Loss Severity

Hedge fund manager exposes the ugly truth about America's energy revolution: it's like the housing bubble but larger!

"... If the unemployment rate were to edge up after reaching a trough in two years and the gap between U-6 and unemployment remains as wide as it is today – in excess of historical norms – the size of the program would be expected to reach roughly $3.3 trillion in 2024, $1.7 trillion more than in the base case." - TBAC

"Bond King" Bill Gross may not have had a good year following over $40 billion in redemptions from his $250 billion Total Return Fund, but another aspirational Bond King, DoubleLine's Jeff Gundlach, had an even worse year on an relative basis, when his Total Return Bond Fund saw $6 billion in redemptions ending the year at $30.9 billion in AUM following seven consecutive months of withdrawals. So in his attempt to start the new year on better footing, here is his first webcast (as usual open to the public), titled "Let the Race Begin! 2014 Markets: Year of the Horse", in which as usual Jeff will discuss the economy, the markets and his outlook for the best investment strategiest of 2014. Let's hope that for bond fund manager, that 2014 is not just another "year of the donkey", as was the case in the past year which everyone managing duration would rather forget.

Not only does FNM seem to be unprofitable under the new FHFA guidance, but payments made to Treasury might need to be reversed. 

From the just released Bank of America 10-Q: "During the three months ended June 30, 2012, positive trading-related revenue was recorded for 95 percent, or 60 of the 63 trading days of which 75 percent (47 days) were daily trading gains of over $25 million and the largest loss was $11 million. These results can be compared to the three months ended March 31, 2012, where positive trading-related revenue was recorded for 100 percent (62 days) of the trading days of which 95 percent (59 days) were daily trading gains of over $25 million. There were no daily trading losses recorded during the three months ended March 31, 2012." This vaguely reminds us of the JPM's trading performance. Just before they got busted for hiding a $350 billion hedge fund in the firm's "risk hedging" aka CIO/Treasury division that is. Also, if anyone else has problems believing that BofA's trading desk, with or without Merrill, both of which are better known as the C-grade (and that is being generous) of Wall Street traders, could generate profits on 122 of 125 trading days, please lift your hand.

A week ago, Zero Hedge first presented the now viral presentation by Raoul Pal titled "The End Game." We dubbed the presentation scary because it was: in very frank terms it laid out the reality of the current absolutely unsustainable situation while pulling no punches. Yet some may have misread the underlying narrative: Pal did not predict armageddon. Far from it: he forecast the end of the current broken economic, monetary, and fiat system... which following its collapse will be replaced with something different, something stable. Which, incidentally, is why the presentation was called a big "reset", not the big "end." But what does that mean, and how does one protect from such an event? Luckily, we have another presentation to share with readers, this time from Eidesis Capital, given at the Grant's April 11 conference, which picks up where Pal left off. Because if the Big Reset told us what is coming, Eidesis tells us how to get from there to the other side...

The most disturbing observation from this month's RealPoint CMBS analysis, aside from the surge in delinquencies to an all time high of $42 billion, is that the average loss severity on CMBS liquidation has just hit a record of 52.7%. That means that on average less than half the loan is recovered in liquidation. Surely, this is not the kind of news that REITs are looking for as they perch from atop 52 week highs.

"Moody's now expects that a trough in home prices will not be reached until the middle of 2010. In addition, based on recent loan loss severities, Moody's will increase its projected lifetime loan losses for pools backing U.S. Jumbo, Alt-A, Option ARM, and Subprime RMBS issued between 2005 and 2008." - Moody's Investors Services

As anyone who has spent even a day looking at securitization tranching or CDS trading will tell you, there are two critical components to any investment that involves risky fixed income: cumulative loss probability and loss severity: the first tells about how likely any given security is to default within a given amount of time, while the second determines what the final recovery will be assuming there is an actual even of default. The two are usually tied in very closely, as any (forced) delays in reaching a default state usually come at the expense of exhausting any underlying asset value (and in some cases being primed by additional layer of debt which get a first look on assets in the case of liquidation).