FDIC

  • 20 Sep 2012 at 4:42 PM

Sheila Bair Still Feels Bad That JPMorgan Was Forced To Take Cheap Capital To Help Out Citi

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Being in certain rooms at certain times seems to be a good predictor of selling a book. Bin Laden’s bedroom on the night of his death is an obvious one, and various days in the Oval Office have or may soon have their chroniclers, though the world still awaits the unabridged memoirs of the guy who cleaned out Jeff Gundlach’s office at TCW. But the Treasury Department conference room where regulators imposed TARP on eight big banks seems to have been especially fecund; by my count Hank Paulson has already published his account, somebody in the room seems to have contributed to this account, and now Sheila Bair has written a book that includes hers, which was excerpted in Fortune today.

This is weird because – well, one, because a bunch of guys (and Sheila Bair) in suits discussing the terms of a preferred stock purchase in a conference room is not necessarily the first place you’d look for thrilling literature, but also, two, because the accounts are all pretty similar. Here’s Bair’s take on the bankers’ reaction to the TARP terms:

I watched Vikram Pandit scribbling numbers on the back of an envelope. “This is cheap capital,” he announced. I wondered what kind of calculations he needed to make to figure that out. Treasury was asking for only a 5% dividend. For Citi, of course, that was cheap; no private investor was likely to invest in Pandit’s bank. Kovacevich complained, rightfully, that his bank didn’t need $25 billion in capital. I was astonished when Hank shot back that his regulator might have something to say about whether Wells’ capital was adequate if he didn’t take the money. Dimon, always the grownup in the room, said that he didn’t need the money but understood it was important for system stability. Blankfein and Mack echoed his sentiments.

Coincidentally, Dimon is always the grownup in these accounts, too; what is new here is really Bair’s take as the head of the FDIC:1 Read more »

  • 05 Jul 2012 at 10:40 AM
  • Banks

Banks Prove That They Are Not Too Big To Fail By Saying “We Can Fail” On A Piece Of Paper, Moving On

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One way you could spend this slow week is reading the “living wills” submitted by a bunch of banks telling regulators how to wind them up if they go under. Don’t, though: they’re about the most boring and least informative things imaginable and I am angry that I read them.* Here for instance is how JPMorgan would wind itself up if left to its own devices**:

(1) It would just file for bankruptcy and stiff its non-deposit creditors (at the holding company and then, if necessary, at the bank).

(2) If after stiffing its non-deposit creditors it didn’t have enough money to pay its depositors it would sell its highly attractive businesses in a competitive sale to willing buyers who would pay top dollar.

This seems wrong, no? And not just in the sense of “in my opinion that would be sort of difficult, what with people freaking out about JPMorgan going bankrupt and its highly attractive businesses having landing it in, um, bankruptcy.” It’s wrong in the sense that it’s the opposite of having a plan for dealing with banks being “too big to fail”: it’s premised on an assumption that the bank is not too big to fail. If JPMorgan runs into trouble that it can’t get out of without taxpayer support, it’ll just file for bankruptcy like anybody else. Depositors will be repaid (if they’re under FDIC limits); non-depositor creditors will be screwed just like they would be on a failure of Second Community Bank of Kenosha. Read more »

  • 04 Jan 2012 at 4:19 PM
  • Banks

But What Would We Do For Entertainment If Banks Were Boring?

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Here is a standard set of moves in talking about bank riskiness:
1. Banks take too many bad risks!
2. Regulators should only let them take good risks!
3. All better now!

There is, like, a problem there, because actually bankers tend to have compensation structures that are more directly tied to their success, and also larger, than those of bank regulators – which means that, if you had to guess who would be better at picking the good risks, you might pick the bankers over the regulators. You can try to address that problem, maybe by improving the incentives of the regulators to make them better at picking the good risks, or by improving the incentives of the bankers to make them better at picking the good risks, because after all your goal is actually not optimal regulation but optimal risk-picking.

There are other approaches available. Here is a cop-out option:

Banks must therefore be restricted to those activities, like making traditional loans and simple hedging operations, that a regulator of average education and intelligence can monitor. If the average examiner can’t understand it, it shouldn’t be allowed.

Read more »

  • 09 Dec 2011 at 2:35 PM

Sheila Bair Doesn’t Know What The Volcker Rule Prohibits

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Sheila Bair, former head of the FDIC and cartoon-klutz-villain of Too Big to Fail, comes in for the occasional gentle ribbing on Wall Street, and her column in Fortune today is well set up for another round of gentle ribbing, which I will get to in just a minute, so you might think that that headline was intended to make fun of her, but actually, no, she makes a solid point:

MF Global took proprietary positions in European sovereign debt through what Wall Street calls “repo to maturity” transactions. It technically sold the European bonds to other firms, agreeing to repurchase them at a premium when they matured in 2012. MF hoped to make money by pocketing the difference in the rate it paid its trading partners and the higher rate paid on the bonds themselves. … Under the 300-page Rube Goldberg contraption of a regulation recently proposed by federal agencies to implement the Volcker Rule, “repo” transactions like MF Global’s are not generally treated as verboten proprietary trades. Thus, even if MF Global had been a bank, it arguably could have used this exception to gamble away, putting the FDIC at risk.

Now, if I had to guess, I’d say the better side of the argument is that the MF sovereign trades would in fact be streng verboten under the Volcker Rule. (Except, of course, as she points out, that MF is not an FDIC insured bank and so is not covered by the Volcker Rule.) I read the rule’s coverage of “any long, short, synthetic or other position” in a security to include the Corzine repo-to-maturity, which is at least a “synthetic position” in the underlying debt, and since the position seems to have been more “prop” than “flow” it would probably be prohibited. But I had to search around in the proposal for some time to come to that conclusion – it’s not apparent even from the mammoth Davis Polk flowchart that has replaced the actual rule text for my day-to-day Volcker Rule pondering efforts. And the meaning of “synthetic” may not be the same to everyone. So I’ll spot her the claim that a bank could “arguably” use a repo-to-maturity structure to prop trade to its little heart’s content. [Update: A lawyer I trust points to the Volcker Rule's "repo exception" for trades arising out of repo agreements; he thinks that Bair is right that the MF Global trades would fall under the exception and not be covered by the rule. I suspect that the intent of the "repo exception" is to cover the people providing the repo funding (here MF's counterparties), not the people with economic exposure to the position, so I'll tentatively stick to my original claim, but in any case the murk is even murkier than I'd thought. By the way, if I'm wrong, then things are even worse than Sheila Bair thinks. Basically any prop trade is fine as long as you fund it via repo.] Read more »

  • 13 Sep 2011 at 12:55 PM
  • Banks

Soon You’ll Be Able To Go To The FDIC Website And See If Uncle Jamie Left You Anything In His Will

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The term “living will,” applied to liquidation plans for big banks, has always seemed like a bit of a euphemism. After all, it really means “instructions on how to divide up our stuff when we die.” So, y’know, more of a regular will:

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board voted unanimously today to release a joint final rule laying out what the largest and most complex financial firms must include in so-called living wills they’re required to file. The panel also approved contingency planning guidelines for insured banks. … Regulators are requiring financial firms to file plans that are developed under the context of the bankruptcy code, with each designed to give a blueprint for how a firm could be taken apart.

And, lest your estate planning was going to be along the lines of “I must keep in good health and not die,” the Feds are on to that scheme too. From the rule:

Several commenters were concerned that the Proposed Rule favored resolution over recovery and was biased in favor of separation of the insured depository institution from the parent organization rather than looking to maintain enterprise value. By issuing the Rule, the FDIC does not intend to substitute resolution planning for recovery planning. Both are very important and serve complementary purposes. The Rule, however, focuses on resolution planning.

It turns out, though, that this may be a bit of an exaggeration. Read more »

  • 11 Jul 2011 at 5:39 PM

Sheila Bair Not Intimidated By Threats of Financial Meltdown, Awkward Physical Contact

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Sheila Bair continues to be mad that she didn’t get to sit at the grown-ups’ table during the financial crisis, and she told Joe Nocera all about it in his much-talked-about “exit interview” this weekend. She-Bair is not afraid to bring the awkies regarding her relationship with Hank Paulson: “Except for a 10-second handshake, she never even spoke to Henry Paulson her first year or so in office.”

Wait, what? Sadly there are no more details about this 10-second handshake, but we imagine it got pretty creepy. Hank probably started crisp and confident, but by the five-second mark both hands were clammy and eventually Bair had to clear her throat noisily a couple of times and say “crushing my hand here Hank.”

Now, sure, the Bair didn’t like getting snubbed by Timmy and Hank just because her whole agency had to share two computers for most of her tenure. But she has no problem with elitism per se, and doesn’t think government money should be given to just any bunch of losers:
Read more »

  • 09 May 2011 at 3:07 PM

Who Wants To Be Chair(wo)man Of The FDIC?

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If you’re looking for a new gig and think it might be the right fit, put in an application today, as Sheila Bair will be stepping down July 8, after her term expires.

  • 18 Mar 2011 at 11:47 AM

The FDIC Wants $900 Million From Former WaMu Exes, Their Wives

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As you may have heard, the FDIC has sued three former Washington Mutual execs, including CEO Kerry Killinger, COO Stephen Rotella, and home loans president David Schneider, whose “extreme and historically unprecedented risks with WaMu’s held-for-investment home loans portfolio” resulted in the bank’s collapse (according to filing, the bank’s chief risk officer told Killinger WaMu’s “DNA” was missing “the risk chromosome,” a few weeks before it went into receivership, to which Killinger likely scoffed and called the guy a pussy). The regulator wants $900 million from the trio and they’re not the only ones Sheila Bair says better start cutting checks- Killinger and Rotella’s special lady friends (Linda and Esther) have been named in the suit as well. Read more »

  • 07 Feb 2011 at 5:40 PM

Bonus Watch ’11: FDIC Votes To Make Bonus Payouts Multi-Year Event

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Why do it in one year when you can do three? Read more »

  • 28 Apr 2010 at 1:00 PM

What the Hell is a Bank Doing With Mini-Japanese Sculptures?

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When a community bank gets seized by the FDIC, you expect its non-deposit assets to include some computers, office chairs, bank vaults, free lollipops, stress balls, stuff like that. But Bank of Lincolnwood, a Chicago-area community bank that was shut down last year, has some peculiar, and expensive, collectibles in its coffers.

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