I’ve just read through last night’s conference call on J.P. Morgan’s purchase of Bear (ht Calculated Risk). Overall, I’ve many more questions than answers.

1. Sure, executives always talk up their deals. But really, this sounds like a fantastic coup for J.P. Morgan. They get Bear, which as a going concern was worth roughly $10B not long ago, for next to nothing. According to JPM execs, Bear was being candid when it insisted its books were fundamentally sound, and the crisis was just a liquidity issue. Much of the risk JPM might not have been comfortable with has been laid off on the Fed. jck at Alea notes that the markets, skittish about financials though they may be, have rewarded JPM with roughly $11B in excess market capitalization today. The market clearly views the deal as a windfall for J.P. Morgan. If a Fed-guaranteed Bear was a $10 billion bill just waiting for someone to pick up off the floor, why were there no so few bidders this weekend for the firm? Why was J.P. Morgan able to name its price? Alternatively, why didn’t the Fed itself purchase the firm for $2 a ticket and then negotiate at leisure a value-maximizing sale for the benefit of taxpayers?

2. Why were Bear’s shares worth $30 Friday at 4 p.m. and close to $0 by Saturday evening? (Charlie Gasparino announced on Saturday that the firm would likely file for bankruptcy if a deal wasn’t done over the weekend.) Pointing to rating agency downgrades isn’t helpful. S&P and Moody’s have clearly tempered their pace of downgrading the monoline insurers and some AAA structured credits in order to mitigate systemic risk. I think it implausible that they would have downgraded Bear so quickly without some consultations. After all, as of Friday, Bear was perfectly liquid (thanks to the Fed’s special credit line), and it’s overall position looks to have been pretty solid. Somehow, something happened over a period of 24 hours that changed Bear from a slightly tarnished name that yet sell itself for a decent price to an urgently distressed asset. I’ve yet to hear a convincing account of how that went down. (Lawyers have already been called to look into this, and JPM has set aside funds for litigation.)

3. The Fed is financing, and bearing the downside risk, on roughly $30B of Bear assets. About $20B of those are mortgage-backed securities, the rest are unaccounted for. Many of us — perhaps reasonably, perhaps hysterically — view Bear’s derivative portfolio rather than its mortgage-backed securities as the greatest concentration of risk. Is it possible (and I am asking here, I really don’t know!) that an “in-the-money” derivatives portfolio could be viewed as an asset, and pledged to the Fed? After all, synthetic credits include CDS positions, and we wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Fed accepts highly-rated synthetic bonds as collateral. Very specifically, is the Fed’s downside risk on the $30B it has financed limited to $30B (the Fed gets stuck with worthless assets), or has it assumed a role as a guarantor of assets that could become outright liabilities under adverse conditions? I do not think this is likely, it would be too radical, too weird. But it would be nice to have explicit assurance that the portfolio whose losses the Fed has taken responsibility for includes only “limited liability” securities.

4. In my previous post, I feared that Bear execs would use the threat of a destabilizing bankruptcy to try to extract an undue payout to shareholders. Now that the deal is done, and it is Bear shareholders who seem to be shafted, Andrew Clavell asks very pointedly why Bear did not use its bargaining power at least a bit more effectively. Why couldn’t Bear hold out for $4 per share instead of $2? Just how hard ball did J.P. Morgan and/or the Fed end up playing? Andrew points out that the option value of a share in bankrupt Bear might be more than the $2 consolation prize on offer. Why should Bear shareholders accept this deal (they must vote to approve it)? The possibility that Bear shareholders would not approve the deal was the risk Morgan executives seemed least capable of addressing during the conference call. They think shareholders will approve, but things will clearly get complicated if they don’t.

I want to reiterate, I think the outcome of all this is better than it could have been. I feel some sympathy for Bear stockholders, since fundamentally the firm may have been no less sound than its competitors. But managing liquidity risk was the Bear’s responsibility, and it failed to do so. From a “moral hazard” perspective, I’m glad an important player was allowed very publicly to fail. However, any salutary effect on incentives may be counterbalanced by the new funding facility for investment banks, which looks like a commitment by the Fed to bail-out any other firm in similar straits. I’m also a bit uncomfortable with J.P. Morgan’s windfall, which isn’t really a “market outcome”, and strikes me as a massive case of “private the gain, socialize the risk”.

I’m glad the Fed removed any incentive to try to bring down other firms via “bear raids”. But, as a correspondent of Yves Smith points out, investment banks may be safe, but hedge funds are suddenly vulnerable. I’d guess that the Fed is privately suggesting aggressive margin calls on hedge funds would be unwise right now. The Fed’s bully pulpit is in good shape, as a firm excluded from the Fed’s new liquidity facility would be one whisper campaign away from roadkill. The impaled carcass of a bear sits at the gate of Dr. Bernanke’s castle as a reminder to all of the price of being disliked.

Note: Since last week, interfluidity‘s readership has grown by an order of magnitude. Which, quite frankly, has me terrified. I wonder whether it’s still responsible to post some of my darker provocations. What follows has a very short shelf life, and may or may not capture what’s going on in the suddenly urgent quest to sell off Bear Stearns. It’s speculation and conjecture, but I think worth considering before anything rash is arranged.

On Friday, Alea’s jck pointed us to an SEC press release about Bear Stearns:

According to the information supplied to the SEC by Bear Stearns as of Tuesday, March 11, the holding company had a substantial capital cushion. In addition, as of March 11, the firm had over $17 billion in cash and unencumbered liquid assets.

Beginning on that day, however, and increasingly throughout the week, lenders and customers of Bear Stearns began to remove funds from the firm, despite its stable capital position. As a result, Bear Stearns’ excess liquidity rapidly eroded.

The title of jck’s post was “Bear Raid“.

That’s not just a pun on the troubled firm’s name. “Bear raid” is a term of art for a well-known, usually illegal, strategy. Suppose you know the positions of a heavily leveraged, capital-constrained player, and you’d like to have its assets on the cheap. Rather than trying to buy those assets, sell them short to drive down their prices. At the same time, start rumors that their current owner is insolvent. Soon the target starts getting margin calls it cannot meet, and is forced to liquidate its portfolio to satisfy creditors. This puts even more pressure on the already depressed prices of its holdings. Buy up the dying target’s portfolio, along with the assets you sold short, for a song. Ka-ching!

Cassandra offered some wonderful musings on this kind of strategy in connection with the now quaint Amaranth meltdown.

It’s unlikely that Bear’s little liquidity problem last week was anybody’s secret plot. There is quite enough spontaneous, organic panic in the market to explain how a teensy little rumor might spiral into a life-threatening crisis for a firm with an overstretched and uncertain balance sheet.

But, in light of the circumstances, I was troubled to read this CNBC story (via Calculated Risk):

The discussions indicate that potential bidders for Bear have been narrowed to [J.C. Flowers and JPMorgan Chase], although other last minute contenders could still weigh in… time has become a major issue for the investment bank… S&P lowered its long-term counterparty credit rating on Bear to “BBB” from “A,” and it placed long-and short term ratings on credit watch with negative implications… Because of that S&P downgrade, bankers have now come to the conclusion that a deal must be done by Monday morning because no one on the street will trade or lend to Bear Stearns, which is rated a notch above junk bond levels… If there’s no deal Bear Stearns will have to file for bankruptcy, executives said.

A quick sale, on its face, is an attractive option. It’s a “market solution”. Bear stockholders wouldn’t be completely wiped out, and Bear’s counterparties would be relieved to have a stronger player on the other side of their deals.

But a quick sale is likely to be a fire sale, and it’s impossible for a transaction of this complexity to be adequately vetted in 72 hours. With all the world trying to get a deal done, whoever “buys” Bear might end up getting the firm’s good assets cheaply without fully assuming Bear’s potentially unknowable liabilities. (Recall the uncertainty still surrounding Bank of America’s purchase of Countrywide.) In the very worst case, to make the crisis go away, the Fed might be asked to backstop some or all of Bear’s obligations while a “buyer” cherrypicks the assets.

Viewed as a one-shot affair, this might seem like the best that can be done in a bad situation. But, alas, there are always those unanticipated consequences to consider. Bear Stearns probably was not the victim of an intentional bear raid. But, set the right precedent and the next bank to fall very well could be.

Bear Stearns has already been nationalized all but in name. Executives hinting that the firm will file for bankruptcy unless an immediate sale is arranged are playing a game of chicken with the Federal Reserve, trying to get paid now for stock that may be much worse than worthless when all the books are tallied. They suppose they have leverage, since the Fed has made clear that an abrupt bankruptcy would be too harmful to permit (probably because of Bear’s role as a derivative counterparty, see Michael Shedlock).

Suppose that Monday morning, Ben Bernanke is presented with a deal, under which a buyer gets Bear assets on the cheap, Bear stockholders get paid out, and the Fed (implicitly or explicitly) bears residual risk. If the Fed doesn’t approve, executives say, Bear will file for bankruptcy. Dr. Bernanke will then have an unappetizing choice. He can say yes, and hope that there aren’t any more rumors out there about any other firms. Or he can say no, and make it very clear that if Bear Stearns files for bankruptcy despite the Fed’s continuing provision of liquidity, he will do everything in his power to hold Bear executives personally responsible for the crisis that results.

A man who by all accounts is a very nice guy may be forced to play some very hard ball.

Update: Very short shelf life indeed, Monday came on Sunday this week. So, what was the deal? Buyer (J. P. Morgan) does get Bear on the cheap. Bear stockholders get paid a token amount, but really next to nothing. The Fed does bear residual risk, both explicitly via a $30B “+/-” nonrecourse financing arrangement and implicitly since J.P Morgan is even too bigger to fail now. The most important bit, though, is here:

[T]he Federal Reserve Board voted unanimously to authorize the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to create a lending facility to improve the ability of primary dealers to provide financing to participants in securitization markets. This facility will be available for business on Monday, March 17. It will be in place for at least six months and may be extended as conditions warrant. Credit extended to primary dealers under this facility may be collateralized by a broad range of investment-grade debt securities. The interest rate charged on such credit will be the same as the primary credit rate, or discount rate, at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York [which is simultaneously reduced to 3.25%, or the Federal Funds Rate + 25 basis points].

You might call this the “anti-Bear-raid” provision. If this had been in force last week, Bear Stearns would still be a proud Wall Street titan, and we wouldn’t have heard a thing. This should be sufficient to head off a round of competitive consolidation by rumor and guile.

Overall, it looks like J.P. Morgan comes out a big winner, Bear stockholders are the losers, and Bernanke & Co. did better than they might have. If, as I speculated, the bankruptcy rumors were BSC execs playing chicken with the Fed, the Fed won. Whether JPM’s windfall was luck or craft, we may never know, but parsimony and good sportsmanship suggest we call it fortune, absent evidence to the contrary. At least this deal is makes some effort to think about incentives. An important player has finally been allowed to fail, and a set of perverse incentives was carefully eliminated. Still, this arrangement is very, very generous to everyone other than Bear. One was sacrificed that all might survive. (Was it karma, coincidence, or something else that the one firm that refused to participate in the LTCM bailout would be the only firm not bailed out during the Great Credit Crunch of 2008?)

It’s worth noting that the Fed has now committed yet more of its dwindling balance sheet to stabilization, and on easier terms than ever before. Keep a close watch on H.4.1. There’s no doubt that the Fed is taking on a lot of credit risk, and is providing a lifeline to other firms no more or less worthy of being made an example of than Bear.

A few puzzling details: The Fed has provided roughly $30B nonrecourse financing (meaning that the Fed absorbs the credit risk) for “largely mortgage-related” assets, but according the J.P. Morgan’s presentation of the deal (hat tip Calculated Risk), mortgage-related assets will account for only $20B. What’s the other 10B “+/-” about? No mention is made of Bear’s role as derivative counterparty, although “JPM will guarantee the trading obligations of BSC and its subsidiaries effective immediately”.

Perhaps some of this was discussed in this evening’s conference call. I haven’t had a chance yet to listen or read a transcript.

Update II: Yves Smith and Calculated Risk both point to signs that Lehman Brothers may be in trouble as well. Given the Fed’s new facility, if you think (as I do think) that the Fed would lend taking a 15% haircut from par on Monopoly money to prevent another major firm from falling, I have a hard time seeing Lehman going under.

Via the indefatigable Mark Thoma, our attention is drawn to an odd piece by Robert Skidelsky. I was left mostly bewildered by the article, but I was intrigued by the author’s discussion of the virtues that are and are not inculcated by market capitalism:

Consider character. It has often been claimed that capitalism rewards the qualities of self-restraint, hard-work, inventiveness, thrift, and prudence. On the other hand, it crowds out virtues that have no economic utility, like heroism, honor, generosity, and pity. (Heroism survives, in part, in the romanticized idea of the “heroic entrepreneur.”)

The problem is not just the moral inadequacy of the economic virtues, but their disappearance. Hard work and inventiveness are still rewarded, but self-restraint, thrift, and prudence surely started to vanish with the first credit card. In the affluent West, everyone borrows to consume as much as possible. America and Britain are drowning in debt.

One thing to remember is that there is no such thing as “capitalism”. In the real world, there are actual practices and institutions, the details of which bear consequentially on both moral and economic outcomes. There are infinity of possible capitalisms, and at any given moment we are living just one. A stylized graph of supply and demand always hides more than it reveals.

The capitalism we are living right now is rather a nightmare, due to a credit, um, event. So it seems a propos to remember that credit analysis traditionally includes an explicitly moral component. Remember the “5 Cs of Credit“? Character, capacity, capital, collateral, and conditions. Character.

Here’s a famous bit of financial history, as recounted by Jean Strouse in the New York Times:

Asked by the lawyer for a congressional investigating committee in 1912 whether bankers issued commercial credit only to people who already had money or property, [J. P. Morgan] said, “No sir; the first thing is character.” The skeptical lawyer repeated his question and Morgan, in Victorian terminology, elaborated on his answer — “because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”

If you think Morgan, the arch plutocrat, was just telling a nice sounding, self-serving lie, think again. Think about a world in which there was no SEC, FDIC, or Federal Reserve; in which there was no technology sufficient to prevent a person from simply disappearing, changing his name, starting over somewhere else. Morgan invested vast sums, and though he was a powerful man, he could always be taken. When parting with a dollar, he could not be so lazy as to presume a courtroom would ensure its repayment. Morgan had to trust.

Since Morgan’s day, in pursuit of efficiency and safety, we’ve built up institutions designed to automate and certify the evaluation of character. When we lend money, we don’t ask to meet the person who promises to repay us. We look for a nod by a regulator, the AAA brand provided by S&P or Moody’s or Fitch, perhaps a FICO score. But those are not markers of character at all. We don’t take them to be. We understand that banks engage in regulatory arbitrage, finding ways to stretch their balance sheet as far as possible for yield despite whatever regulatory regime is in place. We know that credit issuers (and bond insurers) do what they need to and no more for their rating, that perfectly dishonorable individuals attend to their FICO scores to maintain access to credit. Actual character is completely washed out of these proxies. The capitalism we have is one that presumes that all actors are sharks, that business is business, and that it is irrational to take any less than you can get away with unless you will “incur costs” from decertification. I’m not sure that J.P. Morgan would be willing to lend to any of us, and it’s not because we’re worse people. We just live in different times, a different world.

We shouldn’t go back to the world as it was at the turn of the century. When character evaluation was a personal exercise, it necessarily depended upon social connections, whether someone you know and trust can vouch for someone you don’t yet know, whether you can be sure that disgrace and dishonor would be costly. And we definitely should not adopt a moralistic attitude towards debt nonrepayment right now, just when a throng of irresponsible lenders are demanding “responsibility” from borrowers whose calls they would not even take a year ago. (For the record, I think that “jingle mail” is perfectly acceptable under present circumstances, and that the recent “bankruptcy reform” was a cruel mistake.)

But I do think that it’s an interesting technical question, going forward, whether we couldn’t set things up so that the criteria by which investors decide where to put their money map more closely to what we would recognize as trustworthiness or character. “Abolish the SEC and the Fed and the ratings agencies!” is not a sufficient proposal. Crises due to misplaced trust long predate those institutions, and are a large part of why they came to be in the first place. Morgan was successful not because he did what everybody did, but because he did what almost nobody did, despite the lack of ratings by S&P to stand-in for due diligence. Investors have always been hopeful and lazy in good times.

T.S. Eliot once wrote, “It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.” Perhaps the art is to come up with a system, however imperfect, under which being good is the best way to succeed.

When the TAF program was first announced, it was billed as a temporary facility. The announcement was in December, and some suggested it was intended to help banks meet end-of-year balance sheet needs. Four auctions were announced, two auctions of 20B in December, and two January auctions for an amounts that has not yet determined. An important question at the time was what would happen 28 days later, when loans made via two December auctions expired. Would the amounts of the January auctions be the same as the December auctions, effectively rolling over the TAF loans (not necessarily to individual borrowers, but to the consolidated banking system)? Would the January loans be smaller, indicating a gradual phase-out consistent the temporary nature of the program? Or would the loans be expanded, suggesting an ongoing intervention of indeterminate scale? Since then, the size of the program has more than doubled, and the Fed has announced explicitly that it intends to continue the program “for as long as necessary to address elevated pressures in short-term funding markets”.

In the past few days, the Fed has announced two new programs, and again, we are left to wonder what happens 28 days later. This weekend, I argued that since the Fed cannot retire loans made via TAF and its repo program without adding to those “elevated pressures”, the loans should be considered an equity infusion, because they’ll be repaid at the convenience of the borrower rather than on a schedule agreed with the lender. Does the same argument apply to the new Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)? On face, it’s harder to view TSLF as an equity infusion, since the Fed is giving no one any cash. (In fact, the Fed will withdraw some cash as interest.). Eyes unprotected by green shades will glaze over at descriptions of a kind of asset swap, where some obscure assets are “pledged” to the Fed while other boring securities are lent to firms.

But to firms holding illiquid securities that the Fed is accepting as collateral, the program is equivalent to a not-so-efficient cash infusion, because the Treasuries the Fed is lending are liquid and can be converted to cash easily in private markets. From a cash-strapped firm’s perspective, borrowing a treasury, then borrowing cash against that Treasury in ordinary repo markets, is equivalent to borrowing cash directly from the Fed, except that there’ll be an extra middleman to pay. So, this new facility might well be a form of equity, if the Fed is willing to roll it over indefinitely and require payment only at the convenience of borrowers. We’ll have to wait and see what happens, 28 days later.

As a sidenote on the debt vs equity question, Yves Smith points out that S&P and Moody’s have not cut the AAA ratings of many securities that no longer meet their usual guidelines for that rating. TSLF specifically allows the pledging of “non-agency AAA/Aaa-rated private-label residential MBS” as collateral. (Only Treasuries, agencies, and agency MBS can be pledged for the Fed’s repo program. Non AAA debt can be accepted as TAF collateral, at the discretion of the Fed and at reduced valuations. Fed discount window guidelines apply.) To the extent Fed loans (in cash or securities) are genuinely overcollateralized, they are more “debt-like”, as equity is “risk capital” and the Fed bears little risk of nonrepayment. To the extent that the true value of the collateral is less than the value of the loans, either initially or due to decay over time without new collateral being posted, the facilities appear more like equity.

Update: Yves Smith and Barry Ritholtz both question the quality of TSLF collateral. Barry Ritholtz also tries to quantify the proportion of AAA MBS whose ratings might be questionable, but his analysis is based on the ABX indices, which jck at Alea warns us may not be a fair sample.

There’s been some good conversation in the comments. I thought I’d pull out a few of my favorite bits.

The Fed’s Balance Sheet Constraint

jh writes…

The interesting point that no one has commented on is the existence of a Fed balance sheet constraint on limits to the outstanding TAF.

The Fed is limited by the size of the liability side. It doesn’t ‘force feed’ currency note into the system beyond the demand of the banks and the public for currency. And it has no room to expand bank reserve balances in aggregate of it wants to maintain control over the level of the funds rate. That’s why it’s ‘sterilizing’ now.

So the upper limit to TAF is essentially the size of the Fed balance sheet now, allowing for natural growth in currency demands of the banks and the public.

Beyond that, the Fed couldn’t ‘sterilize’ by selling other assets. It would have to start issuing its own liabilities, such as the sterilization bonds issued by the PBOC used to offset their foreign exchange purchases.

Looking at the March 6 Factors Affecting Reserve Balances, in addition to the already announced TAF and repo programs, the Fed could initiate somewhere between $500 and $600B more in “sterilized interventions” (as Paul Krugman first pointed out these are) before it would have to issue bonds rather than selling existing assets.

There’s more discussion of this point over at Brad Setser’s (in the comments section).

Update: The Fed announced this morning that it will use up $200B more of that capacity via a “Term Securities Lending Facility“. After the FAF expansion, repo program, and TSLF, the Fed will have between $300B and $400B in remaining sterilization capacity, unless it issues bonds directly. Paul Krugman, John Jansen, jck at Alea, Yves Smith, Michael Shedlock, Free Exchange, Justin Fox, Zero Beta (and see this!) comment.

Why the special repo program?

Why did the Fed announced the new repo program rather than just more dramatically expand TAF?

livingston guy offers an explanation:

The new repo line… is nothing more than the TAF for the brokers who dont have access to the TAF. Essentially, a Merrill wants to have the same access to liquidity as JPMorgan but doesn’t have it in the current framework of TAF which is only available to depositories. The new repo line just makes the same facility available to Merrill.

So the repo program can be looked at as a partial implementation of what Thomas Palley suggests. (In a pinch, apparently the Fed can lend directly to whomever it deems necessary, but that power has never been used. See David Wessel, “Analysts: Rate Cuts May Not Be Enough“, ht Mark Thoma.)

Update: Livingston Guy wrote on Sunday, and was referring to the expanded repo program announced Friday, not the TSLF program announced Tuesday. However, both the expanded repo program and TSLF are available to primary dealers, whereas TAF is accessible only to depository institutions.

The /Price Spiral

Len writes…

[Regarding] a widely held misconception; namely that “inflation is the debtors friend”. That IS kind of the way it worked during the Carter inflation as unions, now largely powerless due globalization, were largely able negotiate wage hikes rapidly enough to stay more or less even with inflation, creating the famous wage/price spiral which made debt an ever shrinking entity to the detriment of lenders. Nowadays we have just the /price part of that spiral, wages have been flat to negative in real terms for years. Without a means of increasing his income along with the inflating currency, the debtors debts in fact, instead of looking smaller, look ever larger as his required spending for necessities crowds out available funds for debt service, hastening insolvency.

Compare to a recent speech by Janet Yellen, President of the San Francisco Fed (via WSJ Real Time Economics):

Even so, I expect both total and core inflation to moderate over the next few years… This… assumes that inflation expectations will remain well-anchored, as they have been, and also that workers will not through their bargaining offset the real losses resulting from higher food and energy prices.

Things look different if you’re a central banker.

Felix Salmon points us to a column by Mark Hulbert in today’s New York Times. Hulbert reports on Kenneth French‘s effort to quantify the “cost” of active investing, and reports a headline figure of $100B. Felix pulls an excerpt from Warren Buffet’s recent 2007 shareholder letter that serves a great way to frame the issue:

Naturally, everyone expects to be above average. And those helpers – bless their hearts – will certainly encourage their clients in this belief. But, as a class, the helper-aided group must be below average. The reason is simple: 1) Investors, overall, will necessarily earn an average return, minus costs they incur; 2) Passive and index investors, through their very inactivity, will earn that average minus costs that are very low; 3) With that group earning average returns, so must the remaining group – the active investors. But this group will incur high transaction, management, and advisory costs. Therefore, the active investors will have their returns diminished by a far greater percentage than will their inactive brethren. That means that the passive group – the “know-nothings” – must win.

Buffet, as always, writes charmingly, and the logic here is unassailable. But there’s a subtle point lost in this analysis. Sure, active investors as a class must earn less than passive investors as a class, if passive investors make the same investments in aggregate and pay lower fees. But it does not the follow that active investors, as a class, would have done better had they been passive investors. Why not? Because investors as a whole, including passive investors, would have earned poorer returns without smart active investors setting market prices. If active investors, as a class, accepted the logic that investment expenditures are just costs, all would become passive investors, and the composition of the aggregate portfolio would reflect nothing but noise. My conjecture is that this would impact long-term returns, adversely.

So active investors, as a class, do better than they otherwise would have by bearing the high cost of active investment, even though in doing so they must endure the indignity of being outperformed on average by those who free-ride off their work! It is perverse, under these circumstances, to accuse active investors of squandering $100B, and recommend that we all move to index funds. On the contrary, it is passive investors who ought be discouraged. Passive investors pay none of the costs of generating good investment decisions, but enjoy the benefits by free-riding on the work of others. Their copycatting reduces compensation to those who have earned returns by performing or underwriting informational work. Passive investing also introduces feedback effects and noise into asset prices, rendering the work of active investors more costly and less effective. (See, e.g. information cascades — ht Mark Thoma — and this interesting model of bubbles and crashes — ht jck of Alea — for ways that copying others’ investment decisions as reflected in price moves can lead to instability and error in markets.)

The world of money management is full of shysters and charlatans who’ll take “active investment” fees and do nothing useful with them, sure. But part of that headline $100B “cost” funds real information work, without which markets would devolve entirely to lotteries. Advising people to buy index funds rather than select investments is akin to advising people not to vote, since the cost of voting far exceeds any individual benefit. Those who don’t vote get the same government everyone else does, but at lower cost! A citizenry that takes this reasoning to its logical extreme will get the government it deserves. An investor class that flocks to index funds may soon have the stock market it deserves.

Note: I haven’t seen French’s working paper, which might well have some discussion of these issues.

The Fed announced that it would auction off $100B in loans this month rather than the previously announced $60B via its TAF facility. In the same press release, the FRB announced plans to offer $100B worth of 28 day loans via repurchase agreements against “any of the types of securities — Treasury, agency debt, or agency mortgage-backed securities — that are eligible as collateral in conventional open market operations”.

The second announcement puzzled me. After all, the Fed conducts uses repos routinely in the open market operations by which they try to hold the interbank lending rate to the Federal Funds target. In aggregate, the quantity of funds that the Fed makes available is constrained by the Fed Funds target. So, what do we learn from this? Fortunately, the New York Fed provides more details:

The Federal Reserve has announced that the Open Market Trading Desk will conduct a series of term repurchase (RP) transactions that are expected to cumulate to $100 billion outstanding… These transactions will be conducted as 28-day term RP agreements.. When the Desk arranges its conventional RPs, it accepts propositions from dealers in three collateral “tranches.” In the first tranche, dealers may pledge only Treasury securities. In the second tranche, dealers have the option to pledge federal agency debt in addition to Treasury securities. In the third tranche, dealers have the option to pledge mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies in addition to federal agency debt or Treasury securities. With the special “single-tranche” RPs announced today, dealers have the option to pledge either mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies, federal agency debt, or Treasury securities. The Desk has arranged single-tranche transactions from time to time in the past.

There are a couple of differences, then, between this new program and typical repo operations:

1. The loans are of a longer-term than usual. Ordinarily, the Fed lends on terms ranging from overnight to two weeks in its “temporary open market operations”. The Fed will now offer substantial funding on a 28 day term.
2. The Fed is effectively broadening its collateral requirements by collapsing what are usually 3 distinct levels of collateral which are lent against at different rates to a single category within which no distinctions are made.

The Fed offered the first $15B of repo loans under the program today, so we can see how things are going to work. First, how did the Fed square the circle of ramping up its repos without pushing down the Federal Funds rate? Just as it had done with TAF, the Fed offset the “temporary” injection of funds with a “permanent open market operation”. The Fed sold outright $10B of Treasury securities today at the same time as it offered $15B in exchange for mortgage-backed securities under the new program (at a low interest rate than in traditional repos against MBS collateral). The net cash injection was small, but the composition of securities on bank balance sheets changed markedly, as illiquid securities were exchanged for liquid Treasuries.

In James Hamilton’s wonderful coinage, the Fed is conducting monetary policy on the asset side of the balance sheet. This is an innovation of the Bernanke Fed. Conventionally, monetary policy is about managing the quantity of the central bank’s core liability, currency outstanding. When the Fed wants to loosen, it expands its liabilities by issuing cash in exchange for securities. When it wants to tighten, it redeems cash for securities, reducing Fed liabilities. The asset side is conventionally an afterthought, “government securities”. But the Bernanke Fed has branched out. It has sought to lend against a wide-range of assets, actively seeking to replace securities about which the market seems spooked with safe-haven Treasuries on bank balance sheets without creating new cash. By doing this, the Fed hopes to square the circle of helping banks through their “liquidity crisis” without provoking a broad inflation.

“Monetary policy on the asset side of the balance sheet” is a bit too anodyne a description of what’s going on here though. The Fed has gotten into an entirely new line of business, and on a massive scale. Prior to the introduction of TAF, direct loans from the Fed to banks, including the discount window lending and repos, amounted to less than $40B, the majority of which were repos collateralized by Treasury securities. By the end of this month, the Federal Reserve will have more than $200B of exposure in its new role as Wall Street’s genial pawnbroker. Assuming the liability side of the Fed’s balance sheet is held roughly constant, more than a fifth of the Fed’s balance sheet will be direct loans to banks, almost certainly against collateral not backed by the full faith and credit of the US government (and beyond that we just don’t know). This raises a whole host of issues.

Caroline Baum wrote a column last week poopooing concerns about the Fed taking on credit risk via TAF lending. (Hat tip Mark Thoma.) I usually enjoy Baum’s work, but this column was poorly argued. In it, she points out that the Fed has all the tools it needs to manage credit risk. The Fed offers loans only against collateral, and requires that loans be overcollateralized. If the collateral has no clear market value or if there are questions about an asset’s quality, the Fed has complete discretion to force a “haircut”, writing down the asset (for the purpose of the loan) to whatever value it sees fit. And the Fed can always just say no to any collateral it deems sketchy.

All of that is quite true, and (as Baum snarkily points out) not hard to find on FRB websites. But it fails to address the core issue. Sure the Fed has all the tools it needs to manage credit risk. But does it have the will to use those tools? In word and deed, the Fed’s primary concern since August has been to “restore normal functioning” to financial markets. The Fed has chosen to accept some inflation risk in its fight against macroeconomic meltdown. Why wouldn’t it knowingly accept some credit risk as well? No one has suggested that the Fed is being “snookered”. Skeptics think the Fed is intentionally taking on bank credit risk while still lending at very low rates. Some of us find that troubling.

Which brings us to the more postmodern issue of what credit risk even means to a lender with unlimited cash and an overt unwillingness to let those it lends to default. In a way, I agree with Baum. Until the current crisis is long past, I think it unlikely that any large bank will default and stiff the Fed with toxic collateral. Why not? Because for that to happen, the Fed would have to pull the trigger itself, by demanding payment on loans rather than offering to roll them over. Since TAF started last fall, on net, the Fed has not only rolled over its loans to the banking system, but has periodically increased banks’ line of credit as well. In an echo of the housing bubble, there’s no such thing as a bad loan as long as borrowers can always refinance to cover the last one.

The distinction between debt and equity is much murkier than many people like to believe. Arguably, debt whose timely repayment cannot be enforced should be viewed as equity. (Financial statement analysts perform this sort of reclassification all the time in order to try to tease the true condition of firms out of accounting statements.) If you think, as I do, that the Fed would not force repayment as long as doing so would create hardship for important borrowers, then perhaps these “term loans” are best viewed not as debt, but as very cheap preferred equity.

Let’s go with that for a minute, and think about the implications. One much discussed story of the current crisis is the role of sovereign wealth funds in helping to capitalize struggling banks. Will they, won’t they, should we worry? Sovereign wealth funds have invested about $24B in struggling US financials. Meanwhile, the Fed is quietly providing eight times that on much easier terms.

If we view TAF and the new 28-day, broad-collateral repos as equity, what fraction of bank capitalization would they represent? I haven’t been able to find current numbers on aggregate bank capitalization in the US. In June of 2006, the accounting net worth of U.S. Commercial Banks, Thrift Institutions and Credit Unions was 1.25 trillion dollars. Putting together remarks by Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and data on bank equity to total assets from the St. Louis Fed yields a more recent estimate of about 1.6 trillion. The average price to book among the top ten US banks is about 1.3. So, a reasonable estimate for the current market value of bank equity is 2 trillion dollars. The $200B in “equity” the Fed will have supplied by the end of March will leave the Federal Reserve owning roughly 9.1% of the total bank equity. Obviously, the Fed isn’t investing in the entire bank sector uniformly. Some banks will be very substantially “owned” by the central bank, whereas others will remain entirely private sector entities. As Dean Baker points out, the Fed is giving us no information by which to tell which is which.

What we are witnessing is an incremental, partial nationalization of the US banking system. Northern Rock in the UK is peanuts compared to what the New York Fed is up to.

You may object, and I’m sure many of you will, that our little thought experiment is bunk, debt is debt and equity is equity, these are 28-day loans, and that’s that. But notionally collateralized “term” loans that won’t ever be redeemed unless and until it is convenient for borrowers are an odd sort of liability. Central banks are very familiar with the ruse of disguising equity as liability. Currency itself is formally a liability of the central bank, but in every meaningful sense fiat money is closer to equity.

I do not, by the way, object to nationalizing failing banks. There are (unfortunately) banks that are “too big to fail”, whose abrupt disappearance could cause widespread disruption and harm. These should be nationalized when they fall to the brink. But they should be nationalized overtly, their equity written to zero, and their executives shamed. That sounds harsh. It is harsh. One hates to see bad things happen to nice people, and these are mostly nice people. But running institutions with trillion-dollar balance sheets is a serious business. Accountability matters. These people were not stupid. They knew, in Chuck Prince’s now infamous words, that “when the music stops… things will be complicated.“, and they kept dancing anyway.

But accountability has gone out of style. The Federal Reserve is injecting equity into failing banks while calling it debt. Citibank is paying 11% to Abu Dhabi for ADIA’s small preferred equity stake, while the US Fed gets under 3% now for the “collateralized 28-day loans” it makes to Citi. Pace Accrued Interest (whom I much admire), I still think this all amounts to a gigantic bail-out. And that it is a brilliantly bad idea from which financial capitalism may have a hard time recovering. Like a well-meaning surgeon slicing up arteries to salvage the appendix, the Federal Reserve is only trying to help.

Update: Many thanks to commenter Fullcarry, who noticed that I flipped the sign on Friday’s permanent market op. Changed “purchased outright” to “sold outright”, since that’s what the Fed actually did.

Note: Reading through, this post is unintentionally reminiscent of a much better column by Brad DeLong.

Yesterday I was flabbergasted by a small thing. I came upon this article on Morningstar. The piece, targeted towards potential investors, was called Munis Today: Lots of Yield, without All the Risk. It was chirpishly positive about munis and municipal bonds funds. You might think, given current circumstances, that there’d be some discussion of the monoline insurance crisis and the auction rate securities lockup. Here’s what there is:

By contrast [to corporate bonds], it’s a safe bet that in 10 years, the commonwealth of Virginia–which Fitch rates AAA–will still be free to collect taxes to meet debt and principal payments on general-obligation bonds maturing in June 2018. And across the nation, munis are often insured (the issuer buys default insurance from a handful of AAA rated insurance agencies) or prerefunded (meaning they’re backed by U.S. Treasuries). In fact, according to S&P data, about 67% of munis rated BBB or higher fall into one of these two categories.

As analyst David Kathman wrote in this recent article, bond insurers’ recent issues have thus far weighed primarily (though not exclusively) on the equity funds that own these insurers’ stocks, rather than on the municipal bonds they insure.

Morningstar is a big name. In their own words, “Morningstar is a trusted source for insightful information… Our ‘investors come first’ approach to our business has led to a strong reputation for independence and objectivity.” Really. You’d never know from this piece that several of that “handful of AAA rated insurance companies” have already had their ratings downgraded, that the entire sophisticated financial community is breathlessly fixated by the drama surrounding the rest, that those “AAA” firms have to pay worse-than-junk-bond rates on their own debt issues, and that for months insured bonds as a class have been losing value relative to “natural” AAA munis, approaching the value of comparable debt with no insurance at all. Still, I suppose it’s true that the “recent issues” have “weighed primarily (though not exclusively)” on bond insurer equity, as monoline shares have lost roughly 80% of their value since September, and insured munis have not. The author is misleading without quite lying.

That’s from Morningstar, a firm whose sole raison d’etre is to provide independent advice to investors. We’ve had the rating agencies taking huge fees and slapping their AAA gold standards on complex, untested products that quickly collapsed. We’ve had household names like Citi in trouble for off-balance sheet schemes eerily reminiscent of the Enron scandal. Now tell me, is it any wonder we have a credit crisis? Who would you trust?

The word “credit” comes from the Latin for faith or belief. A “credit crisis” is nothing more or less than a widespread loss of confidence in people or institutions whom we were accustomed to considering trustworthy. This is obvious, but it has implications. Right off, one can imagine two sorts of credit crises. The first, which we’ll call a “panic”, refers to an unreasonable loss of confidence in people or institutions that are fundamentally sound. The second we’ll call a “reckoning”. A reckoning occurs when there is widespread recognition that institutions heretofore deemed reliable are, in fact, not.

The policy implications of these two sorts of crisis are diametrically opposed. In a panic, government liquidity supports and even well-designed “bailouts” are entirely appropriate. When panic subsides, “mark-to-market” losses reverse, and liquidity supports can be removed. “Bailouts” end up costing taxpayers very little, and perhaps even turn a profit for the fisc, as government guarantees expire unused while taxpayers gain from appreciation of assets purchased by the government at a discount.

But in a reckoning, bailouts are dangerous. “Temporary” liquidity supports turn permanent, government guarantees crystallize into taxpayer liabilities, and assets purchased by government continue to lose value. As real wealth is channeled, either via taxation or inflation, from the population generally to the original cohort of unreliable actors, government itself becomes another institution which people reasonably come to consider untrustworthy. In a reckoning, better policy is to let institutions fail. If there are institutions that are too big to fail, they should be allowed to the brink and then nationalized, with equityholders wiped out and other obligations only selectively honored, in order to minimize external costs to the public rather than to satisfy unwise counterparties. (Obviously, this sort of discretion is a magnet for corruption. But paying off all claimants from public funds is corruption by default, and terrible precedent to boot. A reckoning is a bad situation in which quality of government matters, a lot.)

In a reckoning, the overriding policy goal ought not be to restore faith in discredited institutions, but to place firewalls between them and anything worth saving, and, most importantly, to encourage the formation of new institutions worthy of the public’s trust. That’s not as easy as cutting checks to incumbents, and it’s not a matter of “more” vs. “less” regulation. Building a better financial system from the ashes of a broken one is a project for which there are no cut-out recipes, whose inputs cannot be tallied as one-dimensional quantities, and whose results might look different from what we are accustomed to. But it’s not an impossible task, and it may well be unavoidable. A friend of mine, a pilot among other things, once related me the advice of his flying instructor: “The plane is going to land. The only question is whether you are still going to be flying it when it does.” In a reckoning, that’s advice that governments ought take to heart.

Which kind of credit crisis is the current one, a panic or a reckoning? Is the American economy, the US financial system “fundamentally sound”? Is Wall Street, with its current regulatory and institutional structure, worthy of the investors’ trust and simply going through a rough patch? Or has the financial sector failed in a deeper way, either because of uncontrolled “agency costs”, or because it is unable to fulfill its core mission, directing capital to opportunities whose long-term return is sufficient to provide both investors and financiers adequate compensation? What do you think?

Generally speaking, the Ben-Stein-o-sphere is one corner of the financial internet from which I’m delighted to absent myself. Yves Smith is more courageous than I am in that regard, and while strolling the mean streets, he offers the following conjecture:

It is one thing to move the prices of single securities, quite another to move entire markets, particularly ones as big as the global equity markets and the US credit markets. We must have a simply staggering number of traders all conspiring together.

That’s a perfectly commonsensical thing to say. But is it true? I don’t know, but I think it’s a fascinating question. Here’s the pro and con as I see it:

Pro: By analogy with price impact behavior on individual securities, market indices should be well-nigh impossible to move. Generally speaking, the price impact of transactions is inversely related to the dollar trading volume of the traded issue and positively related to its volatility. It’s much easier to move a thinly traded small-cap whose value has recently ranged all over the map than to move, say GE. Broad indices are by definition diversified (which reduces volatility), and the dollar trading volume of index components is gargantuan. Ergo, it should be very difficult to move indices.

Con: Perhaps the analogy between indices and issues is misleading. Indices can be traded as though they were single issues, via ETFs and futures, for example. But the market for such instruments is fragmented, and trading in any one is orders of magnitude thinner than the volume of the overall market it mimcs. An ETF or index future would be hard to move not so much by virtue of its own depth, but because it is bound by arbitrage to the price of the market as a whole. But the market as a whole has a great many degrees of freedom, and many stocks whose “true” values are uncertain. If one wants to materially move the price of a single issue, one probably has to push against “informed valuation” by investors who specialize in the stock’s industry and are willing to take bets on relative pricing. But if one pushes against a whole index, arbitrage constraints can be resolved my moving many stocks only slightly, each issue remaining within the bounds of what would be considered noise by those who might trade a deeper mispricing. There’s an elegance to this approach, in that the market itself determines an optimal path to resolve the disconnect created by the manipulator. Stocks for which there is a great deal of valuation uncertainty would move more than those whose prospects are clear, and the market manipulator avoids the transaction costs of trading these tens or hundreds of relatively illiquid issues herself. (Price-weighted or equal-weighted indices would be more vulnerable than value-weighted indices to this sort of attack, as smaller / less liquid / more volatile stocks have disproportionate sway.)

That’s a nice theory, but would it work? I have no idea. If anyone out there has any insight into the question, hypothetically speaking of course, please do comment. It is frequently suggested that, while individual stock prices may be manipulable in the short-term, broad markets are immune. Is that right?

Felix Salmon writes, regarding this morning’s heroic 75 bp rate cut:

Does this mean that all the talk of “Helicopter Ben” and the “Bernanke put” was justified all along? Well, yes… There’s one reason and one reason only that the Fed took this move, and it’s the plunge in global stock markets on Monday, along with indications that the US markets were set to follow suit…. [T]his action smells a bit like panic to me, and it might also have prevented the kind of stomach-lurching selling which could conceivably have marked a market bottom. I have to say I don’t like it.

James Hamiltion responds:

I doubt very much that anyone on the FOMC has much interest in protecting the investments of stock market participants. Instead, I suspect that the Fed is using equity prices just as I and many other economic analysts do, namely, as a useful aggregator of private and public information about near-term prospects for economic growth. All the recent indicators have suggested a significant deterioration of real economic activity over the last two months. I take the global stock market sell-off as one more confirmation of that assessment, and new information about the global scope of the problems we face.

Hamiltion’s interpretation is charitable, too charitable to fit the evidence. If the Fed were only using world equity prices as an indicator, and were not specifically concerned with altering US stock market outcomes on this day, Tuesday, January 22, 2007, they would not have scrambled over a holiday weekend, perhaps over a single long night, to put together a virtual FOMC meeting prior to market open on a cold, tired winter morning. Nor is this the first time the Bernanke Fed has behaved this way. By my count this is the third unexpected pre-market announcement issued by the Bernanke Fed following indications of turmoil in equity markets. [1]

Let’s recall what William Poole, President of FRB St Louis (and, interestingly, the only dissenter to this morning’s move) said in November, 2007 about the “Fed put”:

I can state my conclusion compactly: There is a sense in which a Fed put does exist. However, those who believe that the Fed put reflects unwise monetary policy misunderstand the responsibilities of a central bank. The basic argument is very simple: A monetary policy that stabilizes the price level and the real economy cannot create moral hazard because there is no hazard, moral or otherwise. Nor does monetary policy action designed to prevent a financial upset from cascading into financial crisis create moral hazard. Finally, the notion that the Fed responds to stock market declines per se, independent of the relationship of such declines to achievement of the Fed’s dual mandate in the Federal Reserve Act, is not supported by evidence from decades of monetary history.

Poole is quite clear that he believes it is within the Fed’s mandate to use monetary policy “to prevent a financial upset from cascading into financial crisis”. That’s a plausible view of what the Fed is after with its surprise, early morning interventions.

Poole goes on to say…

From time to time, to be sure, Fed action to stabilize the economy—to cushion recession or deal with a systemic financial crisis—will have the effect of pushing up stock prices. That effect is part of the transmission mechanism through which monetary policy affects the economy. However, it is a fundamental misreading of monetary policy to believe that the stock market per se is an objective of policy. It is also a mistake to believe that a policy action that is desirable to help stabilize the economy should not be taken because it will also tend to increase stock prices.

Reviewing these two snippets reveals what I think are fatal tensions in the Fed’s practice of asymmetric macroeconomic stabilization (stimulate busts but never prejudge a boom a bubble). Poole is at pains, throughout his talk (whose theme is moral hazard) to claim that stabilization policy uses the stock market as a instrument of policy, but that this does not imply that the stock market can use the FRB as a backstop or guarantee. In the question of who’s using who, Poole wants to make it clear that the FRB is the boss. But, if the Fed must intervene to prevent “panics”, it has placed itself in the role of a parent habitually blackmailed by a self-destructive adolescent. “If you don’t give me what I want want Mommy, I’ll cut myself and maybe I’ll die!” As too many parents know, it’s a bad situation, precisely because the threat of harm can be credible. One can’t condemn a parent for capitulating in any particular squabble. But, it’s also obvious that this is a bad dynamic, one that shouldn’t be lauded as the cutting edge of “intelligent macrofamilial stabilization policy.” It’s not a particular policy action that’s bad, it’s the macroeconomic game that we’ve settled into that has to be changed if we want markets that aggregate external information and make wise allocation decisions rather than focusing on intrafinancial Kremlinology.

I’m not optimistic that the current Fed will transcend heroics and push towards a new dynamic. The Great Depression haunts the Fed chairman like the memory of an older sibling’s suicide. The troubled younger child will be coddled and indulged, and fingers will be wagged only when it is very safe to do so. But, tragically, indulgence and capitulation don’t always work, what appears to be the least risky course can sometimes be a sure route to escalation and destruction. When the last child died, it was blamed on tough love. But that might not be right, or if it was, it might say little about what this child needs.

Anyway, I think recent events have shown pretty clearly that a Fed put does exist. The Fed can be counted on quite specifically to try to forestall extreme lower tail outcomes on very short period US equity returns. That doesn’t mean the Fed is setting a floor under long-term asset prices. They might soberly stand aside as markets fall by 60% over a period of months. But they don’t want it to happen in a day. Long-term, buy-and-hold investors should take little comfort. But short-horizon traders have every reason to truncate the lower tails of the subjective probability distributions that guide their moves.

Still, though Bernanke & Co may fully intend to try, there’s no guarantee that the Fed will succeed at preventing sharp drops or sudden stops. The Fed is doing its best to offer traders a put, but as markets are now learning, counterparty risk can be a bitch.

[1] The first surprise intervention was the announcement on August 17 of the cut in the discount window spread from 100 to 50 bps following an overnight crash on Asian markets. The second was the Fed’s announcement of the TAF and central bank coordination on December 12, following a disappointed reaction in equity markets to a fed funds cut of “only” 25 bps. The third intervention was today’s. The timing of the Dec 12 announcement may have been a coincidence not much related to equity prices behavior, but the Jan 22 and Aug 17 announcements were, in my opinion, clearly intended to affect US stock markets.