Adding up the Bailout

From CNN Money:

I encourage you to follow the link, since there’s a nice interactive chart. According to CNN’s calculations, we’ve spent $2.6 trillion of the $10.5 trillion we’ve allocated to the bailout. This now dwarfs one of my earlier posts on the cumulative cost of the Iraq War.

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“The Open Door Bailout”

I can’t believe this Op-Ed from Thomas Friedman slipped by me…

Leave it to a brainy Indian to come up with the cheapest and surest way to stimulate our economy: immigration.

“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

The guys from Marginal Revolution have actually been on this idea since October:

We should encourage the immigration of prime-age individuals. Beginning in 2007, net immigration fell to half of its level over the previous five years. Increasing immigration would increase the demand for housing and raise home prices. And note that the benefit would be immediate. Home prices — and the value of subprime obligations — would rise in anticipation of a higher population base. The U.S. particularly needs highly skilled workers. These workers not only would purchase homes, but would generate higher living standards for all Americans.

There are a couple of things we know are certain:

1. We have too many houses (excess supply)
2. In order for prices to stop falling, we need to either bull-doze a couple hundred-thousand homes, or somehow boost demand.

If we approached immigration in a Utopian manner (only allowing people who can buy a house), we could (in effect) import demand growth, and decouple from the global recession.

Brilliant!

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Paulson’s Plan For 2009

Of course I’m referring to John Paulson (since Hank no longer matters), the guy who turned $500 million into $3.5 billion in a single year (2007) by shorting sub-prime mortgage backed securities through buying credit default swaps.

The New York Times received a copy of his year end letter, which gives his guidance for 2009…the NYT website won’t allow me to embed the letter, so here’s the link if you’re curious.

Since the report is 28 pages long, here’s some abridged analysis via Paul Kedrosky:

Looking forward to 2009, Paulson remains highly bearish. Here is his general strategy, he says, for the first half:

• Slight short exposure to equity markets
• Remain short financials
• Focus on long distressed opportunity
  • Mortgages
  • Bankrupt debt
  • Distressed
  • Capital restructurings
• Focus on strategic merger deals
• Maintain short focus on financials, with the belief that we only perhaps half-way thru

To remain short financials, he must believe on some level that a nationalization is in the cards to wipe out the equity of troubled banks. That’s not to say that nationalization is the only shoe left to drop, since rising unemployment is likely to go hand in hand with continued mortgage defaults, along with the potential for more trouble in commercial real-estate.

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Are We Turning Japanese?

From the Financial Times:

The point of the FT article was to describe how it is extremely difficult for the private sector to deleverage, or reduce debt levels, during periods of falling prices…As the charts show, the US is witnessing debt balloon to levels not seen since the 1950’s (as a percentage of GDP), while asset prices have fallen precipitously.

As the author describes;

It has long been argued that the US could not suffer like Japan. This is wrong. It is true the US has three advantages over Japan: the destruction of wealth in the collapse of the Japanese bubble was three times gross domestic product, while US losses will surely be far smaller; US non-financial companies do not appear grossly overindebted; and, despite efforts by opponents of marking assets to market, recognition of losses has come far sooner.

Basically, our situation is more similar to that of Japan circa 1990-2005 than we had anticipated – not to mention some  economic characteristics which are considerably less desirable (a global recession, leaving little room for other countries to pick up the slack in our budget/trading deficit by buying our debt and consuming our exports).

Surprisingly, part of the reason the author included all of this background was to advocate for a bigger stimulus package, not to be depressing.

Unfortunately, there is no discernible solution to the problems brought up in this article, other than the old “we’ll have to tough this one out” analysis:

The bigger point, however, is not that the package needs to be larger, although it does. It is that escaping from huge and prolonged deficits will be very hard. As long as the private sector seeks to reduce its debt and the current account is in structural deficit, the US must run big fiscal deficits if it is to sustain full employment.

There will be a Part II to this author’s column in next week’s FT, if at all interested.

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“Why Banks Still Won’t Lend”

Despite the flood of cash from the government, Banks are still hoarding cash…What could explain this phenomenon?

From BusinessWeek:

They (Banks Chiefs) argue that the government funds are designed to shore up capital and support lending, but that they have no obligation to make new loans. “It’s not a one-to-one relationship,” says BofA CEO Kenneth D. Lewis. “We don’t write $15 billion in loans because we got $15 billion from the government.”

So there’s a disagreement on what the TARP money should be used for…But some may ask why banks won’t make new loans? The answer, as always, is dependent on money:

Right now there’s little financial incentive to make fresh loans. In the current unease, new corporate loans are immediately marked down to between 60¢ and 80¢ on the dollar, forcing banks to take a hit on the debt. It’s more lucrative, then, for them to buy old loans that are discounted already.

Just when you think all of the side effects of repealing Glass-Steagall were out of the system. Now banks won’t even make new loans; since there are so many discounted securitized mortgages on the market, they’re using the TARP money to buy outstanding mortgages…

Since the TARP was so Ad hoc by nature,  The government didn’t  force them to do otherwise, so you can’t blame banks for cutting the best deals.

The most important point regards their capital requirements:

Under federal rules, banks are required to maintain a certain level of capital based on their assets. When they incur losses, they either have to raise more capital or sell assets to keep those ratios in check.

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Value at Risk: The Great Unravelling.

“Dating back to work on the random walk hypothesis by French economist Louis Bachelier (1870-1946), the efficient market hypothesis asserts that stock market prices are the best available estimates of the real value of shares since the market has taken account of all available information on an individual stock.”

– Economy Professor

Now from New York Times Magazine, which had an interesting 10 page spread about Risk valuation last Saturday:

VaR is often measured daily and rarely extends beyond a few weeks, and because it is a very short-term measure, it assumes that tomorrow will be more or less like today. Even what’s called “historical VaR” — a variation of standard VaR that measures potential portfolio risk a year or two out, only uses the previous few years as its benchmark. As the risk consultant Marc Groz puts it, “The years 2005-2006,” which were the culmination of the housing bubble, “aren’t a very good universe for predicting what happened in 2007-2008.”

How are these two phenomena related? The risk models our world of finance has been relying upon for several years are grounded in the Efficient Market Hypothesis; VaR models – or models which price risk – would not function without the corollary of the underlying asset being priced properly. We took comfort in this convenient theory, that everything is priced appropriately, all the time.

The counter to this argument is not another theory, but a series of real life outliers. If markets are efficient, How does George Soros continually compound his fortune by trading according to his boom/bust empiricism (like shorting the British Pound)? Warren Buffet also acknowledges fault with this theory: “I would be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were always efficient.”

Every theory has shortcomings, and the admitted shortcoming of the Efficient Market Hypothesis is one of “black swans”, or in economic terms, exogenous shocks. These are events which cannot be predicted, ones which are often described as lying outside a 99% confidence interval, and ones which continually disprove the efficiency of market pricing – especially during times of panic.

The second glaring shortcoming is one which lies about the applications of the EMH, or one of our perception. One assumption of the hypothesis, like an assumption in micro-economic theory, is that the participants are completely rational (much like human calculators). This assumption has proven to hold under times of tranquility – like the times LTCM succeeded in making money – but during times of deception and opacity, many of us are hopelessly irrational.

To quote Michael Lewis’s most recent book, Panic!, on the pricing of Bear Stearns:

“If the market got the value of Bear Stearns so wrong, how can it possibly believe it knows even the approximate value of any Wall Street firm?” (P. 342)

The pillar of the EMH that comes tumbling down in times like today is “known information”…On the surface, who is to say that Bear’s balance sheet was all that bad? I’d like to believe we could extrapolate everything from the footnotes (never mind having everyone read them), but the population of people who called for the failure of Bear Stearns in 2006 lie far outside the depths of the “normal distribution.” Furthermore, here’s a real life example: how could the Nasdaq be accurately priced at 1,400 in 1997; at 5,000 in 2000; and back at 1,400 in 2002?

All of this is to argue that the notion of efficient markets, which we have taken shelter in for much of our modern financial history, stands paralyzed in times of uncertainty; this would provide insight into why panic ensues at the very signal that we are “in the dark” concerning anything (this could also be a reflection of our poor sentiment; the constant belief that we will be disappointed by Wall Street is becoming a part of our psychology). This would also provide an explanation for our dependence on models as a “crutch”, to grant us what has turned out to be a false sense of security by quantifying risk with numerical values.

The fallout of the sub-prime mortgage crisis has uncovered many of the issues with deriving models after this hypothesis – the only problem is, we haven’t come up with anything better. VaR were used heavily in the late 1990’s by none other than LTCM, but as the NYT article points out:

Firms viewed it as a human failure rather than a failure of risk modeling. The collapse only amplified the feeling on Wall Street that firms needed to be able to understand their risks for the entire firm. Only VaR could do that. (Page 7)

We then reverted back to their use.

I will end with a phrase which has time and again been a sure way to see oneself proven wrong – Maybe this time it’s different.

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Krugman: “$850 will most certainly not be enough”

Paul Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize in economics this year, speaks about the state of our economy at the National Press Club.

Here’s the best part of his hour long speech:

Start around the 4 minute mark, and follow through until the end – this is the part of his speech where he breaks away from his notes and speaks about the practicality of a bailout package.

Some fun facts from the speech:

• The Multiplier Effect of government spending is $1.50 for every dollar of fiscal stimulus; if we had a bailout package of $850 billion, the effect on the real economy would be $1.275 trillion.
• GDP needs to grow by 2% in order to eliminate 1% of unemployment; the real effect of the stimulus package would be around 9% of our GDP (1.275/14), eliminating 4.5% unemployment…Krugman estimates that unemployment will be around 9-10% by year end. Therefore, on the surface, this stimulus would set the U.S. off into a world of full employment, but we must consider how quickly we can spend the money (which believe it or not, is the hard part).
• Finally, we’ve  concluded that infrastructure would be one of the best targets of fiscal spending (besides technology). However, estimates show that there are only $150 billion worth of “shovel ready” jobs, or projects which can be started in 6 months (at the earliest). This means we will have to get creative in our methods of spending – green collar jobs, fix bridges, retrofit buildings, upgrade our electrical grid from AC to DC (which would allow our electrical lines to go under water, allowing us to build wind farms in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean).

Hat-tip to Paul for the video.

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“Who’s To Blame? Who Cares.”

Some people have been making a big fuss about who exactly caused this deregulatory mess (Bush, Greenspan), and this topic has been a particularly prevalent theme over at The Big Picture:

Today’s New York Times has a damning article linking Senator Chuck Schumer to many of the radical deregulatory policies that underlie much of the current crisis.

I have assessed a lot of blame for the crisis on several people — Greenspan at the top of the list, followed by several others, including President Bush. Phil Gramm was a prime sponsor of all manners of ruinous legislation — which, I hasten to add, was signed into law by one President Clinton (he sure isn’t blameless in the mess).

I guess it’s fun to point fingers and try to single out a scapegoat, but we can’t go much deeper than recognizing our mistakes and trying to make sure they don’t happen again. In The Great Depression, for example, we learned that using the gold standard likely exacerbated a series of demand shocks which could have been averted if we had targeted the money supply using interest rates, like we do today (hence, learning from our mistakes).

That said, where are we in the process of identifying what is wrong with our current system, and what will it mean for the future? If we determine that the problem is 30-1 leverage ratios and easy access to money, we are going to accommodate their absence with a much slower rate of growth in our next expansion.

All of that said, I’d like to point fingers for a moment. Anyone think about blaming the SEC? The news of Bernard Madoff’s ponzi-scheme is especially sobering to the fact that no one was/is watching these guys.

From Bloomberg:

Dec. 14 (Bloomberg) — Bernard Madoff’s investment advisory business, alleged to be a Ponzi scheme that cost investors $50 billion, was never inspected by U.S. regulators after he subjected it to oversight two years ago, people familiar with the case said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission hasn’t examined Madoff’s books since he registered the unit with the agency in September 2006, two people said, declining to be identified because the reviews aren’t public. The SEC tries to inspect advisers at least every five years and to scrutinize newly registered firms in their first year, former agency officials and securities lawyers said.

Wait…this is the best part:

“Given what the SEC claims is the magnitude of the fraud, this is something you would hope an inspection would have uncovered,”

Hmm. Good point. Did they even check this Madoff guy out? As soon as the fraud was exposed, a series of reports came out (almost instantaneously) which identified how this was a blatant ponzi-scheme – here, here, here, and here. So how did the SEC not figure this out? Is our public sector really that far behind the curve, as not to identify a $50 billion scam?

Either way, I think there is no chance that the current SEC chairman, Christopher Cox, makes it into the Obama administration. None. Please read his Op-Ed in the WSJ to see how Bob Rubin-esque his analysis of this situation is. As many have pointed out, the SEC has utterly failed to carry out their explicit responsibility in regulating rating agencies, the same agencies which deemed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac AAA caliber debt, just before they had to be nationalized. The SEC was also responsible for relinquishing the mandated debt-to-net capital ratio (read: leverage) from 12:1 to 40:1, by the way.

As much as I’m not a fan of Jim Cramer’s antics, he could do a better job than Cox – what more could he do worse? He’s talked about reinstating the uptick rule, banning these leveraged ETF’s (which would undoubtedly lower volatility), changing mark-to-market accounting principles for illiquid assets (think of any 3 letter acronym – CDO. CDS. MBS.) – All of which would have a positive influence on the markets, and ultimately our economy.

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“Big Bailouts, Bigger Bucks”

From TheBigPicture:

If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars. People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Jim Bianco of Bianco Research crunched the inflation adjusted numbers. The bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

That is $686 billion less than the cost of the credit crisis thus far.

The only single American event in history that even comes close to matching the cost of the credit crisis is World War II: Original Cost: $288 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $3.6 trillion

The always reliable Barry Ritholz…I wish he were wrong sometimes. So the bailout, as a percentage of our GDP is now (4.6165/14.000) or 32.975% of our pre-recession GDP; I’m assuming it hasn’t been reduced by the credit crisis, falling house prices, and wealth evaporation.

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Scrap the Old Plan; Take Action

Halt trading – give these computer drone traders a vacation, and let them come back to reality. Let congress vote on the future of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler; whatever the result may be, let it settle without any trading.

If they choose to let the Big 3 file bankruptcy, they should facilitate it such that the American Autos have temporary access to a credit line. This would allow them to carry on business as usual without closing their doors; as they try to keep creditors away, they can straighten out their business model and break the unions, all while preventing a Chapter 7 bankruptcy – which would lead to liquidation and 100,000 jobs lost.

From here – during the halted trading – the SEC should reinstate the uptick rule, which should temper the volatility going forward (as we saw, banning short selling on Financials is NOT the answer…as soon as it is lifted? Bombs away!)

There should be nothing hindering any of the above actions, except the bureaucratic nature of our government, which we no longer have time for at this juncture.

While we’re at it, we might as well consider an interest rate cut, as it should at least have a placebo effect on the markets…the reason I say that is the effective Federal Funds interest rate has been well below the targeted 1% for quite some time:

As for Barack Obama, he should take preliminary action in appointing some cabinet members; get an all-star team of financial geniuses for a special committee – Buffett, Summers, Volker, Soros, Roubini – some of the smartest people in the world live in this country, and their talent should be utilized.

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