold some mortgage-backed securities to a thing called FSAM, which was basically a subsidiary of Franco-Belgian monstrosité Dexia, and FSAM sold the RMBS on to Dexia, and the mortgages were all terrible, and their value dropped, and Dexia sued JPMorgan, currently the proud owner of Bear Stearns, and today JPMorgan won:

JPMorgan Chase & Co has won the dismissal of the vast majority of a lawsuit accusing it of misleading the Belgian-French bank Dexia SA into buying more than $1.6 billion of troubled mortgage debt.

The decision, made public Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan, is a victory for the largest U.S. bank, in a case that gained notoriety after emails and other materials were disclosed that suggested the bank and its affiliates knew the debt was toxic, but sold it anyway.

Despite the notoriety this is kind of a boring case: it’s a garden-variety RMBS fraud case; Bear said various things in the offering documents that maybe weren’t so true, and the market crashed and the investors lost a lot of money, and now they’re mad. There’s like a zillion of those cases; actually there’s like a zillion of those cases just against Bear Stearns (here are two).

But the fact that the bank won is pretty interesting? Like, if JPMorgan can win a garden-variety RMBS case then so can anyone? I guess? So I suppose it’s worth spending a minute figuring out what this means for other banks.

We run into immediate problems because it’s hard to know exactly why JPMorgan won; the judge’s order is two pages of “opinion to follow.” But reading JPMorgan’s submissions you can get behind CNBC’s interpretation: Read more »

  • 07 Feb 2013 at 6:52 PM

Hedge Fund Manager Who Ripped Off Bear Stearns May Do 200 Years

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Let this be a lesson to anyone hoping to avoid a couple centuries in prison– nobody fucks with Jimmy Cayne’s roach clip and gets away with it! Read more »

  • 18 Jan 2013 at 4:42 PM

2007 Fed Not As Informed About 2008 As 2013 Critics

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Today the Federal Reserve released transcripts of its 2007 FOMC meetings. The Fed has a policy of releasing these transcripts with a five-year lag. This has various advantages in terms of encouraging candor and allowing the FOMC members to discuss material nonpublic information, etc., but it has the singular disadvantage of making them look like idiots, because everyone else is five years smarter than they are. “Hahaha William Dudley thinks that Bear Stearns is fine! Bear disappeared like four years ago! Has he been living under a rock? What a moron!”

Still I think the advantages of delay outweigh the disadvantages, for the Fed. Here is Dudley in August 2007 on Bear, etc.:

As far as the issue of material nonpublic information that shows worse problems than are in the newspapers, I’m not sure exactly how to characterize that because I guess I wouldn’t know how to characterize how bad the newspapers think these problems are. [Laughter] We’ve done quite a bit of work trying to identify some of the funding questions surrounding Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and some of the commercial paper programs. There is some strain, but so far it looks as though nothing is really imminent in those areas. Now, could that change quickly? Absolutely. For example, one question that we’re following with Bear Stearns is what their clients do in terms of continuing to want to do business with them. Obviously, if people start to pull back in their willingness to do business with Bear Stearns, the franchise value of the company goes down, and that exacerbates the problem. One thing that we have heard about Bear Stearns is that they have approached a number of major commercial banks about a secured line of credit. We don’t know what the outcome will be, but they are clearly trying to get even better liquidity backstops than those they have in place today. But as far as we know, they have enough liquidity—and Countrywide as well at this moment.

Laugh if you want, but that’s sort of the thing about banks and liquidity: it’s there one day, and gone the next, and its disappearance is never predictable because as soon as it becomes predictable that your liquidity will disappear, it has already disappeared. However good may be your arguments. Bear, at the time, really was drowning in liquidity.1 Dudley just looks a little wrong in hindsight; the guys at Bear who were working to bail their sinking ship had no choice but to make contemporaneous public statements about their liquidity that were true until they weren’t. And that looked, by virtue of the quick flip between “drowning in liquidity” and just “drowning,” like they weren’t true – in a liability-incurring way – even when they were.

The transcripts don’t seem particularly laughable to me2; the FOMC members seem serious and sensible and earnest and informed and reasonably on top of current events without being all that on top of the future.3 This is called the efficient markets hypothesis. Here is Ryan Avent: Read more »

  • 07 Nov 2012 at 5:46 PM

JPMorgan May Soon Be Rid Of One Of Many Bear Stearns Mortgage Investigations

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Mortgage-backed securities are sort of conceptually simple – put mortgages in a pot, stir, sell layers of resulting goop – but complex in execution; they have not only economic but also legal and accounting and bankruptcy purposes and so their offering documents are long and boring and filled with dotted and dashed lines and arrows and boxes and originators selling to sponsors selling to depositors selling to trustees selling to underwriters selling to investors. All those arrows serve as a finely calibrated series of one-way gates; each link in that chain is meant to shield the person before the link from something, some real or imaginary claim from the people coming after the link, allowing originators/sponsors/etc. to tell themselves “I never need to worry about those mortgages again!”

Hahahaha no they totally do. Today the Journal and the FT have stories about a possible JPMorgan SEC settlement on some Bear Stearns mortgage practices, specifically (per JPM’s filings) “potential claims against Bear Stearns entities, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and J.P. Morgan Securities LLC relating to settlements of claims against originators involving loans included in a number of Bear Stearns securitizations”. If you’re keeping score these are:

  • not the thing where Bear maybe did a shoddy job underwriting mortgages, and
  • not the New York state lawsuit involving, besides the shoddy underwriting, Bear Stearns’ settlements of claims against originators, but rather
  • the SEC’s investigation of what seem to be those same settlements of claims against originators.1

This is how the FT describes it: Read more »

  • 10 Oct 2012 at 3:52 PM

Jamie Dimon Is Still Waiting For His Thank You For Buying Bear

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JPMorgan Chase Chief Executive Jamie Dimon said his company has lost up to $10 billion as a result of the government asking him to buy teetering Wall Street firm Bear Stearns during the financial crisis. “Someone said the Fed did us a favor to finance some of this or something like that. No no no. We did them a favor,” Dimon said, speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “I’m going to say we’ve lost $5 billion to $10 billion on various things related to Bear Stearns now. And yes, I put it in the unfair category,” the CEO added. [CNBC]

Alan Schwartz Has Move On From Bear Stearns And Suggests You Do The Same

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A pair of BSAM’s most successful hedge funds were run by Ralph Cioffi, one of the firm’s top traders, and Matthew Tannin. The funds traded in the kinds of exotic assets Mr. Marin and Bear Stearns were experts in, collateralized debt obligations. When the housing market on which these bundles of mortgages were based seized up, the funds tanked and Bear Stearns had to spend $3.2 billion bailing them out, the second-largest intervention in Wall Street history (though it would pale in comparison to what was coming). When asked about these events, and how Mr. Marin comported himself, Mr. Schwartz was insistent. “I do not want to talk about that,” he said from his car Tuesday morning, on the way to a meeting. “If you want to talk about the ferris wheel and Rich, great. Every article doesn’t have to be dredging up what happened at Bear Stearns. Rich is a good guy, a creative guy, a good business man. I don’t want to reminisce about what happened at that time. It’s frankly a disservice to drag it back up.” [NYO]

  • 02 Oct 2012 at 1:17 PM

To Be Fair, Bear Stearns Never Told Investors That Its RMBS Deals Weren’t “Shit Breathers”

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So, subprime mortgage-backed securities. Here’s a schematic:

  • Banks packaged subprime mortgages into bonds and sold them to people.
  • Something.
  • The bonds were bad and the people lost money.

What’s the something? There are two main theories. Theory 1 says that everyone knew at some lizard-brain level that it was a bad idea to give lots of money to poor unemployed people with low credit scores to buy overpriced houses, but figured it would work out fine if house prices kept going up. This worked until it didn’t; when house prices went down, badness ensued.

Theory 2 says that, while mortgage originators and securitizers knew that they were giving mortgages to people who had no chance of paying them back, the buyers of those mortgages had no idea: they thought that the originators were holding them to rigorous underwriting standards, where “rigorous” is read to mean “other than requiring a job, or an income, or assets, or a credit score.” When that turned out to be false, badness ensued.

Theory 1 has the benefit of probably being right.1 Theory 2 is superior on every other metric. For one thing, it fits well with deep cultural desires to find villains for the subprime crisis, and punish them. For another, it better fits the explicit facts. No subprime offering document actually said “these guys are all just terrible reprobates and the only way you’ll get your money back is if they can find a greater fool to buy their overpriced house when their rate resets.” But there’s no shortage of internal emails that say – well:

In connection with the Bear Stearns Second Lien Trust 2007-1 (“BSSLT 2007-1”) securitization, for example, one Bear Stearns executive asked whether the securitization was a “going out of business sale” and expressed a desire to “close this dog.” In another internal email, the SACO 2006-8 securitization was referred to as a “SACK OF SHIT”2 and a “shit breather.”

Thanks Eric Schneiderman! Read more »

  • 14 May 2012 at 12:25 PM

New JPMorgan CIO Doesn’t Get Out Of Bed For Less Than A Great Depression-Level Financial Catastrophe

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Earlier today, it was announced that Matt Zames had been named JPMorgan’s new Chief Investment Officer, to replace Ina Drew, the woman who supervised the trader responsible for the firm’s whale of a loss and was dismissed over the weekend. Previously, Zames served as the firm’s head of fixed income and while he may be happy to be seen by senior management as a guy capable of putting out a fire, based on his experience, is probably at least a little bit underwhelmed by the task. Read more »

  • 04 Apr 2012 at 4:33 PM

This Is A Thing That Happened

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All-Star executives Dick Fuld and Alan Schwartz break bread in Midtown today [Erik Schatzker via BI]

  • 21 Mar 2012 at 4:05 PM

Jimmy Cayne May Be About To Come Into Some Money!

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10-pound bag of Chronic Supernova, consider yourself bought. Read more »

  • 18 Aug 2011 at 12:02 PM

Jim Cramer Asks People To Remember His Legitimate Bear Stearns Calls

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“I got crucified because I said you can keep your money in Bear Stearns. I got crucified in this country!!! I learned my lesson, you can’t be as confident as you’d like. I never said you should buy Bear Stearns, I said you should keep your money there. In 36 hours Bear Stearns fell apart. It was fine to say it wasn’t going to fall apart and then it fell apart. My first call was that it was okay to keep your money there which turned out to be true.” Read more »