Photo essay

Scenes from the housing meltdown - a gallery by Anthony Suau

Cleveland, Ohio, March 25, 2008 -- Detective Robert Kole of the Cuyahoga County Sheriff's Department cautiously approaches an abandoned house. He must search it, room by room, at gunpoint to ensure that the house is clear of weapons and squatters or inhabitants. It can be a dangerous and, at times, depressing, job. In this home, the decomposing body of a dog, tied to a leash and left to starve to death, was discovered in the kitchen.

The A. I. G. Sinkhole

Joe Nocera of the Times on AIG - the company which got a further $30 billion yesterday in addition to the $150 billion already committed by the United States taxpayer so far.

Here’s what is most infuriating: Here we are now, fully aware of how these scams worked. Yet for all practical purposes, the government has to keep them going. Indeed, that may be the single most important reason it can’t let A.I.G. fail. If the company defaulted, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of credit-default swaps would “blow up,” and all those European banks whose toxic assets are supposedly insured by A.I.G. would suddenly be sitting on immense losses. Their already shaky capital structures would be destroyed. A.I.G. helped create the illusion of regulatory capital with its swaps, and now the government has to actually back up those contracts with taxpayer money to keep the banks from collapsing. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful. I asked Mr. Arvanitis, the former A.I.G. executive, if the company viewed what it had done during the bubble as a form of gaming the system. “Oh no,” he said, “they never thought of it as abuse. They thought of themselves as satisfying their customers.”

That’s either a remarkable example of the power of rationalization, or they were lying to themselves, figuring that when the house of cards finally fell, somebody else would have to clean it up.

That would be us, the taxpayers.

Clueless and scheming

Thomas Friedman commenting on the people who were responsible for the mortgage market meltdown and the resulting credit freeze.

So many people were in on it: People who had no business buying a home, with nothing down and nothing to pay for two years; people who had no business pushing such mortgages, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business bundling those loans into securities and selling them to third parties, as if they were AAA bonds, but made fortunes doing so; people who had no business rating those loans as AAA, but made a fortunes doing so; and people who had no business buying those bonds and putting them on their balance sheets so they could earn a little better yield, but made fortunes doing so.

The great monthly flip flopping ritual

Former Goldman Sachs CEO and current Treasury Secretary Henry 'FlipFlop' Paulson is caught in a curious case of shape shifting. We are now able to soundly predict with a large degree of confidence the frequency with which the Treasury Secretary performs the flips and flops on the bailout package. Yes, the predictable recurrence pattern on plans to use bailout funds now happens monthly. See below.

In September: The $700,000,000,000.00 bailout bill was called TARP (or Troubled Assets Relief Program). It was sold to lawmakers as a mechanism to buy off troubled and toxic securitized assets off banks and lending institutions and thus ease the credit crisis sparked by the mortgage meltdown.

In October: Buying troubled assets was cast by the wayside and the Treasury decided to flip and put out a plan to buy equity stakes in American banks of their choice. Hank's alma mater Goldman Sachs saw a cash injection of $10 billion. Morgan Stanley got another $10 billion. Is it a matter of coincidence that both of them announced bonus pools of 7 billion dollars. No, I would not dare suggest that they used taxpayer money to pay their bonuses.

In November: Treasury flopped and now announces that they have decided that buying up equity stakes in banks are not working (or maybe worked just well enough for those banks to declare bonuses). The wizards yesterday announced that they are planning on using the remaining bailout funds to help companies that issue credit cards, make student loans and finance car purchases.

In December: Plans to unveil disbursement of as yet unknown cash injections to as yet unknown set of companies as Christmas gifts. Consumer retail stores, bodegas and kiosks might need to behave properly in line as they queue up to get a part of the largesse.

Curiously missing from the whole bailout equation was help for troubled and distressed homeowners.

United States Senator from the state of NJ Robert Menendez summed it up best:

In the month of August, over 9,800 homes entered foreclosure every day, if this statistic was that there were over 9,800 Wall Street executives that lost their jobs every day in August, we would have ended this a long time ago.

Sad but true...

Greenspan scam

Looks like the guy who gave us terms like 'irrational exuberance' is finally conceding. Yes, in addition to contributing towards the annals of linguistic gymnastics, he also managed to screw up the markets as a result of his policies while lording over as the Fed Chairman. Greenspan has an interesting term for these times - credit tsunami.

In a statement yesterday that reveals the absurdly obvious, he also said: "Investors, chastened, will be exceptionally cautious".

It is revealing to see what this seer had to say about markets and risk in the go-go days of 2004: “Not only have individual financial institutions become less vulnerable to shocks from underlying risk factors, but also the financial system as a whole has become more resilient.”

Tip of the iceberg slowly thaws...

Finally, signs that something might be happening in the secretive, tony world of executive compensation...

American International Group Inc. agreed Wednesday to freeze some $19 million in payments to its former chief executive, Martin Sullivan, while New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo reviews executive compensation and other expenditures aid out as the company neared collapse earlier this year.

About time... Of course, one can't be too sure if Cuomo is trying another Spitzer...

Details of an orgy

Maureen Dowd on why heads must roll in the orgy of executive excesses that is being played out even as the mortage meltdown unfolds...

Just when we thought executives of A.I.G., the insurance giant bailed out by taxpayers for $123 billion, had been shamed into stopping their post-bailout Marie Antoinette spa treatments, luxury sports suites, Vegas and California posh resort retreats, we were dumbfounded to learn that some A.I.G. execs were cavorting at a lavish shooting party at a British country manor. London’s News of the World sent undercover reporters to hunt down the feckless financiers on their $86,000 partridge hunt as they tromped through the countryside in tweed knickers, and then later as they “slurped fine wine” and feasted on pigeon breast and halibut.
The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor — not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset — and spent $17,500 for food and rooms. The private jet to get there cost another $17,500, and the limos added up to $8,000 more. In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, “The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine.”

On that note

Adapted from here: "If you had a stack of $1000 bills in your hand only four inches high you would be a millionaire. 700 billion dollars would be a stack of $1000-dollar bills 44 miles high"

On why Bear Stearns should have failed this time

For all the talk about 'government is the problem' and 'too much regulation stifles the free market', the events that unfolded over the weekend saw the government actually financing the purchase of a troubled investment bank (Bear Sterns) through a conduit (JP Morgan Chase) leaving one to believe ardently in the fact that, more, if not an excessive oversight of the financial markets would be the medicine for the boom-bust cycle that we seem to be living through (with a cyclic frequency approaching the 10 year mark - the last one I remember was the dot com bust).

The government yesterday evening, decided to underwrite the take-over of a troubled investment bank on Wall Street in the hopes that rescuing this one might stave off further collapse of the financial system. While, it is well intentioned, this has left me pondering on these open unanswered questions:

- In bailing out some of the key stakeholders of the financial system, isn’t the government also bailing out some of the same people who led us into this mess (people who lived and got their bonuses through promising people easy homes with no money down, interest only payments and adjustable rate mortgages)?

- By bailing out banks and institutional players in the industry, is the government also helping to prop up what might be a house of cards built upon the mortgage bubble? Shouldn’t the government just sit and wait this one out and let the structural readjustment process bring the hype to what the markets can nominally sustain? Isn’t the government just putting off for another day what might have happened today (a normal structural adjustment to prevailing levels)?

- Aren’t we, in effect, playing dice with 'free-market / market-knows-best’ principles that was embraced in better times but thrown to the winds at the first sign of trouble?

As this and other questions swirl in my mind, it is worth reading excerpts from the op-ed column by Paul Krugman in today’s Times

Between 2002 and 2007, false beliefs in the private sector — the belief that home prices only go up, that financial innovation had made risk go away, that a triple-A rating really meant that an investment was safe — led to an epidemic of bad lending. Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs.

The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses. A large chunk of these losses will fall on financial institutions: commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and so on.

Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”

Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.

Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.

At the time of writing this, the markets and futures are still falling globally, the Federal Reserve further cut the overnight lending rate and the New York Stock Exchange just opened with a 150 point drop in the DOW.

Journey of the U.S. dollar

A fascinating essay over at the Atlantic Online on subsidizing American life by dollars from China while simultaneously holding down living conditions in China so that the vicious cycle continues... A must read.

The following poignant excerpt from the essay traces the journey of the U.S. dollar from a customer’s hand in America to a factory in China and back again to bond auctions here.

Let’s say you buy an Oral-B electric toothbrush for $30 at a CVS in the United States. I choose this example because I’ve seen a factory in China that probably made the toothbrush. Most of that $30 stays in America, with CVS, the distributors, and Oral-B itself. Eventually $3 or so—an average percentage for small consumer goods—makes its way back to southern China.

When the factory originally placed its bid for Oral-B’s business, it stated the price in dollars: X million toothbrushes for Y dollars each. But the Chinese manufacturer can’t use the dollars directly. It needs RMB—to pay the workers their 1,200-RMB ($160) monthly salary, to buy supplies from other factories in China, to pay its taxes. So it takes the dollars to the local commercial bank—let’s say the Shenzhen Development Bank. After showing receipts or waybills to prove that it earned the dollars in genuine trade, not as speculative inflow, the factory trades them for RMB.

This is where the first controls kick in. In other major countries, the counterparts to the Shenzhen Development Bank can decide for themselves what to do with the dollars they take in. Trade them for euros or yen on the foreign-exchange market? Invest them directly in America? Issue dollar loans? Whatever they think will bring the highest return. But under China’s “surrender requirements,” Chinese banks can’t do those things. They must treat the dollars, in effect, as contraband, and turn most or all of them (instructions vary from time to time) over to China’s equivalent of the Federal Reserve Bank, the People’s Bank of China, for RMB at whatever is the official rate of exchange.

With thousands of transactions per day, the dollars pile up like crazy at the PBOC. More precisely, by more than a billion dollars per day. They pile up even faster than the trade surplus with America would indicate, because customers in many other countries settle their accounts in dollars, too.

The PBOC must do something with that money, and current Chinese doctrine allows it only one option: to give the dollars to another arm of the central government, the State Administration for Foreign Exchange. It is then SAFE’s job to figure out where to park the dollars for the best return: so much in U.S. stocks, so much shifted to euros, and the great majority left in the boring safety of U.S. Treasury notes.

And thus our dollar comes back home. Spent at CVS, passed to Oral-B, paid to the factory in southern China, traded for RMB at the Shenzhen bank, “surrendered” to the PBOC, passed to SAFE for investment, and then bid at auction for Treasury notes, it is ready to be reinjected into the U.S. money supply and spent again—ideally on Chinese-made goods.

At no point did an ordinary Chinese person decide to send so much money to America. In fact, at no point was most of this money at his or her disposal at all. These are in effect enforced savings, which are the result of the two huge and fundamental choices made by the central government.

Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Metal fucking rats with heart shaped tail, 22" x 25" x 7", Welded scrap metal and light projector, 2007