jeSpirals

So, today instead of teaching an English class at the local community centre, we went for a walk.

The UK is second only to Germany for the seriousness with which it walks. The Germans may be out there with their walking sticks and proper boots but the English have anoraks, ordinance survey maps and a mapped network of protected public footpaths.

My lovely English students live beside one of the longer protected & signed foot paths that encircles London, without knowing anything of the freedom that lies at their doorsteps.

So today, rather than spending the day indoors studying the uses of the past continuous, we went for a walk. And I learned so much.

In Pakistan a woman does not go for a walk in nature or anywhere else alone.
In Turkey a woman does not go for a walk in nature or anywhere else alone.

There could be snakes, there could be.... danger anywhere. There could be danger.

For me being alone in nature feels like freedom. For me running, walking, moving away from all that could confine me feels like freedom. The beautiful brilliant women who I am helping to learn English, who have left their families, their cultures, all that they know, these brave, strong women, for them this is a new experience. Walking alone is a new experience.

I have the privilege and joy of introducing them to rambling, walking in the not quite wild (this is England after all).

How do I tell them how safe it is? How do I cross the cultural divide? Woman to woman how do I say you are free?

I say "Walking in the park alone is safer than having a boyfriend."

Which is statistically true. But when I posted this on my Facebook page I got arguments from 2 men.

And you know what? Fuck the fuck off. If you really can't stand the fact that women are victimised in western society then women in other societies stand no chance at all. Fuck off.

Yeah, I know this is not the most eloquent defence but YOU are responsible for your own education. I'm so tired, I'm so DONE with all that society has decided is my responsibility as a female. I hope that you feel the same about what society tries to force upon you as a male. And for everyone in-between, yeah me too. I can't count the number of times an 'expert' on a program has described me and said this is what males are like.

Walking in the park alone is safer than having a boyfriend, girlfriend or any other friend.

but allies are precious beyond value...

Please, unless you are judged by your secondary sexual attributes, unless you are assumed to be a decoration for someone else's world, fuck off.

And if all of this is me stating the obvious and you can't believe I've had to explain it, I love you too.

So to begin with the back story...

I was a kayaking, biking, hiking, figure skating, wood working, instrument making
person.

Then I fell and broke my left wrist. Then my resting heart rate rose to 99bpm and I lost 10 kilos sitting still and eating Christmas food. So I went to the doctor.

Hyperthyroid!

The meds settled my heart rate and metabolism down and I blithely went back to skating.

and broke my right wrist
(I had been skating for 10 years with lots of similar falls & no breaks)

Now bone density scans & consultants. And oh by the way, fatigue and the realisation that for the last year I had been training (3-4 days/week x 2hrs) without gaining strength (jumps, spins footwork all the fancy figure skating stuff).

Bone scan reveals osteopenia in my lumbar spine and hip. That's half way to sneeze and you'll break.

FUCK
bye bye ice

begin 2 years of sitting on the sofa knitting - yes I tried the gym and almost passed out on the cross training machine, fell over in yoga and ...
could no longer trust my body

hello sofa time and bottles of wine looking like single serving containers, and chocolates, lots of chocolates.
(thanks to one dear friend I did become a kick ass knitter)

Fast forward... 2 years of treatment for bone density and thyroid and...

How do I start over? How do I do little enough that I can tell whether it's my lack of fitness or if my metabolism is still broken?

Oh, and at the same time I'm being referred to by the endochrinologist as 'This nice 55year old lady'(slow silent scream)

Where do I find the instructions for a recovering former athlete? When I work out on my own I can't help but base my expectations on the last time I... oh fuck

Yeah, the last time I... was when I was training 4 times a week...

How the fuck do you start over?

And then the person(BFF) who's been helping me avoid complete break down said
'Couch to 5k'

An adventure begins. Well, the pre travel anxiety and over thinking begins. But this time I will be endeavouring to travel light. For those who have camped with me at festivals, you can stop laughing now. I've already decided I have to have my fins, mask & snorkel. The question is, how few clothes can I manage to take. I'm currently debating air book or iPad or both. Both throws the 'travel light' out the window though. But I've got books loaded on my iPad and it's so nice to read from. But I want to blog and the air book has a nice keyboard... first world problems, sigh.

Guest Post: The CDOs That Destroyed AIG: The Big Short Doesn't Quite Reveal What They Knew And When They Knew It

By Tyler Durden
Created 03/15/2010 - 22:35
Submitted by David Fiderer

It's been eighteen months since AIG collapsed, and Congress has yet to seriously focus on the most important questions: What did they know and when did they know it?

"What" refers to the fatal flaws in the collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, that AIG insured.

"They" are the bankers that structured and sold the CDOs, plus the AIG executives who took on the credit risk, plus the rating agencies that handed out AAA ratings.

"When" harkens back to 2005 and 2006, when those toxic CDOs were first issued.

Just before the backdoor bailout of AIG's banks actually closed, Michael Lewis addressed what they knew and when they knew it in Portfolio. [1] He explained why the CDO market was ground zero for Wall Street malfeasance that led to the meltdown:

The funny thing, looking back on it, is how long it took for even someone who predicted the disaster to grasp its root causes... [Fund manager Steve] Eisman knew subprime lenders could be scumbags. What he underestimated was the total unabashed complicity of the upper class of American capitalism. For instance, he knew that the big Wall Street investment banks took huge piles of loans that in and of themselves might be rated BBB, threw them into a trust [i.e. a CDO], carved the trust into tranches, and wound up with 60 percent of the new total being rated AAA.
?But he couldn't figure out exactly how the rating agencies justified turning BBB loans into AAA-rated bonds. "I didn't understand how they were turning all this garbage into gold," he says. He brought some of the bond people from Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, and UBS over for a visit. "We always asked the same question," says Eisman. "Where are the rating agencies in all of this? And I'd always get the same reaction. It was a smirk."


The Disaster Created Under Hank Paulson's Watch

That collective smirk reflected more than the bankers' contempt for the rating agencies' analyses. It was a way of maintaining deniability about CDO investments that were obviously designed to become insolvent at the time they were created. In The Big Short, Lewis expands on this point:

[T]here were large sums of money to be made, if you could somehow get [triple-B mortgage bonds] re-rated as triple-A, thereby lowering their perceived risk, however dishonestly and artificially. This is what Goldman Sachs had cleverly done.
This all started at the end of 2004, when:

Goldman was in the position of selling bonds to its customers created by its own traders, so they might bet against them...

According to a former Goldman derivatives trader, Goldman would buy the triple-A tranche of some CDO, pair it off with the credit default swaps AIG sold Goldman that insured the tranche (at a cost well below the yield of the tranche), declare the entire package risk-free, and hold it off its balance sheet. Of course, the whole thing wasn't risk free: If AIG went bust, the insurance was worthless, and Goldman would lose everything. Today, Goldman Sachs is, to put it mildly, unhelpful when asked to explain exactly what it did, and this lack of transparency extends to its own shareholders. "If a team of forensic accountants went over Goldman's books, they'd be shocked at just how good Goldman is at hiding things," says one former AIG FP employee, who helped to unravel the mess, and who was intimate with his Goldman counterparts.

The guy in charge of all this, Goldman's CEO, was Hank Paulson. When he moved over to Treasury, Paulson acknowledged that the subprime bubble, which he helped foment, was central to destabilizing the markets. As he wrote [2] exactly two years ago:

The turmoil in financial markets clearly was triggered by a dramatic weakening of underwriting standards for US subprime mortgages, beginning in late 2004 and extending into early 2007.
[Those are Paulson's italics, not mine.]


Goldman now says that it didn't manipulate anything; it simply responded to market demand. Or as Lloyd Blankfein testified, "what we did in that business was underwrite to [] the most sophisticated investors who sought that exposure." Of course, a lot of so-called sophisticated investors were played for suckers. Just ask Bernie Madoff's clientele.

According to Lewis, the guys at AIG who bought Goldman's deals had no idea that they were so heavily exposed to subprime residential mortgages. I still find this part of Lewis's story too weird to be believable. Most of the deals disclosed investment schedules, like Appendix B for Adirondack 2 [3], which were pretty easy to eyeball.

But even smart people can be fooled by CDO terminology, which is Orwellian by design. Consider the super-senior tranches of high grade multi-sector CDOs [4] that AIG insured via credit default swaps. Where else in the English-speaking world does "multi-sector" translate into "singularly invested in risky real estate mortgages"? Where else are "super-senior" tranches exclusively invested in deeply subordinated claims? And how is it that "high grade" CDOs are differentiated their mezzanine counterparts by a 2% sliver of capitalization, a virtual rounding error?

Lewis also writes that these CDO deals were never seriously questioned by AIG's then-CEO, Martin Sullivan. In June 2008, Sullivan was fired and replaced by Bob Willumstad, an outsider who had first joined AIG's board in April 2006, after the AIG had decided to stop insuring subprime CDOs.

In September 2008, the one thing that AIG had going for it was a CEO who had no reason to defend the toxic CDO deals that closed in 2005 and 2006. Willumstad could look regulators and investors in the eye and agree with Lewis's assessment:

Goldman created a bunch of multi-billion dollar deals that transferred to AIG the responsibility for all future losses from $20 billion in triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds. It was incredible: In exchange for a few million bucks a year, this insurance company was taking the very real risk that the $20 billion would simply go poof.
So Paulson unilaterally replaced Willumstad, and installed a crony, Goldman director Ed Liddy, who would never challenge the dodgy CDOs. In On the Brink [5], Paulson's lobotomized financial history, he goes after Willumstad with a passive aggressive smear. He recounts a comment from a former Goldman partner, billionaire investor Chris Flowers, at a meeting to discuss financing options for Lehman, on Saturday, September 13, 2008:

As everyone got up to leave, Chris Flowers motioned me aside and said, "Hank, can I tell you what a mess it is over at AIG?" He produced a piece of paper that he said showed AIG's day-to-day liquidity...Flowers told me that according to AIG's own projections the company would run out of cash in ten days.
"Is there a deal to be done?" I asked.

"They are totally incompetent," Flowers said. "I would only put money in if management was replaced."

I knew AIG was having problems--its shares had been pummeled all week--but I didn't expect this. In addition to its vast insurance operations, the company had written credit default swaps to insure obligations backed by mortgages. The housing market crash hurt AIG badly, and it had posted losses for the past three quarters.

With his "I-didn't-expect-this" story, Paulson expects us to believe that he was surprised to learn the exact problems that were laid out by AIG to the Fed, which kept Treasury fully apprised at all times, 48 hours earlier. On September 11, 2008 [6], AIG approached the New York Fed, which simultaneously informed Treasury, to inform all concerned that AIG was running out of cash because it was facing a ratings downgrade that was caused by credit default swaps on subprime mortgages. On that very day in that very building, New York Fed employees were trying to determine if AIG's bankruptcy would have presented an unacceptable systemic risk.

"I have been blessed with a good memory, so I almost never needed to take notes," writes Paulson, who also testified [7], "I did not know -- I had no knowledge of the size of the [CDO] claim of any bank." That must mean that the topic never came up during the 24 different phone calls he had with Lloyd Blankfein during the week that AIG was bailed out. Apparently, the information was never conveyed by his personal proxy, Dan Jester [8], who "was calling many of the shots at the insurer between mid-September, when the New York Fed decided to go ahead with the bailout, and the end of October 2008, when Jester was replaced at A.I.G. by another Treasury official because, according to The New York Times, of Jester's 'stockholdings in Goldman Sachs.'"

Paulson's little hit-and-run smear against Willumstad was intended to distract us from the source of the mess and to conflate blame on to those tasked with the cleanup. On the Brink never recounts Paulson's personal role in role in destroying AIG, his decision to replace Willumstad with Liddy, or his own analysis dated March 13, 2008. In typical "Who me?" fashion, Paulson decries the problems with opaque CDOs, but never mentions Goldman's pivotal role in creating the disaster. Lewis writes:

Goldman Sachs had created a security so opaque and complex that it would remain forever misunderstood by investors and rating agencies: the synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed CDO, or collateralized debt obligation...[I]t didn't require any sort of genius to see the fortune to be had from the laundering of triple-B-rated bonds into triple-A-rated bonds. What demanded genius was finding $20 billion in triple-B-rated bonds to launder...To create a billion-dollar CDO composed solely of triple-B-rated subprime mortgage bonds, you needed to lend $50 billion in cash to actual human beings. That took time and effort. A credit default swap took neither.
Those synthetic CDOs, including the notorious Abacus CDOs, were not sold by AIG to the New York Fed, which only financed securities holding "real" assets. They remain on AIG's balance sheet, shrouded in secrecy.

The CDO Market Remains A Bunch of Black Boxes

The bankers and hedge fund managers who made billions selling these toxic CDOs are still smirking. They made billions by shorting those subprime bonds and CDOs, but almost all of their handiwork remains hidden, concealed from public view. The Big Short [9], The Greatest Trade Ever [10] and The Quants [11] never give us specifics. The authors never identify the particular CDOs that Greg Lippman, John Paulson or Alec Litowitz bet against. Without the actual details on the trades, we must rely on the hearsay narratives of three journalists; we cannot examine the hard evidence to trace through to what they knew and when they knew it.

CDOs are not like regular mortgage bonds, which may be scrutinized via their initial prospectuses registered with the S.E.C. Bonds such as GSAMP Trust 2005-HE4 [12] are structured so that the mortgage pool is essentially fixed at closing. What you see is what you get. Actual bond performance is available, for a price, from ABSNet [13].

CDOs are different. Everything is concealed. Aside from a relative handful of cases, the public has no access to the initial prospectuses. Even if a CDO prospectus were retrievable through the Irish Stock Exchange, that CDO's investment portfolio is still likely to be kept secret. Unlike subprime mortgage bonds, these CDOs had no legitimate business purpose. They neither financed the mortgages, which had been financed through the bonds, nor did they add to liquidity in the marketplace, since the CDOs were non-tradable black box investments.

You'll never figure out a CDO by reading a rating agency analysis, which offers a few cryptic comments of substance buried amid the boilerplate.

In addition, the CDOs are set up so that the asset manager can do all sorts of bait-and-switch maneuvers, within broad credit-rating based parameters, after the deal closes. CDO performance cannot be tracked, because the performance data is only accessible to CDO investors.

Hundreds of billions of fatally flawed subprime CDOs were created, but, with a handful of exceptions, we still do not know who bought what under what circumstances.

That's why the investigation into AIG's CDO exposure is such an important opportunity. For the first time in February, we had a schedule where we could match up the CDOs with the relevant exposure amounts with the insured counterparties. It sure looks like Societe Generale "bought" CDOs for the sole purpose of acting as a front for Goldman, which created most of the CDOs that AIG insured on SG's behalf. When The New York Times [14] pointed out the suspicious circumstances of SG's CDO positions, Goldman spokesman [15] Lucas van Praag responded with a non sequitur denial:

NYT assertion: "In addition, according to two people with knowledge of the positions a portion of the $11 billion in taxpayer money that went to Societe Generale, a French bank that traded with A.I.G, was subsequently transferred to Goldman under a deal the two banks had struck."?
The facts: The assertion is false and misleading. Goldman Sachs provided financing to many counterparties, but in that role we would not have known whether a counterparty had obtained credit default protection, let alone from whom or in what amount.

Neither van Praag, nor the Goldman lawyers who reviewed his statement, are confused. They simply want to confuse us. The Times didn't allege that Goldman provided financing to SG; it alleged the opposite--that SG provided financing to Goldman. By acting as the middleman in two back-to-back transactions, SG bought the credit risk from Goldman and simultaneously sold the same risk, in the form of a credit default swap, to AIG. In other words, SG acted like the character in the Edward Jones commercial [16] who, after submitting the highest bid at an art auction, says, "I want to go ahead and sell it now."

The best way to start to get to the bottom of all this is to pass a law that requires all performance reports of all private label mortgage securitizations, past and present, be made public. Second, as I wrote previously [17], there should be a national registry for every ownership claim, including every derivative claim, on a mortgage securitization. We won't get anywhere until these transactions are fully exposed to sunlight.

So far, Neil Barofsky, the TARP Inspector General appointed by Paulson, has shown no curiosity in finding out what they knew and when they knew it. His report [18] on the backdoor bailout of the CDO banks ignores the subject completely. The selective pursuit of evidence is a big topic for another piece.

AIG American International Group CDO Chris Flowers Collateralized Debt Obligations Counterparties Credit Default Swaps Ed Liddy Goldman Sachs Guest Post Hank Paulson Housing Market John Paulson Lehman Lehman Brothers Lloyd Blankfein Lucas Van Praag Market Crash Martin Sullivan Meltdown Michael Lewis Neil Barofsky New York Fed New York Times Rating Agencies Rating Agency ratings Real estate Subprime Mortgages TARP Transparency
Source URL: http://www.zerohedge.com/article/guest-post-cdos-destroyed-aig-big-short-doesnt-quite-reveal-what-they-knew-and-when-they-kne
Links:
[1] http://www-stat.wharton.upenn.edu/~steele/Courses/434/434Context/The End by Michael Lewis.pdf
[2] http://www.ustreas.gov/press/releases/reports/pwgpolicystatemktturmoil_03122008.pdf
[3] http://www.ise.ie/debt_documents/ADIRONDACK 2005-2 LTD_23.01.06_2782.pdf
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/ [5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/05/AR2010020503960.html
[6] http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d09975.pdf
[7] http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?Itemid=2&id=4756&option=com_content&task=view
[8] http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/mystery-men-of-the-financial-crisis/?pagemode=print
[9] http://books.wwnorton.com/books/978-0-393-07223-5/
[10] http://www.amazon.com/Greatest-Trade-Ever-Behind-Scenes/dp/0385529910/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268451635&sr=8-1
[11] http://www.amazon.com/Quants-Whizzes-Conquered-Street-Destroyed/dp/0307453375/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268451694&sr=1-1
[12] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/807641/000112528205004519/b408510_424b5.txt
[13] http://www.absnet.net/home.asp?CookieLogin=True
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/business/07goldman.html?pagewanted=1&ref=business
[15] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lucas-van-praag/goldmans-response-to-the_b_454296.html
[16] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKFowsEXFMc
[17] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fiderer/why-obama-wont-do-whats-n_b_375798.html
[18] http://www.sigtarp.gov/reports/audit/2009/Factors_Affecting_Efforts_to_Limit_Payments_to_AIG_Counterparties.pdf

I heard this whilst listening to BBC Radio4 over the web in our cottage by the sea this summer.

---------------------------------------------------

Checking out of 'Hotel America'
After an eventful eight years in Washington, the BBC's North America editor Justin Webb has mixed feelings about his imminent return to the UK.

“ If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it ”
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…"

America was not designed to be left. The opposite in fact - it was designed to be arrived in.

It was programmed to receive and - as was the case in the Eagles' song Hotel California - there is some wonderment at the front desk when you try to go.

For effect, I sometimes exaggerate our sadness at the end of our time in America, result: confusion.

"Our British home is in south London so we'll probably all be murdered before Christmas."

"Oh, my gosh, um, why not stay?" Because you have no sense of humour, would be one answer. But it is not why we are leaving.

In more than seven years of life in America, I have come to value - to love, actually - the stolid, sunny, unchallenging, simple virtuousness of the American suburban psyche.

The woman who is to sell our house is a prime specimen. She is perky. Nothing gets her down, not even the fact that we are selling in the midst of the biggest depression since the Great Flood. In this area it is different.

"You have a lovely home!"

But she thinks we have too many books. She does not say so but she talks of creating spaces on the shelves - for snow-globes, perhaps, or silver photo frames with perfect children showing off perfect teeth.

This is a cultural thing. When selling a home in America, you have to pretend that you do not live there.

No, you have to pretend that no-one lives there. Or ever has.

Previously owned homes are of course the norm for us Europeans. We understand that previous generations have made their mark. This means - as we English know, having grown up with rattling windows and mouldy grouting - that a home will be imperfect.

They do not make such allowances in America.

Illusion of safety

So the inspector's report, the survey, is the cause of much deliberation and soul-searching with our potential buyers.

An outside light is not working properly. A tap is leaking. A chimney needs investigation.

“ I feel crazy going back to the old world ”
As I read it, my mind turns to our house in London which is actually falling down - somebody omitted to prop up the middle when an arch was cut in a downstairs room 100 years ago - but which is still eminently saleable.

The English understand that we are all falling down. Dust to dust, we intuit. Americans do not. They have not got there yet.

Truth be told, I would rather be them than us. I admire the concern over the chimney and the belief that the problem can be fixed.

I sit on the porch, in the growing evening heat of the Washington spring, the cicadas chirruping and the sound of lawns being mowed, and yearn to be staying. It would be so easy, so uncomplicated, so safe.

And yet of course - like the perfect home we tried to create - this safety is an illusion.

Route 17

From Washington let me take you south 600 miles (965 km) or so to the state of South Carolina.

In the steamy heat of the night, cicadas deafening in these parts, breeze all but non-existent, I drove Route 17 south, out of Charleston and down into the low country, the salt marshes.

Charleston is one of America's most elegant cities, but Route 17 is not on any tourist maps, at least not as an attraction in its own right.

In a sense though, it should be. It gives a wonderful insight into hardscrabble American life, the sleazy glamour of the road that repels and appeals to visitors - and indeed Americans themselves - in roughly equal measure: gas stations, tattoo parlours, Bojangles Pizza, $59 (£35)-a-night motels, pawn shops, gun shops, car showrooms, nail bars, and Piggly Wiggly, the local supermarket chain which, in my limited experience, smells almost as odd as it sounds.

It is a panorama of the mundane: Doric columns a-plenty but all of them made of cheap concrete and attached to restaurants or two-bit accountants' offices. On and on it goes, encroaching into the palm forests with no hint of apology.

'Bible-laced hypocrisy'

As it happens, I am due to visit one of those forests and the following morning I find myself standing next to a black, four-wheel-drive vehicle and another quintessentially American phenomenon. A politician mired in Bible-laced hypocrisy.

At the time I met Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, just a few months ago, I didn't know about the hypocrisy. But I should have guessed when he offered to let me in to a secret. He was a closet tiller of fields, he said, and liked nothing better than to get out with his boys and work the land.

A little too wholesome to be true.

Weeks after telling me that all-American story, it transpired that he was also ploughing furrows in foreign fields. The man disappeared only to turn up in Buenos Aires with an Argentine woman who was not Mrs Sanford.

This from a man who, when he was a congressman, lived in some peculiar Christian fellowship house in DC. It did not stop his Doric columns from being false.

Zest for life

And yet for all the ugliness, the deadening tawdriness of much of the American landscape and the tinny feebleness of many of its politicians - for all that nastiness and shallowness and flakiness - there is no question in my mind that to live here has been the greatest privilege of my life.

The immensity of America, the energy and the zest for life remind me sometimes of India. And as with India, where I spent some time for the BBC many moons ago, America shines a light on the entire human condition.

Few other nations really do. Italy reveals truths about Italians, Afghanistan about Afghans, Fiji about Fijians. But America speaks to the whole of humanity because the whole of humanity is represented here; our possibilities and our propensities.

Often what is revealed is unpleasing; truths that are not attractive or wholesome or hopeful.

On the last day we spent in our home in north-east Washington, they were holding a food-eating competition in a burger bar at the end of our street. The sight was nauseating: acne-ridden youths, several already obese, stuffing meat and buns into their mouths while local television reporters, the women in dinky pastel suits, rushed around getting the best shots.

America can be seen as little more than an eating competition, a giant, gaudy, manic effort to stuff grease and gunge into already sated innards.

You could argue that the sub-prime mortgage crisis - the Ground Zero of the world recession - was caused mainly by greed: a lack of proportion, a lack of proper respect for the natural way of things that persuaded companies to stuff mortgages into the mouths of folks whose credit rating was always likely to induce an eventual spray of vomit.

There is an intellectual ugliness as well: a dark age lurking, even when the president has been to Harvard. The darkness epitomised by the recent death in Wisconsin of a little girl who should still be alive.

Stone-Age superstitions

Eleven-year-old Kara Neumann was suffering from type one diabetes, an auto-immune condition my son was recently diagnosed with.

Her family, for religious reasons, decided not to take her to hospital. They prayed by her bedside and the little girl died.

The night before she died - and she would have been in intense discomfort - her parents called the founder of a religious website and prayed with him on the telephone. But they did not call a doctor.

If Kara had been taken to hospital, even at that late stage, insulin could have saved her. She could have been home in a few days and chirpy by the end of the week, as my son was.

It was an entirely preventable death caused, let's be frank, by some of the Stone Age superstition that stalks the richest and most technologically advanced nation on earth.

I deplore the superstition and the eating competitions and the tatty dreariness of so much of America, and I note that the new president is also unimpressed by the infrastructure and not a fan of fat but, after more than seven years living here, I am increasingly convinced that these elements of the nation are not the flip side of the greatness of America, they are part of that greatness.

There is something about the carelessness of America that gives space for greatness.

Making it big

Out on route 17 in South Carolina, you can do very well or very badly. You can crash and burn, or you can fill up with cheap petrol and ride off into the sunset. If you do not like yourself in South Carolina, you can hire a self-drive hire truck and take it to Seattle. If you do not like your life and you have drive and luck, you can change it because - being American - you believe you can change it.

Sitting in a dingy apartment in New York watching Perry Mason on the TV, you can decide to make it big in law as eight-year-old Sonia Sotomayor once did.

This summer, now in her fifties, she becomes a Supreme Court justice and the latest American story to send shivers down the spines of dreamers of the American dream.

But if Sonia Sotomayor is to make it big, there must be something creating the drive, and part of that something is the poverty of the alternative, the discomfort of the ordinary lives that most Americans endure and the freedom that Americans have to go to hell if that is the decision they take.

This is the atmosphere in which Nobel Prize winners are nurtured. A nation which will one day mass produce a cure for type one diabetes, could not, would not, save little Kara Neumann from the bovine idiocy of her religious parents.

More than 300 million people live here now, settlers from all over the world. From Ho Chi Minh City, from Timbuktu, from Vilnius, from Tehran, from every last corner of the earth, they have made America their home and they are still streaming in.

I feel crazy going back to the old world. My five-year-old daughter Clara, who is the proud owner of an American passport, agrees.

She says she intends to leave home, at around 12-years-old, and return to her native land. I do not blame her.

If you are willing to chance your arm, if you back yourself, if you want to live the life, America is still the place to be. Drive out on Route 17 and take a chance!

So that's it from me, I am checking out. But part of me can never leave…

How to listen to: From our own Correspondent

Radio 4: Saturdays, 1130. Second weekly edition on Thursdays, 1100 (some weeks only)

World Service: See programme schedules

Download the

Listen on

Story by story at the

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8176448.stm

Published: 2009/08/01 11:05:10 GMT

© BBC MMIX

... manage to un-retire an attorney.


Wire: BLOOMBERG News (BN) Date: 2009-04-29 04:00:01
Flawed Credit Ratings Reap Profits as Regulators Fail Investors


By David Evans and Caroline Salas
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Ron Grassi says he thought he had
retired five years ago after a 35-year career as a trial lawyer.
Now Grassi, 68, has set up a war room in his Tahoe City,
California, home to single-handedly take on Standard & Poor’s,
Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings. He’s sued the three
credit rating firms for negligence, fraud and deceit.
Grassi says the companies’ faulty debt analyses have been
at the core of the global financial meltdown and the firms
should be held accountable. Exhibit One is his own investment.
He and his wife, Sally, held $40,000 in Lehman Brothers Holdings
Inc. bonds because all three credit raters gave them at least an
A rating -- meaning they were a safe investment -- right until
Sept. 15, the day Lehman filed for bankruptcy.
“They’re supposed to spot time bombs,” Grassi says. “The
bombs exploded before the credit companies acted.”
As the U.S. and other economic powers devise ways to
overhaul financial regulations, they have yet to come up with
plans to address one issue at the heart of the crisis: the role
of the rating firms.
That’s partly because the reach of the three big credit
raters extends into virtually every corner of the financial
system. Everyone from banks to the agencies that regulate them
is hooked on ratings.
Debt grades are baked into hundreds of rules, laws and
private contracts that affect banking, insurance, mutual funds
and pension funds. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
guidelines, for example, require money market fund managers to
rely on ratings in deciding what to buy with $3.9 trillion of
investors’ money.

‘Stop Our Reliance’

State regulators depend on credit grades to monitor the
safety of $450 billion of bonds held by U.S. insurance
companies. Even the plans crafted by Federal Reserve Chairman
Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to
stimulate the economy count on rating firms to determine how the
money will be spent.
“The key to policy going forward has to be to stop our
reliance on these credit ratings,” says Frank Partnoy, a
professor at the San Diego School of Law and a former
derivatives trader who has written four books on modern finance,
including Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the
Financial Markets (Times Books, 2003).
“Even though few people respect the credit raters, most
continue to rely on them,” Partnoy says. “We’ve become
addicted to them like a drug, and we have to figure out a way to
wean regulators and investors off of them.”

AIG Downgrade

Just how critical a role ratings firms play in the health
and stability of the financial system became clear in the case
of American International Group Inc., the New York-based insurer
that’s now a ward of the U.S. government.
On Sept. 16, one day after the three credit rating firms
downgraded AIG’s double-A score by two to three grades, private
contract provisions that AIG had with banks around the world
based on credit rating changes forced the insurer to hand over
billions of dollars of collateral to its customers. The company
didn’t have the cash.
Trying to avert a global financial cataclysm, the Federal
Reserve rescued AIG with an $85 billion loan -- the first of
four U.S. bailouts of the insurer.
Investors, traders and regulators have been questioning
whether credit rating companies serve a good purpose ever since
Enron Corp. imploded in 2001. Until four days before the
Houston-based energy company filed for what was then the
largest-ever U.S. bankruptcy, its debt had investment-grade
stamps of approval from S&P, Moody’s and Fitch.
In the run-up to the current financial crisis, credit
companies evolved from evaluators of debt into consultants.

‘Abjectly Failed’

They helped banks create $3.2 trillion of subprime mortgage
securities. Typically, the firms awarded triple-A ratings to 75
percent of those debt packages.
“Ratings agencies just abjectly failed in serving the
interests of investors,” SEC Commissioner Kathleen Casey says.
S&P President Deven Sharma says he knows his firm is taking
heat from all sides -- and he expects to turn that around.
“Our company has always operated by the principle that if
you do the right thing by the customers and the market,
ultimately you’ll succeed,” Sharma says.
Moody’s Chief Executive Officer Raymond McDaniel and Fitch
CEO Stephen Joynt declined to comment for this story.
“We are firmly committed to meeting the highest standards
of integrity in our ratings practice,” McDaniel said in an
April 15 SEC hearing.
“We remain committed to the highest standards of integrity
and objectivity in all aspects of our work,” Joynt told the
SEC.

Ratings and Rescue

Notwithstanding the role the credit companies played in
fomenting disaster, the U.S. government is relying on them to
help fix the system they had a hand in breaking.
The Federal Reserve’s Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan
Facility, or TALF, will finance the purchase by taxpayers of as
much as $1 trillion of new securities backed by consumer loans
or other asset-backed debt -- on the condition they have
triple-A ratings.
And the Fed has also been buying commercial paper directly
from companies since October, only if the debt has at least the
equivalent of an A-1 rating, the second highest for short-term
credit. The three rating companies graded Lehman debt A-1 the
day it filed for bankruptcy.
The Fed’s financial rescue is good for the bottom lines of
the three rating firms, Connecticut Attorney General Richard
Blumenthal says. They could enjoy as much as $400 million in
fees that come from taxpayer money, he says.
S&P, Moody’s and Fitch, all based in New York, got their
official blessing from the SEC in 1975, when the regulator named
them Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organizations.

Conflict of Interest

Seven companies, along with the big three, now have SEC
licensing. The regulator created the NRSRO designation after
deciding to set capital requirements for broker-dealers. The SEC
relies on ratings from the NRSROs to evaluate the bond holdings
of those firms.
At the core of the rating system is an inherent conflict of
interest, says Lawrence White, the Arthur E. Imperatore
Professor of Economics at New York University in Manhattan.
Credit raters are paid by the companies whose debt they analyze,
so the ratings might reflect a bias, he says.
“So long as you are delegating these decisions to for-
profit companies, inevitably there are going to be conflicts,”
he says.
In a March 25 report, policy makers from the Group of 20
nations recommended that credit rating companies be supervised
to provide more transparency, improve rating quality and avoid
conflicts of interest. The G-20 didn’t offer specifics.

52 Percent Profit Margin

As lawmakers scratch their heads over how to come up with
an alternative approach, the rating firms continue to pull in
rich profits.
Moody’s, the only one of the three that stands alone as a
publicly traded company, has averaged pretax profit margins of
52 percent over the past five years. It reported revenue of
$1.76 billion -- earning a pretax margin of 41 percent -- even
during the economic collapse in 2008.
S&P, Moody’s and Fitch control 98 percent of the market for
debt ratings in the U.S., according to the SEC. The
noncompetitive market leads to high fees, says SEC Commissioner
Casey, 43, appointed by President George W. Bush in July 2006 to
a five-year term. S&P, a unit of McGraw-Hill Cos., has profit
margins similar to those at Moody’s, she says.
“They’ve benefited from the monopoly status that they’ve
achieved with a tremendous amount of assistance from
regulators,” Casey says.
Sharma, 53, says S&P has justifiably earned its income.

‘People See Value’

“Why does anybody pay $200, or whatever, for Air Jordan
shoes?” he asks, sitting in a company boardroom high over the
southern tip of Manhattan. “It’s the same. People see value in
that. And it all boils down to the value of what people see in
it.”
Blumenthal says he sees little value in credit ratings. He
says raters shouldn’t be getting money from federal financial
rescue efforts.
“It rewards the very incompetence of Standard & Poors,
Moody’s and Fitch that helped cause our current financial
crisis,” he says. “It enables those specific credit rating
agencies to profit from their own self-enriching malfeasance.”
Blumenthal has subpoenaed documents from the three
companies to determine if they improperly influenced the TALF
rules to snatch business from smaller rivals.
S&P and Fitch deny Blumenthal’s accusations.

‘Without Merit’

“The investigation by the Connecticut attorney general is
without merit,” S&P Vice President Chris Atkins says. “The
attorney general fails to recognize S&P’s strong track record
rating consumer asset-backed securities, the assets that will be
included in the TALF program. S&P’s fees for this work are
subject to fee caps.”
Fitch Managing Director David Weinfurter says the
government makes all the rules -- not the rating firms.
“Fitch Ratings views Blumenthal’s investigation into
credit ratings eligibility requirements under TALF and other
federal lending programs as an unfortunate development stemming
from incomplete or inaccurate information,” he says.
Moody’s Senior Vice President Anthony Mirenda declined to
comment.
Sharma says it’s clear that his firm’s housing market
assumptions were incorrect. S&P is making its methodology
clearer so investors can better decide whether they agree with
the ratings, he says.

‘Talk to Us’

“The thing to do is make it transparent, ‘Here are our
criteria. Here are our analytics. Here are our assumptions. Here
are the stress-test scenarios. And now, if you have any
questions, talk to us,’” Sharma says.
The rating companies reaped a bonanza in fees earlier this
decade as they worked with financial firms to manufacture
collateralized debt obligations. Those creations held a mix of
questionable debt, including subprime mortgages, auto loans and
junk-rated assets.
S&P, Moody’s and Fitch won as much as three times more in
fees for grading structured securities than they charged for
rating ordinary bonds. The CDO market started to crash in mid-
2007, as investors learned the securities were jammed with bad
debt.
Financial firms around the world have reported about
$1.3 trillion in writedowns and losses in the past two years.
Alex Pollock, now a resident fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute in Washington, says more competition among
credit raters would reduce fees.

‘An SEC-Created Cartel’

“The rating agencies are an SEC-created cartel,” he says.
“Usually, issuers need at least two ratings, so they don’t even
have to compete.”
Pollock was president of the Federal Home Loan Bank in
Chicago from 1991 to 2004. The bank was rated triple-A by both
Moody’s and S&P. He says he recalls an annual ritual as he
visited with representatives of each company.
“They’d say, ‘Here’s what it’s going to cost,’” he says.
“I’d say, ‘That’s outrageous.’ They’d repeat, ‘This is what
it’s going to cost.’ Finally, I’d say, ‘OK.’ With no ratings,
you can’t sell your debt.”
Congress has held hearings on credit raters routinely this
decade, first in 2002 after Enron and then again each year
through 2008. In 2006, Congress passed the Credit Rating Agency
Reform Act, which gave the SEC limited authority to regulate
raters’ business practices.
The SEC adopted rules under the law in December 2008
banning rating firms from grading debt structures they designed
themselves. The law forbids the SEC from ordering the firms to
change their analytical methods.

Role of Congress

Only Congress has the power to overhaul the rating system.
So far, nobody has introduced legislation that would do that. In
a hearing on April 15, the SEC heard suggestions for legislation
on credit raters. Some of the loudest proponents for change are
in state government and on Wall Street. But no one’s agreed on
how to do it.
“We should replace ratings agencies,” says Peter Fisher,
managing director and co-head of fixed income at New York-based
BlackRock Inc., the largest publicly traded U.S. asset
management company.

‘Flash Forward’

“Our credit rating system is anachronistic,” he says.
“Eighty years ago, equities were thought to be complicated and
bonds were thought to be simple, so it appeared to make sense to
have a few rating agencies set up to tell us all what bonds to
buy. But flash forward to the slicing and dicing of credit
today, and it’s really a pretty wacky concept.”
To create competition, the U.S. should license individuals,
not companies, as credit rating professionals, Fisher says. They
should be more like equity analysts and would be primarily paid
by institutional investors, Fisher says. Neither equity analysts
nor those who work at rating companies currently need to be
licensed.
Such a system wouldn’t be fair, says Daniel Fuss, vice
chairman of Boston-based Loomis Sayles & Co., which manages $106
billion. An investor-pay ratings model may give the biggest
money managers a huge advantage over smaller firms and
individuals because they can afford to pay for the analyses, he
says.
“What about individuals?” he asks.
Eric Dinallo, New York’s top insurance regulator, proposes
a government takeover of the rating business.
“There’s nothing wrong with saying Moody’s or someone is
going to just become a government agency,” he says. “We’ve
hung the entire global economy on ratings.”

‘Like Consumer Reports’

Insurance companies are among the world’s largest bond
investors. Dinallo suggests that insurers could fund a credit
rating collective run by the National Association of Insurance
Commissioners, a group of state regulators.
“It would be like the Consumer Reports of credit
ratings,” Dinallo says, referring to the not-for-profit
magazine that provides unbiased reviews of consumer products.
Turning over the credit ratings to a consortium headed by
state governments could lead to lower quality because there
would be even less competition, Fuss says.
“I would be strongly opposed to the government taking over
the function of credit ratings,” he says. “I just don’t think
it would work at all. The business creativity, the drive, would
go straight out of it.”
At the April 15 SEC hearing, Joseph Grundfest, a professor
at Stanford Law School in Stanford, California, suggested a
variation of Dinallo’s idea. He said the SEC could authorize a
new kind of rating company, owned and run by the largest debt
investors.

‘Greater Discipline’

All bond issuers that pay for a traditional rating would
also have to buy a credit analysis from one of these firms.
SEC Commissioner Casey has another solution. She wants to
remove rating requirements from federal guidelines. She also
faults investors for shirking their responsibility to do
independent research, rather than simply looking to the grades
produced by credit raters.
“I’d like to promote greater competition in the market and
greater discipline,” she says. “Eliminating the references to
ratings will play a huge role in removing the undue reliance
that we’ve seen.”
Sharma, who became president of S&P in August 2007, agrees
with Casey that ratings are too enmeshed in SEC rules. He wants
the SEC to either get rid of references to rating companies in
regulations or add other benchmarks such as current market
prices, volatility and liquidity.
“Just don’t leave us the way it is today,” Sharma says.
“There’s too much risk of being overused and inappropriately
used.”

‘Hurt Now’

Sharma says that even with widespread regulatory reliance
on ratings, his firm will lose business if investors say it
doesn’t produce accurate ones.
“Our reputation is hurt now,” he says. “Let’s say it
continues to be hurt; it never comes back. Three other
competitors come back who do much-better-quality work. Investors
will finally say, ‘I don’t want S&P ratings.’”
S&P will prove to the public that it can help companies and
bondholders by updating and clarifying its rating methodology,
Sharma says. The company will also add commentary on the
liquidity and volatility of securities.

S&P’s New Steps

S&P has incorporated so-called credit stability into its
ratings to address the risk that ratings will fall several
levels under stress conditions, which is what happened to CDO
grades. The company has also created an ombudsman office in an
effort to resolve potential conflicts of interest.
Jerome Fons, who worked at Moody’s for 17 years and was
managing director for credit policy until August 2007, says
investors don’t have to wait for a change in the rating system.
They can learn more about the value of debt by tracking the
prices of credit-default swaps, he says.
The swaps, which are derivatives, are an unregulated type
of insurance in which one side bets that a company will default
and the other side, or counterparty, gambles that the firm won’t
fail. The higher the price of that protection, the greater the
perceived risk of default.

‘More Accurate’

“We know the spreads are more accurate than ratings,”
says Fons, now principal of Fons Risk Solutions, a credit risk
consulting firm in New York. Moody’s sells a service called
Moody’s Implied Ratings, which is based on prices of credit
swaps, debt and stock.
In July 2007, credit-default-swap traders started pricing
Bear Stearns Cos. and Lehman as if they were Ba1 rated, the
highest junk level. They pegged Merrill Lynch & Co. as a Ba1
credit three months later, according to the Moody’s model.
Each of those investment banks was stamped at investment
grade by the top three credit raters within weeks of when the
banks either failed or were rescued in 2008.
Lynn Tilton, who manages $6 billion as CEO of private
equity firm Patriarch Partners in New York, says she woke up one
morning in August 2007 convinced the banking system would
collapse and started buying gold coins.
“I predicted the banks would be insolvent,” Tilton says.
“My biggest issue was credit-default swaps. When the size of
that market started to dwarf gross domestic product by six or
seven times, then my understanding of what defaults would be in
a down market became clear: There’s no escaping.”

‘Collective Wisdom’

Investors like Tilton watched as the financial firms
tumbled while credit raters held on to investment-grade marks.
“If the ratings mandate weren’t there, we wouldn’t care
because the credit-default-swap markets can tell us basically
what we want to know about default probabilities,” NYU’s White
says. “I’m a market-oriented guy, so I’m more inclined to be
relying on the collective wisdom of the market participants.”
While credit-default-swap traders lack inside information
that companies give to credit raters, swap traders move faster
because they’re reacting to market changes every day.
San Diego School of Law’s Partnoy, who’s written law review
articles about credit rating firms for more than a decade and
has been a paid consultant to plaintiffs suing rating companies,
says raters hold back from downgrading because they know the
consequences can be dire.
In September, Moody’s and S&P downgraded AIG to A2 and A-,
the sixth- and seventh-highest investment-grade ratings. The
downgrades triggered CDS payouts and led to the U.S. lending AIG
$85 billion. The government has since more than doubled AIG’s
rescue funds.

‘Basically Trapped’

“When you get into a situation like we’re in right now
with AIG, the rating agencies are basically trapped into
maintaining high ratings because they know if they downgrade,
they don’t only have this regulatory effect but they have all
these effects,” Partnoy says.
“It’s all this stuff that basically turns the rating
downgrade into a bullet fired at the heart of a bunch of
institutions,” he says.
Sharma says S&P has never delayed a ratings change because
of potential downgrade results. He says his firm tells clients
not to use ratings as triggers in private contracts.
“We take action based on what we feel is right,” Sharma
says.
While swap prices may be better than bond ratings at
predicting a disaster, swaps can also cause a disaster.
AIG, one of the world’s biggest sellers of CDS protection,
nearly collapsed -- taking the global financial system with it
-- when it didn’t have enough cash to honor its swaps contracts.
Loomis’s Fuss says relying on swap prices is a bad idea.

‘Not Always Right’

“The market is not always right,” he says. “An
unregulated market isn’t always a fair appraisal of value.”
Moody’s was the first credit rating firm in the U.S. It
started grading railroad bonds in 1909. Standard Statistics, a
precursor of S&P, began rating securities seven years later.
After the 1929 stock market crash, the government decided
it wasn’t able to determine the quality of the assets held by
banks on its own, Partnoy says. In 1931, the U.S. Treasury
started using bond ratings to analyze banks’ holdings.
James O’Connor, then comptroller of the currency, issued a
regulation in 1936 restricting banks to buying only securities
that were deemed high quality by at least two credit raters.
“One of the major responses was to try to find a way --
just as we are now with the stress tests and the examination of
the banks -- to figure out how to get the bad assets off the
banks’ books,” Partnoy says.
Since then, regulators have increasingly leaned on ratings
to police debt investing. In 1991, the SEC ruled that money
market mutual fund managers must put 95 percent of their
investments into highly rated commercial paper.

Avoiding Liability

Like auditors, lawyers and investment bankers, rating firms
serve as gatekeepers to the financial markets. They provide
assurances to bond investors. Unlike the others, ratings
companies have generally avoided liability for errors.
Grassi, the retired California lawyer, wants to change
that. He filed his lawsuit against the rating companies on Jan.
26 in state superior court in Placer County.
The white-haired lawyer discusses his case seated at a tiny
wooden desk in his small guest bedroom, with files spread over
both levels of a bunk bed. Grassi says in his complaint that the
raters were negligent for failing to downgrade Lehman Brothers
debt as the bank’s finances were deteriorating.
The day Lehman filed for bankruptcy, S&P rated the
investment bank’s debt as A, which according to S&P’s definition
means a “strong” capacity to meet financial commitments.
Moody’s rated Lehman A2 that day, which Moody’s defines as a
“low credit risk.” Fitch gave Lehman a grade of A+, which it
describes as “high credit quality.”

‘Without Merit’

“We’d like to have a jury hear this,” Grassi says. “This
wouldn’t be six economists, just six normal people. That would
scare the rating agencies to death.”
The rating companies haven’t yet filed responses. They’ve
asked the federal court in Sacramento to take jurisdiction from
the state court.
S&P and Fitch say they dispute Grassi’s allegations. “We
believe the complaint is without merit and intend to defend
against it vigorously,” S&P’s Atkins says.
Fitch’s Weinfurter says, “The lawsuit is fully without
merit and we will vigorously defend it.”
Mirenda at Moody’s declined to comment.
S&P included a standard disclaimer with Lehman’s ratings:
“Any user of the information contained herein should not rely
on any credit rating or other opinion contained herein in making
any investment decision.”

‘On Your Own’

Grassi isn’t deterred.
“They’re saying we know you’re going to rely on us and if
you get screwed, you’re on your own because our lawyers have
told us to put this paragraph in here,” he says.
The companies have defended their ratings from lawsuits,
arguing that they were just opinions, protected by the free
speech guarantees of the First Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution.
McGraw-Hill used the First Amendment defense in 1996 after
its subsidiary S&P was sued for professional negligence by
Orange County, California. S&P had given the county an AA-
rating before the county filed for the largest-ever municipal
bankruptcy.
Orange County alleged in its lawsuit that S&P had failed to
warn the government that its treasurer, Robert Citron, had made
risky investments with county cash.

Not Liable

The U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California, ruled
that the county would have needed to prove the rating company’s
“knowledge of falsity or reckless disregard for the truth” to
win damages.
The court found that the credit rater couldn’t be held
liable for mere negligence, agreeing with S&P that it was
shielded by the First Amendment.
Sharma says rating companies shouldn’t be responsible when
investors misuse ratings.
“Hold us accountable for what you can,” he says. He
compares the rating companies to carmakers. “Look, if you drove
the car wrong, the manufacturer can’t be held negligent. But if
you designed the car wrong, then of course the manufacturer
should be held negligent.”
The bigger issue is whether the credit rating system should
be changed or even abolished. From California to New York to
Washington, investors and regulators are saying it doesn’t work.
No one has been able to fix it.

‘Like a Cancer’

The federal government created the rating cartel, and the
U.S. is as dependent on it as everyone else. So far, the
legislative branch hasn’t cleaned up the ratings mess.
“This problem really is like a cancer that has spread
throughout the entire investment system,” Partnoy says.
“You’ve got a body filled with little tumors, and you’ve got to
go through and find them and cut them out.”
As the U.S. has spent, lent or pledged about $12.8 trillion
in efforts to revive the slumping economy, and as President
Barack Obama and Congress have worked overtime to find a way out
of the deepest recession in 70 years, no one has taken steps
that would substantially fix a broken ratings system.
If the government doesn’t head in that direction, all of
its efforts at financial reform may be put in jeopardy by the
one piece of this puzzle that nobody has yet figured out how
to solve.

--With assistance from Shannon D. Harrington in New York.
Editor: Jonathan Neumann, Gail Roche


To contact the reporters on this story:
David Evans in Los Angeles at +1-323-782-4241 or
davidevans@bloomberg.net
Caroline Salas in New York at +1-212-617-2314 or
csalas1@bloomberg.net.

====================------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2009, Bloomberg, L. P.

I'll be posting a series of articles as I find them, with the intent of illuminating some of the background causes of this manufactured economic crisis.

I have NO access to any information of a privileged nature only a more direct interest in economics than I ever imagined I'd have, strange position for a hippie-at-heart.

-----------------------------

This is a bit of change happening now.

Pointing out problems with an accounting change which triggered the current ... erm ... problems.

----------------------------

http://www.riskcenter.com/story.php?id=18201

Location: New York
Author: Andrew Davidson
Date: Thursday, April 16, 2009
Thank you for the opportunity to comment on the proposed FASB Staff Position (FSP) amendment to FAS Statement 157, Fair Value Measurements. The intersection of quantitative financial modeling and financial reporting is an area of great concern to us and our clients. The following analysis presents a conceptual discussion of Fair Value accounting and a proposed modification of 157-e.

The Fair Value Dilemma

Fair Value accounting is built upon the ideas of efficient markets theory that prices reflect all available information about a security. Thus the value of a security is reflected in its price. In that framework, market price is the best measure of Fair Value.

FASB now faces the unfortunate circumstance where market prices do not seem to reflect the economic value of some securities. Market prices have dropped more for some securities than appears justified by loss expectations.

Accounting statements should provide stakeholders, and possibly others such as regulators, with the ability to assess the ongoing prospects of the subject firm. Changes in the expected performance of assets will alter those prospects. Normally, market prices would be the ideal measure to assess changes in expected performance of assets. Now however, the linkage between price and performance is not so clear, as market prices appear to reflect other factors. It seems that if firms use market prices to determine fair values, they falsely state the prospects of the firm. On the other hand, if firms use cash flow based values then they falsely state the values of their assets. And so FASB faces a dilemma.

In the current environment declines in market values reflect two factors. First, there has been a substantial deterioration in the likely cash flows of many financial instruments. Second, there has been a disproportional increase in the discount rate applied to those cash flows, as the discount rate also reflects the on-going deleveraging of the financial system.

For a firm that is forced to liquidate its assets the current gdistressedh market prices reflect its true economics. Even firms which may not liquidate but offer investors the opportunity to invest or sell at Net Asset Value, market prices are the best measure of value. Use of any other price would create inappropriate incentives.

For firms that have the ability and intent to retain assets that they acquired earlier, and can maintain financial leverage, the situation is more complex. The use of market prices might indicate that the firm has insufficient assets to meet its liabilities. Yet, a cash flow analysis would indicate that the firm has excess capital. Use of market prices creates the illusion that the firm has failed, while use of a cash flow based price, using historical discount rates, ignores the changing dynamics of the market and opportunity cost the firm faces.

A Liability Based Solution

One solution to the dilemma is to focus on the liability side of the balance sheet. If assets are deeply depressed in value because of higher discount rates, the value of the firmfs debt obligations are also likely depressed. Legacy liabilities at low interest rates create tremendous value on the balance sheet. This solution creates the odd situation that a firmfs liabilities are reduced in value well below the actual obligation. A liability based solution also creates issues when the source of value is a government guarantee that will allow the firm to continue borrowing at rates otherwise well below market in the future.

For example, suppose a bank issues a 12 month CD at 2.5%. Without government support the rate on that CD might be 10% or more. The bank could discount its liability by about 7% to reflect its funding advantage. Suppose the bank owns a three year asset with a coupon of 5% which is funded with the CD. Suppose the market rate on that asset is now 12%. The firm would need to mark the asset at a price of about 80 to reflect its market value. The firm would still show a mark to market loss of 13% on the net position. To fully reflect the value of the liability, the firm would need to show an additional reduction in liability costs of about 13% to reflect future liabilities that would benefit from the government guaranty.

An Asset Based Solution

As an alternative, it may make sense to allow the firm to value assets based upon its own cost of capital reflecting its liability mix and leverage. This is especially true if the institution has existing liabilities at below market rates or the access to borrowing because of government guarantees or other preferred access to debt markets. In such a case the firm would value its assets at discount rates reflective of its cost structure, rather than the cost structure of the marginal buyers of assets.

In such a world, each firm (or set of firms with similar circumstances) would have its own asset value. While this contradicts the idea of mark-to-market and it makes determination of value subjective, it does reflect the economic reality in the current environment. Implementation of these ideas will require linking assets and liabilities and require a reconsideration of current approaches to Fair Value accounting.

A Short Term Solution

In the interim, the following is a possible approach:

Limit the application of FSP FAS 157-e to assets where management can demonstrate that:

1. It does not have the intent to sell the security,

2. It is more likely than not that it will not have to sell the security,

3. It has access to liabilities to fund the asset at a lower rate than the discount rate used to value the security after adjusting for expected losses and imbedded option costs.

This approach should be limited to held to maturity and available for sale securities. It should not be available to entities which are subject to redemption or investment at Net Asset Value.

One benefit of this approach is that it provides greater guidance as to the appropriate discount rates to use to value securities in distressed markets. Another benefit is that this approach ties the use of cash flow based pricing to the analysis of other than temporary impairment (OTTI) and requires a positive statement as to the source of the value of the asset.

Fair Value accounting carries the promise of clearer presentation of the prospects of a firm.

While at times market values provide the best indications of Fair Value, in the current environment market values may distort a true picture of a firmfs viability. A complete analysis of the value of assets and liabilities in combination could resolve the dilemma of mark to market accounting. Such an analysis would need to take into account the value a firmfs existing liabilities and access to future liabilities at better than market rates. In the interim, allowing firms with access to preferred financing terms to value their assets based on liability costs may provide a method to resolve the current inconsistencies between fair value analysis and cash flow analysis.

-------------
If you made it through that and want more try this:
http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=77902

containing much that was in my blog and a great deal more....
--------------------------------------------------------

AIG weekly recap - history, bonuses, Congress and outrage

March 20, 2009 by Steve McGough
Filed under Featured
& available here: http://radioviceonline.com/aig-weekly-recap-history-bonuses-congress-and-outrage/


I certainly hope that this will not turn into a weekly feature, but the amount of news, sound bites, and heated rhetoric pouring in from every direction resulted in Jim and myself electing to take a knee for the past 48 hours when it comes to posting AIG articles.
That said, we’re slowly putting our toes back into the water and I’ve put together a recap for you to absorb this weekend. That way, you can get all fired up about it again on Monday morning.
History
AIG Financial Products (AIGFP) is a small division of AIG born in the late 1980s. The idea was to use AIGs strong credit rating and get involved with derivative trading - usually the purview of financial institutions - and make profits that would be split between AIG-proper and AIGFP. Even though derivative trades normally took years to pay out, AIGFP received profits up-front, with AIG holding most of the risk.
In the late 1990s, AIGFP got involved with credit default swaps (CDSs) by insuring the corporate debt of financial institutions like JP Morgan. AIGFP was hedging, treating the CDS business as they do other insurance lines of business. They bet that very few customers - like JP Morgan - would default on their corporate debt.
After AIGFP got rolling, the Republican Congress enacted, and President Clinton signed, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act into law in 2000, attached t0 - get this - another one of those huge omnibus budget bills that nobody seems to read. Not designed to weaken regulation, the act made the system more complex and opened doors to other ways of trading derivatives like credit default swaps.1
Many of the credit default swaps AIGFP made deals on included collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) with a high percentage of sub-prime mortgages. Yes, those sub-prime mortgages.
In March of 2005, AIGFP employee count had grown to about 400, and the New York attorney general was investigating AIG-proper’s accounting practices. Hank Greenberg, who ran AIG since the late 1960s was out, and the credit rating of the corporate giant was downgraded.
With their credit rating lower, and lots of the CDOs tied up in sub-prime mortgages, AIGFP was about to get squeezed - really hard - from both sides.
In late 2005, AIGFP pretty much got out of the CDS business due to the risk, but they could not undo the billions of CDOs already on the books.
With their credit rating lowered and the mortgage crisis hitting hard in late 2007, AIGFP was getting phone calls from investment firms like Goldman Sachs demanding billions to cover losses from mortgage-backed securities the AIG CDSs had insured.
The dominoes started to fall, AIGs credit rating declined, more phone calls came. Even when the writing was on the wall, AIGFP CEO Joseph Cassano and AIG CEO Martin Sullivan put on a consolidated front - the investments were solid.
AIG continued to loose billions. Cassano was gone by April 2008 and Sullivan by late June. A new CEO - Robert Willumstad formerly CEO at Allstate - was hired in June, but was gone by September and replaced by Edward Liddy when the government injected $85 billion in cash - with billions more to follow - to help save AIG while taking 80 percent ownership of the company.
It’s important to note that Liddy was called out of retirement by the new owners - the federal government - to guide AIG out of the mess it was in. His salary is one dollar per year.
In October, Gerry Pasciucco was brought in to lead AIGFP and try to figure out the tangled mess of derivatives with the remaining employees. I include his photo (right) just so readers can wonder about the Che T-shirt.
Retention bonuses
In early December, members of Congress knew about AIGs retention bonus program that seems to have been effective on Sept. 22, just after Liddy came in as CEO. The SEC knew about the retention bonus program by late September, within days - if not just before - the first $85 billion bailout.
The following is from a letter (PDF, 2KB) written on Dec. 1 from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the full PDF is courtesy Salon.com and an article by Glenn Greenwald on March 19. It indicates that the day after Liddy came to AIG, the retention bonus program was put into place.
There is no way Liddy put this program into place in eight business hours, it was planned by former CEO Sullivan or Willumstad.
Why pay retention bonuses and who are the employees getting them? There is much confusion about who is getting the retention bonus cash, but my speculation is employees who were managing AIGFP into the crisis are gone, and employees who were brought in to extract AIG from almost $2.7 trillion in exposure were asked to stay and offered retention bonuses.
From Hinderaker at Power Line, with my emphasis…
All of these payments, as to AIG’s troubled financial products division, are retention bonuses, not performance bonuses.
The money is not going to anyone responsible for the implosion of AIG–those people, who were in the credit default swap area, are gone.
These retention bonuses were promised to AIG employees who are responsible for winding down the company’s financial products division. At the beginning, this division had a potential exposure of $2.7 trillion. Winding down AIG’s book of business in this area was a dead-end job, and there was a great likelihood that the people responsible for the work, who knew the most about the products involved, would take jobs elsewhere.
In late 2007 or early 2008, AIG made a deal with these employees: if they would stay at AIG until specified conditions were met, i.e., either certain business was wound down or a given period of time had elapsed, they would receive a specified retention bonus.
As to all of the employees involved, they satisfied the terms of the bonus by wrapping up a portfolio for which they were responsible and/or staying on the job until now. As a result of the efforts of this group, AIG’s financial products exposure is down from $2.7 trillion to $1.6 trillion.
If you were one of the 400 employees in a dead-end job trying to untangle a $2.7 trillion dollar problem would you stick around? Those employees - with knowledge - could possibly take off without the retention bonus program. My interpretation was if they stayed for specified periods of time they would get a certain retention bonus. The longer they stayed, the greater the bonus. Yes, some may have stay only for a certain period of time, but they stayed long enough - per contract - to get a retention bonus that was paid last week.
Now, if you were still at AIG and trying to work out the remaining $1.6 trillion problem, would you stick around as AIG corporate security advises you how to protect yourself? Maybe you’d feel OK about a United States senator suggesting you commit suicide? Screw the $1.6 trillion, I might walk.
But Edward Liddy isn’t walking. During the theatrical presentation on the Hill the past couple of days, Liddy was crucified by some members of Congress who refuse to acknowledge that Liddy was brought in to clean up the mess after the fact. Liddy is a man who knew what was coming, walked in and took it like a professional. I’m not sure if he will succeed in leading AIG out of this mess, but for darn sure he knows that Congress doesn’t care one whit about him.
What happens to that $1.6 trillion if - let’s say - half of the employees quit? Just wondering…
The theatrics of outrage
Outrage this week comes from every American and politician froma coast to coast, but Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn. & Iowa) is getting the brunt of it. I actually feel bad for the guy since he’s so disliked everywhere. But I want Connecticut to have a glimmering shade of red in the future so I want him gone from office too.
Wyndeward recently commented…
Chris Dodd would appear to be being cast in the Lou Costello role — the hapless peanut-vendor who just doesn’t seem to “get” it, while Barack Obama, among others, takes the Bud Abbot role — the slick, smooth-talking manager who leads his hapless counter-part around the infield legislation, manipulating the senior senator from Connecticut to their own ends.
First Dodd said he knew nothing about the clause that protected the retention bonus program - big mistake - then he said he knew about it but it was not his idea and did not know why it was there. Then he said it was the Executive Branch and we finally learn that it was Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner who demanded the change.
Now Dodd has suggested - and Congress is already working on - a bill to selectively tax the AIG employees who received retention bonuses.
The big picture
Goodness, we’re talking about $165 million in bonuses paid out to employees and AIG has gotten $170 billion from the federal government since September. We’re talking about less than one-tenth of one percent here for the retention bonuses. This group of employees seem to have successfully negotiated AIG out of $1.1 trillion in exposure in the past seven or eight months.
Is this a Congressional diversion to take the eye of the people - and the media - off the real problem?
When we started bailout-palooza we went in for a few billion, and we’re now in for a few trillion.
Resources
Washington Post article from Dec. 2009 - part 1, 2 and 3
Did AIG explicity lie about its bonuses? (Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com)
Allah at Hot Air providing an update on the AIG bonus tax bill in the Senate.
Ed at Hot Air with video - Geitner knew about AIG retention bonuses March 3
Malkin’s syndicated column looks beyond the bonus smokescreen
Michelle also has the breakdown of Republicans who voted for the targeted AIG bonus tax
Allah’s got video of the theatrical outrage designed to keep the heat off Congress - where it really belongs
1700-plus words… I don’t think I spelled anything wrong…
Appendix
1 The act would again permit single stock futures contracts, allowing investors to treat stocks like commodities and resolving the disputes between the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) as to which regulating body would regulate the market.
As a side note, the act included language excluding energy commodity trading from regulation by the CFTC or the SEC. This allowed Enron to launch EnronOnline, their Web based commodity trading application that was the companies downfall. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) worked with Enron lobbyists to include the language in the omnibus bill.

Shine a bright light to see things clearly, and the recent public illumination has revealed a few things to me.

I don't live my life to impress others.

Things don't matter much to me, people do.

I am surrounded by beautiful amazing loving friends.

Thank you for making me laugh, giving me a place to run away to, keeping me too busy to worry, showing me the amazing things I didn't know I could do, letting me fall apart a bit, coming and playing at my parties... so much more.

Thank you all.