Wall Street Journal

You have read Dealbook's superficial (and practically dictated) defense of Goldman's subprime bet. Below we present David Fiderer's a vastly different perspective than the one shared by straight-to-HBO expert A.R.S., which provides a far more realistic perspective of what really happened with Goldman and its "big short."

My take on a big story today.

Nearly a year ago, Zero Hedge first brought broad public attention to the nebulous aspects of the dark and dirty underworld of the market, exposing the "second-tier" of privileged market participants, consisting of quant traders, high frequency trading, flash trading, sponsored access, co-location, latency arbitrage, Morgan Stanley's discussed-below PDT operation, and many other topics (check our Glossary for much more). In April, Zero Hedge wrote an open letter to the quant community, pleading for more transparency absent which the eventual result would be "larger, systematic problems at the largest, most sophisticated quant managers." Since April, the impact of market neutral quants has progressively declined, as factors, one after another, have failed, and market neutral indexes are probing multiyear lows (HSKAX). The question of who has stepped in to replace the whales' liquidity provisioning is still unanswered, although the explosion of small, inexperienced 3 man quant shops consisting of a math Ph.D. and two programmers, may be part of the answer. The integration of Goldman within the structure of the NYSE and other exchanges, may be another: at last check, Goldman is still a key component of the NYSE's SLP program, regarding which there is still barely any information, despite promises by NYSE representatives to the contrary (and with Goldman's prop operation potentially terminally crippled, the question of how extensively intertwined prop trading is with liquidity provisioning, will be a major topic going forward). Today, the WSJ's Scott Patterson takes advantage of the recent furor over quants and in extensive article promotes his new book "The Quants" in which "he suggests how this new breed of mathematicians and computer scientists took over much of the financial system—and the damage they inflicted in the 2007 meltdown." We are glad that, after nearly a year of writing about it, the topic of the market systemic threat presented by a small subcommunity of quantitative traders is finally emerging on the mainstream scene.

Two months ago Bloomberg's Jonathan Weil brought up the very relevant topic of fair value divergences on bank balance sheets courtesy of SFAS 107 and lax accounting firm standards (some more lax than others). Zero Hedge immediately followed up on this theme and presented a comparative analysis of various bank asset shortfalls, speculating that certain accounting firms are doing their best to do an Arthur Andersen redux for Generation Bailout.

On October 15 we said: "Just what about the economic environment has given Citi auditors KPMG the flawed idea that the bank's loan can be easily offloaded with virtually no discount? And just how much managerial whispering has gone into this particular decision. If one assumes a comparable deterioration for the Citi loan book as for the other big 4 firms, and extrapolates the 2.8% getting worse by the average 1.5% decline, one would end up with a 4.2% Book-to-FV deterioration. On $602 billion of loan at Q2, this implies a major $25 billion haircut. Yet this much more realistic number is completely ignored courtesy of some very flexible interpretation of fair value accounting rules at KPMG. Maybe Citi and its accountants should take a hint from Regions Financial CEO Dowd Ritter who carries the FV of his $90.9 billion loan book value at a 25% discount." Today, finally, after a two month delay, these two articles seem to have finally made the inbox of the financial gurus at the Wall Street Journal, which, in an article named "Accounting for the bank's value gaps," says: "can investors count on consistency when it comes to bank accounting? As many banks struggle with piles of bad loans, it appears some auditors are being stricter than others when assessing their true value." Way to be on top of that ball WSJ/Mike Rapaport. Nonetheless, we are happy that this very critical topic, is finally starting to get the due and proper, if largely delayed and uncredited, attention it deserves.

"Last week I was a participant in the Wall Street Journal's Future of Finance Initiative in England. WSJ has written a summary of the conference highlights, and missed some key points. Allow me to fill in the blanks." - Janet Tavakoli

Why economists REALLY got it wrong...