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TAKEAWAYS FROM RESEARCH AND INVESTIGATION PLAN
ON COMPLEX FINANCIAL DERIVATIVES
9/4/2010
CONTENTS
I.
Takeaways from the Complex Financial Derivatives Working Group...………………3
II.
Specific Takeaways on which No Consensus was Reached……..…………………………4
III.
Takeaways from the Staff.……………………………………………………………………………….6
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I.
CONSENSUS TAKEAWAYS FROM THE COMPLEX FINANCIAL DERIVATIVES
WORKING GROUP
AIG
1. There was a failure of corporate management at AIG.
2. Compensation and compensation incentives were misaligned with long term
performance of AIG.
3. AIG management, including the management of AIGFP, and its auditors failed to
properly disclose losses to the public and shareholders in December 2007.
4. AIG failed because of its enormous sales of CDSs on CDOs and other instruments
without having to put up collateral, set aside capital reserves or hedge its exposure.
Credit Default Swaps and Other Credit Derivatives
1. The use of CDS helped to fuel securitization and the housing bubble.
2. Derivatives were used to hedge by issuers and so facilitated securitization.
3. Synthetic and hybrid CDOs, consisting of CDSs allowed securitization to continue
and expand.
4. CDSs were used by certain large hedge funds, derivatives dealers in their
proprietary trading (including Goldman Sachs) and other speculators to bet against
the housing market and various mortgage securities and loans.
5. Speculators demand for such CDSs on the housing market helped to fuel the creation
and sale of synthetic and hybrid CDOs and thus extended and amplified
securitization.
6. The AIG/Goldman relationship/disagreements exposed a number of important
issues: the lack of effective price discovery, the lack of transparency around
significant transactions affecting the larger marketplace, the difficulty of
establishing mark to market prices for illiquid securities, and the potential for price
manipulation or distortions (e.g. did Goldman drive prices down in this non‐
transparent market because it was short on the housing market?)
All OTC Derivatives
1. The growth in speculation in derivatives contributed to a number of asset bubbles in
addition to the housing bubble, including 2008 bubbles in energy and agricultural
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products. (Commodity index swaps, which facilitate speculation in agriculture and
energy, for example, increased more than ten fold from 2003 to 2008, at the time
when the oil market and the market for various agricultural products were
experiencing bubbles.)
2. Some large over the counter derivatives dealers were considered by regulators to be
too big to fail in significant part because of the interconnections created by their
hundreds of thousands or millions of derivatives contracts and were therefore
rescued through government bail outs, including AIG and Bear Stearns.
Lack of Regulation
1. Lack of regulation allowed the OTC derivatives markets to grow without
transparency.
2. The risks posed by derivatives is directly related to the lack of regulation of the
market caused by the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000 ("CFMA"),
which expressly eliminated virtually all federal regulatory power and government
oversight over the OTC derivatives market and preempted state gaming and bucket
shop laws as well.
3. State insurance regulators did not regulate the sale of credit default swaps in part
because of the deregulatory effect of the CFMA.
4. The Office of Thrift Supervision was ill equipped to oversee AIG and failed in its
mission. It did not have the resources, capability, or focus to supervise an institution
of the scale and complexity of AIG.
5. State insurance supervisors did make some headway in reducing the securities
lending portfolio, but were poorly positioned to oversee AIG.
II.
SPECIFIC TAKEAWAYS ON WHICH NO CONSENSUS WAS REACHED
Credit Default Swaps and Other Credit Derivatives
1. Credit derivatives increased the amount of exposure to mortgage credit in the
system, by increasing both the amount of losses and the number of investors
experiencing losses when defaults rose, as well as increasing the gains.
2. The possible collapse of AIG could have brought down its counterparties and then in
turn their counterparties, causing cascading losses and collapses throughout the
financial system and necessitated the government bailout
3. Shorting the housing bubble tended to reduce the bubble, to the degree it made
being long on the housing market more expensive.
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4. When the housing market did collapse, the enormous and highly leveraged bets on
the housing market through the use of CDSs (as well as other credit derivatives
including trading on the ABX) caused the credit exposure to the collapse to be
substantially larger than the mortgages involved.
5. When CDS protection of CDOs and other loans was weakened or lost because of
fears that AIG and others would default on their obligations, the value of the
underlying loans diminished.
6. These synthetic instruments extended the scale and duration of the mortgage
securities bubble, with synthetic securities continued to be issued even after the
housing market began declining and the mortgage market was imploding (issuance
continued even after the failure of major subprime lenders).
All OTC Derivatives
1. The over‐the‐counter derivatives market created significant systemic risk in the
financial system and helped to fuel the panic in the financial crisis, exposing the
system to contagion of cascading defaults and losses.
2. This risk was greatly inflated by the excessive speculation and enormous leverage in
the derivatives market.
3. Lack of transparency and effective price discovery in the derivatives market
contributed to financial institutions' inability to assess their exposures and those of
their counterparties, fueling panic when the housing bubble collapsed.
4. The concentration of risk in the hands of the large OTC derivatives dealers, our
largest banks and investment banks, caused by the enormous derivatives positions
they held and their exposure to failing institutions through derivatives contracts
played a significant role in the uncertainly and panic in the market.
5. The "bank runs" on large OTC derivatives dealers, such as Bear Stearns and Lehman
Brothers, included runs on their derivatives operations by their counterparties and
potential counterparties. During the panic such dealers also suffered operational
difficulties relating to derivatives trading which exacerbated their problems.
6. The complexity of customized derivatives sold by OTC derivatives dealers along
with the lack of transparency of the market and the limited access of their
customers to relevant information on pricing or risk has apparently caused a great
deal of misunderstanding and mispricing of risk. It has also created enormous
profits for the derivatives dealers from wide pricing spreads and high fees.
7. The over‐the‐counter derivatives market experienced a sharp and unprecedented
contraction during the last half of 2008.
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Lack of Regulation
1. This lack of regulation has also allowed OTC derivatives to be used to evade
accounting requirements (e.g., Enron), disguise debt (e.g., Greece), evade tax laws
(e.g., the current IRS investigation of the use of equity swaps to evade withholding
tax), and get around other regulatory requirements such as insider trading rules, net
capital requirements, bankruptcy requirements, etc. This is less important as a
direct causal factor.
III.
STAFF TAKEAWAYS FROM DERIVATIVES HEARING
1. Credit derivatives led to more credit creation. Credit default swaps on CDOs
facilitated the cash ABS CDO market, which facilitated the subprime MBS market.
Experts made this argument in interviews with staff prior to the hearing, and Gary
Cohn of Goldman Sachs repeated during the hearing that credit would have been
more limited without the ability to hedge with derivatives.
2. Credit derivatives affected the location of losses related to mortgage credit in
systemically significant ways, by transferring losses from the mortgage market to
CDOs and by creating profits for shorts and losses for longs. The long investors that
suffered losses included large banks, AIG and the monolines, many of which were
determined by supervisors to be systemically significant.
3. Price discovery in the OTC derivatives market was impaired during the financial
crisis. The impairment in price discovery undermined the ability of participants in
OTC derivatives markets to manage their counterparty credit exposure. And, it led
to disputes and delays in correcting for changes in exposures that were caused by
changes in prices and interest rates. Transparency is important because of the
importance of price discovery and because of its impact on stability (i.e. opaqueness
makes system more vulnerable). Commissioners do not yet agree on how important
a factor this was in the financial crisis. Staff is preparing data and conducting
further interviews on this topic.
4. Derivatives were inadequately collateralized. Commissioners agree that this was
the case for AIG. Staff is preparing data on the experience of other market
participants.
5. Collateral calls created financial problems for many firms, leading to financial
problems and deleveraging (as many firms tried to sell assets to cover their
collateral calls), and insolvency in some cases. Commissioners agree this was the
case for AIG and the monolines. Staff is preparing data on other market
participants.
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