Rating Agencies

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has started its hearing on the worthlessness of Rating Agencies. As was previously reported, Warren Buffett was subpoenaed to participate in this hearing after the refused to testify voluntarily. Interested readers can watch the full hearing live and commercial free at the following C-Span 2 site.

Earlier we reported that Caja Madrid was put on downgrade review by S&P, following Friday's puke fest on all things Spanish by Fitch. The rating agencies may have gotten it right for once: MarketWatch reports that according to a report, Caja Madrid "will tap the government for €3 billion in rescue funds." That CajaSur "New Century" domino, as we predicted, is starting to really set in.

The jocular ukulele-strumming grandpa, who many years ago railed on and on against derivatives (see his 1982 letter here) then subsequently sold billions in notional of index puts against his earlier oh so sincere advice, has been formally subpoenaed, note - not invited, to testify before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on the topic of "Credibility of Credit Ratings, the Investment Decisions Made Based on those Ratings, and the Financial Crisis", side by side with Moody's archvillain CEO Raymond McDaniel, the head of a company in which Buffett has (or is that had?) a huge equity stake, up until MCO's announcement it had received Wells Notice together with a recommendation to strip it of its NRSRO status, when it became obvious that Warren had been selling shares of Moody's in the period between the Notice receipt and announcement. What is most interesting is that Buffett had to be forced to participate in the hearing following a formal subpoena receipt, after he had declined participation on two prior occasions. We wonder, if in addition to unmatched hypocrisy and a guilty conscience, the octogenarian has anything else to hide?

Full recap of the ideas and recommendations at yesterday's Ira Sohn conference.

Update: the Einhorn-Ackman dynamic duo does the groupthink tango, as Ackman joins Einhorn in bashing rating agencies. Tomorrow's MCO open will be a bloodbath

It's official: Moody's is the next Lehman. The ratings agency just received the kiss of death after David Einhorn announced he is short the name at the Ira Sohn conference (we are not sure how this is news...Einhorn has repeatedly noted his hatred of the rating agency). With numerous other adverse catalysts, such as the pending Wells Notice, as well as the fact that its business model is conflicted is obsolete, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. And since we are confident that uber honest capitalist Waren Buffett is by now completely out of the name, replaced presumably with the same idiot middle east sovereign wealth money that just gulped up the Treasury's Citi stake, there won't be too many tears wept at its funeral. RIP Moody's.

Game theory causal relations are now superseding simple myopic "in-a-vacuum" economic variables. Are you prepared for the paradigm shift? David Einhorn is (and so are we).

With hundreds of amendments crammed into the Senate version of Financial Reform, the dust is only now settling on what the impact of all these will be for Wall Street firms. One of the less discussed amendments is that of Maine Senator Collins, which would result in the disqualification of Trust Preferred Securities from Tier 1 regulatory capital, and which if passed into law, will trim about $108 billion from bank holdco Tier 1 capital, an amount which is about 13% of the "Big 4" banks' total Tier 1 capital according to Moody's. The resulting need to shore up bank holdco balance sheets would be substantial and would require additional equity infusions and/or debt dispositions, as well as more FASB suspensions of various Mark-To-Market rules. Additionally, the enactment of this amendment would likely result in future downgrades of holdcos by discredited rating agencies such as Moody's.

Europe today officially fell off the stupid tree and hit every branch on the way down. The CDS ban is all but fixed: "Michel Barnier, the European commissioner in charge of an overhaul of financial services, may propose capping the size of individual trades, giving watchdogs the power to police big deals in derivatives such as Greek debt default insurance. Under a model which would resemble the approach in Washington, traders could be stopped from building up a large position that could let them swing prices in anything from oil to currency in their favour."

First the SEC issues a Wells Notice, and threatens an NRSRO registration C&D, and now the head of the firm's sovereign rating group, arguably the most important business aspect left to the discredited rating agency, leaves the company. Time for Moody's to issue a D-rating on itself. We wonder just who the administration's hand-picked replacement for Mr. Cailleteau is going to be.

Lately we have gotten notification from both the CBO and independent economists that America's fiscal lack of responsibility will saddle the country with trillions in future deficits, roughly around $10 trillion in 10 years. Yet this is only half the story. Contrary to expectations that every dollar in deficit spending is funded with a dollar of debt, historical data indicates that actual debt-funded spending vastly exceeds monthly deficits. In fact, since the beginning of Fiscal 2007 (October 2006), the total cumulative deficit is $3 trillion. It may come as a surprise to some that over the same period, total US debt has increased not by $3 trillion (which would make intuitive sense), but nearly 50% more, by $4.4 trillion, meaning that the US Treasury has accumulated approximately $34 billion of debt in excess of any given month's average deficit. This means that should this trend persist, the $10 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years, will translate into roughly $15 trillion in new debt. Adding this amount to today's existing total debt of $12.9 trillion means that by 2020, the US will be saddled with $28 trillion in debt, or roughly double today's GDP. As this is a 9% CAGR, it means that GDP will need to increase by about 7% annually just to stay at about 100% debt/GDP in 2020: a ludicrous assumption.A more realistic one, in which US GDP increases by 2.5% each year, leads to a 2020 Debt-To-GDP ratio of 151%. Welcome to the new normal.

Lars Schall of MMNews Germany has recently interviewed many outspoken critics of the inner workings of our global financial system including former Federal Housing Commissioner and Solari Inc. President Catherine Austin Fitts and Associate Professor of Economics and Law at the University of Missouri,Kansas City (UMKC) William K. Black. Below is my recent interview with Mr. Schall.

Activision CEO Robert Kotick can make some mean Modern Warfare games, but that will not be sufficient to get him back on CNBC again. Ever. CNBC's poor Julia Boorstin gets clotheslined (metaphorically, although it would be funny in real life) when she asks Robert whether the American consumer is back on track, no doubt hoping for a fervent yes as the cue cards said. At that point the man whose top line lives and dies by the vagaries of the 18-45 year old's spending habits takes a two second pause and replies: "We don't think so. I think that from a a macroeconomic perspective we definitely are in a challenging time and nothing that we see would give us encouragement that the economy is going to materially change any time soon." At this point the CNBC producer is rabidly screaming to cut to Joseph Cohen, who based on h....er extensive knowledge of stuff, and pets.com, sees the S&P at 1250 shortly, thanks to the US consumer who is now coming back with a vengeance and buying Gulfstreams. At which point someone asks h...er why Goldman's popularity rating is 4%.

There does not seem to pass a day anymore without Goldman having to do a daily trip to CVS to buy a barrel of KY. The NYT reports that today's criminal investigation comes courtesy of Ny AG Andrew Cuomo who is now investigating whether 8 banks provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate grades of mortgage and other securities. The banks in question are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and Merrill Lynch. We are confident that unless "misleading information" is a euphemism for massive and totally unwarranted fees (and expenses), and oftentimes criminal leaks (Deep Shah comes to mind), Cuomo will find little to base an actual investigation on. Furthermore, as an escape mechanism, the rating agencies can always place the blame on Microsoft for creating a faulty Excel product whichalways # Ref'ed out whenever the agencies tried to put in anything less than infinite growth rates.

Got Gold?

On August 9, 2007, game over. If you have to pick a day for the Minsky Moment, it was August 9. And, actually, it didn’t happen here in the United States. It happened in France, when Paribas Bank (BNP) said that it could not value the toxic mortgage assets in three of its off-balance sheet vehicles, and that, therefore, the liability holders, who thought they could get out at any time, were frozen. I remember the day like my son’s birthday. And that happens every year. Because the unraveling started on that day. In fact, it was later that month that I actually coined the term “Shadow Banking System” at the Fed’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole.

It was only my second year there. And I was in awe, and mainly listened for most of the three days. At the end, Marty Feldstein always does the wrap-up. Everybody wanted to talk. And since I was a newbie, I didn’t say anything until almost the very end. I stood up and (paraphrasing) said, “What’s going on is really simple. We’re having a run on the Shadow Banking System and the only question is how intensely it will self-feed as its assets and liabilities are put back onto the balance sheet of the conventional banking system.” - Paul McCulley