Risk Management

The rating actions are based on our view that Berkshire's overall capital adequacy, as well as that of its insurance operations, has weakened to levels no longer consistent with a 'AAA' rating and is not expected to return to extremely strong levels in the near term. Furthermore, we expect that the consolidated liquidity position of BRK will be reduced from extremely strong historical levels as a result of the acquisition. As capital adequacy and liquidity levels have declined, investment risk remains very high in our view, compounding the need for extremely strong capital and liquidity given potential investment volatility. A key concern is that BRK's risk tolerances appear to have increased, yet we believe they remain ill defined while the organization increases in complexity. Generally, we believe Berkshire has a high risk tolerance for capital volatility and investment risk. We do not believe that the company's overall risk management framework has evolved atthe same pace as the organization's complexity and that enterprise risk management practices remain in silos within each investment. - S&P

Europe bailout tracker update: Portugal edition. Hey Almunia, is there anything to be concerned about in Portugal? We thought so... The country's 10 year spread is now 18 bps wider to 147 bps after the country just had an almost failed BILL (12 months) auction. The country had previously announced an indicative offer of €500 million in 12 month bill to be auctioned. The result- a sale of just €300 million at yields over 50 bps higher compared to just two weeks ago. Oh, forget Greece, Portugal CDS is now trading at record wides.

Senator Corker challenged Mr. Volcker's stance in today's congressional hearings on the Volker Rule by saying that no financial holding company that had a commercial bank failed while performing proprietary trading. It appears as if Mr. Corker may have received his information from the banking lobby, and did not do his own homework.
Let's reference the largest commercial bank/thrift failure of all...

The SIGTARP has been busy - a 224 page report just released provides an update of his activity to date, and covers everything from the ongoing investigation into whether the closure of Chrysler dealers was politically motivated, to the SEC's complete humiliation in regard to the BofA-ML settlement, to the dismal permanent modification rate in the HAMP program, to the firing of alleged sex-tape fiend Jeff Gundlach, to how the Fed is the New Century of the new decade.

Update: here is a first run of the data, with a focus on Goldman Sachs.

The previously top-secret Schedule A has been released and is attached. We are currently going through the data, focusing on prices, ratings, LTVs and other taxpayer critical data. Stephen Friedman saying, as we type, that revealing Schedule A will injure the taxpayer interest, as when the Fed will try to sell these CUSIPs, buyers will have an advantage. Of course, we note, these sophisticated buyers will exist only because this list was offloaded to the taxpayers in the first place.

On and someone tell those doomsayers in Congress today this info was leaked and the market did not crash... Stunning, we know.

Dear Congressmen, please read this before your questioning of Tim Geithner tomorrow. A complete and thorough investigation by David Fiderer, into what is allegedly the greatest (Goldman-facilitated) taxpayer heist in history for the sole benefit of the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe.

Also, Dear FRBNY general counsel Thomas Baxter - please tell us how the below is wrong? Because it would appear your proclamations of saving the world are not only self-serving, but flawed and hypocritical beyond measure:

"The party line, expressed in Too Big To Fail and elsewhere, is that an AIG bankruptcy posed a greater systemic risk than a Lehman bankruptcy, because AIG was so much bigger. But that analysis is highly superficial and very misleading. AIG itself was a holding company, which guaranteed the debt of its unregulated financial subsidiary, AIGFP. The lion's share of AIG's revenues and profits, and about 80% of its consolidated assets, were concentrated among its different insurance company subsidiaries. Those insurance companies were solvent. They did not pose any systemic risk. In fact, it's quite likely that they would have continued to operate outside of bankruptcy.

The only subsidiary with major problems was AIGFP, whose financial obligations were guaranteed by the parent. But AIGFP was only about one-third the size of Lehman. It's almost impossible to see how AIGFP ever posed a systemic risk, unless everyone's intention to provide a backdoor bailout to the banks. Put another way, it seems that the only reason that the government needed to step in for AIG was to provide a backdoor bailout to its banks."

One of Canada's largest pension funds, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, is refocusing its priorities as it tries to come back from an underwhelming investment performance...

A talking point that has gripped the media in light of the sudden weakness ahead of the Ben Bernanke reconfirmation process, is the question of who should succeed the Fed Chairman, should he fail to obtain the requisite number of votes to continue. Many have said "Ben is bad, but anyone that would come after him would likely be even worse." While this is true for any of the potential successors (Donald Kohn, ex-Morgan Stanley banker Kevin Warsh, community-banker Elizabeth Duke, Daniel Tarullo, or ex-Goldmanite Bill Dudley, and speaking of the New York Fed, where Jeff Immelt is a Class B director: did Jamie Dimon, whose membership expired on December 31, 2009, get the Goldman renewal vote?), this is not an exclusive case. Which is why Zero Hedge proposes the candidacy of Stanford economist, and "Taylor Rule" creator, John Taylor for the post of Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

While many pundits will obsess over the markets' gyration in this past week, and make it into a major headline in the quest for eyeballs, the truth is that the S&P turning negative for the year was merely a sideshow (the next real market crash will be much more memorable). No - the real story was the advent of Paul Volcker to his rightful place on the, well, right of President Obama, coupled with the now imminent departure of Geithner and Summers, and the massive question mark that now hangs over Goldman Sachs. Who could have believed that the implications of one Senatorial election could be so profound, yet that is precisely the stuff black swans are made of. The new regime is here, and like it or not, it brings with it a new framework of variables. Yet shifting from the past and looking at the future, the question now becomes what should investors focus on? Just who is this Paul Volcker who will now be the President's seemingly primary economic advisor, and more importantly, what will his policies be like? Luckily, an extensive blueprint already exists, and Zero Hedge readers should be quite familiar with it by now.

Politico has obtained the phone log of conversations performed by then FRBNY President Tim Geithner during the period of the financial crisis, or specifically September 14, 2008 through the end of the year. Some of the people called include (many of them repeatedly) pretty much all the usual suspects... And who is mysterious ex-Goldmanite Dan Jester and why was he, together with another ex-Goldmanite, Hank Paulson, the first two people called the day Lehman filed?

Recently Goldman Sachs has been attempting to downplay the impact of prop trading on its operations, with various executives, among them both Lloyd Blankfein and David Viniar, claiming that proprietary trading accounts for a mere 10% of total revenue. This is likely a major misrepresentation and a substantial underestimation of the true impact of prop trading to the firm if an earlier analysis by third party credit analysis firm CreditSights is correct. According to CS analysts, Goldman's true prop exposure is at least 30% and probably inbetween 30% and 40%. This would imply that the proposed ban will have a truly material impact on Goldman, much more so than Goldman's executives claim.

As we drill down into the details of ideas for breaking the economic and political power of oversized banks, we need this litmus test against which serious suggestions should be judged: Does a proposal, at the end of the day, imply that Goldman Sachs should break itself up into at least four or five independent pieces, with the biggest being no more than 1 percent of gross domestic product, or roughly $150 billion?

If the answer is yes, we are making progress in moving our financial system back toward where it was in the early 1990s, when it worked fine (and Goldman was a world-class investment bank) and was much less threatening to the global economy. If the answer is no, we are merely repainting -- ever so gently -- the deckchairs on the Titanic.

US and Western European political leaders have begun to focus on Yemen as a source of projected instability and as a haven for jihadist terrorism against the West.

This simplistic and overly narrow view has largely been a reaction to media reporting of the links of alleged (and unsuccessful) Nigerian-born terrorist bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to a radical Yemeni group, and to intense ongoing fighting between insurgents and Yemeni and Saudi government forces on the Yemen-Saudi border.

The reality is far more complex and far-reaching.

Let’s assume for a moment that Goldman Sachs is wrong. After all, at most points in time and space, predictions tend to fail—except the lucky ones. So it’s good to think through scenarios that one would consider extremely remote. Active risk management means low probability / high catastrophic outcome tail events must be hedged, and as importantly, gain exposure to those pesky Blacks Swans in ways that lead to advantage. To accomplish this, it helps to obtain a quantitative sense of their impact, to get a “feel for the cloth” as an wise former boss of mine used to say. So let’s try here.

What if the Fed more than succeeds in reflating and the end result is hyperinflation? As remote a possibility as I think this is, they really could print a way to another, completely different type of economic destruction. All they have to do is print proactively, not reactively.

It was a four short months ago that the Clearing House Association, in a court filing, threatened with untold destruction if the Fed was ordered to submit to an audit that would expose all their dirty laundry in the form of undervalued assets used as collateral by the Federal Reserve.

It is fitting that as attempts to expose the Fed's shady practices accelerate on all fronts, and include direct legal approaches as well as subpoena demands by various politicians, that a Fed President would once again come out today, and recap the good old Mutual Assured Destruction treatise that both Wall and Main Street have gotten used to since the beginning of the bailouts. Somehow financial M.A.D. makes an appearance every time the bankers demand something and have no other rational justifications. So why not just feed the stupid plebs something about the Apocalypse that is certain to transpire should the financial oligarchs not get their way. Today was no exception.