AIG Bonuses: Schumer's Phony Outrage

"If you don't return it on your own, we will do it for you," Senator Charles E. Schumer warned the AIG bonus recipients, as he joined in the public outrage against AIG's executive bonuses of $165 million. After receiving $170b in US taxpayer money, AIG announced these scandalous bonuses for their executives in the financial products unit which sold derivatives that cratered the company and the entire financial system.

The grandstanding by the senator from Wall Street, as Mr. Schumer is known because of his close links to the financial services industry, seems to be designed to deflect public anger and scrutiny from the real scandal and the main culprits of collapse of AIG and other financial institutions--the politicians in Washington. For years, as the Wall Street cheerleader on Capitol Hill, the senator joined his other corrupt colleagues in preventing any regulation of the financial weapons of mass destruction such as credit default swaps (CDS) and collaterlized debt obligations (CDO) in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign contribution from Wall Street.

Mr. Schumer led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, raising a record $240 million while increasing donations from Wall Street by 50 percent, according to the New York Times. That money helped the Democrats gain power in Congress, elevated Mr. Schumer’s standing in his party and increased the industry’s clout in the capital.

Schumer gathered support and donations by embracing the industry’s free-market, deregulatory agenda more than almost any other Democrat in Congress, even backing measures now blamed for contributing to the financial crisis.

While other lawmakers took the lead on efforts like deregulating the complicated financial instruments called derivatives, it was Mr. Schumer, a member of the Banking and Finance Committees, who repeatedly took other steps to protect industry players from government oversight and tougher rules, a review of his record shows. Over the years, he has also helped save financial institutions billions of dollars in higher taxes or fees, according to the New York Times.

On the nature of deregulated credit default swaps (CDS) that caused the collapse of AIG and financial markets, a recent CBS 60 Minutes segment explained, "In retrospect, giving Wall Street immunity from state gambling laws and legalizing activity that had been banned for most of the 20th century should have given lawmakers pause, but on the last day and the last vote of the lame duck 106th Congress, Wall Street got what it wanted when the Senate passed the bill unanimously." Though CNN has only picked Senator Phil Gramm as one its top 10 Culprits of Collapse, the entire US Congress shares responsibility for it.

The American people need to put the AIG bonus issue in proper perspective to channelize their genuine and deep anger and resentment against the corrupt political-industrial elite who are the real culprits of collapse. The bonus amount of $165m is an extremely tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars of losses in retirement savings and home values suffered by Americans because of the Wall Street misdeeds, committed with the collaboration of Schumer and his fellow politicians in Washington. It's also a small fraction of the tens of billions of dollars of US aid for Israel, the biggest recipient of US aid, that Sen. Schumer continues to champion as a staunch supporter of Israel on the Hill. The anger of the nation in severe distress should be used to force reforms in Washington. The first steps toward serious reform should include a grassroots campaign for major curbs on political campaign contributions by the lobbyists followed by an open, public trial of Senators Charles Schumer, Chris Dodds, Phil Gram and their Democratic and Republican colleagues on the US Senate's Finance and Banking Committees to hold them to account.

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Gaussian Copula: The Formula That Wrecked the World Economy

Not unlike Albert Einstein whose equation E=MC2 made possible the creation of physical weapons of mass destruction, Chinese mathematician David X. Li could go down in history as the man who enabled the development of financial weapons of mass destruction on Wall Street. Li's Gaussian copula models for the pricing of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)are being blamed for the catastrophic losses leading to the global financial collapse.

In addition to underlying bonds, bond investors also invest in pools of hundreds or even thousands of mortgages. The sums involved are mind boggling: Americans now owe more than $11 trillion on their homes, according to Wired Magazine. But mortgage pools are not as simple as most bonds. There's no guaranteed interest rate, since the amount of money homeowners collectively pay back every month is a function of how many have refinanced and how many have defaulted. There's certainly no fixed maturity date: Money shows up in irregular chunks as people pay down their mortgages at unpredictable times—for instance, when they decide to sell their house. And most problematic, there's no easy way to assign a single probability to the chance of default. Al of this makes it much more difficult to calculate risk on mortgage pools and CDOs than on conventional bonds or old-fashioned home loans.

Wall Street "solved" many of these problems through a process called tranching, which divides a pool and allows for the creation of safe bonds with a risk-free triple-A credit rating. Investors in the first tranche, or slice, are first in line to be paid off. Those next in line might get only a double-A credit rating on their tranche of bonds but will be able to charge a higher interest rate for bearing the slightly higher chance of default. And so on.

David Li simplified the risk models further by using market data of credit default swaps on underlying debt, including pools of disparate mortgages, as convenient proxy for the probability of default on various tranches the CDOs. Almost all of CDS market data, however, was accumulated during a period of rising real estate values and fairly robust job markets, when defaults were rare.

What are credit default swaps? Credit-default swaps are an indicator of the cost of bond "insurance" that varies with the risk of bond default. Credit default swaps are privately traded derivative contracts traditionally bought by bond holders from CDS issuers like AIG, Ambac, FGIC, and MBIA and other entities. Like other derivatives, CDSs are not regulated by government agencies. Any investor can sell CDSs. The CDS sellers are expected (not guaranteed or back-stopped by governments) to reimburse bondholders or buyers in case the bond issuing companies or governments default.

As an investor, you have a choice: You can either lend directly to borrowers or sell investors credit default swaps, insurance against those same borrowers defaulting. In either case, you get a regular income stream—interest payments or insurance premiums —and either way, if the borrower defaults, you lose a lot of money. The returns on both strategies are nearly identical, but because an unlimited number of credit default swaps can be sold against each borrower, the supply of swaps isn't limited the way the supply of bonds is, so the CDS market managed to grow very raidly. Though credit default swaps were relatively new when Li proposed his idea, they soon became a bigger and more liquid market than the underlying bonds on which they were based.

The growth of the CDO market was exponential. Using Li's formula, Wall Street's quants saw a new range of possibilities. And the first thing they did was start creating a huge number of brand-new triple-A securities. Using Li's copula approach meant that ratings agencies like Moody's—or anybody wanting to model the risk of a tranche—no longer needed to puzzle over the quality of mortgages of various kinds that also proliferated. All they needed was that correlation number based on CDS data, and out would come a rating telling them how safe or risky the tranche was.

The CDS and CDO markets grew along similar trajectories, drawing strength from each other. At the end of 2001, there was $920 billion in credit default swaps outstanding. By the end of 2007, that number had skyrocketed to more than $62 trillion. The CDO market, which stood at $275 billion in 2000, grew to $4.7 trillion by 2006.

It all worked well until the housing market and job markets began to weaken, causing a wave of defaults, beginning with the less creditworthy borrowers. The CDS markets started to behave erratically out of fear. And the CDS data accumulated during the good times no longer served as a useful proxy for the actual risk of various trances of mortgage pools. Even the AAA rated tranches were hit by defaults, because some them contained subprime mortgages.

There were several people, including experts such as Darrell Duffie, Paul Wilmott and Janet Tavakoli, who warned about the dangers of blindly using Li's copula function as a basis for assessing risk of default for CDOs. But the greedy Wall Street executives and money managers, who were making enormous profits from such derivatives, ignored such warnings. And the politicians didn't care because they were receiving their share of the profits as Wall Street contributed large amounts of money to their campaign coffers.

The CDOs, based on Li's Copula function and created and traded on Wall street, now account for most of the toxic assets that have turned shares of major banks like Citicorp into penny stocks. The insolvent troubled banks are now receiving hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayer funded bailouts orchestrated by the US treasury. The ongoing credit crunch and the wave of home foreclosures show no signs of abating. The negative effects of the US woes are being felt around the world. With globalization of the financial markets and trade, the rest of of the world is not immune from America's economic crisis.

Here's a video titled "The Formula That Wrecked the Economy":



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Credit Markets Expecting Pakistan Default

Amidst a flurry of activity by Pakistani government to seek bailout from friendly nations and possible resort to IMF loans, the credit markets are betting that Pakistan will most likely default on its sovereign debt. Pakistan's sovereign debt now has the dubious distinction of being the riskiest, surpassing Argentina's sovereign debt.

According to The News, the price for insuring $10 million worth of Argentina's debt in September stood at $788,000 while the price to insure the Government of Pakistan-guaranteed debt skyrocketed to $950,000, something that has never happened before.

As recently as June this year, Pakistan sovereign debt credit default swaps (CDS) traded at 530 basis points in Hong Kong, meaning it cost $530,000 a year to protect $10 million of Pakistan's debt from default for five years. A jump from 530 to 950 basis points means the risk of default by Pakistan has almost doubled since June, 2008. The risk has particularly shot up since President Musharraf left office in August, 2008. It should be noted that Pakistan CDS traded at a record low of 146 basis points around the time of the February elections.

Credit-default swaps are an indicator of the cost of bond "insurance" that varies with the risk of bond default. Credit default swaps are privately traded derivative contracts usually bought by bond holders from CDS issuers like AIG, Ambac, FGIC, and MBIA and other entities. Like other derivatives, CDS are not regulated by government agencies. The CDS issuers are expected (not gauranteed or back-stopped by governments) to reimburse bondholders in case the bond issuing companies or governments default. A basis point on a credit-default swap contract protecting $10 million of debt from default for five years is equivalent to $1,000 a year. The buyers of CDS do not have to be bondholders. Any one can buy a CDS to bet on the probability of default by debt issuers. Once issued, the credit default swaps are bought and sold like any other contract. Many of these derivative contracts were bought to bet that the housing bubble would pop and many homeowners would default on their mortgages. That is exactly what happened this year.

Lately, credit default swaps have come under heavy criticism for being the main contributor to the unfolding financial crisis around the world. Since credit default swaps are unregulated derivatives, they can be issued by any one. Many thinly-capitalized entities are in the business of issuing CDS to make a lot of money fast. In its recent issue, Fortune magazine reports that Wachovia and Citigroup are wrangling in court with a $50 million hedge fund located in the Channel Islands. The reason: A dispute over two $10 million credit default swaps covering some debt. What's most revealing is that these massive banks put their faith in a Lilliputian fund (in an inaccessible jurisdiction) that was risking 40% of its capital for just two CDS. Can anyone imagine that Citi would, say, insure its headquarters building with a thinly capitalized, unregulated, offshore entity?

Fortune compares the CDS market with casino gambling. It says that when you put $10 on black 22, you're pretty sure the casino will pay off if you win. The CDS market offers no such assurance. One reason the market grew so quickly was that hedge funds poured in, sensing easy money. And not just big, well-established hedge funds but a lot of upstarts. The ease and low cost of CDS encouraged a lot of lending and borrowing that would not have occurred otherwise. Both the lenders and borrowers believed they could easily transfer risk to a third party at relatively low cost.

The result of the rapid growth in credit default swaps is a $54.6 trillion problem. In spite of the massive global government intervention, including US government's takeover of AIG, the biggest CDS player, this huge problem will take considerable time and money to unwind. Meanwhile, it will get a lot harder for Pakistan and other economically troubled governments such as Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Argentina get credit from any one other than the International Monetary Fund. Such credit usually comes with tough conditions and micromanagement of country's budget, taxes, spending and economy by IMF officials.

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Pakistani Debt Default Concerns Rise

Pakistan, whose credit default swaps (CDS) have more than doubled since October 2007 because of growing political uncertainty and tension between rival parties, is expected to join Markit's iTraxx Asia ex-Japan Index of credit-default swaps. This follows a dramatic increase in demand to trade on the credit default swap contracts for Pakistan, reports Bloomberg.com. Pakistan is also slated to join the 20- member sub-index for non investment-grade governments and companies.

Credit-default swaps are an indicator of the cost of bond insurance that varies with the risk of bond default. Credit default swaps are usually bought by bond holders from credit insurance companies like Ambac, FGIC, and MBIA. These insurers reimburse bondholders in case the bond issuing companies or governments default. A basis point on a credit-default swap contract protecting $10 million of debt from default for five years is equivalent to $1,000 a year. This is the first time Pakistan is being included in an index of bond default swaps since it got a B+ rating from S&P and started raising capital through borrowing in the international commercial debt market. Prior to this, Pakistan was considered such a high-risk that it could only borrow from IMF, World Bank, Asian Development bank and other similar institutions that lend to the poor nations deemed not credit-worthy. Pakistan did not have access to the commercial credit markets in the 1990s. Pakistan is becoming more active in raising money in global capital markets despite its volatile politics. Last month the country said it was considering issuing a sovereign bond issue, although it has yet to provide further details behind its plan.

It should be noted that the international and the US bond markets have been seriously unsettled recently due to the sub-prime mortgage backed securities crisis. Just yesterday, the Federal Reserve had to bail out Bear Stearns in the United States. Still, the value of Bear Stearns stock dropped by a half in a single day. There are serious concerns about the default of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and the ability of the bond insurers such as Ambac to protect the holders of such securities. This has led to a severe credit crunch in which the major banks are unwilling to loan money to each other.