cdos

  • 19 Jan 2012 at 6:40 PM

When The Junior Analyst And The VP Disagree About The Model, Who Is Likely To Be Right?*

By Matt Levine

Carrick Mollenkamp is a great reporter who currently owns one of my favorite niches: finding insider moles to bring to light behavior at big financial companies that is ambiguously squicky. Today he’s got one that’s close to my heart, and here it is: a junior analyst at Deutsche Bank disagreed about a technical modeling question with his VP.

Wait, what?

Well, here:

At a time when mortgage-backed securities were imploding and customers were fleeing the market, a junior analyst at Deutsche Bank AG protested when he was asked to alter the numbers in a spreadsheet to make a Deutsche security look less risky to ratings agencies, according to a person with knowledge of the matter.

The analyst, this person said, was asked by a mid-level Deutsche executive in late 2007 to make it appear that the investment would produce more cash than the bank actually expected at certain time points. …

[Ajit] Jain had studied at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi and joined Deutsche in June 2006, according to employment records kept by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority. He joined the New York office in September 2007, when the CDO Group was struggling to find investors.

Within a short time of his arrival, according to three people familiar with the matter, Jain raised questions about whether spreadsheets were being improperly altered. His complaints went to senior levels within Deutsche, including its legal and compliance departments, according to people familiar with the matter.

These spreadsheets were cash flow models for some of Deutsche’s CDO deals, which Deutsche gave to ratings agencies to rate those CDOs. They were complicated. How complicated? Here is a lovely detail: Continue reading »

  • 17 Jan 2012 at 11:58 AM

Europe Needs A Better Blender

By Matt Levine

I guess we should talk about Europe and credit ratings. Now France isn’t AAA and Italy isn’t A and Portugal isn’t investment grade and here is something that someone at S&P actually said:

Our role is to give timely information to investors and if you give them timely information, if you give it to them in modest increments, then we think that they can make their own judgments about how they are going to allocate their portfolios.

Really! That could be S&P’s motto, “timely information, but in modest increments. Also not really that timely.”

If you’re into this sort of thing, though, the action is not in France so much as it is in the European Financial Stability Facility. The EFSF is basically, France and Germany and the other eurozone countries issue a bunch of debt*, put it into a blender, pulse until smooth, and then issue it as “EFSF debt.” The EFSF gets the money and uses it to prop up Greece, buy Italian bonds, etc. Because all the things are also all the other things, people saw this and were like:

1. Hey, that’s a CDO!
2. CDOs suck boo etc.

Here’s what the EFSF had to say about those claims:
Continue reading »

  • 09 Jan 2012 at 2:23 PM

On The Bright Side, Does This Mean That Banks Did An Awesome Job Of Managing Risk?

By Matt Levine

A story that is told about banks is this: Bankers are paid to maximize short-term results and screw the risks. All they care about is this-period earnings. They dance until the music stops. (Then they sue.) In this story, banker pay drives risk and volatility and other terrible things.

A counter-narrative that sometimes floats around is this: there’s no particular evidence that bankers are paid in line with short-term risks. The jury is sort of out on this one because the data isn’t really there one way or the other; see this post from the Epicurean Dealmaker for why you shouldn’t take seriously claims that bank executive comp (who cares about executives?) doesn’t closely track stock prices (who cares about stock prices?). He tentatively endorses a form of the traditional view:

My industry’s pay practices and culture were built over decades when the vast majority of business investment banks conducted was agency business. Business like M&A, where you earn a fee for helping a client buy or sell a company, or security underwriting, where you earn a fee for placing client securities with outside investors, or securities market making, where you earn a spread for standing between buy- and sell-side investors as a middleman and temporary warehouser. None of these businesses entailed any material amount of persistent or hidden financial risk to investment banks …

The problem arose when investment banks (and their bastard cousins and often ultimate owners, commercial or universal banks) began conducting business as principals, either explicitly and in full knowledge, or—most dangerously—in total ignorance. Mouthwateringly profitable leveraged lending, structured products, complex derivatives, and proprietary investing of all kinds meant that investment banks no longer conducted business as short-term conduits of temporary risk, but began accumulating long-term financial risks on or off their balance sheet, often without their own knowledge. But when this happens, the old view that Joe in Structured Products should get a massive bonus in February because he brought in $100 million of fee revenue to the firm this year cannot cope with the fact that Joe’s fabulous trades expose the firm to $1 billion in potential losses over the next five years.

Lest you reply “but you get paid in stock so ooh long-term incentives ooh,” ED has an answer to that that is I think irrefutable. And he ends up calling for an empirical study of line-trader-and-banker pay that determines how much risk-taking is and is not incentivized by comp.

Maybe we’ll do that when we get an intern. Until then, a data point you might look at is this paper that Oliver Faltin-Traeger of Blackrock and Christopher Mayer of Columbia Business School presented this weekend at a fancy soirée in Chicago. It is not at all about banker comp. It is about the fact that CDOs were shit, pure shit, basically. I know, you knew that already, but really: Continue reading »

  • 28 Nov 2011 at 3:11 PM

Surely The SEC Is Sick Of Going To Court By Now?

By Matt Levine

A lot of legal issues look like substantive things but are actually things about what institutions can and want to do. Obviously more people want to think about questions like “should the U.S. have universal health insurance?” than about questions like “does the Anti-Injunction Act bar lower federal courts from reviewing the individual mandate until taxes are collected in 2014?,” but judges tend to get into the latter question. That’s why they’re judges. That difference can make judicial decisions sort of hard to interpret.

Today everyone’s favorite federal judge, Jed Rakoff, surprised few but pleased many by beating the ever-loving crap out of the SEC’s settlement with Citigroup, in which Citi had agreed to pay the SEC $285 million in exchange for the SEC not asking too many questions about its synthetic CDO deals that were maybe not so hot. Here’s the gist of it:

Applying these standards to the case in hand, the Court concludes, regretfully, that the proposed Consent Judgment is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest. Most fundamentally, this is because it does not provide the Court with a sufficient evidentiary basis to know whether the requested relief is justified under any of these standards. Purely private parties can settle a case without ever agreeing on the facts, for all that is required is that a plaintiff dismiss his complaint. But when a public agency asks a court to become its partner in enforcement by imposing wide-ranging injunctive remedies on a defendant, enforced by the formidable judicial power of contempt, the court, and the public, need some knowledge of what the underlying facts are: for otherwise, the court becomes a mere handmaiden to a settlement privately negotiated on the basis of unknown facts, while the public is deprived of ever knowing the truth in a matter of obvious public importance.

Here, the S.E.C.’s long-standing policy – hallowed by history, but not by reason – of allowing defendants to enter into Consent Judgments without admitting or denying the underlying allegations, deprives the Court of even the most minimal assurance that the substantial injunctive relieve it is being asked to impose has any basis in fact.

Right on! But also maybe just a little disingenuous. Judge Rakoff was not being asked for “substantial injunctive relief,” not really. It looks like that on the surface, in the sense that (1) the SEC and Citi worked out a deal where Citi gives the SEC money, promises not to violate the securities laws again, and agrees to do some remedial stuff like telling its salespeople to stop peddling synthetic CDOs structured by the protection buyer without telling anyone because somehow that is still a problem; and in the sense that (2) the SEC was asking Judge Rakoff to enshrine that agreement in an injunction. And then, if Citi didn’t keep its agreement – by not doing the remedial things, say, or by violating the securities laws again – the SEC could go back to court and say “hey, Citi violated the injunction” and Judge Rakoff could hold Citi in contempt and fuck. it. up. Continue reading »

  • 27 Oct 2011 at 6:28 PM

Federal Judge Wants To Know Why SEC Is Only Charging Citi 1/5th As Much As It Charged Goldman For Ripping Off CDO Investors

By Matt Levine

If the SEC really wanted to reduce the chances of embarrassing itself, besides better Internet monitoring software it really ought to look into filing securities lawsuits outside of New York. Every bank is incorporated in Delaware and does all of its activities everywhere – surely they could find a CDO investor in California. But the SEC keeps suing in New York, they keep drawing Judge Rakoff in the suspiciously random assignment system, and he always goes and does this:

A federal judge has raised questions about why he should approve the government’s $285 million civil settlement with Citigroup, suggesting that he is skeptical of the pact. … He posed nine questions to the parties, including how a fraud of this nature and magnitude could be the result simply of negligence. The judge also asked why the court should approve a settlement in a case in which the S.E.C. alleged a serious fraud but the defendant neither admits nor denies wrongdoing.

They’re good questions, including “Why … is the penalty in this case less than one-fifth* of the $535 million penalty assessed in SEC v. Goldman Sachs … ?” And you do get the sense that most other judges wouldn’t have bothered with them and would skip straight to “wow, that’s a lot of money, willing buyer willing seller, I’ll approve the settlement.”
Continue reading »

  • 19 Oct 2011 at 2:16 PM
  • Banks

So Maybe Citi Created A Mortgage-Backed Security Filled With Loans They Knew Were Going To Fail So That They Could Sell It To A Client Who Wasn’t Aware That They Sabotaged It By Intentionally Picking The Misleadingly Rated Loans Most Likely To Be Defaulted Upon, So What?

By Matt Levine

Citi today paid out some of its DVA gains to settle SEC charges that it sold investors a CDO-squared that facilitated its own naked CDS purchases on the underlying CDOs, while misleading investors into thinking that an independent collateral manager selected the underlying portfolio. If my grandmother reads Dealbreaker she’s now stopped.

Anyway. I’m proud of my time at Goldman, which I thought was a great place filled with smart and ethical people (really) and which also was a market leader in many areas, including paying fines for fraudulent CDO structuring fraud. In that line of business we were first both in time and in market share, settling Abacus for $550mm in July; JPMorgan’s $153.6mm Magnetar settlement came a week later and Citi didn’t get around to their $285mm entry (and Credit Suisse’s $2.5mm addition) until today.

Now, maybe it’s just my Goldman bias talking but I never really got the outrage at these things, which always seemed to come from importing an already incorrect understanding of how nonfinancial transactions work into a market-making, two-sided, financial markets context. But reading the Citi CDO documents, which are fascinating, I think makes it a little more comprehensible.

There are five points to which your free-floating rage could maybe attach:
Continue reading »

  • 21 Jun 2011 at 3:46 PM

JPMorgan Settles CDO Probe, Pays Back Lutherans

By Bess Levin

$153.6 million for those pregnancy emails. Continue reading »