Credit Default Swaps:
Why Washington Ignored Our Warning
June 28, 2011
By Martin Hutchinson, Global Investing Strategist, Money Morning
http://moneymorning.com/2011/06/28/credit-default-swaps-why-washington-ignored-our-warning/ Three years ago, I told you that Wall Street's newest invention - credit default swaps - would cause a major financial crash.
Now, I'll concede that credit default swaps (CDS) weren't the only cause of the financial meltdown that brought about the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings (OTC: LEHMQ) and nearly brought down American International Group Inc. (NYSE: AIG). But these financial derivatives were a major exacerbating factor - which is why I also warned that credit default swaps should be banned.
Just three years later, we're embroiled in yet another financial crisis. But the stakes have grown: This time around we're talking about entire countries - and not just banks - defaulting on their debt. Not surprisingly, credit default swaps are once again at center stage.
Just yesterday (Monday), in fact, the possibility of a Greek-debt default drove spreads on Western European credit default swaps up to record levels, providing even more profits for those speculating against the overall health of the Western financial system. Those profits for speculators increase the overall losses in the world financial system whenever something goes wrong, creating the possibility that even moderate "credit events" could collapse the whole shaky edifice.
If Washington had heeded my warnings back before the first global financial crisis, you and I would be much better off today.
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Three Options Washington Missed
Despite their clearly dangerous tendencies, credit default swaps have displayed an unparalleled ability to survive - and were largely unaffected by the 2,000 pages of regulatory legislation in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act and several years of additional regulation.
That's a travesty, since Dodd-Frank - the Wall Street "overhaul" signed into law almost exactly one year ago by U.S. President Barack Obama - represented the best chance to blunt the hefty influence of these derivative financial instruments.
As daunting as this sounds, I assure you that there would have been three very clear ways of achieving this goal:
•Ban the things altogether - a proposal that features the virtue of simplicity, and has little economic cost (since credit default swaps don't really do the job they were designed for, as I'll show you in a moment).
•Ban the sale of a "naked" credit default swap - meaning one in which the party doesn't own the underlying debt (since it would bring the CDS market in line with the insurance market, where it has since 1774 been illegal to buy a life insurance policy on a stranger - ostensibly because the chance of an "accident" is too great).
•Or require banks to assess the full value of their CDS obligations as loans, and count the appropriate percentage of them against capital, making it difficult for huge volumes of CDS trading to develop (since it would become hugely expensive for banks to write them).
As originally designed, credit default swaps were a form of "insurance" that protected the lender in the event of a loan default. In fact, when a lender buys a CDS from an insurance company, the loan turns into an "asset" that can be "swapped" for cash if the borrower defaults.
As we've seen, however, credit default swaps have largely been used as vehicles of speculation - and dangerous ones, at that. Credit default swaps aren't traded on any sort of formal exchange, and there's not any kind of requirement to report the transactions to a regulatory agency.
This lack of transparency - coupled with the CDS market's huge size (the market for credit default swaps is believed to have soared from $900 billion in 2000 to an estimated peak of $60 trillion in 2008) - had regulaors conceding that credit default swaps could pose a "systemic risk" to the overall economy.
A Failed Experiment
I ran a modest derivatives desk from 1982-87. Even back then we were looking at ways to design derivatives that revolved around credit events. There was an obvious market for shifting credit from banks to such entities as insurance companies and pension funds. You see, banks were good at originating loans, but had limited balance sheets. Insurance companies and pension funds, by contrast, had a very limited ability to source loan assets, but had plenty of appetite for properly remunerated credit risk.
The problem was that there was no fair way to calculate the payoff on bankruptcy, nor was there a watertight way to adjudicate in the innumerable situations that were not quite formal bankruptcies.
The upshot: We decided the technical problems of determining payoffs were just too great to get around.
It was another 10 years - in 1995, to be exact - when the first credit-default-swap agreements were finally carried out. That surprisingly late date indicates the shakiness of the structure.
By 1995, the profitability of all kinds of derivatives operations - assisted by the "funny money" that then-U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was just beginning to create - made derivatives traders simply ignore the problems.
They put in place a mock auction procedure to determine the payoff on bankruptcies, one that was infinitely easy to "game," because it allowed an auction of a few millions of obligations to determine payoffs on billions of dollars of debt. This also led to complex and essentially unworkable rules to determine when a bankruptcy had occurred.
The bottom line was that the entire process was nothing but a sophisticated scam. That was clearly the case with AIG, where credit default swaps on the insurance giant paid off spectacularly at the same time as AIG was paying all its creditors in full - and using our money (as U.S. taxpayers) to do so.
Sophisticated operators such as Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE: GS) were thus able to get paid twice - once from the government on their AIG debt and then a second time through their holdings of AIG credit default swaps.
What's more, the problems with the actual credit default swaps that we've detailed here weren't the only problems that needed addressing: It's also clear in hindsight that banks grossly underestimated their risk.
The problem here is that - unlike with a currency position or a bond - the potential loss from a credit default swap if something goes wrong may be 100-times the premium received for selling the CDS instrument.
Thus the fluctuations in CDS prices in normal times are a tiny fraction of the potential loss on a default event.
At any point in time, if the maturity of one credit default swaps is the same as another, then the swap associated with the firm or country with the higher CDS "spread" is viewed by the market as being more likely to default. That's because a higher fee is charged to protect against this happening. But that's only if everything else is equal, and that isn't always the case.
Since Wall Street's risk management looks at normal price fluctuations and then assesses the maximum possible risk as a modest multiple of the daily fluctuation, it was completely inadequate in measuring the risk of a CDS book. That, in a nutshell, is why AIG went bust and had to be bailed out with $170 billion of taxpayer money.
After the dust cleared, it became clear that the CDS market bore a large part of the responsibility for the disaster. Credit problems were multiplied through them, so that when losses occurred they rippled through the entire banking system, rather than being confined to just those with a direct business relationship with the defaulter.
Credit Default Swaps: The Greek Connection
Given all of their flaws, credit default swaps clearly do not accurately hedge against the risk of loss from a loan default, so they differ very little from straight gambling contracts. Since we, as taxpayers, are forced to underwrite the losses of the banking system, we should have the right to shut down this "gambling" element of the CDS market.
Needless to say, since Wall Street lobbied hard to prevent any of its really profitable games from being closed off, last year's Dodd-Frank Act did nothing to shut down the CDS market; indeed it seems to have achieved very little other than adding bureaucratic cost and uncertainty to the financial system. According to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), CDS volume outstanding had fallen from its $60 trillion peak in 2008 all the way down to $30 trillion at the end of last year.
But this apparent decline is actually spurious; it simply reflects the big dealers being more careful to net off countervailing operations as far as possible, to keep the total "optical" exposure down and prevent calls for further regulation.
In reality, the credit-default-swaps market is as active as ever. Indeed, yesterday's headlines underscore that credit default swaps are playing a major role in the struggle over Greece's possible default.
If Greece defaults, the losses to the banking system will not simply be some fraction of the $100 billion of Greek debt, but also the gamblers' payoffs on the CDS outstanding on Greece - current estimates say we're talking about an additional $100 billion.
Let's face it: A system that doubles the potential loss on a bankruptcy (and probably more than that, because the holders of Greek-debt credit default swaps will manipulate the foolish "auction" system of determining payout) is imposing a huge cost - not a benefit - on the world economy.
U.S. banks had total exposure of $41 billion to Greece by the end of 2010, according to a June 9 report from the BIS. About 83% of that total is tied to "guarantees" that range from protection for sellers of credit-default-swap contracts, to other third-party obligations.
Let's hope that - after we've suffered through a more-severe version of the 2008 financial crisis (something that appears increasingly likely, thanks to the world's foolish cheap-money polices) - governments around the world will finally wise up and get around to banning credit default swaps.
The unfortunate reality is that, as the hard-working taxpayers who shoulder most of the burden in the world's "real" economy, you and I will be considerably poorer by then.
At the end of the day, one thing is abundantly clear: When we sounded the alarm about credit default swaps more than three years ago, it's a damned shame that our feckless leaders in Washington just didn't listen.
News and Related Story Links:
•Wikipedia:
Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
•Bloomberg News:
Sovereign Debt Risk Surges to Record on Greek Default Concern.
•Money Morning:
Here's Why It's Time to Ban Credit Default Swaps
•Money Morning:
Credit Default Swaps: A $50 Trillion Problem
•Investopedia:
Credit Default Swaps.
•Bank for International Settlements:
Official Website.
About the Author
Martin Hutchinson has nearly 30 years’ experience as a global investment banker – plus a reputation for being bearish at just the right time. Slate magazine singled him out as the financier who most accurately predicted how bad the 2009 bear market would turn out to be. Martin is the editor of the Permanent Wealth Investor, where he focuses on stocks that pay high, reliable dividends. In his Merchant Banker Alert, Martin uncovers the fastest-growing companies in the fastest-growing economies and brings those ideas back home to you. Learn more about Martin on our contributors page.
View articles by Martin Hutchinson
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10 Responses
Scott | June 28, 2011
so how do I protect myself ??
Reply
Peter Lederer | June 28, 2011
http://moneymorning.com/2011/06/28/credit-default-swaps-why-washington-ignored-our-warning/You write, "…it's a damned shame that our feckless leaders in Washington just didn't listen."
I share your dismay. But I am equally aghast that virtually our entire financial community cannot seem to muster even a shred of self-restraint, decency and wisdom. Instead there is the spectacle of millions spent in fighting tooth and nail to prevent meaningful regulation of these "financial weapons of mass destruction". In the face of this, how on earth can effective voices for reason prevail?
How sad!
Reply
William Harden | June 28, 2011
Everyone should read the book by Alan Jones, "How the World Really Works" It is a stange book in that it is a review of 12 incredible books in its 12 chapters. One of them is 1984.This book was written in 96 and it described much of what happened in 08. It puts the blame directly on the top bankers. I urge everyone to stop complaining and protesting until they read this book. I peronally went out of my way to read 10 of the 12 books summarized in this book. Then if they complain, their protests will at least be targeted at the true criminals of the world. Then prehaps we can reform.
Reply
Paul Kozak | June 28, 2011
Indeed, perhaps we should just work towards making money obsolete = solve plenty of problems….of course this would take quite a psyhcic social change ie dump individual rights and work on collective rights! This may sound crazy, however no crazyier than creating something of value out of nothing = naked selling….
Reply
david | June 28, 2011
Try The creature of Jekyll Island,William as it is global and its a small few who run or allow the supposed PTB do their thing.As BOb Dylan said these times are a changin.
Reply
Farok Ardesher | June 28, 2011
You have only mentioned GREECE. What about the other PIIGS. Portugal, Ireland, ITALY,and Spain.
Do I need to sell all my Money Market Accounts and go into Gold and Silver BARS. Have we learned NOTHING from the fiasco of 2008. (I hear Bankers are loaning money to the PIIGS from our Money Market Accounts.)
Reply
Kenneth Anderson | June 29, 2011
Well said, and all quite frustrating. And, yes, I think most rational human beings would agree that it would be marvelous if
"governments around the world will finally wise up and get around to banning credit default swaps."
The problem with imagining this happening, is that it is difficult imagining this happening. National and international financial institutions are openly populated with the very bankers who have profited enormously from, as you rightly called it, this "sophisticated scam." We've just got news that the European Central Bank now has as its new chief, Goldman Sachs alum, Mario Draghi. No one can expect that such actors are going to practice due diligence.
Regards, and thanks again for your excellent commentary in this regard.
Reply
Allen Novotny | July 3, 2011
What's really sad is, the very people that were involved are the ones on CNBC crying about not raising taxes on the rich fat cats on wall street. If they aren't careful, there will be a revolution in this country like nothing the world has ever seen.
Reply
Frank De Silva | July 5, 2011
Spot on in relation to credit default swaps and other 'mystical' creatures, the invention of non-productive bankers in $10,000 suits. When I last worked in a large bank 6 years ago I asked some of the 'derivatives' and money market guys 'upstairs' how these things really worked, but could never understand how $1 of real asset could be 'processed' and come out the other end worth $100, so I just assumed I was stupid. A couple of years later the GFC arrived and I heard major bankers/CEOs admitting they really didn't know what had been going on either. Now it's happening again !!! Is the world mad … and where is the salient and rational comment from our dear economists from the Chicago School of Economics, MIT, Harvard et al … who claim to know how the world works … busy at the 'Wise-After-The -Event' Pre-Armegeddon Party ??
Keep up the healthy scepticism … someone has to tell the Little Finance Emperors that they are naked
Reply
sirloin869 | September 1, 2011
can regular people write off personal debt with credit default swaps?
still waiting on the zombie apokolypse
Reply
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