UBS investment bankers yesterday learned that their bonus pool would be down by 60%, and that anyone inclined to grumble to division head Carsten Kengeter should be aware that (1) he would have none of it and (2) he himself was taking a bonus of zero, so see point (1). Rank-and-file bankers were perhaps a mite peeved, but they learned today that they have nothing to complain about compared to their formerly better-compensated elders, for whom “down 60%” or “zero bonus” would be an absolute joy when the reality is more like this: Continue reading »
DVA
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Banks
Bonus Watch ’12: UBS Investment Bankers Thought Zero Was The Minimum Bonus? They Thought Wrong
By Matt Levine
Financial institutions normally prefer not to have everyone think they’re a shitty credit, because that can lead to doom, or MF Doom, or glitchy intimations of doom that quickly get sorted. But it can also sometimes lead to profit.
Sometimes that profit is fake, or fake-ish. When banks book a mark-to-market profit on their own credit spreads widening, that looks … a little fake. We don’t particularly object here, since it reflects a sort of economic reality, but it is probably temporary – your liabilities roll forward and eventually either you pay them off at par, in which case your DVA gains fritter down to zero through PnL, or you don’t, in which case the permanency of your accounting gains are not of much interest to most people.
In any case, because it looks fake, or fake-ish, banks actually don’t much abuse the privilege. Thus most of the DVA gains that banks booked last quarter were on derivatives, where US GAAP requires you to mark DVA to market, or on derivatives-looking things like structured notes where it seems more plausible than not. You don’t see a lot of banks taking a lot of DVA gains on vanilla debt.
So when you have $295bn of public debt (with, I don’t know, maybe a 2 year weighted average duration, whatever) and your CDS blows out by 300bps in a quarter, you don’t book $18 billion of gains. You book, um, $4.5 billion. You never get to taste most of that delicious credit widening.
Now, if only there were a way for a bank to (1) get a gain on its vanilla public debt and (2) make it permanent. Like, say, this, from Bank of America’s 10-Q filed today:
Continue reading »
If you are in the business of selling derivatives you have to value them from time to time, because counterparties want to know what their thing is worth, and regulators want to know how deep in the hole you are. This is not always as easy as valuing a stock by just going out and getting a quote. But the principles can be stated sort of simply: you just take an integral of your net discounted cash flows over every possible future state of the world, appropriately probability weighted.*
Easy to say, but hard to do, because you have only so much direct access to possible future states of the world. Fortunately there are rules of thumb for this, of greater or lesser reliability, which exclude the unlikely and immaterial states of the world (your BAC warrants are worth zero if the world ends this Friday, but that’s unlikely; you’re perhaps equally likely to eat a bacon bowl or a salad for lunch tomorrow, but your choice will have only an immaterial effect on the value of your BAC warrants). All of these methods, however, provide only market-sanctioned guesses about the fair value of your derivatives; if the future world moves in ways not contemplated by the moving parts of your model your calculations are just wrong.
This is, I’ve always thought, a nice way to think of the world, and certainly more conceptually satisfying than “it’s worth what people will pay for it” or “it’s worth what the formula says.” And once you get into thinking of things this way, you can have fun thinking of all the possible things that (1) are not trivially unlikely and (2) would have a not trivial effect on your stuff.
Like, it turns out, your own demise. Continue reading »
- Use the Bloomberg command
NH BLG_DEALBREAKER <GO>
to access Dealbreaker
