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THE
FINANCIAL CRISIS
INQUIRY REPORT
OFFICIAL
GOVERNMENT
EDITION
I S B N 978-0-16-087727-8
90000
9
FC_cover.indd 1
780160 877278
-gritty matte UV
THE
FINANCIAL
CRISIS
INQUIRY REPORT
Final Report of the National Commission
on the Causes of the Financial and
Economic Crisis in the United States
• OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT EDITION •
1/20/11 2:07 PM
THE
FINANCIAL
CRISIS
INQUIRY REPORT
THE
FINANCIAL
CRISIS
INQUIRY REPORT
∞
FINAL REPORT OF THE NATIONAL COMMISSION
ON THE CAUSES OF THE FINANCIAL AND
ECONOMIC CRISIS IN THE UNITED STATES
Submitted by
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION
Pursuant to Public Law 111-21
January 2011
OFFICIAL GOVERNMENT EDITION
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office
Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC area (202) 512-1800
Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC 20402-0001
I S B N 978-0-16-087727-8
CONTENTS
Commissioners ...................................................................................................vii
Commissioner Votes...........................................................................................viii
Commission Staff List ..........................................................................................ix
Preface ................................................................................................................xi
C ONCLUSIONS OF T H E
F I NA N C IA L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N .....................xv
PA R T I : C R I S I S O N T H E H O R I Z O N
Chapter
Before Our Very Eyes .........................................................................
PA R T I I : S E T T I N G T H E S TA G E
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Shadow Banking ...............................................................................
Securitization and Derivatives.......................................................
Deregulation Redux .........................................................................
Subprime Lending ............................................................................
PA R T I I I : T H E B O O M A N D B U S T
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Credit Expansion ..............................................................................
The Mortgage Machine.................................................................
The CDO Machine ........................................................................
All In ..................................................................................................
The Madness ...................................................................................
The Bust............................................................................................
v
vi
CONTENTS
PA R T I V : T H E U N R AV E L I N G
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Chapter
Early : Spreading Subprime Worries.................................
Summer : Disruptions in Funding....................................
Late to Early : Billions in Subprime Losses ...........
March : The Fall of Bear Stearns........................................
March to August : Systemic Risk Concerns....................
September :
The Takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac..................
September : The Bankruptcy of Lehman ........................
September : The Bailout of AIG ........................................
Crisis and Panic ..............................................................................
PA R T V : T H E A F T E R S H O C K S
Chapter
Chapter
The Economic Fallout...................................................................
The Foreclosure Crisis ..................................................................
DI S SE N T I NG V I E WS
By Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, and Bill Thomas ........................
By Peter J. Wallison....................................................................................................
Appendix A: Glossary ....................................................................................... 539
Appendix B: List of Hearings and Witnesses ...................................................... 545
Notes ................................................................................................................ 553
Index available online at www.publicaffairsbooks.com/fcicindex.pdf
MEMBERS OF
THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION
Phil Angelides
Chairman
Hon. Bill Thomas
Vice Chairman
Brooksley Born
Douglas Holtz-Eakin
Commissioner
Commissioner
Byron Georgiou
Heather H. Murren, CFA
Commissioner
Commissioner
Senator Bob Graham
John W. Thompson
Commissioner
Commissioner
Keith Hennessey
Peter J. Wallison
Commissioner
Commissioner
COMMISSIONERS VOTING TO ADOPT THE REPORT:
Phil Angelides, Brooksley Born, Byron Georgiou,
Bob Graham, Heather H. Murren, John W. Thompson
COMMISSIONERS DISSENTING FROM THE REPORT:
Keith Hennessey, Douglas Holtz-Eakin,
Bill Thomas, Peter J. Wallison
COMMISSION STAFF
Wendy Edelberg, Executive Director
Gary J. Cohen, General Counsel
Chris Seefer, Director of Investigations
Greg Feldberg, Director of Research
Shaista I. Ahmed
Hilary J. Allen
Jonathan E. Armstrong
Rob Bachmann
Barton Baker
Susan Baltake
Bradley J. Bondi
Sylvia Boone
Tom Borgers
Ron Borzekowski
Mike Bryan
Ryan Bubb
Troy A. Burrus
R. Richard Cheng
Jennifer Vaughn Collins
Matthew Cooper
Alberto Crego
Victor J. Cunicelli
Jobe G. Danganan
Sam Davidson
Elizabeth A. Del Real
Kirstin Downey
Karen Dubas
Desi Duncker
Bartly A. Dzivi
Michael E. Easterly
Alice Falk
Megan L. Fasules
Michael Flagg
Sean J. Flynn, Jr.
Scott C. Ganz
Thomas Greene
Maryann Haggerty
Robert C. Hinkley
Anthony C. Ingoglia
Ben Jacobs
Peter Adrian Kavounas
Michael Keegan
Thomas J. Keegan
Brook L. Kellerman
Sarah Knaus
Thomas L. Krebs
Jay N. Lerner
Jane E. Lewin
Susan Mandel
Julie A. Marcacci
Alexander Maasry
Courtney Mayo
Carl McCarden
Bruce G. McWilliams
Menjie L. Medina
Joel Miller
Steven L. Mintz
Clara Morain
Girija Natarajan
Gretchen Kinney Newsom
Dixie Noonan
Donna K. Norman
Adam M. Paul
Jane D. Poulin
Andrew C. Robinson
Steve Sanderford
Ryan Thomas Schulte
Lorretto J. Scott
Skipper Seabold
Kim Leslie Shafer
Gordon Shemin
Stuart C. P. Shroff
Alexis Simendinger
Mina Simhai
Jeffrey Smith
Thomas H. Stanton
Landon W. Stroebel
Brian P. Sylvester
Shirley Tang
Fereshteh Z. Vahdati
Antonio A. Vargas Cornejo
Melana Zyla Vickers
George Wahl
Tucker Warren
Cassidy D. Waskowicz
Arthur E. Wilmarth, Jr.
Sarah Zuckerman
ix
PREFACE
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was created to “examine the causes of the
current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” In this report, the Commission presents to the President, the Congress, and the American people the results
of its examination and its conclusions as to the causes of the crisis.
More than two years after the worst of the financial crisis, our economy, as well as
communities and families across the country, continues to experience the aftershocks. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes, and the economy
is still struggling to rebound. This report is intended to provide a historical accounting of what brought our financial system and economy to a precipice and to help policy makers and the public better understand how this calamity came to be.
The Commission was established as part of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery
Act (Public Law -) passed by Congress and signed by the President in May
. This independent, -member panel was composed of private citizens with experience in areas such as housing, economics, finance, market regulation, banking,
and consumer protection. Six members of the Commission were appointed by the
Democratic leadership of Congress and four members by the Republican leadership.
The Commission’s statutory instructions set out specific topics for inquiry and
called for the examination of the collapse of major financial institutions that failed or
would have failed if not for exceptional assistance from the government. This report
fulfills these mandates. In addition, the Commission was instructed to refer to the attorney general of the United States and any appropriate state attorney general any
person that the Commission found may have violated the laws of the United States in
relation to the crisis. Where the Commission found such potential violations, it referred those matters to the appropriate authorities. The Commission used the authority it was given to issue subpoenas to compel testimony and the production of
documents, but in the vast majority of instances, companies and individuals voluntarily cooperated with this inquiry.
In the course of its research and investigation, the Commission reviewed millions
of pages of documents, interviewed more than witnesses, and held days of
public hearings in New York, Washington, D.C., and communities across the country
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that were hard hit by the crisis. The Commission also drew from a large body of existing work about the crisis developed by congressional committees, government
agencies, academics, journalists, legal investigators, and many others.
We have tried in this report to explain in clear, understandable terms how our
complex financial system worked, how the pieces fit together, and how the crisis occurred. Doing so required research into broad and sometimes arcane subjects, such
as mortgage lending and securitization, derivatives, corporate governance, and risk
management. To bring these subjects out of the realm of the abstract, we conducted
case study investigations of specific financial firms—and in many cases specific facets
of these institutions—that played pivotal roles. Those institutions included American
International Group (AIG), Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Countrywide Financial, Fannie
Mae, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Moody’s, and Wachovia. We
looked more generally at the roles and actions of scores of other companies.
We also studied relevant policies put in place by successive Congresses and administrations. And importantly, we examined the roles of policy makers and regulators, including at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Federal Reserve
Board, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (and its successor, the Federal Housing Finance
Agency), the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Securities and Exchange Commission,
and the Treasury Department.
Of course, there is much work the Commission did not undertake. Congress did
not ask the Commission to offer policy recommendations, but required it to delve
into what caused the crisis. In that sense, the Commission has functioned somewhat
like the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates aviation and other
transportation accidents so that knowledge of the probable causes can help avoid future accidents. Nor were we tasked with evaluating the federal law (the Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP) that provided financial assistance to major
financial institutions. That duty was assigned to the Congressional Oversight Panel
and the Special Inspector General for TARP.
This report is not the sole repository of what the panel found. A website—
www.fcic.gov—will host a wealth of information beyond what could be presented here.
It will contain a stockpile of materials—including documents and emails, video of the
Commission’s public hearings, testimony, and supporting research—that can be studied for years to come. Much of what is footnoted in this report can be found on the
website. In addition, more materials that cannot be released yet for various reasons will
eventually be made public through the National Archives and Records Administration.
Our work reflects the extraordinary commitment and knowledge of the members of the Commission who were accorded the honor of this public service. We also
benefited immensely from the perspectives shared with commissioners by thousands of concerned Americans through their letters and emails. And we are grateful
to the hundreds of individuals and organizations that offered expertise, information, and personal accounts in extensive interviews, testimony, and discussions with
the Commission.
P R E FA C E
xiii
We want to thank the Commission staff, and in particular, Wendy Edelberg, our
executive director, for the professionalism, passion, and long hours they brought to
this mission in service of their country. This report would not have been possible
without their extraordinary dedication.
With this report and our website, the Commission’s work comes to a close. We
present what we have found in the hope that readers can use this report to reach their
own conclusions, even as the comprehensive historical record of this crisis continues
to be written.
CONCLUSIONS OF THE
FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY COMMISSION
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been called upon to examine the financial and economic crisis that has gripped our country and explain its causes to the
American people. We are keenly aware of the significance of our charge, given the
economic damage that America has suffered in the wake of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Our task was first to determine what happened and how it happened so that we
could understand why it happened. Here we present our conclusions. We encourage
the American people to join us in making their own assessments based on the evidence gathered in our inquiry. If we do not learn from history, we are unlikely to fully
recover from it. Some on Wall Street and in Washington with a stake in the status quo
may be tempted to wipe from memory the events of this crisis, or to suggest that no
one could have foreseen or prevented them. This report endeavors to expose the
facts, identify responsibility, unravel myths, and help us understand how the crisis
could have been avoided. It is an attempt to record history, not to rewrite it, nor allow
it to be rewritten.
To help our fellow citizens better understand this crisis and its causes, we also present specific conclusions at the end of chapters in Parts III, IV, and V of this report.
The subject of this report is of no small consequence to this nation. The profound
events of and were neither bumps in the road nor an accentuated dip in
the financial and business cycles we have come to expect in a free market economic
system. This was a fundamental disruption—a financial upheaval, if you will—that
wreaked havoc in communities and neighborhoods across this country.
As this report goes to print, there are more than million Americans who are
out of work, cannot find full-time work, or have given up looking for work. About
four million families have lost their homes to foreclosure and another four and a half
million have slipped into the foreclosure process or are seriously behind on their
mortgage payments. Nearly trillion in household wealth has vanished, with retirement accounts and life savings swept away. Businesses, large and small, have felt
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the sting of a deep recession. There is much anger about what has transpired, and justifiably so. Many people who abided by all the rules now find themselves out of work
and uncertain about their future prospects. The collateral damage of this crisis has
been real people and real communities. The impacts of this crisis are likely to be felt
for a generation. And the nation faces no easy path to renewed economic strength.
Like so many Americans, we began our exploration with our own views and some
preliminary knowledge about how the world’s strongest financial system came to the
brink of collapse. Even at the time of our appointment to this independent panel,
much had already been written and said about the crisis. Yet all of us have been
deeply affected by what we have learned in the course of our inquiry. We have been at
various times fascinated, surprised, and even shocked by what we saw, heard, and
read. Ours has been a journey of revelation.
Much attention over the past two years has been focused on the decisions by the
federal government to provide massive financial assistance to stabilize the financial
system and rescue large financial institutions that were deemed too systemically important to fail. Those decisions—and the deep emotions surrounding them—will be
debated long into the future. But our mission was to ask and answer this central question: how did it come to pass that in our nation was forced to choose between two
stark and painful alternatives—either risk the total collapse of our financial system
and economy or inject trillions of taxpayer dollars into the financial system and an
array of companies, as millions of Americans still lost their jobs, their savings, and
their homes?
In this report, we detail the events of the crisis. But a simple summary, as we see
it, is useful at the outset. While the vulnerabilities that created the potential for crisis were years in the making, it was the collapse of the housing bubble—fueled by
low interest rates, easy and available credit, scant regulation, and toxic mortgages—
that was the spark that ignited a string of events, which led to a full-blown crisis in
the fall of . Trillions of dollars in risky mortgages had become embedded
throughout the financial system, as mortgage-related securities were packaged,
repackaged, and sold to investors around the world. When the bubble burst, hundreds of billions of dollars in losses in mortgages and mortgage-related securities
shook markets as well as financial institutions that had significant exposures to
those mortgages and had borrowed heavily against them. This happened not just in
the United States but around the world. The losses were magnified by derivatives
such as synthetic securities.
The crisis reached seismic proportions in September with the failure of
Lehman Brothers and the impending collapse of the insurance giant American International Group (AIG). Panic fanned by a lack of transparency of the balance sheets of major financial institutions, coupled with a tangle of interconnections among institutions
perceived to be “too big to fail,” caused the credit markets to seize up. Trading ground
to a halt. The stock market plummeted. The economy plunged into a deep recession.
The financial system we examined bears little resemblance to that of our parents’
generation. The changes in the past three decades alone have been remarkable. The
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financial markets have become increasingly globalized. Technology has transformed
the efficiency, speed, and complexity of financial instruments and transactions. There
is broader access to and lower costs of financing than ever before. And the financial
sector itself has become a much more dominant force in our economy.
From to , the amount of debt held by the financial sector soared from
trillion to trillion, more than doubling as a share of gross domestic product.
The very nature of many Wall Street firms changed—from relatively staid private
partnerships to publicly traded corporations taking greater and more diverse kinds of
risks. By , the largest U.S. commercial banks held of the industry’s assets,
more than double the level held in . On the eve of the crisis in , financial
sector profits constituted of all corporate profits in the United States, up from
in . Understanding this transformation has been critical to the Commission’s analysis.
Now to our major findings and conclusions, which are based on the facts contained in this report: they are offered with the hope that lessons may be learned to
help avoid future catastrophe.
• We conclude this financial crisis was avoidable. The crisis was the result of human
action and inaction, not of Mother Nature or computer models gone haywire. The
captains of finance and the public stewards of our financial system ignored warnings
and failed to question, understand, and manage evolving risks within a system essential to the well-being of the American public. Theirs was a big miss, not a stumble.
While the business cycle cannot be repealed, a crisis of this magnitude need not have
occurred. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault lies not in the stars, but in us.
Despite the expressed view of many on Wall Street and in Washington that the
crisis could not have been foreseen or avoided, there were warning signs. The tragedy
was that they were ignored or discounted. There was an explosion in risky subprime
lending and securitization, an unsustainable rise in housing prices, widespread reports of egregious and predatory lending practices, dramatic increases in household
mortgage debt, and exponential growth in financial firms’ trading activities, unregulated derivatives, and short-term “repo” lending markets, among many other red
flags. Yet there was pervasive permissiveness; little meaningful action was taken to
quell the threats in a timely manner.
The prime example is the Federal Reserve’s pivotal failure to stem the flow of toxic
mortgages, which it could have done by setting prudent mortgage-lending standards.
The Federal Reserve was the one entity empowered to do so and it did not. The
record of our examination is replete with evidence of other failures: financial institutions made, bought, and sold mortgage securities they never examined, did not care
to examine, or knew to be defective; firms depended on tens of billions of dollars of
borrowing that had to be renewed each and every night, secured by subprime mortgage securities; and major firms and investors blindly relied on credit rating agencies
as their arbiters of risk. What else could one expect on a highway where there were
neither speed limits nor neatly painted lines?
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• We conclude widespread failures in financial regulation and supervision
proved devastating to the stability of the nation’s financial markets. The sentries
were not at their posts, in no small part due to the widely accepted faith in the selfcorrecting nature of the markets and the ability of financial institutions to effectively
police themselves. More than 30 years of deregulation and reliance on self-regulation
by financial institutions, championed by former Federal Reserve chairman Alan
Greenspan and others, supported by successive administrations and Congresses, and
actively pushed by the powerful financial industry at every turn, had stripped away
key safeguards, which could have helped avoid catastrophe. This approach had
opened up gaps in oversight of critical areas with trillions of dollars at risk, such as
the shadow banking system and over-the-counter derivatives markets. In addition,
the government permitted financial firms to pick their preferred regulators in what
became a race to the weakest supervisor.
Yet we do not accept the view that regulators lacked the power to protect the financial system. They had ample power in many arenas and they chose not to use it.
To give just three examples: the Securities and Exchange Commission could have required more capital and halted risky practices at the big investment banks. It did not.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York and other regulators could have clamped
down on Citigroup’s excesses in the run-up to the crisis. They did not. Policy makers
and regulators could have stopped the runaway mortgage securitization train. They
did not. In case after case after case, regulators continued to rate the institutions they
oversaw as safe and sound even in the face of mounting troubles, often downgrading
them just before their collapse. And where regulators lacked authority, they could
have sought it. Too often, they lacked the political will—in a political and ideological
environment that constrained it—as well as the fortitude to critically challenge the
institutions and the entire system they were entrusted to oversee.
Changes in the regulatory system occurred in many instances as financial markets evolved. But as the report will show, the financial industry itself played a key
role in weakening regulatory constraints on institutions, markets, and products. It
did not surprise the Commission that an industry of such wealth and power would
exert pressure on policy makers and regulators. From to , the financial
sector expended . billion in reported federal lobbying expenses; individuals and
political action committees in the sector made more than billion in campaign
contributions. What troubled us was the extent to which the nation was deprived of
the necessary strength and independence of the oversight necessary to safeguard
financial stability.
• We conclude dramatic failures of corporate governance and risk management
at many systemically important financial institutions were a key cause of this crisis. There was a view that instincts for self-preservation inside major financial firms
would shield them from fatal risk-taking without the need for a steady regulatory
hand, which, the firms argued, would stifle innovation. Too many of these institutions acted recklessly, taking on too much risk, with too little capital, and with too
much dependence on short-term funding. In many respects, this reflected a funda-
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mental change in these institutions, particularly the large investment banks and bank
holding companies, which focused their activities increasingly on risky trading activities that produced hefty profits. They took on enormous exposures in acquiring and
supporting subprime lenders and creating, packaging, repackaging, and selling trillions of dollars in mortgage-related securities, including synthetic financial products.
Like Icarus, they never feared flying ever closer to the sun.
Many of these institutions grew aggressively through poorly executed acquisition
and integration strategies that made effective management more challenging. The
CEO of Citigroup told the Commission that a billion position in highly rated
mortgage securities would “not in any way have excited my attention,” and the cohead of Citigroup’s investment bank said he spent “a small fraction of ” of his time
on those securities. In this instance, too big to fail meant too big to manage.
Financial institutions and credit rating agencies embraced mathematical models
as reliable predictors of risks, replacing judgment in too many instances. Too often,
risk management became risk justification.
Compensation systems—designed in an environment of cheap money, intense
competition, and light regulation—too often rewarded the quick deal, the short-term
gain—without proper consideration of long-term consequences. Often, those systems
encouraged the big bet—where the payoff on the upside could be huge and the downside limited. This was the case up and down the line—from the corporate boardroom
to the mortgage broker on the street.
Our examination revealed stunning instances of governance breakdowns and irresponsibility. You will read, among other things, about AIG senior management’s ignorance of the terms and risks of the company’s billion derivatives exposure to
mortgage-related securities; Fannie Mae’s quest for bigger market share, profits, and
bonuses, which led it to ramp up its exposure to risky loans and securities as the housing market was peaking; and the costly surprise when Merrill Lynch’s top management realized that the company held billion in “super-senior” and supposedly
“super-safe” mortgage-related securities that resulted in billions of dollars in losses.
• We conclude a combination of excessive borrowing, risky investments, and lack
of transparency put the financial system on a collision course with crisis. Clearly,
this vulnerability was related to failures of corporate governance and regulation, but
it is significant enough by itself to warrant our attention here.
In the years leading up to the crisis, too many financial institutions, as well as too
many households, borrowed to the hilt, leaving them vulnerable to financial distress
or ruin if the value of their investments declined even modestly. For example, as of
, the five major investment banks—Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman
Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley—were operating with extraordinarily
thin capital. By one measure, their leverage ratios were as high as to , meaning for
every in assets, there was only in capital to cover losses. Less than a drop in
asset values could wipe out a firm. To make matters worse, much of their borrowing
was short-term, in the overnight market—meaning the borrowing had to be renewed
each and every day. For example, at the end of , Bear Stearns had . billion in
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equity and . billion in liabilities and was borrowing as much as billion in
the overnight market. It was the equivalent of a small business with , in equity
borrowing . million, with , of that due each and every day. One can’t
really ask “What were they thinking?” when it seems that too many of them were
thinking alike.
And the leverage was often hidden—in derivatives positions, in off-balance-sheet
entities, and through “window dressing” of financial reports available to the investing
public.
The kings of leverage were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two behemoth government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs). For example, by the end of , Fannie’s
and Freddie’s combined leverage ratio, including loans they owned and guaranteed,
stood at to .
But financial firms were not alone in the borrowing spree: from to , national mortgage debt almost doubled, and the amount of mortgage debt per household rose more than from , to ,, even while wages were
essentially stagnant. When the housing downturn hit, heavily indebted financial
firms and families alike were walloped.
The heavy debt taken on by some financial institutions was exacerbated by the
risky assets they were acquiring with that debt. As the mortgage and real estate markets churned out riskier and riskier loans and securities, many financial institutions
loaded up on them. By the end of , Lehman had amassed billion in commercial and residential real estate holdings and securities, which was almost twice
what it held just two years before, and more than four times its total equity. And
again, the risk wasn’t being taken on just by the big financial firms, but by families,
too. Nearly one in mortgage borrowers in and took out “option ARM”
loans, which meant they could choose to make payments so low that their mortgage
balances rose every month.
Within the financial system, the dangers of this debt were magnified because
transparency was not required or desired. Massive, short-term borrowing, combined
with obligations unseen by others in the market, heightened the chances the system
could rapidly unravel. In the early part of the th century, we erected a series of protections—the Federal Reserve as a lender of last resort, federal deposit insurance, ample regulations—to provide a bulwark against the panics that had regularly plagued
America’s banking system in the th century. Yet, over the past -plus years, we
permitted the growth of a shadow banking system—opaque and laden with shortterm debt—that rivaled the size of the traditional banking system. Key components
of the market—for example, the multitrillion-dollar repo lending market, off-balance-sheet entities, and the use of over-the-counter derivatives—were hidden from
view, without the protections we had constructed to prevent financial meltdowns. We
had a st-century financial system with th-century safeguards.
When the housing and mortgage markets cratered, the lack of transparency, the
extraordinary debt loads, the short-term loans, and the risky assets all came home to
roost. What resulted was panic. We had reaped what we had sown.
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• We conclude the government was ill prepared for the crisis, and its inconsistent
response added to the uncertainty and panic in the financial markets. As part of
our charge, it was appropriate to review government actions taken in response to the
developing crisis, not just those policies or actions that preceded it, to determine if
any of those responses contributed to or exacerbated the crisis.
As our report shows, key policy makers—the Treasury Department, the Federal
Reserve Board, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York—who were best positioned to watch over our markets were ill prepared for the events of and .
Other agencies were also behind the curve. They were hampered because they did
not have a clear grasp of the financial system they were charged with overseeing, particularly as it had evolved in the years leading up to the crisis. This was in no small
measure due to the lack of transparency in key markets. They thought risk had been
diversified when, in fact, it had been concentrated. Time and again, from the spring
of on, policy makers and regulators were caught off guard as the contagion
spread, responding on an ad hoc basis with specific programs to put fingers in the
dike. There was no comprehensive and strategic plan for containment, because they
lacked a full understanding of the risks and interconnections in the financial markets. Some regulators have conceded this error. We had allowed the system to race
ahead of our ability to protect it.
While there was some awareness of, or at least a debate about, the housing bubble,
the record reflects that senior public officials did not recognize that a bursting of the
bubble could threaten the entire financial system. Throughout the summer of ,
both Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson offered public assurances that the turmoil in the subprime mortgage markets
would be contained. When Bear Stearns’s hedge funds, which were heavily invested
in mortgage-related securities, imploded in June , the Federal Reserve discussed
the implications of the collapse. Despite the fact that so many other funds were exposed to the same risks as those hedge funds, the Bear Stearns funds were thought to
be “relatively unique.” Days before the collapse of Bear Stearns in March , SEC
Chairman Christopher Cox expressed “comfort about the capital cushions” at the big
investment banks. It was not until August , just weeks before the government
takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that the Treasury Department understood
the full measure of the dire financial conditions of those two institutions. And just a
month before Lehman’s collapse, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was still
seeking information on the exposures created by Lehman’s more than , derivatives contracts.
In addition, the government’s inconsistent handling of major financial institutions
during the crisis—the decision to rescue Bear Stearns and then to place Fannie Mae
and Freddie Mac into conservatorship, followed by its decision not to save Lehman
Brothers and then to save AIG—increased uncertainty and panic in the market.
In making these observations, we deeply respect and appreciate the efforts made
by Secretary Paulson, Chairman Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, formerly president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now treasury secretary, and so
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many others who labored to stabilize our financial system and our economy in the
most chaotic and challenging of circumstances.
• We conclude there was a systemic breakdown in accountability and ethics. The
integrity of our financial markets and the public’s trust in those markets are essential
to the economic well-being of our nation. The soundness and the sustained prosperity of the financial system and our economy rely on the notions of fair dealing, responsibility, and transparency. In our economy, we expect businesses and individuals
to pursue profits, at the same time that they produce products and services of quality
and conduct themselves well.
Unfortunately—as has been the case in past speculative booms and busts—we
witnessed an erosion of standards of responsibility and ethics that exacerbated the financial crisis. This was not universal, but these breaches stretched from the ground
level to the corporate suites. They resulted not only in significant financial consequences but also in damage to the trust of investors, businesses, and the public in the
financial system.
For example, our examination found, according to one measure, that the percentage of borrowers who defaulted on their mortgages within just a matter of months
after taking a loan nearly doubled from the summer of to late . This data
indicates they likely took out mortgages that they never had the capacity or intention
to pay. You will read about mortgage brokers who were paid “yield spread premiums”
by lenders to put borrowers into higher-cost loans so they would get bigger fees, often never disclosed to borrowers. The report catalogues the rising incidence of mortgage fraud, which flourished in an environment of collapsing lending standards and
lax regulation. The number of suspicious activity reports—reports of possible financial crimes filed by depository banks and their affiliates—related to mortgage fraud
grew -fold between and and then more than doubled again between
and . One study places the losses resulting from fraud on mortgage loans
made between and at billion.
Lenders made loans that they knew borrowers could not afford and that could
cause massive losses to investors in mortgage securities. As early as September ,
Countrywide executives recognized that many of the loans they were originating
could result in “catastrophic consequences.” Less than a year later, they noted that
certain high-risk loans they were making could result not only in foreclosures but
also in “financial and reputational catastrophe” for the firm. But they did not stop.
And the report documents that major financial institutions ineffectively sampled
loans they were purchasing to package and sell to investors. They knew a significant
percentage of the sampled loans did not meet their own underwriting standards or
those of the originators. Nonetheless, they sold those securities to investors. The
Commission’s review of many prospectuses provided to investors found that this critical information was not disclosed.
T HESE CONCLUSIONS must be viewed in the context of human nature and individual
and societal responsibility. First, to pin this crisis on mortal flaws like greed and
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hubris would be simplistic. It was the failure to account for human weakness that is
relevant to this crisis.
Second, we clearly believe the crisis was a result of human mistakes, misjudgments, and misdeeds that resulted in systemic failures for which our nation has paid
dearly. As you read this report, you will see that specific firms and individuals acted
irresponsibly. Yet a crisis of this magnitude cannot be the work of a few bad actors,
and such was not the case here. At the same time, the breadth of this crisis does not
mean that “everyone is at fault”; many firms and individuals did not participate in the
excesses that spawned disaster.
We do place special responsibility with the public leaders charged with protecting
our financial system, those entrusted to run our regulatory agencies, and the chief executives of companies whose failures drove us to crisis. These individuals sought and
accepted positions of significant responsibility and obligation. Tone at the top does
matter and, in this instance, we were let down. No one said “no.”
But as a nation, we must also accept responsibility for what we permitted to occur.
Collectively, but certainly not unanimously, we acquiesced to or embraced a system,
a set of policies and actions, that gave rise to our present predicament.
* * *
T HIS REPORT DESCRIBES THE EVENTS and the system that propelled our nation toward crisis. The complex machinery of our financial markets has many essential
gears—some of which played a critical role as the crisis developed and deepened.
Here we render our conclusions about specific components of the system that we believe contributed significantly to the financial meltdown.
• We conclude collapsing mortgage-lending standards and the mortgage securitization pipeline lit and spread the flame of contagion and crisis. When housing
prices fell and mortgage borrowers defaulted, the lights began to dim on Wall Street.
This report catalogues the corrosion of mortgage-lending standards and the securitization pipeline that transported toxic mortgages from neighborhoods across America to investors around the globe.
Many mortgage lenders set the bar so low that lenders simply took eager borrowers’ qualifications on faith, often with a willful disregard for a borrower’s ability to
pay. Nearly one-quarter of all mortgages made in the first half of were interestonly loans. During the same year, of “option ARM” loans originated by Countrywide and Washington Mutual had low- or no-documentation requirements.
These trends were not secret. As irresponsible lending, including predatory and
fraudulent practices, became more prevalent, the Federal Reserve and other regulators and authorities heard warnings from many quarters. Yet the Federal Reserve
neglected its mission “to ensure the safety and soundness of the nation’s banking and
financial system and to protect the credit rights of consumers.” It failed to build the
retaining wall before it was too late. And the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision, caught up in turf wars, preempted state
regulators from reining in abuses.
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While many of these mortgages were kept on banks’ books, the bigger money came
from global investors who clamored to put their cash into newly created mortgage-related securities. It appeared to financial institutions, investors, and regulators alike that
risk had been conquered: the investors held highly rated securities they thought were
sure to perform; the banks thought they had taken the riskiest loans off their books;
and regulators saw firms making profits and borrowing costs reduced. But each step in
the mortgage securitization pipeline depended on the next step to keep demand going. From the speculators who flipped houses to the mortgage brokers who scouted
the loans, to the lenders who issued the mortgages, to the financial firms that created
the mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDOs
squared, and synthetic CDOs: no one in this pipeline of toxic mortgages had enough
skin in the game. They all believed they could off-load their risks on a moment’s notice to the next person in line. They were wrong. When borrowers stopped making
mortgage payments, the losses—amplified by derivatives—rushed through the
pipeline. As it turned out, these losses were concentrated in a set of systemically important financial institutions.
In the end, the system that created millions of mortgages so efficiently has proven
to be difficult to unwind. Its complexity has erected barriers to modifying mortgages
so families can stay in their homes and has created further uncertainty about the
health of the housing market and financial institutions.
• We conclude over-the-counter derivatives contributed significantly to this
crisis. The enactment of legislation in 2000 to ban the regulation by both the federal
and state governments of over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives was a key turning
point in the march toward the financial crisis.
From financial firms to corporations, to farmers, and to investors, derivatives
have been used to hedge against, or speculate on, changes in prices, rates, or indices
or even on events such as the potential defaults on debts. Yet, without any oversight,
OTC derivatives rapidly spiraled out of control and out of sight, growing to trillion in notional amount. This report explains the uncontrolled leverage; lack of
transparency, capital, and collateral requirements; speculation; interconnections
among firms; and concentrations of risk in this market.
OTC derivatives contributed to the crisis in three significant ways. First, one type
of derivative—credit default swaps (CDS)—fueled the mortgage securitization
pipeline. CDS were sold to investors to protect against the default or decline in value
of mortgage-related securities backed by risky loans. Companies sold protection—to
the tune of billion, in AIG’s case—to investors in these newfangled mortgage securities, helping to launch and expand the market and, in turn, to further fuel the
housing bubble.
Second, CDS were essential to the creation of synthetic CDOs. These synthetic
CDOs were merely bets on the performance of real mortgage-related securities. They
amplified the losses from the collapse of the housing bubble by allowing multiple bets
on the same securities and helped spread them throughout the financial system.
Goldman Sachs alone packaged and sold billion in synthetic CDOs from July ,
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, to May , . Synthetic CDOs created by Goldman referenced more than
, mortgage securities, and of them were referenced at least twice. This is
apart from how many times these securities may have been referenced in synthetic
CDOs created by other firms.
Finally, when the housing bubble popped and crisis followed, derivatives were in
the center of the storm. AIG, which had not been required to put aside capital reserves as a cushion for the protection it was selling, was bailed out when it could not
meet its obligations. The government ultimately committed more than billion
because of concerns that AIG’s collapse would trigger cascading losses throughout
the global financial system. In addition, the existence of millions of derivatives contracts of all types between systemically important financial institutions—unseen and
unknown in this unregulated market—added to uncertainty and escalated panic,
helping to precipitate government assistance to those institutions.
• We conclude the failures of credit rating agencies were essential cogs in the
wheel of financial destruction. The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of
the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis
could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval. Investors relied on them, often blindly. In some cases, they were obligated to use them, or regulatory capital standards were hinged on them. This crisis could not have happened
without the rating agencies. Their ratings helped the market soar and their downgrades through 2007 and 2008 wreaked havoc across markets and firms.
In our report, you will read about the breakdowns at Moody’s, examined by the
Commission as a case study. From to , Moody’s rated nearly ,
mortgage-related securities as triple-A. This compares with six private-sector companies in the United States that carried this coveted rating in early . In
alone, Moody’s put its triple-A stamp of approval on mortgage-related securities
every working day. The results were disastrous: of the mortgage securities rated
triple-A that year ultimately were downgraded.
You will also read about the forces at work behind the breakdowns at Moody’s, including the flawed computer models, the pressure from financial firms that paid for
the ratings, the relentless drive for market share, the lack of resources to do the job
despite record profits, and the absence of meaningful public oversight. And you will
see that without the active participation of the rating agencies, the market for mortgage-related securities could not have been what it became.
* * *
T HERE ARE MANY COMPETING VIEWS as to the causes of this crisis. In this regard, the
Commission has endeavored to address key questions posed to us. Here we discuss
three: capital availability and excess liquidity, the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
(the GSEs), and government housing policy.
First, as to the matter of excess liquidity: in our report, we outline monetary policies and capital flows during the years leading up to the crisis. Low interest rates,
widely available capital, and international investors seeking to put their money in real
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estate assets in the United States were prerequisites for the creation of a credit bubble.
Those conditions created increased risks, which should have been recognized by
market participants, policy makers, and regulators. However, it is the Commission’s
conclusion that excess liquidity did not need to cause a crisis. It was the failures outlined above—including the failure to effectively rein in excesses in the mortgage and
financial markets—that were the principal causes of this crisis. Indeed, the availability of well-priced capital—both foreign and domestic—is an opportunity for economic expansion and growth if encouraged to flow in productive directions.
Second, we examined the role of the GSEs, with Fannie Mae serving as the Commission’s case study in this area. These government-sponsored enterprises had a
deeply flawed business model as publicly traded corporations with the implicit backing of and subsidies from the federal government and with a public mission. Their
trillion mortgage exposure and market position were significant. In and
, they decided to ramp up their purchase and guarantee of risky mortgages, just
as the housing market was peaking. They used their political power for decades to
ward off effective regulation and oversight—spending million on lobbying from
to . They suffered from many of the same failures of corporate governance
and risk management as the Commission discovered in other financial firms.
Through the third quarter of , the Treasury Department had provided billion in financial support to keep them afloat.
We conclude that these two entities contributed to the crisis, but were not a primary cause. Importantly, GSE mortgage securities essentially maintained their value
throughout the crisis and did not contribute to the significant financial firm losses
that were central to the financial crisis.
The GSEs participated in the expansion of subprime and other risky mortgages,
but they followed rather than led Wall Street and other lenders in the rush for fool’s
gold. They purchased the highest rated non-GSE mortgage-backed securities and
their participation in this market added helium to the housing balloon, but their purchases never represented a majority of the market. Those purchases represented .
of non-GSE subprime mortgage-backed securities in , with the share rising to
in , and falling back to by . They relaxed their underwriting standards to purchase or guarantee riskier loans and related securities in order to meet
stock market analysts’ and investors’ expectations for growth, to regain market share,
and to ensure generous compensation for their executives and employees—justifying
their activities on the broad and sustained public policy support for homeownership.
The Commission also probed the performance of the loans purchased or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. While they generated substantial losses, delinquency
rates for GSE loans were substantially lower than loans securitized by other financial
firms. For example, data compiled by the Commission for a subset of borrowers with
similar credit scores—scores below —show that by the end of , GSE mortgages were far less likely to be seriously delinquent than were non-GSE securitized
mortgages: . versus ..
We also studied at length how the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) affordable housing goals for the GSEs affected their investment in
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risky mortgages. Based on the evidence and interviews with dozens of individuals involved in this subject area, we determined these goals only contributed marginally to
Fannie’s and Freddie’s participation in those mortgages.
Finally, as to the matter of whether government housing policies were a primary
cause of the crisis: for decades, government policy has encouraged homeownership
through a set of incentives, assistance programs, and mandates. These policies were
put in place and promoted by several administrations and Congresses—indeed, both
Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush set aggressive goals to increase homeownership.
In conducting our inquiry, we took a careful look at HUD’s affordable housing
goals, as noted above, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). The CRA was
enacted in to combat “redlining” by banks—the practice of denying credit to individuals and businesses in certain neighborhoods without regard to their creditworthiness. The CRA requires banks and savings and loans to lend, invest, and provide
services to the communities from which they take deposits, consistent with bank
safety and soundness.
The Commission concludes the CRA was not a significant factor in subprime lending or the crisis. Many subprime lenders were not subject to the CRA. Research indicates only of high-cost loans—a proxy for subprime loans—had any connection to
the law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they
were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same
neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.
Nonetheless, we make the following observation about government housing policies—they failed in this respect: As a nation, we set aggressive homeownership goals
with the desire to extend credit to families previously denied access to the financial
markets. Yet the government failed to ensure that the philosophy of opportunity was
being matched by the practical realities on the ground. Witness again the failure of
the Federal Reserve and other regulators to rein in irresponsible lending. Homeownership peaked in the spring of and then began to decline. From that point on,
the talk of opportunity was tragically at odds with the reality of a financial disaster in
the making.
* * *
W HEN THIS C OMMISSION began its work months ago, some imagined that the
events of and their consequences would be well behind us by the time we issued
this report. Yet more than two years after the federal government intervened in an
unprecedented manner in our financial markets, our country finds itself still grappling with the aftereffects of the calamity. Our financial system is, in many respects,
still unchanged from what existed on the eve of the crisis. Indeed, in the wake of the
crisis, the U.S. financial sector is now more concentrated than ever in the hands of a
few large, systemically significant institutions.
While we have not been charged with making policy recommendations, the very
purpose of our report has been to take stock of what happened so we can plot a new
course. In our inquiry, we found dramatic breakdowns of corporate governance,
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profound lapses in regulatory oversight, and near fatal flaws in our financial system.
We also found that a series of choices and actions led us toward a catastrophe for
which we were ill prepared. These are serious matters that must be addressed and
resolved to restore faith in our financial markets, to avoid the next crisis, and to rebuild a system of capital that provides the foundation for a new era of broadly
shared prosperity.
The greatest tragedy would be to accept the refrain that no one could have seen
this coming and thus nothing could have been done. If we accept this notion, it will
happen again.
This report should not be viewed as the end of the nation’s examination of this
crisis. There is still much to learn, much to investigate, and much to fix.
This is our collective responsibility. It falls to us to make different choices if we
want different results.
PART I
Crisis on the Horizon
1
BEFORE OUR VERY EYES
In examining the worst financial meltdown since the Great Depression, the Financial
Crisis Inquiry Commission reviewed millions of pages of documents and questioned
hundreds of individuals—financial executives, business leaders, policy makers, regulators, community leaders, people from all walks of life—to find out how and why it
happened.
In public hearings and interviews, many financial industry executives and top
public officials testified that they had been blindsided by the crisis, describing it as a
dramatic and mystifying turn of events. Even among those who worried that the
housing bubble might burst, few—if any—foresaw the magnitude of the crisis that
would ensue.
Charles Prince, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Citigroup Inc.,
called the collapse in housing prices “wholly unanticipated.” Warren Buffett, the
chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., which until
was the largest single shareholder of Moody’s Corporation, told the Commission
that “very, very few people could appreciate the bubble,” which he called a “mass
delusion” shared by “ million Americans.” Lloyd Blankfein, the chairman and
chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., likened the financial crisis to a
hurricane.
Regulators echoed a similar refrain. Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal
Reserve Board since , told the Commission a “perfect storm” had occurred that
regulators could not have anticipated; but when asked about whether the Fed’s lack of
aggressiveness in regulating the mortgage market during the housing boom was a
failure, Bernanke responded, “It was, indeed. I think it was the most severe failure of
the Fed in this particular episode.” Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman during the
two decades leading up to the crash, told the Commission that it was beyond the ability of regulators to ever foresee such a sharp decline. “History tells us [regulators]
cannot identify the timing of a crisis, or anticipate exactly where it will be located or
how large the losses and spillovers will be.”
In fact, there were warning signs. In the decade preceding the collapse, there were
many signs that house prices were inflated, that lending practices had spun out of
control, that too many homeowners were taking on mortgages and debt they could ill
afford, and that risks to the financial system were growing unchecked. Alarm bells
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were clanging inside financial institutions, regulatory offices, consumer service organizations, state law enforcement agencies, and corporations throughout America,
as well as in neighborhoods across the country. Many knowledgeable executives saw
trouble and managed to avoid the train wreck. While countless Americans joined in
the financial euphoria that seized the nation, many others were shouting to government officials in Washington and within state legislatures, pointing to what would
become a human disaster, not just an economic debacle.
“Everybody in the whole world knew that the mortgage bubble was there,” said
Richard Breeden, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission
appointed by President George H. W. Bush. “I mean, it wasn’t hidden. . . . You cannot
look at any of this and say that the regulators did their job. This was not some hidden
problem. It wasn’t out on Mars or Pluto or somewhere. It was right here. . . . You can’t
make trillions of dollars’ worth of mortgages and not have people notice.”
Paul McCulley, a managing director at PIMCO, one of the nation’s largest money
management firms, told the Commission that he and his colleagues began to get worried about “serious signs of bubbles” in ; they therefore sent out credit analysts to
cities to do what he called “old-fashioned shoe-leather research,” talking to real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, and local investors about the housing and mortgage
markets. They witnessed what he called “the outright degradation of underwriting
standards,” McCulley asserted, and they shared what they had learned when they got
back home to the company’s Newport Beach, California, headquarters. “And when
our group came back, they reported what they saw, and we adjusted our risk accordingly,” McCulley told the Commission. The company “severely limited” its participation in risky mortgage securities.
Veteran bankers, particularly those who remembered the savings and loan crisis,
knew that age-old rules of prudent lending had been cast aside. Arnold Cattani, the
chairman of Bakersfield, California–based Mission Bank, told the Commission that
he grew uncomfortable with the “pure lunacy” he saw in the local home-building
market, fueled by “voracious” Wall Street investment banks; he thus opted out of certain kinds of investments by .
William Martin, the vice chairman and chief executive officer of Service st Bank
of Nevada, told the FCIC that the desire for a “high and quick return” blinded people
to fiscal realities. “You may recall Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black, where he holds a
device in the air, and with a bright flash wipes clean the memories of everyone who
has witnessed an alien event,” he said.
Unlike so many other bubbles—tulip bulbs in Holland in the s, South Sea
stocks in the s, Internet stocks in the late s—this one involved not just another commodity but a building block of community and social life and a cornerstone of the economy: the family home. Homes are the foundation upon which many
of our social, personal, governmental, and economic structures rest. Children usually
go to schools linked to their home addresses; local governments decide how much
money they can spend on roads, firehouses, and public safety based on how much
property tax revenue they have; house prices are tied to consumer spending. Downturns in the housing industry can cause ripple effects almost everywhere.
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When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates early in the new century and mortgage rates fell, home refinancing surged, climbing from billion in to .
trillion in , allowing people to withdraw equity built up over previous decades
and to consume more, despite stagnant wages. Home sales volume started to increase, and average home prices nationwide climbed, rising in eight years by one
measure and hitting a national high of , in early . Home prices in
many areas skyrocketed: prices increased nearly two and one-half times in Sacramento, for example, in just five years, and shot up by about the same percentage in
Bakersfield, Miami, and Key West. Prices about doubled in more than metropolitan areas, including Phoenix, Atlantic City, Baltimore, Ft. Lauderdale, Los Angeles,
Poughkeepsie, San Diego, and West Palm Beach. Housing starts nationwide
climbed , from . million in to more than million in . Encouraged
by government policies, homeownership reached a record . in the spring of
, although it wouldn’t rise an inch further even as the mortgage machine kept
churning for another three years. By refinancing their homes, Americans extracted
. trillion in home equity between and , including billion in
alone, more than seven times the amount they took out in . Real estate speculators and potential homeowners stood in line outside new subdivisions for a chance to
buy houses before the ground had even been broken. By the first half of , more
than one out of every ten home sales was to an investor, speculator, or someone buying a second home. Bigger was better, and even the structures themselves ballooned
in size; the floor area of an average new home grew by , to , square feet, in
the decade from to .
Money washed through the economy like water rushing through a broken dam.
Low interest rates and then foreign capital helped fuel the boom. Construction workers, landscape architects, real estate agents, loan brokers, and appraisers profited on
Main Street, while investment bankers and traders on Wall Street moved even higher
on the American earnings pyramid and the share prices of the most aggressive financial service firms reached all-time highs. Homeowners pulled cash out of their
homes to send their kids to college, pay medical bills, install designer kitchens with
granite counters, take vacations, or launch new businesses. They also paid off credit
cards, even as personal debt rose nationally. Survey evidence shows that about of
homeowners pulled out cash to buy a vehicle and over spent the cash on a catchall category including tax payments, clothing, gifts, and living expenses. Renters
used new forms of loans to buy homes and to move to suburban subdivisions, erecting swing sets in their backyards and enrolling their children in local schools.
In an interview with the Commission, Angelo Mozilo, the longtime CEO of
Countrywide Financial—a lender brought down by its risky mortgages—said that a
“gold rush” mentality overtook the country during these years, and that he was swept
up in it as well: “Housing prices were rising so rapidly—at a rate that I’d never seen in
my years in the business—that people, regular people, average people got caught
up in the mania of buying a house, and flipping it, making money. It was happening.
They buy a house, make , . . . and talk at a cocktail party about it. . . . Housing
suddenly went from being part of the American dream to house my family to settle
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down—it became a commodity. That was a change in the culture. . . . It was sudden,
unexpected.”
On the surface, it looked like prosperity. After all, the basic mechanisms making
the real estate machine hum—the mortgage-lending instruments and the financing
techniques that turned mortgages into investments called securities, which kept cash
flowing from Wall Street into the U.S. housing market—were tools that had worked
well for many years.
But underneath, something was going wrong. Like a science fiction movie in
which ordinary household objects turn hostile, familiar market mechanisms were being transformed. The time-tested -year fixed-rate mortgage, with a down payment, went out of style. There was a burgeoning global demand for residential
mortgage–backed securities that offered seemingly solid and secure returns. Investors around the world clamored to purchase securities built on American real estate, seemingly one of the safest bets in the world.
Wall Street labored mightily to meet that demand. Bond salesmen earned multimillion-dollar bonuses packaging and selling new kinds of loans, offered by new
kinds of lenders, into new kinds of investment products that were deemed safe but
possessed complex and hidden risks. Federal officials praised the changes—these
financial innovations, they said, had lowered borrowing costs for consumers and
moved risks away from the biggest and most systemically important financial institutions. But the nation’s financial system had become vulnerable and interconnected in ways that were not understood by either the captains of finance or the
system’s public stewards. In fact, some of the largest institutions had taken on what
would prove to be debilitating risks. Trillions of dollars had been wagered on the
belief that housing prices would always rise and that borrowers would seldom default on mortgages, even as their debt grew. Shaky loans had been bundled into investment products in ways that seemed to give investors the best of both
worlds—high-yield, risk-free—but instead, in many cases, would prove to be highrisk and yield-free.
All this financial creativity was a lot “like cheap sangria,” said Michael Mayo, a
managing director and financial services analyst at Calyon Securities (USA) Inc. “A
lot of cheap ingredients repackaged to sell at a premium,” he told the Commission. “It
might taste good for a while, but then you get headaches later and you have no idea
what’s really inside.”
The securitization machine began to guzzle these once-rare mortgage products
with their strange-sounding names: Alt-A, subprime, I-O (interest-only), low-doc,
no-doc, or ninja (no income, no job, no assets) loans; –s and –s; liar loans;
piggyback second mortgages; payment-option or pick-a-pay adjustable rate mortgages. New variants on adjustable-rate mortgages, called “exploding” ARMs, featured
low monthly costs at first, but payments could suddenly double or triple, if borrowers
were unable to refinance. Loans with negative amortization would eat away the borrower’s equity. Soon there were a multitude of different kinds of mortgages available
on the market, confounding consumers who didn’t examine the fine print, baffling
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conscientious borrowers who tried to puzzle out their implications, and opening the
door for those who wanted in on the action.
Many people chose poorly. Some people wanted to live beyond their means, and by
mid-, nearly one-quarter of all borrowers nationwide were taking out interestonly loans that allowed them to defer the payment of principal. Some borrowers
opted for nontraditional mortgages because that was the only way they could get a
foothold in areas such as the sky-high California housing market. Some speculators
saw the chance to snatch up investment properties and flip them for profit—and
Florida and Georgia became a particular target for investors who used these loans to
acquire real estate. Some were misled by salespeople who came to their homes and
persuaded them to sign loan documents on their kitchen tables. Some borrowers
naively trusted mortgage brokers who earned more money placing them in risky
loans than in safe ones. With these loans, buyers were able to bid up the prices of
houses even if they didn’t have enough income to qualify for traditional loans.
Some of these exotic loans had existed in the past, used by high-income, financially secure people as a cash-management tool. Some had been targeted to borrowers with impaired credit, offering them the opportunity to build a stronger payment
history before they refinanced. But the instruments began to deluge the larger market
in and . The changed occurred “almost overnight,” Faith Schwartz, then an
executive at the subprime lender Option One and later the executive director of Hope
Now, a lending-industry foreclosure relief group, told the Federal Reserve’s Consumer Advisory Council. “I would suggest most every lender in the country is in it,
one way or another.”
At first not a lot of people really understood the potential hazards of these new
loans. They were new, they were different, and the consequences were uncertain. But
it soon became apparent that what had looked like newfound wealth was a mirage
based on borrowed money. Overall mortgage indebtedness in the United States
climbed from . trillion in to . trillion in . The mortgage debt of
American households rose almost as much in the six years from to as it
had over the course of the country’s more than -year history. The amount of
mortgage debt per household rose from , in to , in . With
a simple flourish of a pen on paper, millions of Americans traded away decades of equity tucked away in their homes.
Under the radar, the lending and the financial services industry had mutated. In
the past, lenders had avoided making unsound loans because they would be stuck
with them in their loan portfolios. But because of the growth of securitization, it
wasn’t even clear anymore who the lender was. The mortgages would be packaged,
sliced, repackaged, insured, and sold as incomprehensibly complicated debt securities
to an assortment of hungry investors. Now even the worst loans could find a buyer.
More loan sales meant higher profits for everyone in the chain. Business boomed
for Christopher Cruise, a Maryland-based corporate educator who trained loan officers for companies that were expanding mortgage originations. He crisscrossed the
nation, coaching about , loan originators a year in auditoriums and classrooms.
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His clients included many of the largest lenders—Countrywide, Ameriquest, and
Ditech among them. Most of their new hires were young, with no mortgage experience, fresh out of school and with previous jobs “flipping burgers,” he told the FCIC.
Given the right training, however, the best of them could “easily” earn millions.
“I was a sales and marketing trainer in terms of helping people to know how to
sell these products to, in some cases, frankly unsophisticated and unsuspecting borrowers,” he said. He taught them the new playbook: “You had no incentive whatsoever to be concerned about the quality of the loan, whether it was suitable for the
borrower or whether the loan performed. In fact, you were in a way encouraged not
to worry about those macro issues.” He added, “I knew that the risk was being
shunted off. I knew that we could be writing crap. But in the end it was like a game of
musical chairs. Volume might go down but we were not going to be hurt.”
On Wall Street, where many of these loans were packaged into securities and sold
to investors around the globe, a new term was coined: IBGYBG, “I’ll be gone, you’ll
be gone.” It referred to deals that brought in big fees up front while risking much
larger losses in the future. And, for a long time, IBGYBG worked at every level.
Most home loans entered the pipeline soon after borrowers signed the documents and picked up their keys. Loans were put into packages and sold off in bulk to
securitization firms—including investment banks such as Merrill Lynch, Bear
Stearns, and Lehman Brothers, and commercial banks and thrifts such as Citibank,
Wells Fargo, and Washington Mutual. The firms would package the loans into residential mortgage–backed securities that would mostly be stamped with triple-A ratings by the credit rating agencies, and sold to investors. In many cases, the securities
were repackaged again into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs)—often composed of the riskier portions of these securities—which would then be sold to other
investors. Most of these securities would also receive the coveted triple-A ratings
that investors believed attested to their quality and safety. Some investors would buy
an invention from the s called a credit default swap (CDS) to protect against the
securities’ defaulting. For every buyer of a credit default swap, there was a seller: as
these investors made opposing bets, the layers of entanglement in the securities market increased.
The instruments grew more and more complex; CDOs were constructed out of
CDOs, creating CDOs squared. When firms ran out of real product, they started generating cheaper-to-produce synthetic CDOs—composed not of real mortgage securities but just of bets on other mortgage products. Each new permutation created an
opportunity to extract more fees and trading profits. And each new layer brought in
more investors wagering on the mortgage market—even well after the market had
started to turn. So by the time the process was complete, a mortgage on a home in
south Florida might become part of dozens of securities owned by hundreds of investors—or parts of bets being made by hundreds more. Treasury Secretary Timothy
Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank during the crisis, described the resulting product as “cooked spaghetti” that became hard to “untangle.”
Ralph Cioffi spent several years creating CDOs for Bear Stearns and a couple of
more years on the repurchase or “repo” desk, which was responsible for borrowing
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money every night to finance Bear Stearns’s broader securities portfolio. In September , Cioffi created a hedge fund within Bear Stearns with a minimum investment of million. As was common, he used borrowed money—up to borrowed
for every from investors—to buy CDOs. Cioffi’s first fund was extremely successful; it earned for investors in and in —after the annual management fee and the slice of the profit for Cioffi and his Bear Stearns team—and
grew to almost billion by the end of . In the fall of , he created another,
more aggressive fund. This one would shoot for leverage of up to to . By the end
of , the two hedge funds had billion invested, half in securities issued by
CDOs centered on housing. As a CDO manager, Cioffi also managed another billion of mortgage-related CDOs for other investors.
Cioffi’s investors and others like them wanted high-yielding mortgage securities.
That, in turn, required high-yielding mortgages. An advertising barrage bombarded
potential borrowers, urging them to buy or refinance homes. Direct-mail solicitations flooded people’s mailboxes. Dancing figures, depicting happy homeowners,
boogied on computer monitors. Telephones began ringing off the hook with calls
from loan officers offering the latest loan products: One percent loan! (But only for
the first year.) No money down! (Leaving no equity if home prices fell.) No income
documentation needed! (Mortgages soon dubbed “liar loans” by the industry itself.)
Borrowers answered the call, many believing that with ever-rising prices, housing
was the investment that couldn’t lose.
In Washington, four intermingled issues came into play that made it difficult to acknowledge the looming threats. First, efforts to boost homeownership had broad political support—from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and successive
Congresses—even though in reality the homeownership rate had peaked in the spring
of . Second, the real estate boom was generating a lot of cash on Wall Street and
creating a lot of jobs in the housing industry at a time when performance in other sectors of the economy was dreary. Third, many top officials and regulators were reluctant to challenge the profitable and powerful financial industry. And finally, policy
makers believed that even if the housing market tanked, the broader financial system
and economy would hold up.
As the mortgage market began its transformation in the late s, consumer advocates and front-line local government officials were among the first to spot the
changes: homeowners began streaming into their offices to seek help in dealing with
mortgages they could not afford to pay. They began raising the issue with the Federal
Reserve and other banking regulators. Bob Gnaizda, the general counsel and policy
director of the Greenlining Institute, a California-based nonprofit housing group,
told the Commission that he began meeting with Greenspan at least once a year
starting in , each time highlighting to him the growth of predatory lending practices and discussing with him the social and economic problems they were creating.
One of the first places to see the bad lending practices envelop an entire market
was Cleveland, Ohio. From to , home prices in Cleveland rose , climbing from a median of , to ,, while home prices nationally rose about
in those same years; at the same time, the city’s unemployment rate, ranging
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from . in to . in , more or less tracked the broader U.S. pattern.
James Rokakis, the longtime county treasurer of Cuyahoga County, where Cleveland
is located, told the Commission that the region’s housing market was juiced by “flipping on mega-steroids,” with rings of real estate agents, appraisers, and loan originators earning fees on each transaction and feeding the securitized loans to Wall Street.
City officials began to hear reports that these activities were being propelled by new
kinds of nontraditional loans that enabled investors to buy properties with little or no
money down and gave homeowners the ability to refinance their houses, regardless
of whether they could afford to repay the loans. Foreclosures shot up in Cuyahoga
County from , a year in to , a year in . Rokakis and other public
officials watched as families who had lived for years in modest residences lost their
homes. After they were gone, many homes were ultimately abandoned, vandalized,
and then stripped bare, as scavengers ripped away their copper pipes and aluminum
siding to sell for scrap.
“Securitization was one of the most brilliant financial innovations of the th century,” Rokakis told the Commission. “It freed up a lot of capital. If it had been done
responsibly, it would have been a wondrous thing because nothing is more stable,
there’s nothing safer, than the American mortgage market. . . . It worked for years.
But then people realized they could scam it.”
Officials in Cleveland and other Ohio cities reached out to the federal government
for help. They asked the Federal Reserve, the one entity with the authority to regulate
risky lending practices by all mortgage lenders, to use the power it had been granted
in under the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA) to issue
new mortgage lending rules. In March , Fed Governor Edward Gramlich, an advocate for expanding access to credit but only with safeguards in place, attended a
conference on the topic in Cleveland. He spoke about the Fed’s power under HOEPA,
declared some of the lending practices to be “clearly illegal,” and said they could be
“combated with legal enforcement measures.”
Looking back, Rokakis remarked to the Commission, “I naively believed they’d go
back and tell Mr. Greenspan and presto, we’d have some new rules. . . . I thought it
would result in action being taken. It was kind of quaint.”
In , when Cleveland was looking for help from the federal government, other
cities around the country were doing the same. John Taylor, the president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, with the support of community leaders
from Nevada, Michigan, Maryland, Delaware, Chicago, Vermont, North Carolina,
New Jersey, and Ohio, went to the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), which regulated savings and loan institutions, asking the agency to crack down on what they
called “exploitative” practices they believed were putting both borrowers and lenders
at risk.
The California Reinvestment Coalition, a nonprofit housing group based in
Northern California, also begged regulators to act, CRC officials told the Commission. The nonprofit group had reviewed the loans of borrowers and discovered
that many individuals were being placed into high-cost loans when they qualified for
better mortgages and that many had been misled about the terms of their loans.
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There were government reports, too. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department issued a joint report on predatory lending
in June that made a number of recommendations for reducing the risks to borrowers. In December , the Federal Reserve Board used the HOEPA law to
amend some regulations; among the changes were new rules aimed at limiting highinterest lending and preventing multiple refinancings over a short period of time, if
they were not in the borrower’s best interest. As it would turn out, those rules covered only of subprime loans. FDIC Chairman Sheila C. Bair, then an assistant
treasury secretary in the administration of President George W. Bush, characterized
the action to the FCIC as addressing only a “narrow range of predatory lending issues.” In , Gramlich noted again the “increasing reports of abusive, unethical
and in some cases, illegal, lending practices.”
Bair told the Commission that this was when “really poorly underwritten loans,
the payment shock loans” were beginning to proliferate, placing “pressure” on traditional banks to follow suit. She said that she and Gramlich considered seeking rules
to rein in the growth of these kinds of loans, but Gramlich told her that he thought
the Fed, despite its broad powers in this area, would not support the effort. Instead,
they sought voluntary rules for lenders, but that effort fell by the wayside as well.
In an environment of minimal government restrictions, the number of nontraditional loans surged and lending standards declined. The companies issuing these
loans made profits that attracted envious eyes. New lenders entered the field. Investors clamored for mortgage-related securities and borrowers wanted mortgages.
The volume of subprime and nontraditional lending rose sharply. In , the top
nonprime lenders originated billion in loans. Their volume rose to billion
in , and then billion in .
California, with its high housing costs, was a particular hotbed for this kind of
lending. In , nearly billion, or of all nontraditional loans nationwide,
were made in that state; California’s share rose to by , with these kinds of
loans growing to billion or by in California in just two years. In those
years, “subprime and option ARM loans saturated California communities,” Kevin
Stein, the associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, testified to the
Commission. “We estimated at that time that the average subprime borrower in California was paying over more per month on their mortgage payment as a result
of having received the subprime loan.”
Gail Burks, president and CEO of Nevada Fair Housing, Inc., a Las Vegas–based
housing clinic, told the Commission she and other groups took their concerns directly to Greenspan at this time, describing to him in person what she called the
“metamorphosis” in the lending industry. She told him that besides predatory lending practices such as flipping loans or misinforming seniors about reverse mortgages,
she also witnessed examples of growing sloppiness in paperwork: not crediting payments appropriately or miscalculating accounts.
Lisa Madigan, the attorney general in Illinois, also spotted the emergence of a
troubling trend. She joined state attorneys general from Minnesota, California,
Washington, Arizona, Florida, New York, and Massachusetts in pursuing allegations
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about First Alliance Mortgage Company, a California-based mortgage lender. Consumers complained that they had been deceived into taking out loans with hefty fees.
The company was then packaging the loans and selling them as securities to Lehman
Brothers, Madigan said. The case was settled in , and borrowers received
million. First Alliance went out of business. But other firms stepped into the void.
State officials from around the country joined together again in to investigate another fast-growing lender, California-based Ameriquest. It became the nation’s largest subprime lender, originating billion in subprime loans in
—mostly refinances that let borrowers take cash out of their homes, but with
hefty fees that ate away at their equity. Madigan testified to the FCIC, “Our multistate investigation of Ameriquest revealed that the company engaged in the kinds of
fraudulent practices that other predatory lenders subsequently emulated on a wide
scale: inflating home appraisals; increasing the interest rates on borrowers’ loans or
switching their loans from fixed to adjustable interest rates at closing; and promising
borrowers that they could refinance their costly loans into loans with better terms in
just a few months or a year, even when borrowers had no equity to absorb another
refinance.”
Ed Parker, the former head of Ameriquest’s Mortgage Fraud Investigations Department, told the Commission that he detected fraud at the company within one
month of starting his job there in January , but senior management did nothing
with the reports he sent. He heard that other departments were complaining he
“looked too much” into the loans. In November , he was downgraded from
“manager” to “supervisor,” and was laid off in May .
In late , Prentiss Cox, then a Minnesota assistant attorney general, asked
Ameriquest to produce information about its loans. He received about boxes of
documents. He pulled one file at random, and stared at it. He pulled out another
and another. He noted file after file where the borrowers were described as “antiques dealers”—in his view, a blatant misrepresentation of employment. In another
loan file, he recalled in an interview with the FCIC, a disabled borrower in his s
who used a walker was described in the loan application as being employed in
“light construction.”
“It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out this was bogus,” Cox told the Commission. As he tried to figure out why Ameriquest would make such obviously fraudulent loans, a friend suggested that he “look upstream.” Cox suddenly realized that
the lenders were simply generating product to ship to Wall Street to sell to investors.
“I got that it had shifted,” Cox recalled. “The lending pattern had shifted.”
Ultimately, states and the District of Columbia joined in the lawsuit against
Ameriquest, on behalf of “more than , borrowers.” The result was a million settlement. But during the years when the investigation was under way, between
and , Ameriquest originated another . billion in loans, which then
flowed to Wall Street for securitization.
Although the federal government played no role in the Ameriquest investigation,
some federal officials said they had followed the case. At the Department of Housing
and Urban Development, “we began to get rumors” that other firms were “running
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wild, taking applications over the Internet, not verifying peoples’ income or their
ability to have a job,” recalled Alphonso Jackson, the HUD secretary from to
, in an interview with the Commission. “Everybody was making a great deal of
money . . . and there wasn’t a great deal of oversight going on.” Although he was the
nation’s top housing official at the time, he placed much of the blame on Congress.
Cox, the former Minnesota prosecutor, and Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, told the Commission that one of the single biggest obstacles to effective state
regulation of unfair lending came from the federal government, particularly the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), which regulated nationally chartered
banks—including Bank of America, Citibank, and Wachovia—and the OTS, which
regulated nationally chartered thrifts. The OCC and OTS issued rules preempting
states from enforcing rules against national banks and thrifts. Cox recalled that in
, Julie Williams, the chief counsel of the OCC, had delivered what he called a
“lecture” to the states’ attorneys general, in a meeting in Washington, warning them
that the OCC would “quash” them if they persisted in attempting to control the consumer practices of nationally regulated institutions.
Two former OCC comptrollers, John Hawke and John Dugan, told the Commission that they were defending the agency’s constitutional obligation to block state efforts to impinge on federally created entities. Because state-chartered lenders had
more lending problems, they said, the states should have been focusing there rather
than looking to involve themselves in federally chartered institutions, an arena where
they had no jurisdiction. However, Madigan told the Commission that national
banks funded of the largest subprime loan issuers operating with state charters,
and that those banks were the end market for abusive loans originated by the statechartered firms. She noted that the OCC was “particularly zealous in its efforts to
thwart state authority over national lenders, and lax in its efforts to protect consumers from the coming crisis.”
Many states nevertheless pushed ahead in enforcing their own lending regulations, as did some cities. In , Charlotte, North Carolina–based Wachovia Bank
told state regulators that it would not abide by state laws, because it was a national
bank and fell under the supervision of the OCC. Michigan protested Wachovia’s announcement, and Wachovia sued Michigan. The OCC, the American Bankers Association, and the Mortgage Bankers Association entered the fray on Wachovia’s side;
the other states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia aligned themselves
with Michigan. The legal battle lasted four years. The Supreme Court ruled – in
Wachovia’s favor on April , , leaving the OCC its sole regulator for mortgage
lending. Cox criticized the federal government: “Not only were they negligent, they
were aggressive players attempting to stop any enforcement action[s]. . . . Those guys
should have been on our side.”
Nonprime lending surged to billion in and then . trillion in ,
and its impact began to be felt in more and more places. Many of those loans were
funneled into the pipeline by mortgage brokers—the link between borrowers and
the lenders who financed the mortgages—who prepared the paperwork for loans
and earned fees from lenders for doing it. More than , new mortgage brokers
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began their jobs during the boom, and some were less than honorable in their dealings with borrowers. According to an investigative news report published in ,
between and , at least , people with criminal records entered the
field in Florida, for example, including , who had previously been convicted of
such crimes as fraud, bank robbery, racketeering, and extortion. J. Thomas Cardwell, the commissioner of the Florida Office of Financial Regulation, told the Commission that “lax lending standards” and a “lack of accountability . . . created a
condition in which fraud flourished.” Marc S. Savitt, a past president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers, told the Commission that while most mortgage brokers looked out for borrowers’ best interests and steered them away from
risky loans, about , of the newcomers to the field nationwide were willing to do
whatever it took to maximize the number of loans they made. He added that some
loan origination firms, such as Ameriquest, were “absolutely” corrupt.
In Bakersfield, California, where home starts doubled and home values grew
even faster between and , the real estate appraiser Gary Crabtree initially
felt pride that his birthplace, miles north of Los Angeles, “had finally been discovered” by other Californians. The city, a farming and oil industry center in the
San Joaquin Valley, was drawing national attention for the pace of its development.
Wide-open farm fields were plowed under and divided into thousands of building
lots. Home prices jumped in Bakersfield in , in , in ,
and more in .
Crabtree, an appraiser for years, started in and to think that things
were not making sense. People were paying inflated prices for their homes, and they
didn’t seem to have enough income to pay for what they had bought. Within a few
years, when he passed some of these same houses, he saw that they were vacant. “For
sale” signs appeared on the front lawns. And when he passed again, the yards were
untended and the grass was turning brown. Next, the houses went into foreclosure,
and that’s when he noticed that the empty houses were being vandalized, which
pulled down values for the new suburban subdivisions.
The Cleveland phenomenon had come to Bakersfield, a place far from the Rust
Belt. Crabtree watched as foreclosures spread like an infectious disease through the
community. Houses fell into disrepair and neighborhoods disintegrated.
Crabtree began studying the market. In , he ended up identifying what he believed were fraudulent transactions in Bakersfield; some, for instance, were allowing insiders to siphon cash from each property transfer. The transactions
involved many of the nation’s largest lenders. One house, for example, was listed for
sale for ,, and was recorded as selling for , with financing,
though the real estate agent told Crabtree that it actually sold for ,. Crabtree
realized that the gap between the sales price and loan amount allowed these insiders
to pocket ,. The terms of the loan required the buyer to occupy the house, but
it was never occupied. The house went into foreclosure and was sold in a distress sale
for ,.
Crabtree began calling lenders to tell them what he had found; but to his shock,
they did not seem to care. He finally reached one quality assurance officer at Fremont
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Investment & Loan, the nation’s eighth-largest subprime lender. “Don’t put your nose
where it doesn’t belong,” he was told.
Crabtree took his story to state law enforcement officials and to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “I was screaming at the top of my lungs,” he said. He grew infuriated at the slow pace of enforcement and at prosecutors’ lack of response to a
problem that was wreaking economic havoc in Bakersfield.
At the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the FBI, Chris Swecker, an assistant director, was also trying to get people to pay attention to mortgage fraud. “It has the potential to be an epidemic,” he said at a news conference in Washington in . “We
think we can prevent a problem that could have as much impact as the S&L crisis.”
Swecker called another news conference in December to say the same thing,
this time adding that mortgage fraud was a “pervasive problem” that was “on the
rise.” He was joined by officials from HUD, the U.S. Postal Service, and the Internal
Revenue Service. The officials told reporters that real estate and banking executives
were not doing enough to root out mortgage fraud and that lenders needed to do
more to “police their own organizations.”
Meanwhile, the number of cases of reported mortgage fraud continued to swell.
Suspicious activity reports, also known as SARs, are reports filed by banks to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau within the Treasury Department. In November , the network published an analysis that found a -fold
increase in mortgage fraud reports between and . According to FinCEN,
the figures likely represented a substantial underreporting, because two-thirds of all
the loans being created were originated by mortgage brokers who were not subject to
any federal standard or oversight. In addition, many lenders who were required to
submit reports did not in fact do so.
“The claim that no one could have foreseen the crisis is false,” said William K.
Black, an expert on white-collar crime and a former staff director of the National
Commission on Financial Institution Reform, Recovery and Enforcement, created by
Congress in as the savings and loan crisis was unfolding.
Former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, who served from February to
, told the FCIC he could not remember the press conferences or news reports
about mortgage fraud. Both Gonzales and his successor Michael Mukasey, who
served as attorney general in and , told the FCIC that mortgage fraud had
never been communicated to them as a top priority. “National security . . . was an
overriding” concern, Mukasey said.
To community activists and local officials, however, the lending practices were a
matter of national economic concern. Ruhi Maker, a lawyer who worked on foreclosure cases at the Empire Justice Center in Rochester, New York, told Fed Governors
Bernanke, Susan Bies, and Roger Ferguson in October that she suspected that
some investment banks—she specified Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers—were
producing such bad loans that the very survival of the firms was put in question. “We
repeatedly see false appraisals and false income,” she told the Fed officials, who were
gathered at the public hearing period of a Consumer Advisory Council meeting. She
urged the Fed to prod the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine the
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quality of the firms’ due diligence; otherwise, she said, serious questions could arise
about whether they could be forced to buy back bad loans that they had made or
securitized.
Maker told the board that she feared an “enormous economic impact” could result from a confluence of financial events: flat or declining incomes, a housing bubble, and fraudulent loans with overstated values.
In an interview with the FCIC, Maker said that Fed officials seemed impervious to
what the consumer advocates were saying. The Fed governors politely listened and
said little, she recalled. “They had their economic models, and their economic models did not see this coming,” she said. “We kept getting back, ‘This is all anecdotal.’”
Soon nontraditional mortgages were crowding other kinds of products out of the
market in many parts of the country. More mortgage borrowers nationwide took out
interest-only loans, and the trend was far more pronounced on the West and East
Coasts. Because of their easy credit terms, nontraditional loans enabled borrowers
to buy more expensive homes and ratchet up the prices in bidding wars. The loans
were also riskier, however, and a pattern of higher foreclosure rates frequently appeared soon after.
As home prices shot up in much of the country, many observers began to wonder
if the country was witnessing a housing bubble. On June , , the Economist
magazine’s cover story posited that the day of reckoning was at hand, with the headline “House Prices: After the Fall.” The illustration depicted a brick plummeting out
of the sky. “It is not going to be pretty,” the article declared. “How the current housing
boom ends could decide the course of the entire world economy over the next few
years.”
That same month, Fed Chairman Greenspan acknowledged the issue, telling the
Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress that “the apparent froth in housing
markets may have spilled over into the mortgage markets.” For years, he had
warned that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, bolstered by investors’ belief that these institutions had the backing of the U.S. government, were growing so large, with so little oversight, that they were creating systemic risks for the financial system. Still, he
reassured legislators that the U.S. economy was on a “reasonably firm footing” and
that the financial system would be resilient if the housing market turned sour.
“The dramatic increase in the prevalence of interest-only loans, as well as the introduction of other relatively exotic forms of adjustable rate mortgages, are developments of particular concern,” he testified in June.
To be sure, these financing vehicles have their appropriate uses. But to
the extent that some households may be employing these instruments to
purchase a home that would otherwise be unaffordable, their use is beginning to add to the pressures in the marketplace. . . .
Although we certainly cannot rule out home price declines, especially in some local markets, these declines, were they to occur, likely
would not have substantial macroeconomic implications. Nationwide
banking and widespread securitization of mortgages makes it less likely
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that financial intermediation would be impaired than was the case in
prior episodes of regional house price corrections.
Indeed, Greenspan would not be the only one confident that a housing downturn
would leave the broader financial system largely unscathed. As late as March ,
after housing prices had been declining for a year, Bernanke testified to Congress that
“the problems in the subprime market were likely to be contained”—that is, he expected little spillover to the broader economy.
Some were less sanguine. For example, the consumer lawyer Sheila Canavan, of
Moab, Utah, informed the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council in October that
of recently originated loans in California were interest-only, a proportion that
was more than twice the national average. “That’s insanity,” she told the Fed governors. “That means we’re facing something down the road that we haven’t faced before
and we are going to be looking at a safety and soundness crisis.”
On another front, some academics offered pointed analyses as they raised alarms.
For example, in August , the Yale professor Robert Shiller, who along with Karl
Case developed the Case-Shiller Index, charted home prices to illustrate how precipitously they had climbed and how distorted the market appeared in historical terms.
Shiller warned that the housing bubble would likely burst.
In that same month, a conclave of economists gathered at Jackson Lake Lodge in
Wyoming, in a conference center nestled in Grand Teton National Park. It was a
“who’s who of central bankers,” recalled Raghuram Rajan, who was then on leave
from the University of Chicago’s business school while serving as the chief economist
of the International Monetary Fund. Greenspan was there, and so was Bernanke.
Jean-Claude Trichet, the president of the European Central Bank, and Mervyn King,
the governor of the Bank of England, were among the other dignitaries.
Rajan presented a paper with a provocative title: “Has Financial Development
Made the World Riskier?” He posited that executives were being overcompensated
for short-term gains but let off the hook for any eventual losses—the IBGYBG syndrome. Rajan added that investment strategies such as credit default swaps could
have disastrous consequences if the system became unstable, and that regulatory institutions might be unable to deal with the fallout.
He recalled to the FCIC that he was treated with scorn. Lawrence Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary who was then president of Harvard University, called Rajan a “Luddite,” implying that he was simply opposed to technological change. “I felt
like an early Christian who had wandered into a convention of half-starved lions,”
Rajan wrote later.
Susan M. Wachter, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, prepared a research paper in suggesting that the
United States could have a real estate crisis similar to that suffered in Asia in the
s. When she discussed her work at another Jackson Hole gathering two years
later, it received a chilly reception, she told the Commission. “It was universally
panned,” she said, and an economist from the Mortgage Bankers Association called it
“absurd.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
In , news reports were beginning to highlight indications that the real estate
market was weakening. Home sales began to drop, and Fitch Ratings reported signs
that mortgage delinquencies were rising. That year, the hedge fund manager Mark
Klipsch of Orix Credit Corp. told participants at the American Securitization Forum,
a securities trade group, that investors had become “over optimistic” about the market. “I see a lot of irrationality,” he added. He said he was unnerved because people
were saying, “It’s different this time”—a rationale commonly heard before previous
collapses.
Some real estate appraisers had also been expressing concerns for years. From
to , a coalition of appraisal organizations circulated and ultimately delivered to Washington officials a public petition; signed by , appraisers and including the name and address of each, it charged that lenders were pressuring
appraisers to place artificially high prices on properties. According to the petition,
lenders were “blacklisting honest appraisers” and instead assigning business only to
appraisers who would hit the desired price targets. “The powers that be cannot claim
ignorance,” the appraiser Dennis J. Black of Port Charlotte, Florida, testified to the
Commission.
The appraiser Karen Mann of Discovery Bay, California, another industry veteran, told the Commission that lenders had opened subsidiaries to perform appraisals, allowing them to extract extra fees from “unknowing” consumers and
making it easier to inflate home values. The steep hike in home prices and the unmerited and inflated appraisals she was seeing in Northern California convinced her
that the housing industry was headed for a cataclysmic downturn. In , she laid
off some of her staff in order to cut her overhead expenses, in anticipation of the
coming storm; two years later, she shut down her office and began working out of her
home.
Despite all the signs that the housing market was slowing, Wall Street just kept going and going—ordering up loans, packaging them into securities, taking profits,
earning bonuses. By the third quarter of , home prices were falling and mortgage
delinquencies were rising, a combination that spelled trouble for mortgage-backed
securities. But from the third quarter of on, banks created and sold some .
trillion in mortgage-backed securities and more than billion in mortgagerelated CDOs.
Not everyone on Wall Street kept applauding, however. Some executives were
urging caution, as corporate governance and risk management were breaking down.
Reflecting on the causes of the crisis, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan testified to the
FCIC, “I blame the management teams and . . . no one else.”
At too many financial firms, management brushed aside the growing risks to their
firms. At Lehman Brothers, for example, Michael Gelband, the head of fixed income,
and his colleague Madelyn Antoncic warned against taking on too much risk in the
face of growing pressure to compete aggressively against other investment banks. Antoncic, who was the firm’s chief risk officer from to , was shunted aside: “At
the senior level, they were trying to push so hard that the wheels started to come off,”
she told the Commission. She was reassigned to a policy position working with gov-
B E F O R E O U R V E RY E Y E S
ernment regulators. Gelband left; Lehman officials blamed Gelband’s departure on
“philosophical differences.”
At Citigroup, meanwhile, Richard Bowen, a veteran banker in the consumer lending group, received a promotion in early when he was named business chief
underwriter. He would go on to oversee loan quality for over billion a year of
mortgages underwritten and purchased by CitiFinancial. These mortgages were sold
to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and others. In June , Bowen discovered that as
much as of the loans that Citi was buying were defective. They did not meet Citigroup’s loan guidelines and thus endangered the company—if the borrowers were to
default on their loans, the investors could force Citi to buy them back. Bowen told the
Commission that he tried to alert top managers at the firm by “email, weekly reports,
committee presentations, and discussions”; but though they expressed concern, it
“never translated into any action.” Instead, he said, “there was a considerable push to
build volumes, to increase market share.” Indeed, Bowen recalled, Citi began to
loosen its own standards during these years up to : specifically, it started to purchase stated-income loans. “So we joined the other lemmings headed for the cliff,” he
said in an interview with the FCIC.
He finally took his warnings to the highest level he could reach—Robert Rubin,
the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors and a former
U.S. treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, and three other bank officials.
He sent Rubin and the others a memo with the words “URGENT—READ IMMEDIATELY” in the subject line. Sharing his concerns, he stressed to top managers that
Citi faced billions of dollars in losses if investors were to demand that Citi repurchase
the defective loans.
Rubin told the Commission in a public hearing in April that Citibank handled the Bowen matter promptly and effectively. “I do recollect this and that either I
or somebody else, and I truly do not remember who, but either I or somebody else
sent it to the appropriate people, and I do know factually that that was acted on
promptly and actions were taken in response to it.” According to Citigroup, the
bank undertook an investigation in response to Bowen’s claims and the system of underwriting reviews was revised.
Bowen told the Commission that after he alerted management by sending emails,
he went from supervising people to supervising only , his bonus was reduced,
and he was downgraded in his performance review.
Some industry veterans took their concerns directly to government officials.
J. Kyle Bass, a Dallas-based hedge fund manager and a former Bear Stearns executive,
testified to the FCIC that he told the Federal Reserve that he believed the housing securitization market to be on a shaky foundation. “Their answer at the time was, and
this was also the thought that was—that was homogeneous throughout Wall Street’s
analysts—was home prices always track income growth and jobs growth. And they
showed me income growth on one chart and jobs growth on another, and said, ‘We
don’t see what you’re talking about because incomes are still growing and jobs are still
growing.’ And I said, well, you obviously don’t realize where the dog is and where the
tail is, and what’s moving what.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Even those who had profited from the growth of nontraditional lending practices
said they became disturbed by what was happening. Herb Sandler, the co-founder of
the mortgage lender Golden West Financial Corporation, which was heavily loaded
with option ARM loans, wrote a letter to officials at the Federal Reserve, the FDIC,
the OTS, and the OCC warning that regulators were “too dependent” on ratings
agencies and “there is a high potential for gaming when virtually any asset can be
churned through securitization and transformed into a AAA-rated asset, and when a
multi-billion dollar industry is all too eager to facilitate this alchemy.”
Similarly, Lewis Ranieri, a mortgage finance veteran who helped engineer the Wall
Street mortgage securitization machine in the s, said he didn’t like what he called
“the madness” that had descended on the real estate market. Ranieri told the Commission, “I was not the only guy. I’m not telling you I was John the Baptist. There were
enough of us, analysts and others, wandering around going ‘look at this stuff,’ that it
would be hard to miss it.” Ranieri’s own Houston-based Franklin Bank Corporation
would itself collapse under the weight of the financial crisis in November .
Other industry veterans inside the business also acknowledged that the rules of
the game were being changed. “Poison” was the word famously used by Countrywide’s Mozilo to describe one of the loan products his firm was originating. “In all
my years in the business I have never seen a more toxic [product],” he wrote in an internal email. Others at the bank argued in response that they were offering products “pervasively offered in the marketplace by virtually every relevant competitor of
ours.” Still, Mozilo was nervous. “There was a time when savings and loans were
doing things because their competitors were doing it,” he told the other executives.
“They all went broke.”
In late , regulators decided to take a look at the changing mortgage market.
Sabeth Siddique, the assistant director for credit risk in the Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board, was charged with investigating how broadly loan patterns were changing. He took the questions directly to large
banks in and asked them how many of which kinds of loans they were making.
Siddique found the information he received “very alarming,” he told the Commission. In fact, nontraditional loans made up percent of originations at Countrywide, percent at Wells Fargo, at National City, at Washington
Mutual, . at CitiFinancial, and . at Bank of America. Moreover, the banks
expected that their originations of nontraditional loans would rise by in , to
. billion. The review also noted the “slowly deteriorating quality of loans due to
loosening underwriting standards.” In addition, it found that two-thirds of the nontraditional loans made by the banks in had been of the stated-income, minimal
documentation variety known as liar loans, which had a particularly great likelihood
of going sour.
The reaction to Siddique’s briefing was mixed. Federal Reserve Governor Bies recalled the response by the Fed governors and regional board directors as divided
from the beginning. “Some people on the board and regional presidents . . . just
wanted to come to a different answer. So they did ignore it, or the full thrust of it,” she
told the Commission.
B E F O R E O U R V E RY E Y E S
The OCC was also pondering the situation. Former comptroller of the currency
John C. Dugan told the Commission that the push had come from below, from bank
examiners who had become concerned about what they were seeing in the field.
The agency began to consider issuing “guidance,” a kind of nonbinding official
warning to banks, that nontraditional loans could jeopardize safety and soundness
and would invite scrutiny by bank examiners. Siddique said the OCC led the effort,
which became a multiagency initiative.
Bies said that deliberations over the potential guidance also stirred debate within
the Fed, because some critics feared it both would stifle the financial innovation that
was bringing record profits to Wall Street and the banks and would make homes less
affordable. Moreover, all the agencies—the Fed, the OCC, the OTS, the FDIC, and
the National Credit Union Administration—would need to work together on it, or it
would unfairly block one group of lenders from issuing types of loans that were available from other lenders. The American Bankers Association and Mortgage Bankers
Association opposed it as regulatory overreach.
“The bankers pushed back,” Bies told the Commission. “The members of Congress pushed back. Some of our internal people at the Fed pushed back.”
The Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, which represents mortgage insurance companies, weighed in on the other side. “We are deeply concerned about
the contagion effect from poorly underwritten or unsuitable mortgages and home
equity loans,” the trade association wrote to regulators in . “The most recent
market trends show alarming signs of undue risk-taking that puts both lenders and
consumers at risk.”
In congressional testimony about a month later, William A. Simpson, the group’s
vice president, pointedly referred to past real estate downturns. “We take a conservative position on risk because of our first loss position,” Simpson informed the Senate
Subcommittee on Housing, Transportation and Community Development and the
Senate Subcommittee on Economic Policy. “However, we also have a historical perspective. We were there when the mortgage markets turned sharply down during the
mid-s especially in the oil patch and the early s in California and the
Northeast.”
Within the Fed, the debate grew heated and emotional, Siddique recalled. “It got
very personal,” he told the Commission. The ideological turf war lasted more than a
year, while the number of nontraditional loans kept growing and growing.
Consumer advocates kept up the heat. In a Fed Consumer Advisory Council
meeting in March , Fed Governors Bernanke, Mark Olson, and Kevin Warsh
were specifically and publicly warned of dangers that nontraditional loans posed to
the economy. Stella Adams, the executive director of the North Carolina Fair Housing Center, raised concerns that nontraditional lending “may precipitate a downward
spiral that starts on the coast and then creates panic in the east that could have implications on our total economy as well.”
At the next meeting of the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council, held in June
and attended by Bernanke, Bies, Olson, and Warsh, several consumer advocates described to the Fed governors alarming incidents that were now occurring all over the
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
country. Edward Sivak, the director of policy and evaluation at the Enterprise Corp.
of the Delta, in Jackson, Mississippi, spoke of being told by mortgage brokers that
property values were being inflated to maximize profit for real estate appraisers and
loan originators. Alan White, the supervising attorney at Community Legal Services
in Philadelphia, reported a “huge surge in foreclosures,” noting that up to half of the
borrowers he was seeing with troubled loans had been overcharged and given highinterest rate mortgages when their credit had qualified them for lower-cost loans.
Hattie B. Dorsey, the president and chief executive officer of Atlanta Neighborhood
Development, said she worried that houses were being flipped back and forth so
much that the result would be neighborhood “decay.” Carolyn Carter of the National
Consumer Law Center in Massachusetts urged the Fed to use its regulatory authority
to “prohibit abuses in the mortgage market.”
The balance was tipping. According to Siddique, before Greenspan left his post as
Fed chairman in January , he had indicated his willingness to accept the guidance. Ferguson worked with the Fed board and the regional Fed presidents to get it
done. Bies supported it, and Bernanke did as well.
More than a year after the OCC had began discussing the guidance, and after the
housing market had peaked, it was issued in September as an interagency warning that affected banks, thrifts, and credit unions nationwide. Dozens of states followed, directing their versions of the guidance to tens of thousands of state-chartered
lenders and mortgage brokers.
Then, in July , long after the risky, nontraditional mortgage market had disappeared and the Wall Street mortgage securitization machine had ground to a halt,
the Federal Reserve finally adopted new rules under HOEPA to curb the abuses
about which consumer groups had raised red flags for years—including a requirement that borrowers have the ability to repay loans made to them.
By that time, however, the damage had been done. The total value of mortgagebacked securities issued between and reached . trillion. There was a
mountain of problematic securities, debt, and derivatives resting on real estate assets
that were far less secure than they were thought to have been.
Just as Bernanke thought the spillovers from a housing market crash would be
contained, so too policymakers, regulators, and financial executives did not understand how dangerously exposed major firms and markets had become to the potential contagion from these risky financial instruments. As the housing market began
to turn, they scrambled to understand the rapid deterioration in the financial system
and respond as losses in one part of that system would ricochet to others.
By the end of , most of the subprime lenders had failed or been acquired, including New Century Financial, Ameriquest, and American Home Mortgage. In January , Bank of America announced it would acquire the ailing lender
Countrywide. It soon became clear that risk—rather than being diversified across the
financial system, as had been thought—was concentrated at the largest financial
firms. Bear Stearns, laden with risky mortgage assets and dependent on fickle shortterm lending, was bought by JP Morgan with government assistance in the spring.
B E F O R E O U R V E RY E Y E S
Before the summer was over, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would be put into conservatorship. Then, in September, Lehman Brothers failed and the remaining investment banks, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, struggled as they
lost the market’s confidence. AIG, with its massive credit default swap portfolio and
exposure to the subprime mortgage market, was rescued by the government. Finally,
many commercial banks and thrifts, which had their own exposures to declining
mortgage assets and their own exposures to short-term credit markets, teetered. IndyMac had already failed over the summer; in September, Washington Mutual became the largest bank failure in U.S. history. In October, Wachovia struck a deal to be
acquired by Wells Fargo. Citigroup and Bank of America fought to stay afloat. Before
it was over, taxpayers had committed trillions of dollars through more than two
dozen extraordinary programs to stabilize the financial system and to prop up the nation’s largest financial institutions.
The crisis that befell the country in had been years in the making. In testimony to the Commission, former Fed chairman Greenspan defended his record and
said most of his judgments had been correct. “I was right of the time but I was
wrong of the time,” he told the Commission. Yet the consequences of what
went wrong in the run-up to the crisis would be enormous.
The economic impact of the crisis has been devastating. And the human devastation is continuing. The officially reported unemployment rate hovered at almost
in November , but the underemployment rate, which includes those who have
given up looking for work and part-time workers who would prefer to be working
full-time, was above . And the share of unemployed workers who have been out
of work for more than six months was just above . Of large metropolitan areas,
Las Vegas, Nevada, and Riverside–San Bernardino, California, had the highest unemployment—their rates were above .
The loans were as lethal as many had predicted, and it has been estimated that ultimately as many as million households in the United States may lose their homes
to foreclosure. As of , foreclosure rates were highest in Florida and Nevada; in
Florida, nearly of loans were in foreclosure, and Nevada was not very far
behind. Nearly one-quarter of American mortgage borrowers owed more on their
mortgages than their home was worth. In Nevada, the percentage was nearly .
Households have lost trillion in wealth since .
As Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Moody’s Economy.com, testified to the
Commission, “The financial crisis has dealt a very serious blow to the U.S. economy.
The immediate impact was the Great Recession: the longest, broadest and most severe downturn since the Great Depression of the s. . . . The longer-term fallout
from the economic crisis is also very substantial. . . . It will take years for employment
to regain its pre-crisis level.”
Looking back on the years before the crisis, the economist Dean Baker said: “So
much of this was absolute public knowledge in the sense that we knew the number of
loans that were being issued with zero down. Now, do we suddenly think we have
that many more people—who are capable of taking on a loan with zero down who we
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
think are going to be able to pay that off—than was true , , years ago? I mean,
what’s changed in the world? There were a lot of things that didn’t require any investigation at all; these were totally available in the data.”
Warren Peterson, a home builder in Bakersfield, felt that he could pinpoint when
the world changed to the day. Peterson built homes in an upscale neighborhood, and
each Monday morning, he would arrive at the office to find a bevy of real estate
agents, sales contracts in hand, vying to be the ones chosen to purchase the new
homes he was building. The stream of traffic was constant. On one Saturday in November , he was at the sales office and noticed that not a single purchaser had
entered the building.
He called a friend, also in the home-building business, who said he had noticed
the same thing, and asked him what he thought about it.
“It’s over,” his friend told Peterson.
PART II
Setting the Stage
2
SHADOW BANKING
CONTENTS
Commercial paper and repos: “Unfettered markets”............................................
The savings and loan crisis: “They put a lot of
pressure on their regulators” ............................................................................
The financial crisis of and was not a single event but a series of crises that
rippled through the financial system and, ultimately, the economy. Distress in one
area of the financial markets led to failures in other areas by way of interconnections
and vulnerabilities that bankers, government officials, and others had missed or dismissed. When subprime and other risky mortgages—issued during a housing bubble
that many experts failed to identify, and whose consequences were not understood—
began to default at unexpected rates, a once-obscure market for complex investment
securities backed by those mortgages abruptly failed. When the contagion spread, investors panicked—and the danger inherent in the whole system became manifest. Financial markets teetered on the edge, and brand-name financial institutions were left
bankrupt or dependent on the taxpayers for survival.
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke now acknowledges that he missed the
systemic risks. “Prospective subprime losses were clearly not large enough on their
own to account for the magnitude of the crisis,” Bernanke told the Commission.
“Rather, the system’s vulnerabilities, together with gaps in the government’s crisis-response toolkit, were the principal explanations of why the crisis was so severe and
had such devastating effects on the broader economy.”
This part of our report explores the origins of risks as they developed in the financial system over recent decades. It is a fascinating story with profound consequences—a complex history that could yield its own report. Instead, we focus on four
key developments that helped shape the events that shook our financial markets and
economy. Detailed books could be written about each of them; we stick to the essentials for understanding our specific concern, which is the recent crisis.
First, we describe the phenomenal growth of the shadow banking system—the
investment banks, most prominently, but also other financial institutions—that
freely operated in capital markets beyond the reach of the regulatory apparatus that
had been put in place in the wake of the crash of and the Great Depression.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
This new system threatened the once-dominant traditional commercial banks, and
they took their grievances to their regulators and to Congress, which slowly but
steadily removed long-standing restrictions and helped banks break out of their traditional mold and join the feverish growth. As a result, two parallel financial systems of enormous scale emerged. This new competition not only benefited Wall
Street but also seemed to help all Americans, lowering the costs of their
mortgages and boosting the returns on their (k)s. Shadow banks and commercial banks were codependent competitors. Their new activities were very profitable—and, it turned out, very risky.
Second, we look at the evolution of financial regulation. To the Federal Reserve
and other regulators, the new dual system that granted greater license to market participants appeared to provide a safer and more dynamic alternative to the era of traditional banking. More and more, regulators looked to financial institutions to police
themselves—“deregulation” was the label. Former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan put
it this way: “The market-stabilizing private regulatory forces should gradually displace many cumbersome, increasingly ineffective government structures.” In the
Fed’s view, if problems emerged in the shadow banking system, the large commercial
banks—which were believed to be well-run, well-capitalized, and well-regulated despite the loosening of their restraints—could provide vital support. And if problems
outstripped the market’s ability to right itself, the Federal Reserve would take on the
responsibility to restore financial stability. It did so again and again in the decades
leading up to the recent crisis. And, understandably, much of the country came to assume that the Fed could always and would always save the day.
Third, we follow the profound changes in the mortgage industry, from the sleepy
days when local lenders took full responsibility for making and servicing -year
loans to a new era in which the idea was to sell the loans off as soon as possible, so
that they could be packaged and sold to investors around the world. New mortgage
products proliferated, and so did new borrowers. Inevitably, this became a market in
which the participants—mortgage brokers, lenders, and Wall Street firms—had a
greater stake in the quantity of mortgages signed up and sold than in their quality.
We also trace the history of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, publicly traded corporations established by Congress that became dominant forces in providing financing to
support the mortgage market while also seeking to maximize returns for investors.
Fourth, we introduce some of the most arcane subjects in our report: securitization, structured finance, and derivatives—words that entered the national vocabulary as the financial markets unraveled through and . Put simply and most
pertinently, structured finance was the mechanism by which subprime and other
mortgages were turned into complex investments often accorded triple-A ratings by
credit rating agencies whose own motives were conflicted. This entire market depended on finely honed computer models—which turned out to be divorced from
reality—and on ever-rising housing prices. When that bubble burst, the complexity
bubble also burst: the securities almost no one understood, backed by mortgages no
lender would have signed years earlier, were the first dominoes to fall in the financial sector.
SHA D OW BA N K I NG
A basic understanding of these four developments will bring the reader up to
speed in grasping where matters stood for the financial system in the year , at
the dawn of a decade of promise and peril.
COMMERCIAL PAPER AND REPOS:
“UNFETTERED MARKETS”
For most of the th century, banks and thrifts accepted deposits and loaned that
money to home buyers or businesses. Before the Depression, these institutions were
vulnerable to runs, when reports or merely rumors that a bank was in trouble
spurred depositors to demand their cash. If the run was widespread, the bank might
not have enough cash on hand to meet depositors’ demands: runs were common before the Civil War and then occurred in , , , , , and . To
stabilize financial markets, Congress created the Federal Reserve System in ,
which acted as the lender of last resort to banks.
But the creation of the Fed was not enough to avert bank runs and sharp contractions in the financial markets in the s and s. So in Congress passed the
Glass-Steagall Act, which, among other changes, established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. The FDIC insured bank deposits up to ,—an amount that
covered the vast majority of deposits at the time; that limit would climb to , by
, where it stayed until it was raised to , during the crisis in October .
Depositors no longer needed to worry about being first in line at a troubled bank’s
door. And if banks were short of cash, they could now borrow from the Federal Reserve, even when they could borrow nowhere else. The Fed, acting as lender of last resort, would ensure that banks would not fail simply from a lack of liquidity.
With these backstops in place, Congress restricted banks’ activities to discourage
them from taking excessive risks, another move intended to help prevent bank failures, with taxpayer dollars now at risk. Furthermore, Congress let the Federal Reserve
cap interest rates that banks and thrifts—also known as savings and loans, or S&Ls—
could pay depositors. This rule, known as Regulation Q, was also intended to keep institutions safe by ensuring that competition for deposits did not get out of hand.
The system was stable as long as interest rates remained relatively steady, which
they did during the first two decades after World War II. Beginning in the late-s,
however, inflation started to increase, pushing up interest rates. For example, the
rates that banks paid other banks for overnight loans had rarely exceeded in the
decades before , when it reached . However, thanks to Regulation Q, banks
and thrifts were stuck offering roughly less than on most deposits. Clearly, this
was an untenable bind for the depository institutions, which could not compete on
the most basic level of the interest rate offered on a deposit.
Compete with whom? In the s, Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, Vanguard, and others
persuaded consumers and businesses to abandon banks and thrifts for higher returns.
These firms—eager to find new businesses, particularly after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) abolished fixed commissions on stock trades in —
created money market mutual funds that invested these depositors’ money in
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
short-term, safe securities such as Treasury bonds and highly rated corporate debt,
and the funds paid higher interest rates than banks and thrifts were allowed to pay.
The funds functioned like bank accounts, although with a different mechanism: customers bought shares redeemable daily at a stable value. In , Merrill Lynch introduced something even more like a bank account: “cash management accounts”
allowed customers to write checks. Other money market mutual funds quickly
followed.
These funds differed from bank and thrift deposits in one important respect: they
were not protected by FDIC deposit insurance. Nevertheless, consumers liked the
higher interest rates, and the stature of the funds’ sponsors reassured them. The fund
sponsors implicitly promised to maintain the full net asset value of a share. The
funds would not “break the buck,” in Wall Street terms. Even without FDIC insurance, then, depositors considered these funds almost as safe as deposits in a bank or
thrift. Business boomed, and so was born a key player in the shadow banking industry, the less-regulated market for capital that was growing up beside the traditional
banking system. Assets in money market mutual funds jumped from billion in
to more than billion in and . trillion by .
To maintain their edge over the insured banks and thrifts, the money market
funds needed safe, high-quality assets to invest in, and they quickly developed an appetite for two booming markets: the “commercial paper” and “repo” markets.
Through these instruments, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, and other Wall Street investment banks could broker and provide (for a fee) short-term financing to large
corporations. Commercial paper was unsecured corporate debt—meaning that it was
backed not by a pledge of collateral but only by the corporation’s promise to pay.
These loans were cheaper because they were short-term—for less than nine months,
sometimes as short as two weeks and, eventually, as short as one day; the borrowers
usually “rolled them over” when the loan came due, and then again and again. Because only financially stable corporations were able to issue commercial paper, it was
considered a very safe investment; companies such as General Electric and IBM, investors believed, would always be good for the money. Corporations had been issuing
commercial paper to raise money since the beginning of the century, but the practice
grew much more popular in the s.
This market, though, underwent a crisis that demonstrated that capital markets,
too, were vulnerable to runs. Yet that crisis actually strengthened the market. In ,
the Penn Central Transportation Company, the sixth-largest nonfinancial corporation in the U.S., filed for bankruptcy with million in commercial paper outstanding. The railroad’s default caused investors to worry about the broader
commercial paper market; holders of that paper—the lenders—refused to roll over
their loans to other corporate borrowers. The commercial paper market virtually
shut down. In response, the Federal Reserve supported the commercial banks with
almost million in emergency loans and with interest rate cuts. The Fed’s actions enabled the banks, in turn, to lend to corporations so that they could pay off
their commercial paper. After the Penn Central crisis, the issuers of commercial paper—the borrowers—typically set up standby lines of credit with major banks to en-
SHA D OW BA N K I NG
able them to pay off their debts should there be another shock. These moves reassured investors that commercial paper was a safe investment.
In the s, the commercial paper market jumped more than sevenfold. Then in
the s, it grew almost fourfold. Among the largest buyers of commercial paper
were the money market mutual funds. It seemed a win-win-win deal: the mutual
funds could earn a solid return, stable companies could borrow more cheaply, and
Wall Street firms could earn fees for putting the deals together. By , commercial
paper had risen to . trillion from less than billion in .
The second major shadow banking market that grew significantly was the market
for repos, or repurchase agreements. Like commercial paper, repos have a long history, but they proliferated quickly in the s. Wall Street securities dealers often
sold Treasury bonds with their relatively low returns to banks and other conservative
investors, while then investing the cash proceeds of these sales in securities that paid
higher interest rates. The dealers agreed to repurchase the Treasuries—often within a
day—at a slightly higher price than that for which they sold them. This repo transaction—in essence a loan—made it inexpensive and convenient for Wall Street firms to
borrow. Because these deals were essentially collateralized loans, the securities dealers borrowed nearly the full value of the collateral, minus a small “haircut.” Like commercial paper, repos were renewed, or “rolled over,” frequently. For that reason, both
forms of borrowing could be considered “hot money”—because lenders could
quickly move in and out of these investments in search of the highest returns, they
could be a risky source of funding.
The repo market, too, had vulnerabilities, but it, too, had emerged from an early
crisis stronger than ever. In , two major borrowers, the securities firms Drysdale
and Lombard-Wall, defaulted on their repo obligations, creating large losses for
lenders. In the ensuing fallout, the Federal Reserve acted as lender of last resort to
support a shadow banking market. The Fed loosened the terms on which it lent
Treasuries to securities firms, leading to a -fold increase in its securities lending.
Following this episode, most repo participants switched to a tri-party arrangement in
which a large clearing bank acted as intermediary between borrower and lender, essentially protecting the collateral and the funds by putting them in escrow. This
mechanism would have severe consequences in and . In the s, however, these new procedures stabilized the repo market.
The new parallel banking system—with commercial paper and repo providing
cheaper financing, and money market funds providing better returns for consumers
and institutional investors—had a crucial catch: its popularity came at the expense of
the banks and thrifts. Some regulators viewed this development with growing alarm.
According to Alan Blinder, the vice chairman of the Federal Reserve from to
, “We were concerned as bank regulators with the eroding competitive position
of banks, which of course would threaten ultimately their safety and soundness, due
to the competition they were getting from a variety of nonbanks—and these were
mainly Wall Street firms, that were taking deposits from them, and getting into the
loan business to some extent. So, yeah, it was a concern; you could see a downward
trend in the share of banking assets to financial assets.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Traditional and Shadow Banking Systems
The funding available through the shadow banking system grew sharply in the
2000s, exceeding the traditional banking system in the years before the crisis.
IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS
$15
$13.0
Traditional
Banking
12
9
$8.5
Shadow
Banking
6
3
0
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
NOTE: Shadow banking funding includes commercial paper and other short-term borrowing (bankers
acceptances), repo, net securities loaned, liabilities of asset-backed securities issuers, and money market mutual
fund assets.
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Report
Figure .
Figure . shows that during the s the shadow banking system steadily
gained ground on the traditional banking sector—and actually surpassed the banking sector for a brief time after .
Banks argued that their problems stemmed from the Glass-Steagall Act. GlassSteagall strictly limited commercial banks’ participation in the securities markets, in
part to end the practices of the s, when banks sold highly speculative securities
to depositors. In , Congress also imposed new regulatory requirements on banks
owned by holding companies, in order to prevent a holding company from endangering any of its deposit-taking banks.
Bank supervisors monitored banks’ leverage—their assets relative to equity—
because excessive leverage endangered a bank. Leverage, used by nearly every financial institution, amplifies returns. For example, if an investor uses of his own
money to purchase a security that increases in value by , he earns . However,
if he borrows another and invests times as much (,), the same increase in value yields a profit of , double his out-of-pocket investment. If the
investment sours, though, leverage magnifies the loss just as much. A decline of
costs the unleveraged investor , leaving him with , but wipes out the leveraged
investor’s . An investor buying assets worth times his capital has a leverage
SHA D OW BA N K I NG
ratio of :, with the numbers representing the total money invested compared to
the money the investor has committed to the deal.
In , bank supervisors established the first formal minimum capital standards,
which mandated that capital—the amount by which assets exceed debt and other liabilities—should be at least of assets for most banks. Capital, in general, reflects
the value of shareholders’ investment in the bank, which bears the first risk of any potential losses.
By comparison, Wall Street investment banks could employ far greater leverage,
unhindered by oversight of their safety and soundness or by capital requirements
outside of their broker-dealer subsidiaries, which were subject to a net capital rule.
The main shadow banking participants—the money market funds and the investment banks that sponsored many of them—were not subject to the same supervision
as banks and thrifts. The money in the shadow banking markets came not from federally insured depositors but principally from investors (in the case of money market
funds) or commercial paper and repo markets (in the case of investment banks).
Both money market funds and securities firms were regulated by the Securities and
Exchange Commission. But the SEC, created in , was supposed to supervise the
securities markets to protect investors. It was charged with ensuring that issuers of
securities disclosed sufficient information for investors, and it required firms that
bought, sold, and brokered transactions in securities to comply with procedural restrictions such as keeping customers’ funds in separate accounts. Historically, the
SEC did not focus on the safety and soundness of securities firms, although it did impose capital requirements on broker-dealers designed to protect their clients.
Meanwhile, since deposit insurance did not cover such instruments as money
market mutual funds, the government was not on the hook. There was little concern
about a run. In theory, the investors had knowingly risked their money. If an investment lost value, it lost value. If a firm failed, it failed. As a result, money market funds
had no capital or leverage standards. “There was no regulation,” former Fed chairman Paul Volcker told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. “It was kind of a
free ride.” The funds had to follow only regulations restricting the type of securities
in which they could invest, the duration of those securities, and the diversification of
their portfolios. These requirements were supposed to ensure that investors’ shares
would not diminish in value and would be available anytime—important reassurances, but not the same as FDIC insurance. The only protection against losses was
the implicit guarantee of sponsors like Merrill Lynch with reputations to protect.
Increasingly, the traditional world of banks and thrifts was ill-equipped to keep
up with the parallel world of the Wall Street firms. The new shadow banks had few
constraints on raising and investing money. Commercial banks were at a disadvantage and in danger of losing their dominant position. Their bind was labeled “disintermediation,” and many critics of the financial regulatory system concluded that
policy makers, all the way back to the Depression, had trapped depository institutions in this unprofitable straitjacket not only by capping the interest rates they could
pay depositors and imposing capital requirements but also by preventing the institutions from competing against the investment banks (and their money market mutual
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
funds). Moreover, critics argued, the regulatory constraints on industries across the
entire economy discouraged competition and restricted innovation, and the financial
sector was a prime example of such a hampered industry.
Years later, Fed Chairman Greenspan described the argument for deregulation:
“Those of us who support market capitalism in its more competitive forms might argue that unfettered markets create a degree of wealth that fosters a more civilized existence. I have always found that insight compelling.”
THE SAVINGS AND LOAN CRISIS:
“THEY PUT A LOT OF PRESSURE ON THEIR REGULATORS”
Traditional financial institutions continued to chafe against the regulations still in
place. The playing field wasn’t level, which “put a lot of pressure on institutions to get
higher-rate performing assets,” former SEC Chairman Richard Breeden told the
FCIC. “And they put a lot of pressure on their regulators to allow this to happen.”
The banks and the S&Ls went to Congress for help. In , the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act repealed the limits on the interest
rates that depository institutions could offer on their deposits. Although this law removed a significant regulatory constraint on banks and thrifts, it could not restore
their competitive advantage. Depositors wanted a higher rate of return, which banks
and thrifts were now free to pay. But the interest banks and thrifts could earn off of
mortgages and other long-term loans was largely fixed and could not match their
new costs. While their deposit base increased, they now faced an interest rate
squeeze. In , the difference in interest earned on the banks’ and thrifts’ safest investments (one-year Treasury notes) over interest paid on deposits was almost .
percentage points; by , it was only . percentage points. The institutions lost almost percentage points of the advantage they had enjoyed when the rates were
capped. The legislation had not done enough to reduce the competitive pressures facing the banks and thrifts.
That legislation was followed in by the Garn-St. Germain Act, which significantly broadened the types of loans and investments that thrifts could make. The act
also gave banks and thrifts broader scope in the mortgage market. Traditionally, they
had relied on -year, fixed-rate mortgages. But the interest on fixed-rate mortgages
on their books fell short as inflation surged in the mid-s and early s and
banks and thrifts found it increasingly difficult to cover the rising costs of their
short-term deposits. In the Garn-St. Germain Act, Congress sought to relieve this
interest rate mismatch by permitting banks and thrifts to issue interest-only, balloon-payment, and adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), even in states where state
laws forbade these loans. For consumers, interest-only and balloon mortgages made
homeownership more affordable, but only in the short term. Borrowers with ARMs
enjoyed lower mortgage rates when interest rates decreased, but their rates would
rise when interest rates rose. For banks and thrifts, ARMs offered an interest rate
that floated in relationship to the rates they were paying to attract money from depositors. The floating mortgage rate protected banks and S&Ls from the interest rate
SHA D OW BA N K I NG
squeeze caused by inflation, but it effectively transferred the risk of rising interest
rates to borrowers.
Then, beginning in , the Federal Reserve accommodated a series of requests
from the banks to undertake activities forbidden under Glass-Steagall and its modifications. The new rules permitted nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies to
engage in “bank-ineligible” activities, including selling or holding certain kinds of securities that were not permissible for national banks to invest in or underwrite. At
first, the Fed strictly limited these bank-ineligible securities activities to no more
than of the assets or revenue of any subsidiary. Over time, however, the Fed relaxed these restrictions. By , bank-ineligible securities could represent up to
of assets or revenues of a securities subsidiary, and the Fed also weakened or eliminated other firewalls between traditional banking subsidiaries and the new securities
subsidiaries of bank holding companies.
Meanwhile, the OCC, the regulator of banks with national charters, was expanding the permissible activities of national banks to include those that were “functionally equivalent to, or a logical outgrowth of, a recognized bank power.” Among
these new activities were underwriting as well as trading bets and hedges, known as
derivatives, on the prices of certain assets. Between and , the OCC broadened the derivatives in which banks might deal to include those related to debt securities (), interest and currency exchange rates (), stock indices (),
precious metals such as gold and silver (), and equity stocks ().
Fed Chairman Greenspan and many other regulators and legislators supported
and encouraged this shift toward deregulated financial markets. They argued that financial institutions had strong incentives to protect their shareholders and would
therefore regulate themselves through improved risk management. Likewise, financial markets would exert strong and effective discipline through analysts, credit rating agencies, and investors. Greenspan argued that the urgent question about
government regulation was whether it strengthened or weakened private regulation.
Testifying before Congress in , he framed the issue this way: financial “modernization” was needed to “remove outdated restrictions that serve no useful purpose,
that decrease economic efficiency, and that . . . limit choices and options for the consumer of financial services.” Removing the barriers “would permit banking organizations to compete more effectively in their natural markets. The result would be a
more efficient financial system providing better services to the public.”
During the s and early s, banks and thrifts expanded into higher-risk
loans with higher interest payments. They made loans to oil and gas producers, financed leveraged buyouts of corporations, and funded developers of residential and
commercial real estate. The largest commercial banks advanced money to companies
and governments in “emerging markets,” such as countries in Asia and Latin America. Those markets offered potentially higher profits, but were much riskier than the
banks’ traditional lending. The consequences appeared almost immediately—especially in the real estate markets, with a bubble and massive overbuilding in residential
and commercial sectors in certain regions. For example, house prices rose per
year in Texas from to . In California, prices rose annually from
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
to . The bubble burst first in Texas in and , but the trouble rapidly
spread across the Southeast to the mid-Atlantic states and New England, then swept
back across the country to California and Arizona. Before the crisis ended, house
prices had declined nationally by . from July to February —the first
such fall since the Depression—driven by steep drops in regional markets. In the
s, with the mortgages in their portfolios paying considerably less than current
interest rates, spiraling defaults on the thrifts’ residential and commercial real estate
loans, and losses on energy-related, leveraged-buyout, and overseas loans, the industry was shattered.
Almost , commercial banks and thrifts failed in what became known as the
S&L crisis of the s and early s. By comparison, only banks had failed
between and . By , one-sixth of federally insured depository institutions had either closed or required financial assistance, affecting of the banking
system’s assets. More than , bank and S&L executives were convicted of
felonies. By the time the government cleanup was complete, the ultimate cost of the
crisis was billion.
Despite new laws passed by Congress in and in response to the S&L
crisis that toughened supervision of thrifts, the impulse toward deregulation continued. The deregulatory movement focused in part on continuing to dismantle regulations that limited depository institutions’ activities in the capital markets. In ,
the Treasury Department issued an extensive study calling for the elimination of the
old regulatory framework for banks, including removal of all geographic restrictions
on banking and repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. The study urged Congress to abolish
these restrictions in the belief that large nationwide banks closely tied to the capital
markets would be more profitable and more competitive with the largest banks from
the United Kingdom, Europe, and Japan. The report contended that its proposals
would let banks embrace innovation and produce a “stronger, more diversified financial system that will provide important benefits to the consumer and important protections to the taxpayer.”
The biggest banks pushed Congress to adopt Treasury’s recommendations. Opposed were insurance agents, real estate brokers, and smaller banks, who felt threatened by the possibility that the largest banks and their huge pools of deposits would
be unleashed to compete without restraint. The House of Representatives rejected
Treasury’s proposal in , but similar proposals were adopted by Congress later in
the s.
In dealing with the banking and thrift crisis of the s and early s, Congress was greatly concerned by a spate of high-profile bank bailouts. In , federal
regulators rescued Continental Illinois, the nation’s th-largest bank; in , First
Republic, number ; in , MCorp, number ; in , Bank of New England,
number . These banks had relied heavily on uninsured short-term financing to aggressively expand into high-risk lending, leaving them vulnerable to abrupt withdrawals once confidence in their solvency evaporated. Deposits covered by the FDIC
were protected from loss, but regulators felt obliged to protect the uninsured depositors—those whose balances exceeded the statutorily protected limits—to prevent po-
SHA D OW BA N K I NG
tential runs on even larger banks that reportedly may have lacked sufficient assets to
satisfy their obligations, such as First Chicago, Bank of America, and Manufacturers
Hanover.
During a hearing on the rescue of Continental Illinois, Comptroller of the Currency C. Todd Conover stated that federal regulators would not allow the largest
“money center banks” to fail. This was a new regulatory principle, and within moments it had a catchy name. Representative Stewart McKinney of Connecticut responded, “We have a new kind of bank. It is called ‘too big to fail’—TBTF—and it is a
wonderful bank.”
In , during this era of federal rescues of large commercial banks, Drexel
Burnham Lambert—once the country’s fifth-largest investment bank—failed. Crippled by legal troubles and losses in its junk bond portfolio, the firm was forced into
the largest bankruptcy in the securities industry to date when lenders shunned it in
the commercial paper and repo markets. While creditors, including other investment
banks, were rattled and absorbed heavy losses, the government did not step in, and
Drexel’s failure did not cause a crisis. So far, it seemed that among financial firms,
only commercial banks were deemed too big to fail.
In , Congress tried to limit this “too big to fail” principle, passing the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation Improvement Act (FDICIA), which sought to curb
the use of taxpayer funds to rescue failing depository institutions. FDICIA mandated
that federal regulators must intervene early when a bank or thrift got into trouble. In
addition, if an institution did fail, the FDIC had to resolve the failed institution in a
manner that produced the least cost to the FDIC’s deposit insurance fund. However,
the legislation contained two important loopholes. One exempted the FDIC from the
least-cost constraints if it, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve determined that the
failure of an institution posed a “systemic risk” to markets. The other loophole addressed a concern raised by some Wall Street investment banks, Goldman Sachs in
particular: the reluctance of commercial banks to help securities firms during previous market disruptions, such as Drexel’s failure. Wall Street firms successfully lobbied
for an amendment to FDICIA to authorize the Fed to act as lender of last resort to investment banks by extending loans collateralized by the investment banks’
securities.
In the end, the legislation sent financial institutions a mixed message: you
are not too big to fail—until and unless you are too big to fail. So the possibility of
bailouts for the biggest, most centrally placed institutions—in the commercial and
shadow banking industries—remained an open question until the next crisis,
years later.
3
SECURITIZATION AND DERIVATIVES
CONTENTS
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “The whole army of lobbyists”.............................
Structured finance: “It wasn’t reducing the risk”...................................................
The growth of derivatives: “By far the most significant event
in finance during the past decade” ...................................................................
FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC:
“THE WHOLE ARMY OF LOBBYISTS”
The crisis in the thrift industry created an opening for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
the two massive government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) created by Congress to
support the mortgage market.
Fannie Mae (officially, the Federal National Mortgage Association) was chartered
by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation during the Great Depression in to
buy mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The new government agency was authorized to purchase mortgages that adhered to the FHA’s underwriting standards, thereby virtually guaranteeing the supply of mortgage credit
that banks and thrifts could extend to homebuyers. Fannie Mae either held the mortgages in its portfolio or, less often, resold them to thrifts, insurance companies, or
other investors. After World War II, Fannie Mae got authority to buy home loans
guaranteed by the Veterans Administration (VA) as well.
This system worked well, but it had a weakness: Fannie Mae bought mortgages by
borrowing. By , Fannie’s mortgage portfolio had grown to . billion and its
debt weighed on the federal government. To get Fannie’s debt off of the government’s
balance sheet, the Johnson administration and Congress reorganized it as a publicly
traded corporation and created a new government entity, Ginnie Mae (officially, the
Government National Mortgage Association) to take over Fannie’s subsidized mortgage programs and loan portfolio. Ginnie also began guaranteeing pools of FHA and
VA mortgages. The new Fannie still purchased federally insured mortgages, but it
was now a hybrid, a “government-sponsored enterprise.”
Two years later, in , the thrifts persuaded Congress to charter a second GSE,
Freddie Mac (officially, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), to help the
S E C U R I T I Z AT I O N
AND
D E R I VAT I V E S
thrifts sell their mortgages. The legislation also authorized Fannie and Freddie to buy
“conventional” fixed-rate mortgages, which were not backed by the FHA or the VA.
Conventional mortgages were stiff competition to FHA mortgages because borrowers could get them more quickly and with lower fees. Still, the conventional mortgages did have to conform to the GSEs’ loan size limits and underwriting guidelines,
such as debt-to-income and loan-to-value ratios. The GSEs purchased only these
“conforming” mortgages.
Before , Fannie Mae generally held the mortgages it purchased, profiting
from the difference—or spread—between its cost of funds and the interest paid on
these mortgages. The and laws gave Ginnie, Fannie, and Freddie another
option: securitization. Ginnie was the first to securitize mortgages, in . A lender
would assemble a pool of mortgages and issue securities backed by the mortgage
pool. Those securities would be sold to investors, with Ginnie guaranteeing timely
payment of principal and interest. Ginnie charged a fee to issuers for this guarantee.
In , Freddie got into the business of buying mortgages, pooling them, and then
selling mortgage-backed securities. Freddie collected fees from lenders for guaranteeing timely payment of principal and interest. In , after a spike in interest rates
caused large losses on Fannie’s portfolio of mortgages, Fannie followed. During the
s and s, the conventional mortgage market expanded, the GSEs grew in importance, and the market share of the FHA and VA declined.
Fannie and Freddie had dual missions, both public and private: support the mortgage market and maximize returns for shareholders. They did not originate mortgages; they purchased them—from banks, thrifts, and mortgage companies—and
either held them in their portfolios or securitized and guaranteed them. Congress
granted both enterprises special privileges, such as exemptions from state and local
taxes and a . billion line of credit each from the Treasury. The Federal Reserve
provided services such as electronically clearing payments for GSE debt and securities as if they were Treasury bonds. So Fannie and Freddie could borrow at rates almost as low as the Treasury paid. Federal laws allowed banks, thrifts, and investment
funds to invest in GSE securities with relatively favorable capital requirements and
without limits. By contrast, laws and regulations strictly limited the amount of loans
banks could make to a single borrower and restricted their investments in the debt
obligations of other firms. In addition, unlike banks and thrifts, the GSEs were required to hold very little capital to protect against losses: only . to back their
guarantees of mortgage-backed securities and . to back the mortgages in their
portfolios. This compared to bank and thrift capital requirements of at least of
mortgages assets under capital standards. Such privileges led investors and creditors
to believe that the government implicitly guaranteed the GSEs’ mortgage-backed securities and debt and that GSE securities were therefore almost as safe as Treasury
bills. As a result, investors accepted very low returns on GSE-guaranteed mortgagebacked securities and GSE debt obligations.
Mortgages are long-term assets often funded by short-term borrowings. For
example, thrifts generally used customer deposits to fund their mortgages. Fannie
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
bought its mortgage portfolio by borrowing short- and medium-term. In ,
when the Fed increased short-term interest rates to quell inflation, Fannie, like the
thrifts, found that its cost of funding rose while income from mortgages did not. By
the s, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated
Fannie had a negative net worth of billion. Freddie emerged unscathed because unlike Fannie then, its primary business was guaranteeing mortgage-backed
securities, not holding mortgages in its portfolio. In guaranteeing mortgagebacked securities, Freddie Mac avoided taking the interest rate risk that hit Fannie’s
portfolio.
In , Congress provided tax relief and HUD relaxed Fannie’s capital requirements to help the company avert failure. These efforts were consistent with lawmakers’ repeated proclamations that a vibrant market for home mortgages served the
best interests of the country, but the moves also reinforced the impression that the
government would never abandon Fannie and Freddie. Fannie and Freddie would
soon buy and either hold or securitize mortgages worth hundreds of billions, then
trillions, of dollars. Among the investors were U.S. banks, thrifts, investment funds,
and pension funds, as well as central banks and investment funds around the world.
Fannie and Freddie had become too big to fail.
While the government continued to favor Fannie and Freddie, they toughened
regulation of the thrifts following the savings and loan crisis. Thrifts had previously
dominated the mortgage business as large holders of mortgages. In the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act of (FIRREA), Congress
imposed tougher, bank-style capital requirements and regulations on thrifts. By contrast, in the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of ,
Congress created a supervisor for the GSEs, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise
Oversight (OFHEO), without legal powers comparable to those of bank and thrift
supervisors in enforcement, capital requirements, funding, and receivership. Cracking down on thrifts while not on the GSEs was no accident. The GSEs had shown
their immense political power during the drafting of the law. “OFHEO was
structurally weak and almost designed to fail,” said Armando Falcon Jr., a former director of the agency, to the FCIC.
All this added up to a generous federal subsidy. One study put the value of
that subsidy at billion or more and estimated that more than half of these benefits accrued to shareholders, not to homebuyers.
Given these circumstances, regulatory arbitrage worked as it always does: the
markets shifted to the lowest-cost, least-regulated havens. After Congress imposed
stricter capital requirements on thrifts, it became increasingly profitable for them to
securitize with or sell loans to Fannie and Freddie rather than hold on to the loans.
The stampede was on. Fannie’s and Freddie’s debt obligations and outstanding mortgage-backed securities grew from billion in to . trillion in and
. trillion in .
The legislation that transformed Fannie in also authorized HUD to prescribe
affordable housing goals for Fannie: to “require that a reasonable portion of the corporation’s mortgage purchases be related to the national goal of providing adequate
S E C U R I T I Z AT I O N
AND
D E R I VAT I V E S
housing for low and moderate income families, but with reasonable economic return
to the corporation.” In , HUD tried to implement the law and, after a barrage of
criticism from the GSEs and the mortgage and real estate industries, issued a weak
regulation encouraging affordable housing. In the Federal Housing Enterprises
Financial Safety and Soundness Act, Congress extended HUD’s authority to set affordable housing goals for Fannie and Freddie. Congress also changed the language to
say that in the pursuit of affordable housing, “a reasonable economic return . . . may
be less than the return earned on other activities.” The law required HUD to consider
“the need to maintain the sound financial condition of the enterprises.” The act now
ordered HUD to set goals for Fannie and Freddie to buy loans for low- and moderateincome housing, special affordable housing, and housing in central cities, rural areas,
and other underserved areas. Congress instructed HUD to periodically set a goal for
each category as a percentage of the GSEs’ mortgage purchases.
In , President Bill Clinton announced an initiative to boost homeownership
from . to . of families by , and one component raised the affordable
housing goals at the GSEs. Between and , almost . million households
entered the ranks of homeowners, nearly twice as many as in the previous two years.
“But we have to do a lot better,” Clinton said. “This is the new way home for the
American middle class. We have got to raise incomes in this country. We have got to
increase security for people who are doing the right thing, and we have got to make
people believe that they can have some permanence and stability in their lives even as
they deal with all the changing forces that are out there in this global economy.” The
push to expand homeownership continued under President George W. Bush, who,
for example, introduced a “Zero Down Payment Initiative” that under certain circumstances could remove the down payment rule for first-time home buyers with
FHA-insured mortgages.
In describing the GSEs’ affordable housing loans, Andrew Cuomo, secretary of
Housing and Urban Development from to and now governor of New
York, told the FCIC, “Affordability means many things. There were moderate income
loans. These were teachers, these were firefighters, these were municipal employees,
these were people with jobs who paid mortgages. These were not subprime, predatory loans at all.”
Fannie and Freddie were now crucial to the housing market, but their dual missions—promoting mortgage lending while maximizing returns to shareholders—
were problematic. Former Fannie CEO Daniel Mudd told the FCIC that “the GSE
structure required the companies to maintain a fine balance between financial goals
and what we call the mission goals . . . the root cause of the GSEs’ troubles lies with
their business model.” Former Freddie CEO Richard Syron concurred: “I don’t
think it’s a good business model.”
Fannie and Freddie accumulated political clout because they depended on federal
subsidies and an implicit government guarantee, and because they had to deal with
regulators, affordable housing goals, and capital standards imposed by Congress and
HUD. From to , the two reported spending more than million on lobbying, and their employees and political action committees contributed million
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
to federal election campaigns. The “Fannie and Freddie political machine resisted
any meaningful regulation using highly improper tactics,” Falcon, who regulated
them from to , testified. “OFHEO was constantly subjected to malicious
political attacks and efforts of intimidation.” James Lockhart, the director of
OFHEO and its successor, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, from through
, testified that he argued for reform from the moment he became director and
that the companies were “allowed to be . . . so politically strong that for many years
they resisted the very legislation that might have saved them.” Former HUD secretary Mel Martinez described to the FCIC “the whole army of lobbyists that continually paraded in a bipartisan fashion through my offices. . . . It’s pretty amazing the
number of people that were in their employ.”
In , that army helped secure new regulations allowing the GSEs to count toward their affordable housing goals not just their whole loans but mortgage-related
securities issued by other companies, which the GSEs wanted to purchase as investments. Still, Congressional Budget Office Director June O’Neill declared in that
“the goals are not difficult to achieve, and it is not clear how much they have affected
the enterprises’ actions. In fact . . . depository institutions as well as the Federal Housing Administration devote a larger proportion of their mortgage lending to targeted
borrowers and areas than do the enterprises.”
Something else was clear: Fannie and Freddie, with their low borrowing costs and
lax capital requirements, were immensely profitable throughout the s. In ,
Fannie had a return on equity of ; Freddie, . That year, Fannie and Freddie
held or guaranteed more than trillion of mortgages, backed by only . billion
of shareholder equity.
STRUCTURED FINANCE:
“IT WASN’ T REDUCING THE RISK”
While Fannie and Freddie enjoyed a near-monopoly on securitizing fixed-rate mortgages that were within their permitted loan limits, in the s the markets began to
securitize many other types of loans, including adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs)
and other mortgages the GSEs were not eligible or willing to buy. The mechanism
worked the same: an investment bank, such as Lehman Brothers or Morgan Stanley
(or a securities affiliate of a bank), bundled loans from a bank or other lender into securities and sold them to investors, who received investment returns funded by the
principal and interest payments from the loans. Investors held or traded these securities, which were often more complicated than the GSEs’ basic mortgage-backed securities; the assets were not just mortgages but equipment leases, credit card debt, auto
loans, and manufactured housing loans. Over time, banks and securities firms used
securitization to mimic banking activities outside the regulatory framework for
banks. For example, where banks traditionally took money from deposits to make
loans and held them until maturity, banks now used money from the capital markets—often from money market mutual funds—to make loans, packaging them into
securities to sell to investors.
S E C U R I T I Z AT I O N
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For commercial banks, the benefits were large. By moving loans off their books,
the banks reduced the amount of capital they were required to hold as protection
against losses, thereby improving their earnings. Securitization also let banks rely
less on deposits for funding, because selling securities generated cash that could be
used to make loans. Banks could also keep parts of the securities on their books as
collateral for borrowing, and fees from securitization became an important source of
revenues.
Lawrence Lindsey, a former Federal Reserve governor and the director of the National Economic Council under President George W. Bush, told the FCIC that previous housing downturns made regulators worry about banks’ holding whole loans on
their books. “If you had a regional . . . real estate downturn it took down the banks in
that region along with it, which exacerbated the downturn,” Lindsey said. “So we said
to ourselves, ‘How on earth do we get around this problem?’ And the answer was,
‘Let’s have a national securities market so we don’t have regional concentration.’ . . . It
was intentional.”
Private securitizations, or structured finance securities, had two key benefits to investors: pooling and tranching. If many loans were pooled into one security, a few defaults would have minimal impact. Structured finance securities could also be sliced
up and sold in portions—known as tranches—which let buyers customize their payments. Risk-averse investors would buy tranches that paid off first in the event of default, but had lower yields. Return-oriented investors bought riskier tranches with
higher yields. Bankers often compared it to a waterfall; the holders of the senior
tranches—at the top of the waterfall—were paid before the more junior tranches.
And if payments came in below expectations, those at the bottom would be the first
to be left high and dry.
Securitization was designed to benefit lenders, investment bankers, and investors.
Lenders earned fees for originating and selling loans. Investment banks earned fees
for issuing mortgage-backed securities. These securities fetched a higher price than if
the underlying loans were sold individually, because the securities were customized
to investors’ needs, were more diversified, and could be easily traded. Purchasers of
the safer tranches got a higher rate of return than ultra-safe Treasury notes without
much extra risk—at least in theory. However, the financial engineering behind these
investments made them harder to understand and to price than individual loans. To
determine likely returns, investors had to calculate the statistical probabilities that
certain kinds of mortgages might default, and to estimate the revenues that would be
lost because of those defaults. Then investors had to determine the effect of the losses
on the payments to different tranches.
This complexity transformed the three leading credit rating agencies—Moody’s,
Standard & Poor’s (S&P), and Fitch—into key players in the process, positioned between the issuers and the investors of securities. Before securitization became common, the credit rating agencies had mainly helped investors evaluate the safety of
municipal and corporate bonds and commercial paper. Although evaluating probabilities was their stock-in-trade, they found that rating these securities required a
new type of analysis.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Participants in the securitization industry realized that they needed to secure favorable credit ratings in order to sell structured products to investors. Investment banks
therefore paid handsome fees to the rating agencies to obtain the desired ratings. “The
rating agencies were important tools to do that because you know the people that we
were selling these bonds to had never really had any history in the mortgage business. . . . They were looking for an independent party to develop an opinion,” Jim Callahan told the FCIC; Callahan is CEO of PentAlpha, which services the securitization
industry, and years ago he worked on some of the earliest securitizations.
With these pieces in place—banks that wanted to shed assets and transfer risk, investors ready to put their money to work, securities firms poised to earn fees, rating
agencies ready to expand, and information technology capable of handling the job—
the securitization market exploded. By , when the market was years old,
about billion worth of securitizations, beyond those done by Fannie, Freddie,
and Ginnie, were outstanding (see figure .). That included billion of automobile loans and over billion of credit card debt; nearly billion worth of securities were mortgages ineligible for securitization by Fannie and Freddie. Many were
subprime.
Securitization was not just a boon for commercial banks; it was also a lucrative
new line of business for the Wall Street investment banks, with which the commercial
banks worked to create the new securities. Wall Street firms such as Salomon Brothers and Morgan Stanley became major players in these complex markets and relied
increasingly on quantitative analysts, called “quants.” As early as the s, Wall
Street executives had hired quants—analysts adept in advanced mathematical theory
and computers—to develop models to predict how markets or securities might
change. Securitization increased the importance of this expertise. Scott Patterson, author of The Quants, told the FCIC that using models dramatically changed finance.
“Wall Street is essentially floating on a sea of mathematics and computer power,” Patterson said.
The increasing dependence on mathematics let the quants create more complex
products and let their managers say, and maybe even believe, that they could better
manage those products’ risk. JP Morgan developed the first “Value at Risk” model
(VaR), and the industry soon adopted different versions. These models purported to
predict with at least certainty how much a firm could lose if market prices
changed. But models relied on assumptions based on limited historical data; for
mortgage-backed securities, the models would turn out to be woefully inadequate.
And modeling human behavior was different from the problems the quants had addressed in graduate school. “It’s not like trying to shoot a rocket to the moon where
you know the law of gravity,” Emanuel Derman, a Columbia University finance
professor who worked at Goldman Sachs for years, told the Commission. “The
way people feel about gravity on a given day isn’t going to affect the way the rocket
behaves.”
Paul Volcker, Fed chairman from to , told the Commission that regulators were concerned as early as the late s that once banks began selling instead of
holding the loans they were making, they would care less about loan quality. Yet as
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Asset-Backed Securities Outstanding
In the 1990s, many kinds of loans were packaged into asset-backed securities.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
$1,000
Other
800
Student
loans
600
Manufactured
housing
400
Home equity
and other
residential
Equipment
200
Credit card
Automobile
0
’85
’86
’87
’88
’89
’90
’91
’92
’93
’94
’95
’96
’97
’98
’99
NOTE: Residential loans do not include loans securitized by government-sponsored enterprises.
SOURCE: Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association
Figure .
these instruments became increasingly complex, regulators increasingly relied on the
banks to police their own risks. “It was all tied up in the hubris of financial engineers,
but the greater hubris let markets take care of themselves,” Volcker said. Vincent
Reinhart, a former director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs, told the Commission that he and other regulators failed to appreciate the complexity of the new financial instruments and the difficulties that complexity posed in assessing risk.
Securitization “was diversifying the risk,” said Lindsey, the former Fed governor.
“But it wasn’t reducing the risk. . . . You as an individual can diversify your risk. The system as a whole, though, cannot reduce the risk. And that’s where the confusion lies.”
THE GROWTH OF DERIVATIVES: “BY FAR THE MOST
SIGNIFICANT EVENT IN FINANCE DURING THE PAST DECADE”
During the financial crisis, leverage and complexity became closely identified with
one element of the story: derivatives. Derivatives are financial contracts whose prices
are determined by, or “derived” from, the value of some underlying asset, rate, index,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
or event. They are not used for capital formation or investment, as are securities;
rather, they are instruments for hedging business risk or for speculating on changes
in prices, interest rates, and the like. Derivatives come in many forms; the most common are over-the-counter-swaps and exchange-traded futures and options. They
may be based on commodities (including agricultural products, metals, and energy
products), interest rates, currency rates, stocks and indexes, and credit risk. They can
even be tied to events such as hurricanes or announcements of government figures.
Many financial and commercial firms use such derivatives. A firm may hedge its
price risk by entering into a derivatives contract that offsets the effect of price movements. Losses suffered because of price movements can be recouped through gains
on the derivatives contract. Institutional investors that are risk-averse sometimes use
interest rate swaps to reduce the risk to their investment portfolios of inflation and
rising interest rates by trading fixed interest payments for floating payments with
risk-taking entities, such as hedge funds. Hedge funds may use these swaps for the
purpose of speculating, in hopes of profiting on the rise or fall of a price or interest
rate.
The derivatives markets are organized as exchanges or as over-the-counter (OTC)
markets, although some recent electronic trading facilities blur the distinctions. The
oldest U.S. exchange is the Chicago Board of Trade, where futures and options are
traded. Such exchanges are regulated by federal law and play a useful role in price
discovery—that is, in revealing the market’s view on prices of commodities or rates
underlying futures and options. OTC derivatives are traded by large financial institutions—traditionally, bank holding companies and investment banks—which act as
derivatives dealers, buying and selling contracts with customers. Unlike the futures
and options exchanges, the OTC market is neither centralized nor regulated. Nor is it
transparent, and thus price discovery is limited. No matter the measurement—trading volume, dollar volume, risk exposure—derivatives represent a very significant
sector of the U.S. financial system.
The principal legislation governing these markets is the Commodity Exchange
Act of , which originally applied only to derivatives on domestic agricultural
products. In , Congress amended the act to require that futures and options contracts on virtually all commodities, including financial instruments, be traded on a
regulated exchange, and created a new federal independent agency, the Commodity
Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), to regulate and supervise the market.
Outside of this regulated market, an over-the-counter market began to develop
and grow rapidly in the s. The large financial institutions acting as OTC derivatives dealers worried that the Commodity Exchange Act’s requirement that trading
occur on a regulated exchange might be applied to the products they were buying
and selling. In , the CFTC sought to address these concerns by exempting certain nonstandardized OTC derivatives from that requirement and from certain other
provisions of the Commodity Exchange Act, except for prohibitions against fraud
and manipulation.
As the OTC market grew following the CFTC’s exemption, a wave of significant
losses and scandals hit the market. Among many examples, in Procter & Gamble,
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a leading consumer products company, reported a pretax loss of million, the
largest derivatives loss by a nonfinancial firm, stemming from OTC interest and foreign
exchange rate derivatives sold to it by Bankers Trust. Procter & Gamble sued Bankers
Trust for fraud—a suit settled when Bankers Trust forgave most of the money that
Procter & Gamble owed it. That year, the CFTC and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) fined Bankers Trust million for misleading Gibson Greeting Cards
on interest rate swaps resulting in a mark-to-market loss of million, larger than
Gibson’s prior-year profits. In late , Orange County, California, announced it had
lost . billion speculating in OTC derivatives. The county filed for bankruptcy—the
largest by a municipality in U.S. history. Its derivatives dealer, Merrill Lynch, paid
million to settle claims. In response, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report on financial derivatives that found dangers in the concentration of OTC derivatives activity among major dealers, concluding that “the sudden failure or abrupt
withdrawal from trading of any one of these large dealers could cause liquidity problems in the markets and could also pose risks to the others, including federally insured
banks and the financial system as a whole.” While Congress then held hearings on the
OTC derivatives market, the adoption of regulatory legislation failed amid intense lobbying by the OTC derivatives dealers and opposition by Fed Chairman Greenspan.
In , Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation lost . billion on copper derivatives
traded on a London exchange. The CFTC charged the company with using derivatives to manipulate copper prices, including using OTC derivatives contracts to disguise the speculation and to finance the scheme. Sumitomo settled for million
in penalties and restitution. The CFTC also charged Merrill Lynch with knowingly
and intentionally aiding, abetting, and assisting the manipulation of copper prices; it
settled for a fine of million.
Debate intensified in . In May, the CFTC under Chairperson Brooksley Born
said the agency would reexamine the way it regulated the OTC derivatives market,
given the market’s rapid evolution and the string of major losses since . The
CFTC requested comments. It got them.
Some came from other regulators, who took the unusual step of publicly criticizing the CFTC. On the day that the CFTC issued a concept release, Treasury Secretary
Robert Rubin, Greenspan, and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt issued a joint statement
denouncing the CFTC’s move: “We have grave concerns about this action and its
possible consequences. . . . We are very concerned about reports that the CFTC’s action may increase the legal uncertainty concerning certain types of OTC derivatives.” They proposed a moratorium on the CFTC’s ability to regulate OTC
derivatives.
For months, Rubin, Greenspan, Levitt, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Lawrence
Summers opposed the CFTC’s efforts in testimony to Congress and in other public
pronouncements. As Alan Greenspan said: “Aside from safety and soundness regulation of derivatives dealers under the banking and securities laws, regulation of derivatives transactions that are privately negotiated by professionals is unnecessary.”
In September, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York orchestrated a . billion
recapitalization of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) by major OTC
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
derivatives dealers. An enormous hedge fund, LTCM had amassed more than
trillion in notional amount of OTC derivatives and billion of securities on .
billion of capital without the knowledge of its major derivatives counterparties or
federal regulators. Greenspan testified to Congress that in the New York Fed’s
judgment, LTCM’s failure would potentially have had systemic effects: a default by
LTCM “would not only have a significant distorting impact on market prices but
also in the process could produce large losses, or worse, for a number of creditors
and counterparties, and for other market participants who were not directly involved with LTCM.”
Nonetheless, just weeks later, in October , Congress passed the requested
moratorium.
Greenspan continued to champion derivatives and advocate deregulation of the
OTC market and the exchange-traded market. “By far the most significant event in
finance during the past decade has been the extraordinary development and expansion of financial derivatives,” Greenspan said at a Futures Industry Association conference in March . “The fact that the OTC markets function quite effectively
without the benefits of [CFTC regulation] provides a strong argument for development of a less burdensome regime for exchange-traded financial derivatives.”
The following year—after Born’s resignation—the President’s Working Group on
Financial Markets, a committee of the heads of the Treasury, Federal Reserve, SEC, and
Commodity Futures Trading Commission charged with tracking the financial system
and chaired by then Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, essentially adopted
Greenspan’s view. The group issued a report urging Congress to deregulate OTC derivatives broadly and to reduce CFTC regulation of exchange-traded derivatives as well.
In December , in response, Congress passed and President Clinton signed
the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of (CFMA), which in essence
deregulated the OTC derivatives market and eliminated oversight by both the CFTC
and the SEC. The law also preempted application of state laws on gaming and on
bucket shops (illegal brokerage operations) that otherwise could have made OTC derivatives transactions illegal. The SEC did retain antifraud authority over securitiesbased OTC derivatives such as stock options. In addition, the regulatory powers of
the CFTC relating to exchange-traded derivatives were weakened but not eliminated.
The CFMA effectively shielded OTC derivatives from virtually all regulation or
oversight. Subsequently, other laws enabled the expansion of the market. For example, under a amendment to the bankruptcy laws, derivatives counterparties
were given the advantage over other creditors of being able to immediately terminate
their contracts and seize collateral at the time of bankruptcy.
The OTC derivatives market boomed. At year-end , when the CFMA was
passed, the notional amount of OTC derivatives outstanding globally was . trillion, and the gross market value was . trillion. In the seven and a half years from
then until June , when the market peaked, outstanding OTC derivatives increased more than sevenfold to a notional amount of . trillion; their gross market value was . trillion.
Greenspan testified to the FCIC that credit default swaps—a small part of the
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D E R I VAT I V E S
market when Congress discussed regulating derivatives in the s—“did create
problems” during the financial crisis. Rubin testified that when the CFMA passed
he was “not opposed to the regulation of derivatives” and had personally agreed with
Born’s views, but that “very strongly held views in the financial services industry in
opposition to regulation” were insurmountable. Summers told the FCIC that while
risks could not necessarily have been foreseen years ago, “by our regulatory
framework with respect to derivatives was manifestly inadequate,” and that “the derivatives that proved to be by far the most serious, those associated with credit default
swaps, increased fold between and .”
One reason for the rapid growth of the derivatives market was the capital requirements advantage that many financial institutions could obtain through hedging with
derivatives. As discussed above, financial firms may use derivatives to hedge their
risks. Such use of derivatives can lower a firm’s Value at Risk as determined by computer models. In addition to gaining this advantage in risk management, such hedges
can lower the amount of capital that banks are required to hold, thanks to a
amendment to the regulatory regime known as the Basel International Capital Accord, or “Basel I.”
Meeting in Basel, Switzerland, in , the world’s central banks and bank supervisors adopted principles for banks’ capital standards, and U.S. banking regulators
made adjustments to implement them. Among the most important was the requirement that banks hold more capital against riskier assets. Fatefully, the Basel rules
made capital requirements for mortgages and mortgage-backed securities looser
than for all other assets related to corporate and consumer loans. Indeed, capital requirements for banks’ holdings of Fannie’s and Freddie’s securities were less than for
all other assets except those explicitly backed by the U.S. government.
These international capital standards accommodated the shift to increased leverage. In , large banks sought more favorable capital treatment for their trading,
and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision adopted the Market Risk Amendment to Basel I. This provided that if banks hedged their credit or market risks using
derivatives, they could hold less capital against their exposures from trading and
other activities.
OTC derivatives let derivatives traders—including the large banks and investment
banks—increase their leverage. For example, entering into an equity swap that mimicked the returns of someone who owned the actual stock may have had some upfront costs, but the amount of collateral posted was much smaller than the upfront
cost of purchasing the stock directly. Often no collateral was required at all. Traders
could use derivatives to receive the same gains—or losses—as if they had bought the
actual security, and with only a fraction of a buyer’s initial financial outlay. Warren
Buffett, the chairman and chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., testified
to the FCIC about the unique characteristics of the derivatives market, saying, “they
accentuated enormously, in my view, the leverage in the system.” He went on to call
derivatives “very dangerous stuff,” difficult for market participants, regulators, auditors, and investors to understand—indeed, he concluded, “I don’t think I could manage” a complex derivatives book.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
A key OTC derivative in the financial crisis was the credit default swap (CDS),
which offered the seller a little potential upside at the relatively small risk of a potentially large downside. The purchaser of a CDS transferred to the seller the default risk
of an underlying debt. The debt security could be any bond or loan obligation. The
CDS buyer made periodic payments to the seller during the life of the swap. In return, the seller offered protection against default or specified “credit events” such as a
partial default. If a credit event such as a default occurred, the CDS seller would typically pay the buyer the face value of the debt.
Credit default swaps were often compared to insurance: the seller was described as
insuring against a default in the underlying asset. However, while similar to insurance,
CDS escaped regulation by state insurance supervisors because they were treated as
deregulated OTC derivatives. This made CDS very different from insurance in at least
two important respects. First, only a person with an insurable interest can obtain an
insurance policy. A car owner can insure only the car she owns—not her neighbor’s.
But a CDS purchaser can use it to speculate on the default of a loan the purchaser does
not own. These are often called “naked credit default swaps” and can inflate potential
losses and corresponding gains on the default of a loan or institution.
Before the CFMA was passed, there was uncertainty about whether or not state
insurance regulators had authority over credit default swaps. In June , in response to a letter from the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, LLP,
the New York State Insurance Department determined that “naked” credit default
swaps did not count as insurance and were therefore not subject to regulation.
In addition, when an insurance company sells a policy, insurance regulators require that it put aside reserves in case of a loss. In the housing boom, CDS were sold
by firms that failed to put up any reserves or initial collateral or to hedge their exposure. In the run-up to the crisis, AIG, the largest U.S. insurance company, would accumulate a one-half trillion dollar position in credit risk through the OTC market
without being required to post one dollar’s worth of initial collateral or making any
other provision for loss. AIG was not alone. The value of the underlying assets for
CDS outstanding worldwide grew from . trillion at the end of to a peak of
. trillion at the end of . A significant portion was apparently speculative or
naked credit default swaps.
Much of the risk of CDS and other derivatives was concentrated in a few of the
very largest banks, investment banks, and others—such as AIG Financial Products, a
unit of AIG—that dominated dealing in OTC derivatives. Among U.S. bank holding
companies, of the notional amount of OTC derivatives, millions of contracts,
were traded by just five large institutions (in , JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank
of America, Wachovia, and HSBC)—many of the same firms that would find themselves in trouble during the financial crisis. The country’s five largest investment
banks were also among the world’s largest OTC derivatives dealers.
While financial institutions surveyed by the FCIC said they do not track revenues and profits generated by their derivatives operations, some firms did provide
estimates. For example, Goldman Sachs estimated that between and of its
revenues from through were generated by derivatives, including to
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D E R I VAT I V E S
of the firm’s commodities business, and half or more of its interest rate and currencies business. From May through November , billion, or , of
the billion of trades made by Goldman’s mortgage department were derivative
transactions.
When the nation’s biggest financial institutions were teetering on the edge of failure in , everyone watched the derivatives markets. What were the institutions’
holdings? Who were the counterparties? How would they fare? Market participants
and regulators would find themselves straining to understand an unknown battlefield
shaped by unseen exposures and interconnections as they fought to keep the financial system from collapsing.
4
DEREGULATION REDUX
CONTENTS
Expansion of banking activities: “Shatterer of Glass-Steagall” .............................
Long-Term Capital Management:
“That’s what history had proved to them” .....................................................
Dot-com crash: “Lay on more risk”......................................................................
The wages of finance: “Well, this one’s doing it, so how can I not do it?” ..............
Financial sector growth:
“I think we overdid finance versus the real economy”....................................
EXPANSION OF BANKING ACTIVITIES:
“SHATTERER OF GLASSSTEAGALL”
By the mid-s, the parallel banking system was booming, some of the largest
commercial banks appeared increasingly like the large investment banks, and all of
them were becoming larger, more complex, and more active in securitization. Some
academics and industry analysts argued that advances in data processing, telecommunications, and information services created economies of scale and scope in finance and thereby justified ever-larger financial institutions. Bigger would be safer,
the argument went, and more diversified, innovative, efficient, and better able to
serve the needs of an expanding economy. Others contended that the largest banks
were not necessarily more efficient but grew because of their commanding market
positions and creditors’ perception they were too big to fail. As they grew, the large
banks pressed regulators, state legislatures, and Congress to remove almost all remaining barriers to growth and competition. They had much success. In Congress authorized nationwide banking with the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and
Branching Efficiency Act. This let bank holding companies acquire banks in every
state, and removed most restrictions on opening branches in more than one state. It
preempted any state law that restricted the ability of out-of-state banks to compete
within the state’s borders.
Removing barriers helped consolidate the banking industry. Between and
, “megamergers” occurred involving banks with assets of more than billion each. Meanwhile the largest jumped from owning of the industry’s assets
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
to . From to , the combined assets of the five largest U.S. banks—Bank
of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo—more than tripled,
from . trillion to . trillion. And investment banks were growing bigger, too.
Smith Barney acquired Shearson in and Salomon Brothers in , while Paine
Webber purchased Kidder, Peabody in . Two years later, Morgan Stanley merged
with Dean Witter, and Bankers Trust purchased Alex. Brown & Sons. The assets of
the five largest investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch,
Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns—quadrupled, from trillion in to trillion in .
In , the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act required federal regulators to review their rules every decade and solicit comments on
“outdated, unnecessary, or unduly burdensome” rules. Some agencies responded
with gusto. In , the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s annual report included a photograph of the vice chairman, John Reich; the director of the Office of
Thrift Supervision (OTS), James Gilleran; and three banking industry representatives using a chainsaw and pruning shears to cut the “red tape” binding a large stack
of documents representing regulations.
Less enthusiastic agencies felt heat. Former Securities and Exchange Commission
chairman Arthur Levitt told the FCIC that once word of a proposed regulation got
out, industry lobbyists would rush to complain to members of the congressional
committee with jurisdiction over the financial activity at issue. According to Levitt,
these members would then “harass” the SEC with frequent letters demanding answers to complex questions and appearances of officials before Congress. These requests consumed much of the agency’s time and discouraged it from making
regulations. Levitt described it as “kind of a blood sport to make the particular
agency look stupid or inept or venal.”
However, others said interference—at least from the executive branch—was modest. John Hawke, a former comptroller of the currency, told the FCIC he found the
Treasury Department “exceedingly sensitive” to his agency’s independence. His successor, John Dugan, said “statutory firewalls” prevented interference from the executive branch.
Deregulation went beyond dismantling regulations; its supporters were also disinclined to adopt new regulations or challenge industry on the risks of innovations.
Federal Reserve officials argued that financial institutions, with strong incentives to
protect shareholders, would regulate themselves by carefully managing their own
risks. In a speech, Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson praised “the truly impressive improvement in methods of risk measurement and management and the
growing adoption of these technologies by mostly large banks and other financial intermediaries.” Likewise, Fed and other officials believed that markets would self-regulate through the activities of analysts and investors. “It is critically important to
recognize that no market is ever truly unregulated,” said Fed Chairman Alan
Greenspan in . “The self-interest of market participants generates private market
regulation. Thus, the real question is not whether a market should be regulated.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Rather, the real question is whether government intervention strengthens or weakens
private regulation.”
Richard Spillenkothen, the Fed’s director of Banking Supervision and Regulation
from to , discussed banking supervision in a memorandum submitted to
the FCIC: “Supervisors understood that forceful and proactive supervision, especially early intervention before management weaknesses were reflected in poor financial performance, might be viewed as i) overly-intrusive, burdensome, and
heavy-handed, ii) an undesirable constraint on credit availability, or iii) inconsistent
with the Fed’s public posture.”
To create checks and balances and keep any agency from becoming arbitrary or
inflexible, senior policy makers pushed to keep multiple regulators. In ,
Greenspan testified against proposals to consolidate bank regulation: “The current
structure provides banks with a method . . . of shifting their regulator, an effective
test that provides a limit on the arbitrary position or excessively rigid posture of any
one regulator. The pressure of a potential loss of institutions has inhibited excessive
regulation and acted as a countervailing force to the bias of a regulatory agency to
overregulate.” Further, some regulators, including the OTS and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), were funded largely by assessments from the institutions they regulated. As a result, the larger the number of institutions that chose these
regulators, the greater their budget.
Emboldened by success and the tenor of the times, the largest banks and their regulators continued to oppose limits on banks’ activities or growth. The barriers separating commercial banks and investment banks had been crumbling, little by little,
and now seemed the time to remove the last remnants of the restrictions that separated banks, securities firms, and insurance companies.
In the spring of , after years of opposing repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Securities Industry Association—the trade organization of Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch—changed course. Because restrictions on banks had
been slowly removed during the previous decade, banks already had beachheads in
securities and insurance. Despite numerous lawsuits against the Fed and the OCC,
securities firms and insurance companies could not stop this piecemeal process of
deregulation through agency rulings. Edward Yingling, the CEO of the American
Bankers Association (a lobbying organization), said, “Because we had knocked so
many holes in the walls separating commercial and investment banking and insurance, we were able to aggressively enter their businesses—in some cases more aggressively than they could enter ours. So first the securities industry, then the insurance
companies, and finally the agents came over and said let’s negotiate a deal and work
together.”
In , Citicorp forced the issue by seeking a merger with the insurance giant
Travelers to form Citigroup. The Fed approved it, citing a technical exemption to the
Bank Holding Company Act, but Citigroup would have to divest itself of many
Travelers assets within five years unless the laws were changed. Congress had to make
a decision: Was it prepared to break up the nation’s largest financial firm? Was it time
to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, once and for all?
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
As Congress began fashioning legislation, the banks were close at hand. In ,
the financial sector spent million lobbying at the federal level, and individuals
and political action committees (PACs) in the sector donated million to federal
election campaigns in the election cycle. From through , federal lobbying by the financial sector reached . billion; campaign donations from individuals and PACs topped billion.
In November , Congress passed and President Clinton signed the GrammLeach-Bliley Act (GLBA), which lifted most of the remaining Glass-Steagall-era restrictions. The new law embodied many of the measures Treasury had previously
advocated. The New York Times reported that Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill hung in
his office “a hunk of wood—at least feet wide—etched with his portrait and the
words ‘The Shatterer of Glass-Steagall.’”
Now, as long as bank holding companies satisfied certain safety and soundness
conditions, they could underwrite and sell banking, securities, and insurance products and services. Their securities affiliates were no longer bound by the Fed’s
limit—their primary regulator, the SEC, set their only boundaries. Supporters of the
legislation argued that the new holding companies would be more profitable (due to
economies of scale and scope), safer (through a broader diversification of risks),
more useful to consumers (thanks to the convenience of one-stop shopping for financial services), and more competitive with large foreign banks, which already offered
loans, securities, and insurance products. The legislation’s opponents warned that allowing banks to combine with securities firms would promote excessive speculation
and could trigger a crisis like the crash of . John Reed, former co-CEO of Citigroup, acknowledged to the FCIC that, in hindsight, “the compartmentalization that
was created by Glass-Steagall would be a positive factor,” making less likely a “catastrophic failure” of the financial system.
To win the securities industry’s support, the new law left in place two exceptions
that let securities firms own thrifts and industrial loan companies, a type of depository institution with stricter limits on its activities. Through them, securities firms
could access FDIC-insured deposits without supervision by the Fed. Some securities
firms immediately expanded their industrial loan company and thrift subsidiaries.
Merrill’s industrial loan company grew from less than billion in assets in to
billion in , and to billion in . Lehman’s thrift grew from million
in to billion in , and its assets rose as high as billion in .
For institutions regulated by the Fed, the new law also established a hybrid regulatory structure known colloquially as “Fed-Lite.” The Fed supervised financial holding
companies as a whole, looking only for risks that cut across the various subsidiaries
owned by the holding company. To avoid duplicating other regulators’ work, the Fed
was required to rely “to the fullest extent possible” on examinations and reports of
those agencies regarding subsidiaries of the holding company, including banks, securities firms, and insurance companies. The expressed intent of Fed-Lite was to eliminate excessive or duplicative regulation. However, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
told the FCIC that Fed-Lite “made it difficult for any single regulator to reliably see
the whole picture of activities and risks of large, complex banking institutions.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Indeed, the regulators, including the Fed, would fail to identify excessive risks and
unsound practices building up in nonbank subsidiaries of financial holding companies such as Citigroup and Wachovia.
The convergence of banks and securities firms also undermined the supportive
relationship between banking and securities markets that Fed Chairman Greenspan
had considered a source of stability. He compared it to a “spare tire”: if large commercial banks ran into trouble, their large customers could borrow from investment
banks and others in the capital markets; if those markets froze, banks could lend using their deposits. After , securitized mortgage lending provided another source
of credit to home buyers and other borrowers that softened a steep decline in lending
by thrifts and banks. The system’s resilience following the crisis in Asian financial
markets in the late s further proved his point, Greenspan said.
The new regime encouraged growth and consolidation within and across banking, securities, and insurance. The bank-centered financial holding companies such
as Citigroup, JP Morgan, and Bank of America could compete directly with the “big
five” investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman
Brothers, and Bear Stearns—in securitization, stock and bond underwriting, loan
syndication, and trading in over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives. The biggest bank
holding companies became major players in investment banking. The strategies of
the largest commercial banks and their holding companies came to more closely resemble the strategies of investment banks. Each had advantages: commercial banks
enjoyed greater access to insured deposits, and the investment banks enjoyed less
regulation. Both prospered from the late s until the outbreak of the financial crisis in . However, Greenspan’s “spare tire” that had helped make the system less
vulnerable would be gone when the financial crisis emerged—all the wheels of the
system would be spinning on the same axle.
LONGTERM CAPITAL MANAGEMENT:
“THAT’S WHAT HISTORY HAD PROVED TO THEM”
In August , Russia defaulted on part of its national debt, panicking markets. Russia announced it would restructure its debt and postpone some payments. In the aftermath, investors dumped higher-risk securities, including those having nothing to
do with Russia, and fled to the safety of U.S. Treasury bills and FDIC-insured deposits. In response, the Federal Reserve cut short-term interest rates three times in
seven weeks. With the commercial paper market in turmoil, it was up to the commercial banks to take up the slack by lending to corporations that could not roll over
their short-term paper. Banks loaned billion in September and October of
—about . times the usual amount—and helped prevent a serious disruption
from becoming much worse. The economy avoided a slump.
Not so for Long-Term Capital Management, a large U.S. hedge fund. LTCM had
devastating losses on its billion portfolio of high-risk debt securities, including
the junk bonds and emerging market debt that investors were dumping. To buy
these securities, the firm had borrowed for every of investors’ equity; lenders
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
included Merrill Lynch, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Goldman
Sachs, and Chase Manhattan. The previous four years, LTCM’s leveraging strategy
had produced magnificent returns: ., ., ., and ., while the S&P
yielded an average .
But leverage works both ways, and in just one month after Russia’s partial default,
the fund lost more than billion—or more than of its nearly billion in capital. Its debt was about billion. The firm faced insolvency.
If it were only a matter of less than billion, LTCM’s failure might have been
manageable. But the firm had further leveraged itself by entering into derivatives
contracts with more than trillion in notional amount—mostly interest rate and
equity derivatives. With very little capital in reserve, it threatened to default on its
obligations to its derivatives counterparties—including many of the largest commercial and investment banks. Because LTCM had negotiated its derivatives transactions
in the opaque over-the-counter market, the markets did not know the size of its positions or the fact that it had posted very little collateral against those positions. As the
Fed noted then, if all the fund’s counterparties had tried to liquidate their positions
simultaneously, asset prices across the market might have plummeted, which would
have created “exaggerated” losses. This was a classic setup for a run: losses were likely,
but nobody knew who would get burned. The Fed worried that with financial markets already fragile, these losses would spill over to investors with no relationship to
LTCM, and credit and derivatives markets might “cease to function for a period of
one or more days and maybe longer.”
To avert such a disaster, the Fed called an emergency meeting of major banks and
securities firms with large exposures to LTCM. On September , after considerable
urging, institutions agreed to organize a consortium to inject . billion into
LTCM in return for of its stock. The firms contributed between million
and million each, although Bear Stearns declined to participate. An orderly
liquidation of LTCM’s securities and derivatives followed.
William McDonough, then president of the New York Fed, insisted “no Federal
Reserve official pressured anyone, and no promises were made.” The rescue involved no government funds. Nevertheless, the Fed’s orchestration raised a question:
how far would it go to forestall what it saw as a systemic crisis?
The Fed’s aggressive response had precedents in the previous two decades. In
, the Fed had supported the commercial paper market; in , dealers in silver
futures; in , the repo market; in , the stock market after the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by percent in three days. All provided a template for future
interventions. Each time, the Fed cut short-term interest rates and encouraged financial firms in the parallel banking and traditional banking sectors to help ailing markets. And sometimes it organized a consortium of financial institutions to rescue
firms.
During the same period, federal regulators also rescued several large banks that
they viewed as “too big to fail” and protected creditors of those banks, including
uninsured depositors. Their rationale was that major banks were crucial to the financial markets and the economy, and regulators could not allow the collapse of one
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
large bank to trigger a panic among uninsured depositors that might lead to more
bank failures.
But it was a completely different proposition to argue that a hedge fund could be
considered too big to fail because its collapse might destabilize capital markets. Did
LTCM’s rescue indicate that the Fed was prepared to protect creditors of any type of
firm if its collapse might threaten the capital markets? Harvey Miller, the bankruptcy
counsel for Lehman Brothers when it failed in , told the FCIC that “they [hedge
funds] expected the Fed to save Lehman, based on the Fed’s involvement in LTCM’s
rescue. That’s what history had proved to them.”
For Stanley O’Neal, Merrill’s CFO during the LTCM rescue, the experience was
“indelible.” He told the FCIC, “The lesson I took away from it though was that had
the market seizure and panic and lack of liquidity lasted longer, there would have
been a lot of firms across the Street that were irreparably harmed, and Merrill would
have been one of those.”
Greenspan argued that the events of had confirmed the spare tire theory. He
said in a speech that the successful resolution of the crisis showed that “diversity within the financial sector provides insurance against a financial problem
turning into economy-wide distress.” The President’s Working Group on Financial
Markets came to a less definite conclusion. In a report, the group noted that
LTCM and its counterparties had “underestimated the likelihood that liquidity,
credit, and volatility spreads would move in a similar fashion in markets across the
world at the same time.” Many financial firms would make essentially the same mistake a decade later. For the Working Group, this miscalculation raised an important
issue: “As new technology has fostered a major expansion in the volume and, in some
cases, the leverage of transactions, some existing risk models have underestimated
the probability of severe losses. This shows the need for insuring that decisions about
the appropriate level of capital for risky positions become an issue that is explicitly
considered.”
The need for risk management grew in the following decade. The Working Group
was already concerned that neither the markets nor their regulators were prepared
for tail risk—an unanticipated event causing catastrophic damage to financial institutions and the economy. Nevertheless, it cautioned that overreacting to threats such as
LTCM would diminish the dynamism of the financial sector and the real economy:
“Policy initiatives that are aimed at simply reducing default likelihoods to extremely
low levels might be counterproductive if they unnecessarily disrupt trading activity
and the intermediation of risks that support the financing of real economic activity.”
Following the Working Group’s findings, the SEC five years later would issue a
rule expanding the number of hedge fund advisors—to include most advisors—that
needed to register with the SEC. The rule would be struck down in by the
United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia after the SEC was sued
by an investment advisor and hedge fund.
Markets were relatively calm after , Glass-Steagall would be deemed unnecessary, OTC derivatives would be deregulated, and the stock market and the economy would continue to prosper for some time. Like all the others (with the exception
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
of the Great Depression), this crisis soon faded into memory. But not before, in February , Time magazine featured Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan
Greenspan on its cover as “The Committee to Save the World.” Federal Reserve
Chairman Greenspan became a cult hero—the “Maestro”—who had handled every
emergency since the stock market crash.
DOTCOM CRASH: “LAY ON MORE RISK”
The late s was a good time for investment banking. Annual public underwritings and private placements of corporate securities in U.S. markets almost quadrupled, from billion in to . trillion in . Annual initial public offerings
of stocks (IPOs) soared from billion in to billion in as banks and
securities firms sponsored IPOs for new Internet and telecommunications companies—the dot-coms and telecoms. A stock market boom ensued comparable to the
great bull market of the s. The value of publicly traded stocks rose from . trillion in December to . trillion in March . The boom was particularly
striking in recent dot-com and telecom issues on the NASDAQ exchange. Over this
period, the NASDAQ skyrocketed from to ,.
In the spring of , the tech bubble burst. The “new economy” dot-coms and
telecoms had failed to match the lofty expectations of investors, who had relied on
bullish—and, as it turned out, sometimes deceptive—research reports issued by the
same banks and securities firms that had underwritten the tech companies’ initial
public offerings. Between March and March , the NASDAQ fell by almost
two-thirds. This slump accelerated after the terrorist attacks on September as the
nation slipped into recession. Investors were further shaken by revelations of accounting frauds and other scandals at prominent firms such as Enron and Worldcom. Some leading commercial and investment banks settled with regulators over
improper practices in the allocation of IPO shares during the bubble—for spinning
(doling out shares in “hot” IPOs in return for reciprocal business) and laddering
(doling out shares to investors who agreed to buy more later at higher prices). The
regulators also found that public research reports prepared by investment banks’ analysts were tainted by conflicts of interest. The SEC, New York’s attorney general, the
National Association of Securities Dealers (now FINRA), and state regulators settled
enforcement actions against firms for million, forbade certain practices, and
instituted reforms.
The sudden collapses of Enron and WorldCom were shocking; with assets of
billion and billion, respectively, they were the largest corporate bankruptcies
before the default of Lehman Brothers in .
Following legal proceedings and investigations, Citigroup, JP Morgan, Merrill
Lynch, and other Wall Street banks paid billions of dollars—although admitted no
wrongdoing—for helping Enron hide its debt until just before its collapse. Enron and
its bankers had created entities to do complex transactions generating fictitious
earnings, disguised debt as sales and derivative transactions, and understated the
firm’s leverage. Executives at the banks had pressured their analysts to write glowing
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
evaluations of Enron. The scandal cost Citigroup, JP Morgan, CIBC, Merrill Lynch,
and other financial institutions more than million in settlements with the SEC;
Citigroup, JP Morgan, CIBC, Lehman Brothers, and Bank of America paid another
. billion to investors to settle class action lawsuits. In response, the SarbanesOxley Act of required the personal certification of financial reports by CEOs
and CFOs; independent audit committees; longer jail sentences and larger fines for
executives who misstate financial results; and protections for whistleblowers.
Some firms that lent to companies that failed during the stock market bust were
successfully hedged, having earlier purchased credit default swaps on these firms.
Regulators seemed to draw comfort from the fact that major banks had succeeded in
transferring losses from those relationships to investors through these and other
hedging transactions. In November , Fed Chairman Greenspan said credit derivatives “appear to have effectively spread losses” from defaults by Enron and other
large corporations. Although he conceded the market was “still too new to have been
tested” thoroughly, he observed that “to date, it appears to have functioned well.”
The following year, Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson noted that “the most remarkable fact regarding the banking industry during this period is its resilience and
retention of fundamental strength.”
This resilience led many executives and regulators to presume the financial system had achieved unprecedented stability and strong risk management. The Wall
Street banks’ pivotal role in the Enron debacle did not seem to trouble senior Fed officials. In a memorandum to the FCIC, Richard Spillenkothen described a presentation to the Board of Governors in which some Fed governors received details of the
banks’ complicity “coolly” and were “clearly unimpressed” by analysts’ findings. “The
message to some supervisory staff was neither ambiguous nor subtle,” Spillenkothen
wrote. Earlier in the decade, he remembered, senior economists at the Fed had called
Enron an example of a derivatives market participant successfully regulated by market discipline without government oversight.
The Fed cut interest rates aggressively in order to contain damage from the dotcom and telecom bust, the terrorist attacks, and the financial market scandals. In January , the federal funds rate, the overnight bank-to-bank lending rate, was ..
By mid-, the Fed had cut that rate to just , the lowest in half a century, where
it stayed for another year. In addition, to offset the market disruptions following the
/ attacks, the Fed flooded the financial markets with money by purchasing more
than billion in government securities and lending billion to banks. It also
suspended restrictions on bank holding companies so the banks could make large
loans to their securities affiliates. With these actions the Fed prevented a protracted
liquidity crunch in the financial markets during the fall of , just as it had done
during the stock market crash and the Russian crisis.
Why wouldn’t the markets assume the central bank would act again—and again
save the day? Two weeks before the Fed cut short-term rates in January , the
Economist anticipated it: “the ‘Greenspan put’ is once again the talk of Wall Street. . . .
The idea is that the Federal Reserve can be relied upon in times of crisis to come to
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
the rescue, cutting interest rates and pumping in liquidity, thus providing a floor for
equity prices.” The “Greenspan put” was analysts’ shorthand for investors’ faith that
the Fed would keep the capital markets functioning no matter what. The Fed’s policy
was clear: to restrain growth of an asset bubble, it would take only small steps, such as
warning investors some asset prices might fall; but after a bubble burst, it would use
all the tools available to stabilize the markets. Greenspan argued that intentionally
bursting a bubble would heavily damage the economy. “Instead of trying to contain a
putative bubble by drastic actions with largely unpredictable consequences,” he said
in , when housing prices were ballooning, “we chose . . . to focus on policies ‘to
mitigate the fallout when it occurs and, hopefully, ease the transition to the next
expansion.’”
This asymmetric policy—allowing unrestrained growth, then working hard to
cushion the impact of a bust—raised the question of “moral hazard”: did the policy
encourage investors and financial institutions to gamble because their upside was unlimited while the full power and influence of the Fed protected their downside (at
least against catastrophic losses)? Greenspan himself warned about this in a
speech, noting that higher asset prices were “in part the indirect result of investors
accepting lower compensation for risk” and cautioning that “newly abundant liquidity can readily disappear.” Yet the only real action would be an upward march of the
federal funds rate that had begun in the summer of , although, as he pointed out
in the same speech, this had little effect.
And the markets were undeterred. “We had convinced ourselves that we were in a
less risky world,” former Federal Reserve governor and National Economic Council
director under President George W. Bush Lawrence Lindsey told the Commission.
“And how should any rational investor respond to a less risky world? They should lay
on more risk.”
THE WAGES OF FINANCE:
“WELL, THIS ONE’S DOING IT, SO HOW CAN I NOT DO IT? ”
As figure . demonstrates, for almost half a century after the Great Depression, pay
inside the financial industry and out was roughly equal. Beginning in , they diverged. By , financial sector compensation was more than greater than in
other businesses—a considerably larger gap than before the Great Depression.
Until , the New York Stock Exchange, a private self-regulatory organization,
required members to operate as partnerships. Peter J. Solomon, a former Lehman
Brothers partner, testified before the FCIC that this profoundly affected the investment bank’s culture. Before the change, he and the other partners had sat in a single
room at headquarters, not to socialize but to “overhear, interact, and monitor” each
other. They were all on the hook together. “Since they were personally liable as partners, they took risk very seriously,” Solomon said. Brian Leach, formerly an executive at Morgan Stanley, described to FCIC staff Morgan Stanley’s compensation
practices before it issued stock and became a public corporation: “When I first
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Compensation in the financial sector outstripped pay elsewhere,
a pattern not seen since the years before the Great Depression.
ANNUAL AVERAGE, IN 2009 DOLLARS
$120,000
$102,069
100,000
Financial
80,000
$58,666
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
1929
1940
1950
1960
1970
1980
1990
2000
2009
NOTE: Average compensation includes wages, salaries, commissions, tips, bonuses, and payments for
SOURCES: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-Urban, FCIC calculations
Figure .
started at Morgan Stanley, it was a private company. When you’re a private company,
you don’t get paid until you retire. I mean, you get a good, you know, year-to-year
compensation.” But the big payout was “when you retire.”
When the investment banks went public in the s and s, the close relationship between bankers’ decisions and their compensation broke down. They were
now trading with shareholders’ money. Talented traders and managers once tethered
to their firms were now free agents who could play companies against each other for
more money. To keep them from leaving, firms began providing aggressive incentives, often tied to the price of their shares and often with accelerated payouts. To
keep up, commercial banks did the same. Some included “clawback” provisions that
would require the return of compensation under narrow circumstances, but those
proved too limited to restrain the behavior of traders and managers.
Studies have found that the real value of executive pay, adjusted for inflation, grew
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
only . a year during the years after World War II, lagging companies’ increasing
size. But the rate picked up during the s and rose faster each decade, reaching
a year from to . Much of the change reflected higher earnings in the
financial sector, where by executives’ pay averaged . million annually, the
highest of any industry. Though base salaries differed relatively little across sectors,
banking and finance paid much higher bonuses and awarded more stock. And brokers
and dealers did by far the best, averaging more than million in compensation.
Both before and after going public, investment banks typically paid out half their
revenues in compensation. For example, Goldman Sachs spent between and
a year between and , when Morgan Stanley allotted between and .
Merrill paid out similar percentages in and , but gave in —a year
it suffered dramatic losses.
As the scale, revenue, and profitability of the firms grew, compensation packages
soared for senior executives and other key employees. John Gutfreund, reported to
be the highest-paid executive on Wall Street in the late s, received . million in
as CEO of Salomon Brothers. Stanley O’Neal’s package was worth more than
million in , the last full year he was CEO of Merrill Lynch. In , Lloyd
Blankfein, CEO at Goldman Sachs, received . million; Richard Fuld, CEO of
Lehman Brothers, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, received about
million and million, respectively. That year Wall Street paid workers in New
York roughly billion in year-end bonuses alone. Total compensation for the major U.S. banks and securities firms was estimated at billion.
Stock options became a popular form of compensation, allowing employees to
buy the company’s stock in the future at some predetermined price, and thus to reap
rewards when the stock price was higher than that predetermined price. In fact, the
option would have no value if the stock price was below that price. Encouraging the
awarding of stock options was legislation making compensation in excess of
million taxable to the corporation unless performance-based. Stock options had potentially unlimited upside, while the downside was simply to receive nothing if the
stock didn’t rise to the predetermined price. The same applied to plans that tied pay
to return on equity: they meant that executives could win more than they could lose.
These pay structures had the unintended consequence of creating incentives to increase both risk and leverage, which could lead to larger jumps in a company’s stock
price.
As these options motivated financial firms to take more risk and use more leverage, the evolution of the system provided the means. Shadow banking institutions
faced few regulatory constraints on leverage; changes in regulations loosened the
constraints on commercial banks. OTC derivatives allowing for enormous leverage
proliferated. And risk management, thought to be keeping ahead of these developments, would fail to rein in the increasing risks.
The dangers of the new pay structures were clear, but senior executives believed
they were powerless to change it. Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill told the Commission, “I think if you look at the results of what happened on Wall Street, it became,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
‘Well, this one’s doing it, so how can I not do it, if I don’t do it, then the people are going to leave my place and go someplace else.’” Managing risk “became less of an important function in a broad base of companies, I would guess.”
And regulatory entities, one source of checks on excessive risk taking, had challenges recruiting financial experts who could otherwise work in the private sector.
Lord Adair Turner, chairman of the U.K. Financial Services Authority, told the Commission, “It’s not easy. This is like a continual process of, you know, high-skilled
people versus high-skilled people, and the poachers are better paid than the gamekeepers.” Bernanke said the same at an FCIC hearing: “It’s just simply never going to
be the case that the government can pay what Wall Street can pay.”
Tying compensation to earnings also, in some cases, created the temptation to
manipulate the numbers. Former Fannie Mae regulator Armando Falcon Jr. told the
FCIC, “Fannie began the last decade with an ambitious goal—double earnings in
years to . [per share]. A large part of the executives’ compensation was tied to
meeting that goal.” Achieving it brought CEO Franklin Raines million of his
million pay from to . However, Falcon said, the goal “turned out to be unachievable without breaking rules and hiding risks. Fannie and Freddie executives
worked hard to persuade investors that mortgage-related assets were a riskless investment, while at the same time covering up the volatility and risks of their own mortgage portfolios and balance sheets.” Fannie’s estimate of how many mortgage holders
would pay off was off by million at year-end , which meant no bonuses. So
Fannie counted only half the million on its books, enabling Raines and other
executives to meet the earnings target and receive of their bonuses.
Compensation structures were skewed all along the mortgage securitization
chain, from people who originated mortgages to people on Wall Street who packaged
them into securities. Regarding mortgage brokers, often the first link in the process,
FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair told the FCIC that their “standard compensation practice . . . was based on the volume of loans originated rather than the performance and
quality of the loans made.” She concluded, “The crisis has shown that most financialinstitution compensation systems were not properly linked to risk management. Formula-driven compensation allows high short-term profits to be translated into
generous bonus payments, without regard to any longer-term risks.” SEC Chairman
Mary Schapiro told the FCIC, “Many major financial institutions created asymmetric
compensation packages that paid employees enormous sums for short-term success,
even if these same decisions result in significant long-term losses or failure for investors and taxpayers.”
FINANCIAL SECTOR GROWTH:
“I THINK WE OVERDID FINANCE VERSUS THE REAL ECONOMY”
For about two decades, beginning in the early s, the financial sector grew faster
than the rest of the economy—rising from about of gross domestic product
(GDP) to about in the early st century. In , financial sector profits were
about of corporate profits. In , they hit a high of but fell back to
D E R E G U L AT I O N R E D U X
in , on the eve of the financial crisis. The largest firms became considerably
larger. JP Morgan’s assets increased from billion in to . trillion in
, a compound annual growth rate of . Bank of America and Citigroup grew
by and a year, respectively, with Citigroup reaching . trillion in assets in
(down from . trillion in ) and Bank of America . trillion. The investment banks also grew significantly from to , often much faster than
commercial banks. Goldman’s assets grew from billion in to . trillion
by , an annual growth rate of . At Lehman, assets rose from billion to
billion, or .
Fannie and Freddie grew quickly, too. Fannie’s assets and guaranteed mortgages
increased from . trillion in to . trillion in , or annually. At Freddie, they increased from trillion to . trillion, or a year.
As they grew, many financial firms added lots of leverage. That meant potentially
higher returns for shareholders, and more money for compensation. Increasing
leverage also meant less capital to absorb losses.
Fannie and Freddie were the most leveraged. The law set the governmentsponsored enterprises’ minimum capital requirement at . of assets plus . of
the mortgage-backed securities they guaranteed. So they could borrow more than
for each dollar of capital used to guarantee mortgage-backed securities. If they
wanted to own the securities, they could borrow for each dollar of capital. Combined, Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed . trillion of mortgage-related assets at the end of against just . billion of capital, a ratio of :.
From to , large banks and thrifts generally had to in assets for
each dollar of capital, for leverage ratios between : and :. For some banks,
leverage remained roughly constant. JP Morgan’s reported leverage was between :
and :. Wells Fargo’s generally ranged between : and :. Other banks upped
their leverage. Bank of America’s rose from : in to : in . Citigroup’s
increased from : to :, then shot up to : by the end of , when Citi
brought off-balance sheet assets onto the balance sheet. More than other banks, Citigroup held assets off of its balance sheet, in part to hold down capital requirements.
In , even after bringing billion worth of assets on balance sheet, substantial
assets remained off. If those had been included, leverage in would have been
:, or about higher. In comparison, at Wells Fargo and Bank of America, including off-balance-sheet assets would have raised the leverage ratios and
, respectively.
Because investment banks were not subject to the same capital requirements as
commercial and retail banks, they were given greater latitude to rely on their internal
risk models in determining capital requirements, and they reported higher leverage.
At Goldman Sachs, leverage increased from : in to : in . Morgan
Stanley and Lehman increased about and , respectively, and both reached
: by the end of . Several investment banks artificially lowered leverage ratios
by selling assets right before the reporting period and subsequently buying them back.
As the investment banks grew, their business models changed. Traditionally, investment banks advised and underwrote equity and debt for corporations, financial
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
institutions, investment funds, governments, and individuals. An increasing amount
of the investment banks’ revenues and earnings was generated by trading and investments, including securitization and derivatives activities. At Goldman, revenues from
trading and principal investments increased from of the total in to in
. At Merrill Lynch, they generated of revenue in , up from in .
At Lehman, similar activities generated up to of pretax earnings in , up from
in . At Bear Stearns, they accounted for more than of pretax earnings
in some years after because of pretax losses in other businesses.
Between and , debt held by financial companies grew from trillion to
trillion, more than doubling from to of GDP. Former Treasury Secretary John Snow told the FCIC that while the financial sector must play a “critical” role
in allocating capital to the most productive uses, it was reasonable to ask whether
over the last or years it had become too large. Financial firms had grown
mainly by simply lending to each other, he said, not by creating opportunities for investment. In , financial companies borrowed in the credit markets for
every borrowed by nonfinancial companies. By , financial companies were
borrowing for every . “We have a lot more debt than we used to have, which
means we have a much bigger financial sector,” said Snow. “I think we overdid finance versus the real economy and got it a little lopsided as a result.”
5
SUBPRIME LENDING
CONTENTS
Mortgage securitization: “This stuff is so complicated how is
anybody going to know?” ..............................................................................
Greater access to lending: “A business where we can make some money”.............
Subprime lenders in turmoil: “Adverse market conditions”..................................
The regulators: “Oh, I see” ...................................................................................
In the early s, subprime lenders such as Household Finance Corp. and thrifts
such as Long Beach Savings and Loan made home equity loans, often second mortgages, to borrowers who had yet to establish credit histories or had troubled financial
histories, sometimes reflecting setbacks such as unemployment, divorce, medical
emergencies, and the like. Banks might have been unwilling to lend to these borrowers, but a subprime lender would if the borrower paid a higher interest rate to offset
the extra risk. “No one can debate the need for legitimate non-prime (subprime)
lending products,” Gail Burks, president of the Nevada Fair Housing Center, Inc., testified to the FCIC.
Interest rates on subprime mortgages, with substantial collateral—the house—
weren’t as high as those for car loans, and were much less than credit cards. The advantages of a mortgage over other forms of debt were solidified in with the Tax
Reform Act, which barred deducting interest payments on consumer loans but kept
the deduction for mortgage interest payments.
In the s and into the early s, before computerized “credit scoring”—a
statistical technique used to measure a borrower’s creditworthiness—automated the
assessment of risk, mortgage lenders (including subprime lenders) relied on other
factors when underwriting mortgages. As Tom Putnam, a Sacramento-based mortgage banker, told the Commission, they traditionally lent based on the four C’s: credit
(quantity, quality, and duration of the borrower’s credit obligations), capacity
(amount and stability of income), capital (sufficient liquid funds to cover down payments, closing costs, and reserves), and collateral (value and condition of the property). Their decisions depended on judgments about how strength in one area, such
as collateral, might offset weaknesses in others, such as credit. They underwrote borrowers one at a time, out of local offices.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
In a few cases, such as CitiFinancial, subprime lending firms were part of a bank
holding company, but most—including Household, Beneficial Finance, The Money
Store, and Champion Mortgage—were independent consumer finance companies.
Without access to deposits, they generally funded themselves with short-term lines
of credit, or “warehouse lines,” from commercial or investment banks. In many
cases, the finance companies did not keep the mortgages. Some sold the loans to the
same banks extending the warehouse lines. The banks would securitize and sell the
loans to investors or keep them on their balance sheets. In other cases, the finance
company itself packaged and sold the loans—often partnering with the banks extending the warehouse lines. Meanwhile, the S&Ls that originated subprime loans
generally financed their own mortgage operations and kept the loans on their balance sheets.
MORTGAGE SECURITIZATION: “THIS STUFF IS
SO COMPLICATED HOW IS ANYBODY GOING TO KNOW? ”
Debt outstanding in U.S. credit markets tripled during the s, reaching . trillion in ; was securitized mortgages and GSE debt. Later, mortgage securities
made up of the debt markets, overtaking government Treasuries as the single
largest component—a position they maintained through the financial crisis.
In the s mortgage companies, banks, and Wall Street securities firms began
securitizing mortgages (see figure .). And more of them were subprime. Salomon
Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and other Wall Street firms started packaging and selling
“non-agency” mortgages—that is, loans that did not conform to Fannie’s and Freddie’s standards. Selling these required investors to adjust expectations. With securitizations handled by Fannie and Freddie, the question was not “will you get the money
back” but “when,” former Salomon Brothers trader and CEO of PentAlpha Jim Callahan told the FCIC. With these new non-agency securities, investors had to worry
about getting paid back, and that created an opportunity for S&P and Moody’s. As
Lewis Ranieri, a pioneer in the market, told the Commission, when he presented the
concept of non-agency securitization to policy makers, they asked, “‘This stuff is so
complicated how is anybody going to know? How are the buyers going to buy?’”
Ranieri said, “One of the solutions was, it had to have a rating. And that put the rating services in the business.”
Non-agency securitizations were only a few years old when they received a powerful stimulus from an unlikely source: the federal government. The savings and
loan crisis had left Uncle Sam with billion in loans and real estate from failed
thrifts and banks. Congress established the Resolution Trust Corporation (RTC) in
to offload mortgages and real estate, and sometimes the failed thrifts themselves, now owned by the government. While the RTC was able to sell . billion of
these mortgages to Fannie and Freddie, most did not meet the GSEs’ standards.
Some were what might be called subprime today, but others had outright documentation errors or servicing problems, not unlike the low-documentation loans that
later became popular.
SUBPRIME LENDING
Funding for Mortgages
The sources of funds for mortgages changed over the decades.
IN PERCENT, BY SOURCE
Savings & loans
Government-sponsored enterprises
60%
54%
50
40
30
20
4%
10
0
’70
’80
’90
’00
’10
’70
’80
’90
’00
’10
Non-agency securities
Commercial banks & others
60%
50
40
29%
30
13%
20
10
0
’70
’80
’90
’00
’10
’70
’80
’90
’00
’10
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Report
Figure .
RTC officials soon concluded that they had neither the time nor the resources to
sell off the assets in their portfolio one by one and thrift by thrift. They turned to the
private sector, contracting with real estate and financial professionals to securitize
some of the assets. By the time the RTC concluded its work, it had securitized billion in residential mortgages. The RTC in effect helped expand the securitization of
mortgages ineligible for GSE guarantees. In the early s, as investors became
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Subprime Mortgage Originations
In 2006, $600 billion of subprime loans were originated, most of which were
securitized. That year, subprime lending accounted for 23.5% of all mortgage
originations.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
23.5%
$700
Subprime share of entire
mortgage market
600
20.9%
22.7%
Securitized
Non-securitized
500
8.3%
400
10.1%
10.6%
10.4%
7.6%
7.4%
300
9.5%
9.2%
9.8%
200
100
1.7%
0
’96
’97
’98
’99
’00
’01
’02
2007, securities issued exceeded originations.
’03
’04
’05
’06
’07
’08
SOURCE: Inside Mortgage Finance
Figure .
more familiar with the securitization of these assets, mortgage specialists and Wall
Street bankers got in on the action. Securitization and subprime originations grew
hand in hand. As figure . shows, subprime originations increased from billion
in to billion in . The proportion securitized in the late s peaked at
, and subprime mortgage originations’ share of all originations hovered around
.
Securitizations by the RTC and by Wall Street were similar to the Fannie and
Freddie securitizations. The first step was to get principal and interest payments from
a group of mortgages to flow into a single pool. But in “private-label” securities (that
is, securitizations not done by Fannie or Freddie), the payments were then “tranched”
in a way to protect some investors from losses. Investors in the tranches received different streams of principal and interest in different orders.
Most of the earliest private-label deals, in the late s and early s, used a
rudimentary form of tranching. There were typically two tranches in each deal. The
SUBPRIME LENDING
less risky tranche received principal and interest payments first and was usually guaranteed by an insurance company. The more risky tranche received payments second, was
not guaranteed, and was usually kept by the company that originated the mortgages.
Within a decade, securitizations had become much more complex: they had more
tranches, each with different payment streams and different risks, which were tailored to meet investors’ demands. The entire private-label mortgage securitization
market—those who created, sold, and bought the investments—would become
highly dependent on this slice-and-dice process, and regulators and market participants alike took for granted that it efficiently allocated risk to those best able and willing to bear that risk.
To demonstrate how this process worked, we’ll describe a typical deal, named
CMLTI -NC, involving million in mortgage-backed bonds. In , New
Century Financial, a California-based lender, originated and sold , subprime
mortgages to Citigroup, which sold them to a separate legal entity that Citigroup
sponsored that would own the mortgages and issue the tranches. The entity purchased
the loans with cash it had raised by selling the securities these loans would back. The
entity had been created as a separate legal structure so that the assets would sit off
Citigroup’s balance sheet, an arrangement with tax and regulatory benefits.
The , mortgages carried the rights to the borrowers’ monthly payments,
which the Citigroup entity divided into tranches of mortgage-backed securities;
each tranche gave investors a different priority claim on the flow of payments from
the borrowers, and a different interest rate and repayment schedule. The credit rating
agencies assigned ratings to most of these tranches for investors, who—as securitization became increasingly complicated—came to rely more heavily on these ratings.
Tranches were assigned letter ratings by the rating agencies based on their riskiness.
In this report, ratings are generally presented in S&P’s classification system, which assigns ratings such as “AAA” (the highest rating for the safest investments, referred to
here as triple-A), “AA” (less safe than AAA), “A,” “BBB,” and “BB,” and further distinguishes ratings with “+” and “–.” Anything rated below “BBB-” is considered “junk.”
Moody’s uses a similar system in which “Aaa” is highest, followed by “Aa,” “A,” “Baa,”
“Ba,” and so forth. For example, an S&P rating of BBB would correspond to a
Moody’s rating of Baa. In this Citigroup deal, the four senior tranches—the safest—
were rated triple-A by the agencies.
Below the senior tranches and next in line for payments were eleven “mezzanine”
tranches—so named because they sat between the riskiest and the safest tranches.
These were riskier than the senior tranches and, because they paid off more slowly,
carried a higher risk that an increase in interest rates would make the locked-in interest payments less valuable. As a result, they paid a correspondingly higher interest
rate. Three of these tranches in the Citigroup deal were rated AA, three were A, three
were BBB (the lowest investment-grade rating), and two were BB, or junk.
The last to be paid was the most junior tranche, called the “equity,” “residual,” or
“first-loss” tranche, set up to receive whatever cash flow was left over after all the
other investors had been paid. This tranche would suffer the first losses from any
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
defaults of the mortgages in the pool. Commensurate with this high risk, it provided
the highest yields (see figure .). In the Citigroup deal, as was common, this piece of
the deal was not rated at all. Citigroup and a hedge fund each held half the equity
tranche.
While investors in the lower-rated tranches received higher interest rates because
they knew there was a risk of loss, investors in the triple-A tranches did not expect
payments from the mortgages to stop. This expectation of safety was important, so
the firms structuring securities focused on achieving high ratings. In the structure of
this Citigroup deal, which was typical, million, or , was rated triple-A.
GREATER ACCESS TO LENDING:
“A BUSINESS WHERE WE CAN MAKE SOME MONEY”
As private-label securitization began to take hold, new computer and modeling technologies were reshaping the mortgage market. In the mid-s, standardized data
with loan-level information on mortgage performance became more widely available. Lenders underwrote mortgages using credit scores, such as the FICO score, developed by Fair Isaac Corporation. In , Freddie Mac rolled out Loan Prospector,
an automated system for mortgage underwriting for use by lenders, and Fannie Mae
released its own system, Desktop Underwriter, two months later. The days of laborious, slow, and manual underwriting of individual mortgage applicants were over,
lowering cost and broadening access to mortgages.
This new process was based on quantitative expectations: Given the borrower, the
home, and the mortgage characteristics, what was the probability payments would be
on time? What was the probability that borrowers would prepay their loans, either
because they sold their homes or refinanced at lower interest rates?
In the s, technology also affected implementation of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA). Congress enacted the CRA in to ensure that banks and
thrifts served their communities, in response to concerns that banks and thrifts were
refusing to lend in certain neighborhoods without regard to the creditworthiness of
individuals and businesses in those neighborhoods (a practice known as redlining).
The CRA called on banks and thrifts to invest, lend, and service areas where they
took in deposits, so long as these activities didn’t impair their own financial safety
and soundness. It directed regulators to consider CRA performance whenever a bank
or thrift applied for regulatory approval for mergers, to open new branches, or to engage in new businesses.
The CRA encouraged banks to lend to borrowers to whom they may have previously denied credit. While these borrowers often had lower-than-average income, a
study indicated that loans made under the CRA performed consistently with
the rest of the banks’ portfolios, suggesting CRA lending was not riskier than the
banks’ other lending. “There is little or no evidence that banks’ safety and soundness have been compromised by such lending, and bankers often report sound business opportunities,” Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said of CRA lending
in .
SUBPRIME LENDING
Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities
Financial institutions packaged subprime, Alt-A and other mortgages into securities. As long
as the housing market continued to boom, these securities would perform. But when the
economy faltered and the mortgages defaulted, lower-rated tranches were left worthless.
1
Originate
RMBS
Lenders extend mortgages, including
subprime and Alt-A loans.
2
TRANCHES
Low risk, low yield
Pool of
Mortgages
Pool
AAA
Securities firms
purchase these loans
and pool them.
SENIOR
TRANCHES
First claim to cash flow
from principal & interest
payments…
3
Tranche
Residential mortgage-backed
securities are sold to
investors, giving them the
right to the principal and
interest from the mortgages.
These securities are sold in
tranches, or slices. The flow
of cash determines the rating
of the securities, with AAA
tranches getting the first cut
of principal and interest
payments, then AA, then A,
and so on.
next
claim…
AA
next…
etc.
A
BBB
BB
EQUITY TRANCHES
High risk, high yield
Figure .
MEZZANINE
TRANCHES
These tranches
were often
purchased by
CDOs. See page
128 for an
explanation.
Collateralized
Debt
Obligation
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
In , President Bill Clinton asked regulators to improve banks’ CRA performance while responding to industry complaints that the regulatory review process for
compliance was too burdensome and too subjective. In , the Fed, Office of Thrift
Supervision (OTS), Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) issued regulations that shifted the regulatory
focus from the efforts that banks made to comply with the CRA to their actual results. Regulators and community advocates could now point to objective, observable
numbers that measured banks’ compliance with the law.
Former comptroller John Dugan told FCIC staff that the impact of the CRA had
been lasting, because it encouraged banks to lend to people who in the past might not
have had access to credit. He said, “There is a tremendous amount of investment that
goes on in inner cities and other places to build things that are quite impressive. . . .
And the bankers conversely say, ‘This is proven to be a business where we can make
some money; not a lot, but when you factor that in plus the good will that we get
from it, it kind of works.’”
Lawrence Lindsey, a former Fed governor who was responsible for the Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs, which oversees CRA enforcement, told
the FCIC that improved enforcement had given the banks an incentive to invest in
technology that would make lending to lower-income borrowers profitable by such
means as creating credit scoring models customized to the market. Shadow banks
not covered by the CRA would use these same credit scoring models, which could
draw on now more substantial historical lending data for their estimates, to underwrite loans. “We basically got a cycle going which particularly the shadow banking
industry could, using recent historic data, show the default rates on this type of lending were very, very low,” he said. Indeed, default rates were low during the prosperous s, and regulators, bankers, and lenders in the shadow banking system took
note of this success.
SUBPRIME LENDERS IN TURMOIL:
“ADVERSE MARKET CONDITIONS”
Among nonbank mortgage originators, the late s were a turning point. During
the market disruption caused by the Russian debt crisis and the Long-Term Capital
Management collapse, the markets saw a “flight to quality”—that is, a steep fall in demand among investors for risky assets, including subprime securitizations. The rate
of subprime mortgage securitization dropped from . in to . in .
Meanwhile, subprime originators saw the interest rate at which they could borrow in
credit markets skyrocket. They were caught in a squeeze: borrowing costs increased
at the very moment that their revenue stream dried up. And some were caught
holding tranches of subprime securities that turned out to be worth far less than the
value they had been assigned.
Mortgage lenders that depended on liquidity and short-term funding had immediate problems. For example, Southern Pacific Funding (SFC), an Oregon-based subprime lender that securitized its loans, reported relatively positive second-quarter
SUBPRIME LENDING
results in August . Then, in September, SFC notified investors about “recent adverse market conditions” in the securities markets and expressed concern about “the
continued viability of securitization in the foreseeable future.” A week later, SFC
filed for bankruptcy protection. Several other nonbank subprime lenders that were
also dependent on short-term financing from the capital markets also filed for bankruptcy in and . In the two years following the Russian default crisis, of the
top subprime lenders declared bankruptcy, ceased operations, or sold out to
stronger firms.
When these firms were sold, their buyers would frequently absorb large losses.
First Union, a large regional bank headquartered in North Carolina, incurred charges
of almost . billion after it bought The Money Store. First Union eventually shut
down or sold off most of The Money Store’s operations.
Conseco, a leading insurance company, purchased Green Tree Financial, another
subprime lender. Disruptions in the securitization markets, as well as unexpected
mortgage defaults, eventually drove Conseco into bankruptcy in December . At
the time, this was the third-largest bankruptcy in U.S. history (after WorldCom and
Enron).
Accounting misrepresentations would also bring down subprime lenders. Keystone, a small national bank in West Virginia that made and securitized subprime
mortgage loans, failed in . In the securitization process—as was common practice in the s—Keystone retained the riskiest “first-loss” residual tranches for its
own account. These holdings far exceeded the bank’s capital. But Keystone assigned
them grossly inflated values. The OCC closed the bank in September , after discovering “fraud committed by the bank management,” as executives had overstated
the value of the residual tranches and other bank assets. Perhaps the most significant failure occurred at Superior Bank, one of the most aggressive subprime mortgage lenders. Like Keystone, it too failed after having kept and overvalued the
first-loss tranches on its balance sheet.
Many of the lenders that survived or were bought in the s reemerged in
other forms. Long Beach was the ancestor of Ameriquest and Long Beach Mortgage
(which was in turn purchased by Washington Mutual), two of the more aggressive
lenders during the first decade of the new century. Associates First was sold to Citigroup, and Household bought Beneficial Mortgage before it was itself acquired by
HSBC in .
With the subprime market disrupted, subprime originations totaled billion
in , down from billion two years earlier. Over the next few years, however,
subprime lending and securitization would more than rebound.
THE REGULATORS: “OH, I SEE”
During the s, various federal agencies had taken increasing notice of abusive
subprime lending practices. But the regulatory system was not well equipped to respond consistently—and on a national basis—to protect borrowers. State regulators,
as well as either the Fed or the FDIC, supervised the mortgage practices of state
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
banks. The OCC supervised the national banks. The OTS or state regulators were responsible for the thrifts. Some state regulators also licensed mortgage brokers, a
growing portion of the market, but did not supervise them.
Despite this diffusion of authority, one entity was unquestionably authorized by
Congress to write strong and consistent rules regulating mortgages for all types of
lenders: the Federal Reserve, through the Truth in Lending Act of . In , the
Fed adopted Regulation Z for the purpose of implementing the act. But while Regulation Z applied to all lenders, its enforcement was divided among America’s many financial regulators.
One sticking point was the supervision of nonbank subsidiaries such as subprime
lenders. The Fed had the legal mandate to supervise bank holding companies, including the authority to supervise their nonbank subsidiaries. The Federal Trade
Commission was given explicit authority by Congress to enforce the consumer protections embodied in the Truth in Lending Act with respect to these nonbank
lenders. Although the FTC brought some enforcement actions against mortgage
companies, Henry Cisneros, a former secretary of the Department of Housing and
Urban Development (HUD), worried that its budget and staff were not commensurate with its mandate to supervise these lenders. “We could have had the FTC oversee
mortgage contracts,” Cisneros told the Commission. “But the FTC is up to their neck
in work today with what they’ve got. They don’t have the staff to go out and search
out mortgage problems.”
Glenn Loney, deputy director of the Fed’s Consumer and Community Affairs
Division from to , told the FCIC that ever since he joined the agency in
, Fed officials had been debating whether they—in addition to the FTC—should
enforce rules for nonbank lenders. But they worried about whether the Fed would be
stepping on congressional prerogatives by assuming enforcement responsibilities that
legislation had delegated to the FTC. “A number of governors came in and said, ‘You
mean to say we don’t look at these?’” Loney said. “And then we tried to explain it to
them, and they’d say, ‘Oh, I see.’” The Federal Reserve would not exert its authority
in this area, nor others that came under its purview in , with any real force until
after the housing bubble burst.
The legislation that gave the Fed new responsibilities was the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA), passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton to address growing concerns about abusive and predatory mortgage
lending practices that especially affected low-income borrowers. HOEPA specifically
noted that certain communities were “being victimized . . . by second mortgage
lenders, home improvement contractors, and finance companies who peddle highrate, high-fee home equity loans to cash-poor homeowners.” For example, a Senate
report highlighted the case of a -year-old homeowner, who testified at a hearing
that she paid more than , in upfront finance charges on a , second
mortgage. In addition, the monthly payments on the mortgage exceeded her
income.
HOEPA prohibited abusive practices relating to certain high-cost refinance mortgage loans, including prepayment penalties, negative amortization, and balloon pay-
SUBPRIME LENDING
ments with a term of less than five years. The legislation also prohibited lenders from
making high-cost refinance loans based on the collateral value of the property alone
and “without regard to the consumers’ repayment ability, including the consumers’
current and expected income, current obligations, and employment.” However, only
a small percentage of mortgages were initially subject to the HOEPA restrictions, because the interest rate and fee levels for triggering HOEPA’s coverage were set too
high to catch most subprime loans. Even so, HOEPA specifically directed the Fed to
act more broadly to “prohibit acts or practices in connection with [mortgage loans]
that [the Board] finds to be unfair, deceptive or designed to evade the provisions of
this [act].”
In June , two years after HOEPA took effect, the Fed held the first set of public hearings required under the act. The venues were Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Consumer advocates reported abuses by home equity lenders. A report
summarizing the hearings, jointly issued with the Department of Housing and Urban
Development and released in July , said that mortgage lenders acknowledged
that some abuses existed, blamed some of these on mortgage brokers, and suggested
that the increasing securitization of subprime mortgages was likely to limit the opportunity for widespread abuses. The report stated, “Creditors that package and securitize their home equity loans must comply with a series of representations and
warranties. These include creditors’ representations that they have complied with
strict underwriting guidelines concerning the borrower’s ability to repay the loan.”
But in the years to come, these representations and warranties would prove to be
inaccurate.
Still, the Fed continued not to press its prerogatives. In January , it formalized
its long-standing policy of “not routinely conducting consumer compliance examinations of nonbank subsidiaries of bank holding companies,” a decision that would be
criticized by a November General Accounting Office report for creating a “lack
of regulatory oversight.” The July report also made recommendations on
mortgage reform. While preparing draft recommendations for the report, Fed staff
wrote to the Fed’s Committee on Consumer and Community Affairs that “given the
Board’s traditional reluctance to support substantive limitations on market behavior,
the draft report discusses various options but does not advocate any particular approach to addressing these problems.”
In the end, although the two agencies did not agree on the full set of recommendations addressing predatory lending, both the Fed and HUD supported legislative
bans on balloon payments and advance collection of lump-sum insurance premiums,
stronger enforcement of current laws, and nonregulatory strategies such as community outreach efforts and consumer education and counseling. But Congress did not
act on these recommendations.
The Fed-Lite provisions under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act affirmed the Fed’s
hands-off approach to the regulation of mortgage lending. Even so, the shakeup in
the subprime industry in the late s had drawn regulators’ attention to at least
some of the risks associated with this lending. For that reason, the Federal Reserve,
FDIC, OCC, and OTS jointly issued subprime lending guidance on March , .
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
This guidance applied only to regulated banks and thrifts, and even for them it would
not be binding but merely laid out the criteria underlying regulators’ bank examinations. It explained that “recent turmoil in the equity and asset-backed securities market has caused some non-bank subprime specialists to exit the market, thus creating
increased opportunities for financial institutions to enter, or expand their participation in, the subprime lending business.”
The agencies then identified key features of subprime lending programs and the
need for increased capital, risk management, and board and senior management
oversight. They further noted concerns about various accounting issues, notably the
valuation of any residual tranches held by the securitizing firm. The guidance went
on to warn, “Institutions that originate or purchase subprime loans must take special
care to avoid violating fair lending and consumer protection laws and regulations.
Higher fees and interest rates combined with compensation incentives can foster
predatory pricing. . . . An adequate compliance management program must identify,
monitor and control the consumer protection hazards associated with subprime
lending.”
In spring , in response to growing complaints about lending practices, and at
the urging of members of Congress, HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Treasury
Secretary Lawrence Summers convened the joint National Predatory Lending Task
Force. It included members of consumer advocacy groups; industry trade associations representing mortgage lenders, brokers, and appraisers; local and state officials;
and academics. As the Fed had done three years earlier, this new entity took to the
field, conducting hearings in Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and
Chicago. The task force found “patterns” of abusive practices, reporting “substantial
evidence of too-frequent abuses in the subprime lending market.” Questionable practices included loan flipping (repeated refinancing of borrowers’ loans in a short
time), high fees and prepayment penalties that resulted in borrowers’ losing the equity in their homes, and outright fraud and abuse involving deceptive or high-pressure sales tactics. The report cited testimony regarding incidents of forged signatures,
falsification of incomes and appraisals, illegitimate fees, and bait-and-switch tactics.
The investigation confirmed that subprime lenders often preyed on the elderly, minorities, and borrowers with lower incomes and less education, frequently targeting
individuals who had “limited access to the mainstream financial sector”—meaning
the banks, thrifts, and credit unions, which it viewed as subject to more extensive
government oversight.
Consumer protection groups took the same message to public officials. In interviews with and testimony to the FCIC, representatives of the National Consumer
Law Center (NCLC), Nevada Fair Housing Center, Inc., and California Reinvestment
Coalition each said they had contacted Congress and the four bank regulatory agencies multiple times about their concerns over unfair and deceptive lending practices. “It was apparent on the ground as early as ’ or ’ . . . that the market for
low-income consumers was being flooded with inappropriate products,” Diane
Thompson of the NCLC told the Commission.
The HUD-Treasury task force recommended a set of reforms aimed at protecting
SUBPRIME LENDING
borrowers from the most egregious practices in the mortgage market, including better disclosure, improved financial literacy, strengthened enforcement, and new legislative protections. However, the report also recognized the downside of restricting
the lending practices that offered many borrowers with less-than-prime credit a
chance at homeownership. It was a dilemma. Gary Gensler, who worked on the report as a senior Treasury official and is currently the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the FCIC that the report’s recommendations “lasted
on Capitol Hill a very short time. . . . There wasn’t much appetite or mood to take
these recommendations.”
But problems persisted, and others would take up the cause. Through the early
years of the new decade, “the really poorly underwritten loans, the payment shock
loans” continued to proliferate outside the traditional banking sector, said FDIC
Chairman Sheila Bair, who served at Treasury as the assistant secretary for financial
institutions from to . In testimony to the Commission, she observed that
these poor-quality loans pulled market share from traditional banks and “created
negative competitive pressure for the banks and thrifts to start following suit.” She
added,
[Subprime lending] was started and the lion’s share of it occurred in the
nonbank sector, but it clearly created competitive pressures on
banks. . . . I think nipping this in the bud in and with some
strong consumer rules applying across the board that just simply said
you’ve got to document a customer’s income to make sure they can repay the loan, you’ve got to make sure the income is sufficient to pay the
loans when the interest rate resets, just simple rules like that . . . could
have done a lot to stop this.
After Bair was nominated to her position at Treasury, and when she was making
the rounds on Capitol Hill, Senator Paul Sarbanes, chairman of the Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, told her about lending problems in Baltimore,
where foreclosures were on the rise. He asked Bair to read the HUD-Treasury report
on predatory lending, and she became interested in the issue. Sarbanes introduced
legislation to remedy the problem, but it faced significant resistance from the mortgage industry and within Congress, Bair told the Commission. Bair decided to try to
get the industry to adopt a set of “best practices” that would include a voluntary ban
on mortgages that strip borrowers of their equity, and would offer borrowers the opportunity to avoid prepayment penalties by agreeing instead to pay a higher interest
rate. She reached out to Edward Gramlich, a governor at the Fed who shared her concerns, to enlist his help in getting companies to abide by these rules. Bair said that
Gramlich didn’t talk out of school but made it clear to her that the Fed avenue wasn’t
going to happen. Similarly, Sandra Braunstein, the director of the Division of Consumer and Community Affairs at the Fed, said that Gramlich told the staff that
Greenspan was not interested in increased regulation.
When Bair and Gramlich approached a number of lenders about the voluntary
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
program, Bair said some originators appeared willing to participate. But the Wall
Street firms that securitized the loans resisted, saying that they were concerned about
possible liability if they did not adhere to the proposed best practices, she recalled.
The effort died.
Of course, even as these initiatives went nowhere, the market did not stand still.
Subprime mortgages were proliferating rapidly, becoming mainstream products.
Originations were increasing, and products were changing. By , three of every
four subprime mortgages was a first mortgage, and of those were used for refinancing rather than a home purchase. Fifty-nine percent of those refinancings were
cash-outs, helping to fuel consumer spending while whittling away homeowners’
equity.
PART III
The Boom and Bust
6
CREDIT EXPANSION
CONTENTS
Housing: “A powerful stabilizing force” ................................................................
Subprime loans: “Buyers will pay a high premium” .............................................
Citigroup: “Invited regulatory scrutiny” ...............................................................
Federal rules: “Intended to curb unfair or abusive lending” .................................
States: “Long-standing position”...........................................................................
Community-lending pledges: “What we do is reaffirm our intention” .................
Bank capital standards: “Arbitrage” .....................................................................
By the end of , the economy had grown straight quarters. Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan argued the financial system had achieved unprecedented
resilience. Large financial companies were—or at least to many observers at the time,
appeared to be—profitable, diversified, and, executives and regulators agreed, protected from catastrophe by sophisticated new techniques of managing risk.
The housing market was also strong. Between and , prices rose at an annual rate of .; over the next five years, the rate would hit .. Lower interest
rates for mortgage borrowers were partly the reason, as was greater access to mortgage credit for households who had traditionally been left out—including subprime
borrowers. Lower interest rates and broader access to credit were available for other
types of borrowing, too, such as credit cards and auto loans.
Increased access to credit meant a more stable, secure life for those who managed
their finances prudently. It meant families could borrow during temporary income
drops, pay for unexpected expenses, or buy major appliances and cars. It allowed
other families to borrow and spend beyond their means. Most of all, it meant a shot
at homeownership, with all its benefits; and for some, an opportunity to speculate in
the real estate market.
As home prices rose, homeowners with greater equity felt more financially secure
and, partly as a result, saved less and less. Many others went one step further, borrowing against the equity. The effect was unprecedented debt: between and ,
mortgage debt nationally nearly doubled. Household debt rose from of disposable personal income in to almost by mid-. More than three-quarters
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
of this increase was mortgage debt. Part of the increase was from new home purchases, part from new debt on older homes.
Mortgage credit became more available when subprime lending started to grow
again after many of the major subprime lenders failed or were purchased in and
. Afterward, the biggest banks moved in. In , Citigroup, with billion in
assets, paid billion for Associates First Capital, the second-biggest subprime
lender. Still, subprime lending remained only a niche, just . of new mortgages
in .
Subprime lending risks and questionable practices remained a concern. Yet the
Federal Reserve did not aggressively employ the unique authority granted it by the
Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA). Although in the Fed
fined Citigroup million for lending violations, it only minimally revised the rules
for a narrow set of high-cost mortgages. Following losses by several banks in subprime securitization, the Fed and other regulators revised capital standards.
HOUSING: “A POWERFUL STABILIZING FORCE”
By the beginning of , the economy was slowing, even though unemployment remained at a -year low of . To stimulate borrowing and spending, the Federal
Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee lowered short-term interest rates aggressively. On January , , in a rare conference call between scheduled meetings,
it cut the benchmark federal funds rate—at which banks lend to each other
overnight—by a half percentage point, rather than the more typical quarter point.
Later that month, the committee cut the rate another half point, and it continued cutting throughout the year— times in all—to ., the lowest in years.
In the end, the recession of was relatively mild, lasting only eight months,
from March to November, and gross domestic product, or GDP—the most common
gauge of the economy—dropped by only .. Some policy makers concluded that
perhaps, with effective monetary policy, the economy had reached the so-called end
of the business cycle, which some economists had been predicting since before the
tech crash. “Recessions have become less frequent and less severe,” said Ben
Bernanke, then a Fed governor, in a speech early in . “Whether the dominant
cause of the Great Moderation is structural change, improved monetary policy, or
simply good luck is an important question about which no consensus has yet
formed.”
With the recession over and mortgage rates at -year lows, housing kicked into
high gear—again. The nation would lose more than , nonfarm jobs in
but make small gains in construction. In states where bubbles soon appeared, construction picked up quickly. California ended with a total of only , more
jobs, but with , new construction jobs. In Florida, of net job growth was in
construction. In , builders started more than . million single-family dwellings,
a rate unseen since the late s. From to , residential construction contributed three times more to the economy than it had contributed on average since
.
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
But elsewhere the economy remained sluggish, and employment gains were frustratingly small. Experts began talking about a “jobless recovery”—more production
without a corresponding increase in employment. For those with jobs, wages stagnated. Between and , weekly private nonfarm, nonsupervisory wages actually fell by after adjusting for inflation. Faced with these challenges, the Fed
shifted perspective, now considering the possibility that consumer prices could fall,
an event that had worsened the Great Depression seven decades earlier. While concerned, the Fed believed deflation would be avoided. In a widely quoted speech,
Bernanke said the chances of deflation were “extremely small” for two reasons. First,
the economy’s natural resilience: “Despite the adverse shocks of the past year, our
banking system remains healthy and well-regulated, and firm and household balance
sheets are for the most part in good shape.” Second, the Fed would not allow it. “I am
confident that the Fed would take whatever means necessary to prevent significant
deflation in the United States. . . . [T]he U.S. government has a technology, called a
printing press (or, today, its electronic equivalent), that allows it to produce as many
U.S. dollars as it wishes at essentially no cost.”
The Fed’s monetary policy kept short-term interest rates low. During , the
strongest U.S. companies could borrow for days in the commercial paper market
at an average ., compared with . just three years earlier; rates on three-month
Treasury bills dropped below in mid- from in .
Low rates cut the cost of homeownership: interest rates for the typical -year
fixed-rate mortgage traditionally moved with the overnight fed funds rate, and from
to , this relationship held (see figure .). By , creditworthy home buyers could get fixed-rate mortgages for ., percentage points lower than three
years earlier. The savings were immediate and large. For a home bought at the median price of ,, with a down payment, the monthly mortgage payment
would be less than in . Or to turn the perspective around—as many people
did—for the same monthly payment of ,, a homeowner could move up from a
, home to a , one.
An adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) gave buyers even lower initial payments or
made a larger house affordable—unless interest rates rose. In , just of prime
borrowers with new mortgages chose ARMs; in , did. In , the proportion rose to . Among subprime borrowers, already heavy users of ARMs, it rose
from around to .
As people jumped into the housing market, prices rose, and in hot markets they
really took off (see figure .). In Florida, average home prices gained . annually
from to and then . annually from to . In California, those
numbers were even higher: . and .. In California, a house bought for
, in was worth , nine years later. However, soaring prices were
not necessarily the norm. In Washington State, prices continued to appreciate, but
more slowly: . annually from to , . annually from to . In
Ohio, the numbers were . and .. Nationwide, home prices rose . annually from to —historically high, but well under the fastest-growing
markets.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Bank Borrowing and Mortgage Interest Rates
Rates for both banks and homeowners have been low in recent years.
IN PERCENT
20%
15
10
30-year
conventional
mortgage rate
5
0
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
Effective
federal funds
rate
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Federal Reserve Economic Database
Figure .
Homeownership increased steadily, peaking at . of households in . Because so many families were benefiting from higher home values, household wealth
rose to nearly six times income, up from five times a few years earlier. The top of
households by net worth, of whom owned their homes, saw the value of their
primary residences rise between and from , to , (adjusted
for inflation), an increase of more than ,. Median net worth for all households
in the top , after accounting for other housing value and assets, as well as all liabilities, was . million in . Homeownership rates for the bottom of households ticked up from to between and ; the median value of their
primary residences rose from , to ,, an increase of more than ,.
Median net worth for households in the bottom was , in .
Historically, every , increase in housing wealth boosted consumer spending
by an estimated a year. But economists debated whether the wealth increases
would affect spending more than in past years, because so many homeowners at so
many levels of wealth saw increases and because it was easier and cheaper to tap
home equity.
Higher home prices and low mortgage rates brought a wave of refinancing to the
prime mortgage market. In alone, lenders refinanced over million mortgages, more than one in four—an unprecedented level. Many homeowners took out
cash while cutting their interest rates. From through , cash-out refinanc-
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
U.S. Home Prices
INDEX VALUE: JANUARY 2000 = 100
300
U.S. April 2006 201
Sand states
U.S. total
Non-sand states
250
200
150
100
U.S. August 2010 145
50
0
1976
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
NOTE: Sand states are Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada.
SOURCE: CoreLogic and U.S. Census Bureau: 2007 American Community Survey, FCIC calculations
Figure .
ings netted these households an estimated billion; homeowners accessed another billion via home equity loans. Some were typical second liens; others
were a newer invention, the home equity line of credit. These operated much like a
credit card, letting the borrower borrow and repay as needed, often with the convenience of an actual plastic card.
According to the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, . of homeowners
who tapped their equity used that money for expenses such as medical bills, taxes, electronics, and vacations, or to consolidate debt; another . used it for home improvements; and the rest purchased more real estate, cars, investments, clothing, or jewelry.
A Congressional Budget Office paper from reported on the recent history:
“As housing prices surged in the late s and early s, consumers boosted their
spending faster than their income rose. That was reflected in a sharp drop in the personal savings rate.” Between and , increased consumer spending accounted for between and of GDP growth in any year—rising above
in years when spending growth offset declines elsewhere in the economy. Meanwhile,
the personal saving rate dropped from . to .. Some components of spending
grew remarkably fast: home furnishings and other household durables, recreational
goods and vehicles, spending at restaurants, and health care. Overall consumer
spending grew faster than the economy, and in some years it grew faster than real
disposable income.
Nonetheless, the economy looked stable. By , it had weathered the brief recession of and the dot-com bust, which had caused the largest loss of wealth in
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
decades. With new financial products like the home equity line of credit, households
could borrow against their homes to compensate for investment losses or unemployment. Deflation, against which the Fed had struck preemptively, did not materialize.
At a congressional hearing in November , Greenspan acknowledged—at least
implicitly—that after the dot-com bubble burst, the Fed cut interest rates in part to
promote housing. Greenspan argued that the Fed’s low-interest-rate policy had stimulated the economy by encouraging home sales and housing starts with “mortgage
interest rates that are at lows not seen in decades.” As Greenspan explained, “Mortgage markets have also been a powerful stabilizing force over the past two years of
economic distress by facilitating the extraction of some of the equity that homeowners had built up.” In February , he reiterated his point, referring to “a large
extraction of cash from home equity.”
SUBPRIME LOANS: “BUYERS WILL PAY A HIGH PREMIUM”
The subprime market roared back from its shakeout in the late s. The value of
subprime loans originated almost doubled from through , to billion.
In , of these were securitized; in , . Low interest rates spurred this
boom, which would have long-term repercussions, but so did increasingly widespread computerized credit scores, the growing statistical history on subprime borrowers, and the scale of the firms entering the market.
Subprime was dominated by a narrowing field of ever-larger firms; the marginal
players from the past decade had merged or vanished. By , the top subprime
lenders made of all subprime loans, up from in .
There were now three main kinds of companies in the subprime origination and
securitization business: commercial banks and thrifts, Wall Street investment banks,
and independent mortgage lenders. Some of the biggest banks and thrifts—Citigroup, National City Bank, HSBC, and Washington Mutual—spent billions on boosting subprime lending by creating new units, acquiring firms, or offering financing to
other mortgage originators. Almost always, these operations were sequestered in
nonbank subsidiaries, leaving them in a regulatory no-man’s-land.
When it came to subprime lending, now it was Wall Street investment banks that
worried about competition posed by the largest commercial banks and thrifts. Former Lehman president Bart McDade told the FCIC that the banks had gained their
own securitization skills and didn’t need the investment banks to structure and distribute. So the investment banks moved into mortgage origination to guarantee a
supply of loans they could securitize and sell to the growing legions of investors. For
example, Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank, purchased six different domestic lenders between and , including BNC and Aurora. Bear
Stearns, the fifth-largest, ramped up its subprime lending arm and eventually acquired three subprime originators in the United States, including Encore. In ,
Merrill Lynch acquired First Franklin, and Morgan Stanley bought Saxon Capital; in
, Goldman Sachs upped its stake in Senderra Funding, a small subprime lender.
Meanwhile, several independent mortgage companies took steps to boost growth.
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
New Century and Ameriquest were especially aggressive. New Century’s “Focus
” plan concentrated on “originating loans with characteristics for which whole
loan buyers will pay a high premium.” Those “whole loan buyers” were the firms on
Wall Street that purchased loans and, most often, bundled them into mortgagebacked securities. They were eager customers. In , New Century sold . billion in whole loans, up from . billion three years before, launching the firm from
tenth to second place among subprime originators. Three-quarters went to two securitizing firms—Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse—but New Century reassured its
investors that there were “many more prospective buyers.”
Ameriquest, in particular, pursued volume. According to the company’s public
statements, it paid its account executives less per mortgage than the competition, but
it encouraged them to make up the difference by underwriting more loans. “Our
people make more volume per employee than the rest of the industry,” Aseem Mital,
CEO of Ameriquest, said in . The company cut costs elsewhere in the origination process, too. The back office for the firm’s retail division operated in assemblyline fashion, Mital told a reporter for American Banker; the work was divided into
specialized tasks, including data entry, underwriting, customer service, account
management, and funding. Ameriquest used its savings to undercut by as much as
. what competing originators charged securitizing firms, according to an industry analyst’s estimate. Between and , Ameriquest loan origination rose
from an estimated billion to billion annually. That vaulted the firm from
eleventh to first place among subprime originators. “They are clearly the aggressor,”
Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo told his investors in . By , Countrywide
was third on the list.
The subprime players followed diverse strategies. Lehman and Countrywide pursued a “vertically integrated” model, involving them in every link of the mortgage
chain: originating and funding the loans, packaging them into securities, and finally
selling the securities to investors. Others concentrated on niches: New Century, for
example, mainly originated mortgages for immediate sale to other firms in the chain.
When originators made loans to hold through maturity—an approach known as
originate-to-hold—they had a clear incentive to underwrite carefully and consider the
risks. However, when they originated mortgages to sell, for securitization or otherwise—known as originate-to-distribute—they no longer risked losses if the loan defaulted. As long as they made accurate representations and warranties, the only risk
was to their reputations if a lot of their loans went bad—but during the boom, loans
were not going bad. In total, this originate-to-distribute pipeline carried more than
half of all mortgages before the crisis, and a much larger piece of subprime mortgages.
For decades, a version of the originate-to-distribute model produced safe mortgages. Fannie and Freddie had been buying prime, conforming mortgages since the
s, protected by strict underwriting standards. But some saw that the model now
had problems. “If you look at how many people are playing, from the real estate agent
all the way through to the guy who is issuing the security and the underwriter and
the underwriting group and blah, blah, blah, then nobody in this entire chain is responsible to anybody,” Lewis Ranieri, an early leader in securitization, told the FCIC,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
not the outcome he and other investment bankers had expected. “None of us wrote
and said, ‘Oh, by the way, you have to be responsible for your actions,’” Ranieri said.
“It was pretty self-evident.”
The starting point for many mortgages was a mortgage broker. These independent brokers, with access to a variety of lenders, worked with borrowers to complete
the application process. Using brokers allowed more rapid expansion, with no need
to build branches; lowered costs, with no need for full-time salespeople; and extended geographic reach.
For brokers, compensation generally came as up-front fees—from the borrower,
from the lender, or both—so the loan’s performance mattered little. These fees were
often paid without the borrower’s knowledge. Indeed, many borrowers mistakenly believed the mortgage brokers acted in borrowers’ best interest. One common fee paid
by the lender to the broker was the “yield spread premium”: on higher-interest loans,
the lending bank would pay the broker a higher premium, giving the incentive to sign
the borrower to the highest possible rate. “If the broker decides he’s going to try and
make more money on the loan, then he’s going to raise the rate,” said Jay Jeffries, a former sales manager for Fremont Investment & Loan, to the Commission. “We’ve got a
higher rate loan, we’re paying the broker for that yield spread premium.”
In theory, borrowers are the first defense against abusive lending. By shopping
around, they should realize, for example, if a broker is trying to sell them a higherpriced loan or to place them in a subprime loan when they would qualify for a lessexpensive prime loan. But many borrowers do not understand the most basic aspects
of their mortgage. A study by two Federal Reserve economists estimated at least
of borrowers with adjustable-rate mortgages did not understand how much their interest rates could reset at one time, and more than half underestimated how high
their rates could reach over the years. The same lack of awareness extended to other
terms of the loan—for example, the level of documentation provided to the lender.
“Most borrowers didn’t even realize that they were getting a no-doc loan,” said
Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending. “They’d come in
with their W- and end up with a no-doc loan simply because the broker was getting
paid more and the lender was getting paid more and there was extra yield left over for
Wall Street because the loan carried a higher interest rate.”
And borrowers with less access to credit are particularly ill equipped to challenge
the more experienced person across the desk. “While many [consumers] believe they
are pretty good at dealing with day-to-day financial matters, in actuality they engage
in financial behaviors that generate expenses and fees: overdrawing checking accounts, making late credit card payments, or exceeding limits on credit card charges,”
Annamaria Lusardi, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College, told the FCIC.
“Comparing terms of financial contracts and shopping around before making financial decisions are not at all common among the population.”
Recall our case study securitization deal discussed earlier—in which New Century sold , mortgages to Citigroup, which then sold them to the securitization
trust, which then bundled them into tranches for sale to investors. Out of those
, mortgages, brokers originated , on behalf of New Century. For each, the
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
brokers received an average fee from the borrowers of ,, or . of the loan
amount. On top of that, the brokers also received yield spread premiums from New
Century for , of these loans, averaging , each. In total, the brokers received
more than . million in fees for the , loans.
Critics argued that with this much money at stake, mortgage brokers had every incentive to seek “the highest combination of fees and mortgage interest rates the market
will bear.” Herb Sandler, the founder and CEO of the thrift Golden West Financial
Corporation, told the FCIC that brokers were the “whores of the world.” As the housing and mortgage market boomed, so did the brokers. Wholesale Access, which tracks
the mortgage industry, reported that from to , the number of brokerage
firms rose from about , to ,. In , brokers originated of loans; in
, they peaked at . JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon testified to the FCIC that
his firm eventually ended its broker-originated business in after discovering the
loans had more than twice the losses of the loans that JP Morgan itself originated.
As the housing market expanded, another problem emerged, in subprime and
prime mortgages alike: inflated appraisals. For the lender, inflated appraisals meant
greater losses if a borrower defaulted. But for the borrower or for the broker or loan
officer who hired the appraiser, an inflated value could make the difference between
closing and losing the deal. Imagine a home selling for , that an appraiser
says is actually worth only ,. In this case, a bank won’t lend a borrower, say,
, to buy the home. The deal dies. Sure enough, appraisers began feeling pressure. One survey found that of the appraisers had felt pressed to inflate the
value of homes; by , this had climbed to . The pressure came most frequently from the mortgage brokers, but appraisers reported it from real estate agents,
lenders, and in many cases borrowers themselves. Most often, refusal to raise the appraisal meant losing the client. Dennis J. Black, president of the Florida appraisal
and brokerage services firm D. J. Black & Co. and an appraiser with years’ experience, held continuing education sessions all over the country for the National Association of Independent Fee Appraisers. He heard complaints from the appraisers that
they had been pressured to ignore missing kitchens, damaged walls, and inoperable
mechanical systems. Black told the FCIC, “The story I have heard most often is the
client saying he could not use the appraisal because the value was [not] what they
needed.” The client would hire somebody else.
Changes in regulations reinforced the trend toward laxer appraisal standards, as
Karen Mann, a Sacramento appraiser with years’ experience, explained in testimony to the FCIC. In , the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency, Office of Thrift Supervision, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
loosened the appraisal requirements for the lenders they regulated by raising from
, to , the minimum home value at which an appraisal from a licensed professional was required. In addition, Mann cited the lack of oversight of appraisers, noting, “We had a vast increase of licensed appraisers in [California] in spite
of the lack of qualified/experienced trainers.” The Bakersfield appraiser Gary Crabtree told the FCIC that California’s Office of Real Estate Appraisers had eight investigators to supervise , appraisers.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
In , the four bank regulators issued new guidance to strengthen appraisals.
They recommended that an originator’s loan production staff not select appraisers.
That led Washington Mutual to use an “appraisal management company,” First
American Corporation, to choose appraisers. Nevertheless, in the New York
State attorney general sued First American: relying on internal company documents,
the complaint alleged the corporation improperly let Washington Mutual’s loan production staff “hand-pick appraisers who bring in appraisal values high enough to
permit WaMu’s loans to close, and improperly permit[ted] WaMu to pressure . . .
appraisers to change appraisal values that are too low to permit loans to close.”
CITIGROUP: “INVITED REGULATORY SCRUTINY”
As subprime originations grew, Citigroup decided to expand, with troubling consequences. Barely a year after the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act validated its merger
with Travelers, Citigroup made its next big move. In September , it paid billion for Associates First, then the second-largest subprime lender in the country (after Household Finance.). Such a merger would usually have required approval from
the Federal Reserve and the other bank regulators, because Associates First owned
three small banks (in Utah, Delaware, and South Dakota). But because these banks
were specialized, a provision tucked away in Gramm-Leach-Bliley kept the Fed out of
the mix. The OCC, FDIC, and New York State banking regulators reviewed the deal.
Consumer groups fought it, citing a long record of alleged lending abuses by Associates First, including high prepayment penalties, excessive fees, and other opaque
charges in loan documents—all targeting unsophisticated borrowers who typically
could not evaluate the forms. “It’s simply unacceptable to have the largest bank in
America take over the icon of predatory lending,” said Martin Eakes, founder of a
nonprofit community lender in North Carolina.
Advocates for the merger argued that a large bank under a rigorous regulator
could reform the company, and Citigroup promised to take strong actions. Regulators approved the merger in November , and by the next summer Citigroup had
started suspending mortgage purchases from close to two-thirds of the brokers and
half the banks that had sold loans to Associates First. “We were aware that brokers
were at the heart of that public discussion and were at the heart of a lot of the [controversial] cases,” said Pam Flaherty, a Citigroup senior vice president for community
relations and outreach.
The merger exposed Citigroup to enhanced regulatory scrutiny. In , the Federal Trade Commission, which regulates independent mortgage companies’ compliance with consumer protection laws, launched an investigation into Associates First’s
premerger business and found that the company had pressured borrowers to refinance into expensive mortgages and to buy expensive mortgage insurance. In ,
Citigroup reached a record million civil settlement with the FTC over Associates’ “systematic and widespread deceptive and abusive lending practices.”
In , the New York Fed used the occasion of Citigroup’s next proposed acquisition—European American Bank on Long Island, New York—to launch its own in-
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
vestigation of CitiFinancial, which now contained Associates First. “The manner in
which [Citigroup] approached that transaction invited regulatory scrutiny,” former
Fed Governor Mark Olson told the FCIC. “They bought a passel of problems for
themselves and it was at least a two-year [issue].” The Fed eventually accused CitiFinancial of converting unsecured personal loans (usually for borrowers in financial
trouble) into home equity loans without properly assessing the borrower’s ability to
repay. Reviewing lending practices from and , the Fed also accused the unit
of selling credit insurance to borrowers without checking if they would qualify for a
mortgage without it. For these violations and for impeding its investigation, the Fed
in assessed million in penalties. The company said it expected to pay another million in restitution to borrowers.
FEDERAL RULES:
“INTENDED TO CURB UNFAIR OR ABUSIVE LENDING”
As Citigroup was buying Associates First in , the Federal Reserve revisited the
rules protecting borrowers from predatory conduct. It conducted its second round of
hearings on the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act (HOEPA), and subsequently the staff offered two reform proposals. The first would have effectively barred
lenders from granting any mortgage—not just the limited set of high-cost loans defined
by HOEPA—solely on the value of the collateral and without regard to the borrower’s
ability to repay. For high-cost loans, the lender would have to verify and document the
borrower’s income and debt; for other loans, the documentation standard was weaker,
as the lender could rely on the borrower’s payment history and the like. The staff memo
explained this would mainly “affect lenders who make no-documentation loans.” The
second proposal addressed practices such as deceptive advertisements, misrepresenting
loan terms, and having consumers sign blank documents—acts that involve fraud, deception, or misrepresentations.
Despite evidence of predatory tactics from their own hearings and from the recently released HUD-Treasury report, Fed officials remained divided on how aggressively to strengthen borrower protections. They grappled with the same trade-off that
the HUD-Treasury report had recently noted. “We want to encourage the growth in
the subprime lending market,” Fed Governor Edward Gramlich remarked at the Financial Services Roundtable in early . “But we also don’t want to encourage the
abuses; indeed, we want to do what we can to stop these abuses.” Fed General Counsel Scott Alvarez told the FCIC, “There was concern that if you put out a broad rule,
you would stop things that were not unfair and deceptive because you were trying to
get at the bad practices and you just couldn’t think of all of the details you would
need. And if you did think of all of the details, you’d end up writing a rule that people
could get around very easily.”
Greenspan, too, later said that to prohibit certain products might be harmful.
“These and other kinds of loan products, when made to borrowers meeting appropriate underwriting standards, should not necessarily be regarded as improper,” he
said, “and on the contrary facilitated the national policy of making homeownership
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
more broadly available.” Instead, at least for certain violations of consumer protection laws, he suggested another approach: “If there is egregious fraud, if there is egregious practice, one doesn’t need supervision and regulation, what one needs is law
enforcement.” But the Federal Reserve would not use the legal system to rein in
predatory lenders. From to the end of Greenspan’s tenure in , the Fed referred to the Justice Department only three institutions for fair lending violations related to mortgages: First American Bank, in Carpentersville, Illinois; Desert
Community Bank, in Victorville, California; and the New York branch of Société
Générale, a large French bank.
Fed officials rejected the staff proposals. After some wrangling, in December
the Fed did modify HOEPA, but only at the margins. Explaining its actions, the
board highlighted compromise: “The final rule is intended to curb unfair or abusive
lending practices without unduly interfering with the flow of credit, creating unnecessary creditor burden, or narrowing consumers’ options in legitimate transactions.”
The status quo would change little. Fed economists had estimated the percentage of
subprime loans covered by HOEPA would increase from to as much as under the new regulations. But lenders changed the terms of mortgages to avoid the
new rules’ revised interest rate and fee triggers. By late , it was clear that the new
regulations would end up covering only about of subprime loans. Nevertheless,
reflecting on the Federal Reserve’s efforts, Greenspan contended in an FCIC interview that the Fed had developed a set of rules that have held up to this day.
This was a missed opportunity, says FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, who described
the “one bullet” that might have prevented the financial crisis: “I absolutely would
have been over at the Fed writing rules, prescribing mortgage lending standards
across the board for everybody, bank and nonbank, that you cannot make a mortgage
unless you have documented income that the borrower can repay the loan.”
The Fed held back on enforcement and supervision, too. While discussing
HOEPA rule changes in , the staff of the Fed’s Division of Consumer and Community Affairs also proposed a pilot program to examine lending practices at bank
holding companies’ nonbank subsidiaries, such as CitiFinancial and HSBC Finance,
whose influence in the subprime market was growing. The nonbank subsidiaries
were subject to enforcement actions by the Federal Trade Commission, while the
banks and thrifts were overseen by their primary regulators. As the holding company
regulator, the Fed had the authority to examine nonbank subsidiaries for “compliance
with the [Bank Holding Company Act] or any other Federal law that the Board has
specific jurisdiction to enforce”; however, the consumer protection laws did not explicitly give the Fed enforcement authority in this area.
The Fed resisted routine examinations of these companies, and despite the support of Fed Governor Gramlich, the initiative stalled. Sandra Braunstein, then a staff
member in the Fed’s Consumer and Community Affairs Division and now its director, told the FCIC that Greenspan and other officials were concerned that routinely
examining the nonbank subsidiaries could create an uneven playing field because the
subsidiaries had to compete with the independent mortgage companies, over which
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the Fed had no supervisory authority (although the Fed’s HOEPA rules applied to all
lenders). In an interview with the FCIC, Greenspan went further, arguing that with
or without a mandate, the Fed lacked sufficient resources to examine the nonbank
subsidiaries. Worse, the former chairman said, inadequate regulation sends a misleading message to the firms and the market; if you examine an organization incompletely, it tends to put a sign in their window that it was examined by the Fed, and
partial supervision is dangerous because it creates a Good Housekeeping stamp.
But if resources were the issue, the Fed chairman could have argued for more. The
Fed draws income from interest on the Treasury bonds it owns, so it did not have to
ask Congress for appropriations. It was always mindful, however, that it could be subject to a government audit of its finances.
In the same FCIC interview, Greenspan recalled that he sat in countless meetings
on consumer protection, but that he couldn’t pretend to have the kind of expertise on
this subject that the staff had.
Gramlich, who chaired the Fed’s consumer subcommittee, favored tighter supervision of all subprime lenders—including units of banks, thrifts, bank holding companies, and state-chartered mortgage companies. He acknowledged that because
such oversight would extend Fed authority to firms (such as independent mortgage
companies) whose lending practices were not subject to routine supervision, the
change would require congressional legislation “and might antagonize the states.” But
without such oversight, the mortgage business was “like a city with a murder law, but
no cops on the beat.” In an interview in , Gramlich told the Wall Street Journal
that he privately urged Greenspan to clamp down on predatory lending. Greenspan
demurred and, lacking support on the board, Gramlich backed away. Gramlich told
the Journal, “He was opposed to it, so I did not really pursue it.” (Gramlich died in
of leukemia, at age .)
The Fed’s failure to stop predatory practices infuriated consumer advocates and
some members of Congress. Critics charged that accounts of abuses were brushed off
as anecdotal. Patricia McCoy, a law professor at the University of Connecticut who
served on the Fed’s Consumer Advisory Council between and , was familiar with the Fed’s reaction to stories of individual consumers. “That is classic Fed
mindset,” said McCoy. “If you cannot prove that it is a broad-based problem that
threatens systemic consequences, then you will be dismissed.” It frustrated Margot
Saunders of the National Consumer Law Center: “I stood up at a Fed meeting in
and said, ‘How many anecdotes makes it real? . . . How many tens [of] thousands of
anecdotes will it take to convince you that this is a trend?’”
The Fed’s reluctance to take action trumped the HUD-Treasury report and
reports issued by the General Accounting Office in and . The Fed did not
begin routinely examining subprime subsidiaries until a pilot program in July ,
under new chairman Ben Bernanke. The Fed did not issue new rules under HOEPA
until July , a year after the subprime market had shut down. These rules banned
deceptive practices in a much broader category of “higher-priced mortgage loans”;
moreover, they prohibited making those loans without regard to the borrower’s ability
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
to pay, and required companies to verify income and assets. The rules would not take
effect until October , , which was too little, too late.
Looking back, Fed General Counsel Alvarez said his institution succumbed to the
climate of the times. He told the FCIC, “The mind-set was that there should be no
regulation; the market should take care of policing, unless there already is an identified problem. . . . We were in the reactive mode because that’s what the mind-set was
of the ‘s and the early s.” The strong housing market also reassured people. Alvarez noted the long history of low mortgage default rates and the desire to help
people who traditionally had few dealings with banks become homeowners.
STATES: “LONGSTANDING POSITION”
As the Fed balked, many states proceeded on their own, enacting “mini-HOEPA”
laws and undertaking vigorous enforcement. They would face opposition from two
federal regulators, the OCC and the OTS.
In , North Carolina led the way, establishing a fee trigger of : that is, for
the most part any mortgage with points and fees at origination of more than of
the loan qualified as “high-cost mortgage” subject to state regulations. This was considerably lower than the set by the Fed’s HOEPA regulations. Other provisions addressed an even broader class of loans, banning prepayment penalties for
mortgage loans under , and prohibiting repeated refinancing, known as loan
“flipping.”
These rules did not apply to federally chartered thrifts. In , the Office of
Thrift Supervision reasserted its “long-standing position” that its regulations “occupy
the entire field of lending regulation for federal savings associations, leaving no room
for state regulation.” Exempting states from “a hodgepodge of conflicting and overlapping state lending requirements,” the OTS said, would let thrifts deliver “low-cost
credit to the public free from undue regulatory duplication and burden.” Meanwhile,
“the elaborate network of federal borrower-protection statutes” would protect
consumers.
Nevertheless, other states copied North Carolina’s tactic. State attorneys general
launched thousands of enforcement actions, including more than , in
alone. By , states and the District of Columbia would pass some form of
anti-predatory lending legislation. In some cases, two or more states teamed up to
produce large settlements: in , for example, a suit by Illinois, Massachusetts, and
Minnesota recovered more than million from First Alliance Mortgage Company,
even though the firm had filed for bankruptcy. Also that year, Household Finance—
later acquired by HSBC—was ordered to pay million in penalties and restitution to consumers. In , a coalition of states and the District of Columbia
settled with Ameriquest for million and required the company to follow restrictions on its lending practices.
As we will see, however, these efforts would be severely hindered with respect to
national banks when the OCC in officially joined the OTS in constraining states
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
from taking such actions. “The federal regulators’ refusal to reform [predatory] practices and products served as an implicit endorsement of their legality,” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan testified to the Commission.
COMMUNITYLENDING PLEDGES:
“WHAT WE DO IS REAFFIRM OUR INTENTION”
While consumer groups unsuccessfully lobbied the Fed for more protection against
predatory lenders, they also lobbied the banks to invest in and loan to low- and moderate-income communities. The resulting promises were sometimes called “CRA
commitments” or “community development” commitments. These pledges were not
required under law, including the Community Reinvestment Act of ; in fact,
they were often outside the scope of the CRA. For example, they frequently involved
lending to individuals whose incomes exceeded those covered by the CRA, lending
in geographic areas not covered by the CRA, or lending to minorities, on which the
CRA is silent. The banks would either sign agreements with community groups or
else unilaterally pledge to lend to and invest in specific communities or populations.
Banks often made these commitments when courting public opinion during the
merger mania at the turn of the st century. One of the most notable promises was
made by Citigroup soon after its merger with Travelers in : a billion lending
and investment commitment, some of which would include mortgages. Later, Citigroup made a billion commitment when it acquired California Federal Bank in
. When merging with FleetBoston Financial Corporation in , Bank of America announced its largest commitment to date: billion over years. Chase announced commitments of . billion and billion, respectively, in its mergers
with Chemical Bank and Bank One. The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, an advocacy group, eventually tallied more than . trillion in commitments
from to ; mortgage lending made up a significant portion of them.
Although banks touted these commitments in press releases, the NCRC says it
and other community groups could not verify this lending happened. The FCIC
sent a series of requests to Bank of America, JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo,
the nation’s four largest banks, regarding their “CRA and community lending commitments.” In response, the banks indicated they had fulfilled most promises. According to the documents provided, the value of commitments to community groups
was much smaller than the larger unilateral pledges by the banks. Further, the
pledges generally covered broader categories than did the CRA, including mortgages
to minority borrowers and to borrowers with up-to-median income. For example,
only of the mortgages made under JP Morgan’s billion “community development initiative” would have fallen under the CRA. Bank of America, which
would count all low- and moderate-income and minority lending as satisfying its
pledges, stated that just over half were likely to meet CRA requirements.
Many of these loans were not very risky. This is not surprising, because such broad
definitions necessarily included loans to borrowers with strong credit histories—low
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
income and weak or subprime credit are not the same. In fact, Citigroup’s pledge
of billion in mortgage lending “consisted of entirely prime loans” to low- and
moderate-income households, low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, and minority borrowers. These loans performed well. JP Morgan’s largest commitment to a
community group was to the Chicago CRA Coalition: billion in loans over
years. Of loans issued between and , fewer than have been -or-moredays delinquent, even as of late . Wachovia made billion in mortgage loans
between and under its billion in unilateral pledges: only about .
were ever more than days delinquent over the life of the loan, compared with an
estimated national average of . The better performance was partly the result of
Wachovia’s lending concentration in the relatively stable Southeast, and partly a reflection of the credit profile of many of these borrowers.
During the early years of the CRA, the Federal Reserve Board, when considering
whether to approve mergers, gave some weight to commitments made to regulators.
This changed in February , when the board denied Continental Bank’s application to merge with Grand Canyon State Bank, saying the bank’s commitment to improve community service could not offset its poor lending record. In April , the
FDIC, OCC, and Federal Home Loan Bank Board (the precursor of the OTS) joined
the Fed in announcing that commitments to regulators about lending would be considered only when addressing “specific problems in an otherwise satisfactory record.”
Internal documents, and its public statements, show the Fed never considered
pledges to community groups in evaluating mergers and acquisitions, nor did it enforce them. As Glenn Loney, a former Fed official, told Commission staff, “At the
very beginning, [we] said we’re not going to be in a posture where the Fed’s going to
be sort of coercing banks into making deals with . . . community groups so that they
can get their applications through.”
In fact, the rules implementing the changes to the CRA made it clear that the
Federal Reserve would not consider promises to third parties or enforce prior agreements with those parties. The rules state “an institution’s record of fulfilling these
types of agreements [with third parties] is not an appropriate CRA performance criterion.” Still, the banks highlighted past acts and assurances for the future. In ,
for example, when NationsBank said it was merging with BankAmerica, it also announced a -year, billion initiative that included pledges of billion for affordable housing, billion for consumer lending, billion for small businesses,
and and billion for economic and community development, respectively.
This merger was perhaps the most controversial of its time because of the size of
the two banks. The Fed held four public hearings and received more than , comments. Supporters touted the community investment commitment, while opponents
decried its lack of specificity. The Fed’s internal staff memorandum recommending
approval repeated the Fed’s insistence on not considering these promises: “The Board
considers CRA agreements to be agreements between private parties and has not facilitated, monitored, judged, required, or enforced agreements or specific portions of
agreements. . . . NationsBank remains obligated to meet the credit needs of its entire
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community, including [low- and moderate-income] areas, with or without private
agreements.”
In its public order approving the merger, the Federal Reserve mentioned the commitment but then went on to state that “an applicant must demonstrate a satisfactory
record of performance under the CRA without reliance on plans or commitments for
future action. . . . The Board believes that the CRA plan—whether made as a plan or
as an enforceable commitment—has no relevance in this case without the demonstrated record of performance of the companies involved.”
So were these commitments a meaningful step, or only a gesture? Lloyd Brown, a
managing director at Citigroup, told the FCIC that most of the commitments would
have been fulfilled in the normal course of business. Speaking of the merger
with Countrywide, Andrew Plepler, head of Global Corporate Social Responsibility
at Bank of America, told the FCIC: “At a time of mergers, there is a lot of concern,
sometimes, that one plus one will not equal two in the eyes of communities where the
acquired bank has been investing. . . . So, what we do is reaffirm our intention to continue to lend and invest so that the communities where we live and work will continue to economically thrive.” He explained further that the pledge amount was
arrived at by working “closely with our business partners” who project current levels
of business activity that qualifies toward community lending goals into the future to
assure the community that past lending and investing practices will continue.
In essence, banks promised to keep doing what they had been doing, and community groups had the assurance that they would.
BANK CAPITAL STANDARDS: “ARBITRAGE”
Although the Federal Reserve had decided against stronger protections for consumers, it internalized the lessons of and , when the first generation of subprime lenders put themselves at serious risk; some, such as Keystone Bank and
Superior Bank, collapsed when the values of the subprime securitized assets they
held proved to be inflated. In response, the Federal Reserve and other regulators reworked the capital requirements on securitization by banks and thrifts.
In October , they introduced the “Recourse Rule” governing how much capital a bank needed to hold against securitized assets. If a bank retained an interest in a
residual tranche of a mortgage security, as Keystone, Superior, and others had done,
it would have to keep a dollar in capital for every dollar of residual interest. That
seemed to make sense, since the bank, in this instance, would be the first to take
losses on the loans in the pool. Under the old rules, banks held only in capital to
protect against losses on residual interests and any other exposures they retained in
securitizations; Keystone and others had been allowed to seriously understate their
risks and to not hold sufficient capital. Ironically, because the new rule made the capital charge on residual interests , it increased banks’ incentive to sell the residual
interests in securitizations—so that they were no longer the first to lose when the
loans went bad.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The Recourse Rule also imposed a new framework for asset-backed securities.
The capital requirement would be directly linked to the rating agencies’ assessment
of the tranches. Holding securities rated AAA or AA required far less capital than
holding lower-rated investments. For example, invested in AAA or AA mortgage-backed securities required holding only . in capital (the same as for securities backed by government-sponsored enterprises). But the same amount invested in
anything with a BB rating required in capital, or times more.
Banks could reduce the capital they were required to hold for a pool of mortgages
simply by securitizing them, rather than holding them on their books as whole loans.
If a bank kept in mortgages on its books, it might have to set aside about , including in capital against unexpected losses and in reserves against expected
losses. But if the bank created a mortgage-backed security, sold that security in
tranches, and then bought all the tranches, the capital requirement would be about
.. “Regulatory capital arbitrage does play a role in bank decision making,” said
David Jones, a Fed economist who wrote an article about the subject in , in an
FCIC interview. But “it is not the only thing that matters.”
And a final comparison: under bank regulatory capital standards, a triple-A
corporate bond required in capital—five times as much as the triple-A mortgagebacked security. Unlike the corporate bond, it was ultimately backed by real estate.
The new requirements put the rating agencies in the driver’s seat. How much
capital a bank held depended in part on the ratings of the securities it held. Tying
capital standards to the views of rating agencies would come in for criticism after
the crisis began. It was “a dangerous crutch,” former Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson testified to the Commission. However, the Fed’s Jones noted it was better
than the alternative—“to let the banks rate their own exposures.” That alternative
“would be terrible,” he said, noting that banks had been coming to the Fed and arguing for lower capital requirements on the grounds that the rating agencies were
too conservative.
Meanwhile, banks and regulators were not prepared for significant losses on
triple-A mortgage-backed securities, which were, after all, supposed to be among the
safest investments. Nor were they prepared for ratings downgrades due to expected
losses, which would require banks to post more capital. And were downgrades to occur at the moment the banks wanted to sell their securities to raise capital, there
would be no buyers. All these things would occur within a few years.
C R E D I T E X PA N S I O N
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 6
The Commission concludes that there was untrammeled growth in risky mortgages. Unsustainable, toxic loans polluted the financial system and fueled the
housing bubble.
Subprime lending was supported in significant ways by major financial institutions. Some firms, such as Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, and Morgan Stanley,
acquired subprime lenders. In addition, major financial institutions facilitated the
growth in subprime mortgage–lending companies with lines of credit, securitization, purchase guarantees and other mechanisms.
Regulators failed to rein in risky home mortgage lending. In particular, the
Federal Reserve failed to meet its statutory obligation to establish and maintain
prudent mortgage lending standards and to protect against predatory lending.
7
THE MORTGAGE MACHINE
CONTENTS
Foreign investors: “An irresistible profit opportunity” .........................................
Mortgages: “A good loan” ...................................................................................
Federal regulators: “Immunity from many state laws is a significant benefit” ....
Mortgage securities players: “Wall Street was very hungry for our product” ......
Moody’s: “Given a blank check”..........................................................................
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “Less competitive in the marketplace”................
In , commercial banks, thrifts, and investment banks caught up with Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac in securitizing home loans. By , they had taken the lead.
The two government-sponsored enterprises maintained their monopoly on securitizing prime mortgages below their loan limits, but the wave of home refinancing by
prime borrowers spurred by very low, steady interest rates petered out. Meanwhile,
Wall Street focused on the higher-yield loans that the GSEs could not purchase and
securitize—loans too large, called jumbo loans, and nonprime loans that didn’t meet
the GSEs’ standards. The nonprime loans soon became the biggest part of the market—“subprime” loans for borrowers with weak credit and “Alt-A” loans, with characteristics riskier than prime loans, to borrowers with strong credit.
By and , Wall Street was securitizing one-third more loans than Fannie
and Freddie. In just two years, private-label mortgage-backed securities had grown
more than , reaching . trillion in ; were subprime or Alt-A.
Many investors preferred securities highly rated by the rating agencies—or were
encouraged or restricted by regulations to buy them. And with yields low on other
highly rated assets, investors hungered for Wall Street mortgage securities backed by
higher-yield mortgages—those loans made to subprime borrowers, those with nontraditional features, those with limited or no documentation (“no-doc loans”), or
those that failed in some other way to meet strong underwriting standards.
“Securitization could be seen as a factory line,” former Citigroup CEO Charles
Prince told the FCIC. “As more and more and more of these subprime mortgages
were created as raw material for the securitization process, not surprisingly in hindsight, more and more of it was of lower and lower quality. And at the end of that
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
process, the raw material going into it was actually bad quality, it was toxic quality,
and that is what ended up coming out the other end of the pipeline. Wall Street obviously participated in that flow of activity.”
The origination and securitization of these mortgages also relied on short-term financing from the shadow banking system. Unlike banks and thrifts with access to deposits, investment banks relied more on money market funds and other investors for
cash; commercial paper and repo loans were the main sources. With house prices already up from to , this flood of money and the securitization apparatus helped boost home prices another from the beginning of until the peak
in April —even as homeownership was falling. The biggest gains over this period were in the “sand states”: places like the Los Angeles suburbs (), Las Vegas
(), and Orlando ().
FOREIGN INVESTORS:
“AN IRRESISTIBLE PROFIT OPPORTUNITY”
From June through June , the Federal Reserve kept the federal funds rate
low at to stimulate the economy following the recession. Over the next two
years, as deflation fears waned, the Fed gradually raised rates to . in quarterpoint increases.
In the view of some, the Fed simply kept rates too low too long. John Taylor, a
Stanford economist and former under secretary of treasury for international affairs,
blamed the crisis primarily on this action. If the Fed had followed its usual pattern,
he told the FCIC, short-term interest rates would have been much higher, discouraging excessive investment in mortgages. “The boom in housing construction starts
would have been much more mild, might not even call it a boom, and the bust as well
would have been mild,” Taylor said. Others were more blunt: “Greenspan bailed out
the world’s largest equity bubble with the world’s largest real estate bubble,” wrote
William A. Fleckenstein, the president of a Seattle-based money management firm.
Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan disagree. Both the current and former Fed
chairman argue that deciding to purchase a home depends on long-term interest
rates on mortgages, not the short-term rates controlled by the Fed, and that shortterm and long-term rates had become de-linked. “Between and , the fed
funds rate and the mortgage rate moved in lock-step,” Greenspan said. When the
Fed started to raise rates in , officials expected mortgage rates to rise, too, slowing growth. Instead, mortgage rates continued to fall for another year. The construction industry continued to build houses, peaking at an annualized rate of . million
starts in January —more than a -year high.
As Greenspan told Congress in , this was a “conundrum.” One theory
pointed to foreign money. Developing countries were booming and—vulnerable to
financial problems in the past—encouraged strong saving. Investors in these countries placed their savings in apparently safe and high-yield securities in the United
States. Fed Chairman Bernanke called it a “global savings glut.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
As the United States ran a large current account deficit, flows into the country
were unprecedented. Over six years from to , U.S. Treasury debt held by
foreign official public entities rose from . trillion to . trillion; as a percentage
of U.S. debt held by the public, these holdings increased from . to .. Foreigners also bought securities backed by Fannie and Freddie, which, with their implicit government guarantee, seemed nearly as safe as Treasuries. As the Asian
financial crisis ended in , foreign holdings of GSE securities held steady at the
level of almost years earlier, about billion. By —just two years later—
foreigners owned billion in GSE securities; by , billion. “You had a
huge inflow of liquidity. A very unique kind of situation where poor countries like
China were shipping money to advanced countries because their financial systems
were so weak that they [were] better off shipping [money] to countries like the
United States rather than keeping it in their own countries,” former Fed governor
Frederic Mishkin told the FCIC. “The system was awash with liquidity, which helped
lower long-term interest rates.”
Foreign investors sought other high-grade debt almost as safe as Treasuries and
GSE securities but with a slightly higher return. They found the triple-A assets pouring from the Wall Street mortgage securitization machine. As overseas demand drove
up prices for securitized debt, it “created an irresistible profit opportunity for the U.S.
financial system: to engineer ‘quasi’ safe debt instruments by bundling riskier assets
and selling the senior tranches,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the FCIC.
Paul Krugman, an economist at Princeton University, told the FCIC, “It’s hard to
envisage us having had this crisis without considering international monetary capital
movements. The U.S. housing bubble was financed by large capital inflows. So were
Spanish and Irish and Baltic bubbles. It’s a combination of, in the narrow sense, of a
less regulated financial system and a world that was increasingly wide open for big
international capital movements.”
It was an ocean of money.
MORTGAGES: “A GOOD LOAN”
The refinancing boom was over, but originators still needed mortgages to sell to the
Street. They needed new products that, as prices kept rising, could make expensive
homes more affordable to still-eager borrowers. The solution was riskier, more aggressive, mortgage products that brought higher yields for investors but correspondingly greater risks for borrowers. “Holding a subprime loan has become something of
a high-stakes wager,” the Center for Responsible Lending warned in .
Subprime mortgages rose from of mortgage originations in to in
.About of subprime borrowers used hybrid adjustable-rate mortgages
(ARMs) such as /s and /s—mortgages whose low “teaser” rate lasts for the
first two or three years, and then adjusts periodically thereafter. Prime borrowers
also used more alternative mortgages. The dollar volume of Alt-A securitization rose
almost from to . In general, these loans made borrowers’ monthly
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
mortgage payments on ever more expensive homes affordable—at least initially. Popular Alt-A products included interest-only mortgages and payment-option ARMs.
Option ARMs let borrowers pick their payment each month, including payments
that actually increased the principal—any shortfall on the interest payment was
added to the principal, something called negative amortization. If the balance got
large enough, the loan would convert to a fixed-rate mortgage, increasing the
monthly payment—perhaps dramatically. Option ARMs rose from of mortgages
in to in .
Simultaneously, underwriting standards for nonprime and prime mortgages
weakened. Combined loan-to-value ratios—reflecting first, second, and even third
mortgages—rose. Debt-to-income ratios climbed, as did loans made for non-owneroccupied properties. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s market share shrank from
of all mortgages purchased in to in , and down to by . Taking their place were private-label securitizations—meaning those not issued and
guaranteed by the GSEs.
In this new market, originators competed fiercely; Countrywide Financial Corporation took the crown. It was the biggest mortgage originator from until the
market collapsed in . Even after Countrywide nearly failed, buckling under a
mortgage portfolio with loans that its co-founder and CEO Angelo Mozilo once
called “toxic,” Mozilo would describe his -year-old company to the Commission as
having helped million people buy homes and prevented social unrest by extending
loans to minorities, historically the victims of discrimination: “Countrywide was one
of the greatest companies in the history of this country and probably made more difference to society, to the integrity of our society, than any company in the history of
America.” Lending to home buyers was only part of the business. Countrywide’s
President and COO David Sambol told the Commission, as long as a loan did not
harm the company from a financial or reputation standpoint, Countrywide was “a
seller of securities to Wall Street.” Countrywide’s essential business strategy was
“originating what was salable in the secondary market.” The company sold or securitized of the . trillion in mortgages it originated between and .
In , Mozilo announced a very aggressive goal of gaining “market dominance”
by capturing of the origination market. His share at the time was . But Countrywide was not unique: Ameriquest, New Century, Washington Mutual, and others all
pursued loans as aggressively. They competed by originating types of mortgages created years before as niche products, but now transformed into riskier, mass-market versions. “The definition of a good loan changed from ‘one that pays’ to ‘one that could be
sold,’” Patricia Lindsay, formerly a fraud specialist at New Century, told the FCIC.
/s and /s: “Adjust for the affordability”
Historically, /s or /s, also known as hybrid ARMs, let credit-impaired borrowers repair their credit. During the first two or three years, a lower interest rate meant
a manageable payment schedule and enabled borrowers to demonstrate they could
make timely payments. Eventually the interest rates would rise sharply, and payments
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
could double or even triple, leaving borrowers with few alternatives: if they had established their creditworthiness, they could refinance into a similar mortgage or one
with a better interest rate, often with the same lender; if unable to refinance, the
borrower was unlikely to be able to afford the new higher payments and would have
to sell the home and repay the mortgage. If they could not sell or make the higher
payments, they would have to default.
But as house prices rose after , the /s and /s acquired a new role: helping to get people into homes or to move up to bigger homes. “As homes got less and
less affordable, you would adjust for the affordability in the mortgage because you
couldn’t really adjust people’s income,” Andrew Davidson, the president of Andrew
Davidson & Co. and a veteran of the mortgage markets, told the FCIC. Lenders
qualified borrowers at low teaser rates, with little thought to what might happen
when rates reset. Hybrid ARMs became the workhorses of the subprime securitization market.
Consumer protection groups such as the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights
railed against /s and /s, which, they said, neither rehabilitated credit nor
turned renters into owners. David Berenbaum from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition testified to Congress in the summer of : “The industry has
flooded the market with exotic mortgage lending such as / and / ARMs. These
exotic subprime mortgages overwhelm borrowers when interest rates shoot up after
an introductory time period.” To their critics, they were simply a way for lenders to
strip equity from low-income borrowers. The loans came with big fees that got rolled
into the mortgage, increasing the chances that the mortgage could be larger than the
home’s value at the reset date. If the borrower could not refinance, the lender would
foreclose—and then own the home in a rising real estate market.
Option ARMs: “Our most profitable mortgage loan”
When they were originally introduced in the s, option ARMs were niche products, too, but by they too became loans of choice because their payments were
lower than more traditional mortgages. During the housing boom, many borrowers
repeatedly made only the minimum payments required, adding to the principal balance of their loan every month.
An early seller of option ARMs was Golden West Savings, an Oakland, California–based thrift founded in and acquired in by Marion and Herbert Sandler. In , the Sandlers merged Golden West with World Savings; Golden West
Financial Corp., the parent company, operated branches under the name World Savings Bank. The thrift issued about billion in option ARMs between and
. Unlike other mortgage companies, Golden West held onto them.
Sandler told the FCIC that Golden West’s option ARMs—marketed as “Pick-aPay” loans—had the lowest losses in the industry for that product. Even in —the
last year prior to its acquisition by Wachovia—when its portfolio was almost entirely
in option ARMs, Golden West’s losses were low by industry standards. Sandler attributed Golden West’s performance to its diligence in running simulations about what
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
would happen to its loans under various scenarios—for example, if interest rates
went up or down or if house prices dropped , even . “For a quarter of a century, it worked exactly as the simulations showed that it would,” Sandler said. “And
we have never been able to identify a single loan that was delinquent because of the
structure of the loan, much less a loss or foreclosure.” But after Wachovia acquired
Golden West in and the housing market soured, charge-offs on the Pick-a-Pay
portfolio would suddenly jump from . to . by September . And foreclosures would climb.
Early in the decade, banks and thrifts such as Countrywide and Washington
Mutual increased their origination of option ARM loans, changing the product in
ways that made payment shocks more likely. At Golden West, after years, or if the
principal balance grew to of its original size, the Pick-a-Pay mortgage would
recast into a new fixed-rate mortgage. At Countrywide and Washington Mutual, the
new loans would recast in as little as five years, or when the balance hit just of
the original size. They also offered lower teaser rates—as low as —and loan-tovalue ratios as high as . All of these features raised the chances that the borrower’s required payment could rise more sharply, more quickly, and with less
cushion.
In , Washington Mutual was the second-largest mortgage originator, just
ahead of Countrywide. It had offered the option ARM since , and in , as
cited by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, the originator conducted a study “to explore what Washington Mutual could do to increase sales of Option ARMs, our most profitable mortgage loan.” A focus group made clear that few
customers were requesting option ARMs and that “this is not a product that sells itself.” The study found “the best selling point for the Option Arm” was to show consumers “how much lower their monthly payment would be by choosing the Option
Arm versus a fixed-rate loan.” The study also revealed that many WaMu brokers
“felt these loans were ‘bad’ for customers.” One member of the focus group remarked, “A lot of (Loan) Consultants don’t believe in it . . . and don’t think [it’s] good
for the customer. You’re going to have to change the mindset.”
Despite these challenges, option ARM originations soared at Washington Mutual
from billion in to billion in , when they were more than half of
WaMu’s originations and had become the thrift’s signature adjustable-rate home loan
product. The average FICO score was around , well into the range considered
“prime,” and about two-thirds were jumbo loans—mortgage loans exceeding the
maximum Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were allowed to purchase or guarantee.
More than half were in California.
Countrywide’s option ARM business peaked at . billion in originations in the
second quarter of , about of all its loans originated that quarter. But it had
to relax underwriting standards to get there. In July , Countrywide decided it
would lend up to of a home’s appraised value, up from , and reduced the
minimum credit score to as low as . In early , Countrywide eased standards
again, increasing the allowable combined loan-to-value ratio (including second liens)
to .
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The risk in these loans was growing. From to , the average loan-tovalue ratio rose about , the combined loan-to-value ratio rose about , and debtto-income ratios had risen from to : borrowers were pledging more of their
income to their mortgage payments. Moreover, of these two originators’ option
ARMs had low documentation in . The percentage of these loans made to investors and speculators—that is, borrowers with no plans to use the home as their
primary residence—also rose.
These changes worried the lenders even as they continued to make the loans. In
September and August , Mozilo emailed to senior management that these
loans could bring “financial and reputational catastrophe.” Countrywide should not
market them to investors, he insisted. “Pay option loans being used by investors is a
pure commercial spec[ulation] loan and not the traditional home loan that we have
successfully managed throughout our history,” Mozilo wrote to Carlos Garcia, CEO
of Countrywide Bank. Speculative investors “should go to Chase or Wells not us. It is
also important for you and your team to understand from my point of view that there
is nothing intrinsically wrong with pay options loans themselves, the problem is the
quality of borrowers who are being offered the product and the abuse by third party
originators. . . . [I]f you are unable to find sufficient product then slow down the
growth of the Bank for the time being.”
However, Countrywide’s growth did not slow. Nor did the volume of option
ARMs retained on its balance sheet, increasing from billion in to billion
in and peaking in at billion. Finding these loans very profitable,
through , WaMu also retained option ARMs—more than billion with the
bulk from California, followed by Florida. But in the end, these loans would cause
significant losses during the crisis.
Mentioning Countrywide and WaMu as tough, “in our face” competitors, John
Stumpf, the CEO, chairman, and president of Wells Fargo, recalled Wells’s decision
not to write option ARMs, even as it originated many other high-risk mortgages.
These were “hard decisions to make at the time,” he said, noting “we did lose revenue,
and we did lose volume.”
Across the market, the volume of option ARMs had risen nearly fourfold from
to , from approximately billion to billion. By then, WaMu and
Countrywide had plenty of evidence that more borrowers were making only the
minimum payments and that their mortgages were negatively amortizing—which
meant their equity was being eaten away. The percentage of Countrywide’s option
ARMs that were negatively amortizing grew from just in to in and
then to more than by . At WaMu, it was in , in , and
in . Declines in house prices added to borrowers’ problems: any equity remaining after the negative amortization would simply be eroded. Increasingly, borrowers
would owe more on their mortgages than their homes were worth on the market, giving them an incentive to walk away from both home and mortgage.
Kevin Stein, from the California Reinvestment Coalition, testified to the FCIC
that option ARMs were sold inappropriately: “Nowhere was this dynamic more
clearly on display than in the summer of when the Federal Reserve convened
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
HOEPA (Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act) hearings in San Francisco. At
the hearing, consumers testified to being sold option ARM loans in their primary
non-English language, only to be pressured to sign English-only documents with significantly worse terms. Some consumers testified to being unable to make even their
initial payments because they had been lied to so completely by their brokers.”
Mona Tawatao, a regional counsel with Legal Services of Northern California, described the borrowers she was assisting as “people who got steered or defrauded into
entering option ARMs with teaser rates or pick-a-pay loans forcing them to pay
into—pay loans that they could never pay off. Prevalent among these clients are
seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, and limited English speakers and
seniors who are African American and Latino.”
Underwriting standards: “We’re going to have to hold our nose”
Another shift would have serious consequences. For decades, the down payment for
a prime mortgage had been (in other words, the loan-to-value ratio (LTV) had
been ). As prices continued to rise, finding the cash to put down became
harder, and from on, lenders began accepting smaller down payments.
There had always been a place for borrowers with down payments below .
Typically, lenders required such borrower to purchase private mortgage insurance for
a monthly fee. If a mortgage ended in foreclosure, the mortgage insurance company
would make the lender whole. Worried about defaults, the GSEs would not buy or
guarantee mortgages with down payments below unless the borrower bought
the insurance. Unluckily for many homeowners, for the housing industry, and for the
financial system, lenders devised a way to get rid of these monthly fees that had
added to the cost of homeownership: lower down payments that did not require
insurance.
Lenders had latitude in setting down payments. In , Congress ordered federal
regulators to prescribe standards for real estate lending that would apply to banks
and thrifts. The goal was to “curtail abusive real estate lending practices in order to
reduce risk to the deposit insurance funds and enhance the safety and soundness of
insured depository institutions.” Congress had debated including explicit LTV standards, but chose not to, leaving that to the regulators. In the end, regulators declined
to introduce standards for LTV ratios or for documentation for home mortgages.
The agencies explained: “A significant number of commenters expressed concern
that rigid application of a regulation implementing LTV ratios would constrict credit,
impose additional lending costs, reduce lending flexibility, impede economic growth,
and cause other undesirable consequences.”
In , regulators revisited the issue, as high LTV lending was increasing. They
tightened reporting requirements and limited a bank’s total holdings of loans with
LTVs above that lacked mortgage insurance or some other protection; they also
reminded the banks and thrifts that they should establish internal guidelines to manage the risk of these loans.
High LTV lending soon became even more common, thanks to the so-called
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
piggyback mortgage. The lender offered a first mortgage for perhaps of the
home’s value and a second mortgage for another or even . Borrowers liked
these because their monthly payments were often cheaper than a traditional mortgage plus the required mortgage insurance, and the interest payments were tax deductible. Lenders liked them because the smaller first mortgage—even without
mortgage insurance—could potentially be sold to the GSEs.
At the same time, the piggybacks added risks. A borrower with a higher combined LTV had less equity in the home. In a rising market, should payments become
unmanageable, the borrower could always sell the home and come out ahead. However, should the payments become unmanageable in a falling market, the borrower
might owe more than the home was worth. Piggyback loans—which often required
nothing down—guaranteed that many borrowers would end up with negative equity
if house prices fell, especially if the appraisal had overstated the initial value.
But piggyback lending helped address a significant challenge for companies like
New Century, which were big players in the market for mortgages. Meeting investor
demand required finding new borrowers, and homebuyers without down payments
were a relatively untapped source. Yet among borrowers with mortgages originated
in , by September those with piggybacks were four times as likely as other
mortgage holders to be or more days delinquent. When senior management at
New Century heard these numbers, the head of the Secondary Marketing Department asked for “thoughts on what to do with this . . . pretty compelling” information.
Nonetheless, New Century increased mortgages with piggybacks to of loan production by the end of , up from only in . They were not alone. Across
securitized subprime mortgages, the average combined LTV rose from to
between and .
Another way to get people into mortgages—and quickly—was to require less information of the borrower. “Stated income” or “low-documentation” (or sometimes
“no-documentation”) loans had emerged years earlier for people with fluctuating or
hard-to-verify incomes, such as the self-employed, or to serve longtime customers
with strong credit. Or lenders might waive information requirements if the loan
looked safe in other respects. “If I’m making a , , loan-to-value, I’m not
going to get all of the documentation,” Sandler of Golden West told the FCIC. The
process was too cumbersome and unnecessary. He already had a good idea how
much money teachers, accountants, and engineers made—and if he didn’t, he could
easily find out. All he needed was to verify that his borrowers worked where they said
they did. If he guessed wrong, the loan-to-value ratio still protected his investment.
Around , however, low- and no-documentation loans took on an entirely different character. Nonprime lenders now boasted they could offer borrowers the convenience of quicker decisions and not having to provide tons of paperwork. In
return, they charged a higher interest rate. The idea caught on: from to ,
low- and no-doc loans skyrocketed from less than to roughly of all outstanding loans. Among Alt-A securitizations, of loans issued in had limited or
no documentation. As William Black, a former banking regulator, testified before
the FCIC, the mortgage industry’s own fraud specialists described stated income
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
loans as “an open ‘invitation to fraud’ that justified the industry term ‘liar’s loans.’”
Speaking of lending up to at Citigroup, Richard Bowen, a veteran banker in the
consumer lending group, told the FCIC, “A decision was made that ‘We’re going to
have to hold our nose and start buying the stated product if we want to stay in business.’” Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, told the Commission, “In mortgage
underwriting, somehow we just missed, you know, that home prices don’t go up forever and that it’s not sufficient to have stated income.”
In the end, companies in subprime and Alt-A mortgages had, in essence, placed
all their chips on black: they were betting that home prices would never stop rising.
This was the only scenario that would keep the mortgage machine humming. The evidence is present in our case study mortgage-backed security, CMLTI -NC,
whose loans have many of the characteristics just described.
The , loans bundled in this deal were adjustable-rate and fixed-rate residential mortgages originated by New Century. They had an average principal balance of
,—just under the median home price of , in . The vast majority had a -year maturity, and more than were originated in May, June, and July
, just after national home prices had peaked. More than were reportedly for
primary residences, with for home purchases and for cash-out refinancings.
The loans were from all states and the District of Columbia, but more than a fifth
came from California and more than a tenth from Florida.
About of the loans were ARMs, and most of these were /s or /s. In a
twist, many of these hybrid ARMs had other “affordability features” as well. For example, more than of the ARMs were interest-only—during the first two or three
years, not only would borrowers pay a lower fixed rate, they would not have to pay
any principal. In addition, more than of the ARMs were “/ hybrid balloon”
loans, in which the principal would amortize over years—lowering the monthly
payments even further, but as a result leaving the borrower with a final principal payment at the end of the -year term.
The great majority of the pool was secured by first mortgages; of these, had a
piggyback mortgage on the same property. As a result, more than one-third of the
mortgages in this deal had a combined loan-to-value ratio between and .
Raising the risk a bit more, of the mortgages were no-doc loans. The rest were
“full-doc,” although their documentation was fuller in some cases than in others. In
sum, the loans bundled in this deal mirrored the market: complex products with high
LTVs and little documentation. And even as many warned of this toxic mix, the regulators were not on the same page.
FEDERAL REGULATORS: “IMMUNITY FROM
MANY STATE LAWS IS A SIGNIFICANT BENEFIT”
For years, some states had tried to regulate the mortgage business, especially to clamp
down on the predatory mortgages proliferating in the subprime market. The national
thrifts and banks and their federal regulators—the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS)
and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), respectively—resisted the
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
states’ efforts to regulate those national banks and thrifts. The companies claimed that
without one uniform set of rules, they could not easily do business across the country,
and the regulators agreed. In August , as the market for riskier subprime and AltA loans grew, and as lenders piled on more risk with smaller down payments, reduced
documentation requirements, interest-only loans, and payment-option loans, the
OCC fired a salvo. The OCC proposed strong preemption rules for national banks,
nearly identical to earlier OTS rules that empowered nationally chartered thrifts to
disregard state consumer laws.
Back in the OTS had issued rules saying federal law preempted state predatory lending laws for federally regulated thrifts. In , the OTS referred to these
rules in issuing four opinion letters declaring that laws in Georgia, New York, New
Jersey, and New Mexico did not apply to national thrifts. In the New Mexico opinion,
the regulator pronounced invalid New Mexico’s bans on balloon payments, negative
amortization, prepayment penalties, loan flipping, and lending without regard to the
borrower’s ability to repay.
The Comptroller of the Currency took the same line on the national banks that it
regulated, offering preemption as an inducement to use a national bank charter. In a
speech, before the final OCC rules were passed, Comptroller John D. Hawke Jr.
pointed to “national banks’ immunity from many state laws” as “a significant benefit
of the national charter—a benefit that the OCC has fought hard over the years to preserve.” In an interview that year, Hawke explained that the potential loss of regulatory market share for the OCC “was a matter of concern.”
In August the OCC issued its first preemptive order, aimed at Georgia’s
mini-HOEPA statute, and in January the OCC adopted a sweeping preemption
rule applying to all state laws that interfered with or placed conditions on national
banks’ ability to lend. Shortly afterward, three large banks with combined assets of
more than trillion said they would convert from state charters to national charters,
which increased OCC’s annual budget .
State-chartered operating subsidiaries were another point of contention in the
preemption battle. In the OCC had adopted a regulation preempting state law
regarding state-chartered operating subsidiaries of national banks. In response, several large national banks moved their mortgage-lending operations into subsidiaries
and asserted that the subsidiaries were exempt from state mortgage lending laws.
Four states challenged the regulation, but the Supreme Court ruled against them in
.
Once OCC and OTS preemption was in place, the two federal agencies were the
only regulators with the power to prohibit abusive lending practices by national
banks and thrifts and their direct subsidiaries. Comptroller John Dugan, who succeeded Hawke, defended preemption, noting that “ of all nonprime mortgages
were made by lenders that were subject to state law. Well over half were made by
mortgage lenders that were exclusively subject to state law.” Lisa Madigan, the attorney general of Illinois, flipped the argument around, noting that national banks and
thrifts, and their subsidiaries, were heavily involved in subprime lending. Using different data, she contended: “National banks and federal thrifts and . . . their sub-
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
sidiaries . . . were responsible for almost percent of subprime mortgage loans, .
percent of the Alt-A loans, and percent of the pay-option and interest-only ARMs
that were sold.” Madigan told the FCIC:
Even as the Fed was doing little to protect consumers and our financial
system from the effects of predatory lending, the OCC and OTS were
actively engaged in a campaign to thwart state efforts to avert the coming crisis. . . . In the wake of the federal regulators’ push to curtail state
authority, many of the largest mortgage-lenders shed their state licenses
and sought shelter behind the shield of a national charter. And I think
that it is no coincidence that the era of expanded federal preemption
gave rise to the worst lending abuses in our nation’s history.
Comptroller Hawke offered the FCIC a different interpretation: “While some critics have suggested that the OCC’s actions on preemption have been a grab for power,
the fact is that the agency has simply responded to increasingly aggressive initiatives
at the state level to control the banking activities of federally chartered institutions.”
MORTGAGE SECURITIES PLAYERS:
“WALL STREET WAS VERY HUNGRY FOR OUR PRODUCT”
Subprime and Alt-A mortgage–backed securities depended on a complex supply
chain, largely funded through short-term lending in the commercial paper and repo
market—which would become critical as the financial crisis began to unfold in .
These loans were increasingly collateralized not by Treasuries and GSE securities but
by highly rated mortgage securities backed by increasingly risky loans. Independent
mortgage originators such as Ameriquest and New Century—without access to deposits—typically relied on financing to originate mortgages from warehouse lines of
credit extended by banks, from their own commercial paper programs, or from
money borrowed in the repo market.
For commercial banks such as Citigroup, warehouse lending was a multibilliondollar business. From to , Citigroup made available at any one time as much
as billion in warehouse lines of credit to mortgage originators, including million to New Century and more than . billion to Ameriquest. Citigroup CEO
Chuck Prince told the FCIC he would not have approved, had he known. “I found out
at the end of my tenure, I did not know it before, that we had some warehouse lines
out to some originators. And I think getting that close to the origination function—
being that involved in the origination of some of these products—is something that I
wasn’t comfortable with and that I did not view as consistent with the prescription I
had laid down for the company not to be involved in originating these products.”
As early as , Moody’s called the new asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP)
programs “a whole new ball game.” As asset-backed commercial paper became a
popular method to fund the mortgage business, it grew from about one-quarter to
about one-half of commercial paper sold between and .
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
In , only five mortgage companies borrowed a total of billion through asset-backed commercial paper; in , entities borrowed billion. For instance, Countrywide launched the commercial paper programs Park Granada in
and Park Sienna in . By May , it was borrowing billion through
Park Granada and . billion through Park Sienna. These programs would house
subprime and other mortgages until they were sold.
Commercial banks used commercial paper, in part, for regulatory arbitrage.
When banks kept mortgages on their balance sheets, regulators required them to
hold in capital to protect against loss. When banks put mortgages into off-balance-sheet entities such as commercial paper programs, there was no capital charge
(in , a small charge was imposed). But to make the deals work for investors,
banks had to provide liquidity support to these programs, for which they earned a
fee. This liquidity support meant that the bank would purchase, at a previously set
price, any commercial paper that investors were unwilling to buy when it came up for
renewal. During the financial crisis these promises had to be kept, eventually putting
substantial pressure on banks’ balance sheets.
When the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the private group that establishes standards for financial reports, responded to the Enron scandal by making it
harder for companies to get off-balance-sheet treatment for these programs, the favorable capital rules were in jeopardy. The asset-backed commercial paper market
stalled. Banks protested that their programs differed from the practices at Enron and
should be excluded from the new standards. In , bank regulators responded by
proposing to let banks remove these assets from their balance sheets when calculating regulatory capital. The proposal would have also introduced for the first time a
capital charge amounting to at most . of the liquidity support banks provided to
the ABCP programs. However, after strong pushback—the American Securitization
Forum, an industry association, called that charge “arbitrary,” and State Street Bank
complained it was “too conservative”—regulators in announced a final rule
setting the charge at up to ., or half the amount of the first proposal. Growth in
this market resumed.
Regulatory changes—in this case, changes in the bankruptcy laws—also boosted
growth in the repo market by transforming the types of repo collateral. Prior to ,
repo lenders had clear and immediate rights to their collateral following the borrower’s bankruptcy only if that collateral was Treasury or GSE securities. In the
Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of , Congress expanded that provision to include many other assets, including mortgage loans, mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and certain derivatives. The
result was a short-term repo market increasingly reliant on highly rated non-agency
mortgage-backed securities; but beginning in mid-, when banks and investors
became skittish about the mortgage market, they would prove to be an unstable
funding source (see figure .). Once the crisis hit, these “illiquid, hard-to-value securities made up a greater share of the tri-party repo market than most people would
have wanted,” Darryll Hendricks, a UBS executive and chair of a New York Fed task
force examining the repo market after the crisis, told the Commission.
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
Repo Borrowing
Broker-dealers’ use of repo borrowing rose sharply before the crisis.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
$1,500
1,200
900
600
300
$396
0
–300
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
2010
NOTE: Net borrowing by broker-dealers.
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Flow of Funds Report
Figure .
Our sample deal, CMLTI -NC, shows how these funding and securitization
markets worked in practice. Eight banks and securities firms provided most of the
money New Century needed to make the , mortgages it would sell to Citigroup.
Most of the funds came through repo agreements from a set of banks—including
Morgan Stanley ( million); Barclays Capital, a division of a U.K.-based bank
( million); Bank of America ( million); and Bear Stearns ( million). The
financing was provided when New Century originated these mortgages; so for about
two months, New Century owed these banks approximately million secured by
the mortgages. Another million in funding came from New Century itself, including million through its own commercial paper program. On August , , Citigroup paid New Century million for the mortgages (and accrued interest), and
New Century repaid the repo lenders after keeping a million (.) premium.
The investors in the deal
Investors for mortgage-backed securities came from all over the globe; what made securitization work were the customized tranches catering to every one of them.
CMLTI -NC had tranches, whose investors are shown in figure .. Fannie
Mae bought the entire million triple-A-rated A tranche, which paid a better
return than super-safe U.S. Treasuries. The other triple-A-rated tranches, worth
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Selected Investors in CMLTI 2006-NC2
A wide variety of investors throughout the world purchased the securities in this
deal, including Fannie Mae, many international banks, SIVs and many CDOs.
2
78%
21%
MEZZANINE
EQUITY
1
1%
SENIOR
Tranche
Original Balance
(MILLIONS)
Original
Rating1
Spread2
Selected Investors
A1
$154.6
AAA
0.14%
Fannie Mae
A2-A
$281.7
AAA
0.04%
Chase Security Lendings Asset
Management; 1 investment fund
in China; 6 investment funds
A2-B
$282.4
AAA
0.06%
Federal Home Loan Bank of
Chicago; 3 banks in Germany,
Italy and France; 11 investment
funds; 3 retail investors
A2-C
$18.3
AAA
0.24%
2 banks in the U.S. and Germany
M-1
$39.3
AA+
0.29%
1 investment fund and 2
banks in Italy; Cheyne Finance
Limited; 3 asset managers
M-2
$44 .0
AA
0.31%
Parvest ABS Euribor; 4 asset
managers; 1 bank in China;
1 CDO
M-3
$14.2
AA-
0.34%
2 CDOs; 1 asset manager
M-4
$16.1
A+
0.39%
1 CDO; 1 hedge fund
M-5
$16.6
A
0.40%
2 CDOs
M-6
$10.9
A-
0.46%
3 CDOs
M-7
$9.9
BBB+
0.70%
3 CDOs
M-8
$8.5
BBB
0.80%
2 CDOs; 1 bank
M-9
$11.8
BBB-
1.50%
5 CDOs; 2 asset managers
M-10
$13.7
BB+
2.50%
3 CDOs; 1 asset manager
M-11
$10.9
BB
2.50%
NA
CE
$13.3
NR
Citi and Capmark Fin Grp
P, R, Rx: Additional tranches entitled to specific payments
Standard & Poor’s.
The yield is the rate on the one-month London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR), an interbank lending
interest rate, plus the spread listed. For example, when the deal was issued, Fannie Mae would have
received the LIBOR rate of 5.32% plus 0.14% to give a total yield of 5.46%.
SOURCES: Citigroup; Standard & Poor’s; FCIC calculations
Figure .
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
million, went to more than institutional investors around the world, spreading the risk globally. These triple-A tranches represented of the deal. Among
the buyers were foreign banks and funds in China, Italy, France, and Germany; the
Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago; the Kentucky Retirement Systems; a hospital;
and JP Morgan, which purchased part of the tranche using cash from its securitieslending operation. (In other words, JP Morgan lent securities held by its clients to
other financial institutions in exchange for cash collateral, and then put that cash to
work investing in this deal. Securities lending was a large, but ultimately unstable,
source of cash that flowed into this market.)
The middle, mezzanine tranches in this deal constituted about of the total
value of the security. If losses rose above to (by design the threshold would increase over time), investors in the residual tranches would be wiped out, and the
mezzanine investors would start to lose money. Creators of collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs—discussed in the next chapter—bought most of the mezzanine
tranches rated below triple-A and nearly all those rated below AA. Only a few of the
highest-rated mezzanine tranches were not put into CDOs. For example, Cheyne Finance Limited purchased million of the top mezzanine tranche. Cheyne—a structured investment vehicle (SIV)—would be one of the first casualties of the crisis,
sparking panic during the summer of . Parvest ABS Euribor, which purchased
million of the second mezzanine tranche, would be one of the BNP Paribas
funds which helped ignite the financial crisis that summer.
Typically, investors seeking high returns, such as hedge funds, would buy the equity tranches of mortgage-backed securities; they would be the first to lose if there
were problems. These investors anticipated returns of , , or even . Citigroup retained part of the residual or “first-loss” tranches, sharing the rest with Capmark Financial Group.
“Compensated very well”
The business of structuring, selling, and distributing this deal, and the thousands like
it, was lucrative for the banks. The mortgage originators profited when they sold
loans for securitization. Some of this profit flowed down to employees—particularly
those generating mortgage volume.
Part of the million premium received by New Century for the deal we analyzed went to pay the many employees who participated. “The originators, the loan
officers, account executives, basically the salespeople [who] were the reason our loans
came in . . . were compensated very well,” New Century’s Patricia Lindsay told the
FCIC. And volume mattered more than quality. She noted, “Wall Street was very
hungry for our product. We had our loans sold three months in advance, before they
were even made at one point.”
Similar incentives were at work at Long Beach Mortgage, the subprime division of
Washington Mutual, which organized its Incentive Plan by volume. As WaMu
showed in a plan, “Home Loans Product Strategy,” the goals were also productspecific: to drive “growth in higher margin products (Option ARM, Alt A, Home Equity,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Subprime),” “recruit and leverage seasoned Option ARM sales force,” and “maintain a
compensation structure that supports the high margin product strategy.”
After structuring a security, an underwriter, often an investment bank, marketed
and sold it to investors. The bank collected a percentage of the sale (generally between . and .) as discounts, concessions, or commissions. For a billion
deal like CMLTI -NC, a fee would earn Citigroup million. In this case,
though, Citigroup instead kept parts of the residual tranches. Doing so could yield
large profits as long as the deal performed as expected.
Options Group, which compiles compensation figures for investment banks, examined the mortgage-backed securities sales and trading desks at commercial and investment banks from to . It found that associates had average annual base
salaries of , to , from through , but received bonuses that could
well exceed their salaries. On the next rung, vice presidents averaged base salaries and
bonuses from , to ,,. Directors averaged , to ,,. At
the top was the head of the unit. For example, in , Dow Kim, the head of Merrill’s
Global Markets and Investment Banking segment, received a base salary of ,
plus a million bonus, a package second only to Merrill Lynch’s CEO.
MOODY’S: “GIVEN A BLANK CHECK”
The rating agencies were essential to the smooth functioning of the mortgage-backed
securities market. Issuers needed them to approve the structure of their deals; banks
needed their ratings to determine the amount of capital to hold; repo markets needed
their ratings to determine loan terms; some investors could buy only securities with a
triple-A rating; and the rating agencies’ judgment was baked into collateral agreements
and other financial contracts. To examine the rating process, the Commission focused
on Moody’s Investors Service, the largest and oldest of the three rating agencies.
The rating of structured finance products such as mortgage-backed securities
made up close to half of Moody’s rating revenues in , , and . From
to , revenues from rating such financial instruments increased more than
fourfold. But the rating process involved many conflicts, which would come into focus during the crisis.
To do its work, Moody’s rated mortgage-backed securities using models based, in
part, on periods of relatively strong credit performance. Moody’s did not sufficiently
account for the deterioration in underwriting standards or a dramatic decline in
home prices. And Moody’s did not even develop a model specifically to take into account the layered risks of subprime securities until late , after it had already
rated nearly , subprime securities.
“In the business forevermore”
Credit ratings have been linked to government regulations for three-quarters of a
century. In , the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency let banks report
publicly traded bonds with a rating of BBB or better at book value (that is, the price
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
they paid for the bonds); lower-rated bonds had to be reported at current market
prices, which might be lower. In , the National Association of Insurance Commissioners adopted higher capital requirements on lower-rated bonds held by insurers. But the watershed event in federal regulation occurred in , when the
Securities and Exchange Commission modified its minimum capital requirements
for broker-dealers to base them on credit ratings by a “nationally recognized statistical rating organization” (NRSRO); at the time, that was Moody’s, S&P, or Fitch. Ratings are also built into banking capital regulations under the Recourse Rule, which,
since , has permitted banks to hold less capital for higher-rated securities. For
example, BBB rated securities require five times as much capital as AAA and AA
rated securities, and BB securities require ten times more capital. Banks in some
countries were subject to similar requirements under the Basel II international capital agreement, signed in June , although U.S. banks had not fully implemented
the advanced approaches allowed under those rules.
Credit ratings also determined whether investors could buy certain investments at
all. The SEC restricts money market funds to purchasing “securities that have received credit ratings from any two NRSROs . . . in one of the two highest short-term
rating categories or comparable unrated securities.” The Department of Labor restricts pension fund investments to securities rated A or higher. Credit ratings affect
even private transactions: contracts may contain triggers that require the posting of
collateral or immediate repayment, should a security or entity be downgraded. Triggers played an important role in the financial crisis and helped cripple AIG.
Importantly for the mortgage market, the Secondary Mortgage Market Enhancement Act of permitted federal- and state-chartered financial institutions to invest in mortgage-related securities if the securities had high ratings from at least one
rating agency. “Look at the language of the original bill,” Lewis Ranieri told the FCIC.
“It requires a rating. . . . It put them in the business forevermore. It became one of the
biggest, if not the biggest, business.” As Eric Kolchinsky, a former Moody’s managing director, would summarize the situation, “the rating agencies were given a blank
check.”
The agencies themselves were able to avoid regulation for decades. Beginning in
, the SEC had to approve a company’s application to become an NRSRO—but if
approved, a company faced no further regulation. More than years later, the SEC
got limited authority to oversee NRSROs in the Credit Rating Agency Reform Act of
. That law, taking effect in June , focused on mandatory disclosure of the
rating agencies’ methodologies; however, the law barred the SEC from regulating “the
substance of the credit ratings or the procedures and methodologies.”
Many investors, such as some pension funds and university endowments, relied
on credit ratings because they had neither access to the same data as the rating agencies nor the capacity or analytical ability to assess the securities they were purchasing.
As Moody’s former managing director Jerome Fons has acknowledged, “Subprime
[residential mortgage–backed securities] and their offshoots offer little transparency
around composition and characteristics of the loan collateral. . . . Loan-by-loan data,
the highest level of detail, is generally not available to investors.” Others, even large
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
financial institutions, relied on the ratings. Still, some investors who did their homework were skeptical of these products despite their ratings. Arnold Cattani, chairman
of Mission Bank in Bakersfield, California, described deciding to sell the bank’s holdings of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs:
At one meeting, when things started getting difficult, maybe in , I
asked the CFO what the mechanical steps were in . . . mortgage-backed
securities, if a borrower in Des Moines, Iowa, defaulted. I know what it
is if a borrower in Bakersfield defaults, and somebody has that mortgage. But as a package security, what happens? And he couldn’t answer
the question. And I told him to sell them, sell all of them, then, because
we didn’t understand it, and I don’t know that we had the capability to
understand the financial complexities; didn’t want any part of it.
Notably, rating agencies were not liable for misstatements in securities registrations because courts ruled that their ratings were opinions, protected by the First
Amendment. Moody’s standard disclaimer reads “The ratings . . . are, and must be
construed solely as, statements of opinion and not statements of fact or recommendations to purchase, sell, or hold any securities.” Gary Witt, a former team managing
director at Moody’s, told the FCIC, “People expect too much from ratings . . . investment decisions should always be based on much more than just a rating.”
“Everything but the elephant sitting on the table”
The ratings were intended to provide a means of comparing risks across asset classes
and time. In other words, the risk of a triple-A rated mortgage security was supposed
to be similar to the risk of a triple-A rated corporate bond.
Since the mid-s, Moody’s has rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities
using three models. The first, developed in , rated residential mortgage–backed
securities. In , Moody’s created a new model, M Prime, to rate prime, jumbo,
and Alt-A deals. Only in the fall of , when the housing market had already
peaked, did it develop its model for rating subprime deals, called M Subprime.
The models incorporated firm- and security-specific factors, market factors, regulatory and legal factors, and macroeconomic trends. The M Prime model let
Moody’s automate more of the process. Although Moody’s did not sample or review
individual loans, the company used loan-level information from the issuer. Relying
on loan-to-value ratios, borrower credit scores, originator quality, and loan terms
and other information, the model simulated the performance of each loan in ,
scenarios, including variations in interest rates and state-level unemployment as well
as home price changes. On average, across the scenarios, home prices trended upward at approximately per year. The model put little weight on the possibility
prices would fall sharply nationwide. Jay Siegel, a former Moody’s team managing director involved in developing the model, told the FCIC, “There may have been [statelevel] components of this real estate drop that the statistics would have covered, but
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
the national drop, staying down over this short but multiple-year period, is more
stressful than the statistics call for.” Even as housing prices rose to unprecedented levels, Moody’s never adjusted the scenarios to put greater weight on the possibility of a
decline. According to Siegel, in , “Moody’s position was that there was not a . . .
national housing bubble.”
When the initial quantitative analysis was complete, the lead analyst on the deal
convened a rating committee of other analysts and managers to assess it and determine the overall ratings for the securities. Siegel told the FCIC that qualitative
analysis was also integral: “One common misperception is that Moody’s credit ratings are derived solely from the application of a mathematical process or model. This
is not the case. . . . The credit rating process involves much more—most importantly,
the exercise of independent judgment by members of the rating committee. Ultimately, ratings are subjective opinions that reflect the majority view of the committee’s members.” As Roger Stein, a Moody’s managing director, noted, “Overall, the
model has to contemplate events for which there is no data.”
After rating subprime deals with the model for years, in Moody’s introduced a parallel model for rating subprime mortgage–backed securities. Like M
Prime, the subprime model ran the mortgages through , scenarios. Moody’s
officials told the FCIC they recognized that stress scenarios were not sufficiently severe, so they applied additional weight to the most stressful scenario, which reduced
the portion of each deal rated triple-A. Stein, who helped develop the subprime
model, said the output was manually “calibrated” to be more conservative to ensure
predicted losses were consistent with analysts’ “expert views.” Stein also noted
Moody’s concern about a suitably negative stress scenario; for example, as one step,
analysts took the “single worst case” from the M Subprime model simulations and
multiplied it by a factor in order to add deterioration.
Moody’s did not, however, sufficiently account for the deteriorating quality of the
loans being securitized. Fons described this problem to the FCIC: “I sat on this highlevel Structured Credit committee, which you’d think would be dealing with such issues [of declining mortgage-underwriting standards], and never once was it raised to
this group or put on our agenda that the decline in quality that was going into pools,
the impact possibly on ratings, other things. . . . We talked about everything but, you
know, the elephant sitting on the table.”
To rate CMLTI -NC, our sample deal, Moody’s first used its model to simulate losses in the mortgage pool. Those estimates, in turn, determined how big the junior tranches of the deal would have to be in order to protect the senior tranches from
losses. In analyzing the deal, the lead analyst noted it was similar to another Citigroup
deal of New Century loans that Moody’s had rated earlier and recommended the same
amount. Then the deal was tweaked to account for certain riskier types of loans, including interest-only mortgages. For its efforts, Moody’s was paid an estimated
,. (S&P also rated this deal and received ,.)
As we will describe later, three tranches of this deal would be downgraded less
than a year after issuance—part of Moody’s mass downgrade on July , , when
housing prices had declined by only . In October , the M–M tranches
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
were downgraded and by , all the tranches had been downgraded. Of all mortgage-backed securities it had rated triple-A in , Moody’s downgraded to
junk. The consequences would reverberate throughout the financial system.
FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC:
“LESS COMPETITIVE IN THE MARKETPLACE”
In , Fannie and Freddie faced problems on multiple fronts. They had violated accounting rules and now faced corrections and fines. They were losing market share
to Wall Street, which was beginning to dominate the securitization market. Struggling to remain dominant, they loosened their underwriting standards, purchasing
and guaranteeing riskier loans, and increasing their securities purchases. Yet their
regulator, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), focused
more on accounting and other operational issues than on Fannie’s and Freddie’s increasing investments in risky mortgages and securities.
In , Freddie changed accounting firms. The company had been using Arthur
Andersen for many years, but when Andersen got into trouble in the Enron debacle
(which put both Enron and its accountant out of business), Freddie switched to
PricewaterhouseCoopers. The new accountant found the company had understated
its earnings by billion from through the third quarter of , in an effort to
smooth reported earnings and promote itself as “Steady Freddie,” a company of
strong and steady growth. Bonuses were tied to the reported earnings, and OFHEO
found that this arrangement contributed to the accounting manipulations. Freddie’s
board ousted most top managers, including Chairman and CEO Leland Brendsel,
President and COO David Glenn, and CFO Vaughn Clarke. In December ,
Freddie agreed with OFHEO to pay a million penalty and correct governance,
internal controls, accounting, and risk management. In January , OFHEO directed Freddie to maintain more than its minimum capital requirement until it
reduced operational risk and could produce timely, certified financial statements.
Freddie Mac would settle shareholder lawsuits for million and pay million
in penalties to the SEC.
Fannie was next. In September , OFHEO discovered violations of accounting
rules that called into question previous filings. In , OFHEO reported that Fannie
had overstated earnings from through by billion and that it, too, had
manipulated accounting in ways influenced by compensation plans. OFHEO made
Fannie improve accounting controls, maintain the same capital surplus imposed
on Freddie, and improve governance and internal controls. Fannie’s board ousted
CEO Franklin Raines and others, and the SEC required Fannie to restate its results
for through mid-. Fannie settled SEC and OFHEO enforcement actions for
million in penalties. Donald Bisenius, an executive vice president at Freddie
Mac, told the FCIC that the accounting issues distracted management from the
mortgage business, taking “a tremendous amount of management’s time and attention and probably led to us being less aggressive or less competitive in the marketplace [than] we otherwise might have been.”
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
As the scandals unfolded, subprime private label mortgage–backed securities
(PLS) issued by Wall Street increased from billion in to billion in
(shown in figure .); the value of Alt-A mortgage–backed securities increased from
billion to billion. Starting in for Freddie and for Fannie, the
GSEs—particularly Freddie—became buyers in this market. While private investors
always bought the most, the GSEs purchased . of the private-issued subprime
mortgage–backed securities in . The share peaked at in and then fell
back to in . The share for Alt-A mortgage–backed securities was always
lower. The GSEs almost always bought the safest, triple-A-rated tranches. From
through , the GSEs’ purchases declined, both in dollar amount and as a
percentage.
These investments were profitable at first, but as delinquencies increased in
and , both GSEs began to take significant losses on their private-label mortgage–
backed securities—disproportionately from their purchases of Alt-A securities. By
the third quarter of , total impairments on securities totaled billion at the
two companies—enough to wipe out nearly of their pre-crisis capital.
OFHEO knew about the GSEs’ purchases of subprime and Alt-A mortgage–
backed securities. In its examination, the regulator noted Freddie’s purchases of
these securities. It also noted that Freddie was purchasing whole mortgages with
“higher risk attributes which exceeded the Enterprise’s modeling and costing capabilities,” including “No Income/No Asset loans” that introduced “considerable risk.”
OFHEO reported that mortgage insurers were already seeing abuses with these
loans. But the regulator concluded that the purchases of mortgage-backed securities and riskier mortgages were not a “significant supervisory concern,” and the examination focused more on Freddie’s efforts to address accounting and internal
deficiencies. OFHEO included nothing in Fannie’s report about its purchases of
subprime and Alt-A mortgage–backed securities, and its credit risk management was
deemed satisfactory.
The reasons for the GSEs’ purchases of subprime and Alt-A mortgage–backed securities have been debated. Some observers, including Alan Greenspan, have linked
the GSEs’ purchases of private mortgage–backed securities to their push to fulfill their
higher goals for affordable housing. The former Fed chairman wrote in a working paper submitted as part of his testimony to the FCIC that when the GSEs were pressed to
“expand ‘affordable housing commitments,’ they chose to meet them by investing
heavily in subprime securities.” Using data provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, the FCIC examined how single-family, multifamily, and securities purchases
contributed to meeting the affordable housing goals. In and , Fannie Mae’s
single- and multifamily purchases alone met each of the goals; in other words, the enterprise would have met its obligations without buying subprime or Alt-A mortgage–
backed securities. In fact, none of Fannie Mae’s purchases of subprime or Alt-A
securities were ever submitted to HUD to be counted toward the goals.
Before , or less of the GSEs’ loan purchases had to satisfy the affordable
housing goals. In the goals were increased above ; but even then, singleand multifamily purchases alone met the overall goals. Securities purchases did, in
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Buyers of Non-GSE Mortgage-Backed Securities
The GSEs purchased subprime and Alt-A nonagency securities during the 2000s.
These purchases peaked in 2004.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
Subprime Securities Purchases
Alt-A Securities Purchases
$500
Freddie Mac
Fannie Mae
Other purchasers
400
300
200
100
0
’01
’02
’03
’04
’05
’06
’07
’08
’01
’02
’03
’04
’05
’06
’07
’08
SOURCES: Inside Mortgage Finance, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac
Figure .
several cases, help Fannie meet its subgoals—specific targets requiring the GSEs to
purchase or guarantee loans to purchase homes. In , Fannie missed one of these
subgoals and would have missed a second without the securities purchases; in ,
the securities purchases helped Fannie meet those two subgoals.
The pattern is the same at Freddie Mac, a larger purchaser of non-agency mortgage–backed securities. Estimates by the FCIC show that from through ,
Freddie would have met the affordable housing goals without any purchases of Alt-A
or subprime securities, but used the securities to help meet subgoals.
Robert Levin, the former chief business officer of Fannie Mae, told the FCIC that
buying private-label mortgage–backed securities “was a moneymaking activity—it
was all positive economics. . . . [T]here was no trade-off [between making money and
hitting goals], it was a very broad-brushed effort” that could be characterized as
“win-win-win: money, goals, and share.” Mark Winer, the head of Fannie’s Business, Analysis, and Decisions Group, stated that the purchase of triple-A tranches of
mortgage-backed securities backed by subprime loans was viewed as an attractive
opportunity with good returns. He said that the mortgage-backed securities satisfied
T H E MORTG AG E M AC H I N E
housing goals, and that the goals became a factor in the decision to increase purchases of private label securities.
Overall, while the mortgages behind the subprime mortgage–backed securities
were often issued to borrowers that could help Fannie and Freddie fulfill their goals,
the mortgages behind the Alt-A securities were not. Alt-A mortgages were not generally extended to lower-income borrowers, and the regulations prohibited mortgages
to borrowers with unstated income levels—a hallmark of Alt-A loans—from counting toward affordability goals. Levin told the FCIC that they believed that the purchase of Alt-A securities “did not have a net positive effect on Fannie Mae’s housing
goals.” Instead, they had to be offset with more mortgages for low- and moderateincome borrowers to meet the goals.
Fannie and Freddie continued to purchase subprime and Alt-A mortgage–backed
securities from to and also bought and securitized greater numbers of
riskier mortgages. The results would be disastrous for the companies, their shareholders, and American taxpayers.
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 7
The Commission concludes that the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve,
along with capital flows from abroad, created conditions in which a housing bubble could develop. However, these conditions need not have led to a crisis. The
Federal Reserve and other regulators did not take actions necessary to constrain
the credit bubble. In addition, the Federal Reserve’s policies and pronouncements
encouraged rather than inhibited the growth of mortgage debt and the housing
bubble.
Lending standards collapsed, and there was a significant failure of accountability and responsibility throughout each level of the lending system. This included borrowers, mortgage brokers, appraisers, originators, securitizers, credit
rating agencies, and investors, and ranged from corporate boardrooms to individuals. Loans were often premised on ever-rising home prices and were made regardless of ability to pay.
The nonprime mortgage securitization process created a pipeline through
which risky mortgages were conveyed and sold throughout the financial system.
This pipeline was essential to the origination of the burgeoning numbers of highrisk mortgages. The originate-to-distribute model undermined responsibility and
accountability for the long-term viability of mortgages and mortgage-related securities and contributed to the poor quality of mortgage loans.
(continues)
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
(continued)
Federal and state rules required or encouraged financial firms and some institutional investors to make investments based on the ratings of credit rating agencies, leading to undue reliance on those ratings. However, the rating agencies
were not adequately regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission or any
other regulator to ensure the quality and accuracy of their ratings. Moody’s, the
Commission’s case study in this area, relied on flawed and outdated models to issue erroneous ratings on mortgage-related securities, failed to perform meaningful due diligence on the assets underlying the securities, and continued to rely on
those models even after it became obvious that the models were wrong.
Not only did the federal banking supervisors fail to rein in risky mortgagelending practices, but the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision preempted the applicability of state laws and regulatory
efforts to national banks and thrifts, thus preventing adequate protection for borrowers and weakening constraints on this segment of the mortgage market.
8
THE CDO MACHINE
CONTENTS
CDOs: “We created the investor” .......................................................................
Bear Stearns’s hedge funds: “It functioned fine up until one day
it just didn’t function”.....................................................................................
Citigroup’s liquidity puts: “A potential conflict of interest” ..................................
AIG: “Golden goose for the entire Street” ...........................................................
Goldman Sachs: “Multiplied the effects of the collapse in subprime”..................
Moody’s: “Achieved through some alchemy” .......................................................
SEC: “It’s going to be an awfully big mess”..........................................................
In the first decade of the st century, a previously obscure financial product called the
collateralized debt obligation, or CDO, transformed the mortgage market by creating a
new source of demand for the lower-rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities.*
Despite their relatively high returns, tranches rated other than triple-A could be
hard to sell. If borrowers were delinquent or defaulted, investors in these tranches
were out of luck because of where they sat in the payments waterfall.
Wall Street came up with a solution: in the words of one banker, they “created the
investor.” That is, they built new securities that would buy the tranches that had become harder to sell. Bankers would take those low investment-grade tranches, largely
rated BBB or A, from many mortgage-backed securities and repackage them into the
new securities—CDOs. Approximately of these CDO tranches would be rated
triple-A despite the fact that they generally comprised the lower-rated tranches of
mortgage-backed securities. CDO securities would be sold with their own waterfalls,
with the risk-averse investors, again, paid first and the risk-seeking investors paid
last. As they did in the case of mortgage-backed securities, the rating agencies gave
their highest, triple-A ratings to the securities at the top (see figure .).
Still, it was not obvious that a pool of mortgage-backed securities rated BBB could
be transformed into a new security that is mostly rated triple-A. But math made it so.
*Throughout this book, unless otherwise noted, we use the term “CDOs” to refer to cash CDOs backed
by asset-backed securities (such as mortgage-backed securities), also known as ABS CDOs.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Collateralized Debt Obligations
Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) are structured
financial instruments that purchase and pool
financial assets such as the riskier tranches of various
mortgage-backed securities.
1. Purchase
3. CDO tranches
Similar to
mortgage-backed
securities, the CDO
issues securities in
tranches that vary
based on their place in
the cash flow waterfall.
Low risk, low yield
The CDO manager and securities
firm select and purchase assets,
such as some of the lower-rated
tranches of mortgage-backed
securities.
First claim to cash flow from
principal & interest payments…
New pool
of RMBS
and other
securities
AAA
next
claim…
AAA
2. Pool
AA
A
BBB
BB
The CDO manager
and securities firm
pool various assets
in an attempt to
get diversification
benefits.
next…
etc.
AA
A
BBB
BB
EQUITY
High risk, high yield
Figure .
The securities firms argued—and the rating agencies agreed—that if they pooled
many BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities, they would create additional diversification benefits. The rating agencies believed that those diversification benefits were
significant—that if one security went bad, the second had only a very small chance of
going bad at the same time. And as long as losses were limited, only those investors at
the bottom would lose money. They would absorb the blow, and the other investors
would continue to get paid.
Relying on that logic, the CDO machine gobbled up the BBB and other lower-rated
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
tranches of mortgage-backed securities, growing from a bit player to a multi-hundredbillion-dollar industry. Between and , as house prices rose nationally
and trillion in mortgage-backed securities were created, Wall Street issued nearly
billion in CDOs that included mortgage-backed securities as collateral. With
ready buyers for their own product, mortgage securitizers continued to demand loans
for their pools, and hundreds of billions of dollars flooded the mortgage world. In effect, the CDO became the engine that powered the mortgage supply chain. “There is a
machine going,” Scott Eichel, a senior managing director at Bear Stearns, told a financial journalist in May . “There is a lot of brain power to keep this going.”
Everyone involved in keeping this machine humming—the CDO managers and
underwriters who packaged and sold the securities, the rating agencies that gave
most of them sterling ratings, and the guarantors who wrote protection against their
defaulting—collected fees based on the dollar volume of securities sold. For the
bankers who had put these deals together, as for the executives of their companies,
volume equaled fees equaled bonuses. And those fees were in the billions of dollars
across the market.
But when the housing market went south, the models on which CDOs were based
proved tragically wrong. The mortgage-backed securities turned out to be highly correlated—meaning they performed similarly. Across the country, in regions where
subprime and Alt-A mortgages were heavily concentrated, borrowers would default
in large numbers. This was not how it was supposed to work. Losses in one region
were supposed to be offset by successful loans in another region. In the end, CDOs
turned out to be some of the most ill-fated assets in the financial crisis. The greatest
losses would be experienced by big CDO arrangers such as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch,
and UBS, and by financial guarantors such as AIG, Ambac, and MBIA. These players
had believed their own models and retained exposure to what were understood to be
the least risky tranches of the CDOs: those rated triple-A or even “super-senior,”
which were assumed to be safer than triple-A-rated tranches.
“The whole concept of ABS CDOs had been an abomination,” Patrick Parkinson,
currently the head of banking supervision and regulation at the Federal Reserve
Board, told the FCIC.
CDO S : “WE CREATED THE INVESTOR”
Michael Milken’s Drexel Burnham Lambert assembled the first rated collateralized
debt obligation in out of different companies’ junk bonds. The strategy made
sense—pooling many bonds reduced investors’ exposure to the failure of any one
bond, and putting the securities into tranches enabled investors to pick their preferred level of risk and return.
For the managers who created CDOs, the key to profitability of the CDO was the fee
and the spread—the difference between the interest that the CDO received on the
bonds or loans that it held and the interest that the CDO paid to investors. Throughout
the s, CDO managers generally purchased corporate and emerging market bonds
and bank loans. When the liquidity crisis of drove up returns on asset-backed
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
securities, Prudential Securities saw an opportunity and launched a series of CDOs that
combined different kinds of asset-backed securities into one CDO. These “multisector”
or “ABS” securities were backed by mortgages, mobile home loans, aircraft leases, mutual fund fees, and other asset classes with predictable income streams. The diversity
was supposed to provide yet another layer of safety for investors.
Multisector CDOs went through a tough patch when some of the asset-backed securities in which they invested started to perform poorly in —particularly those
backed by mobile home loans (after borrowers defaulted in large numbers), aircraft
leases (after /), and mutual fund fees (after the dot-com bust). The accepted wisdom among many investment banks, investors, and rating agencies was that the wide
range of assets had actually contributed to the problem; according to this view, the
asset managers who selected the portfolios could not be experts in sectors as diverse
as aircraft leases and mutual funds.
So the CDO industry turned to nonprime mortgage–backed securities, which
CDO managers believed they understood, which seemed to have a record of good
performance, and which paid relatively high returns for what was considered a safe
investment. “Everyone looked at the sector and said, the CDO construct works, but
we just need to find more stable collateral,” said Wing Chau, who ran two firms,
Maxim Group and Harding Advisory, that managed CDOs mostly underwritten by
Merrill Lynch. “And the industry looked at residential mortgage–backed securities,
Alt-A, subprime, and non-agency mortgages, and saw the relative stability.”
CDOs quickly became ubiquitous in the mortgage business. Investors liked the
combination of apparent safety and strong returns, and investment bankers liked
having a new source of demand for the lower tranches of mortgage-backed securities
and other asset-backed securities that they created. “We told you these [BBB-rated
securities] were a great deal, and priced at great spreads, but nobody stepped up,” the
Credit Suisse banker Joe Donovan told a Phoenix conference of securitization
bankers in February . “So we created the investor.”
By , creators of CDOs were the dominant buyers of the BBB-rated tranches
of mortgage-backed securities, and their bids significantly influenced prices in the
market for these securities. By , they were buying “virtually all” of the BBB
tranches. Just as mortgage-backed securities provided the cash to originate mortgages, now CDOs would provide the cash to fund mortgage-backed securities. Also
by , mortgage-backed securities accounted for more than half of the collateral in
CDOs, up from in . Sales of these CDOs more than doubled every year,
jumping from billion in to billion in . Filling this pipeline would
require hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime and Alt-A mortgages.
“It was a lot of effort”
Five key types of players were involved in the construction of CDOs: securities firms,
CDO managers, rating agencies, investors, and financial guarantors. Each took varying degrees of risk and, for a time, profited handsomely.
Securities firms underwrote the CDOs: that is, they approved the selection of col-
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lateral, structured the notes into tranches, and were responsible for selling them to
investors. Three firms—Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and the securities arm of
Citigroup—accounted for more than of CDOs structured from to .
Deutsche Bank and UBS were also major participants. “We had sales representatives in all those [global] locations, and their jobs were to sell structured products,”
Nestor Dominguez, the co-head of Citigroup’s CDO desk, told the FCIC. “We spent a
lot of effort to have people in place to educate, to pitch structured products. So, it was
a lot of effort, about people. And I presume our competitors did the same.”
The underwriters’ focus was on generating fees and structuring deals that they
could sell. Underwriting did entail risks, however. The securities firm had to hold the
assets, such as the BBB-rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities, during the
ramp-up period—six to nine months when the firm was accumulating the mortgagebacked securities for the CDOs. Typically, during that period, the securities firm took
the risk that the assets might lose value. “Our business was to make new issue fees,
[and to] make sure that if the market did have a downturn, we were somehow
hedged,” Michael Lamont, the former co-head for CDOs at Deutsche Bank, told the
FCIC. Chris Ricciardi, formerly head of the CDO desk at Merrill Lynch, likewise
told the FCIC that he did not track the performance of CDOs after underwriting
them. Moreover, Lamont said it was not his job to decide whether the rating agencies’ models had the correct underlying assumptions. That “was not what we brought
to the table,” he said. In many cases, though, underwriters helped CDO managers
select collateral, leading to potential conflicts (more on that later).
The role of the CDO manager was to select the collateral, such as mortgagebacked securities, and in some cases manage the portfolio on an ongoing basis. Managers ranged from independent investment firms such as Chau’s to units of large asset
management companies such as PIMCO and Blackrock.
CDO managers received periodic fees based on the dollar amount of assets in the
CDO and in some cases on performance. On a percentage basis, these may have
looked small—sometimes measured in tenths of a percentage point—but the
amounts were far from trivial. For CDOs that focused on the relatively senior
tranches of mortgage-backed securities, annual manager fees tended to be in the
range of , to a million dollars per year for a billion dollar deal. For CDOs
that focused on the more junior tranches, which were often smaller, fees would be
, to . million per year for a million deal. As managers did more
deals, they generated more fees without much additional cost. “You’d hear statements
like, ‘Everybody and his uncle now wants to be a CDO manager,’” Mark Adelson,
then a structured finance analyst at Nomura Securities and currently chief credit officer at S&P, told the FCIC. “That was an observation voiced repeatedly at several of
the industry conferences around those times—the enormous proliferation of CDO
managers— . . . because it was very lucrative.” CDO managers industry-wide earned
at least . billion in management fees between and .
The role of the rating agencies was to provide basic guidelines on the collateral
and the structure of the CDOs—that is, the sizes and returns of the various
tranches—in close consultation with the underwriters. For many investors, the
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
triple-A rating made those products appropriate investments. Rating agency fees
were typically between , and , for CDOs. For most deals, at least
two rating agencies would provide ratings and receive those fees—although the views
tended to be in sync.
The CDO investors, like investors in mortgage-backed securities, focused on different tranches based on their preference for risk and return. CDO underwriters such
as Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and UBS often retained the super-senior triple-A
tranches for reasons we will see later. They also sold them to commercial paper programs that invested in CDOs and other highly rated assets. Hedge funds often
bought the equity tranches.
Eventually, other CDOs became the most important class of investor for the mezzanine tranches of CDOs. By , CDO underwriters were selling most of the mezzanine tranches—including those rated A—and, especially, those rated BBB, the
lowest and riskiest investment-grade rating—to other CDO managers, to be packaged into other CDOs. It was common for CDOs to be structured with or
of their cash invested in other CDOs; CDOs with as much as to of their
cash invested in other CDOs were typically known as “CDOs squared.”
Finally, the issuers of over-the-counter derivatives called credit default swaps,
most notably AIG, played a central role by issuing swaps to investors in CDO
tranches, promising to reimburse them for any losses on the tranches in exchange for
a stream of premium-like payments. This credit default swap protection made the
CDOs much more attractive to potential investors because they appeared to be virtually risk free, but it created huge exposures for the credit default swap issuers if significant losses did occur.
Profit from the creation of CDOs, as is customary on Wall Street, was reflected in
employee bonuses. And, as demand for all types of financial products soared during
the liquidity boom at the beginning of the st century, pretax profit for the five
largest investment banks doubled between and , from billion to
billion; total compensation at these investment banks for their employees across the
world rose from billion to billion. A part of the growth could be credited to
mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, and various derivatives, and thus employees in
those areas could be expected to be compensated accordingly. “Credit derivatives
traders as well as mortgage and asset-backed securities salespeople should especially
enjoy bonus season,” a firm that compiles compensation figures for investment banks
reported in .
To see in more detail how the CDO pipeline worked, we revisit our illustrative
Citigroup mortgage-backed security, CMLTI -NC. Earlier, we described how
most of the below-triple-A bonds issued in this deal went into CDOs. One such CDO
was Kleros Real Estate Funding III, which was underwritten by UBS, a Swiss bank.
The CDO manager was Strategos Capital Management, a subsidiary of Cohen &
Company; that investment company was headed by Chris Ricciardi, who had earlier
built Merrill’s CDO business. Kleros III, launched in , purchased and held .
million in securities from the A-rated M tranche of Citigroup’s security, along with
junior tranches of other mortgage-backed securities. In total, it owned mil-
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lion of mortgage-related securities, of which were rated BBB or lower, A,
and the rest higher than A. To fund those purchases, Kleros III issued billion of
bonds to investors. As was typical for this type of CDO at the time, roughly of
the Kleros III bonds were triple-A-rated. At least half of the below-triple-A tranches
issued by Kleros III went into other CDOs.
“Mother’s milk to the . . . market”
The growth of CDOs had important impacts on the mortgage market itself. CDO managers who were eager to expand the assets that they were managing—on which their income was based—were willing to pay high prices to accumulate BBB-rated tranches of
mortgage-backed securities. This “CDO bid” pushed up market prices on those
tranches, pricing out of the market traditional investors in mortgage-backed securities.
Informed institutional investors such as insurance companies had purchased the
private-label mortgage–backed securities issued in the s. These securities were
typically protected from losses by bond insurers, who had analyzed the deals as well.
Beginning in the late s, mortgage-backed securities that were structured with six
or more tranches and other features to protect the triple-A investors became more
common, replacing the earlier structures that had relied on bond insurance to protect investors. By , the earlier forms of mortgage-backed securities had essentially vanished, leaving the market increasingly to the multitranche structures and
their CDO investors.
This was a critical development, given that the focus of CDO managers differed
from that of traditional investors. “The CDO manager and the CDO investor are not
the same kind of folks [as the monoline bond insurers], who just backed away,” Adelson said. “They’re mostly not mortgage professionals, not real estate professionals.
They are derivatives folks.”
Indeed, Chau, the CDO manager, portrayed his job as creating structures that rating agencies would approve and investors would buy, and making sure the mortgagebacked securities that he bought “met industry standards.” He said that he relied on
the rating agencies. “Unfortunately, what lulled a lot of investors, and I’m in that
camp as well, what lulled us into that sense of comfort was that the rating stability
was so solid and that it was so consistent. I mean, the rating agencies did a very good
job of making everything consistent.” CDO production was effectively on autopilot.
“Mortgage traders speak lovingly of ‘the CDO bid.’ It is mother’s milk to the . . .
market,” James Grant, a market commentator, wrote in . “Without it, fewer asset-backed structures could be built, and those that were would have to meet a much
more conservative standard of design. The resulting pangs of credit withdrawal
would certainly be felt in the residential real-estate market.”
UBS’s Global CDO Group agreed, noting that CDOs “have now become bullies in
their respective collateral markets.” By promoting an increase in both the volume and
the price of mortgage-backed securities, bids from CDOs had “an impact on the
overall U.S. economy that goes well beyond the CDO market.” Without the demand
for mortgage-backed securities from CDOs, lenders would have been able to sell
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
fewer mortgages, and thus they would have had less reason to push so hard to make
the loans in the first place.
“Leverage is inherent in CDOs”
The mortgage pipeline also introduced leverage at every step. Most financial institutions thrive on leverage—that is, on investing borrowed money. Leverage increases
profits in good times, but also increases losses in bad times. The mortgage itself creates leverage—particularly when the loan is of the low down payment, high loan-tovalue ratio variety. Mortgage-backed securities and CDOs created further leverage
because they were financed with debt. And the CDOs were often purchased as collateral by those creating other CDOs with yet another round of debt. Synthetic CDOs
consisting of credit default swaps, described below, amplified the leverage. The CDO,
backed by securities that were themselves backed by mortgages, created leverage on
leverage, as Dan Sparks, mortgage department head at Goldman Sachs, explained to
the FCIC. “People were looking for other forms of leverage. . . . You could either
take leverage individually, as an institution, or you could take leverage within the
structure,” Citigroup’s Dominguez told the FCIC.
Even the investor that bought the CDOs could use leverage. Structured investment vehicles—a type of commercial paper program that invested mostly in triple-Arated securities—were leveraged an average of just under -to-: in other words,
these SIVs would hold in assets for every dollar of capital. The assets would be
financed with debt. Hedge funds, which were common purchasers, were also often
highly leveraged in the repo market, as we will see. But it would become clear during
the crisis that some of the highest leverage was created by companies such as Merrill,
Citigroup, and AIG when they retained or purchased the triple-A and super-senior
tranches of CDOs with little or no capital backing.
Thus, in , when the homeownership rate was peaking, and when new mortgages were increasingly being driven by serial refinancings, by investors and speculators, and by second home purchases, the value of trillions of dollars of securities
rested on just two things: the ability of millions of homeowners to make the payments on their subprime and Alt-A mortgages and the stability of the market value of
homes whose mortgages were the basis of the securities. Those dangers were understood all along by some market participants. “Leverage is inherent in [asset-backed
securities] CDOs,” Mark Klipsch, a banker with Orix Capital Markets, an asset management firm, told a Boca Raton conference of securitization bankers in October
. While it was good for short-term profits, losses could be large later on. Klipsch
said, “We’ll see some problems down the road.”
BEAR STEARNS’S HEDGE FUNDS: “IT FUNCTIONED FINE
UP UNTIL ONE DAY IT JUST DIDN’ T FUNCTION”
Bear Stearns, the smallest of the five large investment banks, started its asset management business in when it established Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM).
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
Asset management brought in steady fee income, allowed banks to offer new products to customers and required little capital.
BSAM played a prominent role in the CDO business as both a CDO manager and
a hedge fund that invested in mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. At BSAM, by
the end of Ralph Cioffi was managing CDOs with . billion in assets and
hedge funds with billion in assets. Although Bear Stearns owned BSAM,
Bear’s management exercised little supervision over its business. The eventual failure of Cioffi’s two large mortgage-focused hedge funds would be an important event
in , early in the financial crisis.
In , Cioffi launched his first fund at BSAM, the High-Grade Structured
Credit Strategies Fund, and in he added the High-Grade Structured Credit
Strategies Enhanced Leverage Fund. The funds purchased mostly mortgage-backed
securities or CDOs, and used leverage to enhance their returns. The target was for
of assets to be rated either AAA or AA. As Cioffi told the FCIC, “The thesis behind the fund was that the structured credit markets offered yield over and above
what their ratings suggested they should offer.” Cioffi targeted a leverage ratio of
to for the first High-Grade fund. For Enhanced Leverage, Cioffi upped the ante,
touting the Enhanced Leverage fund as “a levered version of the [High Grade] fund”
that targeted leverage of to . At the end of , the High-Grade fund contained
. billion in assets (using . billion of his hedge fund investors’ money and .
billion in borrowed money). The Enhanced Leverage Fund had . billion (using
. billion from investors and . billion in borrowed money).
BSAM financed these asset purchases by borrowing in the repo markets, which
was typical for hedge funds. A survey conducted by the FCIC identified at least
billion of repo borrowing as of June by the approximately hedge funds that
responded. The respondents invested at least billion in mortgage-backed securities or CDOs as of June . The ability to borrow using the AAA and AA
tranches of CDOs as repo collateral facilitated demand for those securities.
But repo borrowing carried risks: it created significant leverage and it had to be
renewed frequently. For example, an investor buying a stock on margin—meaning
with borrowed money—might have to put up cents on the dollar, with the other
cents loaned by his or her stockbroker, for a leverage ratio of to . A homeowner buying a house might make a down payment and take out a mortgage
for the rest, a leverage ratio of to . By contrast, repo lending allowed an investor
to buy a security for much less out of pocket—in the case of a Treasury security, an
investor may have to put in only ., borrowing . from a securities firm
( to ). In the case of a mortgage-backed security, an investor might pay
( to ).
With this amount of leverage, a change in the value of that mortgage-backed
security can double the investor’s money—or lose all of the initial investment.
Another inherent fallacy in the structure was the assumption that the underlying
collateral could be sold easily. But when it came to selling them in times of distress,
private-label mortgage-backed securities would prove to be very different from U.S.
Treasuries.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The short-term nature of repo money also makes it inherently risky and unreliable: funding that is offered at certain terms today could be gone tomorrow. Cioffi’s
funds, for example, took the risk that its repo lenders would decide not to extend, or
“roll,” the repo lines on any given day. Yet more and more, repo lenders were loaning
money to funds like Cioffi’s, rolling the debt nightly, and not worrying very much
about the real quality of the collateral.
The firms loaning money to Cioffi’s hedge funds were often also selling them
mortgage-related securities, and the hedge funds pledged those same securities to secure the loans. If the market value of the collateral fell, the repo lenders could and
would demand more collateral from the hedge fund to back the repo loan. This dynamic would play a pivotal role in the fate of many hedge funds in —most spectacularly in the case of Cioffi’s funds. “The repo market, I mean it functioned fine up
until one day it just didn’t function,” Cioffi told the FCIC. Up to that point, his hedge
funds could buy billions of dollars of CDOs on borrowed money because of the market’s bullishness about mortgage assets, he said. “It became . . . a more and more acceptable asset class, [with] more traders, more repo lenders, more investors
obviously. [It had a] much broader footprint domestically as well as internationally.
So the market just really exploded.”
BSAM touted its CDO holdings to investors, telling them that CDOs were a market opportunity because they were complex and therefore undervalued in the general
marketplace. In , this was a promising market with seemingly manageable risks.
Cioffi and his team not only bought CDOs, they also created and managed other
CDOs. Cioffi would purchase mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, and other securities for his hedge funds. When he had reached his firm’s internal investment limits,
he would repackage those securities and sell CDO securities to other customers.
With the proceeds, Cioffi would pay off his repo lenders, and at the same time he
would acquire the equity tranche of a new CDO.
Because Cioffi managed these newly created CDOs that selected collateral from
his own hedge funds, he was positioned on both sides of the transaction. The structure created a conflict of interest between Cioffi’s obligation to his hedge fund investors and his obligation to his CDO investors; this was not unique on Wall Street,
and BSAM disclosed the structure, and the conflict of interest, to potential investors. For example, a critical question was at what price the CDO should purchase
assets from the hedge fund: if the CDO paid above-market prices for a security, that
would advantage the hedge fund investors and disadvantage the CDO investors.
BSAM’s flagship CDOs—dubbed Klio I, II, and III—were created in rapid succession over and , with Citigroup as their underwriter. All three deals were
mainly composed of mortgage- and asset-backed securities that BSAM already
owned, and BSAM retained the equity position in all three; all three were primarily
funded with asset-backed commercial paper. Typical for the industry at the time,
the expected return for the CDO manager, who was managing assets and holding the
equity tranche, was between and annually, assuming no defaults on the underlying collateral. Thanks to the combination of mortgage-backed securities,
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CDOs, and leverage, Cioffi’s funds earned healthy returns for a time: the High-Grade
fund had returns of in , in , and in after fees. Cioffi and
Tannin made millions before the hedge funds collapsed in . Cioffi was rewarded
with total compensation worth more than million from to . In ,
the year the two hedge funds filed for bankruptcy, Cioffi made more than . million in total compensation. Matt Tannin, his lead manager, was awarded compensation of more than . million from to . Both managers invested some of
their own money in the funds, and used this as a selling point when pitching the
funds to others.
But when house prices fell and investors started to question the value of mortgage-backed securities in , the same short-term leverage that had inflated Cioffi’s
returns would amplify losses and quickly put his two hedge funds out of business.
CITIGROUP’S LIQUIDITY PUTS:
“A POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST”
By the middle of the decade, Citigroup was a market leader in selling CDOs, often
using its depositor-based commercial bank to provide liquidity support. For much of
this period, the company was in various types of trouble with its regulators, and
then-CEO Charles Prince told the FCIC that dealing with those troubles took up
more than half his time. After paying the million fine related to subprime mortgage lending, Citigroup again got into trouble, charged with helping Enron—before
that company filed for bankruptcy in —use structured finance transactions to
manipulate its financial statements. In July , Citigroup agreed to pay the SEC
million to settle these allegations and also agreed, under formal enforcement
actions by the Federal Reserve and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, to
overhaul its risk management practices.
By March , the Fed had seen enough: it banned Citigroup from making any
more major acquisitions until it improved its governance and legal compliance. According to Prince, he had already decided to turn “the company’s focus from an acquisition-driven strategy to more of a balanced strategy involving organic growth.”
Robert Rubin, a former treasury secretary and former Goldman Sachs co-CEO who
was at that time chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup’s board of directors, recommended that Citigroup increase its risk taking—assuming, he told the
FCIC, that the firm managed those risks properly.
Citigroup’s investment bank subsidiary was a natural area for growth after the Fed
and then Congress had done away with restrictions on activities that could be pursued by investment banks affiliated with commercial banks. One opportunity among
many was the CDO business, which was just then taking off amid the booming mortgage market.
In , Citi’s CDO desk was a tiny unit in the company’s investment banking
arm, “eight guys and a Bloomberg” terminal, in the words of Nestor Dominguez,
then co-head of the desk. Nevertheless, this tiny operation under the command of
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Thomas Maheras, co-CEO of the investment bank, had become a leader in the nascent market for CDOs, creating more than billion in and —close to
one-fifth of the market in those years.
The eight guys had picked up on a novel structure pioneered by Goldman Sachs
and WestLB, a German bank. Instead of issuing the triple-A tranches of the CDOs as
long-term debt, Citigroup structured them as short-term asset-backed commercial
paper. Of course, using commercial paper introduced liquidity risk (not present
when the tranches were sold as long-term debt), because the CDO would have to
reissue the paper to investors regularly—usually within days or weeks—for the life of
the CDO. But asset-backed commercial paper was a cheap form of funding at the
time, and it had a large base of potential investors, particularly among money market
mutual funds. To mitigate the liquidity risk and to ensure that the rating agencies
would give it their top ratings, Citibank (Citigroup’s national bank subsidiary) provided assurances to investors, in the form of liquidity puts. In selling the liquidity
put, for an ongoing fee the bank would be on the hook to step in and buy the commercial paper if there were no buyers when it matured or if the cost of funding rose
by a predetermined amount.
The CDO team at Citigroup had jumped into the market in July with a .
billion CDO named Grenadier Funding that included a . billion tranche backed by
a liquidity put from Citibank. Over the next three years, Citi would write liquidity
puts on billion of commercial paper issued by CDOs, more than any other company. BSAM’s three Klio CDOs, which Citigroup had underwritten, accounted for just
over billion of this total, a large number that would not bode well for the bank.
But initially, this “strategic initiative,” as Dominguez called it, was very profitable for
Citigroup. The CDO desk earned roughly of the total deal value in structuring fees
for Citigroup’s investment banking arm, or about million for a billion deal. In
addition, Citigroup would generally charge buyers . to . in premiums annually for the liquidity puts. In other words, for a typical billion deal, Citibank would
receive to million annually on the liquidity puts alone—practically free money, it
seemed, because the trading desk believed that these puts would never be triggered.
In effect, the liquidity put was yet another highly leveraged bet: a contingent liability that would be triggered in some circumstances. Prior to the change in the
capital rules regarding liquidity puts (discussed earlier), Citigroup did not have to
hold any capital against such contingencies. Rather, it was permitted to use its own
risk models to determine the appropriate capital charge. But Citigroup’s financial
models estimated only a remote possibility that the puts would be triggered. Following the rule change, Citibank was required to hold . in capital against the
amount of commercial paper supported by the liquidity put, or . million for a
billion liquidity put. Given a to million annual fee for the put, the annual return
on that capital could still exceed . No doubt about it, Dominguez told the FCIC,
the triple-A or similar ratings, the multiple fees, and the low capital requirements
made the liquidity puts “a much better trade” for Citi’s balance sheet. The events of
would reveal the fallacy of those assumptions and catapult the entire billion
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in commercial paper straight onto the bank’s balance sheet, requiring it to come up
with billion in cash as well as more capital to satisfy bank regulators.
The liquidity puts were approved by Citigroup’s Capital Markets Approval Committee, which was charged with reviewing all new financial products. Deeming
them to be low risk, the company based its opinions on the credit risk of the underlying collateral, but failed to consider the liquidity risk posed by a general market
disruption. The OCC, the supervisor of Citigroup’s largest commercial bank subsidiary, was aware that the bank had issued the liquidity puts. However, the terms of
the OCC’s post-Enron enforcement action focused only on whether Citibank had a
process in place to review the product, and not on the risks of the puts to Citibank’s
balance sheet.
Besides Citigroup, only a few large financial institutions, such as AIG Financial
Products, BNP, WestLB of Germany, and Société Générale of France, wrote significant amounts of liquidity puts on commercial paper issued by CDOs. Bank of
America, the biggest commercial bank in the United States, wrote small deals
through but did billion worth in , just before the market crashed.
When asked why other market participants were not writing liquidity puts,
Dominguez stated that Société Générale and BNP were big players in that market.
“You needed to be a bank with a strong balance sheet, access to collateral, and existing relationships with collateral managers,” he said.
The CDO desk stopped writing liquidity puts in early , when it reached its
internal limits. Citibank’s treasury function had set a billion cap on liquidity
puts; it granted one final exception, bringing the total to billion. Risk management had also set a billion risk limit on top-rated asset-backed securities, which
included the liquidity puts. Later, in an October memo, Citigroup’s Financial
Control Group criticized the firm’s pricing of the puts, which failed to consider the
risk that investors would not buy the commercial paper protected by the liquidity
puts when it came due, thereby creating a billion cash demand on Citibank. An
undated and unattributed internal document (believed to have been drafted in )
also questioned one of the practices of Citigroup’s investment bank, which paid
traders on its CDO desk for generating the deals without regard to later losses:
“There is a potential conflict of interest in pricing the liquidity put cheep [sic] so that
more CDO equities can be sold and more structuring fee to be generated.” The result would be losses so severe that they would help bring the huge financial conglomerate to the brink of failure, as we will see.
AIG: “GOLDEN GOOSE FOR THE ENTIRE STREET”
In , American International Group was the largest insurance company in the
world as measured by stock market value: a massive conglomerate with billion
in assets, , employees in countries, and subsidiaries.
But to Wall Street, AIG’s most valuable asset was its credit rating: that it was
awarded the highest possible rating—Aaa by Moody’s since , AAA by S&P since
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
—was crucial, because these sterling ratings let it borrow cheaply and deploy the
money in lucrative investments. Only six private-sector companies in the United
States in early carried those ratings.
Starting in , AIG Financial Products, a Connecticut-based unit with major operations in London, figured out a new way to make money from those ratings. Relying
on the guarantee of its parent, AIG, AIG Financial Products became a major over-thecounter derivatives dealer, eventually having a portfolio of . trillion in notional
amount. Among other derivatives activities, the unit issued credit default swaps guaranteeing debt obligations held by financial institutions and other investors. In exchange
for a stream of premium-like payments, AIG Financial Products agreed to reimburse
the investor in such a debt obligation in the event of any default. The credit default
swap (CDS) is often compared to insurance, but when an insurance company sells a
policy, regulations require that it set aside a reserve in case of a loss. Because credit default swaps were not regulated insurance contracts, no such requirement was applicable. In this case, the unit predicted with . confidence that there would be no
realized economic loss on the supposedly safest portions of the CDOs on which they
wrote CDS protection, and failed to make any provisions whatsoever for declines in
value—or unrealized losses—a decision that would prove fatal to AIG in .
AIG Financial Products had a huge business selling CDS to European banks on a
variety of financial assets, including bonds, mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, and
other debt securities. For AIG, the fee for selling protection via the swap appeared
well worth the risk. For the banks purchasing protection, the swap enabled them to
neutralize the credit risk and thereby hold less capital against its assets. Purchasing
credit default swaps from AIG could reduce the amount of regulatory capital that the
bank needed to hold against an asset from to .. By , AIG had written
billion in CDS for such regulatory capital benefits; most were with European
banks for a variety of asset types. That total would rise to billion by .
The same advantages could be enjoyed by banks in the United States, where regulators had introduced similar capital standards for banks’ holdings of mortgagebacked securities and other investments under the Recourse Rule in . So a credit
default swap with AIG could also lower American banks’ capital requirements.
In and , AIG sold protection on super-senior CDO tranches valued at
billion, up from just billion in . In an interview with the FCIC, one AIG
executive described AIG Financial Products’ principal swap salesman, Alan Frost, as
“the golden goose for the entire Street.”
AIG’s biggest customer in this business was always Goldman Sachs, consistently a
leading CDO underwriter. AIG also wrote billions of dollars of protection for Merrill
Lynch, Société Générale, and other firms. AIG “looked like the perfect customer for
this,” Craig Broderick, Goldman’s chief risk officer, told the FCIC. “They really ticked
all the boxes. They were among the highest-rated [corporations] around. They had
what appeared to be unquestioned expertise. They had tremendous financial
strength. They had huge, appropriate interest in this space, backed by a long history
of trading in it.”
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
AIG also bestowed the imprimatur of its pristine credit rating on commercial paper programs by providing liquidity puts, similar to the ones that Citigroup’s bank
wrote for many of its own deals, guaranteeing it would buy commercial paper if no
one else wanted it. It entered this business in ; by , it had written more than
billion of liquidity puts on commercial paper issued by CDOs. AIG also wrote
more than billion in CDS to protect Société Générale against the risks on liquidity
puts that the French bank itself wrote on commercial paper issued by CDOs. “What
we would always try to do is to structure a transaction where the transaction was virtually riskless, and get paid a small premium,” Gene Park, who was a managing director at AIG Financial Products, told the FCIC. “And we’re one of the few guys who can
do that. Because if you think about it, no one wants to buy disaster protection from
someone who is not going to be around. . . . That was AIGFP’s sales pitch to the Street
or to banks.”
AIG’s business of offering credit protection on assets of many sorts, including
mortgage-backed securities and CDOs, grew from billion in to billion
in and billion in . This business was a small part of the AIG Financial Services business unit, which included AIG Financial Products; AIG Financial
Services generated operating income of . billion in , or of AIG’s total.
AIG did not post any collateral when it wrote these contracts; but unlike monoline insurers, AIG Financial Products agreed to post collateral if the value of the underlying securities dropped, or if the rating agencies downgraded AIG’s long-term
debt ratings. Its competitors, the monoline financial guarantors—insurance companies such as MBIA and Ambac that focused on guaranteeing financial contracts—
were forbidden under insurance regulations from paying out until actual losses
occurred. The collateral posting terms in AIG’s credit default swap contracts would
have an enormous impact on the crisis about to unfold.
But during the boom, these terms didn’t matter. The investors got their triple-Arated protection, AIG got its fees for providing that insurance—about . of the
notional amount of the swap per year—and the managers got their bonuses. In the
case of the London subsidiary that ran the operation, the bonus pool was of new
earnings. Financial Products CEO Joseph J. Cassano made the allocations at the end
of the year. Between and , the least amount Cassano paid himself in a year
was million. In the later years, his compensation was sometimes double that of
the parent company’s CEO.
In the spring of , disaster struck: AIG lost its triple-A rating when auditors
discovered that it had manipulated earnings. By November , the company had
reduced its reported earnings over the five-year period by . billion. The board
forced out Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who had been CEO for years. New York
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer prepared to bring fraud charges against him.
Greenberg told the FCIC, “When the AAA credit rating disappeared in spring
, it would have been logical for AIG to have exited or reduced its business of
writing credit default swaps.” But that didn’t happen. Instead, AIG Financial Products wrote another billion in credit default swaps on super-senior tranches of
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
CDOs in . The company wouldn’t make the decision to stop writing these contracts until .
GOLDMAN SACHS: “MULTIPLIED THE EFFECTS
OF THE COLLAPSE IN SUBPRIME”
Henry Paulson, the CEO of Goldman Sachs from until he became secretary of
the Treasury in , testified to the FCIC that by the time he became secretary many
bad loans already had been issued—“most of the toothpaste was out of the tube”—
and that “there really wasn’t the proper regulatory apparatus to deal with it.” Paulson provided examples: “Subprime mortgages went from accounting for percent of
total mortgages in to percent by . . . . Securitization separated originators from the risk of the products they originated.” The result, Paulson observed,
“was a housing bubble that eventually burst in far more spectacular fashion than
most previous bubbles.”
Under Paulson’s leadership, Goldman Sachs had played a central role in the creation and sale of mortgage securities. From through , the company provided billions of dollars in loans to mortgage lenders; most went to the subprime
lenders Ameriquest, Long Beach, Fremont, New Century, and Countrywide through
warehouse lines of credit, often in the form of repos. During the same period, Goldman acquired billion of loans from these and other subprime loan originators,
which it securitized and sold to investors. From to , Goldman issued
mortgage securitizations totaling billion (about a quarter were subprime), and
CDOs totaling billion; Goldman also issued synthetic or hybrid CDOs
with a face value of billion between and June .
Synthetic CDOs were complex paper transactions involving credit default swaps.
Unlike the traditional cash CDO, synthetic CDOs contained no actual tranches of
mortgage-backed securities, or even tranches of other CDOs. Instead, they simply
referenced these mortgage securities and thus were bets on whether borrowers would
pay their mortgages. In the place of real mortgage assets, these CDOs contained
credit default swaps and did not finance a single home purchase. Investors in these
CDOs included “funded” long investors, who paid cash to purchase actual securities
issued by the CDO; “unfunded” long investors, who entered into swaps with the
CDO, making money if the reference securities performed; and “short” investors,
who bought credit default swaps on the reference securities, making money if the securities failed. While funded investors received interest if the reference securities performed, they could lose all of their investment if the reference securities defaulted.
Unfunded investors, which were highest in the payment waterfall, received premium-like payments from the CDO as long as the reference securities performed but
would have to pay if the reference securities deteriorated beyond a certain point and
if the CDO did not have sufficient funds to pay the short investors. Short investors,
often hedge funds, bought the credit default swaps from the CDOs and paid those
premiums. Hybrid CDOs were a combination of traditional and synthetic CDOs.
Firms like Goldman found synthetic CDOs cheaper and easier to create than tra-
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
ditional CDOs at the same time as the supply of mortgages was beginning to dry up.
Because there were no mortgage assets to collect and finance, creating synthetic
CDOs took a fraction of the time. They also were easier to customize, because CDO
managers and underwriters could reference any mortgage-backed security—they
were not limited to the universe of securities available for them to buy. Figure .
provides an example of how such a deal worked.
In , Goldman launched its first major synthetic CDO, Abacus -—a deal
worth billion. About one-third of the swaps referenced residential mortgagebacked securities, another third referenced existing CDOs, and the rest, commercial
mortgage–backed securities (made up of bundled commercial real estate loans) and
other securities.
Goldman was the short investor for the entire billion deal: it purchased credit
default swap protection on these reference securities from the CDO. The funded investors—IKB (a German bank), the TCW Group, and Wachovia—put up a total of
million to purchase mezzanine tranches of the deal. These investors would
receive scheduled principal and interest payments if the referenced assets performed.
If the referenced assets did not perform, Goldman, as the short investor, would receive the million. In this sense, IKB, TCW, and Wachovia were “long” investors, betting that the referenced assets would perform well, and Goldman was a
“short” investor, betting that they would fail.
The unfunded investors—TCW and GSC Partners (asset management firms that
managed both hedge funds and CDOs)—did not put up any money up front; they received annual premiums from the CDO in return for the promise that they would
pay the CDO if the reference securities failed and the CDO did not have enough
funds to pay the short investors.
Goldman was the largest unfunded investor at the time that the deal was originated, retaining the . billion super-senior tranche. Goldman’s billion short position more than offset that exposure; about one year later, it transferred the
unfunded long position by buying credit protection from AIG, in return for an annual payment of . million. As a result, by , AIG was effectively the largest
unfunded investor in the super-senior tranches of the Abacus deal.
All told, long investors in Abacus - stood to receive millions of dollars if the
reference securities performed (just as a bond investor makes money when a bond
performs). On the other hand, Goldman stood to gain nearly billion if the assets
failed.
In the end, Goldman, the short investor in the Abacus - CDO, has received
about million while the long investors have lost just about all of their investments.
In April , GSC paid Goldman . million as a result of CDS protection sold by
GSC to Goldman on the first and second loss tranches. In June , Goldman received
million from AIG Financial Products as a result of the CDS protection it had purchased against the super-senior tranche. The same month it received million from
TCW as a result of the CDS purchased against the junior mezzanine tranches, and
million from IKB because of the CDS it purchased against the C tranche. In April ,
IKB paid Goldman another million as a result of the CDS against the B tranche.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Synthetic CDO
Synthetic CDOs, such as Goldman Sachs’s Abacus 2004-1 deal, were complex
paper transactions involving credit default swaps.
1. Short investors
Short investors enter into credit
default swaps with the CDO,
referencing assets such as
mortgage-backed securities. The
CDO receives swap premiums. If
the reference securities do not
perform, the CDO pays out to the
short investors.
CDO
SUPER SENIOR
2. Unfunded investors
Unfunded investors, who typically
buy the super senior tranche, are
effectively in a swap with the CDO
and receive premiums. If the
reference securities do not
perform and there are not enough
funds within the CDO, the
investors pay.
Premiums
CREDIT DEFAULT
SWAPS
Short
Investors
Credit
Protection
Premiums
3. Funded investors
Credit
Protection
Reference
Securities
AAA
Funded investors (bond holders)
invest cash and expect interest
and principal payments. They
typically incur losses before the
unfunded investors.
Interest and
Principal
Payments
AA
AAA
Unfunded
Investors
Bond
Holders
Cash
Invested
A
BBB
BB
EQUITY
AA
A
BBB
BB
4.
Cash Pool
Figure .
Cash Pool
The CDO would invest cash
received from the bond holders
in presumably safe assets.
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
Through May , Goldman received million from IKB, Wachovia, and TCW as a
result of the credit default swaps against the A tranche. As was common, some of the
tranches of Abacus - found their way into other funds and CDOs; for example,
TCW put tranches of Abacus - into three of its own CDOs.
In total, between July , , and May , , Goldman packaged and sold
synthetic CDOs, with an aggregate face value of billion. Its underwriting fee
was . to . of the deal totals, Dan Sparks, the former head of Goldman’s
mortgage desk, told the FCIC. Goldman would earn profits from shorting many of
these deals; on others, it would profit by facilitating the transaction between the
buyer and the seller of credit default swap protection.
As we will see, these new instruments would yield substantial profits for investors
that held a short position in the synthetic CDOs—that is, investors betting that the
housing boom was a bubble about to burst. They also would multiply losses when
housing prices collapsed. When borrowers defaulted on their mortgages, the investors expecting cash from the mortgage payments lost. And investors betting on
these mortgage-backed securities via synthetic CDOs also lost (while those betting
against the mortgages would gain). As a result, the losses from the housing collapse
were multiplied exponentially.
To see this play out, we can return to our illustrative Citigroup mortgage-backed
securities deal, CMLTI -NC. Credit default swaps made it possible for new
market participants to bet for or against the performance of these securities. Synthetic CDOs significantly increased the demand for such bets. For example, there
were about million worth of bonds in the M (BBB-rated) tranche—one of the
mezzanine tranches of the security. Synthetic CDOs such as Auriga, Volans, and
Neptune CDO IV all contained credit default swaps in which the M tranche was referenced. As long as the M bonds performed, investors betting that the tranche
would fail (short investors) would make regular payments into the CDO, which
would be paid out to other investors banking on it to succeed (long investors). If the
M bonds defaulted, then the long investors would make large payments to the short
investors. That is the bet—and there were more than million in such bets in early
on the M tranche of this deal. Thus, on the basis of the performance of
million in bonds, more than million could potentially change hands. Goldman’s
Sparks put it succinctly to the FCIC: if there’s a problem with a product, synthetics
increase the impact.
The amplification of the M tranche was not unique. A million tranche of the
Glacier Funding CDO -A, rated A, was referenced in million worth of synthetic CDOs. A million tranche of the Soundview Home Equity Loan Trust
-EQ, also rated A, was referenced in million worth of synthetic CDOs. A
million tranche of the Soundview Home Equity Loan Trust -EQ, rated
BBB, was referenced in million worth of synthetic CDOs.
In total, synthetic CDOs created by Goldman referenced , mortgage securities,
some of them multiple times. For example, securities were referenced twice. Indeed, one single mortgage-backed security was referenced in nine different synthetic
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
CDOs created by Goldman Sachs. Because of such deals, when the housing bubble
burst, billions of dollars changed hands.
Although Goldman executives agreed that synthetic CDOs were “bets” that magnified overall risk, they also maintained that their creation had “social utility” because it added liquidity to the market and enabled investors to customize the
exposures they wanted in their portfolios. In testimony before the Commission,
Goldman’s President and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn argued: “This is no different than the tens of thousands of swaps written every day on the U.S. dollar versus
another currency. Or, more importantly, on U.S. Treasuries . . . This is the way that
the financial markets work.”
Others, however, criticized these deals. Patrick Parkinson, the current director of
the Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board,
noted that synthetic CDOs “multiplied the effects of the collapse in subprime.”
Other observers were even harsher in their assessment. “I don’t think they have social
value,” Michael Greenberger, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law
and former director of the Division of Trading and Markets at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, told the FCIC. He characterized the credit default swap
market as a “casino.” And he testified that “the concept of lawful betting of billions of
dollars on the question of whether a homeowner would default on a mortgage that
was not owned by either party, has had a profound effect on the American public and
taxpayers.”
MOODY’S: “ACHIEVED THROUGH SOME ALCHEMY”
The machine churning out CDOs would not have worked without the stamp of approval given to these deals by the three leading rating agencies: Moody’s, S&P, and
Fitch. Investors often relied on the rating agencies’ views rather than conduct their
own credit analysis. Moody’s was paid according to the size of each deal, with caps set
at a half-million dollars for a “standard” CDO in and and as much as
, for a “complex” CDO.
In rating both synthetic and cash CDOs, Moody’s faced two key challenges: first,
estimating the probability of default for the mortgage-backed securities purchased by
the CDO (or its synthetic equivalent) and, second, gauging the correlation between
those defaults—that is, the likelihood that the securities would default at the same
time. Imagine flipping a coin to see how many times it comes up heads. Each flip is
unrelated to the others; that is, the flips are uncorrelated. Now, imagine a loaf of
sliced bread. When there is one moldy slice, there are likely other moldy slices. The
freshness of each slice is highly correlated with that of the other slices. As investors
now understand, the mortgage-backed securities in CDOs were less like coins than
like slices of bread.
To estimate the probability of default, Moody’s relied almost exclusively on its
own ratings of the mortgage-backed securities purchased by the CDOs. At no time
did the agencies “look through” the securities to the underlying subprime mortgages.
“We took the rating that had already been assigned by the [mortgage-backed securi-
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
ties] group,” Gary Witt, formerly one of Moody’s team managing directors for the
CDO unit, told the FCIC. This approach would lead to problems for Moody’s—and
for investors. Witt testified that the underlying collateral “just completely disintegrated below us and we didn’t react and we should have. . . . We had to be looking for
a problem. And we weren’t looking.”
To determine the likelihood that any given security in the CDO would default,
Moody’s plugged in assumptions based on those original ratings. This was no simple
task. Meanwhile, if the initial ratings turned out—owing to poor underwriting, fraud,
or any other cause—to poorly reflect the quality of the mortgages in the bonds, the
error was blindly compounded when mortgage-backed securities were packaged
into CDOs.
Even more difficult was the estimation of the default correlation between the securities in the portfolio—always tricky, but particularly so in the case of CDOs consisting of subprime and Alt-A mortgage-backed securities that had only a short
performance history. So the firm explicitly relied on the judgment of its analysts. “In
the absence of meaningful default data, it is impossible to develop empirical default
correlation measures based on actual observations of defaults,” Moody’s acknowledged in one early explanation of its process.
In plainer English, Witt said, Moody’s didn’t have a good model on which to estimate correlations between mortgage-backed securities—so they “made them up.” He
recalled, “They went to the analyst in each of the groups and they said, ‘Well, you
know, how related do you think these types of [mortgage-backed securities] are?’”
This problem would become more serious with the rise of CDOs in the middle of the
decade. Witt felt strongly that Moody’s needed to update its CDO rating model to explicitly address the increasing concentration of risky mortgage-related securities in
the collateral underlying CDOs. He undertook two initiatives to address this issue.
First, in mid-, he developed a new rating methodology that directly incorporated correlation into the model. However, the technique he devised was not applied
to CDO ratings for another year. Second, he proposed a research initiative in early
to “look through” a few CDO deals at the level of the underlying mortgagebacked securities and to see if “the assumptions that we’re making for AAA CDOs are
consistent . . . with the correlation assumptions that we’re making for AAA [mortgage-backed securities].” Although Witt received approval from his superiors for this
investigation, contractual disagreements prevented him from buying the software he
needed to conduct the look-through analysis.
In June , Moody’s updated its approach for estimating default correlation, but
it based the new model on trends from the previous years, a period when housing
prices were rising and mortgage delinquencies were very low—and a period in which
nontraditional mortgage products had been a very small niche. Then, Moody’s modified this optimistic set of “empirical” assumptions with ad hoc adjustments based on
factors such as region, year of origination, and servicer. For example, if two mortgage-backed securities were issued in the same region—say, Southern California—
Moody’s boosted the correlation; if they shared a common mortgage servicer,
Moody’s boosted it further. But at the same time, it would make other technical
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choices that lowered the estimated correlation of default, which would improve the
ratings for these securities. Using these methods, Moody’s estimated that two mortgage-backed securities would be less closely correlated than two securities backed by
other consumer credit assets, such as credit card or auto loans.
The other major rating agencies followed a similar approach. Academics, including some who worked at regulatory agencies, cautioned investors that assumption-heavy CDO credit ratings could be dangerous. “The complexity of structured
finance transactions may lead to situations where investors tend to rely more heavily
on ratings than for other types of rated securities. On this basis, the transformation of
risk involved in structured finance gives rise to a number of questions with important
potential implications. One such question is whether tranched instruments might result in unanticipated concentrations of risk in institutions’ portfolios,” a report from
the Bank for International Settlements, an international financial organization sponsored by the world’s regulators and central banks, warned in June .
CDO managers and underwriters relied on the ratings to promote the bonds. For
each new CDO, they created marketing material, including a pitch book that investors used to decide whether to subscribe to a new CDO. Each book described the
types of assets that would make up the portfolio without providing details. Without exception, every pitch book examined by the FCIC staff cited an analysis from either Moody’s or S&P that contrasted the historical “stability” of these new products’
ratings with the stability of corporate bonds. Statistics that made this case included
the fact that between and , of these new products did not experience
any rating changes over a twelve-month period while only of corporate bonds
maintained their ratings. Over a longer time period, however, structured finance ratings were not so stable. Between and , only of triple-A-rated structured finance securities retained their original rating after five years. Underwriters
continued to sell CDOs using these statistics in their pitch books during and
, after mortgage defaults had started to rise but before the rating agencies had
downgraded large numbers of mortgage-backed securities. Of course, each pitch
book did include the disclaimer that “past performance is not a guarantee of future
performance” and encouraged investors to perform their own due diligence.
As Kyle Bass of Dallas-based Hayman Capital Advisors testified before the House
Financial Services Committee, CDOs that purchased lower-rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities “are arcane structured finance products that were designed
specifically to make dangerous, lowly rated tranches of subprime debt deceptively attractive to investors. This was achieved through some alchemy and some negligence
in adapting unrealistic correlation assumptions on behalf of the ratings agencies.
They convinced investors that of a collection of toxic subprime tranches were
the ratings equivalent of U.S. Government bonds.”
When housing prices started to fall nationwide and defaults increased, it turned
out that the mortgage-backed securities were in fact much more highly correlated
than the rating agencies had estimated—that is, they stopped performing at roughly
the same time. These losses led to massive downgrades in the ratings of the CDOs.
In , of U.S. CDO securities would be downgraded. In , would.
T H E C D O M AC H I N E
In late , Moody’s would throw out its key CDO assumptions and replace them
with an asset correlation assumption two to three times higher than used before
the crisis.
In retrospect, it is clear that the agencies’ CDO models made two key mistakes.
First, they assumed that securitizers could create safer financial products by diversifying among many mortgage-backed securities, when in fact these securities weren’t
that different to begin with. “There were a lot of things [the credit rating agencies]
did wrong,” Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told the FCIC. “They did not
take into account the appropriate correlation between [and] across the categories of
mortgages.”
Second, the agencies based their CDO ratings on ratings they themselves had assigned on the underlying collateral. “The danger with CDOs is when they are based
on structured finance ratings,” Ann Rutledge, a structured finance expert, told the
FCIC. “Ratings are not predictive of future defaults; they only describe a ratings management process, and a mean and static expectation of security loss.”
Of course, rating CDOs was a profitable business for the rating agencies. Including all types of CDOs—not just those that were mortgage-related—Moody’s rated
deals in , in , in , and in ; the value of those deals
rose from billion in to billion in , billion in , and
billion in . The reported revenues of Moody’s Investors Service from structured products—which included mortgage-backed securities and CDOs—grew from
million in , or of Moody’s Corporation’s revenues, to million in
or of overall corporate revenue. The rating of asset-backed CDOs alone
contributed more than of the revenue from structured finance. The boom
years of structured finance coincided with a company-wide surge in revenue and
profits. From to , the corporation’s revenues surged from million to
billion and its profit margin climbed from to .
Yet the increase in the CDO group’s workload and revenue was not paralleled by a
staffing increase. “We were under-resourced, you know, we were always playing
catch-up,” Witt said. Moody’s “penny-pinching” and “stingy” management was reluctant to pay up for experienced employees. “The problem of recruiting and retaining good staff was insoluble. Investment banks often hired away our best people. As
far as I can remember, we were never allocated funds to make counter offers,” Witt
said. “We had almost no ability to do meaningful research.” Eric Kolchinsky, a former team managing director at Moody’s, told the FCIC that from to , the
increase in the number of deals rated was “huge . . . but our personnel did not go up
accordingly.” By , Kolchinsky recalled, “My role as a team leader was crisis management. Each deal was a crisis.” When personnel worked to create a new methodology, Witt said, “We had to kind of do it in our spare time.”
The agencies worked closely with CDO underwriters and managers as each new
CDO was devised. And the rating agencies now relied for a substantial amount of
their revenues on a small number of players. Citigroup and Merrill alone accounted
for more than billion of CDO deals between and .
The ratings agencies’ correlation assumptions had a direct and critical impact on
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
how CDOs were structured: assumptions of a lower correlation made possible larger
easy-to-sell triple-A tranches and smaller harder-to-sell BBB tranches. Thus, as is
discussed later, underwriters crafted the structure to earn more favorable ratings
from the agencies—for example, by increasing the size of the senior tranches. Moreover, because issuers could choose which rating agencies to do business with, and because the agencies depended on the issuers for their revenues, rating agencies felt
pressured to give favorable ratings so that they might remain competitive.
The pressure on rating agency employees was also intense as a result of the high
turnover—a revolving door that often left raters dealing with their old colleagues,
this time as clients. In her interview with FCIC staff, Yuri Yoshizawa, a Moody’s team
managing director for U.S. derivatives in , was presented with an organization
chart from July . She identified out of analysts—about of the staff—
who had left Moody’s to work for investment or commercial banks.
Brian Clarkson, who oversaw the structured finance group before becoming the
president of Moody’s Investors Service, explained to FCIC investigators that retaining
employees was always a challenge, for the simple reason that the banks paid more. As
a precaution, Moody’s employees were prohibited from rating deals by a bank or issuer while they were interviewing for a job with that particular institution, but the responsibility for notifying management of the interview rested on the employee. After
leaving Moody’s, former employees were barred from interacting with Moody’s on
the same series of deals they had rated while in its employ, but there were no bans
against working on other deals with Moody’s.
SEC: “IT’S GOING TO BE AN AWFULLY BIG MESS”
The five major U.S. investment banks expanded their involvement in the mortgage
and mortgage securities industries in the early st century with little formal government regulation beyond their broker-dealer subsidiaries. In , the European
Union told U.S. financial firms that to continue to do business in Europe, they would
need a “consolidated” supervisor by —that is, one regulator that had responsibility for the holding company. The U.S. commercial banks already met that criterion—
their consolidated supervisor was the Federal Reserve—and the Office of Thrift
Supervision’s oversight of AIG would later also satisfy the Europeans. The five investment banks, however, did not meet the standard: the SEC was supervising their securities arms, but no one supervisor kept track of these companies on a consolidated
basis. Thus all five faced an important decision: what agency would they prefer as
their regulator?
By , the combined assets at the five firms totaled . trillion, more than half
of the . trillion of assets held by the five largest U.S. bank holding companies. In the
next three years the investment banks’ assets would grow to . trillion. Goldman
Sachs was the largest, followed by Morgan Stanley and Merrill, then Lehman and Bear.
These large, diverse international firms had transformed their business models over
the years. For their revenues they relied increasingly on trading and OTC derivatives
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dealing, investments, securitization, and similar activities on top of their traditional
investment banking functions. Recall that at Bear Stearns, trading and investments accounted for more than of pretax earnings in some years after .
The investment banks also owned depository institutions through which they
could provide FDIC-insured accounts to their brokerage customers; the deposits provided cheap but limited funding. These depositories took the form of a thrift (supervised by the OTS) or an industrial loan company (supervised by the Federal Deposit
Insurance Corporation and a state supervisor). Merrill and Lehman, which had
among the largest of these subsidiaries, used them to finance their mortgage origination activities.
The investment banks’ possession of depository subsidiaries suggested two obvious choices when they found themselves in need of a consolidated supervisor. If a
firm chartered its depository as a commercial bank, the Fed would be its holding
company supervisor; if as a thrift, the OTS would do the job. But the investment
banks came up with a third option. They lobbied the SEC to devise a system of regulation that would satisfy the terms of the European directive and keep them from
European oversight—and the SEC was willing to step in, although its historical focus was on investor protection.
In November , almost a year after the Europeans made their announcement,
the SEC suggested the creation of the Consolidated Supervised Entity (CSE) program
to oversee the holding companies of investment banks and all their subsidiaries. The
CSE program was open only to investment banks that had large U.S. broker-dealer
subsidiaries already subject to SEC regulation. However, this was the SEC’s first foray
into supervising firms for safety and soundness. The SEC did not have express legislative authority to require the investment banks to submit to consolidated regulation, so it proposed that the CSE program be voluntary; the SEC crafted the new
program out of its authority to make rules for the broker-dealer subsidiaries of investment banks. The program would apply to broker-dealers that volunteered to be
subject to consolidated supervision under the CSE program, or those that already
were subject to supervision by the Fed at the holding company level, such as JP Morgan and Citigroup. The CSE program would introduce a limited form of supervision
by SEC examiners. CSE firms were allowed to use a new methodology to calculate
the regulatory capital that they were holding against their securities portfolios—a
methodology based on the volatility of market prices. This methodology, referred to
as the “alternative net capital rule,” would be similar to the standards—based on the
Market Risk Amendment to the Basel rules—that large commercial banks and
bank holding companies used for their securities portfolios.
The traditional net capital rule that had governed broker-dealers since had
required straightforward calculations based on asset classes and credit ratings, a
bright-line approach that gave firms little discretion in calculating their capital. The
new rules would allow the investment banks to create their own proprietary Value at
Risk (VaR) models to calculate their regulatory capital—that is, the capital each firm
would have to hold to protect its customers’ assets should it experience losses on its
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securities and derivatives. All in all, the SEC estimated that the proposed new reliance on proprietary VaR models would allow broker-dealers to reduce average capital charges by . The firms would be required to give the SEC an early-warning
notice if their tentative net capital (net capital minus hard-to-sell assets) fell below
billion at any time.
Meanwhile, the OTS was already supervising the thrifts owned by several securities firms and argued that it therefore was the natural supervisor of their holding
companies. In a letter to the SEC, the OTS was harshly critical of the agency’s proposal, which it said had “the potential to duplicate or conflict with OTS’s supervisory
responsibilities” over savings and loan holding companies that would also be CSEs.
The OTS argued that the SEC was interfering with the intentions of Congress, which,
in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, “carefully kept the responsibility for supervision of
the holding company itself with the OTS or the Federal Reserve Board, depending
upon whether the holding company was a [thrift holding company] or a bank holding company. This was in recognition of the expertise developed over the years by
these regulators in evaluating the risks posed to depository institutions and the federal deposit insurance funds by depository institution holding companies and their
affiliates.” The OTS declared: “We believe that the SEC’s proposed assertion of authority over [savings and loan holding companies] is unfounded and could pose significant risks to these entities, their insured deposit institution subsidiaries and the
federal deposit insurance funds.”
In contrast, the response from the financial services industry to the SEC proposal
was overwhelmingly positive, particularly with regard to the alternative net capital
computation. Lehman Brothers, for example, wrote that it “applauds and supports
the Commission.” JP Morgan was supportive of what it saw as an improvement over
the old net capital rule that still governed securities subsidiaries of the commercial
banks: “The existing capital rule overstates the amount of capital a broker-dealer
needs,” the company wrote. Deutsche Bank found it to be “a great stride towards consistency with modern comprehensive risk management practices.” In FCIC interviews, SEC officials and executives at the investment banks stated that the firms
preferred the SEC because it was more familiar with their core securities-related
businesses.
In an April meeting, SEC commissioners voted to adopt the CSE program
and the new net capital calculations that went along with it. Over the following year
and a half, the five largest investment banks volunteered for this supervision, although Merrill’s and Lehman’s thrifts continued to be supervised by the OTS. Several
firms delayed entry to the program in order to develop systems that could measure
their exposures to market price movements.
Harvey Goldschmid, SEC commissioner from to , told FCIC staff that
before the CSE program was created, SEC staff members were concerned about how
little authority they had over the Wall Street firms, including their hedge funds and
overseas subsidiaries. Once the CSE program was in place, the SEC had “the authority to look at everything.” SEC commissioners discussed at the time the risks they
were taking by allowing firms to reduce their capital. “If anything goes wrong it’s go-
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ing to be an awfully big mess,” Goldschmid said at a meeting. “Do we feel secure
if these drops in capital and other things [occur] we really will have investor protection?” In response, Annette Nazareth, the SEC official who would be in charge of the
program, assured the commissioners that her division was up to the challenge.
The new program was housed primarily in the SEC’s Office of Prudential Supervision and Risk Analysis, an office with a staff of to within the Division of Market
Regulation. In the beginning, it was supported by the SEC’s much larger examination staff; by the staff dedicated to the CSE program had grown to . Still,
only “monitors” were responsible for the five investment banks; monitors were
assigned to each firm, with some overlap.
The CSE program was based on the bank supervision model, but the SEC did not
try to do exactly what bank examiners did. For one thing, unlike supervisors of
large banks, the SEC never assigned on-site examiners under the CSE program; by
comparison, the OCC alone assigned more than examiners full-time at Citibank.
According to Erik Sirri, the SEC’s former director of trading and markets, the CSE
program was intended to focus mainly on liquidity because, unlike a commercial
bank, a securities firm traditionally had no access to a lender of last resort. (Of
course, that would change during the crisis.) The investment banks were subject to
annual examinations, during which staff reviewed the firms’ systems and records and
verified that the firms had instituted control processes.
The CSE program was troubled from the start. The SEC conducted an exam for
each investment bank when it entered the program. The result of Bear Stearns’s entrance exam, in , showed several deficiencies. For example, examiners were concerned that there were no firmwide VaR limits and that contingency funding plans
relied on overly optimistic stress scenarios. In addition, the SEC was aware of the
firm’s concentration of mortgage securities and its high leverage. Nonetheless, the
SEC did not ask Bear to change its asset balance, decrease its leverage, or increase its
cash liquidity pool—all actions well within its prerogative, according to SEC
officials. Then, because the CSE program was preoccupied with its own staff reorganization, Bear did not have its next annual exam, during which the SEC was supposed to be on-site. The SEC did meet monthly with all CSE firms, including Bear,
and it did conduct occasional targeted examinations across firms. In , the SEC
worried that Bear was too reliant on unsecured commercial paper funding, and Bear
reduced its exposure to unsecured commercial paper and increased its reliance on secured repo lending. Unfortunately, tens of billions of dollars of that repo lending
was overnight funding that could disappear with no warning. Ironically, in the second week of March , when the firm went into its four-day death spiral, the SEC
was on-site conducting its first CSE exam since Bear’s entrance exam more than two
years earlier.
Leverage at the investment banks increased from to , growth that some
critics have blamed on the SEC’s change in the net capital rules. Goldschmid told the
FCIC that the increase was owed to “a wild capital time and the firms being irresponsible.” In fact, leverage had been higher at the five investment banks in the late
s, then dropped before increasing over the life of the CSE program—a history
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that suggests that the program was not solely responsible for the changes. In ,
Sirri noted that under the CSE program the investment banks’ net capital levels “remained relatively stable . . . and, in some cases, increased significantly” over the program. Still, Goldschmid, who left the SEC in , argued that the SEC had the
power to do more to rein in the investment banks. He insisted, “There was much
more than enough moral suasion and kind of practical power that was involved. . . .
The SEC has the practical ability to do a lot if it uses its power.”
Overall, the CSE program was widely viewed as a failure. From until the financial crisis, all five investment banks continued their spectacular growth, relying
heavily on short-term funding. Former SEC chairman Christopher Cox called the
CSE supervisory program “fundamentally flawed from the beginning.” Mary
Schapiro, the current SEC chairman, concluded that the program “was not successful
in providing prudential supervision.” And, as we will see in the chapters ahead, the
SEC’s inspector general would be quite critical, too. In September , in the midst
of the financial crisis, the CSE program was discontinued after all five of the largest
independent investment banks had either closed down (Lehman Brothers), merged
into other entities (Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch), or converted to bank holding
companies to be supervised by the Federal Reserve (Goldman Sachs and Morgan
Stanley).
For the Fed, there would be a certain irony in that last development concerning
Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Fed officials had seen their agency’s regulatory
purview shrinking over the course of the decade, as JP Morgan switched the charter
of its banking subsidiary to the OCC and as the OTS and SEC promoted their alternatives for consolidated supervision. “The OTS and SEC were very aggressive in
trying to promote themselves as a regulator in that environment and wanted to be the
consolidated supervisor . . . to meet the requirements in Europe for a consolidated
supervisor,” said Mark Olson, a Fed governor from to . “There was a lot of
competitiveness among the regulators.” In January , Fed staff had prepared an
internal study to find out why none of the investment banks had chosen the Fed as its
consolidated supervisor. The staff interviewed five firms that already were supervised
by the Fed and four that had chosen the SEC. According to the report, the biggest
reason firms opted not to be supervised by the Fed was the “comprehensiveness” of
the Fed’s supervisory approach, “particularly when compared to alternatives such as
Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) or Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC)
holding company supervision.”
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COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 8
The Commission concludes declining demand for riskier portions (or tranches)
of mortgage-related securities led to the creation of an enormous volume of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). These CDOs—composed of the riskier
tranches—fueled demand for nonprime mortgage securitization and contributed
to the housing bubble. Certain products also played an important role in doing
so, including CDOs squared, credit default swaps, synthetic CDOs, and assetbacked commercial paper programs that invested in mortgage-backed securities
and CDOs. Many of these risky assets ended up on the balance sheets of systemically important institutions and contributed to their failure or near failure in the
financial crisis.
Credit default swaps, sold to provide protection against default to purchasers
of the top-rated tranches of CDOs, facilitated the sale of those tranches by convincing investors of their low risk, but greatly increased the exposure of the sellers
of the credit default swap protection to the housing bubble’s collapse.
Synthetic CDOs, which consisted in whole or in part of credit default swaps,
enabled securitization to continue and expand even as the mortgage market dried
up and provided speculators with a means of betting on the housing market. By
layering on correlated risk, they spread and amplified exposure to losses when the
housing market collapsed.
The high ratings erroneously given CDOs by credit rating agencies encouraged investors and financial institutions to purchase them and enabled the continuing securitization of nonprime mortgages. There was a clear failure of
corporate governance at Moody’s, which did not ensure the quality of its ratings
on tens of thousands of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s poor oversight of the five largest
investment banks failed to restrict their risky activities and did not require them
to hold adequate capital and liquidity for their activities, contributing to the failure or need for government bailouts of all five of the supervised investment banks
during the financial crisis.
9
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CONTENTS
The bubble: “A credit-induced boom”.................................................................
Mortgage fraud: “Crime-facilitative environments” ...........................................
Disclosure and due diligence: “A quality control issue in the factory” .................
Regulators: “Markets will always self-correct”....................................................
Leveraged loans and commercial real estate:
“You’ve got to get up and dance” ....................................................................
Lehman: From “moving” to “storage” .................................................................
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “Two stark choices”............................................
In , the Bakersfield, California, homebuilder Warren Peterson was paying as little as , for a ,-square-foot lot, about the size of three tennis courts. The
next year the cost more than tripled to ,, as real estate boomed. Over the previous quarter century, Peterson had built between and custom and semi-custom
homes a year. For a while, he was building as many as . And then came the crash.
“I have built exactly one new home since late ,” he told the FCIC five years
later.
In , the average price was , for a new house in Bakersfield, at the
southern end of California’s agricultural center, the San Joaquin Valley. That jumped
to almost , by June . “By , money seemed to be coming in very fast
and from everywhere,” said Lloyd Plank, a Bakersfield real estate broker. “They
would purchase a house in Bakersfield, keep it for a short period and resell it. Sometimes they would flip the house while it was still in escrow, and would still make
to .”
Nationally, housing prices jumped between and their peak in ,
more than in any decade since at least . It would be catastrophically downhill
from there—yet the mortgage machine kept churning well into , apparently indifferent to the fact that housing prices were starting to fall and lending standards to
deteriorate. Newspaper stories highlighted the weakness in the housing market—
even suggesting this was a bubble that could burst anytime. Checks were in place, but
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they were failing. Loan purchasers and securitizers ignored their own due diligence
on what they were buying. The Federal Reserve and the other regulators increasingly
recognized the impending troubles in housing but thought their impact would be
contained. Increased securitization, lower underwriting standards, and easier access
to credit were common in other markets, too. For example, credit was flowing into
commercial real estate and corporate loans. How to react to what increasingly appeared to be a credit bubble? Many enterprises, such as Lehman Brothers and Fannie
Mae, pushed deeper.
All along the assembly line, from the origination of the mortgages to the creation
and marketing of the mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations
(CDOs), many understood and the regulators at least suspected that every cog was
reliant on the mortgages themselves, which would not perform as advertised.
THE BUBBLE: “A CREDITINDUCED BOOM”
Irvine, California–based New Century—once the nation’s second-largest subprime
lender—ignored early warnings that its own loan quality was deteriorating and
stripped power from two risk-control departments that had noted the evidence. In a
June presentation, the Quality Assurance staff reported they had found severe
underwriting errors, including evidence of predatory lending, legal and state violations, and credit issues, in of the loans they audited in November and December
. In , Chief Operating Officer and later CEO Brad Morrice recommended
these results be removed from the statistical tools used to track loan performance,
and in , the department was dissolved and its personnel terminated. The same
year, the Internal Audit department identified numerous deficiencies in loan files; out
of nine reviews it conducted in , it gave the company’s loan production department “unsatisfactory” ratings seven times. Patrick Flanagan, president of New Century’s mortgage-originating subsidiary, cut the department’s budget, saying in a
memo that the “group was out of control and tries to dictate business practices instead of audit.”
This happened as the company struggled with increasing requests that it buy
back soured loans from investors. By December , almost of its loans were
going into default within the first three months after origination. “New Century had
a brazen obsession with increasing loan originations, without due regard to the risks
associated with that business strategy,” New Century’s bankruptcy examiner
reported.
In September —seven months before the housing market peaked—thousands of originators, securitizers, and investors met at the ABS East conference
in Boca Raton, Florida, to play golf, do deals, and talk about the market. The assetbacked security business was still good, but even the most optimistic could read the
signs. Panelists had three concerns: Were housing prices overheated, or just driven by
“fundamentals” such as increased demand? Would rising interest rates halt the
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market? And was the CDO, because of its ratings-driven investors, distorting the
mortgage market?
The numbers were stark. Nationwide, house prices had never risen so far, so fast.
And national indices masked important variations. House prices in the four sand
states, especially California, had dramatically larger spikes—and subsequent declines—than did the nation. If there was a bubble, perhaps, as Fed Chairman Alan
Greenspan said, it was only in certain regions. He told a congressional committee in
June that growth in nonprime mortgages was helping to push home prices in
some markets to unsustainable levels, “although a ‘bubble’ in home prices for the nation as a whole does not appear likely.”
Globally, prices jumped in many countries around the world during the s. As
Christopher Mayer, an economist from Columbia Business School, noted to the
Commission, “What really sticks out is how unremarkable the United States house
price experience is relative to our European peers.” From to , price increases in the United Kingdom and Spain were above those in the United States,
while price increases in Ireland and France were just below. In an International Monetary Fund study from , more than one half of the developed countries analyzed had greater home price appreciation than the United States from late
through the third quarter of , and yet some of these countries did not suffer
sharp price declines. Notably, Canada had strong home price increases followed by
a modest and temporary decline in . Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of
Cleveland attributed Canada’s experience to tighter lending standards than in the
United States as well as regulatory and structural differences in the financial system.
Other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain, saw steep house
price declines.
American economists and policy makers struggled to explain the house price increases. The good news was the economy was growing and unemployment was low.
But, a Federal Reserve study in May presented evidence that the cost of owning
rather than renting was much higher than had been the case historically: home prices
had risen from times the annual cost of renting to times. In some cities, the
change was particularly dramatic. From to , the ratio of house prices to
rents rose in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York City by , , and , respectively. In , the National Association of Realtors’ affordability index—which
measures whether a typical family could qualify for a mortgage on a typical home—
had reached a record low. But that was based on the cost of a traditional mortgage
with a down payment, which was no longer required. Perhaps such measures
were no longer relevant, when Americans could make lower down payments and obtain loans such as payment-option adjustable-rate mortgages and interest-only mortgages, with reduced initial mortgage payments. Or perhaps buying a home continued
to make financial sense, given homeowners’ expectations of further price gains.
During a June meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), composed of Federal Reserve governors, four regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents,
and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York president, heard five presentations on
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mortgage risks and the housing market. Members and staff had difficulty developing a consensus on whether housing prices were overvalued and “it was hard for
many FOMC participants . . . to ascribe substantial conviction to the proposition
that overvaluation in the housing market posed the major systemic risks that we
now know it did,” according to a letter from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke to the
FCIC. “The national mortgage system might bend but will likely not break,” and
“neither borrowers nor lenders appeared particularly shaky,” one presentation argued, according to the letter. In discussions about nontraditional mortgage products, the argument was made that “interest-only mortgages are not an especially
sinister development,” and their risks “could be cushioned by large down payments.”
The presentation also noted that while loan-to-value ratios were rising on a portion
of interest-only loans, the ratios for most remained around . Another presentation suggested that housing market activity could be the result of “solid fundamentals.” Yet another presentation concluded that the impact of changes in household
wealth on spending would be “perhaps only half as large as that of the s stock
bubble.” Most FOMC participants agreed “the probability of spillovers to financial
institutions seemed moderate.”
As one recent study argues, many economists were “agnostics” on housing, unwilling to risk their reputations or spook markets by alleging a bubble without finding support in economic theory. Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn was one.
“Identification [of a bubble] is a tricky proposition because not all the fundamental
factors driving asset prices are directly observable,” Kohn said in a speech, citing research by the European Central Bank. “For this reason, any judgment by a central bank that stocks or homes are overpriced is inherently highly uncertain.”
But not all economists hesitated to sound a louder alarm. “The situation is beginning to look like a credit-induced boom in housing that could very well result in a
systemic bust if credit conditions or economic conditions should deteriorate,” Federal
Deposit Insurance Corporation Chief Economist Richard Brown wrote in a March
report. “During the past five years, the average U.S. home has risen in value by
, while homes in the fastest-growing markets have approximately doubled in
value.” While this increase might have been explained by strong market fundamentals, “the dramatic broadening of the housing boom in strongly suggests the influence of systemic factors, including the low cost and wide availability of mortgage
credit.”
A couple of months later, Fed economists in an internal memo acknowledged the
possibility that housing prices were overvalued, but downplayed the potential impacts of a downturn. Even in the face of a large price decline, they argued, defaults
would not be widespread, given the large equity that many borrowers still had in
their homes. Structural changes in the mortgage market made a crisis less likely, and
the financial system seemed well capitalized. “Even historically large declines in
house prices would be small relative to the recent decline in household wealth owing
to the stock market,” the economists concluded. “From a wealth-effects perspective,
this seems unlikely to create substantial macroeconomic problems.”
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MORTGAGE FRAUD:
“CRIMEFACILITATIVE ENVIRONMENTS”
New Century—where of the mortgages were loans with little or no documentation—was not the only company that ignored concerns about poor loan quality.
Across the mortgage industry, with the bubble at its peak, standards had declined,
documentation was no longer verified, and warnings from internal audit departments and concerned employees were ignored. These conditions created an environment ripe for fraud. William Black, a former banking regulator who analyzed
criminal patterns during the savings and loan crisis, told the Commission that by one
estimate, in the mid-s, at least . million loans annually contained “some sort of
fraud,” in part because of the large percentage of no-doc loans originated then.
Fraud for housing can entail a borrower’s lying or intentionally omitting information on a loan application. Fraud for profit typically involves a deception to gain financially from the sale of a house. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan defines
fraud more broadly to include lenders’ “sale of unaffordable or structurally unfair
mortgage products to borrowers.”
In of cases, according to the FBI, fraud involves industry insiders. For example, property flipping can involve buyers, real estate agents, appraisers, and complicit closing agents. In a “silent second,” the buyer, with the collusion of a loan officer
and without the knowledge of the first mortgage lender, disguises the existence of a
second mortgage to hide the fact that no down payment has been made. “Straw buyers” allow their names and credit scores to be used, for a fee, by buyers who want to
conceal their ownership.
In one instance, two women in South Florida were indicted in for placing
ads between and in Haitian community newspapers offering assistance
with immigration problems; they were accused of then stealing the identities of hundreds of people who came for help and using the information to buy properties, take
title in their names, and resell at a profit. U.S. Attorney Wilfredo A. Ferrer told the
Commission it was “one of the cruelest schemes” he had seen.
Estimates vary on the extent of fraud, as it is seldom investigated unless properties go into foreclosure. Ann Fulmer, vice president of business relations at Interthinx, a fraud detection service, told the FCIC that her firm analyzed a large
sample of all loans from to and found contained lies or omissions
significant enough to rescind the loan or demand a buyback if it had been securitized. The firm’s analysis indicated that about trillion of the loans made during
the period were fraudulent. Fulmer further estimated billion worth of fraudulent loans from to resulted in foreclosures, leading to losses of billion for the holders. According to Fulmer, experts in the field—lenders’ quality
assurance officers, attorneys who specialize in loan loss mitigation, and whitecollar criminologists—say the percentage of transactions involving less significant
forms of fraud, such as relatively minor misrepresentations of fact, could reach
of originations. Such loans could stay comfortably under the radar, because many
borrowers made payments on time.
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Ed Parker, the head of mortgage fraud investigation at Ameriquest, the largest
subprime lender in , , and , told the FCIC that fraudulent loans were
very common at the company. “No one was watching. The volume was up and now
you see the fallout behind the loan origination process,” he told the FCIC. David
Gussmann, the former vice president of Enterprise Management Capital Markets at
Fannie Mae, told the Commission that in one package of securitized loans his analysts found one purchaser who had bought properties, falsely identifying himself
each time as the owner of only one property, while another had bought five properties. Fannie Mae’s detection of fraud increased steadily during the housing bubble
and accelerated in late , according to William Brewster, the current director of
the company’s mortgage fraud program. He said that, seeing evidence of fraud, Fannie demanded that lenders such as Bank of America, Countrywide, Citigroup, and
JP Morgan Chase repurchase about million in mortgages in and million in . “Lax or practically non-existent government oversight created what
criminologists have labeled ‘crime-facilitative environments,’ where crime could
thrive,” said Henry N. Pontell, a professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, in testimony to the Commission.
The responsibility to investigate and prosecute mortgage fraud violations falls to
local, state and federal law enforcement officials. On the federal level, the Federal Bureau of Investigation investigates and refers cases for prosecution to U.S. Attorneys,
who are part of the Department of Justice. Cases may also involve other agencies, including the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Department of Housing and Urban
Development, and the Internal Revenue Service. The FBI, which has the broadest jurisdiction of any federal law enforcement agency, was aware of the extent of the
fraudulent mortgage problem. FBI Assistant Director Chris Swecker began noticing
a rise in mortgage fraud while he was the special agent in charge of the Charlotte,
North Carolina, office from to . In , that office investigated First Beneficial Mortgage for selling fraudulent loans to Fannie Mae, leading to the successful
criminal prosecution of the company’s owner, James Edward McLean Jr., and others.
First Beneficial repurchased the mortgages after Fannie discovered evidence of fraud,
but then—without any interference from Fannie—resold them to Ginnie Mae. For
not alerting Ginnie, Fannie paid . million of restitution to the government.
McLean came to the attention of the FBI after buying a luxury yacht for , in
cash. Soon after Swecker was promoted to assistant FBI director for investigations
in , he turned a spotlight on mortgage fraud. “The potential impact of mortgage
fraud is clear,” Swecker told a congressional committee in . “If fraudulent practices become systemic within the mortgage industry and mortgage fraud is allowed
to become unrestrained, it will ultimately place financial institutions at risk and have
adverse effects on the stock market.”
In that testimony, Swecker pointed out the inadequacies of data regarding fraud
and recommended that Congress mandate a reporting system and other remedies
and require all lenders to participate, whether federally regulated or not. For example, suspicious activity reports, also known as SARs, are reports filed by FDIC-insured banks and their affiliates to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network
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(FinCEN), a bureau within the Treasury Department that administers money-laundering laws and works closely with law enforcement to combat financial crimes.
SARs are filed by financial institutions when they suspect criminal activity in a financial transaction. But many mortgage originators, such as Ameriquest, New Century,
and Option One, were outside FinCEN’s jurisdiction—and thus the loans they generated, which were then placed into securitized pools by larger lenders or investment
banks, were not subject to FinCEN review. William Black testified to the Commission that an estimated of nonprime mortgage loans were made by noninsured
lenders not required to file SARs. And as for those institutions required to do so, he
believed he saw evidence of underreporting in that, he said, only about of federally insured mortgage lenders filed even a single criminal referral for alleged mortgage fraud in the first half of .
Countrywide, the nation’s largest mortgage lender at the time, had about , internal referrals of potentially fraudulent activity in its mortgage business in ,
, in , and , in , according to Francisco San Pedro, the former
senior vice president of special investigations at the company. But it filed only
SARs in , , in , and , in .
Similarly, in examining Bank of America in , its lead bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), sampled mortgages and found
with “quality assurance referrals” for suspicious activity for which no report had been
filed with FinCEN. All met the legal requirement for a filing. The OCC consequently required management to refine its processes to ensure that SARs were consistently filed.
Darcy Parmer, a former quality assurance and fraud analyst at Wells Fargo, the
second largest mortgage lender from through and the largest in , told
the Commission that “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of fraud cases” that she
knew were identified within Wells Fargo’s home equity loan division were not reported to FinCEN. And, she added, at least half the loans she flagged for fraud were
nevertheless funded, over her objections.
Despite the underreporting, the jump in mortgage fraud drew attention. FinCEN
in November reported a -fold increase in SARs related to mortgage fraud between and . It noted that two-thirds of the loans being created were originated by mortgage brokers who were not subject to any federal standard or
oversight. Swecker unsuccessfully asked legislators to compel all lenders to forward
information about criminal fraud to regulators and law enforcement agencies.
Swecker attempted to gain more funding to combat mortgage fraud but was resisted. Swecker told the FCIC his funding requests were cut at either the director level at
the FBI, at the Justice Department, or at the Office of Management and Budget. He
called his struggle for more resources an “uphill slog.”
In , , SARs related to mortgage fraud were filed; in there were
,. The number kept climbing, to , in , , in , and , in
. At the same time, top FBI officials, focusing on terrorist threats, reduced the
agents assigned to white-collar crime from , in the fiscal year to fewer than
, by . That year, its mortgage fraud program had only agents at any one
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time to review more than , SARs filed with FinCEN. In response to inquiries
from the FCIC, the FBI said that to compensate for a lack of manpower, it had developed “new and innovative methods to detect and combat mortgage fraud,” such as a
computer application, created in , to detect property flipping.
Robert Mueller, the FBI’s director since , said mortgage fraud needed to be
considered “in context of other priorities,” such as terrorism. He told the Commission that he hired additional resources to fight fraud, but that “we didn’t get what we
had requested” during the budget process. He also said that the FBI allocated additional resources to reflect the growth in mortgage fraud, but acknowledged that those
resources may have been insufficient. “I am not going to tell you that that is adequate
for what is out there,” he said. In the wake of the crisis, the FBI is continuing to investigate fraud, and Mueller suggested that some prosecutions may be still to come.
Alberto Gonzales, the nation’s attorney general from February to September , told the Commission that while he might have done more on mortgage
fraud, in hindsight he believed that other issues were more pressing: “I don’t think
anyone can credibly argue that [mortgage fraud] is more important than the war on
terror. Mortgage fraud doesn’t involve taking loss of life so it doesn’t rank above the
priority of protecting neighborhoods from dangerous gangs or predators attacking
our children.”
In , the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the regulator of the
GSEs, released a report showing a “significant rise in the incidence of fraud in mortgage lending in and the first half of .” OFHEO stated it had been working
closely with law enforcement and was an active member of the Department of Justice
Mortgage Fraud Working Group. “The concern about mortgage fraud and fraud in
general was an issue,” Richard Spillenkothen, head of banking supervision and regulation at the Fed from to , told the FCIC. “And we understood there was an
increasing incidence of [mortgage fraud].”
Michael B. Mukasey, who served as U.S. attorney general from November
to the end of , told the Commission that he recalled “receiving reports of mortgage failures and of there being fraudulent activity in connection with flipping
houses, overvaluation, and the like. . . . I have a dim recollection of outside people
commenting that additional resources should be devoted, and there being speculation about whether resources that were being diverted to national security investigations, and in particular the terrorism investigations were somehow impeding fraud
investigations, which I thought was a bogus issue.” He said that the department had
other pressing priorities, such as terrorism, gang violence, and southwestern border
issues.
In letters to the FCIC, the Department of Justice outlined actions it undertook
along with the FBI to combat mortgage fraud. For example, in , the FBI
launched Operation Continued Action, targeting a variety of financial crimes, including mortgage fraud. In that same year, the agency started to publish an annual
mortgage fraud report. The following year, the FBI and other federal agencies announced a joint effort combating mortgage fraud. From July to October , this
program, Operation Quick Flip, produced indictments, arrests, and
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
convictions for mortgage fraud. In , the FBI started specifically tracking mortgage fraud cases and increased personnel dedicated to those efforts. And in ,
Operation Malicious Mortgage resulted in mortgage fraud cases in which
defendants were charged by U.S. Attorneys offices throughout the country.
William Black told the Commission that Washington essentially ignored the issue
and allowed it to worsen. “The FBI did have severe limits,” because of the need to respond to the / attacks, Black said, and the problem was compounded by the lack
of cooperation: “The terrible thing that happened was that the FBI got virtually no
assistance from the regulators, the banking regulators and the thrift regulators.”
Swecker, the former FBI official, told the Commission he had no contact with banking regulators during his tenure.
As mortgage fraud grew, state agencies took action. In Florida, Ellen Wilcox, a
special agent with the state Department of Law Enforcement, teamed with the Tampa
police department and Hillsborough County Consumer Protection Agency to bring
down a criminal ring scamming homeowners in the Tampa area. Its key member was
Orson Benn, a New York–based vice president of Argent Mortgage Company, a unit
of Ameriquest. Beginning in , investigators and two prosecutors worked for
years to unravel a network of alliances between real estate brokers, appraisers, home
repair contractors, title companies, notaries, and a convicted felon in a case that involved some loans.
According to charging documents in the case, the perpetrators would walk
through neighborhoods, looking for elderly homeowners they thought were likely to
have substantial equity in their homes. They would suggest repairs or improvements
to the homes. The homeowners would fill out paperwork, and insiders would use the
information to apply for loans in their names. Members of the ring would prepare
fraudulent loan documents, including false W- forms, filled with information about
invented employment and falsified salaries, and take out home equity loans in the
homeowners’ names. Each person involved in the transaction would receive a fee for
his or her role; Benn, at Argent, received a , kickback for each loan he helped
secure. When the loan was funded, the checks were frequently made out to the bogus
home construction company that had proposed the work, which would then disappear with the proceeds. Some of the homeowners never received a penny from the
refinancing on their homes. Hillsborough County officials learned of the scam when
homeowners approached them to say that scheduled repairs had never been made to
their homes, and then sometimes learned that they had lost years’ worth of equity as
well. Sixteen of defendants, including Benn, have been convicted or have pled
guilty.
Wilcox told the Commission that the “cost and length of these investigations
make them less attractive to most investigative agencies and prosecutors trying to
justify their budgets based on investigative statistics.” She said it has been hard to
follow up on other cases because so many of the subprime lenders have gone out of
business, making it difficult to track down perpetrators and witnesses. Ameriquest,
for example, collapsed in , although Argent, and the company’s loan-servicing
arm, were bought by Citigroup that same year.
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DISCLOSURE AND DUE DILIGENCE:
“A QUALITY CONTROL ISSUE IN THE FACTORY”
In addition to the rising fraud and egregious lending practices, lending standards deteriorated in the final years of the bubble. After growing for years, Alt-A lending increased another from to . In particular, option ARMs grew during
that period, interest-only mortgages grew , and no-documentation or low-documentation loans (measured for borrowers with fixed-rate mortgages) grew .
Overall, by no-doc or low-doc loans made up of all mortgages originated.
Many of these products would perform only if prices continued to rise and the borrower could refinance at a low rate.
In theory, every participant along the securitization pipeline should have had an
interest in the quality of every underlying mortgage. In practice, their interests were
often not aligned. Two New York Fed economists have pointed out the “seven deadly
frictions” in mortgage securitization—places along the pipeline where one party
knew more than the other, creating opportunities to take advantage. For example,
the lender who originated the mortgage for sale, earning a commission, knew a great
deal about the loan and the borrower but had no long-term stake in whether the
mortgage was paid, beyond the lender’s own business reputation. The securitizer
who packaged mortgages into mortgage-backed securities, similarly, was less likely to
retain a stake in those securities.
In theory, the rating agencies were important watchdogs over the securitization
process. They described their role as being “an umpire in the market.” But they did
not review the quality of individual mortgages in a mortgage-backed security, nor
did they check to see that the mortgages were what the securitizers said they were.
So the integrity of the market depended on two critical checks. First, firms purchasing and securitizing the mortgages would conduct due diligence reviews of the
mortgage pools, either using third-party firms or doing the reviews in-house. Second, following Securities and Exchange Commission rules, parties in the securitization process were expected to disclose what they were selling to investors. Neither of
these checks performed as they should have.
Due diligence firms: “Waived in”
As subprime mortgage securitization took off, securitizers undertook due diligence
on their own or through third parties on the mortgage pools that originators were
selling them. The originator and the securitizer negotiated the extent of the due diligence investigation. While the percentage of the pool examined could be as high as
, it was often much lower; according to some observers, as the market grew and
originators became more concentrated, they had more bargaining power over the
mortgage purchasers, and samples were sometimes as low as to . Some securitizers requested that the due diligence firm analyze a random sample of mortgages
from the pool; others asked for a sampling of those most likely to be deficient in some
way, in an effort to efficiently detect more of the problem loans.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Clayton Holdings, a Connecticut-based firm, was a major provider of third-party
due diligence services. As Clayton Vice President Vicki Beal explained to the FCIC,
firms like hers were “not retained by [their] clients to provide an opinion as to
whether a loan is a good loan or a bad loan.” Rather, they were hired to identify,
among other things, whether the loans met the originator’s stated underwriting
guidelines and, in some measure, to enable clients to negotiate better prices on pools
of loans.
The review fell into three general areas: credit, compliance, and valuation. Did the
loans meet the underwriting guidelines (generally the originator’s standards, sometimes with overlays or additional guidelines provided by the financial institutions
purchasing the loans)? Did the loans comply with federal and state laws, notably
predatory-lending laws and truth-in-lending requirements? Were the reported property values accurate? And, critically: to the degree that a loan was deficient, did it
have any “compensating factors” that offset these deficiencies? For example, if a loan
had a higher loan-to-value ratio than guidelines called for, did another characteristic
such as the borrower’s higher income mitigate that weakness? The due diligence firm
would then grade the loan sample and forward the data to its client. Report in hand,
the securitizer would negotiate a price for the pool and could “kick out” loans that
did not meet the stated guidelines.
Because of the volume of loans examined by Clayton during the housing boom,
the firm had a unique inside view of the underwriting standards that originators were
actually applying—and that securitizers were willing to accept. Loans were classified
into three groups: loans that met guidelines (a Grade Event), those that failed to
meet guidelines but were approved because of compensating factors (a Grade
Event), and those that failed to meet guidelines and were not approved (a Grade
Event). Overall, for the months that ended June , , Clayton rated of the
, loans it analyzed as Grade , and another as Grade —for a total of
that met the guidelines outright or with compensating factors. The remaining of
the loans were Grade . In theory, the banks could have refused to buy a loan pool,
or, indeed, they could have used the findings of the due diligence firm to probe the
loans’ quality more deeply. Over the -month period, of the loans that Clayton
found to be deficient—Grade —were “waived in” by the banks. Thus of the
loans sampled by Clayton were accepted even though the company had found a basis
for rejecting them (see figure .).
Referring to the data, Keith Johnson, the president of Clayton from May to
May , told the Commission, “That to me says there [was] a quality control
issue in the factory” for mortgage-backed securities. Johnson concluded that his
clients often waived in loans to preserve their business relationship with the loan
originator—a high number of rejections might lead the originator to sell the loans to
a competitor. Simply put, it was a sellers’ market. “Probably the seller had more
power than the Wall Street issuer,” Johnson told the FCIC.
The high rate of waivers following rejections may not itself be evidence of something wrong in the process, Beal testified. She said that as originators’ lending guidelines were declining, she saw the securitizing firms introduce additional credit
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Rejected Loans Waived in by Selected Banks
From January 2006 through June 2007, Clayton rejected 28% of the mortgages
it reviewed. Of these, 39% were waived in anyway.
A
ACCEPTED
LOANS
(Event 1 & 2)/
Total pool of
loans
B
REJECTED
LOANS
(Event 3)/
Total pool of
loans
C
REJECTED
LOANS
WAIVED IN BY
FINANCIAL
INSTITUTIONS
E
D
FINANCIAL
REJECTED
LOANS AFTER INSTITUTION
WAIVER RATE
WAIVERS
(C/B)
(B–C)
Financial Institution
Citigroup
58%
42%
13%
29%
31%
Credit Suisse
Deutsche
68
65
32
35
11
17
21
17
33
50
Goldman
JP Morgan
Lehman
Merrill
UBS
WaMu
Total Bank Sample
77
73
74
77
80
73
72%
23
27
26
23
20
27
28%
7
14
10
7
6
8
11%
16
13
16
16
13
19
17%
29
51
37
32
33
29
39%
NOTES: From Clayton Trending Reports. Numbers may not add due to rounding.
SOURCE: Clayton Holdings
Figure .
guidelines. “As you know, there was stated income, they were telling us look for reasonableness of that income, things like that.” With stricter guidelines, one would expect more rejections, and, after the securitizer looks more closely at the rejected
loans, possibly more waivers. As Moody’s Investors Service explained in a letter to
the FCIC, “A high rate of waivers from an institution with extremely tight underwriting standards could result in a pool that is less risky than a pool with no waivers from
an institution with extremely loose underwriting standards.” Nonetheless, many
prospectuses indicated that the loans in the pools either met guidelines outright or
had compensating factors, even though Clayton’s records show that only a portion of
the loans were sampled, and that of those that were sampled, a substantial percentage
of Grade Event loans were waived in.
Johnson said he approached the rating agencies in and to gauge their
interest in the exception-tracking product that Clayton was developing. He said he
shared some of their company’s results, attempting to convince the agencies that the
data would benefit the ratings process. “We went to the rating agencies and said,
‘Wouldn’t this information be great for you to have as you assign tranche levels of
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
risk?’” Johnson recalled. The agencies thought the due diligence firm’s data were
“great,” but they did not want the information, Johnson said, because it would presumably produce lower ratings for the securitizations and cost the agency business—
even in , as the private securitization market was winding down.
When securitizers did kick loans out of the pools, some originators simply put
them into new pools, presumably in hopes that those loans would not be captured in
the next pool’s sampling. The examiner’s report for New Century Financial’s bankruptcy describes such a practice. Similarly, Fremont Investment & Loan had a policy of putting loans into subsequent pools until they were kicked out three times, the
company’s former regulatory compliance and risk manager, Roger Ehrnman, told the
FCIC. As Johnson described the practice to the FCIC, this was the “three strikes,
you’re out rule.”
Some mortgage securitizers did their own due diligence, but seemed to devote
only limited resources to it. At Morgan Stanley, the head of due diligence was based
not in New York but rather in Boca Raton, Florida. He had, at any one time, two to
five individuals reporting to him directly—and they were actually employees of a personnel consultant, Equinox. Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan likewise also had only
small due diligence teams.
Banks did not necessarily have better processes for monitoring the mortgages that
they purchased. At an FCIC hearing on the mortgage business, Richard Bowen, a
whistleblower who had been a senior vice president at CitiFinancial Mortgage in
charge of a staff of -plus professional underwriters, testified that his team conducted quality assurance checks on the loans bought by Citigroup from a network of
lenders, including both subprime mortgages that Citigroup intended to hold and
prime mortgages that it intended to sell to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
For subprime purchases, Bowen’s team would review the physical credit file of the
loans they were purchasing. “During and , I witnessed many changes to the
way the credit risk was being evaluated for these pools during the purchase
processes,” Bowen said. For example, he said, the chief risk officer in Citigroup’s Consumer Lending business reversed large numbers of underwriting decisions from
“turn down” to “approved.”
Another part of Bowen’s charge was to supervise the purchase of roughly billion annually in prime loan pools, a high percentage of which were sold to Fannie
Mae and Freddie Mac for securitization. The sampling provided to Bowen’s staff for
quality control was supposed to include at least of the loan pool for a given securitization, but “this corporate mandate was usually ignored.” Samples of were
more likely, and the loan samples that Bowen’s group did examine showed extremely
high rates of noncompliance. “At the time that I became involved, which was early to
mid-, we identified that to percent of the files either had a ‘disagree’ decision, or they were missing critical documents.”
Bowen repeatedly expressed concerns to his direct supervisor and company executives about the quality and underwriting of mortgages that CitiMortgage purchased
and then sold to the GSEs. As discussed in a later chapter, the GSEs would later re-
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quire Citigroup to buy back . billion in loans as of November , finding that
the loans Citigroup had sold them did not conform to GSE standards.
SEC: “The elephant in the room is that
we didn’t review the prospectus supplements”
By the time the financial crisis hit, investors held more than trillion of non-GSE
mortgage-backed securities and close to billion of CDOs that held mortgagebacked securities. These securities were issued with practically no SEC oversight.
And only a minority were subject to the SEC’s ongoing public reporting requirements. The SEC’s mandate is to protect investors—generally not by reviewing the
quality of securities, but simply by ensuring adequate disclosures so that investors
can make up their own minds. In the case of initial public offerings of a company’s
shares, the work has historically involved a lengthy review of the issuer’s prospectus
and other “offering materials” prior to sale.
However, with the advent of “shelf registration,” a method of registering securities
on an ongoing basis, the process became much quicker for mortgage-backed securities ranked in the highest grades by the rating agencies. The process allowed issuers
to file a base prospectus with the SEC, giving investors notice that the issuer intended
to offer securities in the future. The issuer then filed a supplemental prospectus describing each offering’s terms. “The elephant in the room is that we didn’t review the
prospectus supplements,” the SEC’s deputy director for disclosure in corporation finance, Shelley Parratt, told the FCIC. To improve disclosures pertaining to mortgage-backed securities and other asset-backed securities, the SEC issued Regulation
AB in late . The regulation required that every prospectus include “a description
of the solicitation, credit-granting or underwriting criteria used to originate or purchase the pool assets, including, to the extent known, any changes in such criteria
and the extent to which such policies and criteria are or could be overridden.”
With essentially no review or oversight, how good were disclosures about mortgage-backed securities? Prospectuses usually included disclaimers to the effect that
not all mortgages would comply with the lending policies of the originator: “On a
case-by-case basis [the originator] may determine that, based upon compensating
factors, a prospective mortgage not strictly qualifying under the underwriting risk
category or other guidelines described below warrants an underwriting exception.”
The disclosure typically had a sentence stating that “a substantial number” or perhaps
“a substantial portion of the Mortgage Loans will represent these exceptions.” Citigroup’s Bowen criticized the extent of information provided on loan pools: “There
was no disclosure made to the investors with regard to the quality of the files they
were purchasing.”
Such disclosures were insufficient for investors to know what criteria the mortgages they were buying actually did meet. Only a small portion—as little as to
—of the loans in any deal were sampled, and evidence from Clayton shows that a
significant number did not meet stated guidelines or have compensating factors. On
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
the loans in the remainder of the mortgage pool that were not sampled (as much as
), Clayton and the securitizers had no information, but one could reasonably expect them to have many of the same deficiencies, and at the same rate, as the sampled
loans. Prospectuses for the ultimate investors in the mortgage-backed securities did
not contain this information, or information on how few loans were reviewed, raising
the question of whether the disclosures were materially misleading, in violation of
the securities laws.
CDOs were issued under a different regulatory framework from the one that applied to many mortgage-backed securities, and were not subject even to the minimal
shelf registration rules. Underwriters typically issued CDOs under the SEC’s Rule
A, which allows the unregistered resale of certain securities to so-called qualified
institutional buyers (QIBs); these included investors as diverse as insurance companies like MetLife, pension funds like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, and investment banks like Goldman Sachs.
The SEC created Rule A in , making securities markets more attractive to
borrowers and U.S. investment banks more competitive with their foreign counterparts; at the time, market participants viewed U.S. disclosure requirements as more
onerous than those in other countries. The new rule significantly expanded the market for these securities by declaring that distributions which complied with the rule
would no longer be considered “public offerings” and therefore would not be subject
to the SEC’s registration requirements. In , Congress reinforced this exemption
with the National Securities Markets Improvements Act, legislation that Denise Voigt
Crawford, a commissioner on the Texas Securities Board, characterized to the Commission “as prohibit[ing] the states from taking preventative actions in areas that we
now know have been substantial contributing factors to the current crisis.” Under
this legislation, state securities regulators were preempted from overseeing private
placements such as CDOs. In the absence of registration requirements, a new debt
market developed quickly under Rule A. This market was liquid, since qualified
investors could freely trade Rule A debt securities. But debt securities when Rule
A was enacted were mostly corporate bonds, very different from the CDOs that
dominated the private placement market more than a decade later.
After the crisis unfolded, investors, arguing that disclosure hadn’t been adequate,
filed numerous lawsuits under federal and state securities laws. As we will see, some
have already resulted in substantial settlements.
REGULATORS: “MARKETS WILL ALWAYS SELFCORRECT”
Where were the regulators? Declining underwriting standards and new mortgage
products had been on regulators’ radar screens in the years before the crisis, but disagreements among the agencies and their traditional preference for minimal interference delayed action.
Supervisors had, since the s, followed a “risk-focused” approach that relied
extensively on banks’ own internal risk management systems. “As internal systems
improve, the basic thrust of the examination process should shift from largely dupli-
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cating many activities already conducted within the bank to providing constructive
feedback that the bank can use to enhance further the quality of its risk-management
systems,” Chairman Greenspan had said in . Across agencies, there was a “historic vision, historic approach, that a lighter hand at regulation was the appropriate
way to regulate,” Eugene Ludwig, comptroller of the currency from to , told
the FCIC, referring to the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in . The New York Fed, in a
“lessons-learned” analysis after the crisis, pointed to the mistaken belief that “markets
will always self-correct.” “A deference to the self-correcting property of markets inhibited supervisors from imposing prescriptive views on banks,” the report concluded.
The reliance on banks’ own risk management would extend to capital standards.
Banks had complained for years that the original Basel standards did not allow
them sufficient latitude to base their capital on the riskiness of particular assets. After
years of negotiations, international regulators, with strong support from the Fed, introduced the Basel II capital regime in June , which would allow banks to lower
their capital charges if they could show they had sophisticated internal models for estimating the riskiness of their assets. While no U.S. bank fully implemented the more
sophisticated approaches that it allowed, Basel II reflected and reinforced the supervisors’ risk-focused approach. Spillenkothen said that one of the regulators’ biggest
mistakes was their “acceptance of Basel II premises,” which he described as displaying “an excessive faith in internal bank risk models, an infatuation with the specious
accuracy of complex quantitative risk measurement techniques, and a willingness (at
least in the early days of Basel II) to tolerate a reduction in regulatory capital in return for the prospect of better risk management and greater risk-sensitivity.”
Regulators had been taking notice of the mortgage market for several years before
the crisis. As early as , they recognized that mortgage products and borrowers
had changed during and following the refinancing boom of the previous year, and
they began work on providing guidance to banks and thrifts. But too little was done,
and too late, because of interagency discord, industry pushback, and a widely held
view that market participants had the situation well in hand.
“Within the board, people understood that many of these loan types had gotten to
an extreme,” Susan Bies, then a Fed governor and chair of the Federal Reserve Board’s
subcommittees on both safety and soundness supervision and consumer protection
supervision, told the FCIC. “So the main debate within the board was how tightly
[should we] rein in the abuses that we were seeing. So it was more of ‘to a degree.’”
Indeed, in the same June Federal Open Market Committee meeting described earlier, one FOMC member noted that “some of the newer, more intricate
and untested credit default instruments had caused some market turmoil.” Another
participant was concerned “that subprime lending was an accident waiting to happen.” A third participant noted the risks in mortgage securities, the rapid growth of
subprime lending, and the fact that many lenders had “inadequate information on
borrowers,” adding, however, that record profits and high capital levels allayed those
concerns. A fourth participant said that “we could be seeing the final gasps of house
price appreciation.” The participant expressed concern about “creative financing” and
was “worried that piggybacks and other non-traditional loans,” whose risk of default
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
could be higher than suggested by the securities they backed, “could be making the
books of GSEs look better than they really were.” Fed staff replied that the GSEs were
not large purchasers of private label securities.
In the spring of , the FOMC would again discuss risks in the housing and
mortgage markets and express nervousness about the growing “ingenuity” of the
mortgage sector. One participant noted that negative amortization loans had the pernicious effect of stripping equity and wealth from homeowners and raised concerns
about nontraditional lending practices that seemed based on the presumption of
continued increases in home prices.
John Snow, then treasury secretary, told the FCIC that he called a meeting in late
or early to urge regulators to address the proliferation of poor lending
practices. He said he was struck that regulators tended not to see a problem at their
own institutions. “Nobody had a full -degree view. The basic reaction from financial regulators was, ‘Well, there may be a problem. But it’s not in my field of view,’”
Snow told the FCIC. Regulators responded to Snow’s questions by saying, “Our default rates are very low. Our institutions are very well capitalized. Our institutions
[have] very low delinquencies. So we don’t see any real big problem.”
In May , the banking agencies did issue guidance on the risks of home equity
lines of credit and home equity loans. It cautioned financial institutions about credit risk
management practices, pointing to interest-only features, low- or no-documentation
loans, high loan-to-value and debt-to-income ratios, lower credit scores, greater use of
automated valuation models, and the increase in transactions generated through a loan
broker or other third party. While this guidance identified many of the problematic
lending practices engaged in by bank lenders, it was limited to home equity loans. It did
not apply to first mortgages.
In , examiners from the Fed and other agencies conducted a confidential
“peer group” study of mortgage practices at six companies that together had originated . trillion in mortgages in , almost half the national total. In the group
were five banks whose holding companies were under the Fed’s supervisory
purview—Bank of America, Citigroup, Countrywide, National City, and Wells
Fargo—as well as the largest thrift, Washington Mutual. The study “showed a very
rapid increase in the volume of these irresponsible loans, very risky loans,” Sabeth
Siddique, then head of credit risk at the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Banking
Supervision and Regulation, told the FCIC. A large percentage of their loans issued
were subprime and Alt-A mortgages, and the underwriting standards for these products had deteriorated.
Once the Fed and other supervisors had identified the mortgage problems, they
agreed to express those concerns to the industry in the form of nonbinding guidance.
“There was among the Board of Governors folks, you know, some who felt that if we
just put out guidance, the banks would get the message,” Bies said.
The federal agencies therefore drafted guidance on nontraditional mortgages
such as option ARMs, issuing it for public comment in late . The draft guidance
directed lenders to consider a borrower’s ability to make the loan payment when rates
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adjusted, rather than just the lower starting rate. It warned lenders that lowdocumentation loans should be “used with caution.”
Immediately, the industry was up in arms. The American Bankers Association
said the guidance “overstate[d] the risk of non-traditional mortgages.” Other market participants complained that the guidance required them to assume “a worst case
scenario,” that is, the scenario in which borrowers would have to make the full payment when rates adjusted. They disputed the warning on low-documentation
loans, maintaining that “almost any form of documentation can be appropriate.”
They denied that better disclosures were required to protect borrowers from the risks
of nontraditional mortgages, arguing that they were “not aware of any empirical evidence that supports the need for further consumer protection standards.”
The need for guidance was controversial within the agencies, too. “We got
tremendous pushback from the industry as well as Congress as well as, you know, internally,” the Fed’s Siddique told the FCIC. “Because it was stifling innovation, potentially, and it was denying the American dream to many people.”
The pressures to weaken and delay the guidance were strong and came from
many sources. Opposition by the Office of Thrift Supervision helped delay the mortgage guidance for almost a year. Bies said, “There was some real concern about if
the Fed tightened down on [the banks it regulated], whether that would create an unlevel playing field . . . [for] stand-alone mortgage lenders whom the [Fed] did not regulate.” Another challenge to regulating the mortgage market was Congress. She
recalled an occasion when she testified about a proposed rule and “members of Congress [said] that we were going to deny the dream of homeownership to Americans if
we put this new stronger standard in place.”
When guidance was put in place in , regulators policed their guidance
through bank examinations and informal measures such as “voluntary agreements”
with supervised institutions.
It also appeared some institutions switched regulators in search of more lenient
treatment. In December , Countrywide applied to switch regulators from the Fed
and OCC to the OTS. Countrywide’s move came after several months of evaluation
within the company about the benefits of OTS regulation, many of which were promoted by the OTS itself over the course of an “outreach effort” initiated in mid-
after John Reich became director of the agency. Publicly, Countrywide stated that the
decision to switch to the OTS was driven by the desire to have one, housing-focused
regulator, rather than separate regulators for the bank and the holding company.
However, other factors came into play as well. The OCC’s top Countrywide examiner told the FCIC that Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo and President and COO
David Sambol thought the OCC’s position on property appraisals would be “killing
the business.” An internal July Countrywide briefing paper noted, “The OTS
regulation of holding companies is not as intrusive as that of the Federal Reserve. In
particular, the OTS rarely conducts extensive onsite examinations and when they do
conduct an onsite examination they are generally not considered intrusive to the
holding company.” The briefing paper also noted, “The OTS generally is considered a
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less sophisticated regulator than the Federal Reserve.” In August , Mozilo
wrote to members of his executive team, “It appears that the Fed is now troubled by
pay options while the OTS is not. Since pay options are a major component of both
our volumes and profitability the Fed may force us into a decision faster than we
would like.” Countrywide Chief Risk Officer John McMurray responded that “based
on my meetings with the FRB and OTS, the OTS appears to be both more familiar
and more comfortable with Option ARMs.”
The OTS approved Countrywide’s application for a thrift charter on March ,
.
LEVERAGED LOANS AND COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE:
“YOU’VE GOT TO GET UP AND DANCE”
The credit bubble was not confined to the residential mortgage market. The markets
for commercial real estate and leveraged loans (typically loans to below-investmentgrade companies to aid their business or to finance buyouts) also experienced similar
bubble-and-bust dynamics, although the effects were not as large and damaging as in
residential real estate. From to , these other two markets grew tremendously, spurred by structured finance products—commercial mortgage–backed securities and collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), respectively—which were in
many ways similar to residential mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. And just as
in the residential mortgage market, underwriting standards loosened, even as the
cost of borrowing decreased, and trading in these securities was bolstered by the
development of new credit derivatives products.
Historically, leveraged loans had been made by commercial banks; but a market
for institutional investors developed and grew in the mid- to late s. An “agent”
bank would originate a package of loans to only one company and then sell or syndicate the loans in the package to other banks and large nonbank investors. The package generally included loans with different maturities. Some were short-term lines of
credit, which would be syndicated to banks; the rest were longer-term loans syndicated to nonbank, institutional investors. Leveraged loan issuance more than doubled from to , but the rapid growth was in the longer-term institutional
loans rather than in short-term lending. By , the longer-term leveraged loans
rose to billion, up from billion in .
Starting in , the longer-term leveraged loans were packaged in CLOs, which
were rated according to methodologies similar to those the rating agencies used for
CDOs. Like CDOs, CLOs had tranches, underwriters, and collateral managers. The
market was less than billion annually from to , but then it started growing dramatically. Annual issuance exceeded billion in and peaked above
billion in . From through the third quarter of , more than of
leveraged loans were packaged into CLOs.
As the market for leveraged loans grew, credit became looser and leverage increased as well. The deals became larger and costs of borrowing declined. Loans that
in had paid interest of percentage points over an interbank lending rate were
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refinanced in early into loans paying just percentage points over that same
rate. During the peak of the recent leveraged buyout boom, leveraged loans were frequently issued with interest-only, “payment-in-kind,” and “covenant-lite” terms.
Payment-in-kind loans allowed borrowers to defer paying interest by issuing new
debt to cover accrued interest. Covenant-lite loans exempted borrowers from standard loan covenants that usually require corporate firms to limit their other debts
and to maintain minimum levels of cash. Private equity firms, those that specialized
in investing directly in companies, found it easier and cheaper to finance their leveraged buyouts. Just as home prices rose, so too did the prices of the target companies.
One of the largest deals ever made involving leveraged loans was announced on
April , , by KKR, a private equity firm. KKR said it intended to purchase First
Data Corporation, a processor of electronic data including credit and debit card payments, for about billion. As part of this transaction, KKR would issue billion
in junk bonds and take out another billion in leveraged loans from a consortium
of banks including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC Securities,
Lehman Brothers, and Merrill Lynch.
As late as July , Citigroup and others were still increasing their leveraged loan
business. Citigroup CEO Charles Prince then said of the business, “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is
playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” Prince later explained to
the FCIC, “At that point in time, because interest rates had been so low for so long,
the private equity firms were driving very hard bargains with the banks. And at that
point in time the banks individually had no credibility to stop participating in this
lending business. It was not credible for one institution to unilaterally back away
from this leveraged lending business. It was in that context that I suggested that all of
us, we were all regulated entities, that the regulators had an interest in tightening up
lending standards in the leveraged lending area.”
The CLO market would seize up in the summer of during the financial crisis, just as the much-larger mortgage-related CDO market seized. At the time this
would be roughly billion in outstanding commitments for new loans; as demand in the secondary market dried up, these loans ended up on the banks’ balance
sheets.
Commercial real estate—multifamily apartment buildings, office buildings, hotels, retail establishments, and industrial properties—went through a bubble similar
to that in the housing market. Investment banks created commercial mortgage–
backed securities and even CDOs out of commercial real estate loans, just as they did
with residential mortgages. And, just as houses appreciated from on, so too did
commercial real estate values. Office prices rose by nearly between and
in the central business districts of the markets for which data are available.
The increase was in Phoenix, in Tampa, in Manhattan, and in
Los Angeles.
Issuance of commercial mortgage–backed securities rose from billion in
to billion in , reaching billion in . When securitization markets
contracted, issuance fell to billion in and billion in . When about
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one-fourth of commercial real estate mortgages were securitized in , securitizers
issued billion of commercial mortgage CDOs, a number that again dropped precipitously in .
Leveraged loans and the commercial real estate sector came together on July ,
, when the Blackstone Group announced its plan to buy Hilton—a hotel chain
with , properties—for billion, a premium over the share price. A year
later, one author described this deal as “the apogee of the early-millennial megabuyout frenzy, where cheap and readily available credit, coupled with a relentless one-upmanship, spurred private equity firms to buy out companies at often absurd
overvaluations, saddle them with massive debt, and then pay themselves hefty fees
for the trouble.” Twenty billion dollars in financing came from the top five investment banks and large commercial banks such as Bank of America and Deutsche
Bank.
Bear Stearns was increasingly active in these markets. While Bear topped the
market in residential securitizations, it ranked in the bottom half in commercial securitizations. But it was racing to catch up, and in a presentation boasted: “In
, we firmly established Bear Stearns as a global presence in commercial real estate finance.” The firm’s commercial real estate mortgage originations more than doubled between and .
And then the market came crashing to a halt. Although the commercial real estate
mortgage market was much smaller than the residential real estate market—in ,
commercial real estate debt was less than trillion, compared to trillion for residential mortgages—it declined even more steeply. From its peak, commercial real
estate fell roughly in value, and prices have remained close to their lows. Losses
on commercial real estate would be an issue across Wall Street, particularly for
Lehman and Bear. And potentially for the taxpayer. When the Federal Reserve would
assume billion of Bear’s illiquid assets in , that would include roughly billion in loans from the unsold portion of the Hilton financing package. And the
commercial real estate market would continue to decline long after the housing market had begun to stabilize.
LEHMAN: FROM “MOVING” TO “STORAGE”
Even as the market was nearing its peak, Lehman took on more risk.
On October , , when commercial real estate already made up . of its assets, Lehman Brothers acquired a major stake in Archstone Smith, a publicly traded
real estate investment trust, for . billion. Archstone owned more than ,
apartments, including units still under construction, in over communities in the
United States. It was the bank’s largest commercial real estate investment.
Lehman initially projected that Archstone would generate more than . billion
in profits over years—projections based on optimistic assumptions, given the state
of the market at that point. Both Lehman and Archstone were highly leveraged:
Archstone had little cushion if its rent receipts should go down, and Lehman had little cushion if investments such as Archstone should lose value. Although the firm
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had proclaimed that “Risk Management is at the very core of Lehman’s business
model,” the Executive Committee simply left its risk officer, Madelyn Antoncic, out of
the loop when it made this investment.
Since the late s, Lehman had also built a large mortgage origination arm, a
formidable securities issuance business, and a powerful underwriting division as
well. Then, in its March “Global Strategy Offsite,” CEO Richard Fuld and other
executives explained to their colleagues a new move toward an aggressive growth
strategy, including greater risk and more leverage. They described the change as a
shift from a “moving” or securitization business to a “storage” business, in which
Lehman would make and hold longer-term investments.
By summer , the housing market faced ballooning inventories, sharply reduced sales volumes, and wavering prices. Senior management regularly disregarded
the firm’s risk policies and limits—and warnings from risk managers—and pursued
its “countercyclical growth strategy.” It had worked well during prior market dislocations, and Lehman’s management assumed that it would work again. Lehman’s Aurora unit continued to originate Alt-A loans after the housing market had begun to
show signs of weakening. Lehman also continued to securitize mortgage assets for
sale but was now holding more of them as investments. Across both the commercial
and residential real estate sectors, the mortgage-related assets on Lehman’s books increased from billion in to billion in . This increase would be part
of Lehman’s undoing a year later.
Lehman’s regulators did not restrain its rapid growth. The SEC, Lehman’s main
regulator, knew of the firm’s disregard of risk management. The SEC knew that
Lehman continued to increase its holding of mortgage securities, and that it had increased and exceeded risk limits—facts noted almost monthly in official SEC reports
obtained by the FCIC. Nonetheless, Erik Sirri, who led the SEC’s supervision program, told the FCIC that it would not have mattered if the agency had fully recognized the risks associated with commercial real estate. To avoid serious losses, Sirri
maintained, Lehman would have had to start selling real estate assets in . Instead, it kept buying, well into the first quarter of .
In addition, according to the bankruptcy examiner, Lehman understated its leverage through “Repo ” transactions—an accounting maneuver to temporarily remove assets from the balance sheet before each reporting period. Martin Kelly,
Lehman’s global financial controller, stated that the transactions had “no substance”—their “only purpose or motive . . . was reduction in the balance sheet.” Other
Lehman executives described Repo transactions as an “accounting gimmick” and
a “lazy way of managing the balance sheet as opposed to legitimately meeting balance
sheet targets at quarter-end.” Bart McDade, who became Lehman’s president and
chief operating officer in June , in an email called Repo transactions “another drug we R on.”
Ernst & Young (E&Y), Lehman’s auditor, was aware of the Repo practice but
did not question Lehman’s failure to publicly disclose it, despite being informed in
May by Lehman Senior Vice President Matthew Lee that the practice was improper. The Lehman bankruptcy examiner concluded that E&Y took “virtually no
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action to investigate the Repo allegations, . . . took no steps to question or challenge the non-disclosure by Lehman,” and that “colorable claims exist that E&Y did
not meet professional standards, both in investigating Lee’s allegations and in connection with its audit and review of Lehman’s financial statements.” New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo sued E&Y in December , accusing the firm of
facilitating a “massive accounting fraud” by helping Lehman to deceive the public
about its financial condition.
The Office of Thrift Supervision had also regulated Lehman since through
its jurisdiction over Lehman’s thrift subsidiary. Although “the SEC was regarded as
the primary regulator,” the OTS examiner told the FCIC, “we in no way just assumed
that [the SEC] would do the right thing, so we regulated and supervised the holding
company.” Still, not until July —just a few months before Lehman failed—
would the OTS issue a report warning that Lehman had made an “outsized bet” on
commercial real estate—larger than that by its peer firms, despite Lehman’s smaller
size; that Lehman was “materially overexposed” to the commercial real estate sector;
and that Lehman had “major failings in its risk management process.”
FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC: “TWO STARK CHOICES”
In , while Countrywide, Citigroup, Lehman, and many others in the mortgage
and CDO businesses were going into overdrive, executives at the two behemoth
GSEs, Fannie and Freddie, worried they were being left behind. One sign of the
times: Fannie’s biggest source of mortgages, Countrywide, expanded—that is, loosened—its underwriting criteria, and Fannie would not buy the new mortgages,
Countrywide President and COO Sambol told the FCIC. Typical of the market as a
whole, Countrywide sold of its loans to Fannie in but only in and
in .
“The risk in the environment has accelerated dramatically,” Thomas Lund, Fannie’s head of single-family lending, told fellow senior officers at a strategic planning
meeting on June , . In a bulleted list, he ticked off changes in the market: the
“proliferation of higher risk alternative mortgage products, growing concern about
housing bubbles, growing concerns about borrowers taking on increased risks and
higher debt, [and] aggressive risk layering.”
“We face two stark choices: stay the course [or] meet the market where the market
is,” Lund said. If Fannie Mae stayed the course, it would maintain its credit discipline,
protect the quality of its book, preserve capital, and intensify the company’s public
voice on concerns. However, it would also face lower volumes and revenues, continued declines in market share, lower earnings, and a weakening of key customer relationships. It was simply a matter of relevance, former CEO Dan Mudd told the
FCIC: “If you’re not relevant, you’re unprofitable, and you’re not serving the mission.
And there was danger to profitability. I’m speaking more long term than in any given
quarter or any given year. So this was a real strategic rethinking.”
Lund saw significant obstacles to meeting the market. He noted Fannie’s lack of
capability and infrastructure to structure the types of riskier mortgage-backed secu-
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rities offered by Wall Street, its unfamiliarity with the new credit risks, worries that
the price of the mortgages wouldn’t be worth the risk, and regulatory concerns surrounding certain products. At this and other meetings, Lund recommended studying whether the current market changes were cyclical or more permanent, but he also
recommended that Fannie “dedicate significant resources to develop capabilities to
compete in any mortgage environment.” Citibank executives also made a presentation to Fannie’s board in July , warning that Fannie was increasingly at risk of
being marginalized, and that “stay the course” was not an option. Citibank proposed
that Fannie expand its guarantee business to cover nontraditional products such as
Alt-A and subprime mortgages. Of course, as the second-largest seller of mortgages to Fannie, Citibank would benefit from such a move. Over the next two years,
Citibank would increase its sales to Fannie by more than a quarter, to billion in
the fiscal year, while more than tripling its sales of interest-only mortgages, to
billion.
Lund told the FCIC that in , the board would adopt his recommendation: for
the time being, Fannie would “stay the course,” while developing capabilities to compete with Wall Street in nonprime mortgages. In fact, however, internal reports
show that by September , the company had already begun to increase its acquisitions of riskier loans. By the end of , its Alt-A loans were billion, up from
billion in and billion in ; its loans without full documentation
were billion, up from billion in ; and its interest-only mortgages were
billion in , up from billion in . (Note that these categories can overlap. For example, Alt-A loans may also lack full documentation.) To cover potential
losses from all of its business activities, Fannie had a total of billion in capital at
the end of . “Plans to meet market share targets resulted in strategies to increase
purchases of higher risk products, creating a conflict between prudent credit risk
management and corporate business objectives,” the Federal Housing Finance
Agency (the successor to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight) would
write in September on the eve of the government takeover of Fannie Mae.
“Since , Fannie Mae has grown its Alt-A portfolio and other higher risk products
rapidly without adequate controls in place.”
In its financial statements, Fannie Mae’s disclosures about key loan characteristics
changed over time, making it difficult to discern the company’s exposure to subprime
and Alt-A mortgages. For example, from until , the company’s definition of
a “subprime” loan was one originated by a company or a part of a company that specialized in subprime loans. Using that definition, Fannie Mae stated that subprime
loans accounted for less than of its business volume during those years even while
it reported that of its conventional, single-family loans in , and
loans were to borrowers with FICO scores less than .
Similarly, Freddie had enlarged its portfolios quickly with limited capital. In
, CEO Richard Syron fired David Andrukonis, Freddie’s longtime chief risk officer. Syron said one of the reasons that Andrukonis was fired was that Andrukonis
was concerned about relaxing underwriting standards to meet mission goals. He told
the FCIC, “I had a legitimate difference of opinion on how dangerous it was. Now, as
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it turns out . . . he was able to foresee the market better than a lot of the rest of us
could.” The new risk officer, Anurag Saksena, recounted to the FCIC staff that he
repeatedly made the case for increasing capital to compensate for the increasing
risk, although Donald Bisenius, Freddie’s executive vice president for single-family
housing, told FCIC staff that he did not recall such discussions. Syron never made
Saksena part of the senior management team.
OFHEO, the GSEs’ regulator, noted their increasing purchases of riskier loans and
securities in every examination report. But OFHEO never told the GSEs to stop.
Rather, year after year, the regulator said that both companies had adequate capital,
strong asset quality, prudent credit risk management, and qualified and active officers
and directors.
In May , at the same time as it paid a million penalty related to deficiencies in its accounting practices, Fannie agreed to limit its on-balance-sheet mortgage
portfolio to billion, the level on December , . Two months later, Freddie agreed to limit the growth of its portfolio to per year. In examination reports for the year , issued to both companies in May , OFHEO noted the
growth in purchases of risky loans and non-GSE securities but concluded that each
GSE had “strong” asset quality and was adequately capitalized. OFHEO reported that
management at Freddie was committed to resolving weaknesses and its Board was
“qualified and active.” The examination of Fannie was limited in scope—focusing primarily on the company’s efforts to fix accounting and internal control deficiencies—because of the extensive resources needed to complete a three-year special
examination initiated in the wake of Fannie’s accounting scandal.
In that special examination, OFHEO pinned many of the GSEs’ problems on their
corporate cultures. Its May special examination report on Fannie Mae detailed the
“arrogant and unethical corporate culture where Fannie Mae employees manipulated
accounting and earnings to trigger bonuses for senior executives from to .”
OFHEO Director James Lockhart (who had assumed that position the month the report was issued) recalled discovering during the special examination an email from
Mudd, then Fannie’s chief operating officer, to CEO Franklin Raines. Mudd wrote,
“The old political reality [at Fannie] was that we always won, we took no prisoners . . .
we used to . . . be able to write, or have written rules that worked for us.”
Soon after his arrival, Lockhart began advocating for reform. “The need for legislation was obvious as OFHEO was regulating two of the largest and most systematically important US financial institutions,” he told the FCIC. But no reform
legislation would be passed until July , , and by then it would be too late.
: “Increase our penetration into subprime”
After several years during which Fannie Mae purchased riskier loans and securities,
then-Chief Financial Officer Robert Levin proposed a strategic initiative to “increase
our penetration into subprime” at Fannie’s January board meeting. In the
next month the board gave its approval. Fannie would become more and more aggressive in its purchases. During a summer retreat for Fannie’s senior officers, as
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Stephen Ashley, the chairman of the board, introduced Fannie’s new chief risk officer,
Enrico Dallavecchia, he declared that the new CRO would not stand in the way of
risk taking: “We have to think differently and creatively about risk, about compliance,
and about controls. Historically these have not been strong suits of Fannie Mae. . . .
Today’s thinking requires that these areas become active partners with the business
units and be viewed as tools that enable us to develop product and address market
needs. Enrico Dallavecchia was not brought on-board to be a business dampener.”
In , Fannie acquired billion of loans; of those (including some overlap),
billion, or about , had combined loan-to-value ratios above ; were
interest-only; and did not have full documentation. Fannie also purchased
billion of subprime and billion of Alt-A non-GSE mortgage-backed securities.
The total amount of riskier loans represented larger multiples of capital than before.
At least initially, while house prices were still increasing, the strategic plan to increase risk and market share appeared to be successful. Fannie reported net income
of billion in and then billion in . In those two years, CEO Mudd’s
compensation totaled . million and Levin, who was interim CFO and then chief
business officer, received . million.
In , Freddie Mac also continued to increase risk, “expand[ing] the purchase
and guarantee of higher-risk mortgages . . . to increase market share, meet mission
goals, stay competitive, and be responsive to sellers’ needs.” It lowered its underwriting standards, increasing the use of credit policy waivers and exceptions. Newer
alternative products, offered to a broader range of customers than ever before, accounted for about of that year’s purchases. Freddie Mac’s plan also seemed to be
successful. The company increased risk and market share while maintaining the
same net income for and , billion. CEO Richard Syron’s compensation
totaled . million for and combined, while Chief Operating Officer
Eugene McQuade received . million.
Again, OFHEO was aware of these developments. Its March report noted
that Fannie’s new initiative to purchase higher-risk products included a plan to capture of the subprime market by . And OFHEO reported that credit risk increased “slightly” because of growth in subprime and other nontraditional products.
But overall asset quality in its single-family business was found to be “strong,” and the
board members were “qualified and active.” And, of course, Fannie was “adequately
capitalized.”
Similarly, OFHEO told Freddie in that it had weaknesses that raised some
possibility of failure, but that overall, Freddie’s strength and financial capacity made
failure unlikely. Freddie did remain a “significant supervisory concern,” and
OFHEO noted the significant shift toward higher-risk mortgages. But again, as in
previous years, the regulator concluded that Freddie had “adequate capital,” and its
asset quality and credit risk management were “strong.”
The GSEs charged a fee for guaranteeing payments on GSE mortgage–backed securities, and OFHEO was silent about Fannie’s practice of charging less to guarantee securities than their models indicated was appropriate. Mark Winer, the head of Fannie’s
Business, Analysis and Decisions Group since May and the person responsible for
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modeling pricing fees, raised concerns that Fannie Mae was not charging fees for Alt-A
mortgages that adequately compensated for the risk. Winer recalled that Levin was critical of his models, asking, “Can you show me why you think you’re right and everyone
else is wrong?” Undercharging for the guarantee fees was intended to increase market
share, according to Todd Hempstead, the senior vice president at Fannie in charge of
the western region. Mudd acknowledged the difference between the model fee and
the fee actually charged and also told the FCIC that the scarcity of historical data for
many loans caused the model fee to be unreliable.
In the September , , memo that would recommend that Fannie be placed
into conservatorship, OFHEO would expressly cite this practice as unsafe and unsound: “During and , modeled loan fees were higher than actual fees
charged, due to an emphasis on growing market share and competing with Wall
Street and the other GSE.”
: “Moving deeper into the credit pool”
By the time housing prices had peaked in the second quarter of , delinquencies
had started to rise. During the board meeting held in April , Lund said that dislocation in the housing market was an opportunity for Fannie to reclaim market
share. At the same time, Fannie would support the housing market by increasing liquidity. At the next month’s meeting, Lund reported that Fannie’s market share
could increase to from about in . Indeed, in Fannie Mae forged
ahead, purchasing more high-risk loans. Fannie also purchased billion of subprime non-GSE securities, and billion of Alt-A.
In June, Fannie prepared its five-year strategic plan, titled “Deepen Segments—Develop Breadth.” The plan, which mentioned Fannie’s “tough new challenges—a weakening housing market” and “slower-growing mortgage debt
market”—included taking and managing “more mortgage credit risk, moving deeper
into the credit pool to serve a large and growing part of the mortgage market.” Overall, revenues and earnings were projected to increase in each of the following five
years.
Management told the board that Fannie’s risk management function had all the
necessary means and budget to act on the plan. Chief Risk Officer Dallavecchia did
not agree, especially in light of a planned cut in his budget. In a July , ,
email to CEO Mudd, Dallavecchia wrote that he was very upset that he had to hear at
the board meeting that Fannie had the “will and the money to change our culture and
support taking more credit risk,” given the proposed budget cut for his department in
after a reduction in headcount in . In an earlier email, Dallavecchia
had written to Chief Operating Officer Michael Williams that Fannie had “one of the
weakest control processes” that he “ever witnessed in [his] career, . . . was not even
close to having proper control processes for credit, market and operational risk,” and
was “already back to the old days of scraping on controls . . . to reduce expenses.”
These deficiencies indicated that “people don’t care about the [risk] function or they
don’t get it.”
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Mudd responded, “My experience is that email is not a very good venue for conversation, venting or negotiating.” If Dallavecchia felt that he had been dealt with in
bad faith, he should “address it man to man,” unless he wanted Mudd “to be the one
to carry messages for you to your peers.” Mudd concluded, “Please come and see me
today face to face.” Dallavecchia told the FCIC that when he wrote this email he
was tired and upset, and that the view it expressed was more extreme than what he
thought at the time. Fannie, after continuing to purchase and guarantee higher-risk
mortgages in , would report a . billion net loss for the year, caused by credit
losses. In , Mudd’s compensation totaled . million and Levin’s totaled
million.
In , Freddie Mac also persisted in increasing purchases of riskier loans. A
strategic plan from March highlighted “pressure on the franchise” and the “risk of
falling below our return aspirations.” The company would try to improve earnings
by entering adjacent markets: “Freddie Mac has competitive advantages over nonGSE participants in nonprime,” the strategy document explained. “We have an opportunity to expand into markets we have missed—Subprime and Alt-A.” It took
that opportunity. As OFHEO would note in its examination report, Freddie
purchased and guaranteed loans originated in and with higher-risk characteristics, including interest-only loans, loans with FICO scores less than , loans
with higher loan-to-value ratios, loans with high debt-to-income ratios, and loans
without full documentation. Financial results in were poor: a . billion net
loss driven by credit losses. The value of the billion subprime and Alt-A privatelabel securities book suffered a billion decline in market value. In , Syron’s
compensation totaled . million and McQuade’s totaled . million.
Affordable housing goals: “GSEs cried bloody murder forever”
As discussed earlier, beginning in , the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) periodically set goals for the GSEs related to increasing homeownership among low- and moderate-income borrowers and borrowers in underserved
areas. Until , these goals were based on the fraction of the total mortgage market
made up of low- and moderate-income families. The goals were intended to be only a
modest reach beyond the mortgages that the GSEs would normally purchase.
From to , of GSE purchases were required to meet goals for lowand moderate-income borrowers. In , the goal was raised to . Mudd said
that as long as the goals remained below half of the GSEs’ lending, loans made in the
normal course of business would satisfy the goals: “What comes in the door through
the natural course of business will tend to match the market, and therefore will tend
to meet the goals.” Levin told the FCIC that “there was a great deal of business that
came through normal channels that met goals” and that most of the loans that satisfied the goals “would have been made anyway.”
In HUD announced that starting in , of the GSEs’ purchases would
need to satisfy the low- and moderate-income goals. The targets would reach in
and in . Given the dramatic growth in the number of riskier loans
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originated in the market, the new goals were closer to where the market really was.
But, as Mudd noted, “When became [] ultimately, then you have to work
harder, pay more attention, and create a preference for those loans.” Targeted goals
loans (loans made specifically to meet the targets), while always a small share of the
GSEs’ purchases, rose in importance.
Mudd testified that by , when the housing market was in turmoil, Fannie
Mae could no longer balance its obligations to shareholders with its affordable housing goals and other mission-related demands: “There may have been no way to satisfy of the myriad demands for Fannie Mae to support all manner of projects
[or] housing goals which were set above the origination levels in the marketplace.”
As the combined size of the GSEs rose steadily from . trillion in to . trillion in , the number of mortgage borrowers that the GSEs needed to serve in
order to fulfill the affordable housing goals also rose. By , Fannie and Freddie
were stretching to meet the higher goals, according to a number of GSE executives,
OFHEO officials, and market observers.
Yet all but two of the dozens of current and former Fannie Mae employees and
regulators interviewed on the subject told the FCIC that reaching the goals was not
the primary driver of the GSEs’ purchases of riskier mortgages and of subprime and
Alt-A non-GSE mortgage–backed securities. Executives from Fannie, including
Mudd, pointed to a “mix” of reasons for the purchases, such as reversing the declines
in market share, responding to originators’ demands, and responding to shareholder
demands to increase market share and profits, in addition to fulfilling the mission of
meeting affordable housing goals and providing liquidity to the market.
For example, Levin told the FCIC that while Fannie, to meet its housing goals, did
purchase some subprime mortgages and mortgage-backed securities it would otherwise have passed up, Fannie was driven to “meet the market” and to reverse declining
market share. On the other hand, he said that most Alt-A loans were high-incomeoriented and would not have counted toward the goals, so those were purchased
solely to increase profits. Similarly, Lund told the FCIC that the desire for market
share was the main driver behind Fannie’s strategy in . Housing goals had been a
factor, but not the primary one. And Dallavecchia likewise told the FCIC that Fannie increased its purchases of Alt-A loans to regain relevance in the market and meet
customer needs.
Hempstead, Fannie’s principal contact with Countrywide, told the FCIC that
while housing goals were one reason for Fannie’s strategy, the main reason Fannie entered the riskier mortgage market was that those were the types of loans being originated in the primary market. If Fannie wanted to continue purchasing large
quantities of loans, the company would need to buy riskier loans. Kenneth Bacon,
Fannie’s executive vice president of multifamily lending, said much the same thing,
and added that shareholders also wanted to see market share and returns rise. Former Fannie chairman Stephen Ashley told the FCIC that the change in strategy in
and was owed to a “mix of reasons,” including the desire to regain market
share and the need to respond to pressures from originators as well as to pressures
from real estate industry advocates to be more engaged in the marketplace.
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To ensure an adequate supply of mortgages in case the goals were not met in the
normal course of business, Fannie and Freddie instituted outreach programs in underserved geographic areas and conducted educational programs for originators and
brokers. In addition, as explained by Mike Quinn, the Fannie executive responsible
for the goals, Fannie set lower fees on loans that met the goals, although it would not
purchase mortgages that fell outside its predetermined risk targets. Ashley also
maintained that Fannie did not shift eligibility or underwriting standards to meet
goals but instead directed its resources to marketing and promotional efforts, housing fairs, and outreach programs run by the company’s partnership offices. “The effort was really in the outreach as opposed to reduced or diminished or loosened
standards,” Ashley told the FCIC.
Former OFHEO Director Armando Falcon Jr. testified that the GSEs invested in
subprime and Alt-A mortgages in order to increase profits and regain market share
and that any impact on meeting affordable housing goals was simply a by-product of
this activity. Lockhart, a subsequent OFHEO director, attributed the GSEs’ change
in strategy to their drive for profit and market share, as well as the need to meet housing goals. Noting that the affordable housing goals increased markedly in , he
said in an FCIC interview that the “goals were just one reason, certainly not the exclusive reason” for the change. These views were corroborated by numerous other
officials from the agency.
The former HUD official Mike Price told the FCIC that while the “GSEs cried
bloody murder forever” when it came to the goals, they touted their contribution to
increasing homeownership. In addition, Price and other HUD officials told the FCIC
that the GSEs never claimed that meeting the goals would leave them in an unsafe or
unsound condition.
Indeed, the law allowed both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to fall short of meeting
housing goals that were “infeasible” or that would affect the companies’ safety and
soundness. And while the GSEs often exceeded the goals, in some cases those targets were adjusted downward by HUD or, in rare cases, were simply missed by the
GSEs. For example, on December , , Mudd wrote to HUD: “Fannie Mae believes that the low- and moderate-income and special affordable subgoals are infeasible for .” Fannie Mae’s strategic plan had already anticipated such a
communication, stating, “In the event we reach a viewpoint that achieving the goals
this year is ‘infeasible,’ we will determine how best to address the matter with HUD
and will continue to keep the Board apprised accordingly.” In fact, both Fannie and
Freddie appealed to HUD to lower two components of the goals for affordable housing. HUD complied and allowed the GSEs to fall short without any consequences.
The impact of the goals
At least until HUD set new affordable housing goals for , the GSEs only supplemented their routine purchases with a small volume of loans and non-GSE mortgage–backed securities needed to meet their requirements. The GSEs knew that they
might not earn as much on these targeted goal loans as they would earn on both
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goal-qualifying and non-goal-qualifying loans purchased in the usual course of business; on some of these loans, they might even lose money. The organizations also had
administrative and other costs related to the housing goals.
In June Freddie Mac staff made a presentation to the Business and Risk
Committee of the Board of Directors on the costs of meeting its goals. From to
, the cost of the targeted goal loans was effectively zero, as the goals were
reached through “profitable expansion” of the company’s multifamily business. During the refinance boom, the goals became more challenging and cost Freddie money
in the multifamily business; thus, only after did meeting the multifamily and
single-family goals cost the GSE money. Still, only about of all loans purchased by
Freddie between and were bought “specifically because they contribute to
the goals”—loans it labeled as “targeted affordable.” These loans did have higher than
average expected default rates, although Freddie also charged a higher fee to guarantee them. From through , Freddie’s costs of complying with the housing
goals averaged million annually. The costs of complying with these goals took
into account three components: expected revenues, expected defaults, and foregone
revenues (based on an assumption of what they might have earned elsewhere). These
costs were only computed on the narrow set of loans specifically purchased to
achieve the goals, as opposed to goal-qualifying loans purchased in the normal
course of business. For comparison, the company’s net earnings averaged just under billion per year from to .
In , Fannie Mae retained McKinsey and Citigroup to determine whether it
would be worthwhile to give up the company’s charter as a GSE, which—while affording the company enormous benefits—imposed regulations and put constraints
on business practices, including its mission goals. The final report to Fannie Mae’s
top management, called Project Phineas, found that the explicit cost of compliance
with the goals from to was close to zero: “it is hard to discern a fundamental marginal cost to meeting the housing goals on the single family business side.”
The report came to this conclusion despite the slightly greater difficulty of meeting
the goals in the refinancing boom: the large numbers of homeowners refinancing, in particular those who were middle and upper income, necessarily reduced the
percentage of the pool that would qualify for the goals.
In calculating these costs, the consultants computed the difference between fees
charged on goal-qualifying loans and the higher fees suggested by Fannie’s own models. But this cost was not unique to goal qualifying loans. Across its portfolio, Fannie
charged lower fees than its models computed for goals loans as well as for non-goals
loans. As a result, goals loans, even targeted goals loans, were not solely responsible
for this cost. In fact, Fannie’s discount was actually smaller for many goal-qualifying
loans than for the others from to .
Facing more aggressive goals in and , Fannie Mae expanded initiatives
to purchase targeted goals loans. These included mortgages acquired under the My
Community Mortgage program, mortgages underwritten with looser standards, and
manufactured housing loans. For these loans, Fannie explicitly calculated the opportunity cost (foregone revenues based on an assumption of what they might have
ALL IN
earned elsewhere) along with the so-called cash flow cost, or the difference between
their expected losses and expected revenue on these loans. For , as the market
was peaking, Fannie Mae estimated the cash flow cost of the loans to be million
and the opportunity cost of the targeted goals loans million, compared to net
income that year to Fannie of . billion—a figure that includes returns on the goalqualifying loans made during the normal course of business. The targeted goals
loans amounted to billion, or ., of Fannie Mae’s billion of single-family
mortgage purchases in . As the markets tightened in the middle of , the
opportunity cost for that year was forecast to be roughly billion.
Looking back at how the targeted affordable portfolio performed in comparison
with overall losses, the presentation at Freddie Mac took the analysis of the
goals’ costs one step further. While the outstanding billion of these targeted affordable loans was only of the total portfolio, these were relatively high-risk loans
and were expected to account for of total projected losses. In fact, as of late ,
they had accounted for only of losses—meaning that they had performed better
than expected in relation to the whole portfolio. The company’s major losses came
from loans acquired in the normal course of business. The presentation noted that
many of these defaulted loans were Alt-A.
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 9
The Commission concludes that firms securitizing mortgages failed to perform
adequate due diligence on the mortgages they purchased and at times knowingly
waived compliance with underwriting standards. Potential investors were not
fully informed or were misled about the poor quality of the mortgages contained
in some mortgage-related securities. These problems appear to have been significant. The Securities and Exchange Commission failed to adequately enforce its
disclosure requirements governing mortgage securities, exempted some sales of
such securities from its review, and preempted states from applying state law to
them, thereby failing in its core mission to protect investors.
The Federal Reserve failed to recognize the cataclysmic danger posed by the
housing bubble to the financial system and refused to take timely action to constrain its growth, believing that it could contain the damage from the bubble’s
collapse.
Lax mortgage regulation and collapsing mortgage-lending standards and
practices created conditions that were ripe for mortgage fraud.
10
THE MADNESS
CONTENTS
CDO managers: “We are not a rent-a-manager” ..............................................
Credit default swaps: “Dumb question”..............................................................
Citigroup: “I do not believe we were powerless”..................................................
AIG: “I’m not getting paid enough to stand on these tracks” ..............................
Merrill: “Whatever it takes”...............................................................................
Regulators: “Are undue concentrations of risk developing?” ...............................
Moody’s: “It was all about revenue”....................................................................
The collateralized debt obligation machine could have sputtered to a natural end by
the spring of . Housing prices peaked, and AIG started to slow down its business
of insuring subprime-mortgage CDOs. But it turned out that Wall Street didn’t need
its golden goose any more. Securities firms were starting to take on a significant share
of the risks from their own deals, without AIG as the ultimate bearer of the risk of
losses on super-senior CDO tranches. The machine kept humming throughout
and into . “That just seemed kind of odd, given everything we had seen and
what we had concluded,” Gary Gorton, a Yale finance professor who had designed
AIG’s model for analyzing its CDO positions, told the FCIC.
The CDO machine had become self-fueling. Senior executives—particularly at
three of the leading promoters of CDOs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and UBS—
apparently did not accept or perhaps even understand the risks inherent in the
products they were creating. More and more, the senior tranches were retained by
the arranging securities firms, the mezzanine tranches were bought by other CDOs,
and the equity tranches were bought by hedge funds that were often engaged in
complex trading strategies: they made money when the CDOs performed, but could
also make money if the market crashed. These factors helped keep the mortgage
market going long after house prices had begun to fall and created massive exposures on the books of large financial institutions—exposures that would ultimately
bring many of them to the brink of failure.
The subprime mortgage securitization pioneer Lewis Ranieri called the willing
suspension of prudent standards “the madness.” He told the FCIC, “You had the
THE MADNESS
breakdown of the standards, . . . because you break down the checks and balances
that normally would have stopped them.”
Synthetic CDOs boomed. They provided easier opportunities for bullish and
bearish investors to bet for and against the housing boom and the securities that depended on it. Synthetic CDOs also made it easier for investment banks and CDO
managers to create CDOs more quickly. But synthetic CDO issuers and managers
had two sets of customers, each with different interests. And managers sometimes
had help from customers in selecting the collateral—including those who were betting against the collateral, as a high-profile case launched by the Securities and Exchange Commission against Goldman Sachs would eventually illustrate.
Regulators reacted weakly. As early as , supervisors recognized that CDOs
and credit default swaps (CDS) could actually concentrate rather than diversify risk,
but they concluded that Wall Street knew what it was doing. Supervisors issued guidance in late warning banks of the risks of complex structured finance transactions—but excluded mortgage-backed securities and CDOs, because they saw the
risks of those products as relatively straightforward and well understood.
Disaster was fast approaching.
CDO MANAGERS: “WE ARE NOT A RENTAMANAGER”
During the “madness,” when everyone wanted a piece of the action, CDO managers
faced growing competitive pressures. Managers’ compensation declined, as demand
for mortgage-backed securities drove up prices, squeezing the profit they made on
CDOs. At the same time, new CDO managers were entering the arena. Wing Chau, a
CDO manager who frequently worked with Merrill Lynch, said the fees fell by half
for mezzanine CDOs over time. And overall compensation could be maintained by
creating and managing more new product.
More than had been the case three or four years earlier, in picking the collateral
the managers were influenced by the underwriters—the securities firms that created
and marketed the deals. An FCIC survey of CDO managers confirmed this point.
Sometimes managers were given a portfolio constructed by the securities firm; the
managers would then choose the mortgage assets from that portfolio. The equity investors—who often initiated the deal in the first place—also influenced the selection
of assets in many instances. Still, some managers said that they acted independently.
“We are not a rent-a-manager, we actually select our collateral,” said Lloyd Fass, the
general counsel at Vertical Capital. As we will see, securities firms often had particular CDO managers with whom they preferred to work. Merrill, the market leader,
had a constellation of managers; CDOs underwritten by Merrill frequently bought
tranches of other Merrill CDOs.
According to market participants, CDOs stimulated greater demand for mortgage-backed securities, particularly those with high yields, and the greater demand
in turn affected the standards for originating mortgages underlying those securities.
As standards fell, at least one firm opted out: PIMCO, one of the largest investment
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
funds in the country, whose CDO management unit was one of the nation’s largest in
. Early in , it announced that it would not manage any new deals, in part because of the deterioration in the credit quality of mortgage-backed securities. “There
is an awful lot of moral hazard in the sector,” Scott Simon, a managing director at
PIMCO, told the audience at an industry conference in . “You either take the
high road or you don’t—we’re not going to hurt accounts or damage our reputation
for fees.” Simon said the rating agencies’ methodologies were not sufficiently stringent, particularly because they were being applied to new types of subprime and AltA loans with little or no historical performance data. Not everyone agreed with this
viewpoint. “Managers who are sticking in this business are doing it right,” Armand
Pastine, the chief operating officer at Maxim Group, responded at that same conference. “To suggest that CDO managers would pull out of an economically viable deal
for moral reasons—that’s a cop-out.” As was typical for the industry during the crisis, two of Maxim’s eight mortgage-backed CDOs, Maxim High Grade CDO I and
Maxim High Grade CDO II, would default on interest payments to investors—including investors holding bonds that had originally been rated triple-A—and the
other six would be downgraded to junk status, including all of those originally rated
triple-A.
Another development also changed the CDOs: in and , CDO managers
were less likely to put their own money into their deals. Early in the decade, investors
had taken the managers’ investment in the equity tranche of their own CDOs to be
an assurance of quality, believing that if the managers were sharing the risk of loss,
they would have an incentive to pick collateral wisely. But this fail-safe lost force as
the amount of managers’ investment per transaction declined over time. ACA Management, a unit of the financial guarantor ACA Capital, provides a good illustration
of this trend. ACA held of the equity in the CDOs it originated in and
, and of two deals it originated in , between and of deals
in , and between and of deals in .
And synthetic CDOs, as we will see, had no fail-safe at all with regard to the managers’ incentives. By the very nature of the credit default swaps bundled into these
synthetics, customers on the short side of the deal were betting that the assets would
fail.
CREDIT DEFAULT SWAPS: “DUMB QUESTION”
In June , derivatives dealers introduced the “pay-as-you-go” credit default swap,
a complex instrument that mimicked the timing of the cash flows of real mortgagebacked securities. Because of this feature, the synthetic CDOs into which these new
swaps were bundled were much easier to issue and sell.
The pay-as-you-go swap also enabled a second major development, introduced in
January : the first index based on the prices of credit default swaps on mortgagebacked securities. Known as the ABX.HE, it was really a series of indices, meant to act
as a sort of Dow Jones Industrial Average for the nonprime mortgage market, and it
became a popular way to bet on the performance of the market. Every six months, a
THE MADNESS
consortium of securities firms would select credit default swaps on mortgagebacked securities in each of five ratings-based tranches: AAA, AA, A, BBB, and BBB-.
Investors who believed that the bonds in any given category would fall behind in their
payments could buy protection through credit default swaps. As demand for protection rose, the index would fall. The index was therefore a barometer recording the
confidence of the market.
Synthetic CDOs proliferated, in part because it was much quicker and easier for
managers to assemble a synthetic portfolio out of pay-as-you-go credit default swaps
than to assemble a regular cash CDO out of mortgage-backed securities. “The beauty
in a way of the synthetic deals is you can look at the entire universe, you don’t have to
go and buy the cash bonds,” said Laura Schwartz of ACA Capital. There were also
no warehousing costs or associated risks. And they tended to offer the potential for
higher returns on the equity tranches: one analyst estimated that the equity tranche
on a synthetic CDO could typically yield about , while the equity tranche of a
typical cash CDO could pay .
An important driver in the growth of synthetic CDOs was the demand for credit
default swaps on mortgage-backed securities. Greg Lippmann, a Deutsche Bank
mortgage trader, told the FCIC that he often brokered these deals, matching the
“shorts” with the “longs” and minimizing any risk for his own bank. Lippmann said
that between and he brokered deals for at least and maybe as many as
hedge funds that wanted to short the mezzanine tranches of mortgage-backed
securities. Meanwhile, on the long side, “Most of our CDS purchases were from UBS,
Merrill, and Citibank, because they were the most aggressive underwriters of [synthetic] CDOs.” In many cases, they were buying those positions from Lippmann to
put them into synthetic CDOs; as it would turn out, the banks would retain much of
the risk of those synthetic CDOs by keeping the super-senior and triple-A tranches,
selling below-triple-A tranches largely to other CDOs, and selling equity tranches to
hedge funds.
Issuance of synthetic CDOs jumped from billion in to billion just
one year later. (We include all CDOs with or more synthetic collateral; again,
unless otherwise noted, our data refers to CDOs that include mortgage-backed securities.) Even CDOs that were labeled as “cash CDOs” increasingly held some credit
derivatives. A total of billion in CDOs were issued in , including those labeled as cash, “hybrid,” or synthetic; the FCIC estimates that of the collateral was
derivatives, compared with in and in .
The advent of synthetic CDOs changed the incentives of CDO managers and
hedge fund investors. Once short investors were involved, the CDO had two types of
investors with opposing interests: those who would benefit if the assets performed,
and those who would benefit if the mortgage borrowers stopped making payments
and the assets failed to perform.
Even the incentives of long investors became conflicted. Synthetic CDOs enabled
sophisticated investors to place bets against the housing market or pursue more complex trading strategies. Investors, usually hedge funds, often used credit default swaps
to take offsetting positions in different tranches of the same CDO security; that way,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
they could make some money as long as the CDOs performed, but they stood to
make more money if the entire market crashed. An FCIC survey of more than
hedge funds encompassing over . trillion in assets as of early found this to
be a common strategy among medium-size hedge funds: of all the CDOs issued in
the second half of , more than half of the equity tranches were purchased by
hedge funds that also shorted other tranches. The same approach was being used in
the mortgage-backed securities market as well. The FCIC’s survey found that by June
, the largest hedge funds held billion in equity and other lower-rated
tranches of mortgage-backed securities. These were more than offset by billion
in short positions.
These types of trades changed the structured finance market. Investors in the equity
and most junior tranches of CDOs and mortgage-backed securities traditionally had
the greatest incentive to monitor the credit risk of an underlying portfolio. With the advent of credit default swaps, it was no longer clear who—if anyone—had that incentive.
For one example, consider Merrill Lynch’s . billion Norma CDO, issued in
. The equity investor, Magnetar Capital, a hedge fund, was executing a common
strategy known as the correlation trade—it bought the equity tranche while shorting
other tranches in Norma and other CDOs. According to court documents, Magnetar
was also involved in selecting assets for Norma. Magnetar received . million related to this transaction and NIR Capital Management, the CDO manager, was paid a
fee of , plus additional fees. Magnetar’s counsel told the FCIC that the .
million was a discount in the form of a rebate on the price of the equity tranche and
other long positions purchased by Magnetar and not a payment received in return for
good or services. Court documents indicate that Magnetar was involved in selecting collateral, and that NIR abdicated its asset selection duties to Magnetar with Merrill’s knowledge. In addition, they show that when one Merrill employee learned that
Magnetar had executed approximately million in trades for Norma without
NIR’s apparent involvement or knowledge, she emailed colleagues, “Dumb question.
Is Magnetar allowed to trade for NIR?” Merrill failed to disclose that Magnetar was
paid . million or that Magnetar was selecting collateral when it also had a short
position that would benefit from losses.
The counsel for Merrill’s new owner, Bank of America, explained to the FCIC that
it was a common industry practice for “the equity investor in a CDO, which had
the riskiest investment, to have input during the collateral selection process[;] . . .
however, the collateral manager made the ultimate decisions regarding portfolio
composition.” The letter did not specifically mention the Norma CDO. Bank of
America failed to produce documents related to this issue requested by the FCIC.
Federal regulators have identified abuses that involved short investors influencing
the choice of the instruments inside synthetic CDOs. In April , the SEC charged
Goldman Sachs with fraud for telling investors that an independent CDO manager,
ACA Management, had picked the underlying assets in a CDO when in fact a short
investor, the Paulson & Co. hedge fund, had played a “significant role” in the selection. The SEC alleged that those misrepresentations were in Goldman’s marketing
materials for Abacus -AC, one of Goldman’s Abacus deals.
THE MADNESS
Ira Wagner, the head of Bear Stearns’s CDO Group in , told the FCIC that he
rejected the deal when approached by Paulson representatives. When asked about
Goldman’s contention that Paulson’s picking the collateral was immaterial because the
collateral was disclosed and because Paulson was not well-known at that time, Wagner
called the argument “ridiculous.” He said that the structure encouraged Paulson to
pick the worst assets. While acknowledging the point that every synthetic deal necessarily had long and short investors, Wagner saw having the short investors select the
referenced collateral as a serious conflict and for that reason declined to participate.
ACA executives told the FCIC they were not initially aware that the short investor
was involved in choosing the collateral. CEO Alan Roseman said that he first heard of
Paulson’s role when he reviewed the SEC’s complaint. Laura Schwartz, who was responsible for the deal at ACA, said she believed that Paulson’s firm was the investor
taking the equity tranche and would therefore have an interest in the deal performing
well. She said she would not have been surprised that Paulson would also have had a
short position, because the correlation trade was common in the market, but added,
“To be honest, [at that time,] until the SEC testimony I did not even know that Paulson was only short.” Paulson told the FCIC that any synthetic CDO would have to
invest in “a pool that both a buyer and seller of protection could agree on.” He didn’t
understand the objections: “Every [synthetic] CDO has a buyer and seller of protection. So for anyone to say that they didn’t want to structure a CDO because someone
was buying protection in that CDO, then you wouldn’t do any CDOs.”
In July , Goldman Sachs settled the case, paying a record million fine.
Goldman “acknowledge[d] that the marketing materials for the ABACUS -AC
transaction contained incomplete information. In particular, it was a mistake for the
Goldman marketing materials to state that the reference portfolio was ‘selected by’
ACA Management LLC without disclosing the role of Paulson & Co. Inc. in the portfolio selection process and that Paulson’s economic interests were adverse to CDO
investors.”
The new derivatives provided a golden opportunity for bearish investors to bet
against the housing boom. Home prices in the hottest markets in California and
Florida had blasted into the stratosphere; it was hard for skeptics to believe that their
upward trajectory could continue. And if it did not, the landing would not be a soft
one. Some spoke out publicly. Others bet the bubble would burst. Betting against
CDOs was also, in some cases, a bet against the rating agencies and their models.
Jamie Mai and Ben Hockett, principals at the small investment firm Cornwall Capital, told the FCIC that they had warned the SEC in that the agencies were dangerously overoptimistic in their assessment of mortgage-backed CDOs. Mai and
Hockett saw the rating agencies as “the root of the mess,” because their ratings removed the need for buyers to study prices and perform due diligence, even as “there
was a massive amount of gaming going on.”
Shorting CDOs was “pretty attractive” because the rating agencies had given too
much credit for diversification, Sihan Shu of Paulson & Co. told the FCIC. Paulson
established a fund in June that initially focused only on shorting BBB-rated
tranches. By the end of , Paulson & Co.’s Credit Opportunities fund, set up less
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
than a year earlier to bet exclusively against the subprime housing market, was up
. “Each MBS tranche typically would be mortgages in California, in
Florida, in New York, and when you aggregate MBS positions you still have
the same geographic diversification. To us, there was not much diversification in
CDOs.” Shu’s research convinced him that if home prices were to stop appreciating,
BBB-rated mortgage-backed securities would be at risk for downgrades. Should
prices drop , CDO losses would increase -fold.
And if a relatively small number of the underlying loans were to go into foreclosure, the losses would render virtually all of the riskier BBB-rated tranches worthless. “The whole system worked fine as long as everyone could refinance,” Steve
Eisman, the founder of a fund within FrontPoint Partners, told the FCIC. The minute
refinancing stopped, “losses would explode. . . . By , about half [the mortgages
sold] were no-doc or low-doc. You were at max underwriting weakness at max housing prices. And so the system imploded. Everyone was so levered there was no ability
to take any pain.” On October , , James Grant wrote in his newsletter about the
“mysterious alchemical processes” in which “Wall Street transforms BBB-minus-rated
mortgages into AAA-rated tranches of mortgage securities” by creating CDOs. He estimated that even the triple-A tranches of CDOs would experience some losses if national home prices were to fall just or less within two years; and if prices were to
fall , investors of tranches rated AA- or below would be completely wiped out.
In , Eisman and others were already looking for the best way to bet on this
disaster by shorting all these shaky mortgage-related securities. Buying credit default
swaps was efficient. Eisman realized that he could pick what he considered the most
vulnerable tranches of the mortgage-backed bonds and bet millions of dollars against
them, relatively cheaply and with considerable leverage. And that’s what he did.
By the end of , Eisman had put millions of dollars into short positions on
credit default swaps. It was, he was sure, just a matter of time. “Everyone really did
believe that things were going to be okay,” Eisman said. “[I] thought they were certifiable lunatics.”
Michael Burry, another short who became well-known after the crisis hit, was a
doctor-turned-investor whose hedge fund, Scion Capital, in Northern California’s
Silicon Valley, bet big against mortgage-backed securities—reflecting a change of
heart, because he had invested in homebuilder stocks in . But the closer he
looked, the more he wondered about the financing that supported this booming market. Burry decided that some of the newfangled adjustable rate mortgages were “the
most toxic mortgages” created. He told the FCIC, “I watched those with interest as
they migrated down the credit spectrum to the subprime market. As [home] prices
had increased on the back of virtually no accompanying rise in wages and incomes, I
came to the judgment that in two years there will be a final judgment on housing
when those two-year [adjustable rate mortgages] seek refinancing.” By the middle
of , Burry had bought credit default swaps on billions of dollars of mortgagebacked securities and the bonds of financial companies in the housing market, including Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.
Eisman, Cornwall, Paulson, and Burry were not alone in shorting the housing mar-
THE MADNESS
ket. In fact, on one side of tens of billions of dollars worth of synthetic CDOs were investors taking short positions. The purchasers of credit default swaps illustrate the impact of derivatives in introducing new risks and leverage into the system. Although
these investors profited spectacularly from the housing crisis, they never made a single
subprime loan or bought an actual mortgage. In other words, they were not purchasing
insurance against anything they owned. Instead, they merely made side bets on the
risks undertaken by others. Paulson told the FCIC that his research indicated that if
home prices remained flat, losses would wipe out the BBB-rated tranches; meanwhile,
at the time he could purchase default swap protection on them very cheaply.
On the other side of the zero-sum game were often the major U.S. financial institutions that would eventually be battered. Burry acknowledged to the FCIC, “There
is an argument to be made that you shouldn’t allow what I did.” But the problem, he
said, was not the short positions he was taking; it was the risks that others were accepting. “When I did the shorts, the whole time I was putting on the positions . . .
there were people on the other side that were just eating them up. I think it’s a catastrophe and I think it was preventable.”
Credit default swaps greased the CDO machine in several ways. First, they allowed CDO managers to create synthetic and hybrid CDOs more quickly than they
could create cash CDOs. Second, they enabled investors in the CDOs (including the
originating banks, such as Citigroup and Merrill) to transfer the risk of default to the
issuer of the credit default swap (such as AIG and other insurance companies). Third,
they made correlation trading possible. As the FCIC survey revealed, most hedge
fund purchases of equity and other junior tranches of mortgage-backed securities
and CDOs were done as part of complex trading strategies. As a result, credit default swaps were critical to facilitate demand from hedge funds for the equity or other
junior tranches of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. Finally, they allowed speculators to make bets for or against the housing market without putting up much cash.
On the other hand, it can be argued that credit default swaps helped end the housing and mortgage-backed securities bubble. Because CDO arrangers could more easily buy mortgage exposure for their CDOs through credit default swaps than through
actual mortgage-backed securities, demand for credit default swaps may in fact have
reduced the need to originate high-yield mortgages. In addition, some market participants have contended that without the ability to short the housing market via credit
default swaps, the bubble would have lasted longer. As we will see, the declines in the
ABX index in late would be one of the first harbingers of market turmoil. “Once
[pessimists] can, in effect, sell short via the CDS, prices must reflect their views and
not just the views of the leveraged optimists,” John Geanakoplos, a Yale economics
professor and a partner in the hedge fund Ellington Capital Management, which
both invested in and managed CDOs, told the FCIC.
CITIGROUP: “I DO NOT BELIEVE WE WERE POWERLESS”
While the hedge funds were betting against the housing market in and ,
Citigroup’s CDO desk was pushing more money to the center of the table.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
But after writing billion in liquidity puts—protecting investors who bought
commercial paper issued by Citigroup’s CDOs—the bank’s treasury department had
put a stop to the practice. To keep doing deals, the CDO desk had to find another
market for the super-senior tranches of the CDOs it was underwriting—or it had to
find a way to get the company to support the CDO production line. The CDO desk
accumulated another billion in super-senior exposures, most between early
and August , which it otherwise would have been able to sell into the market
only for a loss. It was also increasingly financing securities that it was holding in its
CDO warehouse—that is, securities that were waiting to be put into new CDOs.
Historically, owning securities was not what securities firms did. The adage “We
are in the moving business, not the storage business” suggests that they were structuring and selling securities, not buying or retaining them.
However, as the biggest commercial banks and investment banks competed in the
securities business in the late s and on into the new century, they often touted
the “balance sheet” that they could make available to support the sale of new securities. In this regard, Citigroup broke new ground in the CDO market. Citigroup retained significant exposure to potential losses on its CDO business, particularly
within Citibank, the trillion commercial bank whose deposits were insured by the
FDIC. While its competitors did the same, few did so as aggressively or, ultimately,
with such losses.
In , Citigroup retained the super-senior and triple-A tranches of most of the
CDOs it created. In many cases Citigroup would hedge the associated credit risk
from these tranches by obtaining credit protection from a monoline insurance company such as Ambac. Because these hedges were in place, Citigroup presumed that
the risk associated with the retained tranches had been neutralized.
Citigroup reported these tranches at values for which they could not be sold, raising questions about their accuracy and, therefore, the accuracy of reported earnings.
“As everybody in any business knows, if inventory is growing, that means you’re not
pricing it correctly,” Richard Bookstaber, who had been head of risk management at
Citigroup in the late s, told the FCIC. But keeping the tranches on the books at
these prices improved the finances for creating the deal. “It was a hidden subsidy of
the CDO business by mispricing,” Bookstaber said. The company would not begin
writing the securities down toward the market’s real valuations until the fall of .
Part of the reason for retaining exposures to super-senior positions in CDOs was
their favorable capital treatment. As we saw in an earlier chapter, under the Recourse Rule, one of the attractions of triple-A-rated securities was that banks were required to hold relatively less capital against them than against lower-rated securities.
And if the bank held those assets in their trading account (as opposed to holding
them as a long-term investment), it could get even better capital treatment under the
Market Risk Amendment. That rule allowed banks to use their own models to
determine how much capital to hold, an amount that varied according to how much
market prices moved. Citigroup judged that the capital requirement for the super-senior tranches of synthetic CDOs it held for trading purposes was effectively zero, be-
THE MADNESS
cause the prices didn’t move much. As a result, Citigroup held little regulatory capital
against the super-senior tranches.
Citibank also held “unfunded” positions in super-senior tranches of some synthetic CDOs; that is, it sold protection to the CDO. If the referenced mortgage collateral underperformed, the short investors would begin to get paid. Money to pay
them would come first from wiping out long investors who had bought tranches that
were below triple-A. Then, if the short investors were still owed money, Citibank
would have to pay. For taking on this risk, Citi typically received about . to
. in annual fees on the super-senior protection; on a billion-dollar transaction, it
would earn an annual fee of million to million.
Citigroup also had exposure to the mortgage-backed and other securities that
went into CDOs during the ramp-up period, which could be as long as six or nine
months, before it packaged and sold the CDO. Typically, Citigroup’s securities unit
would set up a warehouse funding line for the CDO manager. During the ramp-up
period, the collateral securities would pay interest; depending on the terms of the
agreement, that interest would either go exclusively to Citigroup or be split with the
manager. For the CDO desk, this frequently represented a substantial income stream.
The securities sitting in the warehouse facility had relatively attractive yields—often
. to . more than the typical bank borrowing rate—and it was not uncommon
for the CDO desk to earn to million in interest on a single transaction.
Traders on the desk would get credit for those revenues at bonus time. But Citigroup
would also be on the hook for any losses incurred on assets stuck in the warehouse.
When the financial crisis deepened, many CDO transactions could not be completed; Citigroup and other investment banks were forced to write down the value of
securities held in their warehouses. The result would be substantial losses across Wall
Street. In many cases, to offload assets underwriters placed collateral from CDO
warehouses into other CDOs.
A factor that made firm-wide hedging complicated was that different units of
Citigroup could have various and offsetting exposures to the same CDO. It was possible, even likely, that the CDO desk would structure a given CDO, a different division would buy protection for the underlying collateral, and yet another division
would buy the unfunded super-senior tranche. If the collateral in this CDO ran into
trouble, the CDO immediately would have to pay the division that bought credit protection on the underlying collateral; if the CDO ran out of money to pay, it would
have to draw on the division that bought the unfunded tranche. In November ,
after Citigroup had reported substantial losses on its CDO portfolio, regulators
would note that the company did not have a good understanding of its firmwide
CDO exposures: “The nature, origin, and size of CDO exposure were surprising to
many in senior management and the board. The liquidity put exposure was not well
known. In particular, management did not consider or effectively manage the credit
risk inherent in CDO positions.”
Citigroup’s willingness to use its balance sheet to support the CDO business had
the desired effect. Its CDO desk created billion in CDOs that included mortgage-
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
backed securities in their collateral in and billion in . Among CDO underwriters, including all types of CDOs, Citigroup rose from fourteenth place in
to second place in , according to FCIC analysis of Moody’s data.
What was good for Citigroup’s investment bank was also lucrative for its investment bankers. Thomas Maheras, the co-CEO of the investment bank who said he
spent less than of his time thinking about CDOs, was a highly paid Citigroup executive, earning more than million in salary and bonus compensation in .
Co-head of Global Fixed Income Randolph Barker made about million in that
same year. Citigroup’s chief risk officer made . million. Others were also well rewarded. The co-heads of the global CDO business, Nestor Dominguez and Janice
Warne, each made about million in total compensation in .
Citi did have “clawback” provisions: under narrowly specified circumstances,
compensation would have to be returned to the firm. But despite Citigroup’s eventual
large losses, no compensation was ever clawed back under this policy. The Corporate
Library, which rates firms’ corporate governance, gave Citigroup a C. In early ,
the Corporate Library would downgrade Citigroup to a D, “reflecting a high degree
of governance risk.” Among the issues cited: executive compensation practices that
were poorly aligned with shareholder interests.
Where were Citigroup’s regulators while the company piled up tens of billions of
dollars of risk in the CDO business? Citigroup had a complex corporate structure
and, as a result, faced an array of supervisors. The Federal Reserve supervised the
holding company but, as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley legislation directed, relied on others to monitor the most important subsidiaries: the Office of the Comptroller of the
Currency (OCC) supervised the largest bank subsidiary, Citibank, and the SEC supervised the securities firm, Citigroup Global Markets. Moreover, Citigroup did not
really align its various businesses with the legal entities. An individual working on
the CDO desk on an intricate transaction could interact with various components of
the firm in complicated ways.
The SEC regularly examined the securities arm on a three-year examination cycle,
although it would also sometimes conduct other examinations to target specific concerns. Unlike the Fed and OCC, which had risk management and safety and soundness rules, the SEC used these exams to look for general weaknesses in risk
management. Unlike safety and soundness regulators, who concentrated on preventing firms from failing, the SEC always kept its focus on protecting investors. Its most
recent review of Citigroup’s securities arm preceding the crisis was in , and the
examiners completed their report in June . In that exam, they told the FCIC,
they saw nothing “earth shattering,” but they did note key weaknesses in risk management practices that would prove relevant—weaknesses in internal pricing and
valuation controls, for example, and a willingness to allow traders to exceed their risk
limits.
Unlike the SEC, the Fed and OCC did maintain a continuous on-site presence.
During the years that CDOs boomed, the OCC team regularly criticized the company for its weaknesses in risk management, including specific problems in the CDO
THE MADNESS
business. “Earnings and profitability growth have taken precedence over risk management and internal control,” the OCC told the company in January . Another document from that year stated, “The findings of this examination are
disappointing, in that the business grew far in excess of management’s underlying infrastructure and control processes.” In May , a review undertaken by peers at
the other Federal Reserve banks was critical of the New York Fed—then headed by
the current treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner—for its oversight of Citigroup. The
review concluded that the Fed’s on-site Citigroup team appeared to have “insufficient
resources to conduct continuous supervisory activities in a consistent manner. At
Citi, much of the limited team’s energy is absorbed by topical supervisory issues that
detract from the team’s continuous supervision objectives . . . the level of the staffing
within the Citi team has not kept pace with the magnitude of supervisory issues that
the institution has realized.” That the Fed’s examination of Citigroup did not
raise the concerns expressed that same year by the OCC may illustrate these problems. Four years later, the next peer review would again find substantial weaknesses
in the New York Fed’s oversight of Citigroup.
In April , the Fed raised the holding company’s supervisory rating from the
previous year’s “fair” to “satisfactory.” It lifted the ban on new mergers imposed the
previous year in response to Citigroup’s many regulatory problems. The Fed and
OCC examiners concurred that the company had made “substantial progress” in implementing CEO Charles Prince’s plan to overhaul risk management. The Fed declared: “The company has . . . completed improvements necessary to bring the
company into substantial compliance with two existing Federal Reserve enforcement
actions related to the execution of highly structured transactions and controls.” The
following year, Citigroup’s board would allude to Prince’s successful resolution of its
regulatory compliance problems in justifying his compensation increase.
The OCC noted in retrospect that the lifting of supervisory constraints in
had been a key turning point. “After regulatory restraints against significant acquisitions were lifted, Citigroup embarked on an aggressive acquisition program,” the OCC
wrote to Vikram Pandit, Prince’s replacement, in early . “Additionally, with the removal of formal and informal agreements, the previous focus on risk and compliance
gave way to business expansion and profits.” Meanwhile, risk managers granted exceptions to limits, and increased exposure limits, instead of keeping business units in
check as they had told the regulators. Well after Citigroup sustained large losses on
its CDOs, the Fed would criticize the firm for using its commercial bank to support its
investment banking activities. “Senior management allowed business lines largely unchallenged access to the balance sheet to pursue revenue growth,” the Fed wrote in an
April letter to Pandit. “Citigroup attained significant market share across numerous products, including leveraged finance and structured credit trading, utilizing balance sheet for its ‘originate to distribute’ strategy. Senior management did not
appropriately consider the potential balance sheet implications of this strategy in the
case of market disruptions. Further, they did not adequately access the potential negative impact of earnings volatility of these businesses on the firm’s capital position.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Geithner told the Commission that he and others in leadership positions could
have done more to prevent the crisis, testifying, “I do not believe we were powerless.”
AIG: “I’M NOT GETTING PAID ENOUGH
TO STAND ON THESE TRACKS”
Unlike their peers at Citigroup, some senior executives at AIG’s Financial Products
subsidiary had figured out that the company was taking on too much risk. Nonetheless, they did not do enough about it. Doubts about all the credit default swaps that
they were originating emerged in among AIG Financial Products executives,
including Andrew Forster and Gene Park. Park told the FCIC that he witnessed
Financial Products CEO Joseph Cassano berating a salesman over the large volume
of credit default swaps being written by AIG Financial Products, suggesting there was
already some high-level uneasiness with these deals. Told by a consultant, Gary Gorton, that the “multisector” CDOs on which AIG was selling credit default swaps consisted mainly of mortgage-backed securities with less than subprime and Alt-A
mortgages, Park asked Adam Budnick, another AIG employee, for verification. Budnick double checked and returned to say, according to Park, “‘I can’t believe it. You
know, it’s like or .’” Reviewing the portfolio—and thinking about a friend who
had received financing for his new home after losing his job—Park said, “This
is horrendous business. We should get out of it.”
In July , Park’s colleague Andrew Forster sent an email both to Alan Frost,
the AIG salesman primarily responsible for the company’s booming credit default
swap business, and to Gorton, who had engineered the formula to determine how
much risk AIG was taking on each CDS it wrote. “We are taking on a huge amount of
sub prime mortgage exposure here,” Forster wrote. “Everyone we have talked to says
they are worried about deals with huge amounts [of high-risk mortgage] exposure
yet I regularly see deals with [high-risk mortgage] concentrations currently. Are
these really the same risk as other deals?”
Park and others studied the issue for weeks, talked to bank analysts and other experts, and considered whether it made sense for AIG to continue to write protection
on the subprime and Alt-A mortgage markets. The general view of others was that
some of the underlying mortgages “were structured to fail, [but] that all the borrowers would basically be bailed out as long as real estate prices went up.”
The AIG consultant Gorton recalled a meeting that he and others from AIG had
with one Bear Stearns analyst. The analyst was so optimistic about the housing market that they thought he was “out of his mind” and “must be on drugs or something.” Speaking of a potential decline in the housing market, Park related to the
FCIC the risks as he and some of his colleagues saw them, saying, “We weren’t getting
paid enough money to take that risk. . . . I’m not going to opine on whether there’s a
train on its way. I just know that I’m not getting paid enough to stand on these
tracks.”
By February , Park and others persuaded Cassano and Frost to stop writing
THE MADNESS
CDS protection on subprime mortgage–backed securities. In an email to Cassano on
February , Park wrote:
Joe,
Below summarizes the message we plan on delivering to dealers later
this week with regard to our approach to the CDO of ABS super senior
business going forward. We feel that the CDO of ABS market has increasingly become less diverse over the last year or so and is currently at
a state where deals are almost totally reliant on subprime/non prime
residential mortgage collateral. Given current trends in the housing
market, our perception of deteriorating underwriting standards, and
the potential for higher rates we are no longer as comfortable taking
such concentrated exposure to certain parts of the non prime mortgage
securitizations. On the deals that we participate on we would like to see
significant change in the composition of these deals going forward—i.e.
more diversification into the non-correlated asset classes.
As a result of our ongoing due diligence we are not as comfortable
with the mezzanine layers (namely BBB and single A tranches) of this
asset class. . . . We realize that this is likely to take us out of the CDO of
ABS market for the time being given the arbitrage in subprime collateral. However, we remain committed to working with underwriters and
managers in developing the CDO of ABS market to hopefully become
more diversified from a collateral perspective. With that in mind, we
will be open to including new asset classes to these structures or increasing allocations to others such as [collateralized loan obligations]
and [emerging market] CDOs.
AIG’s counterparties responded with indifference. “The day that you [AIG] drop
out, we’re going to have other people who are going to replace you,” Park says he
was told by an investment banker at another firm. In any event, counterparties had
some time to find new takers, because AIG Financial Products continued to write the
credit default swaps. While the bearish executives were researching the issue from
the summer of onward, the team continued to work on deals that were in the
pipeline, even after February . Overall, they completed deals between September and July —one of them on a CDO backed by subprime
assets.
By June , AIG had written swaps on billion in multisector CDOs, five
times the billion held at the end of . Park asserted that neither he nor most
others at AIG knew at the time that the swaps entailed collateral calls on AIG if the
market value of the referenced securities declined. Park said their concern was simply that AIG would be on the hook if subprime and Alt-A borrowers defaulted in
large numbers. Cassano, however, told the FCIC that he did know about the possible
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
calls, but AIG’s SEC filings to investors for mentioned the risk of collateral
calls only if AIG were downgraded.
Still, AIG never hedged more than million of its total subprime exposure.
Some of AIG’s counterparties not only used AIG’s swaps to hedge other positions but
also hedged AIG’s ability to make good on its contracts. As we will see later, Goldman
Sachs hedged aggressively by buying CDS protection on AIG and by shorting other
securities and indexes to counterbalance the risk that AIG would fail to pay up on its
swaps or that a collapsing subprime market would pull down the value of mortgagebacked securities.
MERRILL: “WHATEVER IT TAKES”
When Dow Kim became co-president of Merrill Lynch’s Global Markets and Investment Banking Group in July , he was instructed to boost revenue, especially in
businesses in which Merrill lagged behind its competitors. Kim focused on the
CDO business; clients saw CDOs as an integral part of their trading strategy, CEO
Stanley O’Neal told the FCIC. Kim hired Chris Ricciardi from Credit Suisse, where
Ricciardi’s group had sold more CDOs than anyone else.
Ricciardi came through, lifting Merrill’s CDO business from fifteenth place in
to second place behind only Citigroup in and Goldman in . Then, in
February , he left the bank to become CEO of Cohen & Company, an asset management business; at Cohen he would manage several CDOs, often deals underwritten by Merrill.
After Ricciardi left, Kim instructed the rest of the team to do “whatever it takes”
not just to maintain market share but also to take over the number one ranking, former employees said in a complaint filed against Merrill Lynch. Kim told FCIC staff
that he couldn’t recall specific conversations but that after Ricciardi left, Merrill was
still trying to expand the CDO business globally and that he, Kim, wanted people to
know that Merrill was willing to commit its people, resources, and balance sheet to
achieve that goal.
It was indeed willing. Despite the loss of its rainmaker, Merrill swamped the competition, originating a total . billion in mortgage-related CDOs in , while
the second-ranked firm, Morgan Stanley, did only . billion, and earning another
first-place ranking in , on the strength of the CDO machine Ricciardi had
built—a machine that brought in more than billion in fees between and
.
To keep its CDO business going, Merrill pursued three strategies, all of which involved repackaging riskier mortgages more attractively or buying its own products
when no one else would. Like Citigroup, Merrill increasingly retained for its own
portfolio substantial portions of the CDOs it was creating, mainly the super-senior
tranches, and it increasingly repackaged the hard-to-sell BBB-rated and other lowrated tranches of its CDOs into its other CDOs; it used the cash sitting in its synthetic
CDOs to purchase other CDO tranches.
THE MADNESS
It had long been standard practice for CDO underwriters to sell some mezzanine
tranches to other CDO managers. Even in the early days of ABS CDOs, these assets
often contained a small percentage of mezzanine tranches of other CDOs; the rating
agencies signed off on this practice when rating each deal. But reliance on them became heavier as the demand from traditional investors waned, as it had for the riskier
tranches of mortgage-backed securities. The market came to call traditional investors
the “real money,” to distinguish them from CDO managers who were buying tranches
just to put them into their CDOs. Between and , the typical amount a CDO
could include of the tranches of other CDOs and still maintain its ratings grew from
to , according to the CDO manager Wing Chau. According to data compiled
by the FCIC, tranches from CDOs rose from an average of of the collateral in
mortgage-backed CDOs in to by . CDO-squared deals—those engineered primarily from the tranches of other CDOs—grew from marketwide in
to in and in . Merrill created and sold of them.
Still, there are clear signs that few “real money” investors remained in the CDO
market by late . Consider Merrill: for the ABS CDOs that Merrill created and
sold from the fourth quarter of through August , nearly of the mezzanine tranches were purchased by CDO managers. The pattern was similar for Chau:
an FCIC analysis determined that of the mezzanine tranches sold by the
CDOs managed by Chau were sold for inclusion into other CDOs. An estimated
different CDO managers purchased tranches in Merrill’s Norma CDO. In the most
extreme case found by the FCIC, CDO managers were the only purchasers of Merrill’s Neo CDO.
Marketwide, in CDOs took in about of the A tranches, of the Aa
tranches, and of the Baa tranches issued by other CDOs, as rated by Moody’s.
(Moody’s rating of Aaa is equivalent to S&P’s AAA, Aa to AA, Baa to BBB, and Ba to
BB). In , those numbers were , , and , respectively. Merrill and
other investment banks simply created demand for CDOs by manufacturing new
ones to buy the harder-to-sell portions of the old ones.
As SEC attorneys told the FCIC, heading into there was a Streetwide gentleman’s agreement: you buy my BBB tranche and I’ll buy yours.
Merrill and its CDO managers were the biggest buyers of their own products.
Merrill created and sold CDOs from to . All but of these—
CDOs—sold at least one tranche into another Merrill CDO. In Merrill’s deals, on average, of the collateral packed into the CDOs consisted of tranches of other
CDOs that Merrill itself had created and sold. This was a relatively high percentage,
but not the highest: for Citigroup, another big player in this market, the figure was
. For UBS, it was just .
Managers defended the practice. Chau, who managed CDOs created and sold
by Merrill at Maxim Group and later Harding Advisory and had worked with Ricciardi at Prudential Securities in the early days of multisector CDOs, told the FCIC that
plain mortgage-backed securities had become expensive in relation to their returns,
even as the real estate market sagged. Because CDOs paid better returns than did
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
similarly rated mortgage-backed securities, they were in demand, and that is why
CDO managers packed their securities with other CDOs.
And Merrill continued to push its CDO business despite signals that the market
was weakening. As late as the spring of , when AIG stopped insuring even the
very safest, super-senior CDO tranches for Merrill and others, it did not reconsider
its strategy. Cut off from AIG, which had already insured . billion of its CDO
bonds—Merrill was AIG’s third-largest counterparty, after Goldman and Société
Générale—Merrill switched to the monoline insurance companies for protection. In
the summer of , Merrill management noticed that Citigroup, its biggest competitor in underwriting CDOs, was taking more super-senior tranches of CDOs onto
its own balance sheet at razor-thin margins, and thus in effect subsidizing returns for
investors in the BBB-rated and equity tranches. In response, Merrill continued to
ramp up its CDO warehouses and inventory; and in an effort to compete and get
deals done, it increasingly took on super-senior positions without insurance from
AIG or the monolines.
This would not be the end of Merrill’s all-in wager on the mortgage and CDO
businesses. Even though it did grab the first-place trophy in the mortgage-related
CDO business in , it had come late to the “vertical integration” mortgage model
that Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns had pioneered, which required having a stake
in every step of the mortgage business—originating mortgages, bundling these loans
into securities, bundling these securities into other securities, and selling all of them
on Wall Street. In September , months after the housing bubble had started to
deflate and delinquencies had begun to rise, Merrill announced it would acquire a
subprime lender, First Franklin Financial Corp., from National City Corp. for .
billion. As a finance reporter later noted, this move “puzzled analysts because the
market for subprime loans was souring in a hurry.” And Merrill already had a
million ownership position in Ownit Mortgage Solutions Inc., for which it provided a
warehouse line of credit; it also provided a line of credit to Mortgage Lenders Network. Both of those companies would cease operations soon after the First Franklin
purchase.
Nor did Merrill cut back in September , when one of its own analysts issued a
report warning that this subprime exposure could lead to a sudden cut in earnings,
because demand for these mortgages assets could dry up quickly. That assessment
was not in line with the corporate strategy, and Merrill did nothing. Finally, at the
end of , Kim instructed his people to reduce credit risk across the board. As it
would turn out, they were too late. The pipeline was too large.
REGULATORS: “ARE UNDUE CONCENTRATIONS
OF RISK DEVELOPING?”
As had happened when they faced the question of guidance on nontraditional mortgages, in dealing with the rapidly changing structured finance market the regulators
failed to take timely action. They missed a crucial opportunity. On January , ,
one year after the collapse of Enron, the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on In-
THE MADNESS
vestigations called on the Fed, OCC, and SEC “to immediately initiate a one-time,
joint review of banks and securities firms participating in complex structured finance
products with U.S. public companies to identify those structured finance products,
transactions, or practices which facilitate a U.S. company’s use of deceptive accounting in its financial statements or reports.” The subcommittee recommended the agencies issue joint guidance on “acceptable and unacceptable structured finance
products, transactions and practices” by June . Four years later, the banking
agencies and the SEC issued their “Interagency Statement on Sound Practices Concerning Elevated Risk Complex Structured Finance Activities,” a document that was
all of nine pages long.
In the intervening years, from to , the banking agencies and SEC issued
two draft statements for public comment. The draft, issued the year after the
OCC, Fed, and SEC had brought enforcement actions against Citigroup and JP Morgan for helping Enron to manipulate its financial statements, focused on the policies
and procedures that financial institutions should have for managing the structured finance business. The aim was to avoid another Enron—and for that reason, the
statement encouraged financial institutions to look out for customers that, like Enron, were trying to use structured transactions to circumvent regulatory or financial
reporting requirements, evade tax liabilities, or engage in other illegal or improper
behavior.
Industry groups criticized the draft guidance as too broad, prescriptive, and burdensome. Several said it would cover many structured finance products that did not
pose significant legal or reputational risks. Another said that it “would disrupt the
market for legitimate structured finance products and place U.S. financial institutions
at a competitive disadvantage in the market for [complex structured finance transactions] in the United States and abroad.”
Two years later, in May , the agencies issued an abbreviated draft that reflected a more “principles-based” approach, and again requested comments. Most of
the requirements were very similar to those that the OCC and Fed had imposed on
Citigroup and JP Morgan in the enforcement actions.
When the regulators issued the final guidance in January , the industry was
more supportive. One reason was that mortgage-backed securities and CDOs were
specifically excluded: “Most structured finance transactions, such as standard public
mortgage-backed securities and hedging-type transactions involving ‘plain vanilla’
derivatives or collateralized debt obligations, are familiar to participants in the financial markets, have well-established track records, and typically would not be considered [complex structured finance transactions] for purposes of the Final
Statement.” Those exclusions had been added after the regulators received comments on the draft.
Regulators did take note of the potential risks of CDOs and credit default swaps.
In , the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision’s Joint Forum, which includes
banking, securities, and insurance regulators from around the world, issued a comprehensive report on these products. The report focused on whether banks and other
firms involved in the CDO and credit default swap business understood the credit
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
risk they were taking. It advised them to make sure that they understood the nature
of the rating agencies’ models, especially for CDOs. And it further advised them to
make sure that counterparties from whom they bought credit protection—such as
AIG and the financial guarantors—would be good for that protection if it was
needed.
The regulators also said they had researched in some depth, for the CDO and derivatives market, the question “Are undue concentrations of risk developing?” Their
answer: probably not. The credit risk was “quite modest,” the regulators concluded,
and the monoline financial guarantors appeared to know what they were doing.
The [Joint Forum’s Working Group on Risk Assessment and Capital]
has not found evidence of ‘hidden concentrations’ of credit risk. There
are some non-bank firms whose primary business model focuses on
taking on credit risk. Most important among these firms are the monoline financial guarantors. Other market participants seem to be fully
aware of the nature of these firms. In the case of the monolines, credit
risk has always been a primary business activity and they have invested
heavily in obtaining the relevant expertise. While obviously this does
not rule out the potential for one of these firms to experience unanticipated problems or to misjudge the risks, their risks are primarily at the
catastrophic or macroeconomic level. It is also clear that such firms are
subjected to regulatory, rating agency, and market scrutiny.
The regulators noted that industry participants appeared to have learned from
earlier flare-ups in the CDO sector: “The Working Group believes that it is important
for investors in CDOs to seek to develop a sound understanding of the credit risks involved and not to rely solely on rating agency assessments. In many respects, the
losses and downgrades experienced on some of the early generation of CDOs have
probably been salutary in highlighting the potential risks involved.”
MOODY’S: “IT WAS ALL ABOUT REVENUE”
Like other market participants, Moody’s Investors Service, one of the three dominant
rating agencies, was swept up in the frenzy of the structured products market. The
tranching structure of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs was standardized according to guidelines set by the agencies; without their models and their generous allotment of triple-A ratings, there would have been little investor interest and few
deals. Between and , the volume of Moody’s business devoted to rating residential mortgage–backed securities more than doubled; the dollar value of that business increased from million to million; the number of staff rating these
deals doubled. But over the same period, while the volume of CDOs to be rated increased sevenfold, staffing increased only . From to , annual revenue
tied to CDOs grew from million to million.
When Moody’s Corporation went public in , the investor Warren Buffett’s
THE MADNESS
Berkshire Hathaway held of the company. After share repurchases by Moody’s
Corporation, Berkshire Hathaway’s holdings of outstanding shares increased to over
by . As of , Berkshire Hathaway and three other investors owned a combined . of Moody’s. When asked whether he was satisfied with the internal controls at Moody’s, Buffett responded to the FCIC that he knew nothing about the
management of Moody’s. “I had no idea. I’d never been at Moody’s, I don’t know where
they are located.” Buffett said that he invested in the company because the rating
agency business was “a natural duopoly,” which gave it “incredible” pricing power—
and “the single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.”
Many former employees said that after the public listing, the company culture
changed—it went “from [a culture] resembling a university academic department to
one which values revenues at all costs,” according to Eric Kolchinsky, a former managing director. Employees also identified a new focus on market share directed by
former president of Moody’s Investors Service Brian Clarkson. Clarkson had joined
Moody’s in as a senior analyst in the residential mortgage group, and after successive promotions he became co-chief operating officer of the rating agency in ,
and then president in August . Gary Witt, a former team managing director
covering U.S. derivatives, described the cultural transformation under Clarkson: “My
kind of working hypothesis was that [former chairman and CEO] John Rutherford
was thinking, ‘I want to remake the culture of this company to increase profitability
dramatically [after Moody’s became an independent corporation],’ and that he made
personnel decisions to make that happen, and he was successful in that regard. And
that was why Brian Clarkson’s rise was so meteoric: . . . he was the enforcer who could
change the culture to have more focus on market share.” The former managing director Jerome Fons, who was responsible for assembling an internal history of
Moody’s, agreed: “The main problem was . . . that the firm became so focused, particularly the structured area, on revenues, on market share, and the ambitions of Brian
Clarkson, that they willingly looked the other way, traded the firm’s reputation for
short-term profits.”
Moody’s Corporation Chairman and CEO Raymond McDaniel did not agree with
this assessment, telling the FCIC that he didn’t see “any particular difference in culture” after the spin-off. Clarkson also disputed this version of events, explaining
that market share was important to Moody’s well before it was an independent company. “[The idea that before Moody’s] was spun off from Dun & Bradstreet, it was a
sort of sleepy, academic kind of company that was in an ivory tower . . . isn’t the case,
you know,” he explained. “I think [the ivory tower] was really a misnomer. I think
that Moody’s has always been focused on business.”
Clarkson and McDaniel also adamantly disagreed with the perception that concerns about market share trumped ratings quality. Clarkson told the FCIC that it was
fine for Moody’s to lose transactions if it was for the “right reasons”: “If it was an analytical reason or it was a credit reason, there’s not a lot you can do about that. But if you’re
losing a deal because you’re not communicating, you’re not being transparent, you’re
not picking up the phone, that could be problematic.” McDaniel cited unforeseen
market conditions as the reason that the models did not accurately predict the credit
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
quality. He testified to the FCIC, “We believed that our ratings were our best opinion
at the time that we assigned them. As we obtained new information and were able to
update our judgments based on the new information and the trends we were seeing in
the housing market, we made what I think are appropriate changes to our ratings.”
Nonetheless, Moody’s president did not seem to have the same enthusiasm for
compliance as he did for market share and profit, according to those who worked
with him. Scott McCleskey, a former chief compliance officer at Moody’s, recounted a
story to the FCIC about an evening when he and Clarkson were dining with the
board of directors after the company had announced strong earnings, particularly in
the business of rating mortgage-backed securities and CDOs. “So Brian Clarkson
comes up to me, in front of everybody at the table, including board members, and
says literally, ‘How much revenue did Compliance bring in this quarter? Nothing.
Nothing.’ . . . For him to say that in front of the board, that’s just so telling of how he
felt that he was bulletproof. . . . For him, it was all about revenue.” Clarkson told the
FCIC that he didn’t remember this conversation transpiring and said, “From my perspective, compliance is a very important function.”
According to some former Moody’s employees, Clarkson’s management style left
little room for discussion or dissent. Witt referred to Clarkson as the “dictator” of
Moody’s and said that if he asked an employee to do something, “either you comply
with his request or you start looking for another job.” “When I joined Moody’s in
late , an analyst’s worst fear was that we would contribute to the assignment of a
rating that was wrong,” Mark Froeba, former senior vice president, testified to the
FCIC. “When I left Moody’s, an analyst’s worst fear was that he would do something,
or she, that would allow him or her to be singled out for jeopardizing Moody’s market share.” Clarkson denied having a “forceful” management style, and his supervisor, Raymond McDaniel, told the FCIC that Clarkson was a “good manager.”
Former team managing director Gary Witt recalled that he received a monthly
email from Clarkson “that outlined basically my market share in the areas that I was
in charge of. . . . I believe it listed the deals that we did, and then it would list the deals
like S&P and/or Fitch did that we didn’t do that was in my area. And at times, I would
have to comment on that verbally or even write a written report about—you know,
look into what was it about that deal, why did we not rate it. So, you know, it was clear
that market share was important to him.” Witt acknowledged the pressures that he
felt as a manager: “When I was an analyst, I just thought about getting the deals
right. . . . Once I [was promoted to managing director and] had a budget to meet, I
had salaries to pay, I started thinking bigger picture. I started realizing, yes, we do
have shareholders and, yes, they deserved to make some money. We need to get the
ratings right first, that’s the most important thing; but you do have to think about
market share.”
Even as far back as , a strong emphasis on market share was evident in employee performance evaluations. In July , Clarkson circulated a spreadsheet to
subordinates that listed analysts and the number and dollar volume of deals each
had “rated” or “NOT rated.” Clarkson’s instructions: “You should be using this in PE’s
THE MADNESS
[performance evaluations] and to give people a heads up on where they stand relative
to their peers.” Team managing directors, who oversaw the analysts rating the
deals, received a base salary, cash bonus, and stock options. Their performance goals
generally fell into the categories of market coverage, revenue, market outreach (such
as speeches and publications), ratings quality, and development of analytical tools,
only one of which was impossible to measure in real time as compensation was being
awarded: ratings quality. It might take years for the poor quality of a rating to become
clear as the rated asset failed to perform as expected.
In January , a derivatives manager listed his most important achievements in
a performance evaluation. At the top of the list: “Protected our market share in
the CDO corporate cash flow sector. . . . To my knowledge we missed only one CLO
[collateralized loan obligation] from BofA and that CLO was unratable by us because
of it’s [sic] bizarre structure.”
More evidence of Moody’s emphasis on market share was provided by an email that
circulated in the fall of , in the midst of significant downgrades in the structured finance market. Group Managing Director of U.S. Derivatives Yuri Yoshizawa asked her
team’s managing directors to explain a market share decrease from to .
Despite this apparent emphasis on market share, Clarkson told the FCIC that “the
most important goal for any managing director would be credibility . . . and performance [of] the ratings.” McDaniel, the chairman and CEO of Moody’s Corporation,
elaborated: “I disagree that there was a drive for market share. We pay attention to
our position in the market. . . . But ratings quality, getting the ratings to the best possible predictive content, predictive status, is paramount.”
Whatever McDaniel’s or Clarkson’s intended message, some employees continued
to see an emphasis on Moody’s market share. Former team managing director Witt
recalled that the “smoking gun” moment of his employment at Moody’s occurred
during a “town hall” meeting in the third quarter of with Moody’s management
and its managing directors, after Moody’s had already announced mass downgrades
on mortgage-related securities. After McDaniel made a presentation about
Moody’s financial outlook for the year ahead, one managing director responded: “I
was interested, Ray, to hear your belief that the first thing in the minds of people in
this room is the financial outlook for the remainder of the year. . . . [M]y thinking is
there’s a much greater concern about the franchise.” He added, “I think that the
greater anxiety being felt by the people in this room and . . . by the analysts is what’s
going on with the ratings and what the outlook is[,] . . . specifically the severe ratings
transitions we’re dealing with . . . and uncertainty about what’s ahead on that, the ratings accuracy.” Witt recalled, “Moody’s reputation was just being absolutely lacerated; and that these people are standing here, and they’re not even
addressing—they’re acting like it’s not even happening, even now that it’s already
happened. . . . [T]hat just made it so clear to me . . . that the balance was far too much
on the side of short-term profitability.”
In an internal memorandum from October sent to McDaniel, in a section
titled “Conflict of Interest: Market Share,” Chief Credit Officer Andrew Kimball
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
explained that “Moody’s has erected safeguards to keep teams from too easily solving the market share problem by lowering standards.” But he observed that these
protections were far from fail-safe, as he detailed in two area. First, “Ratings are assigned by committee, not individuals. (However, entire committees, entire departments, are susceptible to market share objectives).” Second, “Methodologies &
criteria are published and thus put boundaries on rating committee discretion.
(However, there is usually plenty of latitude within those boundaries to register
market influence.)”
Moreover, the pressure for market share, combined with complacency, may have
deterred Moody’s from creating new models or updating its assumptions, as Kimball
wrote: “Organizations often interpret past successes as evidencing their competence
and the adequacy of their procedures rather than a run of good luck. . . . [O]ur
years of success rating RMBS [residential mortgage–backed securities] may have induced managers to merely fine-tune the existing system—to make it more efficient,
more profitable, cheaper, more versatile. Fine-tuning rarely raises the probability of
success; in fact, it often makes success less certain.”
If an issuer didn’t like a Moody’s rating on a particular deal, it might get a better
rating from another ratings agency. The agencies were compensated only for rated
deals—in effect, only for the deals for which their ratings were accepted by the issuer.
So the pressure came from two directions: in-house insistence on increasing market
share and direct demands from the issuers and investment bankers, who pushed for
better ratings with fewer conditions.
Richard Michalek, a former Moody’s vice president and senior credit officer, testified to the FCIC, “The threat of losing business to a competitor, even if not realized,
absolutely tilted the balance away from an independent arbiter of risk towards a captive facilitator of risk transfer.” Witt agreed. When asked if the investment banks
frequently threatened to withdraw their business if they didn’t get their desired rating, Witt replied, “Oh God, are you kidding? All the time. I mean, that’s routine. I
mean, they would threaten you all of the time. . . . It’s like, ‘Well, next time, we’re just
going to go with Fitch and S&P.’” Clarkson affirmed that “it wouldn’t surprise me to
hear people say that” about issuer pressure on Moody’s employees.
Former managing director Fons suggested that Moody’s was complaisant when it
should have been principled: “[Moody’s] knew that they were being bullied into caving in to bank pressure from the investment banks and originators of these things. . . .
Moody’s allow[ed] itself to be bullied. And, you know, they willingly played the
game. . . . They could have stood up and said, ‘I’m sorry, this is not—we’re not going
to sign off on this. We’re going to protect investors. We’re going to stop—you know,
we’re going to try to protect our reputation. We’re not going to rate these CDOs, we’re
not going to rate these subprime RMBS.’”
Kimball elaborated further in his October memorandum:
Ideally, competition would be primarily on the basis of ratings quality,
with a second component of price and a third component of service.
THE MADNESS
Unfortunately, of the three competitive factors, rating quality is proving
the least powerful given the long tail in measuring performance. . . . The
real problem is not that the market does underweights [sic] ratings
quality but rather that, in some sectors, it actually penalizes quality by
awarding rating mandates based on the lowest credit enhancement
needed for the highest rating. Unchecked, competition on this basis can
place the entire financial system at risk. It turns out that ratings quality
has surprisingly few friends: issuers want high ratings; investors don’t
want rating downgrades; and bankers game the rating agencies for a few
extra basis points on execution.
Moody’s employees told the FCIC that one tactic used by the investment bankers
to apply subtle pressure was to submit a deal for a rating within a very tight time
frame. Kolchinsky, who oversaw ratings on CDOs, recalled the case of a particular
CDO: “What the trouble on this deal was, and this is crucial about the market share,
was that the banker gave us hardly any notice and any documents and any time to analyze this deal. . . . Because bankers knew that we could not say no to a deal, could not
walk away from the deal because of a market share, they took advantage of that.”
For this CDO deal, the bankers allowed only three or four days for review and final
judgment. Kolchinsky emailed Yoshizawa that the transactions had “egregiously
pushed our time limits (and analysts).” Before the frothy days of the peak of the
housing boom, an agency took six weeks or even two months to rate a CDO. By
, Kolchinsky described a very different environment in the CDO group:
“Bankers were pushing more aggressively, so that it became from a quiet little group
to more of a machine.” In , Moody’s gave triple-A ratings to an average of
more than mortgage securities each and every working day.
Such pressure can be seen in an April email to Yoshizawa from a managing
director in synthetic CDO trading at Credit Suisse, who explained, “I’m going to have
a major political problem if we can’t make this [deal rating] short and sweet because,
even though I always explain to investors that closing is subject to Moody’s timelines,
they often choose not to hear it.”
The external pressure was summed up in Kimball’s October memorandum:
“Analysts and [managing directors] are continually ‘pitched’ by bankers, issuers, investors—all with reasonable arguments—whose views can color credit judgment,
sometimes improving it, other times degrading it (we ‘drink the kool-aid’). Coupled
with strong internal emphasis on market share & margin focus, this does constitute a
‘risk’ to ratings quality.”
The SEC investigated the rating agencies’ ratings of mortgage-backed securities
and CDOs in , reporting its findings to Moody’s in July . The SEC criticized
Moody’s for, among other things, failing to verify the accuracy of mortgage information, leaving that work to due diligence firms and other parties; failing to retain documentation about how most deals were rated; allowing ratings quality to be
compromised by the complexity of CDO deals; not hiring sufficient staff to rate
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
CDOs; pushing ratings out the door with insufficient review; failing to adequately
disclose its rating process for mortgage-backed securities and CDOs; and allowing
conflicts of interest to affect rating decisions.
So matters stood in , when the machine that had been humming so smoothly
and so lucratively slipped a gear, and then another, and another—and then seized up
entirely.
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 10
The Commission concludes that the credit rating agencies abysmally failed in
their central mission to provide quality ratings on securities for the benefit of investors. They did not heed many warning signs indicating significant problems in
the housing and mortgage sector. Moody’s, the Commission’s case study in this
area, continued issuing ratings on mortgage-related securities, using its outdated
analytical models, rather than making the necessary adjustments. The business
model under which firms issuing securities paid for their ratings seriously undermined the quality and integrity of those ratings; the rating agencies placed market
share and profit considerations above the quality and integrity of their ratings.
Despite the leveling off and subsequent decline of the housing market beginning in , securitization of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), CDOs
squared, and synthetic CDOs continued unabated, greatly expanding the exposure to losses when the housing market collapsed and exacerbating the impact of
the collapse on the financial system and the economy.
During this period, speculators fueled the market for synthetic CDOs to bet
on the future of the housing market. CDO managers of these synthetic products
had potential conflicts in trying to serve the interests of customers who were betting mortgage borrowers would continue to make their payments and of customers who were betting the housing market would collapse.
There were also potential conflicts for underwriters of mortgage-related securities to the extent they shorted the products for their own accounts outside of
their roles as market makers.
11
THE BUST
CONTENTS
Delinquencies: “The turn of the housing market” ..............................................
Rating downgrades: “Never before”....................................................................
CDOs: “Climbing the wall of subprime worry”..................................................
Legal remedies: “On the basis of the information”..............................................
Losses: “Who owns residential credit risk?” .......................................................
What happens when a bubble bursts? In early , it became obvious that home
prices were falling in regions that had once boomed, that mortgage originators were
floundering, and that more and more families, especially those with subprime and
Alt-A loans, would be unable to make their mortgage payments.
What was not immediately clear was how the housing crisis would affect the financial system that had helped inflate the bubble. Were all those mortgage-backed
securities and collateralized debt obligations ticking time bombs on the balance
sheets of the world’s largest financial institutions? “The concerns were just that if
people . . . couldn’t value the assets, then that created . . . questions about the solvency
of the firms,” William C. Dudley, now president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York, told the FCIC.
In theory, securitization, over-the-counter derivatives and the many byways of the
shadow banking system were supposed to distribute risk efficiently among investors.
The theory would prove to be wrong. Much of the risk from mortgage-backed securities had actually been taken by a small group of systemically important companies
with outsized holdings of, or exposure to, the super-senior and triple-A tranches of
CDOs. These companies would ultimately bear great losses, even though those investments were supposed to be super-safe.
As went on, increasing mortgage delinquencies and defaults compelled the
ratings agencies to downgrade first mortgage-backed securities, then CDOs.
Alarmed investors sent prices plummeting. Hedge funds faced with margin calls
from their repo lenders were forced to sell at distressed prices; many would shut
down. Banks wrote down the value of their holdings by tens of billions of dollars.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The summer of also saw a near halt in many securitization markets, including the market for non-agency mortgage securitizations. For example, a total of
billion in subprime securitizations were issued in the second quarter of (already
down from prior quarters). That figure dropped precipitously to billion in the
third quarter and to only billion in the fourth quarter of . Alt-A issuance
topped billion in the second quarter, but fell to billion in the fourth quarter
of . Once-booming markets were now gone—only billion in subprime or AltA mortgage-backed securities were issued in the first half of , and almost none
after that.
CDOs followed suit. From a high of more than billion in the first quarter of
, worldwide issuance of CDOs with mortgage-backed securities as collateral
plummeted to billion in the third quarter of and only billion in the
fourth quarter. And as the CDO market ground to a halt, investors no longer trusted
other structured products. Over billion of collateralized loan obligations
(CLOs), or securitized leveraged loans, were issued in ; only billion were issued in . The issuance of commercial real estate mortgage–backed securities
plummeted from billion in to billion in .
Those securitization markets that held up during the turmoil in eventually
suffered in as the crisis deepened. Securitization of auto loans, credit cards,
small business loans, and equipment leases all nearly ceased in the third and fourth
quarters of .
DELINQUENCIES: “THE TURN OF THE HOUSING MARKET”
Home prices rose nationally in , their third year of double-digit growth. But
by the spring of , as the sales pace slowed, the number of months it would take to
sell off all the homes on the market rose to its highest level in years. Nationwide,
home prices peaked in April .
Members of the Federal Reserve’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) discussed housing prices in the spring of . Chairman Ben Bernanke and other
members predicted a decline in home prices but were uncertain whether the decline
would be slow or fast. Bernanke believed some correction in the housing market
would be healthy and that the goal of the FOMC should be to ensure the correction
did not overly affect the growth of the rest of the economy.
In October , with the housing market downturn under way, Moody’s Economy.com, a business unit separate from Moody’s Investors Service, issued a report
authored by Chief Economist Mark Zandi titled “Housing at the Tipping Point: The
Outlook for the U.S. Residential Real Estate Market.” He came to the following
conclusion:
Nearly of the nation’s metro areas will experience a crash in house
prices; a double-digit peak-to-trough decline in house prices. . . . These
sharp declines in house prices are expected along the Southwest coast of
Florida, in the metro areas of Arizona and Nevada, in a number of Cali-
THE BUST
fornia areas, throughout the broad Washington, D.C. area, and in and
around Detroit. Many more metro areas are expected to experience only
house-price corrections in which peak-to-trough price declines remain
in the single digits. . . . It is important to note that price declines in various markets are expected to extend into and even .
With over metro areas representing nearly one-half of the nation’s housing stock experiencing or about to experience price declines,
national house prices are also set to decline. Indeed, odds are high that
national house prices will decline in .
For , the National Association of Realtors announced that the number of
sales of existing homes had experienced the sharpest fall in years. That year, home
prices declined . In , they would drop a stunning . Overall, by the end of
, prices would drop from their peak in . Some cities saw a particularly
large drop: in Las Vegas, as of August , home prices were down from their
peak. And areas that never saw huge price gains have experienced losses as well:
home prices in Denver have fallen since their peak.
In some areas, home prices started to fall as early as late . For example, in
Ocean City, New Jersey, where many properties are vacation homes, home prices had
risen since ; they topped out in December and fell in the first half
of . By mid-, they would be below their peak. Prices topped out in
Sacramento in October and are today down nearly . In most places, prices
rose for a bit longer. For instance, in Tucson, Arizona, prices kept increasing for
much of , climbing from to their high point in August , and then
fell only by the end of the year.
One of the first signs of the housing crash was an upswing in early payment defaults—usually defined as borrowers’ being or more days delinquent within the first
year. Figures provided to the FCIC show that by the summer of , . of loans
less than a year old were in default. The figure would peak in late at ., well
above the . peak in the recession. Even more stunning, first payment defaults—that is, mortgages taken out by borrowers who never made a single payment—
went above . of loans in early . Responding to questions about that data,
CoreLogic Chief Economist Mark Fleming told the FCIC that the early payment default rate “certainly correlates with the increase in the Alt-A and subprime shares and
the turn of the housing market and the sensitivity of those loan products.”
Mortgages in serious delinquency, defined as those or more days past due or in
foreclosure, had hovered around during the early part of the decade, jumped in
, and kept climbing. By the end of , . of mortgage loans were seriously
delinquent. By comparison, serious delinquencies peaked at . in following
the previous recession.
Serious delinquency was highest in areas of the country that had experienced the
biggest housing booms. In the “sand states”—California, Arizona, Nevada, and
Florida—serious delinquency rose to in mid- and by late , double
the rate in other areas of the country (see figure .).
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Mortgage Delinquencies by Region
Arizona, California, Florida, and Nevada—the “sand states”—had the most
problem loans.
IN PERCENT, BY REGION
16%
13.6%
Sand
states
12
8.7%
U.S.
total
8
7.0%
Non-sand
states
4
0
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
NOTE: Serious delinquencies include mortgages 90 days or more past due and those in foreclosure.
SOURCE: Mortgage Bankers Association National Delinquency Survey
Figure .
Serious delinquency also varied by type of loan (see figure .). Subprime adjustable-rate mortgages began to show increases in serious delinquency in early ,
even as house prices were peaking; the rate rose rapidly to in . By late ,
the delinquency rate for subprime ARMs was . Prime ARMs did not weaken until , at about the same time as subprime fixed-rate mortgages. Prime fixed-rate
mortgages, which have historically been the least risky, showed a slow increase in serious delinquency that coincided with the increasing severity of the recession and of
unemployment in .
The FCIC undertook an extensive examination of the relative performance of
mortgages purchased or guaranteed by the GSEs, those securitized in the private
market, and those insured by the Federal Housing Administration or Veterans Administration (see figure .). The analysis was conducted using roughly million
mortgages outstanding at the end of each year from through . The data
contained mortgages in four groups—loans that were sold into private label securitizations labeled subprime by issuers (labeled SUB), loans sold into private label Alt-A
securitizations (ALT), loans either purchased or guaranteed by the GSEs (GSE), and
loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration or Veterans Administration
(FHA). The GSE group, in addition to the more traditional conforming GSE loans,
THE BUST
Mortgage Delinquencies by Loan Type
Serious delinquencies started earlier and were substantially higher among
subprime adjustable-rate loans, compared with other loan types.
IN PERCENT, BY TYPE
50%
Subprime
adjustable
rate
40
30
Subprime
rate
Prime
adjustable
rate
20
10
0
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
Prime
rate
NOTE: Serious delinquencies include mortgages 90 days or more past due and those in foreclosure.
SOURCE: Mortgage Bankers Association National Delinquency Survey
Figure .
also includes mortgages that the GSEs identified as subprime and Alt-A loans owing
to their higher-risk characteristics, as discussed in earlier chapters.
Within each of the four groups, the FCIC created subgroups based on characteristics that could affect loan performance: FICO credit scores, loan-to-value ratios
(LTVs), and mortgage size. For example, one subgroup would be GSE loans with a
balance below , (conforming to GSE loan size limits), a FICO score between
and (a borrower with below-average credit history), and LTV between
and . Another group would be Alt-A loans with the same characteristics. In
each year, the loans were broken into different subgroups— each for GSE,
SUB, ALT, and FHA.
Figure . graphically demonstrates the results of the examination. The various
bars show the range of average delinquencies for each of the four groups examined,
based on the distribution of delinquency rates within the subgroups for each
loan category. The black portion of each bar represents the middle ( on either side of the median) of the distribution of average delinquency rates. The full bar,
including both dark and light shading, represents the middle of the distribution
of average delinquency rates. The bars exclude the at the extremes of each end of
the distribution. For example, at the end of , the black portion of the GSE bar
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Loan Performance in Various Mortgage-Market Segments
Bars shows distribution of average rate of serious delinquency.
IN PERCENT
MIDDLE 50%
2008
2009
MIDDLE 90%
GSE
GSE
SUB
SUB
ALT
ALT
FHA
FHA
0
10
20
30
40%
0
10
20
30
40%
NOTE: Serious delinquencies include mortgages 90 days or more past due and those in foreclosure.
SOURCE: FCIC calculations, based on CoreLogic and Loan Processing Service Inc.
Figure .
spans a . average delinquency rate on the low end and a . average delinquency rate on the high end. The full bar for the GSEs spans average delinquency
rates from . to .. That means that only of GSE loans were in subgroups
with average delinquency rates above .. In sharp contrast, the black bar for private-label subprime securitizations (SUB) spans average delinquency rates between
. on the low end and . on the high end, and the full bar spans average
delinquency rates between . and .. That means that only of SUB loans
were in subgroups with average delinquency rates below . The worst-performing
of GSE loans are in subgroups with rates of serious delinquency similar to the
best-performing of SUB loans.
By the end of , performance within all segments of the market had weakened.
The median delinquency rate—the midpoints of the black bars—rose from in
to . for GSE loans, from to for SUB loans, from to for
Alt-A loans, and remained at roughly for FHA loans.
The data illustrate that in and , GSE loans performed significantly better than privately securitized, or non-GSE, subprime and Alt-A loans. That holds
true even when comparing loans in GSE pools that share the same key characteristics
with the loans in privately securitized mortgages, such as low FICO scores. For example, among loans to borrowers with FICO scores below , a privately securitized
mortgage was more than four times as likely to be seriously delinquent as a GSE.
THE BUST
In , the respective average delinquency rates for the non-GSE and GSE loans
were . and .. These patterns are most likely driven by differences in underwriting standards as well as by some differences not captured in these mortgages.
For instance, in the GSE pool, borrowers tended to make bigger down payments. The
FCIC’s data show that of GSE loans with FICO scores below had an original
loan-to-value ratio below , indicating that the borrower made a down payment
of at least of the sales price. This relatively large down payment would help offset
the effect of the lower FICO score. In contrast, only of loans with FICO scores
below in non-GSE subprime securitizations had an LTV under . The data illustrate that non-agency securitized loans were much more likely to have more than
one risk factor and thereby exhibit so-called risk layering, such as low FICO scores
on top of small down payments.
GSE mortgages with Alt-A characteristics also performed significantly better than
mortgages packaged into non-GSE Alt-A securities. For example, in among
loans with an LTV above , the GSE pools have an average rate of serious delinquency of ., versus a rate of . for loans in private Alt-A securities. These
results are also, in large part, driven by differences in risk layering.
Others frame the situation differently. According to Ed Pinto, a mortgage finance
industry consultant who was the chief credit officer at Fannie Mae in the s, GSEs
dominated the market for risky loans. In written analyses reviewed by the FCIC staff
and sent to Commissioners as well as in a number of interviews, Pinto has argued
that the GSE loans that had FICO scores below , a combined loan-to-value ratio
greater than , or other mortgage characteristics such as interest-only payments
were essentially equivalent to those mortgages in securitizations labeled subprime
and Alt-A by issuers.
Using strict cutoffs on FICO score and loan-to-value ratios that ignore risk layering and thus are only partly related to mortgage performance (as well as relying on a
number of other assumptions), Pinto estimates that as of June , , of all
mortgages in the country—. million of them—were risky mortgages that he defines as subprime or Alt-A. Of these, Pinto counts . million, or , that were
purchased or guaranteed by the GSEs. In contrast, the GSEs categorize fewer than
million of their loans as subprime or Alt-A.
Importantly, as the FCIC review shows, the GSE loans classified as subprime or
Alt-A in Pinto’s analysis did not perform nearly as poorly as loans in non-agency subprime or Alt-A securities. These differences suggest that grouping all of these loans
together is misleading. In direct contrast to Pinto’s claim, GSE mortgages with some
riskier characteristics such as high loan-to-value ratios are not at all equivalent to
those mortgages in securitizations labeled subprime and Alt-A by issuers. The performance data assembled and analyzed by the FCIC show that non-GSE securitized
loans experienced much higher rates of delinquency than did the GSE loans with
similar characteristics.
In addition to examining loans owned and guaranteed by the GSEs, Pinto also commented on the role of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in causing the crisis,
declaring, “The pain and hardship that CRA has likely spawned are immeasurable.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Contrary to this view, two Fed economists determined that lenders actually made
few subprime loans to meet their CRA requirements. Analyzing a database of nearly
million loans originated in , they found that only a small percentage of all
higher-cost loans as defined by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act had any connection to the CRA. These higher-cost loans serve as a rough proxy for subprime mortgages. Specifically, the study found that only of such higher-cost loans were made
to low- or moderate-income borrowers or in low- or moderate-income neighborhoods by banks and thrifts (and their subsidiaries and affiliates) covered by the CRA.
The other of higher-cost loans either were made by CRA-covered institutions
that did not receive CRA credit for these loans or were made by lenders not covered
by the CRA. Using other data sources, these economists also found that CRA-related
subprime loans appeared to perform better than other subprime loans. “Taken together, the available evidence seems to run counter to the contention that the CRA
contributed in any substantive way to the current crisis,” they wrote.
Subsequent research has come to similar conclusions. For example, two economists at the San Francisco Fed, using a different methodology and analyzing data on
the California mortgage market, found that only of loans made by CRA-covered
lenders were located in low- and moderate-income census tracts versus over for
independent mortgage companies not covered by the CRA. Further, fewer than
of the loans made by CRA lenders in low-income communities were higher priced,
even at the peak of the market. In contrast, about one-half of the loans originated by
independent mortgage companies in these communities were higher priced. And after accounting for characteristics of the loans and the borrowers, such as income and
credit score, the authors found that loans made by CRA-covered lenders in the lowand moderate-income areas they serve were half as likely to default as similar loans
made by independent mortgage companies, which are not subject to CRA and are
subject to less regulatory oversight in general. “While certainly not conclusive, this
suggests that the CRA, and particularly its emphasis on loans made within a lender’s
assessment area, helped to ensure responsible lending, even during a period of overall declines in underwriting standards,” they concluded.
Overall, in , , and , CRA-covered banks and thrifts accounted for at
least of all mortgage lending but only between and of higher-priced
mortgages. Independent mortgage companies originated less than one-third of all
mortgages but about one-half of all higher-priced mortgages. Finally, lending by
nonbank affiliates of CRA-covered depository institutions is counted toward CRA
performance at the discretion of the bank or thrift. These affiliates accounted for another roughly of mortgage lending but about of high-price lending.
Bank of America provided the FCIC with performance data on its CRA-qualifying portfolio, which represented only of the bank’s mortgage portfolio. In the
end of the first quarter of , of the bank’s billion portfolio of residential
mortgages was nonperforming: of the billion CRA-qualifying portfolio was
nonperforming at that date.
John Reed, a former CEO of Citigroup, when asked whether he thought government policies such as the CRA played a role in the crisis, said that he didn’t believe
THE BUST
banks would originate “a bad mortgage because they thought the government policy
allowed it” unless the bank could sell off the mortgage to Fannie or Freddie, which
had their own obligations in this arena. He said, “It’s hard for me to answer. If the reason the regulators didn’t jump up and down and yell at the low-doc, no-doc subprime mortgage was because they felt that they, Congress had sort of pushed in that
direction, then I would say yes.”
“You know, CRA could be a pain in the neck,” the banker Lewis Ranieri told the
FCIC. “But you know what? It always, in my view, it always did much more good
than it did anything. You know, we did a lot. CRA made a big difference in communities. . . . You were really putting money in the communities in ways that really stabilized the communities and made a difference.” But lenders including Countrywide
used pro-homeownership policies as a “smokescreen” to do away with underwriting
standards such as requiring down payments, he said. “The danger is that it gives air
cover to all of this kind of madness that had nothing to do with the housing goal.”
RATING DOWNGRADES: “NEVER BEFORE”
Prior to , the ratings of mortgage-backed securities at Moody’s were monitored
by the same analysts who had rated them in the first place. In , Nicolas Weill,
Moody’s chief credit officer and team managing director, was charged with creating
an independent surveillance team to monitor previously rated deals.
In November , the surveillance team began to see a rise in early payment defaults in mortgages originated by Fremont Investment & Loan, and downgraded
several securities with underlying Fremont loans or put them on watch for future
downgrades. “This was a very unusual situation as never before had we put on watch
deals rated in the same calendar year,” Weill later wrote to Raymond McDaniel, the
chairman and CEO of Moody’s Corporation, and Brian Clarkson, the president of
Moody’s Investors Service.
In early , a Moody’s special report, overseen by Weill, about the sharp increases in early payment defaults stated that the foreclosures were concentrated in
subprime mortgage pools. In addition, more than . of the subprime mortgages
securitized in the second quarter of were days delinquent within six months,
more than double the rate a year earlier (.). The exact cause of the trouble was
still unclear to the ratings agency, though. “Moody’s is currently assessing whether
this represents an overall worsening of collateral credit quality or merely a shifting
forward of eventual defaults which may not significantly impact a pool’s overall expected loss.”
For the next few months, the company published regular updates about the subprime mortgage market. Over the next three months, Moody’s took negative rating
actions on . of the outstanding subprime mortgage securities rated Baa. Then, on
July , , in an unprecedented move, Moody’s downgraded subprime mortgage-backed securities that had been issued in and put an additional securities on watch. The . billion of securities that were affected, all rated Baa and lower,
made up of the subprime securities that Moody’s rated Baa in . For the time
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
being, there were no downgrades on higher-rated tranches. Moody’s attributed the
downgrades to “aggressive underwriting combined with prolonged, slowing home
price appreciation” and noted that about of the securities affected contained
mortgages from one of four originators: Fremont Investment & Loan, Long Beach
Mortgage Company, New Century Mortgage Corporation, and WMC Mortgage
Corp.
Weill later told the FCIC staff that Moody’s issued a mass announcement, rather
than downgrading a few securities at a time, to avoid creating confusion in the market. A few days later, Standard & Poor’s downgraded similar tranches. These
initial downgrades were remarkable not only because of the number of securities involved but also because of the sharp rating cuts—an average of four notches per security, when one or two notches was more routine (for example, a single notch
would be a downgrade from AA to AA-). Among the tranches downgraded in July
were the bottom three mezzanine tranches (M, M, and M) of the Citigroup deal that we have been examining, CMLTI -NC. By that point, nearly
of the original loan pool had prepaid but another were or more days
past due or in foreclosure.
Investors across the world were assessing their own exposure, and guessing at that
of others, however indirect, to these assets. A report from Bear Stearns Asset Management detailed its exposure. One of its CDOs, Tall Ships, had direct exposure to
our sample deal, owning million of the M and M tranches. BSAM’s High-Grade
hedge fund also had exposure through a million credit default swap position
with Lehman referencing the M tranche. And BSAM’s Enhanced Leverage hedge
fund owned parts of the equity in Independence CDO, which in turn owned the M
tranche of our sample deal. In addition, these funds had exposure through their
holdings of other CDOs that in turn owned tranches of the Citigroup deal.
Then, on October , Moody’s downgraded another , tranches (. billion) of subprime mortgage–backed securities and placed tranches (. billion) on watch for potential downgrade. Now the total of securities downgraded and
put on watch represented . of the original dollar volume of all subprime
mortgage–backed securities that Moody’s had rated. Of the securities placed on
watch in October, tranches (. billion) were originally Aaa-rated and (.
billion) were Aa-rated. All told, in the first months of , of the mortgagebacked security deals issued in had at least one tranche downgraded or put on
watch.
By this point in October, of the loans in our case study deal CMLTI NC were seriously delinquent and some homes had already been repossessed. The
M through M tranches were downgraded as part of the second wave of mass
downgrades. Five additional tranches would eventually be downgraded in April
.
Before it was over, Moody’s would downgrade of all the Aaa mortgagebacked securities tranches and all of the Baa tranches. For those securities issued in
the second half of , nearly all Aaa and Baa tranches were downgraded. Of all
THE BUST
tranches initially rated investment grade—that is, rated Baa or higher— of
those issued in were downgraded to junk, as were of those from .
CDO S : “CLIMBING THE WALL OF SUBPRIME WORRY”
In March , Moody’s reported that CDOs with high concentrations of subprime
mortgage–backed securities could incur “severe” downgrades. In an internal email
sent five days after the report, Group Managing Director of U.S. Derivatives Yuri
Yoshizawa explained to Moody’s Chairman McDaniel and to Executive Vice President Noel Kirnon that one managing director at Credit Suisse First Boston “sees
banks like Merrill, Citi, and UBS still furiously doing transactions to clear out their
warehouses. . . . He believes that they are creating and pricing the CDOs in order to
remove the assets from the warehouses, but that they are holding on to the CDOs . . .
in hopes that they will be able to sell them later.” Several months later, in a review of
the CDO market titled “Climbing the Wall of Subprime Worry,” Moody’s noted,
“Some of the first quarter’s activity [in ] was the result of some arrangers feverishly working to clear inventory and reduce their balance sheet exposure to the subprime class.” Even though Moody’s was aware that the investment banks were
dumping collateral out of the warehouses and into CDOs—possibly regardless of
quality—the firm continued to rate new CDOs using existing assumptions.
Former Moody’s executive Richard Michalek testified to the FCIC, “It was a case
of, with respect to why didn’t we stop and change our methodology, there is a very
conservative culture at Moody’s, at least while I was there, that suggested that the
only thing worse than quickly getting a new methodology in place is quickly getting
the wrong methodology in place and having to unwind that and to fail to consider
the unintended consequences.”
In July, McDaniel gave a presentation to the board on the company’s strategic plan. His slides had such bleak titles as “Spotlight on Mortgages: Quality Continues to Erode,” “House Prices Are Falling . . . ,” “Mortgage Payment Resets Are
Mounting,” and “. MM Mortgage Defaults Forecast –.” Despite all the evidence that the quality of the underlying mortgages was declining, Moody’s did not
make any significant adjustments to its CDO ratings assumptions until late September. Out of billion in CDOs that Moody’s rated after its mass downgrade of subprime mortgage–backed securities on July , , were rated Aaa.
Moody’s had hoped that rating downgrades could be staved off by mortgage modifications—if their monthly payments became more affordable, borrowers might stay
current. However, in mid-September, Eric Kolchinsky, a team managing director for
CDOs, learned that a survey of servicers indicated that very few troubled mortgages
were being modified. Worried that continuing to rate CDOs without adjusting for
known deterioration in the underlying securities could expose Moody’s to liability,
Kolchinsky advised Yoshizawa that the company should stop rating CDOs until the
securities downgrades were completed. Kolchinsky told the FCIC that Yoshizawa
“admonished” him for making the suggestion.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
By the end of , more than of all tranches of CDOs had been downgraded. Moody’s downgraded nearly all of the Aaa and all of the Baa CDO
tranches. And, again, the downgrades were large—more than of Aaa CDO
bonds and more than of Baa CDO bonds were eventually downgraded to junk.
LEGAL REMEDIES: “ON THE BASIS OF THE INFORMATION”
The housing bust exposed the flaws in the mortgages that had been made and securitized. After the crisis unfolded, those with exposure to mortgages and structured
products—including investors, financial firms, and private mortgage insurance
firms—closely examined the representations and warranties made by mortgage originators and securities issuers. When mortgages were securitized, sold, or insured,
certain representations and warranties were made to assure investors and insurers
that the mortgages met stated guidelines. As mortgage securities lost value, investors
found significant deficiencies in securitizers’ due diligence on the mortgage pools underlying the mortgage-backed securities as well as in their disclosure about the characteristics of those deals. As private mortgage insurance companies found similar
deficiencies in the loans they insured, they have denied claims to an unprecedented
extent.
Fannie and Freddie acquired or guaranteed millions of loans each year. They delegated underwriting authority to originators subject to a legal agreement—representations and warranties—that the loans meet specified criteria. They then checked
samples of the loans to ensure that these representations and warranties were not
breached. If there was a breach and the loans were “ineligible” for purchase, the GSE
had the right to require the seller to buy back the loan—assuming, of course, that the
seller had not gone bankrupt.
As a result of such sampling, during the three years and eight months ending August , , Freddie and Fannie required sellers to repurchase , loans totaling . billion. So far, Freddie has received . billion from sellers, and Fannie has
received . billion—a total of . billion. The amount put back is notable in
that it represents of billion in credit-related expenses recorded by the GSEs
since the beginning of through September .
In testing to ensure compliance with its standards, Freddie reviews a small percentage of performing loans and a high percentage of foreclosed loans (including
well over of all loans that default in the first two years). In total, Freddie reviewed . billion of loans (out of . trillion in loans acquired or guaranteed)
and found . billion to be ineligible, meaning they did not meet representations
and warranties.
Among the performing loans that were sampled, over time an increasing percentage were found to be ineligible, rising from for mortgages originated in to
in . Still, Freddie put back very few of these performing loans to the originators. Among mortgages originated from to , it found that of the delinquent loans were ineligible, as were of the loans in foreclosure. Most of these
were put back to originators—again, in cases in which the originators were still in op-
THE BUST
eration. Sometimes, if the reasons for ineligibility were sufficiently minor, the loans
were not put back.
Overall, of the delinquent loans and loans in foreclosure sampled by Freddie,
were put back. In and , Freddie put back significant loan volumes to the
following lenders: Countrywide, . billion; Wells Fargo, . billion; Chase Home
Financial, . billion; Bank of America, million; and Ally Financial, million.
Using a method similar to Freddie’s to test for loan eligibility, Fannie reviewed between and of the mortgages originated since —sampling at the higher
rates for delinquent loans. From through , Fannie put back loans to the following large lenders: Bank of America, . billion; Wells Fargo, . billion; JP Morgan Chase, . billion; Citigroup, . billion; SunTrust Bank, million; and
Ally Financial, million. In early January , Bank of America reached a deal
with Fannie and Freddie, settling the GSEs’ claims with a payment of more than .
billion.
Like Fannie and Freddie, private mortgage insurance (PMI) companies have been
finding significant deficiencies in mortgages. They are refusing to pay claims on some
insured mortgages that have gone into default. This insurance protects the holder of
the mortgage if a homeowner defaults on a loan, even though the responsibility for
the premiums generally lies with the homeowner. By the end of , PMI companies had insured a total of billion in potential mortgage losses.
As defaults and losses on the insured mortgages have been increasing, the PMI
companies have seen a spike in claims. As of October , the seven largest PMI
companies, which share of the market, had rejected about of the claims (or
billion of billion) brought to them, because of violations of origination
guidelines, improper employment and income reporting, and issues with property
valuation.
Separate from their purchase and guarantee of mortgages, over the course of the
housing boom the GSEs purchased billion of subprime and Alt-A private-label
securities. The GSEs have recorded billion in charges on securities from January , to September , . Frustrated with the lack of information from the
securities’ servicers and trustees, in many cases large banks, on July , , the
GSEs through their regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, issued subpoenas to various trustees and servicers in transactions in which the GSEs lost
money. Where they find that the nonperforming loans in the pools have violations,
the GSEs intend to demand that the trustees recognize their rights (including any
rights to put loans back to the originator or wholesaler).
While this strategy being followed by the GSEs is based in contract law, other investors are relying on securities law to file lawsuits, claiming that they were misled by
inaccurate or incomplete prospectuses; and, in a number of cases, they are winning.
As of mid-, court actions embroiled almost all major loan originators and
underwriters—there were more than lawsuits related to breaches of representations and warranties, by one estimate. These lawsuits filed in the wake of the financial crisis include those alleging “untrue statements of material fact” or “material
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
misrepresentations” in the registration statements and prospectuses provided to investors who purchased securities. They generally allege violations of the Securities
Exchange Act of and the Securities Act of .
Both private and government entities have gone to court. For example, the investment brokerage Charles Schwab has sued units of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and
UBS Securities. The Massachusetts attorney general’s office settled charges against
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, after accusing the firms of inadequate disclosure relating to their sales of mortgage-backed securities. Morgan Stanley agreed to
pay million and Goldman Sachs agreed to pay million.
To take another example, the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago has sued several defendants, including Bank of America, Credit Suisse Securities, Citigroup, and
Goldman Sachs, over its . billion investment in private mortgage-backed securities, claiming they failed to provide accurate information about the securities. Similarly, Cambridge Place Investment Management has sued units of Morgan Stanley,
Citigroup, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, and Bank of America, among others, “on
the basis of the information contained in the applicable registration statement,
prospectus, and prospective supplements.”
LOSSES: “WHO OWNS RESIDENTIAL CREDIT RISK? ”
Through and into , as the rating agencies downgraded mortgage-backed
securities and CDOs, and investors began to panic, market prices for these securities
plunged. Both the direct losses as well as the marketwide contagion and panic that
ensued would lead to the failure or near failure of many large financial firms across
the system. The drop in market prices for mortgage-related securities reflected the
higher probability that the underlying mortgages would actually default (meaning
that less cash would flow to the investors) as well as the more generalized fear among
investors that this market had become illiquid. Investors valued liquidity because
they wanted the assurance that they could sell securities quickly to raise cash if necessary. Potential investors worried they might get stuck holding these securities as market participants looked to limit their exposure to the collapsing mortgage market.
As market prices dropped, “mark-to-market” accounting rules required firms to
write down their holdings to reflect the lower market prices. In the first quarter of
, the largest banks and investment banks began complying with a new accounting rule and for the first time reported their assets in one of three valuation categories: “Level assets,” which had observable market prices, like stocks on the stock
exchange; “Level assets,” which were not as easily priced because they were not actively traded; and “Level assets,” which were illiquid and had no discernible market
prices or other inputs. To determine the value of Level and in some cases Level assets where market prices were unavailable, firms used models that relied on assumptions. Many financial institutions reported Level assets that substantially exceeded
their capital. For example, for the first quarter of , Bear Stearns reported about
billion in Level assets, compared to billion in capital; Morgan Stanley re-
THE BUST
ported about billion in Level assets, against capital of billion; and Goldman
reported about billion, and capital of billion.
Mark-to-market write-downs were required on many securities even if there were
no actual realized losses and in some cases even if the firms did not intend to sell the
securities. The charges reflecting unrealized losses were based, in part, on credit rating agencies’ and investors’ expectations that the mortgages would default. But only
when those defaults came to pass would holders of the securities actually have realized losses. Determining the market value of securities that did not trade was difficult, was subjective, and became a contentious issue during the crisis. Why? Because
the write-downs reduced earnings and capital, and triggered collateral calls.
These mark-to-market accounting rules received a good deal of criticism in recent years, as firms argued that the lower market prices did not reflect market values
but rather fire-sale prices driven by forced sales. Joseph Grundfest, when he was a
member of the SEC’s Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting, noted
that at times, marking securities at market prices “creates situations where you have
to go out and raise physical capital in order to cover losses that as a practical matter
were never really there.” But not valuing assets based on market prices could mean
that firms were not recording losses required by the accounting rules and therefore
were overstating earnings and capital.
As the mortgage market was crashing, some economists and analysts estimated
that actual losses, also known as realized losses, on subprime and Alt-A mortgages
would total to billion; so far, by , the figure has turned out not to be
much more than that. As of year-end , the dollar value of all impaired Alt-A and
subprime mortgage–backed securities total about billion. Securities are impaired when they have suffered realized losses or are expected to suffer realized
losses imminently. While those numbers are small in relation to the trillion U.S.
economy, the losses had a disproportionate impact. “Subprime mortgages themselves
are a pretty small asset class,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke told the FCIC, explaining
how in he and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson had underestimated the
repercussions of the emerging housing crisis. “You know, the stock market goes up
and down every day more than the entire value of the subprime mortgages in the
country. But what created the contagion, or one of the things that created the contagion, was that the subprime mortgages were entangled in these huge securitized
pools.”
The large drop in market prices of the mortgage securities had large spillover effects to the financial sector, for a number of reasons. For example, as just discussed,
when the prices of mortgage-backed securities and CDOs fell, many of the holders of
those securities marked down the value of their holdings—before they had experienced any actual losses.
In addition, rather than spreading the risks of losses among many investors, the
securitization market had concentrated them. “Who owns residential credit risk?”
two Lehman analysts asked in a September report. The answer: three-quarters
of subprime and Alt-A mortgages had been securitized—and “much of the risk in
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
these securitizations is in the investment-grade securities and has been almost entirely transferred to AAA collateralized debt obligation (CDO) holders.” A set of
large, systemically important firms with significant holdings or exposure to these securities would be found to be holding very little capital to protect against potential
losses. And most of those companies would turn out to be considered by the authorities too big to fail in the midst of a financial crisis.
The International Monetary Fund’s Global Financial Stability Report published in
October examined where the declining assets were held and estimated how severe the write-downs would be. All told, the IMF calculated that roughly trillion
in mortgage assets were held throughout the financial system. Of these, . trillion
were GSE mortgage–backed securities; the IMF expected losses of billion, but investors holding these securities would lose no money, because of the GSEs’ guarantee. Another . trillion in mortgage assets were estimated to be prime and
nonprime mortgages held largely by the banks and the GSEs. These were expected to
suffer as much as billion in write-downs due to declines in market value. The
remaining . trillion in assets were estimated to be mortgage-backed securities and
CDOs. Write-downs on those assets were expected to be billion. And, even
more troubling, more than one-half of these losses were expected to be borne by the
investment banks, commercial banks, and thrifts. The rest of the write-downs from
non-agency mortgage–backed securities were shared among institutions such as insurance companies, pension funds, the GSEs, and hedge funds. The October report
also expected another billion in write-downs on commercial mortgage–backed
securities, CLOs, leveraged loans, and other loans and securities—with more than
half coming from commercial mortgage–backed securities. Again, the commercial
banks and thrifts and investment banks were expected to bear much of the brunt.
Furthermore, when the crisis began, uncertainty (suggested by the sizable revisions in the IMF estimates) and leverage would promote contagion. Investors would
realize they did not know as much as they wanted to know about the mortgage assets
that banks, investment banks, and other firms held or to which they were exposed. To
an extent not understood by many before the crisis, financial institutions had leveraged themselves with commercial paper, with derivatives, and in the short-term repo
markets, in part by using mortgage-backed securities and CDOs as collateral.
Lenders would question the value of the assets that those companies had posted as
collateral at the same time that they were questioning the value of those companies’
balance sheets.
Even the highest-rated tranches of mortgage-backed securities were downgraded,
and large write-downs were recorded on financial institutions’ balance sheets based
on declines in market value. However, although this could not be known in , at
the end of most of the triple-A tranches of mortgage-backed securities have
avoided actual losses in cash flow through and may avoid significant realized
losses going forward.
Overall, for to vintage tranches of mortgage-backed securities originally rated triple-A, despite the mass downgrades, only about of Alt-A and of
subprime securities had been “materially impaired”—meaning that losses were im-
THE BUST
Impaired Securities
Impairment of 2005-2007 vintage mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and CDOs as
of year-end 2009, by initial rating. A security is impaired when it is downgraded to
C or Ca, or when it suffers a principal loss.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
$1,000
Not impaired
Impaired
800
600
400
200
0
Aaa
Aa thru B
Alt-A MBS
Aaa
Aa thru B
Subprime MBS
Aaa
Aa thru B
CDOs
SOURCE: Moody’s Investors Service, “Special Comment: Default & Loss Rates of Structured Finance Securities:
1993-2009”; Moody’s SFDRS.
Figure .
minent or had already been suffered—by the end of (see figure .). For the
lower-rated Baa tranches, . of Alt-A and . of subprime securities were impaired. In all, by the end of , billion worth of subprime and Alt-A tranches
had been materially impaired—including . billion originally rated triple-A. The
outcome would be far worse for CDO investors, whose fate largely depended on the
performance of lower-rated mortgage-backed securities. More than of Baa CDO
bonds and . of Aaa CDO bonds were ultimately impaired.
The housing bust would not be the end of the story. As Chairman Bernanke testified to the FCIC: “What I did not recognize was the extent to which the system had
flaws and weaknesses in it that were going to amplify the initial shock from subprime
and make it into a much bigger crisis.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 11
The Commission concludes that the collapse of the housing bubble began the
chain of events that led to the financial crisis.
High leverage, inadequate capital, and short-term funding made many financial institutions extraordinarily vulnerable to the downturn in the market in .
The investment banks had leverage ratios, by one measure, of up to to . This
means that for every of assets, they held only of capital. Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac (the GSEs) had even greater leverage—with a combined to ratio.
Leverage or capital inadequacy at many institutions was even greater than reported when one takes into account “window dressing,” off-balance-sheet exposures such as those of Citigroup, and derivatives positions such as those of AIG.
The GSEs contributed to, but were not a primary cause of, the financial crisis.
Their trillion mortgage exposure and market position were significant, and
they were without question dramatic failures. They participated in the expansion
of risky mortgage lending and declining mortgage standards, adding significant
demand for less-than-prime loans. However, they followed, rather than led, the
Wall Street firms. The delinquency rates on the loans that they purchased or guaranteed were significantly lower than those purchased and securitized by other financial institutions.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA)—which requires regulated banks
and thrifts to lend, invest, and provide services consistent with safety and soundness to the areas where they take deposits—was not a significant factor in subprime lending. However, community lending commitments not required by the
CRA were clearly used by lending institutions for public relations purposes.
PART IV
The Unraveling
12
EARLY 2007:
SPREADING SUBPRIME WORRIES
CONTENTS
Goldman: “Let’s be aggressive distributing things”..............................................
Bear Stearns’s hedge funds: “Looks pretty damn ugly”........................................
Rating agencies: “It can’t be . . . all of a sudden”..................................................
AIG: “Well bigger than we ever planned for” .....................................................
Over the course of , the collapse of the housing bubble and the abrupt shutdown
of subprime lending led to losses for many financial institutions, runs on money market funds, tighter credit, and higher interest rates. Unemployment remained relatively steady, hovering just below . until the end of the year, and oil prices rose
dramatically. By the middle of , home prices had declined almost from their
peak in . Early evidence of the coming storm was the . drop in November
of the ABX Index—a Dow Jones–like index for credit default swaps on BBBtranches of mortgage-backed securities issued in the first half of .
That drop came after Moody’s and S&P put on negative watch selected tranches in
one deal backed by mortgages from one originator: Fremont Investment & Loan. In
December, the same index fell another after the mortgage companies Ownit
Mortgage Solutions and Sebring Capital ceased operations. Senior risk officers of the
five largest investment banks told the Securities and Exchange Commission that they
expected to see further subprime lender failures in . “There is a broad recognition that, with the refinancing and real estate booms over, the business model of
many of the smaller subprime originators is no longer viable,” SEC analysts told Director Erik Sirri in a January , , memorandum.
That became more and more evident. In January, Mortgage Lenders Network announced it had stopped funding mortgages and accepting applications. In February,
New Century reported bigger-than-expected mortgage credit losses and HSBC, the
largest subprime lender in the United States, announced a . billion increase in its
quarterly provision for losses. In March, Fremont stopped originating subprime
loans after receiving a cease and desist order from the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation. In April, New Century filed for bankruptcy.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
These institutions had relied for their operating cash on short-term funding
through commercial paper and the repo market. But commercial paper buyers and
banks became unwilling to continue funding them, and repo lenders became less and
less willing to accept subprime and Alt-A mortgages or mortgage-backed securities
as collateral. They also insisted on ever-shorter maturities, eventually of just one
day—an inherently destabilizing demand, because it gave them the option of withholding funding on short notice if they lost confidence in the borrower.
Another sign of problems in the market came when financial companies began to
report more detail about their assets under the new mark-to-market accounting rule,
particularly about mortgage-related securities that were becoming illiquid and hard
to value. The sum of more illiquid Level and assets at these firms was “eyepopping in terms of the amount of leverage the banks and investment banks had,” according to Jim Chanos, a New York hedge fund manager. Chanos said that the new
disclosures also revealed for the first time that many firms retained large exposures
from securitizations. “You clearly didn’t get the magnitude, and the market didn’t
grasp the magnitude until spring of ’, when the figures began to be published, and
then it was as if someone rang a bell, because almost immediately upon the publication of these numbers, journalists began writing about it, and hedge funds began
talking about it, and people began speaking about it in the marketplace.”
In late and early , some banks moved to reduce their subprime exposures by selling assets and buying protection through credit default swaps. Some,
such as Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, reduced mortgage exposure in some areas of
the firm but increased it in others. Banks that had been busy for nearly four years creating and selling subprime-backed collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) scrambled
in about that many months to sell or hedge whatever they could. They now dumped
these products into some of the most ill-fated CDOs ever engineered. Citigroup,
Merrill Lynch, and UBS, particularly, were forced to retain larger and larger quantities of the “super-senior” tranches of these CDOs. The bankers could always hope—
and many apparently even believed—that all would turn out well with these super
seniors, which were, in theory, the safest of all.
With such uncertainty about the market value of mortgage assets, trades became
scarce and setting prices for these instruments became difficult.
Although government officials knew about the deterioration in the subprime
markets, they misjudged the risks posed to the financial system. In January ,
SEC officials noted that investment banks had credit exposure to struggling subprime
lenders but argued that “none of these exposures are material.” The Treasury and
Fed insisted throughout the spring and early summer that the damage would be limited. “The impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in
the subprime market seems likely to be contained,” Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke
testified before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress on March . That same
day, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told a House Appropriations subcommittee:
“From the standpoint of the overall economy, my bottom line is we’re watching it
closely but it appears to be contained.”
E A R LY : S P R E A D I N G S U B P R I M E W O R R I E S
GOLDMAN: “LET’S BE AGGRESSIVE DISTRIBUTING THINGS”
In December , following the initial decline in ABX BBB indices and after consecutive days of trading losses on its mortgage desk, executives at Goldman Sachs decided to reduce the firm’s subprime exposure. Goldman marked down the value of its
mortgage-related products to reflect the lower ABX prices, and began posting daily
losses for this inventory.
Responding to the volatility in the subprime market, Goldman analysts delivered
an internal report on December , , regarding “the major risk in the Mortgage
business” to Chief Financial Officer David Viniar and Chief Risk Officer Craig Broderick. The next day, executives determined that they would get “closer to home,”
meaning that they wanted to reduce their mortgage exposure: sell what could be sold
as is, repackage and sell everything else. Kevin Gasvoda, the managing director for
Goldman’s Fixed Income, Currency, and Commodities business line, instructed the
sales team to sell asset-backed security and CDO positions, even at a loss: “Pls refocus on retained new issue bond positions and move them out. There will be big opportunities the next several months and we don’t want to be hamstrung based on old
inventory. Refocus efforts and move stuff out even if you have to take a small loss.”
In a December email, Viniar described the strategy to Tom Montag, the co-head
of global securities: “On ABX, the position is reasonably sensible but is just too big.
Might have to spend a little to size it appropriately. On everything else my basic message was let’s be aggressive distributing things because there will be very good opportunities as the market goes into what is likely to be even greater distress and we want
to be in position to take advantage of them.”
Subsequent emails suggest that the “everything else” meant mortgage-related assets. On December , in an internal email with broad distribution, Goldman’s Stacy
Bash-Polley, a partner and the co-head of fixed income sales, noted that the firm, unlike others, had been able to find buyers for the super-senior and equity tranches of
CDOs, but the mezzanine tranches remained a challenge. The “best target,” she said,
would be to put them in other CDOs: “We have been thinking collectively as a group
about how to help move some of the risk. While we have made great progress moving
the tail risks—[super-senior] and equity—we think it is critical to focus on the mezz
risk that has been built up over the past few months. . . . Given some of the feedback
we have received so far [from investors,] it seems that cdo’s maybe the best target for
moving some of this risk but clearly in limited size (and timing right now not ideal).”
It was becoming harder to find buyers for these securities. Back in October, Goldman Sachs traders had complained that they were being asked to “distribute junk that
nobody was dumb enough to take first time around.” Despite the first of Goldman’s
business principles—that “our clients’ interests always come first”—documents indicate that the firm targeted less-sophisticated customers in its efforts to reduce subprime exposure. In a December email discussing a list of customers to target for
the year, Goldman’s Fabrice Tourre, then a vice president on the structured product
correlation trading desk, said to “focus efforts” on “buy and hold rating-based buyers”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
rather than “sophisticated hedge funds” that “will be on the same side of the trade as
we will.” The “same of side of the trade” as Goldman was the selling or shorting
side—those who expected the mortgage market to continue to decline. In January,
Daniel Sparks, the head of Goldman’s mortgage department, extolled Goldman’s success in reducing its subprime inventory, writing that the team had “structured like
mad and traveled the world, and worked their tails off to make some lemonade from
some big old lemons.” Tourre acknowledged that there was “more and more leverage
in the system,” and—writing of himself in the third person—said he was “standing in
middle of all these complex, highly levered, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all the implications of those monstrosities.”
On February , Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein questioned Montag about the
million in losses on residual positions from old deals, asking, “Could/should we
have cleaned up these books before and are we doing enough right now to sell off cats
and dogs in other books throughout the division?”
The numbers suggest that the answer was yes, they had cleaned up pretty well,
even given a million write-off and billions of dollars of subprime exposure still
retained. In the first quarter of , its mortgage business earned a record million, driven primarily by short positions, including a billion short position on the
bellwether ABX BBB index, whose drop the previous November had been the red
flag that got Goldman’s attention.
In the following months, Goldman reduced its own mortgage risk while continuing to create and sell mortgage-related products to its clients. From December
through August , it created and sold approximately . billion of CDOs—
including . billion of synthetic CDOs. The firm used the cash CDOs to unload
much of its own remaining inventory of other CDO securities and mortgage-backed
securities.
Goldman has been criticized—and sued—for selling its subprime mortgage securities to clients while simultaneously betting against those securities. Sylvain Raynes,
a structured finance expert at R&R Consulting in New York, reportedly called Goldman’s practice “the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” and
compared it to “buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing
arson.”
During a FCIC hearing, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein was asked if he believed
it was a proper, legal, or ethical practice for Goldman to sell clients mortgage securities that Goldman believed would default, while simultaneously shorting them.
Blankfein responded, “I do think that the behavior is improper and we regret the result—the consequence [is] that people have lost money” The next day, Goldman issued a press release declaring Blankfein did not state that Goldman’s “practices with
respect to the sale of mortgage-related securities were improper. . . . Blankfein was responding to a lengthy series of statements followed by a question that was predicated
on the assumption that a firm was selling a product that it thought was going to default. Mr. Blankfein agreed that, if such an assumption was true, the practice would
be improper. Mr. Blankfein does not believe, nor did he say, that Goldman Sachs had
behaved improperly in any way.”
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In addition, Goldman President and Chief Operating Officer Gary Cohn testified:
“During the two years of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs lost . billion in its
residential mortgage–related business. . . . We did not bet against our clients, and
these numbers underscore that fact.”
Indeed, Goldman’s short position was not the whole story. The daily mortgage
“Value at Risk” measure, or VaR, which tracked potential losses if the market moved
unexpectedly, increased in the three months through February. By February, Goldman’s company-wide VaR reached an all-time high, according to SEC reports. The
dominant driver of the increase was the one-sided bet on the mortgage market’s continuing to decline. Preferring to be relatively neutral, between March and May, the
mortgage securities desk reduced its short position on the ABX Index; between
June and August, it again reversed course, increasing its short position by purchasing
protection on mortgage-related assets.
The Basis Yield Alpha Fund, a hedge fund and Goldman client that claims to have
invested . million in Goldman’s Timberwolf CDO, sued Goldman for fraud in
. The Timberwolf deal was heavily criticized by Senator Carl Levin and other
members of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations during an April
hearing. The Basis Yield Alpha Fund alleged that Goldman designed Timberwolf to
quickly fail so that Goldman could offload low-quality assets and profit from betting
against the CDO. Within two weeks of the fund’s investment, Goldman began making margin calls on the deal. By the end of July , it had demanded more than
million. According to the hedge fund, Goldman’s demands forced it into bankruptcy in August —Goldman received about million from the liquidation.
Goldman denies Basis Yield Alpha Fund’s claims, and CEO Blankfein dismissed the
notion that Goldman misled investors. “I will tell you, we only dealt with people who
knew what they were buying. And of course when you look after the fact, someone’s
going to come along and say they really didn’t know,” he told the FCIC.
In addition to selling its subprime securities to customers, the firm took short positions using credit default swaps; it also took short positions on the ABX indices and
on some of the financial firms with which it did business. Like every market participant, Goldman “marked,” or valued, its securities after considering both actual market trades and surveys of how other institutions valued the assets. As the crisis
unfolded, Goldman marked mortgage-related securities at prices that were significantly lower than those of other companies. Goldman knew that those lower marks
might hurt those other companies—including some clients—because they could require marking down those assets and similar assets. In addition, Goldman’s marks
would get picked up by competitors in dealer surveys. As a result, Goldman’s marks
could contribute to other companies recording “mark-to-market” losses: that is, the
reported value of their assets could fall and their earnings would decline.
The markdowns of these assets could also require that companies reduce their
repo borrowings or post additional collateral to counterparties to whom they had
sold credit default swap protection. In a May email, Craig Broderick, who as Goldman’s chief risk officer was responsible for tracking how much of the company’s
money was at risk, noted to colleagues that the mortgage group was “in the process
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
of considering making significant downward adjustments to the marks on their
mortgage portfolio [especially] CDOs and CDO squared. This will potentially have a
big [profit and loss] impact on us, but also to our clients due to the marks and associated margin calls on repos, derivatives, and other products. We need to survey our
clients and take a shot at determining the most vulnerable clients, knock on implications, etc. This is getting lots of th floor attention right now.”
Broderick was right about the impact of Goldman’s marks on clients and counterparties. The first significant dispute about these marks began in May : it concerned the two high-flying, mortgage-focused hedge funds run by Bear Stearns Asset
Management (BSAM).
BEAR STEARNS’S HEDGE FUNDS:
“LOOKS PRETTY DAMN UGLY”
In , Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin, who had structured CDOs at Bear
Stearns, were busy managing BSAM’s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund.
When they added the higher-leveraged, higher-risk Enhanced Fund in they became even busier.
By April , internal BSAM risk exposure reports showed about of the
High-Grade fund’s collateral to be subprime mortgage–backed CDOs, assets that
were beginning to lose market value. In a diary kept in his personal email account
because he “didn’t want to use [his] work email anymore,” Tannin recounted that in
“a wave of fear set over [him]” when he realized that the Enhanced Fund “was
going to subject investors to ‘blow up risk’” and “we could not run the leverage as
high as I had thought we could.”
This “blow up risk,” coupled with bad timing, proved fatal for the Enhanced Fund.
Shortly after the fund opened, the ABX BBB- index started to falter, falling in the
last three months of ; then another in January and in February. The
market’s confidence fell with the ABX. Investors began to bail out of both Enhanced
and High-Grade. Cioffi and Tannin stepped up their marketing. On March , ,
Tannin said in an email to investors, “we see an opportunity here—not crazy opportunity—but prudent opportunity—I am putting in additional capital—I think you
should as well.” On a March conference call, Tannin and Cioffi assured investors
that both funds “have plenty of liquidity,” and they continued to use the investment
of their own money as evidence of their confidence. Tannin even said he was increasing his personal investment, although, according to the SEC, he never did.
Despite their avowals of confidence, Cioffi and Tannin were in full red-alert
mode. In April, Cioffi redeemed million of his own . million investment in Enhanced Leverage and transferred the funds to a third hedge fund he managed. They
tried to sell the toxic CDO securities held by the hedge funds. They had little success
selling them directly on the market, but there was another way.
In late May, BSAM put together a CDO-squared deal that would take billion of
CDO assets off the hedge funds’ books. The senior-most tranches, worth . billion,
E A R LY : S P R E A D I N G S U B P R I M E W O R R I E S
were sold as commercial paper to short-term investors such as money market mutual
funds.
Critically, Bank of America guaranteed those deals with a liquidity put—for a fee.
Later, commercial paper investors would refuse to roll over this particular paper;
Bank of America ultimately lost more than billion on this arrangement.
“ is doomsday”
Nearly all hedge funds provide their investors with market value reports, at least
monthly, based on computed mark-to-market prices for the fund’s various investments. Industry standards generally called for valuing readily traded assets, such as
stocks, at the current trading price, while assets in very slow markets were marked by
surveying price quotes from other dealers, factoring in other pricing information,
and then arriving at a final net asset value. For mortgage-backed investments, marking assets was an extremely important exercise, because the market values were used
to inform investors and to calculate the hedge fund’s total fund value for internal risk
management purposes, and because these assets were held as collateral for repo and
other lenders. Crucially, if the value of a hedge fund’s portfolio declined, repo and
other lenders might require more collateral. In April, JP Morgan told Alan Schwartz,
Bear Stearns’s co-president, that the bank would be asking the BSAM hedge funds to
post additional collateral to support its repo borrowing.
Dealer marks were slow to keep up with movements in the ABX indices. Even as
the ABX BBB- index recovered some in March, rebounding , marks by brokerdealers finally started to reflect the lower values. On April , , Goldman sent
BSAM marks ranging from cents to cents on the dollar—meaning that some
securities were worth as little as of their initial value. On Thursday, April ,
in preparation for an investor call the following week, BSAM analysts informed
Cioffi and Tannin that in their view, the value of the funds’ portfolios had declined
sharply. On Sunday, Tannin sent an email from his personal account to Cioffi’s personal account arguing that both hedge funds should be closed and liquidated:
“Looks pretty damn ugly. . . . If we believe the runs [the analyst] has been doing are
ANYWHERE CLOSE to accurate, I think we should close the Funds now. . . . If [the
runs] are correct then the entire sub-prime market is toast.” But by the following
Wednesday, Cioffi and Tannin were back on the same upbeat page. At the beginning
of the conference call, Tannin told investors, “The key sort of big picture point for us
at this point is our confidence that the structured credit market and the sub-prime
market in particular, has not systemically broken down; . . . we’re very comfortable
with exactly where we are.” Cioffi also assured investors that the funds would likely
finish the year with positive returns. On May , , the two hedge funds had attracted more than million in new funds, but more than million was redeemed by investors.
That same day, Goldman sent BSAM marks ranging from cents to cents on
the dollar. Cioffi disputed Goldman’s marks as well as marks from Lehman, Citigroup,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
and JP Morgan. On May , in a preliminary estimate, Cioffi told investors that the
net asset value of the Enhanced Leverage Fund was down . in April. In computing
the final numbers later that month, he requested that BSAM’s Pricing Committee instead use fair value marks based on his team’s modeling, which implied losses that were
to million less than losses using Goldman’s marks. On June , although Goldman’s marks were considered low, the Pricing Committee decided to continue to average dealer marks rather than to use fair value. The committee also noted that the
decline in net asset value would be greater than the . estimate, because “many of the
positions that were marked down received dealer marks after release of the estimate.”
The decline was revised from . to . According to Cioffi, a number of factors
contributed to the April revision, and Goldman’s marks were one factor. After these
meetings, Cioffi emailed one committee member: “There is no market . . . its [sic] all academic anyway— [value] is doomsday.” On June , BSAM announced the
drop and froze redemptions.
“Canary in the mine shaft”
When JP Morgan contacted Bear’s co-president Alan Schwartz in April about its upcoming margin call, Schwartz convened an executive committee meeting to discuss
how repo lenders were marking down positions and making margin calls on the basis
of those new marks. In early June, Bear met with BSAM’s repo lenders to explain
that BSAM lacked cash to meet margin calls and to negotiate a -day reprieve. Some
of these very same firms had sold Enhanced and High-Grade some of the same
CDOs and other securities that were turning out to be such bad assets. Now all
refused Schwartz’s appeal; instead, they made margin calls. As a direct result, the
two funds had to sell collateral at distressed prices to raise cash. Selling the bonds
led to a complete loss of confidence by the investors, whose requests for redemptions
accelerated.
Shortly after BSAM froze redemptions, Merrill Lynch seized more than million of its collateral posted by Bear for its outstanding repo loans. Merrill was able to
sell just million of the seized collateral at auction by July —and at discounts to
its face value. Other repo lenders were increasing their collateral requirements or
refusing to roll over their loans. This run on both hedge funds left both BSAM and
Bear Stearns with limited options. Although it owned the asset management business, Bear’s equity positions in the two BSAM hedge funds were relatively small. On
April , Bear’s co-president Warren Spector approved a million investment into
the Enhanced Leverage Fund. Bear Stearns had no legal obligation to rescue either
the funds or their repo lenders. However, those lenders were the same large investment banks that Bear Stearns dealt with every day. Moreover, any failure of entities
related to Bear Stearns could raise investors’ concerns about the firm itself.
Thomas Marano, the head of the mortgage trading desk, told FCIC staff that the
constant barrage of margin calls had created chaos at Bear. In late June, Bear Stearns
dispatched him to engineer a solution with Richard Marin, BSAM’s CEO. Marano
now worked to understand the portfolio, including what it might be worth in a worst-
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case scenario in which significant amounts of assets had to be sold. Bear Stearns’s
conclusion: High-Grade still had positive value, but Enhanced Leverage did not.
On the basis of that analysis, Bear Stearns committed up to . billion—and ultimately loaned . billion—to take out the High-Grade Fund repo lenders and become the sole repo lender to the fund; Enhanced Leverage was on its own.
During a June Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, members were
informed about the subprime market and the BSAM hedge funds. The staff reported
that the subprime market was “very unsettled and reflected deteriorating fundamentals in the housing market.” The liquidation of subprime securities at the two BSAM
hedge funds was compared to the troubles faced by Long-Term Capital Management
in . Chairman Bernanke noted that the problems the hedge funds experienced
were a good example of how leverage can increase liquidity risk, especially in situations in which counterparties were not willing to give them time to liquidate and
possibly realize whatever value might be in the positions. But it was also noted that
the BSAM hedge funds appeared to be “relatively unique” among sponsored funds in
their concentration in subprime mortgages.
Some members were concerned about the lack of transparency around hedge
funds, the consequent lack of market discipline on valuations of hedge fund holdings, and the fact that the Federal Reserve could not systematically collect information from hedge funds because they were outside its jurisdiction. These facts caused
members to be concerned about whether they understood the scope of the problem.
During the same meeting, FOMC members noted that the size of the credit derivatives market, its lack of transparency and activities related to subprime debt could
be a gathering cloud in the background of policy.
Meanwhile, Bear Stearns executives who supported the High-Grade bailout did
not expect to lose money. However, that support was not universal—CEO James
Cayne and Earl Hedin, the former senior managing director of Bear Stearns and
BSAM, were opposed, because they did not want to increase shareholders’ potential
losses. Their fears proved accurate. By July, the two hedge funds had shrunk to almost nothing: High-Grade Fund was down ; Enhanced Leverage Fund, .
On July , both filed for bankruptcy. Cioffi and Tannin would be criminally charged
with fraud in their communications with investors, but they were acquitted of all
charges in November . Civil charges brought by the SEC were still pending as of
the date of this report.
Looking back, Marano told the FCIC, “We caught a lot of flak for allowing the
funds to fail, but we had no option.” In an internal email in June, Bill Jamison of Federated Investors, one of the largest of all mutual fund companies, referred to the Bear
Stearns hedge funds as the “canary in the mine shaft” and predicted more market turmoil. As the two funds were collapsing, repo lending tightened across the board.
Many repo lenders sharpened their focus on the valuation of any collateral with potential subprime exposure, and on the relative exposures of different financial institutions. They required increased margins on loans to institutions that appeared to be
exposed to the mortgage market; they often required Treasury securities as collateral;
in many cases, they demanded shorter lending terms. Clearly, the triple-A-rated
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
mortgage-backed securities and CDOs were not considered the “super-safe” investments in which investors—and some dealers—had only recently believed.
Cayne called Spector into the office and asked him to resign. On Sunday, August
, Spector submitted his resignation to the board.
RATING AGENCIES: “IT CAN’T BE . . . ALL OF A SUDDEN”
While BSAM was wrestling with its two ailing flagship hedge funds, the major credit
rating agencies finally admitted that subprime mortgage–backed securities would not
perform as advertised. On July , , they issued comprehensive rating downgrades and credit watch warnings on an array of residential mortgage–backed securities. These announcements foreshadowed the actual losses to come.
S&P announced that it had placed tranches backed by U.S. subprime collateral, or some . billion in securities, on negative watch. S&P promised to review
every deal in its ratings database for adverse effects. In the afternoon, Moody’s downgraded mortgage-backed securities issued in backed by U.S. subprime collateral and put an additional tranches on watch. These Moody’s downgrades
affected about . billion in securities. The following day, Moody’s placed
tranches of CDOs, with original face value of about billion, on watch for possible
downgrade. Two days after its original announcement, S&P downgraded of the
tranches it had placed on negative watch. Fitch Ratings, the smallest of the three
major credit rating agencies, announced similar downgrades.
These actions were meaningful for all who understood their implications. While
the specific securities downgraded were only a small fraction of the universe (less
than of mortgage-backed securities issued in ), investors knew that more
downgrades might come. Many investors were critical of the rating agencies, lambasting them for their belated reactions. By July , by one measure, housing
prices had already fallen about nationally from their peak at the spring of .
On a July conference call with S&P, the hedge fund manager Steve Eisman questioned Tom Warrack, the managing director of S&P’s residential mortgage–backed securities group. Eisman asked, “I’d like to know why now. I mean, the news has been
out on subprime now for many, many months. The delinquencies have been a disaster
now for many, many months. (Your) ratings have been called into question now for
many, many months. I’d like to understand why you’re making this move today when
you—and why didn’t you do this many, many months ago. . . . I mean, it can’t be that
all of a sudden, the performance has reached a level where you’ve woken up.” Warrack
responded that S&P “took action as soon as possible given the information at hand.”
The ratings agencies’ downgrades, in tandem with the problems at Bear Stearns’s
hedge funds, had a further chilling effect on the markets. The ABX BBB- index fell
another in July, confirming and guaranteeing even more problems for holders of
mortgage securities. Enacting the same inexorable dynamic that had taken down the
Bear Stearns funds, repo lenders increasingly required other borrowers that had put
up mortgage-backed securities as collateral to put up more, because their value was
unclear or depressed. Many of these borrowers sold assets to meet these margin calls,
E A R LY : S P R E A D I N G S U B P R I M E W O R R I E S
and each sale had the potential to further depress prices. If at all possible, the borrowers sold other assets in more liquid markets, for which prices were readily available,
pushing prices downward in those markets, too.
AIG: “WELL BIGGER THAN WE EVER PLANNED FOR”
Of all the possible losers in the looming rout, AIG should have been among the most
concerned. After several years of aggressive growth, AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary had written billion in over-the-counter credit default swap (CDS) protection on super-senior tranches of multisector CDOs backed mostly by subprime
mortgages.
In a phone call made July , the day after the downgrades, Andrew Forster, the
head of credit trading at AIG Financial Products, told Alan Frost, the executive vice
president of Financial Product’s Marketing Group, that he had to analyze exposures
because “every f***ing . . . rating agency we’ve spoken to . . . [came] out with more
downgrades” and that he was increasingly concerned: “About a month ago I was like,
you know, suicidal. . . . The problem that we’re going to face is that we’re going to have
just enormous downgrades on the stuff that we’ve got. . . . Everyone tells me that it’s
trading and it’s two points lower and all the rest of it and how come you can’t mark
your book. So it’s definitely going to give it renewed focus. I mean we can’t . . . we
have to mark it. It’s, it’s, uh, we’re [unintelligible] f***ed basically.”
Forster was likely worried that most of AIG’s credit default swap contracts required that collateral be posted to the purchasers, should the market value of the referenced securities decline by a certain amount, or should rating agencies downgrade
AIG’s long-term debt. That is, collateral calls could be triggered even if there were no
actual cash losses in, for example, the super-senior tranches of CDOs upon which the
protection had been written. Remarkably, top AIG executives—including CEO Martin Sullivan, CFO Steven Bensinger, Chief Risk Officer Robert Lewis, Chief Credit
Officer Kevin McGinn, and Financial Services Division CFO Elias Habayeb—told
FCIC investigators that they did not even know about these terms of the swaps until
the collateral calls started rolling in during July. Office of Thrift Supervision regulators who supervised AIG on a consolidated basis didn’t know either. Frost, who was
the chief credit default swap salesman at AIG Financial Products, did know about the
terms, and he said he believed they were standard for the industry. Joseph Cassano,
the division’s CEO, also knew about the terms.
And the counterparties knew, of course. On the evening of July , Goldman
Sachs, which held billion of AIG’s super-senior credit default swaps, sent news
of the first collateral call in the form of an email from Goldman’s salesman Andrew
Davilman to Frost:
DAVILMAN: Sorry to bother you on vacation. Margin call coming your way. Want to
give you a heads up.
FROST, minutes later: On what?
DAVILMAN, one minute later: bb [ billion] of supersenior.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The next day, Goldman made the collateral call official by forwarding an invoice
requesting . billion. On the same day, Goldman purchased million of fiveyear protection—in the form of credit default swaps—against the possibility that AIG
might default on its obligations.
Frost never responded to Davilman’s email. And when he returned from vacation, he was instructed to not have any involvement in the issue, because Cassano
wanted Forster to take the lead on resolving the dispute. AIG’s models showed
there would be no defaults on any of the bond payments that AIG’s swaps insured.
The Goldman executives considered those models irrelevant, because the contracts
required collateral to be posted if market value declined, irrespective of any longterm cash losses. Goldman estimated that the average decline in the market value
of the bonds was .
So, first Bear Stearns’s hedge funds and now AIG was getting hit by Goldman’s
marks on mortgage-backed securities. Like Cioffi and his colleagues at Bear Stearns,
Frost and his colleagues at AIG disputed Goldman’s marks. On July , Forster was
told by another AIG trader that “[AIG] would be in fine shape if Goldman wasn’t
hanging its head out there.” The margin call was “something that hit out of the blue
and it’s a f***ing number that’s well bigger than we ever planned for.” He acknowledged that dealers might say the marks “could be anything from to sort of, you
know, ” because of the lack of trading but said Goldman’s marks were “ridiculous.”
In testimony to the FCIC, Viniar said Goldman had stood ready to sell mortgagebacked securities to AIG at Goldman’s own marks. AIG’s Forster stated that he
would not buy the bonds at even cents on the dollar, because values might drop
further. Additionally, AIG would be required to value its own portfolio of similar assets at the same price. Forster said, “In the current environment I still wouldn’t buy
them . . . because they could probably go low . . . we can’t mark any of our positions,
and obviously that’s what saves us having this enormous mark to market. If we start
buying the physical bonds back then any accountant is going to turn around and say,
well, John, you know you traded at , you must be able to mark your bonds then.”
Tough, lengthy negotiations followed. Goldman “was not budging” on its collateral demands, according to Tom Athan, a managing director at AIG Financial Products, describing a conference call with Goldman executives on August . “I played
almost every card I had, legal wording, market practice, intent of the language, meaning of the [contract], and also stressed the potential damage to the relationship and
GS said that this has gone to the ‘highest levels’ at GS and they feel that . . . this is a
‘test case.’”
Goldman Sachs and AIG would continue to argue about Goldman’s marks, even
as AIG would continue to post collateral that would fall short of Goldman’s demands
and Goldman would continue to purchase CDS contracts against the possibility of
AIG’s default. Over the next months, more such disputes would cost AIG tens of
billions of dollars and help lead to one of the biggest government bailouts in American history.
E A R LY : S P R E A D I N G S U B P R I M E W O R R I E S
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 12
The Commission concludes that entities such as Bear Stearns’s hedge funds and
AIG Financial Products that had significant subprime exposure were affected by
the collapse of the housing bubble first, creating financial pressures on their parent companies. The commercial paper and repo markets—two key components
of the shadow banking lending markets—quickly reflected the impact of the
housing bubble collapse because of the decline in collateral asset values and concern about financial firms’ subprime exposure.
13
SUMMER 2007:
DISRUPTIONS IN FUNDING
CONTENTS
IKB of Germany: “Real money investors” ..........................................................
Countrywide: “That’s our /” .........................................................................
BNP Paribas: “The ringing of the bell”...............................................................
SIVs: “An oasis of calm”......................................................................................
Money funds and other investors: “Drink[ing] from a fire hose.........................
In the summer of , as the prices of some highly rated mortgage securities crashed
and Bear’s hedge funds imploded, broader repercussions from the declining housing
market were still not clear. “I don’t think [the subprime mess] poses any threat to the
overall economy,” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson told Bloomberg on July . Meanwhile, nervous market participants were looking under every rock for any sign of hidden
or latent subprime exposure. In late July, they found it in the market for asset-backed
commercial paper (ABCP), a crucial, usually boring backwater of the financial sector.
This kind of financing allowed companies to raise money by borrowing against
high-quality, short-term assets. By mid-, hundreds of billions out of the .
trillion U.S. ABCP market were backed by mortgage-related assets, including some
with subprime exposure.
As noted, the rating agencies had given all of these ABCP programs their top investment-grade ratings, often because of liquidity puts from commercial banks.
When the mortgage securities market dried up and money market mutual funds became skittish about broad categories of ABCP, the banks would be required under
these liquidity puts to stand behind the paper and bring the assets onto their balance
sheets, transferring losses back into the commercial banking system. In some cases,
to protect relationships with investors, banks would support programs they had
sponsored even when they had made no prior commitment to do so.
IKB OF GERMANY: “REAL MONEY INVESTORS”
The first big casualty of the run on asset-backed commercial paper was a German
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bank, IKB Deutsche Industriebank AG. Since its foundation in , IKB had focused on lending to midsize German businesses, but in the past decade, management
diversified. In , IKB created an off-balance-sheet commercial paper program,
called Rhineland, to purchase a portfolio of structured finance securities backed by
credit card receivables, business loans, auto loans, and mortgages. It made money by
using less expensive short-term commercial paper to purchase higher-yielding longterm securities, a strategy known as “securities arbitrage.” By the end of June,
Rhineland owned billion (. billion) of assets, of which were CDOs and
CLOs (collateralized loan obligations—that is, securitized leveraged loans). And at
least billion (. billion) of that was protected by IKB through liquidity puts.
Importantly, German regulators at the time did not require IKB to hold any capital to
offset potential Rhineland losses.
As late as June , when so many were bailing out of the structured products
market, IKB was still planning to expand its off-balance-sheet holdings and was willing to take long positions in mortgage-related derivatives such as synthetic CDOs.
This attitude made IKB a favorite of the investment banks and hedge funds that were
desperate to take the short side of the deal.
In early , when Goldman was looking for buyers for Abacus -AC, the
synthetic CDO mentioned in part III, it looked to IKB. An employee of Paulson &
Co., the hedge fund that was taking the short side of the deal, bluntly said that “real
money” investors such as IKB were outgunned. “The market is not pricing the subprime [residential mortgage–backed securities] wipeout scenario,” the Paulson employee wrote in an email. “In my opinion this situation is due to the fact that rating
agencies, CDO managers and underwriters have all the incentives to keep the game
going, while ‘real money’ investors have neither the analytical tools nor the institutional framework to take action before the losses that one could anticipate based [on]
the ‘news’ available everywhere are actually realized.” IKB subsequently purchased
million of the A and A tranches of the Abacus CDO and placed them in
Rhineland. It would lose of that investment.
In mid-, Rhineland’s asset-backed commercial paper was held by a number
of American investors, including the Montana Board of Investments, the city of Oakland, California, and the Robbinsdale Area School District in suburban Minneapolis.
On July , IKB reassured its investors that ratings downgrades of mortgage-backed
securities would have only a limited impact on its business. However, within days,
Goldman Sachs, which regularly helped Rhineland raise money in the commercial
paper market, told IKB that it would not sell any more Rhineland paper to its clients.
On Friday, July , Deutsche Bank, recognizing that the ABCP markets would soon
abandon Rhineland and that IKB would have to provide substantial support to the
program, decided that doing business with IKB was too risky and cut off its credit
lines. These were necessary for IKB to continue running its business. Deutsche Bank
also alerted the German bank regulator to IKB’s critical state. With the regulator’s encouragement, IKB’s largest shareholder, KfW Bankengruppe, announced on July
that it would bail out IKB. On August , Rhineland exercised its liquidity puts with
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IKB. Rhineland’s commercial paper investors were able to get rid of the paper, and
KfW took the hit instead—with its losses expected to eventually reach .
The IKB episode served notice that exposures to toxic mortgage assets were lurking in the portfolios of even risk-averse investors. Soon, panic seized the short-term
funding markets—even those that were not exposed to risky mortgages. “There was a
recognition, I’d say an acute recognition, that potentially some of the asset-backed
commercial paper conduits could have exposure to those areas. As a result, investors
in general—without even looking into the underlying assets—decided ‘I don’t want
to be in any asset-backed commercial paper, I don’t want to invest in a fund that may
have those positions,’” Steven Meier, global cash investment officer at State Street
Global Advisors, testified to the FCIC.
From its peak of . billion on August , the asset-backed commercial paper
market would decline by almost billion by the end of .
COUNTRYWIDE: “THAT’S OUR 9/11”
On August , three days after the IKB rescue, Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo realized that his company was unable to roll its commercial paper or borrow on the
repo market. “When we talk about [August ] at Countrywide, that’s our /,” he
said. “We worked seven days a week trying to figure this thing out and trying to
work with the banks. . . . Our repurchase lines were coming due billions and billions
of dollars.”
Mozilo emailed Lyle Gramley, a former Fed governor and a former Countrywide
director, “Fear in the credit markets is now tending towards panic. There is little to
no liquidity in the mortgage market with the exception of Fannie and Freddie. . . .
Any mortgage product that is not deemed to be conforming either cannot be sold
into the secondary markets or are subject to egregious discounts.”
On August , despite the internal turmoil at Countrywide, CFO Eric Sieracki told
investors that Countrywide had “significant short-term funding liquidity cushions”
and “ample liquidity sources of our bank. . . . It is important to note that the company
has experienced no disruption in financing its ongoing daily operations, including
placement of commercial paper.” Moody’s reaffirmed its A ratings and stable outlook on the company.
The ratings agencies and the company itself would quickly reverse their positions.
On August , Mozilo reported to the board during a specially convened meeting that,
as the meeting minutes recorded, “the secondary market for virtually all classes of
mortgage securities (both prime and non-prime) had unexpectedly and with almost
no warning seized up and . . . the Company was unable to sell high-quality mortgage[-]backed securities.” President and COO David Sambol told the board, “Management can only plan on a week by week basis due to the tenuous nature of the
situation.” Mozilo reported that although he continued to negotiate with banks for alternative sources of liquidity, the “unprecedented and unanticipated” absence of a
secondary market could force the company to draw down on its backup credit lines.
Shortly after the Countrywide board meeting, the Fed’s Federal Open Market
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Committee members discussed the “considerable financial turbulence” in the subprime mortgage market and that some firms, including Countrywide, were showing
some strain. They noted that the data did not indicate a collapse of the housing market was imminent and that, if the more optimistic scenarios proved to be accurate,
they might look back and be surprised that the financial events did not have a
stronger impact on the real economy. But the FOMC members also expressed concern that the effects of subprime developments could spread to other sectors and
noted that they had been repeatedly surprised by the depth and duration of the deterioration of these markets. One participant, in a paraphrase of a quote he attributed
to Winston Churchill, said that no amount of rewriting of history would exonerate
those present if they did not prepare for the more dire scenarios discussed in the staff
presentations.
Several days later, on August , Countrywide released its July operational
results, reporting that foreclosures and delinquencies were up and that loan production had fallen by during the preceding month. A company spokesman said layoffs would be considered. On the same day, Fed staff, who had supervised
Countrywide’s holding company until the bank switched to a thrift charter in March
, sent a confidential memo to the Fed’s Board of Governors warning about the
company’s condition:
The company is heavily reliant on an originate-to-distribute model, and,
given current market conditions, the firm is unable to securitize or sell
any of its non-conforming mortgages. . . . Countrywide’s short-term
funding strategy relied heavily on commercial paper (CP) and, especially, on ABCP. In current market conditions, the viability of that strategy is questionable. . . . The ability of the company to use [mortgage]
securities as collateral in [repo transactions] is consequently uncertain
in the current market environment. . . . As a result, it could face severe
liquidity pressures. Those liquidity pressures conceivably could lead
eventually to possible insolvency.
Countrywide asked its regulator, the Office of Thrift Supervision, if the Fed could
provide assistance, perhaps by waiving a Fed rule and allowing Countrywide’s thrift
subsidiary to support its holding company by raising money from insured depositors, or perhaps through discount-window lending, which would require the Fed to
accept risky mortgage-backed securities as collateral, something it never had done
and would not do—until the following spring. The Fed did not intervene: “Substantial statutory requirements would have to be met before the Board could authorize
lending to the holding company or mortgage subsidiary,” staff wrote. “The Federal
Reserve had not lent to a nonbank in many decades; and . . . such lending in the current circumstances seemed highly improbable.”
The following day, lacking any other funding, Mozilo recommended to his board
that the company notify lenders of its intention to draw down . billion on backup
lines of credit. Mozilo and his team knew that the decision could lead to ratings
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
downgrades. “The only option we had was to pull down those lines,” he told the
FCIC. “We had a pipeline of loans and we either had to say to the borrowers, the customers, ‘we’re out of business, we’re not going to fund’—and there’s great risk to that,
litigation risk, we had committed to fund. . . . When it’s between your ass and your
image, you hold on to your ass.”
On the same day that Countrywide’s board approved the . billion drawdown—but before the company announced it publicly, the Merrill Lynch analyst
Kenneth Bruce, who had reissued his “buy” rating on the company’s stock two days
earlier, switched to “sell” with a “negative” outlook because of Countrywide’s funding
pressures, adding, “if the market loses confidence in its ability to function properly,
then the model can break. . . . If liquidations occur in a weak market, then it is possible for [Countrywide] to go bankrupt.”
The next day, as news of Bruce’s call spread, Countrywide informed markets
about the drawdown. Moody’s downgraded its senior unsecured debt rating to the
lowest tier of investment grade. Countrywide shares fell , closing at .; for
the year, the company’s stock was down . The bad news led to an old-fashioned
bank run. Mozilo singled out an August Los Angeles Times article covering Bruce’s
report, which, he said, “caused a run on our bank of billion on Monday.” The article spurred customers to withdraw their funds by noting specific addresses of Countrywide branches in southern California, Mozilo told the FCIC. A reporter “came out
with a photographer and, you know, interviewed the people in line, and he created—
it was just horrible. Horrible for the people, horrible for us. Totally unnecessary,”
Mozilo said.
Six days later, on August , Bank of America announced it would invest billion for a stake in Countrywide. Both companies denied rumors that the nation’s
biggest bank would soon acquire the mortgage lender. Mozilo told the press, “There
was never a question about our survival”; he said the investment reinforced Countrywide’s position as one of the “strongest and best-run companies in the country.”
In October, Countrywide reported a net loss of . billion, its first quarterly loss
in years. As charge-offs on its mortgage portfolio grew, Countrywide raised provisions for loan losses to million from only million one year earlier. On
January , , Bank of America issued a press release announcing a “definitive
agreement” to purchase Countrywide for approximately billion. It said the combined entity would stop originating subprime loans and would expand programs to
help distressed borrowers.
BNP PARIBAS: “THE RINGING OF THE BELL”
Meanwhile, problems in U.S. financial markets hit the largest French bank. On August , BNP Paribas SA suspended redemptions from three investment funds that
had plunged in less than two weeks. Total assets in those funds were . billion,
with a third of that amount in subprime securities rated AA or higher. The bank
said it would also stop calculating a fair market value for the funds because “the complete evaporation of liquidity in certain market segments of the US securitization
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Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Outstanding
At the onset of the crisis in summer 2007, asset-backed commercial paper
outstanding dropped as concerns about asset quality quickly spread. By the end of
2007, the amount outstanding had dropped nearly $400 billion.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS
$1,250
1,000
750
500
250
0
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
NOTE: Seasonally adjusted
SOURCE: Federal Reserve Board of Governors
Figure .
market has made it impossible to value certain assets fairly regardless of their quality
or credit rating.”
In retrospect, many investors regarded the suspension of the French funds as the
beginning of the liquidity crisis. August “was the ringing of the bell” for shortterm funding markets, Paul McCulley, a managing director at PIMCO, told the FCIC.
“The buyers went on a buyer strike and simply weren’t rolling.” That is, they
stopped rolling over their commercial paper and instead demanded payment on
their loans. On August , the interest rates for overnight lending of A- rated assetbacked commercial paper rose from . to .—the highest level since January
. It would continue rising unevenly, hitting . in August , . Figure
. shows how, in response, lending declined.
In August alone, the asset-backed commercial paper market shrank by billion, or . On August , subprime lender American Home Mortgage’s assetbacked commercial paper program invoked its privilege of postponing repayment,
trapping lenders’ money for several months. Lenders quickly withdrew from programs with similar provisions, which shrank that market from billion to billion between May and August.
The paper that did sell had significantly shorter maturities, reflecting creditors’
desire to reassess their counterparties’ creditworthiness as frequently as possible. The
average maturity of all asset-backed commercial paper in the United States fell from
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
about days in late July to about days by mid-September, though the overwhelming majority was issued for just to days.
Disruptions quickly spread to other parts of the money market. In a flight to quality, investors dumped their repo and commercial paper holdings and increased their
holdings in seemingly safer money market funds and Treasury bonds. Market participants, unsure of each other’s potential subprime exposures, scrambled to amass funds
for their own liquidity. Banks became less willing to lend to each other. A closely
watched indicator of interbank lending rates, called the one-month LIBOR-OIS
spread, increased, signifying that banks were concerned about the credit risk involved
in lending to each other. On August , it rose sharply, increasing three-to fourfold over
historical values, and by September , it climbed by another . In , it would
peak much higher.
The panic in the repo, commercial paper, and interbank markets was met by immediate government action. On August , the day after BNP Paribas suspended redemptions, the Fed announced that it would “provid[e] liquidity as necessary to facilitate the
orderly functioning of financial markets,” and the European Central Bank infused
billions of Euros into overnight lending markets. On August , the Fed cut the discount rate by basis points—from . to .. This would be the first of many
such cuts aimed at increasing liquidity. The Fed also extended the term of discountwindow lending to days (from the usual overnight or very short-term period) to offer banks a more stable source of funds. On the same day, the Fed’s FOMC released a
statement acknowledging the continued market deterioration and promising that it
was “prepared to act as needed to mitigate the adverse effects on the economy.”
SIV S : “AN OASIS OF CALM”
In August, the turmoil in asset-backed commercial paper markets hit the market for
structured investment vehicles, or SIVs, even though most of these programs had little subprime mortgage exposure. SIVs had a stable history since their introduction in
. These investments had weathered a number of credit crises—even through
early summer of , as noted in a Moody’s report issued on July , , titled
“SIVs: An Oasis of Calm in the Sub-prime Maelstrom.”
Unlike typical asset-backed commercial paper programs, SIVs were funded primarily through medium-term notes—bonds maturing in one to five years. SIVs held
significant amounts of highly liquid assets and marked those assets to market prices
daily or weekly, which allowed them to operate without explicit liquidity support
from their sponsors.
The SIV sector tripled in assets between and . On the eve of the crisis,
there were SIVs with almost billion in assets. About one-quarter of that
money was invested in mortgage-backed securities or in CDOs, but only was invested in subprime mortgage–backed securities and CDOs holding mortgage-backed
securities.
Not surprisingly, the first SIVs to fail were concentrated in subprime mortgage–
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backed securities, mortgage-related CDOs, or both. These included Cheyne Finance
(managed by London-based Cheyne Capital Management), Rhinebridge (another
IKB program), Golden Key, and Mainsail II (both structured by Barclays Capital). Between August and October, each of these four was forced to restructure or liquidate.
Investors soon ran from even the safer SIVs. “The media was quite happy to sensationalize the collapse of the next ‘leaking SIV’ or the next ‘SIV-positive’ institution,”
then-Moody’s managing director Henry Tabe told the FCIC. The situation was
complicated by the SIVs’ lack of transparency. “In a context of opacity about where
risk resides, . . . a general distrust has contaminated many asset classes. What had
once been liquid is now illiquid. Good collateral cannot be sold or financed at anything approaching its true value,” Moody’s wrote on September .
Even high-quality assets that had nothing to do with the mortgage market were
declining in value. One SIV marked down a CDO to seven cents on the dollar while
it was still rated triple-A. To raise cash, managers sold assets. But selling high-quality assets into a declining market depressed the prices of these unimpaired securities
and pushed down the market values of other SIV portfolios.
By the end of November, SIVs still in operation had liquidated of their portfolios, on average. Sponsors rescued some SIVs. Other SIVs restructured or liquidated;
some investors had to wait a year or more to receive payments and, even then, recouped only some of their money. In the case of Rhinebridge, investors lost and
only gradually received their payments over the next year. Investors in one SIV, Sigma,
lost more than . As of fall , not a single SIV remained in its original form.
The subprime crisis had brought to its knees a historically resilient market in which
losses due to subprime mortgage defaults had been, if anything, modest and localized.
MONEY FUNDS AND OTHER INVESTORS:
“DRINKING FROM A FIRE HOSE”
The next dominoes were the money market funds and other funds. Most were sponsored by investment banks, bank holding companies, or “mutual fund complexes”
such as Fidelity, Vanguard, and Federated. Under SEC regulations, money market
funds that serve retail investors must keep two sets of accounting books, one reflecting the price they paid for securities and the other the fund’s mark-to-market value
(the “shadow price,” in market parlance). However, funds do not have to disclose the
shadow price unless the fund’s net asset value (NAV) has fallen by . below (to
.) per share. Such a decline in market value is known as “breaking the buck”
and generally leads to a fund’s collapse. It can happen, for example, if just of a
fund’s portfolio is in an investment that loses just of its value. So a fund manager
cannot afford big risks.
But SIVs were considered very safe investments—they always had been—and
were widely held by money market funds. In fall , dozens of money market
funds faced losses on SIVs and other asset-backed commercial paper. To prevent
their funds from breaking the buck, at least sponsors, including large banks such
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as Bank of America, US Bancorp, and SunTrust, purchased SIV assets from their
money market funds.
Similar dramas played out in the less-regulated realm of the money market sector
known as enhanced cash funds. These funds serve not retail investors but rather
“qualified purchasers,” which may include wealthy investors who invest million
or more. Enhanced cash funds fall outside most SEC regulations and disclosure requirements. Because they have much higher investment thresholds than retail funds,
and because they face less regulation, investors expect somewhat riskier investing
and higher returns. Nonetheless, these funds also aim to maintain a net asset
value.
As the market turned, some of these funds did break the buck, while the sponsors
of others stepped in to support their value. The billion GE Asset Management
Trust Enhanced Cash Trust, a GE-sponsored fund that managed GE’s own pension
and employee benefit assets, ran aground in the summer; it had of its assets in
mortgage-backed securities. When the fund reportedly lost million and closed
in November , investors redeemed their interests at .. Bank of America
supported its Strategic Cash Portfolio—the nation’s largest enhanced cash fund, with
billion in assets at its peak—after one of that fund’s largest investors withdrew
billion in November .
An interesting case study is provided by the meteoric rise and decline of the
Credit Suisse Institutional Money Market Prime Fund. The fund sought to attract investors through Internet-based trading platforms called “portals,” which supplied an
estimated billion to money market funds and other funds. Investors used these
portals to quickly move their cash to the highest-yielding fund. Posting a higher return could attract significant funds: one money market fund manager later compared
the use of portal money to “drink[ing] from a fire hose.” But the money could vanish just as quickly. The Credit Suisse fund posted the highest returns in the industry
during the months before the liquidity crisis, and increased its assets from about
billion in the summer of to more than billion in the summer of . To
deliver those high returns and attract investors, though, it focused on structured finance products, including CDOs and SIVs such as Cheyne. When investors became
concerned about such assets, they yanked about billion out of the fund in August
alone. Credit Suisse, the Swiss bank that sponsored the fund, was forced to bail
it out, purchasing . billion of assets in August. The episode highlights the risks
of money market funds’ relying on “hot money”—that is, institutional investors who
move quickly in and out of funds in search of the highest returns.
The losses on SIVs and other mortgage-tainted investments also battered local
government investment pools across the country, some of which held billions of dollars in these securities. Pooling provides municipalities, school districts, and other
government agencies with economies of scale, investment diversification, and liquidity. In some cases, participation is mandatory.
With billion in assets, Florida’s local government investment pool was the
largest in the country, and “intended to operate like a highly liquid, low-risk money
market fund, with securities like cash, certificates of deposit, . . . U.S. Treasury bills,
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and bonds issued by other U.S. government agencies,” as an investigation by the state
legislature noted. But by November , because of ratings downgrades, the fund
held at least . billion in securities that no longer met the state’s requirements. It
had more than billion in SIVs and other distressed securities, of which about
million had already defaulted. And it held million in Countrywide certificates
of deposit with maturities that stretched out as far as June . In early November,
following a series of news reports, the fund suffered a run. Local governments withdrew billion in just two weeks. Orange and Pinellas counties pulled out their entire investments. On November , the fund’s managers stopped all withdrawals.
Florida’s was the hardest hit, but other state investment pools also took significant
losses on SIVs and other mortgage-related holdings.
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 13
The Commission concludes that the shadow banking system was permitted to
grow to rival the commercial banking system with inadequate supervision and
regulation. That system was very fragile due to high leverage, short-term funding,
risky assets, inadequate liquidity, and the lack of a federal backstop. When the
mortgage market collapsed and financial firms began to abandon the commercial
paper and repo lending markets, some institutions depending on them for funding their operations failed or, later in the crisis, had to be rescued. These markets
and other interconnections created contagion, as the crisis spread even to markets and firms that had little or no direct exposure to the mortgage market.
In addition, regulation and supervision of traditional banking had been weakened significantly, allowing commercial banks and thrifts to operate with fewer
constraints and to engage in a wider range of financial activities, including activities in the shadow banking system.
The financial sector, which grew enormously in the years leading up to the financial crisis, wielded great political power to weaken institutional supervision
and market regulation of both the shadow banking system and the traditional
banking system. This deregulation made the financial system especially vulnerable to the financial crisis and exacerbated its effects.
14
LATE 2007 TO EARLY 2008:
BILLIONS IN SUBPRIME LOSSES
CONTENTS
Merrill Lynch: “Dawning awareness over the course of the summer”.................
Citigroup: “That would not in any way have excited my attention”...................
AIG’s dispute with Goldman: “There could never be losses”...............................
Federal Reserve: “The discount window wasn’t working”...................................
Monoline insurers: “We never expected losses”...................................................
While a handful of banks were bailing out their money market funds and commercial paper programs in the fall of , the financial sector faced a larger problem:
billions of dollars in mortgage-related losses on loans, securities, and derivatives,
with no end in sight. Among U.S. firms, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch reported the
most spectacular losses, largely because of their extensive collateralized debt obligation (CDO) businesses, writing down a total of . billion and . billion, respectively, by the end of the year. Billions more in losses were reported by large
financial institutions such as Bank of America (. billion), Morgan Stanley (.
billion), JP Morgan (. billion), and Bear Stearns (. billion). Insurance companies, hedge funds, and other financial institutions collectively had taken additional
mortgage-related losses of about billion.
The large write-downs strained these firms’ capital and cash reserves. Further,
market participants began discriminating between firms perceived to be relatively
healthy and others about which they were not so sure. Bear Stearns and Lehman
Brothers were at the top of the “suspect” list; by year-end the cost of five-year
protection against default on their obligations in the credit default swap market stood
at, respectively, , and , annually for every million, while the cost
for the relatively stronger Goldman Sachs stood at ,.
Meanwhile, the economy was beginning to show signs of stress. Facing turmoil in
financial markets, declining home prices, and oil prices above a barrel, consumer
spending was slowing. The Federal Reserve lowered the overnight bank borrowing
rate from . earlier in the year to . in September, . in October, and then
. in December.
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MERRILL LYNCH: “DAWNING AWARENESS
OVER THE COURSE OF THE SUMMER”
On October , Merrill Lynch stunned investors when it announced that thirdquarter earnings would include a . billion loss on CDOs and billion on subprime mortgages—. billion in total, the largest Wall Street write-down to that
point, and nearly twice the . billion loss that the company had warned investors to
expect just three weeks earlier. Six days later, the embattled CEO Stanley O’Neal, a
-year Merrill veteran, resigned.
Much of this write-down came from the firm’s holdings of the super-senior
tranches of mortgage-related CDOs that Merrill had previously thought to be extremely safe. As late as fall , its management had been “bullish on growth” and
“bullish on [the subprime] asset class.” But later that year, the signs of trouble were
becoming difficult even for Merrill to ignore. Two mortgage originators to which the
firm had extended credit lines failed: Ownit, in which Merrill also had a small equity
stake, and Mortgage Lenders Network. Merrill seized the collateral backing those
loans: . billion from Mortgage Lenders, . billion from Ownit.
Merrill, like many of its competitors, started to ramp up its sales efforts, packaging its inventory of mortgage loans and securities into CDOs with new vigor. Its goal
was to reduce the firm’s risk by getting those loans and securities off its balance sheet.
Yet it found that it could not sell the super-senior tranches of those CDOs at acceptable prices; it therefore had to “take down senior tranches into inventory in order to
execute deals”—leading to the accumulation of tens of billions of dollars of those
tranches on Merrill’s books. Dow Kim, then the co-president of Merrill’s investment
banking segment, told FCIC staff that the buildup of the retained super-senior
tranches in the CDO positions was actually part of a strategy begun in late to
reduce the firm’s inventory of subprime and Alt-A mortgages. Sell the lower-rated
CDO tranches, retain the super-senior tranches: those had been his instructions to
his managers at the end of , Kim recalled. He believed that this strategy would
reduce overall credit risk. After all, the super-senior tranches were theoretically the
safest pieces of those investments. To some degree, however, the strategy was involuntary: his people were having trouble selling these investments, and some were even
sold at a loss.
Initially, the strategy seemed to work. By May, the amount of mortgage loans and
securities to be packaged into CDOs had declined to . billion from . billion
in March. According to a September internal Merrill presentation, the net
amount in retained super-senior CDO tranches had increased from . billion in
September to . billion by March and . billion by May. But as the
mortgage market came under increasing pressure and as the market value of even super-senior tranches crumbled, the strategy would come back to haunt the firm.
Merrill’s first-quarter earnings for —net revenues of . billion—were its
second-highest quarterly results ever, including a record for the Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities business, which housed the retained CDO positions. These
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results were announced during a conference call with analysts—an event that investors and analysts rely on to obtain important information about the company and
that, like other public statements, is subject to federal securities laws.
Merrill’s then-CFO Jeffrey Edwards indicated that the company’s results would
not be hurt by the dislocation in the subprime market, because “revenues from subprime mortgage-related activities comprise[d] less than of our net revenues” over
the past five quarters, and because Merrill’s “risk management capabilities are better
than ever, and crucial to our success in navigating turbulent markets.” Providing further assurances, he stated, “We believe the issues in this narrow slice of the market remain contained and have not negatively impacted other sectors.”
However, Edwards did not disclose the large increase in retained super-senior
CDO tranches or the difficulty of selling those tranches, even at a loss—though specific questions on the subject were raised.
In July, Merrill followed its strong first-quarter report with another for the second
quarter that “enabled the company to achieve record net revenues, net earnings and
net earnings per diluted share for the first half of .” During the conference call
announcing the results, the analyst Glenn Schorr of UBS, a large Swiss bank, asked
the CFO to provide some “color around myth versus reality” on Merrill’s exposure to
retained CDO positions. As he had three months earlier, Edwards stressed Merrill’s
risk management and the fact that the CDO business was a small part of Merrill’s
overall business. He said that there had been significant reductions in Merrill’s retained exposures to lower-rated segments of the market, although he did not disclose
that the total amount of Merrill’s retained CDOs had reached . billion by June.
Edwards declined to provide details about the company’s exposure to subprime
mortgage CDOs and any inventory of mortgage-backed securities to be packaged
into CDOs. “We don’t disclose our capital allocations against any specific or even
broader group,” Edwards said.
On July , after the super-senior tranches had been accumulating for many
months, Merrill executives first officially informed its board about the buildup. At a
presentation to the board’s Finance Committee, Dale Lattanzio, co-head of the American branch of the Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities business, reported a
“net” exposure of billion in CDO-related assets, essentially all of them rated tripleA, with exposure to the lower-rated asset class significantly reduced. This net
exposure was the amount of CDO positions left after the subtraction of the hedges—
guarantees in one form or another—that Merrill had purchased to pass along its ultimate risk to third parties willing to provide that protection and take that risk for a fee.
AIG and the small club of monoline insurers were significant suppliers of these guarantees, commonly done as credit default swaps. In July , Merrill had begun to
increase the amount of CDS protection to offset the retained CDO positions.
Lattanzio told the committee, “[Management] decided in the beginning of this
year to significantly reduce exposure to lower-rated assets in the sub-prime asset
class and instead migrate exposure to senior and super senior tranches.” Edwards
did not see any problems. As Kim insisted, “Everyone at the firm and most people in
the industry felt that super-senior was super safe.”
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Former CEO O’Neal told FCIC investigators he had not known that the company was retaining the super-senior tranches of the CDOs until Lattanzio’s presentation to the Finance Committee. He was startled, if only because he had been under
the impression that Merrill’s mortgage-backed-assets business had been driven by
demand: he had assumed that if there were no new customers, there would be no
new offerings. If customers demanded the CDOs, why would Merrill have to retain
CDO tranches on the balance sheet? O’Neal said he was surprised about the retained positions but stated that the presentation, analysis, and estimation of potential losses were not sufficient to sound “alarm bells.” Lattanzio’s report in July
indicated that the retained positions had experienced only million in losses.
Over the next three months, the market value of the super-senior tranches plummeted and losses ballooned; O’Neal told the FCIC: “It was a dawning awareness
over the course of the summer and through September as the size of the losses were
being estimated.”
On October , Merrill executives gave its board a detailed account of how the
firm found itself with what was by that time . billion in net exposure to the super-senior tranches—down from a peak in July of . billion because the firm had
increasingly hedged, written off, and sold its exposure. On October , Merrill announced its third-quarter earnings: a stunning . billion mortgage-related writedown contributing to a net loss of . billion. Merrill also reported—for the first
time—its . billion net exposure to retained CDO positions. Still, in their conference call with analysts, O’Neal and Edwards refused to disclose the gross exposures,
excluding the hedges from the monolines and AIG. “I just don’t want to get into the
details behind that,” Edwards said. “Let me just say that what we have provided
again we think is an extraordinarily high level of disclosure and it should be sufficient.” According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, by September ,
Merrill had accumulated billion of “gross” retained CDO positions, almost four
times the . billion of “net” CDO positions reported during the October conference call.
On October , when O’Neal resigned, he left with a severance package worth
. million—on top of the . million in total compensation he earned in
, when his company was still expanding its mortgage banking operations. Kim,
who oversaw the strategy that left Merrill with billions in losses, had left in May
after being paid million for his work in , which was a profitable year for
Merrill as a firm.
By late , the viability of the monoline insurers from which Merrill had purchased almost billion in hedges had come into question, and the rating agencies
were downgrading them, as we will see in more detail shortly. The SEC had told Merrill that it would impose a punitive capital charge on the firm if it purchased additional
credit default protection from the financially troubled monolines. Recognizing that
the monolines might not be good for all the protection purchased, Merrill began to
put aside loss allowances, starting with . billion on January , . By the end of
, Merrill would put aside a total of billion related to monolines and had
recorded total write-downs on nearly billion of other mortgage-related exposures.
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CITIGROUP: “THAT WOULD NOT IN ANY WAY
HAVE EXCITED MY ATTENTION”
Five days after O’Neal’s October departure from Merrill Lynch, Citigroup announced that its total subprime exposure was billion, which was billion more
than it had told investors just three weeks earlier. Citigroup also announced it would
be taking an to billion loss on its subprime mortgage–related holdings and
that Chuck Prince was resigning as its CEO. Like O’Neal, Prince had learned late of
his company’s subprime-related CDO exposures. Prince and Robert Rubin, chairman
of the Executive Committee of the board, told the FCIC that before September ,
they had not known that Citigroup’s investment banking division had sold some
CDOs with liquidity puts and retained the super-senior tranches of others.
Prince told the FCIC that even in hindsight it was difficult for him to criticize any
of his team’s decisions. “If someone had elevated to my level that we were putting on a
trillion balance sheet, billion of triple-A-rated, zero-risk paper, that would not
in any way have excited my attention,” Prince said. “It wouldn’t have been useful for
someone to come to me and say, ‘Now, we have got trillion on the balance sheet of
assets. I want to point out to you there is a one in a billion chance that this billion
could go south.’ That would not have been useful information. There is nothing I can
do with that, because there is that level of chance on everything.” In fact, the odds
were much higher than that. Even before the mass downgrades of CDOs in late ,
a triple-A tranche of a CDO had a in chance of being downgraded within years
of its original rating.
Certainly, Citigroup was a large and complex organization. That trillion balance sheet—and . trillion off-balance sheet—was spread among more than ,
operating subsidiaries in . Prince insisted that Citigroup was not “too big to
manage.” But it was an organization in which one unit would decide to reduce
mortgage risk while another unit increased it. And it was an organization in which
senior management would not be notified of billion in concentrated exposure—
of the company’s balance sheet and more than a third of its capital—because it
was perceived to be “zero-risk paper.”
Significantly, Citigroup’s Financial Control Group had argued in that the liquidity puts that Citigroup had written on its CDOs had been priced for investors too
cheaply in light of the risks. Also, in early , Susan Mills, a managing director in
the securitization unit—which bought mortgages from other companies and bundled them for sale to investors—took note of rising delinquencies in the subprime
market and created a surveillance group to track loans that her unit purchased. By
mid-, her group saw a deterioration in loan quality and an increase in early payment defaults—that is, more borrowers were defaulting within a few months of getting a loan. From to , Mills recalled before the FCIC, the early payment
default rates nearly tripled from to or . In response, the securitization unit
slowed down its purchase of loans, demanded higher-quality mortgages, and conducted more extensive due diligence on what it bought. However, neither Mills nor
other members of the unit shared any of this information with other divisions in Citi-
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group, including the CDO desk. Around March or April , in contrast with the
securitization desk, Citigroup’s CDO desk increased its purchases of mortgagebacked securities because it saw the distressed market as a buying opportunity.
“Effective communication across businesses was lacking,” the company’s regulators later observed. “Management acknowledged that, in looking back, it should have
made the mortgage deterioration known earlier throughout the firm. The Global
Consumer Group saw signs of sub-prime issues and avoided losses, as did mortgage
backed securities traders, but CDO structures business did so belatedly—[there was]
no dialogue across businesses.”
Co-head of the CDO desk Janice Warne told the FCIC that she first saw weaknesses
in the underlying market in early . In February, when the ABX.HE.BBB- - fell
to below par, the CDO desk decided to slow down on the financing of mortgage
securities for inventory to produce CDOs. Shortly thereafter, however, the same ABX
index started to rally, rising to below par in March and holding around that level
through May. So, the CDO desk reversed course and accelerated its purchases of inventory in April, according to Nestor Dominguez, Warne’s co-head on the CDO desk.
Dominguez said he didn’t see the market weakening until the summer, when the index
fell to less than below par.
Murray Barnes, the Citigroup risk officer assigned to the CDO business, approved
the CDO desk’s request to temporarily increase its limits on purchasing collateral.
Barnes observed, in hindsight, that rather than looking at the widening spreads as an
opportunity, Citigroup should have reassessed its assumptions and examined
whether the decline in the ABX was a sign of strain in the mortgage market. He admitted “complacency” about the desk’s ability to manage its risk.
The risk management division also increased the CDO desk’s limits for retaining
the most senior tranches from billion to billion in the first half of . As at
Merrill, traders and risk managers at Citigroup believed that the super-senior
tranches carried little risk. Citigroup’s regulators later wrote, “An acknowledgement
of the risk in its Super Senior AAA CDO exposure was perhaps Citigroup’s ‘biggest
miss.’ . . . As management felt comfortable with the credit risk of these tranches, it began to retain large positions on the balance sheet. . . . As the sub-prime market began
to deteriorate, the risk perceived in these tranches increased, causing large writedowns.” Ultimately, losses at Citigroup from mortgages, Alt-A mortgage–backed securities, and mortgage-related CDOs would total about billion, nearly half of
Citigroup’s capital at the end of . About billion of that loss related to protection purchased from the monoline insurers.
Barnes’s decision to increase the CDO risk limits was approved by his superior,
Ellen Duke. Barnes and Duke reported to David Bushnell, the chief risk officer. Bushnell—whom Prince called “the best risk manager on Wall Street”—told the FCIC that
he did not remember specifically approving the increase but that, in general, the risk
management function did approve higher risk limits when a business line was growing. He described a “firm-wide initiative” to increase Citigroup’s structured products business.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about the conflicting strategies employed by the
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securitization and CDO desks is that their respective risk officers attended the same
weekly independent risk meetings. Duke reflected that she was not overly concerned
when the issue came up, saying she and her risk team were “seduced by structuring
and failed to look at the underlying collateral.” According to Barnes, the CDO desk
didn’t look at the CDOs’ underlying collateral because it lacked the “ability” to see
loan performance data, such as delinquencies and early payment defaults. Yet the
surveillance unit in Citigroup’s securitization desk might have been able to provide
some insights based on its own data. Barnes told the FCIC that Citigroup’s risk
management tended to be managed along business lines, noting that he was only two
offices away from his colleague who covered the securitization business and yet didn’t
understand the nuances of what was happening to the underlying loans. He regretted
not reaching out to the consumer bank to “get the pulse” of mortgage origination.
“That has never happened since the Depression”
Prince and Rubin appeared to believe up until the fall of that any downside risk
in the CDO business was minuscule. “I don’t think anybody focused on the CDOs.
This was one business in a vast enterprise, and until the trouble developed, it wasn’t
one that had any particular profile,” Rubin—in Prince’s words, a “very important
member of [the] board”—told the FCIC. “You know, Tom Maheras was in charge of
trading. Tom was an extremely well regarded trading figure on the street. . . . And this
is what traders do, they handle these kinds of problems.” Maheras, the co-head of
Citigroup’s investment bank, told the FCIC that he spent “a small fraction of ” of
his time thinking about or dealing with the CDO business.
Citigroup’s risk management function was simply not very concerned about housing market risks. According to Prince, Bushnell and others told him, in effect, “‘Gosh,
housing prices would have to go down nationwide for us to have, not a problem
with [mortgage-backed securities] CDOs, but for us to have problems,’ and that has
never happened since the Depression.” Housing prices would be down much less
than when Citigroup began having problems because of write-downs and the
liquidity puts it had written.
By June , national house prices had fallen ., and about of subprime
adjustable-rate mortgages were delinquent. Yet Citigroup still did not expect that the
liquidity puts could be triggered, and it remained unconcerned about the value of its
retained super-senior tranches of CDOs. On June , , Citigroup made a presentation to the SEC about subprime exposure in its CDO business. The presentation noted
that Citigroup did not factor two positions into this exposure: . billion in supersenior tranches and . billion in liquidity puts. The presentation explained that the
liquidity puts were not a concern: “The risk of default is extremely unlikely . . . [and]
certain market events must also occur for us to be required to fund. Therefore, we
view these positions to be even less risky than the Super Senior Book.”
Just a few weeks later, the July failure of the two Bear Stearns hedge funds
spelled trouble. Commercial paper written against three Citigroup-underwritten
CDOs for which Bear Stearns Asset Management was the asset manager and on
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which Citigroup had issued liquidity puts began losing value, and their interest rates
began rising. The liquidity puts would be triggered if interest rates on the assetbacked commercial paper rose above a certain level.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the regulator of Citigroup’s national bank subsidiary, had expressed no apprehensions about the liquidity puts in
. But by the summer of , OCC Examiner-in-Charge John Lyons told the
FCIC, the OCC became concerned. Buying the commercial paper would drain
billion of the company’s cash and expose it to possible balance-sheet losses at a time
when markets were increasingly in distress. But given the rising rates, Lyons also said
Citigroup did not have the option to wait. Over the next six months, Citigroup purchased all billion of the paper that had been subject to its liquidity puts.
On a July conference call, CFO Gary Crittenden told analysts and investors
that the company’s subprime exposures had fallen from billion at the end of
to billion on June . But he made no mention of the super-senior exposures and
liquidity puts. “I think our risk team did a nice job of anticipating that this was going
to be a difficult environment, and so set about in a pretty concentrated effort to reduce our exposure over the last six months,” he said. A week later, on a July call,
Crittenden reiterated that subprime exposure had been cut: “So I think we’ve had
good risk management that has been anticipating some market dislocation here.”
By August, as market conditions worsened, Citigroup’s CDO desk was revaluing
its super-senior tranches, though it had no effective model for assigning value. However, as the market congealed, then froze, the paucity of actual market prices for these
tranches demanded a model. The New York Fed later noted that “the model for Super
Senior CDOs, based on fundamental economic factors, could not be fully validated
by Citigroup’s current validation methodologies yet it was relied upon for reporting
exposures.”
Barnes, the CDO risk officer, told the FCIC that sometime that summer he met
with the co-heads of the CDO desk to express his concerns about possible losses on
both the unsold CDO inventory and the retained super-senior tranches. The message
got through. Nestor Dominguez told the FCIC, “We began extensive discussions
about the implications of the . . . dramatic decline of the underlying subprime markets, and how that would feed into the super-senior positions.” Also at this time—
for the first time—such concerns reached Maheras. He justified his lack of prior
knowledge of the billions of dollars in inventory and super-senior tranches by pointing out “that the business was appropriately supervised by experienced and highly
competent managers and by an independent risk group and that I was properly apprised of the general nature of our work in this area and its attendant risks.”
The exact dates are not certain, but according to Bushnell, he remembers a discussion at a “Business Heads” meeting about the growing mark-to-market volatility on
those super-senior tranches in late August or early September, well after Citigroup
started to buy the commercial paper backing the super-senior tranches of the CDOs
that BSAM managed. This was also when Chairman and CEO Prince first heard
about the possible amount of “open positions” on the super-senior CDO tranches
that Citigroup held: “It wasn’t presented at the time in a startling fashion . . . [but]
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then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, obviously, over the next days.” In late
August, Citigroup’s valuation models suggested that losses on the super-senior
tranches might range from million to billion. This number was recalculated as
to million in mid-September, as the valuation methodology was refined.
In the weeks ahead, those numbers would skyrocket.
“DEFCON calls”
To get a handle on potential losses from the CDOs and liquidity puts, starting on
September Prince convened a series of meetings—and later, nightly “DEFCON
calls”—with members of his senior management team; they included Rubin, Maheras, Crittenden, and Bushnell, as well as Lou Kaden, the chief administrative officer. Rubin was in Korea during the first meeting but Kaden kept him informed.
Rubin later emailed Prince: “According to Lou, Tom [Maheras] never did provide a
clear and direct answer on the super seniors. If that is so, and the meeting did not
bring that to a head, isn’t that deeply troubling not as to what happened—that is a different question that is also troubling—but as to providing full and clear information
and analysis now.” Prince disagreed, writing, “I thought, for first mtg, it was good. We
weren’t trying to get to final answers.”
A second meeting was held September , after Rubin was back in the country.
This meeting marked the first time Rubin recalled hearing of the super-senior and
liquidity put exposure. He later commented, “As far as I was concerned they were all
one thing, because if there was a put back to Citi under any circumstance, however
remote that circumstance might be, you hadn’t fully disposed of the risk.” And, of
course, the circumstance was not remote, since billions of dollars in subprime mortgage assets had already come back onto Citigroup’s books.
Prince told the FCIC that Maheras had assured him throughout the meetings and
the DEFCON calls that the super seniors posed no risk to Citigroup, even as the market deteriorated; he added that he became increasingly uneasy with Maheras’s assessment. “Tom had said and said till his last day at work [October ]: ‘We are never
going to lose a penny on these super seniors. We are never going to lose a penny on
these super seniors. . . . ’ And as we went along and I was more and more uncomfortable with this and more and more uncomfortable with Tom’s conclusions on ultimate
valuations, that is when I really began to have some very serious concerns about what
was going to happen.”
Despite Prince’s concerns, Citigroup remained publicly silent about the additional
subprime exposure from the super-senior positions and liquidity puts, even as it preannounced some details of its third-quarter earnings on October , .
On October , the rating agencies announced the first in a series of downgrades
on thousands of securities. In Prince’s view, these downgrades were “the precipitating
event in the financial crisis.” On the same day, Prince restructured the investment
bank, a move that led to the resignation of Maheras.
Four days later, the question of the super-senior CDOs and liquidity puts was
specifically raised at the board of directors’ Corporate Audit and Risk Management
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Committee meeting and brought up to the full board. A presentation concluded that
“total sub-prime exposure in [the investment bank] was bn with an additional
bn in Direct Super Senior and bn in Liquidity and Par Puts.” Citigroup’s total
subprime exposure was billion, nearly half of its capital. The calculation was
straightforward, but during an analysts’ conference call that day Crittenden omitted
any mention of the super-senior- and liquidity-put-related exposure as he told participants that Citigroup had under billion in subprime exposure.
A week later, on Saturday, October , Prince learned from Crittenden that the
company would have to report subprime-related losses of to billion; on Monday he tendered his resignation to the board. He later reflected, “When I drove home
and Gary called me and told me it wasn’t going to be two or million but it was going to be eight billion—I will never forget that call. I continued driving, and I got
home, I walked in the door, I told my wife, I said here’s what I just heard and if this
turns out to be true, I am resigning.”
On November , Citigroup revealed the accurate subprime exposure—now estimated at billion—and it disclosed the subprime-related losses. Though Prince
had resigned, he remained on Citigroup’s payroll until the end of the year, and the
board of directors gave him a generous parting compensation package: . million
in cash and million in stock, bringing his total compensation to million from
to . The SEC later sued Citigroup for its delayed disclosures. To resolve
the charges, the bank paid million. The New York Fed would later conclude,
“There was little communications on the extensive level of subprime exposure posed
by Super Senior CDO. . . . Senior management, as well as the independent Risk Management function charged with monitoring responsibilities, did not properly identify
and analyze these risks in a timely fashion.”
Prince’s replacements as chairman and CEO—Richard Parsons and Vikram Pandit—were announced in December. Rubin would stay until January , having
been paid more than million from to during his tenure at the company, including his role as chairman of the Executive Committee, a position that carried “no operational responsibilities,” Rubin told the FCIC. “My agreement with Citi
provided that I’d have no management of personnel or operations.”
John Reed, former co-CEO of Citigroup, attributed the firm’s failures in part to a
culture change that occurred when the bank took on Salomon Brothers as part of the
Travelers merger. He said that Salomon executives “were used to taking big risks”
and “had a history . . . [of] making a lot of money . . . but then getting into trouble.”
AIG’S DISPUTE WITH GOLDMAN:
“THERE COULD NEVER BE LOSSES”
Beginning on July , , when Goldman’s Davilman sent the email that disrupted
the vacation of AIG’s Alan Frost, the dispute between Goldman and AIG over the need
for collateral to back credit default swaps captured the attention of the senior management of both companies. For months, Goldman pressed its case and sent AIG a formal demand letter every single business day. It would pursue AIG relentlessly with
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
demands for collateral based on marks that were initially well below those of other
firms—while AIG and its management struggled to come to grips with the burgeoning
crisis.
The initial collateral call was a shock to AIG’s senior executives, most of whom
had not even known that the credit default swaps with Goldman contained collateral
call provisions.
They had known there were enormous exposures— billion, backed in large
part by subprime and Alt-A loans, in , compared with the parent company’s total reported capital of . billion—but executives said they had never been concerned. “The mantra at [AIG Financial Products] had always been (in my
experience) that there could never be losses,” Vice President of Accounting Policy
Joseph St. Denis said.
Then came that first collateral call. St. Denis told FCIC staff that he was so
“stunned” when he got the news that he “had to sit down.” The collateral provisions
surprised even Gene Park, the executive who had insisted months earlier that AIG
stop writing the swaps. He told the FCIC that “rule Number at AIG FP” was to
never post collateral. This was particularly important in the credit default swap business, he said, because it was the only unhedged business that AIG ran.
But Jake Sun, the general counsel of the Financial Products subsidiary, who reviewed the swap contracts before they were executed, told the FCIC that the provisions were standard both at AIG and in the industry. Frost, who was the first to
learn of the collateral call, agreed and said that other financial institutions also commonly did deals with collateral posting provisions. Pierre Micottis, the Paris-based
head of the AIG Financial Products’ Enterprise Risk Management department, told
the FCIC that collateral provisions were indeed common in derivatives contracts—
but surprising in the super-senior CDS contracts, which were considered safe. Insurance supervisors did not permit regulated insurance companies like MBIA and
Ambac to pay out except when the insured entity suffered an actual loss, and therefore those companies were forbidden to post collateral for a decline in market value
or unrealized losses. Because AIG Financial Products was not regulated as an insurance company, it was not subject to this prohibition.
As disturbing as the senior AIG executives’ surprise at the collateral provisions
was their firm’s inability to assess the validity of Goldman’s numbers. AIG Financial
Products did not have its own model or otherwise try to value the CDO portfolio
that it guaranteed through credit default swaps, nor did it hedge its exposure. Gene
Park explained that hedging was seen as unnecessary in part because of the mistaken
belief that AIG would have to pay counterparties only if holders of the super-senior
tranches incurred actual losses. He also said that purchasing a hedge from UBS, the
Swiss bank, was considered, but that Andrew Forster, the head of credit trading at
AIG Financial Products, rejected the idea because it would cost more than the fees
that AIG Financial Products was receiving to write the CDS protection. “We’re not
going to pay a dime for this,” Forster told Park.
Therefore, AIG Financial Products relied on an actuarial model that did not provide a tool for monitoring the CDOs’ market value. The model was developed by
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Gary Gorton, then a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School, who began working as a consultant to AIG Financial Products in and
was close to its CEO, Joe Cassano. The Gorton model had determined with .
confidence that the owners of the super-senior tranches of the CDOs insured by AIG
Financial Products would never suffer real economic losses, even in an economy as
troubled as the worst post–World War II recession. The company’s auditors, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who were apparently also not aware of the collateral requirements, concluded that “the risk of default on [AIG’s] portfolio has been
effectively removed and as a result from a risk management perspective, there are no
substantive economic risks in the portfolio and as a result the fair value of the liability
stream on these positions from a risk management perspective could reasonably be
considered to be zero.”
In speaking with the FCIC, Cassano was adamant that the “CDS book” was effectively hedged. He said that AIG could never suffer losses on the swaps, because the
CDS contracts were written only on the super-senior tranches of top-rated securities
with high “attachment points”—that is, many securities in the CDOs would have to
default in order for losses to reach the super-senior tranches—and because the bulk
of the exposure came from loans made before , when he thought underwriting
standards had begun to deteriorate. Indeed, according to Gene Park, Cassano put a
halt to a million hedge, in which AIG had taken a short position in the ABX index. As Park explained, “Joe stopped that because after we put on the first . . . the
market moved against us . . . we were losing money on the million. . . . Joe said,
‘You know, I don’t think the world is going to blow up . . . I don’t want to spend that
money. Stop it.’”
Despite the limited market transparency in the summer of , Goldman used
what information there was, including information from ABX and other indices, to
estimate what it considered to be realistic prices. Goldman also spoke with other
companies to see what values they assigned to the securities. Finally, Goldman
looked to its own experience: in most cases, when the bank bought credit protection
on an investment, it turned around and sold credit protection on the same investment to other counterparties. These deals yielded more price information.
Until the dispute with Goldman, AIG relied on the Gorton model, which did not
estimate the market value of underlying securities. So Goldman’s marks caught AIG
by surprise. When AIG pushed back, Goldman almost immediately reduced its July
collateral demand from . billion to . billion, a move that underscored the
difficulty of finding reliable market prices. The new demand was still too high, in
AIG’s view, which was corroborated by third-party marks. Goldman valued the
CDOs between and cents on the dollar, while Merrill Lynch, for example, valued the same securities between and cents.
On August , Cassano told PwC that there was “little or no price transparency”
and that it was “difficult to determine whether [collateral calls] were indicative of true
market levels moving.” AIG managers did call other dealers holding similar bonds
to check their marks in order to help its case with Goldman, but those marks were
not “actionable”—that is, the dealers would not actually execute transactions at the
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
quoted prices. “The above estimated values . . . do not represent actual bids or offers
by Merrill Lynch” was the disclaimer in a listing of estimated market values provided
by Merrill to AIG. Goldman Sachs disputed the reliability of such estimates.
“Without being flippant”
On August , for the first time, AIG executives publicly disclosed the billion in
credit default swaps on the super-senior tranches of CDOs during the company’s second-quarter earnings call. They acknowledged that the great majority of the underlying bonds thus insured— billion—were backed by subprime mortgages. Of this
amount, billion was written on CDOs predominantly backed by risky BBB-rated
collateral. On the call, Cassano maintained that the exposures were no problem: “It is
hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of realm or
reason that would see us losing in any of those transactions.” He concluded: “We
see no issues at all emerging. We see no dollar of loss associated with any of [the
CDO] business. Any reasonable scenario that anyone can draw, and when I say reasonable, I mean a severe recession scenario that you can draw out for the life of the
securities.” Senior Vice President and Chief Risk Officer Robert Lewis seconded that
reassurance: “We believe that it would take declines in housing values to reach depression proportions, along with default frequencies never experienced, before our
AAA and AA investments would be impaired.”
These assurances focused on the risk that actual mortgage defaults would create
real economic losses on the company’s credit default swap positions. But more important at the time were the other tremendous risks that AIG executives had already
discussed internally. No one on the conference call mentioned Goldman’s demand
for . billion in collateral; the clear possibility that future, much-larger collateral
calls could jeopardize AIG’s liquidity; or the risk that AIG would be forced to take an
“enormous mark” on its existing book, the concern Forster had noted.
The day after the conference call, AIG posted million in cash to Goldman,
its first collateral posting since Goldman had requested the . billion. As Frost
wrote to Forster in an August , , email, the idea was “to get everyone to chill
out.” For one thing, some AIG executives, including Cassano, had late-summer vacations planned. Cassano signed off on the million “good faith deposit” before
leaving for a cycling trip through Germany and Austria. The parties executed a side
letter making clear that both disputed the amount. For the time being, two companies that had been doing business together for decades agreed to disagree.
On August , Frost went to Goldman’s offices to “start the dialog,” which had
stalled while Cassano and other key executives were on vacation. Two days later, Frost
wrote to Forster: “Trust me. This is not the last margin call we are going to debate.”
He was right. By September , Société Générale—known more commonly as SocGen—had demanded million in collateral on CDS it had purchased from AIG Financial Products, UBS had demanded million, and Goldman had upped its
demand by million. The SocGen demand was based on an . bid price provided by Goldman, which AIG disputed. Tom Athan, managing director at AIG Fi-
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nancial Products, told Forster that SocGen “received marks from GS on positions that
would result in big collateral calls but SG disputed them with GS.” Several weeks
later, Cassano told AIG Financial Services CFO Elias Habayeb that he believed the
SocGen margin call had been “spurred by Goldman,” and that AIG “disputed the call
and [had] not heard from SocGen again on that specific call.” In the second week of
October, the rating agencies announced hundreds of additional downgrades affecting
tens of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage–backed securities and CDOs. By
November , Goldman’s demand had almost doubled, to . billion. On November ,
Bensinger, the CFO, informed AIG’s Audit Committee that Financial Products had received margin calls from five counterparties and was disputing every single one.
This stance was rooted in the company’s continuing belief that Goldman had set
values too low. AIG’s position was corroborated, at least in part, by the wide disparity
in marks from other counterparties. At one point, Merrill Lynch and Goldman made
collateral demands on the very same CDS positions, but Goldman’s marks were almost lower than Merrill’s. Goldman insisted that its marks represented the
“constantly evolving additional information from our market making activities, including trades that we had executed, market activity we observed, price changes in
comparable securities and derivatives and the current prices of relevant liquid . . . indices.” Trading in the ABX would fall from over trades per week through the
end of September to less than per week in the fourth quarter of ; trading in the TABX, which focuses on lower-rated tranches, dropped from roughly
trades per week through mid-July to almost zero by mid-August.
But Cassano believed that the quick reduction in Goldman’s first collateral demand (from . billion on July to . billion on August ) and the interim
agreement on the million deposit confirmed that Goldman was not as certain of
its marks as it later insisted. According to Cassano, Michael Sherwood, co-CEO of
Goldman Sachs International, told him that Goldman “didn’t cover ourselves in glory
during this period” but that “the market’s starting to come our [Goldman’s] way”;
Cassano took those comments as an implicit admission that Goldman’s initial marks
had been aggressive.
“More love notes”
In mid-August, Forster told Frost in an email that Goldman was pursuing a strategy
of aggressively marking down assets to “cause maximum pain to their competitors.” PricewaterhouseCoopers, which served as auditor for both AIG and Goldman during this period, knew full well that AIG had never before marked these
positions to market. In the third quarter of , with the collateral demands piling
up, PwC prompted AIG to begin developing a model of its own. Prior to the Goldman margin call, PwC had concluded that “compensating controls” made up for
AIG’s not having a model. Among those was notice from counterparties that collateral was due. In other words, one of AIG’s risk management tools was to learn of its
own problems from counterparties who did have the ability to mark their own positions to market prices and then demand collateral from AIG.
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
The decision to develop a valuation model was not unanimous. In mid-September, Cassano and Forster met with Habayeb and others to discuss marking the positions down and actually recording valuation losses in AIG’s financial statements.
Cassano still thought the valuation process unnecessary because the possibility of defaults was “remote.” He sent Forster and others emails describing requests from
Habayeb as “more love notes . . . [asking us to go through] the same drill of drafting
answers.” Nevertheless, by October, and in consultation with PwC, AIG started to
evaluate the pricing model for subprime instruments developed and used by
Moody’s. Cassano considered the Moody’s model only a “gut check” until it was fully
validated internally. AIG coupled this model with generic CDO tranche data sold
by JP Morgan that were considered to be relatively representative of the market. Of
course, by this time—and for several preceding months—there was no active market
for many of these tranches. Everyone understood that this was not a perfect solution,
but AIG and its auditors thought it could serve as an interim step. The makeshift
model was up and running in the third quarter.
“Confident in our marks”
On November , when AIG reported its third-quarter earnings, it disclosed that it
was taking a million charge “related to its super senior credit default swap portfolio” and “a further unrealized market valuation loss through October of approximately million before tax [on that] portfolio.” On a conference call, CEO
Sullivan assured investors that the insurance company had “active and strong risk
management.” He said, “AIG continues to believe that it is highly unlikely that AIGFP
will be required to make payments with respect to these derivatives.” Cassano added
that AIG had “more than enough resources to meet any of the collateral calls that
might come in.” While the company remained adamant that there would be no realized economic losses from the credit default swaps, it used the newly adopted—and
adapted—Moody’s model to estimate the million charge. In fact, PwC had questioned the relevance of the model: it hadn’t been validated in advance of the earnings
release, it didn’t take into account important structural information about the swap
contracts, and there were questions about the quality of the data. AIG didn’t mention those caveats on the call.
Two weeks later, on November , Goldman demanded an additional billion in
cash. AIG protested, but paid . billion, bringing the total posted to billion.
Four days later, Cassano circulated a memo from Forster listing the pertinent marks
for the securities from Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Calyon, Bank of Montreal,
and SocGen. The marks varied widely, from as little as of the bonds’ original
value to virtually full value. Goldman’s estimated values were much lower than those
of other dealers. For example, Goldman valued one CDO, the Dunhill CDO, at
of par, whereas Merrill valued it at of par; the Orient Point CDO was valued at
of par by Goldman but at of par by Merrill. Forster suggested that the marks
validated AIG’s long-standing contention that “there is no one dealer with more
knowledge than the others or with a better deal flow of trades and all admit to
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‘guesstimating’ pricing.” Cassano agreed. “No one seems to know how to discern a
market valuation price from the current opaque market environment,” Cassano
wrote to a colleague. “This information is limited due to the lack of participants [willing] to even give indications on these obligations.”
One week later, Cassano called Sherwood in Goldman’s London office and demanded reimbursement of . billion. He told both AIG and Goldman executives
that independent third-party pricing for of the , securities underlying the
CDOs on which AIG FP had written CDS and AIG’s own valuation for the other
indicated that Goldman’s demand was unsupported—therefore Goldman should return the money. Goldman refused, and instead demanded more.
By late November, there was relative agreement within AIG and with its auditor
that the Moody’s model incorporated into AIG’s valuation system was inadequate for
valuing the super-senior book. But there was no consensus on how that book
should be valued. Inputting generic CDO collateral data into the Moody’s model
would result in a . billion valuation loss; using Goldman’s marks would result in a
billion valuation loss, which would wipe out the quarter’s profits. On November
, PwC auditors met with senior executives from AIG and the Financial Products
subsidiary to discuss the whole situation. According to PwC meeting notes, AIG reported that disagreements with Goldman continued, and AIG did not have data to
dispute Goldman’s marks. Forster recalled that Sullivan said that he was going to have
a heart attack when he learned that using Goldman’s marks would eliminate the
quarter’s profits. Sullivan told FCIC staff that he did not remember this part of the
meeting.
AIG adjusted the number, and in doing so it chose not to rely on dealer quotes.
James Bridgewater, the Financial Products executive vice president in charge of models, came up with a solution. Convinced that there was a calculable difference between the value of the underlying bonds and the value of the swap protection AIG
had written on those bonds, Bridgewater suggested using a “negative basis adjustment,” which would reduce the unrealized loss estimate from . billion (Goldman’s
figure) to about . billion. With their auditor’s knowledge, Cassano and others
agreed that the negative basis adjustment was the way to go.
Several documents given to the FCIC by PwC, AIG, and Cassano reflect discussions during and after the November meeting. During a second meeting at which
only the auditor and parent company executives were present (Financial Products executives, including Cassano and Forster, did not attend), PwC expressed significant
concerns about risk management, specifically related to the valuation of the credit
default swap portfolio, as well as to the company’s procedures in posting collateral.
AIG Financial Products had paid out billion without active involvement from the
parent company’s Enterprise Risk Management group. Another issue was “the way in
which AIGFP [had] been ‘managing’ the SS [super senior] valuation process—saying
PwC will not get any more information until after the investor day presentation.”
The auditors laid out their concerns about conflicting strategies pursued by AIG
subsidiaries. Notably, the securities-lending subsidiary had been purchasing mortgage-backed securities, using cash raised by lending securities that AIG held on
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behalf of its insurance subsidiaries. From the end of through September ,
its holdings rose from billion to billion. Meanwhile, Financial Products, acting on its own analysis, had decided in to begin pulling back on writing credit
default swaps on CDOs. In PwC’s view, in allowing one subsidiary to increase exposure to subprime while another subsidiary worked to exit the market entirely, the
parent company’s risk management failed. PwC also said that the company’s second
quarter of financial disclosures would have been changed if the exposure of the
securities-lending business had been known. The auditors concluded that “these
items together raised control concerns around risk management which could be a
material weakness.” Kevin McGinn, AIG’s chief credit officer, shared these concerns about the conflicting strategies. In a November , , email, McGinn wrote:
“All units were apprised regularly of our concerns about the housing market. Some
listened and responded; others simply chose not to listen and then, to add insult to
injury, not to spot the manifest signs.” He concluded that this was akin to “Nero playing the fiddle while Rome burns.” On the opposite side, Sullivan insisted to the
FCIC that the conflicting strategies in the securities-lending business and at AIG Financial Products simply revealed that the two subsidiaries adopted different business
models, and did not constitute a risk management failure.
On December , six days after receiving PwC’s warnings, Sullivan boasted on another conference call about AIG’s risk management systems and the company’s oversight of the subprime exposure: “The risk we have taken in the U.S. residential
housing sector is supported by sound analysis and a risk management structure. . . .
we believe the probability that it will sustain an economic loss is close to zero. . . . We
are confident in our marks and the reasonableness of our valuation methods.” Charlie
Gates, an analyst at Credit Suisse, a Swiss bank, asked directly about valuation and
collateral disputes with counterparties to which AIG had alluded in its third-quarter
financial results. Cassano replied, “We have from time to time gotten collateral calls
from people and then we say to them, well we don’t agree with your numbers. And
they go, oh, and they go away. And you say well what was that? It’s like a drive-by in a
way. And the other times they sat down with us, and none of this is hostile or anything, it’s all very cordial, and we sit down and we try and find the middle ground and
compare where we are.”
Cassano did not reveal the billion collateral posted to Goldman, the several
hundred million dollars posted to other counterparties, and the daily demands from
Goldman and the others for additional cash. The analysts and investors on the call
were not informed about the “negative basis adjustment” used to derive the announced . billion maximum potential exposure. Investors therefore did not know
that AIG’s earnings were overstated by . billion—and they would not learn that
information until February , .
“Material weakness”
By January , AIG still did not have a reliable way to determine the market price
of the securities on which it had written credit protection. Nevertheless, on January
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, Cassano sent an email to Michael Sherwood and CFO David Viniar at Goldman
demanding that they return . billion of the billion posted. He attached a
spreadsheet showing that AIG valued many securities at par, as if there had been no
decline in their value. That was simply not credible, Goldman executives told the
FCIC. Meanwhile, Goldman had by then built up . billion in protection by
purchasing credit default swaps on AIG to cover the difference between the amount
of collateral they had demanded and the amount that AIG had paid.
On February , , PwC auditors met with Robert Willumstad, the chairman of
AIG’s board of directors. They informed him that the “negative basis adjustment”
used to reach the . billion estimate disclosed on the December investor call had
been improper and unsupported, and was a sign that “controls over the AIG Financial Products super senior credit default swap portfolio valuation process and oversight thereof were not effective.” PwC concluded that “this deficiency was a material
weakness as of December , .” In other words, PwC would have to announce
that the numbers AIG had already publicly reported were wrong. Why the auditors
waited so long to make this pronouncement is unclear, particularly given that PwC
had known about the adjustment in November.
In the meeting with Willumstad, the auditors were broadly critical of Sullivan;
Bensinger, whom they deemed unable to compensate for Sullivan’s weaknesses; and
Lewis, who might not have “the skill sets” to run an enterprise-wide risk management department. The auditors concluded that “a lack of leadership, unwillingness to
make difficult decisions regarding [Financial Products] in the past and inexperience
in dealing with these complex matters” had contributed to the problems. Despite
PwC’s findings, Sullivan received million over four years in compensation from
AIG, including a severance package of million. When asked about these figures
at a FCIC hearing, he said, “I have no knowledge or recollection of those numbers
whatsoever, sir. . . . I certainly don’t recall earning that amount of money, sir.”
The following day, PwC met with the entire AIG Audit Committee and repeated
the analysis presented to Willumstad. The auditors said they could complete AIG’s
audit, but only if Cassano “did not interfere in the process.” Retaining Cassano was a
“management judgment, but the culture needed to change at FP.” On February ,
AIG disclosed in an SEC filing that its auditor had identified the material weakness,
acknowledging that it had reduced its December valuation loss estimates by . billion—that is, the difference between the estimates of . billion and . billion—
because of the unsupportable negative basis adjustment.
The rating agencies responded immediately. Moody’s and S&P announced downgrades, and Fitch placed AIG on “Ratings Watch Negative,” suggesting that a future
downgrade was possible. AIG’s stock declined for the day, closing at ..
At the end of February, Goldman held billion in cash collateral, was demanding an additional . billion, and had upped to . billion its CDS protection
against an AIG failure. On February , AIG disappointed Wall Street again—this
time with dismal fourth-quarter and fiscal year earnings. The company reported a net loss of . billion, largely due to . billion in valuation losses related to the super-senior CDO credit default swap exposure and more than .
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billion in losses relating to the securities-lending business’s mortgage-backed purchases. Along with the losses, Sullivan announced Cassano’s retirement, but the news
wasn’t all bad for the former Financial Products chief: He made more than million from the time he joined AIG Financial Products in January of until his retirement in , including a million-a-month consulting agreement after his
retirement.
In March, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the federal regulator in charge of regulating AIG and its subsidiaries, downgraded the company’s composite rating from a
, signifying that AIG was “fundamentally sound,” to a , indicating moderate to severe supervisory concern. The OTS still judged the threat to overall viability as remote. It did not schedule a follow-up review of the company’s financial condition
for another six months.
By then, it would be too late.
FEDERAL RESERVE:
“THE DISCOUNT WINDOW WASN’ T WORKING”
Over the course of the fall, the announcements by Citigroup, Merrill, and others
made it clear that financial institutions were going to take serious losses from their
exposures to the mortgage market. Stocks of financial firms fell sharply; by the end of
November, the S&P Financials Index had lost more than for the year. Between
July and November, asset-backed commercial paper declined about , which
meant that those assets had to be sold or funded by other means. Investment banks
and other financial institutions faced tighter funding markets and increasing cash
pressures. As a result, the Federal Reserve decided that its interest rate cuts and other
measures since August had not been sufficient to provide liquidity and stability to financial markets. The Fed’s discount window hadn’t attracted much bank borrowing
because of the stigma attached to it. “The problem with the discount window is that
people don’t like to use it because they view it as a risk that they will be viewed as
weak,” William Dudley, then head of the capital markets group at the New York Fed
and currently its president, told the FCIC.
Banks and thrifts preferred to draw on other sources of liquidity; in particular,
during the second half of , the Federal Home Loan Banks—which are government-sponsored entities that lend to banks and thrifts, accepting mortgages as collateral—boosted their lending by billion to billion (a increase) when the
securitization market froze. Between the end of March and the end of December
, Washington Mutual, the largest thrift, increased its borrowing from the Federal
Home Loan Banks from billion to billion; Countrywide increased its borrowing from billion to billion; Bank of America increased its borrowing
from billion to billion. The Federal Home Loan Banks could thus be seen as
the lender of next to last resort for commercial banks and thrifts—the Fed being the
last resort.
In addition, the loss of liquidity in the financial sector was making it more diffi-
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cult for businesses and consumers to get credit, raising the Fed’s concerns. From July
to October, the percentage of loan officers reporting tightening standards on prime
mortgages increased from to about . Over that time, the percentage of loan
officers reporting tightening standards on loans to large and midsize companies increased from to , its highest level since . “The Federal Reserve pursued
a whole slew of nonconventional policies . . . very creative measures when the discount window wasn’t working as hoped,” Frederic Mishkin, a Fed governor from
to , told the FCIC. “These actions were very aggressive, [and] they were extremely controversial.” The first of these measures, announced on December ,
was the creation of the Term Auction Facility (TAF). The idea was to reduce the discount window stigma by making the money available to all banks at once through a
regular auction. The program had some success, with banks borrowing billion by
the end of the year. Over time, the Fed would continue to tweak the TAF auctions, offering more credit and longer maturities.
Another Fed concern was that banks and others who did have cash would hoard
it. Hoarding meant foreign banks had difficulty borrowing in dollars and were therefore under pressure to sell dollar-denominated assets such as mortgage-backed securities. Those sales and fears of more sales to come weighed on the market prices of
U.S. securities. In response, the Fed and other central banks around the world announced (also on December ) new “currency swap lines” to help foreign banks
borrow dollars. Under this mechanism, foreign central banks swapped currencies
with the Federal Reserve—local currency for U.S. dollars—and lent these dollars to
foreign banks. “During the crisis, the U.S. banks were very reluctant to extend liquidity to European banks,” Dudley said. Central banks had used similar arrangements
in the aftermath of the / attacks to bolster the global financial markets. In late
, the swap lines totaled billion. During the financial crisis seven years later,
they would reach billion.
The Fed hoped the TAF and the swap lines would reduce strains in short-term
money markets, easing some of the funding pressure on other struggling participants
such as investment banks. Importantly, it wasn’t just the commercial banks and
thrifts but the “broader financial system” that concerned the Fed, Dudley said. “Historically, the Federal Reserve has always tended to supply liquidity to the banks with
the idea that liquidity provided to the banking system can be [lent on] to solvent institutions in the nonbank sector. What we saw in this crisis was that didn’t always
take place to the extent that it had in the past. . . . I don’t think people going in really
had a full understanding of the complexity of the shadow banking system, the role of
[structured investment vehicles] and conduits, the backstops that banks were providing SIV conduits either explicitly or implicitly.”
Burdened with capital losses and desperate to cover their own funding commitments, the banks were not stable enough to fill the void, even after the Fed lowered
interest rates and began the TAF auctions. In January , the Fed cut rates again—
and then again, twice within two weeks, a highly unusual move that brought the federal funds rate from . to ..
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The Fed also started plans for a new program that would use its emergency authority, the Term Securities Lending Facility, though it wasn’t launched until March.
“The TLSF was more a view that the liquidity that we were providing to the banks
through the TAF was not leading to a significant diminishment of financing pressures elsewhere,” Dudley told the FCIC. “So maybe we should think about bypassing
the banking system and [try] to come up with a vehicle to provide liquidity support
to the primary dealer community more directly.”
On March , the Fed increased the total available in each of the biweekly TAF auctions from billion to billion, and guaranteed at least that amount for six
months. The Fed also liberalized its standard for collateral. Primary dealers—mainly
the investment banks and the broker-dealer affiliates of large commercial banks—
could post debt of government-sponsored enterprises, including GSE mortgage–
backed securities, as collateral. The Fed expected to have billion in such loans
outstanding at any given time.
Also at this time, the U.S. central bank began contemplating a step that was revolutionary: a program that would allow investment banks—institutions over which
the Fed had no supervisory or regulatory responsibility—to borrow from the discount window on terms similar to those available to commercial banks.
MONOLINE INSURERS: “WE NEVER EXPECTED LOSSES”
Meanwhile, the rating agencies continued to downgrade mortgage-backed securities
and CDOs through . By January , as a result of the stress in the mortgage
market, S&P had downgraded , tranches of residential mortgage–backed securities and , tranches from CDOs. MBIA and Ambac, the two largest monoline
insurers, had taken on a combined billion of guarantees on mortgage securities
and other structured products. Downgrades on the products that they insured
brought the financial strength of these companies into question. After conducting
stress analysis, S&P estimated in February that Ambac would need up to
million in capital to cover potential losses on structured products. Such charges
would affect the monolines’ own credit ratings, which in turn could lead to more
downgrades of the products they had guaranteed.
Like many of the monolines, ACA, the smallest of them, kept razor-thin capital—
less than million—against its obligations that included billion in credit default swaps on CDOs. In late , ACA reported a net loss of . billion, almost
entirely due to credit default swaps.
This was news. The notion of “zero-loss tolerance” was central to the viability of
the monoline business model, and they and various stakeholders—the rating agencies, investors, and monoline creditors—had traditionally assumed that the monolines never would have to take a loss. As Alan Roseman, CEO of ACA, told FCIC
staff: “We never expected losses. . . . We were providing hedges on market volatility to
institutional counterparties. . . . We were positioned, we believed, to take the volatility because we didn’t have to post collateral against the changes in market value to
our counterparty, number one. Number two, we were told by the rating agencies that
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rated us that that mark-to-market variation was not important to our rating, from a
financial strength point of view at the insurance company.”
In early November, the SEC called the growing concern about Merrill’s use of the
monolines for hedging “a concern that we also share.” The large Wall Street firms
attempted to minimize their exposure to the monolines, particularly ACA. On December , S&P downgraded ACA to junk status, rating the company CCC, which
was fatal for a company whose CEO said that its “rating is the franchise.” Firms like
Merrill Lynch would get virtually nothing for the guarantees they had purchased
from ACA.
Despite the stresses in the market, the SEC saw the monoline problems as largely
confined to ACA. A January internal SEC document said, “While there is a clear
sentiment that capital raising will need to continue, the fact that the guarantors (with
the exception of ACA) are relatively insulated from liquidity driven failures provides
hope that event[s] in this sector will unfold in a manageable manner.”
Still, the rating agencies told the monolines that if they wanted to retain their stellar ratings, they would have to raise capital. MBIA and Ambac ultimately did raise
. billion and . billion, respectively. Nonetheless, S&P downgraded both to
AA in June . As the crisis unfolded, most of the monolines stopped writing new
coverage.
The subprime contagion spread through the monolines and into a previously
unimpaired market: municipal bonds. The path of these falling dominoes is easy to
follow: in anticipation of the monoline downgrades, investors devalued the protection the monolines provided for other securities—even those that had nothing to do
with the mortgage-backed markets, including a set of investments known as auction
rate securities, or ARS. An ARS is a long-term bond whose interest rate is reset at
regularly scheduled auctions held every one to seven weeks. Existing investors can
choose to rebid for the bonds and new investors can come in. The debt is frequently
municipal bonds. As of December , , state and local governments had issued
billion in ARS, accounting for half of the billion market. The other half
were primarily bundles of student loans and debt of nonprofits such as museums and
hospitals.
The key point: these entities wanted to borrow long-term but get the benefit of
lower short-term rates, and investors wanted to get the safety of investing in these securities without tying up their money for a long time. Unlike commercial paper, this
market had no explicit liquidity backstop from a bank, but there was an implicit
backstop: often, if there were not enough new buyers to replace the previous investors, the dealers running these auctions, including firms like UBS, Citigroup, and
Merrill Lynch, would step in and pick up the shortfall. Because of these interventions, there were only failures between and early in more than ,
auctions. Dealers highlighted those minuscule failure rates to convince clients that
ARS were very liquid, short-term instruments, even in times of stress.
However, if an auction did fail, the previous ARS investors would be obligated to
retain their investments. In compensation, the interest rates on the debt would reset,
often much higher, but investors’ funds would be trapped until new investors or the
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dealer stepped up or the borrower paid off the loan. ARS investors were typically
very risk averse and valued liquidity, and so they were willing to pay a premium for
guarantees on the ARS investments from monolines. It necessarily followed that the
monolines’ growing problems in the latter half of affected the ARS market.
Fearing that the monolines would not be able to perform on their guarantees, investors fled. The dealers’ interventions were all that kept the market going, but the
stress became too great. With their own problems to contend with, the dealers were
unable to step in and ensure successful auctions. In February, en masse, they pulled
up stakes. The market collapsed almost instantaneously. On February , in one of
the starkest market dislocations of the financial crisis, of the ARS auctions failed;
the following week, failed.
Hundreds of billions of dollars were trapped by ARS instruments as investors
were obligated to retain their investments. And retail investors—individuals investing less than million, small businesses, and charities—constituted more than
billion of this billion market. Moreover, investors who chose to remain in the market demanded a premium to take on the risk. Between investor demands and interest rate resets, countless governments, infrastructure projects, and
nonprofits on tight budgets were slammed with interest rates of or higher.
Problems in the ARS market cost Georgetown University, a borrower, million.
New York State was stuck with interest rates that soared from about . to more
than on billion of its debt. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey
saw the interest rate on its debt jump from . to in a single week in February.
In alone, the SEC received more than , investor complaints regarding
the failed ARS auctions. Investors argued that brokers had led them to believe that
ARS were safe and liquid, essentially the equivalent of money market accounts but
with the potential for a slightly higher interest rate. Investors also reported that the
frozen market blocked their access to money for short-term needs such as medical
expenses, college tuition, and, for some small businesses and charities, payroll. By
, the SEC had settled with financial institutions including Bank of America, RBC
Capital Markets, and Deutsche Bank to resolve charges that the firms misled investors. As a result, these and other banks made more than billion available to
pay off tens of thousands of ARS investors.
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COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 14
The Commission concludes that some large investment banks, bank holding
companies, and insurance companies, including Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and
AIG, experienced massive losses related to the subprime mortgage market because of significant failures of corporate governance, including risk management.
Executive and employee compensation systems at these institutions disproportionally rewarded short-term risk taking.
The regulators—the Securities and Exchange Commission for the large investment banks and the banking supervisors for the bank holding companies and
AIG—failed to adequately supervise their safety and soundness, allowing them to
take inordinate risk in activities such as nonprime mortgage securitization and
over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives dealing and to hold inadequate capital and
liquidity.
15
MARCH 2008:
THE FALL OF BEAR STEARNS
CONTENTS
“I requested some forbearance” ..........................................................................
“We were suitably skeptical”...............................................................................
“Turn into a death spiral” ..................................................................................
“Duty to protect their investors” .........................................................................
“The government would not permit a higher number” ......................................
“It was heading to a black hole”..........................................................................
After its hedge funds failed in July , Bear Stearns faced more challenges in the
second half of the year. Taking out the repo lenders to the High-Grade Fund brought
nearly . billion in subprime assets onto Bear’s books, contributing to a . billion
write-down on mortgage-related assets in November. That prompted investors to
scrutinize Bear Stearns’s finances. Over the fall, Bear’s repo lenders—mostly money
market mutual funds—increasingly required Bear to post more collateral and pay
higher interest rates. Then, in just one week in March , a run by these lenders,
hedge fund customers, and derivatives counterparties led to Bear’s having to be taken
over in a government-backed rescue.
Mortgage securitization was the biggest piece of Bear Stearns’s most-profitable division, its fixed-income business, which generated of the firm’s total revenues.
Growing fast was the Global Client Services division, which included Bear’s prime
brokerage operation. Bear Stearns was the second-biggest prime broker in the country, with a market share in , trailing Morgan Stanley’s . This business
would figure prominently in the crisis.
In mortgage securitization, Bear followed a vertically integrated model that made
money at every step, from loan origination through securitization and sale. It both
acquired and created its own captive originators to generate mortgages that Bear
bundled, turned into securities, and sold to investors. The smallest of the five large
investment banks, it was still a top-three underwriter of private-label mortgage–
backed securities from to . In , it underwrote billion in collateralized debt obligations of all kinds, more than double its figure of . billion.
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The total included . billion in CDOs that included mortgage-backed securities,
putting it in the top in that business. As was typical on Wall Street, the company’s
view was that Bear was in the moving business, not the storage business—that is, it
sought to provide services to clients rather than take on long-term exposures of its
own.
Bear expanded its mortgage business despite evidence that the market was beginning to falter, as did other firms such as Citigroup and Merrill. As early as May ,
Bear had lost million relating to defaults on mortgages which occurred within
days of origination, which had been rare in the decade. But Bear persisted, assuming
the setback would be temporary. In February , Bear even acquired Encore
Credit, its third captive mortgage originator in the United States, doubling its capacity. The purchase was consistent with Bear’s contrarian business model—buying into
distressed markets and waiting for them to turn around.
Only a month after the purchase of Encore, the Securities and Exchange Commission wrote in an internal report, “Bear’s mortgage business incurred significant market
risk losses” on its Alt-A mortgage assets. The losses were small, but the SEC reported
that “risk managers note[d] that these events reflect a more rapid and severe deterioration in collateral performance than anticipated in ex ante models of stress events.”
“I REQUESTED SOME FORBEARANCE”
Vacationing on Nantucket Island when the two Bear-sponsored hedge funds declared
bankruptcy on July , , former Bear treasurer Robert Upton anticipated that
the rating agencies would downgrade the company, raising borrowing costs. Bear
funded much of its operations borrowing short-term in the repo market; it borrowed
between and billion overnight. Even a threat of a downgrade by a rating
agency would make financing more expensive, starting the next morning.
Investors, analysts, and the credit rating agencies closely scrutinized leverage ratios, available at the end of each quarter. By November , Bear’s leverage ratio had
reached nearly to . By the end of , Bear’s Level assets—illiquid assets difficult to value and to sell—were of its tangible common equity; thus, writing
down these illiquid assets by would wipe out tangible common equity.
At the end of each quarter, Bear would lower its leverage ratio by selling assets,
only to buy them back at the beginning of the next quarter. Bear and other firms
booked these transactions as sales—even though the assets didn’t stay off the balance
sheet for long—in order to reduce the amount of the company’s assets and lower its
leverage ratio. Bear’s former treasurer Upton called the move “window dressing” and
said it ensured that creditors and rating agencies were happy. Bear’s public filings reflected this, to some degree: for example, its annual report said the balance
sheet was approximately lower than the average month-end balance over the
previous twelve months.
To forestall a downgrade, Upton spoke with the three main rating agencies,
Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch, in early August. Several times in —
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including April and June —S&P had confirmed Bear’s strong ratings, noting in
April that “Bear’s risk profile is relatively conservative” and “strong senior management oversight and a strong culture throughout the firm are the foundation of Bear’s
risk management process.” On June , Moody’s had also confirmed its A rating,
and Fitch had confirmed its “stable” outlook.
Now, in early August, Upton provided them information about Bear and argued
that management had learned its lesson about governance and risk management
from the failure of the two hedge funds and was going to rely less on short-term unsecured funding and more on the repo market. Bear and other market participants
did not foresee that Bear’s own repo lenders might refuse to lend against risky mortgage assets and eventually not even against Treasuries.
“I requested some forbearance” from S&P, Upton told the FCIC. He did not get
it. On August , just three days after the two Bear Stearns hedge funds declared bankruptcy, S&P highlighted the funds, Bear’s mortgage-related investments, and its relatively small capital base as it placed Bear on a “negative outlook.”
Asked how he felt about the rating agency’s actions, Jimmy Cayne, Bear’s CEO until , said, “A negative outlook can touch a number of parts of your businesses. . . .
It was like having a beautiful child and they have a disease of some sort that you
never expect to happen and it did. How did I feel? Lousy.”
To reassure investors that no more shoes would drop, Bear invited them on a conference call that same day. The call did not go well. By the end of the day, Bear’s stock
slid , to ., below its all-time high of ., reached earlier in .
“WE WERE SUITABLY SKEPTICAL”
On Sunday, August , two days after the conference call, Bear had another opportunity to make its case: this time, with the SEC. The two SEC supervisors who visited
the company that Sunday were Michael Macchiaroli and Matthew Eichner, respectively, associate director and assistant director of the division of market regulation.
The regulators reviewed Bear’s exposures to the mortgage market, including the
billion in adjustable-rate mortgages on the firm’s books that were waiting to be securitized. Bear executives gave assurances that inventory would shrink once investors
returned in September from their retreats in the Hamptons. “Obviously, regulators
are not supposed to listen to happy talk and go away smiling,” Eichner told the FCIC.
“Thirteen billion in ARMs is no joke.” Still, Eichner did not believe the Bear executives were being disingenuous. He thought they were just emphasizing the upside.
Alan Schwartz, the co-president who later succeeded Jimmy Cayne as CEO, and
Thomas Marano, head of Global Mortgages and Asset Backed Securities, seemed unconcerned. But other executives were leery. Wendy de Monchaux, the head of proprietary trading, urged Marano to trim the mortgage portfolio, as did Steven Meyer, the
co-head of stock sales and trading. According to Chief Risk Officer Michael Alix,
former chairman Alan Greenberg would say, “the best hedge is a sale.” Bear finally
reduced the portfolio from billion in the third quarter of to . billion in
the fourth quarter, but it was too little too late.
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That summer, the SEC felt Bear’s liquidity was adequate for the immediate future,
but supervisors “were suitably skeptical,” Eichner insisted. After the August meeting, the SEC required that Bear Stearns report daily on Bear’s liquidity. However,
Eichner admitted that he and his agency had grossly underestimated the possibility
of a liquidity crisis down the road.
Every weeknight Upton updated the SEC on Bear’s billion balance sheet,
with specifics on repo and commercial paper. On September , Bear Stearns raised
approximately . billion in unsecured -year bonds. The reports slowed to once a
week. The SEC’s inspector general later criticized the regulators, writing that they
did not push Bear to reduce leverage or “make any efforts to limit Bear Stearns’ mortgage securities concentration,” despite “aware[ness] that risk management of mortgages at Bear Stearns had numerous shortcomings, including lack of expertise by risk
managers in mortgage backed securities” and “persistent understaffing; a proximity
of risk managers to traders suggesting a lack of independence; turnover of key personnel during times of crisis; and the inability or unwillingness to update models to
reflect changing circumstances.”
Michael Halloran, a senior adviser to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, told the
FCIC the SEC had ample information and authority to require Bear Stearns to decrease leverage and sell mortgage-backed securities, as other financial institutions
were doing. Halloran said that as early as the first quarter of , he had asked Erik
Sirri, in charge of the SEC’s Consolidated Supervised Entities program, about Bear
Stearns (and Lehman Brothers), “Why can’t we make them reduce risk?” According
to Halloran, Sirri said the SEC’s job was not to tell the banks how to run their companies but to protect their customers’ assets.
“TURN INTO A DEATH SPIRAL”
In August, after the rating agencies revised their outlook on Bear, Cayne tried to obtain lines of credit from Citigroup and JP Morgan. Both banks acknowledged Bear
had always been a very good customer and maintained they were interested in helping. “We wanted to try to be belts-and-suspenders,” said CFO Samuel Molinaro, as
Bear attempted both to obtain lines of credit with banks and to reinforce traditional
sources of short-term liquidity such as money market funds. But, Cayne told the
FCIC, nothing happened. “Why the [large] banks were not more willing to participate and provide lines during that period of time, I can’t tell you,” Molinaro said.
A major money market fund manager, Federated Investors, had decided on October to drop Bear Stearns from its list of approved counterparties for unsecured
commercial paper, illustrating why unsecured commercial paper was traditionally
seen as a riskier lifeline than repo. Throughout , Bear Stearns reduced its unsecured commercial paper (from . billion at the end of to only . billion at
the end of ) and replaced it with secured repo borrowing (which rose from
billion to billion). But Bear Stearns’s growing dependence on overnight repo
would create a different set of problems.
The tri-party repo market used two clearing banks, JP Morgan and BNY Mellon.
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During every business day, these clearing banks return cash to lenders; take possession of borrowers’ collateral, essentially keeping it in escrow; and then lend their own
cash to borrowers during the day. This is referred to as “unwinding” the repo transaction; it allows borrowers to change the assets posted as collateral every day. The
transaction is then “rewound” at the end of the day, when the lenders post cash to the
clearing banks in return for the new collateral.
The little-regulated tri-party repo market had grown from billion in average
daily volume in to . trillion in , . trillion in , and . trillion by
early . It had become a very deep and liquid market. Even though most borrowers rolled repo overnight, it was also considered a very safe market, because
transactions were overcollateralized (loans were made for less than the collateral was
worth). That was the general view before the onset of the financial crisis.
As Bear increased its tri-party repo borrowing, it became more dependent on JP
Morgan, the clearing bank. A risk that was little appreciated before was that
JP Morgan and BNY Mellon could face large losses if a counterparty such as Bear defaulted during the day. Essentially, JP Morgan served as Bear’s daytime repo lender.
Even long-term repo loans have to be unwound every day by the clearing bank, if
not by the lender. Seth Carpenter, an officer at the Federal Reserve Board, compared
it to a mortgage that has to be refinanced every week: “Imagine that your mortgage is
only a week. Instead of a -year mortgage, you’ve got a one-week mortgage. If everything’s going fine, you get to the end of the week, you go out and you refinance that
mortgage because you don’t have enough cash on hand to pay off the whole mortgage. And then you get to the end of another week and you refinance that mortgage.
And that’s, for all intents and purposes, what repos are like for many institutions.”
During the fall, Federated Investors, which had taken Bear Stearns off its list of
approved commercial paper counterparties, continued to provide secured repo
loans. Fidelity Investments, another major lender, limited its overall exposure to
Bear, and shortened the maturities. In October, State Street Global Advisors refused
any repo lending to Bear other than overnight.
Often, backing Bear’s borrowing were mortgage-related securities and of these,
. billion—more than Bear’s equity—were Level assets.
In the fourth quarter of , Bear Stearns reported its first quarterly loss,
million. Still, the SEC saw “no evidence of any deterioration in the firm’s liquidity position following the release and related negative press coverage.” The SEC concluded,
“Bear Stearns’ liquidity pool remains stable.”
In the fall of , Bear’s board had commissioned the consultant Oliver Wyman
to review the firm’s risk management. The report, “Risk Governance Diagnostic: Recommendations and Case for Economic Capital Development,” was presented on February , , to the management committee. Among its conclusions: risk
assessment was “infrequent and ad hoc” and “hampered by insufficient and poorly
aligned resources,” “risk managers [were] not effectively positioned to challenge front
office decisions,” and risk management was “understaffed” and considered a “low priority.” Schwartz told the FCIC the findings did not indicate substantial deficiencies.
He wasn’t looking for positive feedback from the consultants, because the Wyman re-
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port was meant to provide a road map of what “the gold standard” in risk management would be.
In January , before the report was completed, Cayne resigned as CEO, after
receiving . million in compensation from through . He remained as
non-executive chairman of the board. Some senior executives sharply criticized him
and the board. Thomas Marano told the FCIC that Cayne played a lot of golf and
bridge. Speaking of the board, Paul Friedman, a former senior managing director at
Bear Stearns, said, “I guess because I’d never worked at a firm with a real board, it
never dawned on me that at some point somebody would have or should have gotten
the board involved in all of this,” although he told the FCIC that he made these comments in anger and frustration in the wake of Bear’s failure. In its final report on
Bear, the Corporate Library, which researches and rates firms for corporate governance, gave the company a “D,” reflecting “a high degree of governance risk” resulting
from “high levels of concern related to the board and compensation.” When asked if
he had made mistakes while at Bear Stearns, Cayne told the FCIC, “I take responsibility for what happened. I’m not going to walk away from the responsibility.”
At Bear, compensation was based largely on the return on equity in a given year.
For senior executives, about half of each bonus was paid in cash, and about half in restricted stock that vested over three years and had to be held for five. The formula for
the size of each year’s compensation pool was determined by a subcommittee of the
board. Stockholders approved the performance compensation plan and capital accumulation plan for senior managing directors. Cayne told the FCIC he set his own
compensation and the compensation for all five members of the Executive Committee. According to Cayne, no one, including the board, questioned his decisions.
For , even with its losses, Bear Stearns paid out of revenues in compensation. Alix, who sat on the Compensation Committee, told FCIC staff the firm typically
paid but that the percentage increased in because revenues fell—if management had lowered compensation proportionately, he said, many employees might
have quit. Base salaries for senior managers were capped at ,, with the remainder of compensation a discretionary mix of cash, restricted stock, and options.
From through , the top five executives at Bear Stearns took home over
. million in cash and over . billion from stock sales, for more than a total of
. billion. This exceeded the annual budget for the SEC. Alan Schwartz, who took
over as CEO after Cayne and had been a leading proponent of investing in the mortgage sector, earned more than million from to . Warren Spector, the
co-president responsible for overseeing the two hedge funds that had failed, received
more than million during the same period. Although Spector was asked to resign, Bear never asked him to return any money. In , Cayne, Schwartz, and Spector each earned more than times as much as Alix, the chief risk officer.
Cayne was out, Schwartz was in, and Bear Stearns continued hanging on in early
. Bear was still able to fund its balance sheet through repo loans, though the
interest rates the firm had to pay had increased. Marano said he worried this increased cost would signal to the market that Bear was distressed, which could “make
our problems turn into a death spiral.”
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“DUTY TO PROTECT THEIR INVESTORS”
On Wednesday, January , , Treasurer Upton reported an internal accounting
error that showed Bear Stearns to have less than billion in liquidity—triggering a
report to the SEC. While the company identified the error, the SEC reinstituted daily
reporting by the company of its liquidity.
Lenders and customers were more and more reluctant to do business with the
company. On February , Bear Stearns had . billion in mortgages, mortgagebacked securities, and asset-backed securities on its balance sheet, down almost
billion from November. Nearly billion were subprime or Alt-A mortgage–backed
securities and CDOs.
The hedge funds that were clients of Bear’s prime brokerage services were particularly concerned that Bear would be unable to return their cash and securities. Lou
Lebedin, the head of Bear’s prime brokerage, told the FCIC that hedge fund clients
occasionally inquired about the bank’s financial condition in the latter half of ,
but that such inquiries picked up at the beginning of , particularly as the cost increased of purchasing credit default swap protection on Bear. The inquiries became
withdrawals—hedge funds started taking their business elsewhere. “They felt there
were too many concerns about us and felt that this was a short-term move,” Lebedin
said. “Often they would tell us they’d be happy to bring the business back, but that
they had the duty to protect their investors.” Renaissance Technologies, one of Bear’s
biggest prime brokerage clients, pulled out all of its business. By April, Lebedin’s
prime brokerage operation would be holding billion in assets under management, down more than from billion in January.
Nonetheless, during the week of March , when SEC staff inspected Bear’s liquidity pool, they identified “no significant issues.” The SEC found Bear’s liquidity pool
ranged from billion to billion.
Bear opened for business on Monday, March , with approximately billion
in cash reserves. The same day, Moody’s downgraded mortgage-backed securities
issued by Bear Stearns Alt-A Trust, a special purpose entity. News reports on the
downgrades carried abbreviated headlines stating, “Moody’s Downgrades Bear
Stearns,” Upton said. Rumors flew and counterparties panicked. Bear’s liquidity
pool began to dry up, and the SEC was now concerned that Bear was being squeezed
from all directions. While “everything rolled” during the day—that is, Bear’s repo
lenders renewed their commitments—SEC officials worried that this would “probably not continue.”
On Tuesday, the Fed announced it would lend to investment banks and other
“primary dealers.” The Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF) would make available up to billion in Treasury securities, accepting as collateral GSE mortgage–
backed securities and non-GSE mortgage–backed securities rated triple-A. The hope
was that lenders would lend to investment banks if the collateral was Treasuries
rather than other highly rated but now suspect assets such as mortgage-backed securities. The Fed also announced it would extend loans from overnight to days, giv-
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ing investment banks an added breather from the relentless need to unwind repos
every morning.
With the TSLF, the Fed would be setting a new precedent by extending emergency
credit to institutions other than commercial banks. To do so, the Federal Reserve
Board was required under section () of the Federal Reserve Act to determine that
there were “unusual and exigent circumstances.” The Fed had not invoked its section
() authority since the Great Depression; it was the Fed’s first use of the authority
since Congress had expanded the language of the act in to allow the Fed to lend
to investment banks. The Fed was taking the unusual step of declaring its willingness to soon open its checkbook to institutions it did not regulate and whose financial condition it had never examined.
But the Fed would not launch the TSLF until March , more than two weeks
later—and it was not clear that Bear could last that long. The following day, Jim Embersit of the Federal Reserve Board checked on Bear’s liquidity with the SEC. The
SEC said Bear had . billion in cash—down from about billion at the start of
the week—and was able to finance all its bank loans and most of its equity securities
through the repo market. He summarized, “The SEC indicates that no notable losses
have been sustained and that the capital position of the firm is ‘fine.’”
Derivatives counterparties were increasingly reluctant to be exposed to Bear. In
some cases they unwound trades in which they faced Bear, and in others they made
margin or collateral calls. In Bear’s last few years as an independent company, it had
substantially increased its exposure to derivatives. At the end of fiscal year , Bear
had . trillion in notional exposure on derivatives contracts, compared with .
trillion at fiscal year-end and . trillion at the end of .
Derivatives counterparties who worried about Bear’s ability to make good on
their payments could get out of their derivative positions with Bear through assignments or novations. Assignments allow counterparties to assign their positions to
someone else: if firm X has a derivatives contract with firm Y, then firm X can assign
its position to firm Z, so that Z now is the one that has a derivatives contract with Y.
Novations also allow counterparties to get out of their exposure to each other, but by
bringing in a third party: instead of X facing Y, X faces Z and Z faces Y. Both assignments and novations are routine transactions on Wall Street. But on Tuesday, Brian
Peters of the New York Fed advised Eichner at the SEC that the New York Fed was
“seeing some HFs [hedge funds] wishing to assign trades the clients had done with
Bear to other CPs [counterparties] so that Bear ‘steps out.’” Counterparties did not
want to have Bear Stearns as a derivatives counterparty any more.
Bear Stearns also encountered difficulties stepping into trades. Hayman Capital
Partners, a hedge fund in Texas wanting to decrease its exposure to subprime mortgages, had decided to close out a relatively small million subprime derivative position with Goldman Sachs. Bear Stearns offered the best bid, so Hayman expected to
assign its position to Bear, which would then become Goldman’s counterparty in the
derivative. Hayman notified Goldman by a routine email on Tuesday, March , at :
P.M. The reply minutes later was unexpected: “GS does not consent to this trade.”
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
That startled Kyle Bass, Hayman’s managing partner. He told the FCIC he could not
recall any counterparty rejecting a routine novation. Pressed for an explanation,
Goldman the next morning offered no details: “Our trading desk would prefer to stay
facing Hayman. We do not want to face Bear.” Adding to the mystery, minutes later
Goldman agreed to accept Bear Sterns as the counterparty after all. But the damage
was done. The news hit the street that Goldman had refused a routine transaction with
one of the other big five investment banks. The message: don’t rely on Bear Stearns.
CEO Alan Schwartz hoped an appearance on CNBC would reassure markets.
Questioned about this incident, Schwartz said he had no knowledge of such a refusal
and rhetorically asked, “Why do rumors start?” SEC Chairman Cox told reporters
his agency was monitoring capital levels at Bear Stearns and other securities firms
“on a constant basis” and has “a good deal of comfort about the capital cushions at
these firms at the moment.”
Still, the run on Bear accelerated. Many investors believed the Fed’s announcement about its new loan program was directed at Bear Stearns, and they worried
about the facility’s not being available for several weeks. On Wednesday, March ,
the SEC noted that Bear paid another . billion for margin calls from nervous
derivatives counterparties.
Repo lenders who had already tightened the terms for their contracts over the
preceding four or five months shortened the leash again, demanding more collateral
from Bear Stearns. Worries about a default quickly mounted.
By that evening, Bear’s ability to borrow in the repo market was drying up. The
SEC noted that some large and important money funds, including Fidelity and Mellon, had told Bear after the close of business Wednesday they “might be hesitant to
roll some funding tomorrow.” The SEC said that though they believed the amounts
were “very manageable (between and billion),” the withdrawals would not send
a helpful signal to the market. But the issue was almost moot. Schwartz called New
York Fed President Timothy Geithner that night to discuss possible Fed flexibility in
the event that some repo lenders did pull away.
Upton, the treasurer, said that before that week, he had never worried about the
disappearance of repo lending. By Thursday, he believed the end was near. Bear executives informed the board that the rumors were dissuading counterparties from
doing business with Bear, that Bear was receiving and meeting significant margin
calls, that billion in repo was not going to roll over, and that “there was a reasonable chance that there would not be enough cash to meet [Bear’s] needs.” Some repo
lenders were already so averse to Bear that they stopped lending to the company at
all, not even against Treasury collateral, Upton told the FCIC. Derivatives counterparties continued to run from Bear. By that night, liquidity had dwindled to a mere
billion (see figure .).
Bear had run out of cash in one week. Executives and regulators continued to believe the firm was solvent, however. Former SEC Chairman Cox testified before the
FCIC, “At all times during the week of March to , up to and including the time
of its agreement to be acquired by JP Morgan, Bear Stearns had a capital cushion well
above what is required.”
M A R C H : T H E FA L L
OF
BEAR STEARNS
Bear Stearns Liquidity
In the four days before Bear Stearns collapsed, the company’s
liquidity dropped by $16 billion.
IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, DAILY
$25
20
15
10
5
0
22
23
24
25 26
27
28 29
FEBRUARY 2008
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
MARCH 2008
SOURCE: Securities and Exchange Commission
Figure .
“THE GOVERNMENT
WOULD NOT PERMIT A HIGHER NUMBER”
On Thursday evening, March , Bear Stearns informed the SEC that it would be
“unable to operate normally on Friday.” CEO Alan Schwartz called JP Morgan CEO
Jamie Dimon to request a billion credit line. Dimon turned him down, citing,
according to Schwartz, JP Morgan’s own significant exposure to the mortgage market. Because Bear also had a large, illiquid portfolio of mortgage assets, JP Morgan
would not render assistance without government support. Schwartz spoke with Geithner again. Schwartz insisted Bear’s problem was liquidity, not insufficient capital. A
series of calls between Schwartz, Dimon, Geithner, and Treasury Secretary Henry
Paulson followed. To address Bear’s liquidity needs, the New York Fed made a .
billion loan to Bear Stearns through JP Morgan on the morning of Friday, March .
Standard & Poor’s lowered Bear’s rating three levels to BBB. Moody’s and Fitch also
downgraded the company. By the end of the day, Bear was out of cash. Its stock
plummeted , closing below .
The markets evidently viewed the loan as a sign of terminal weakness. After
markets closed on Friday, Paulson and Geithner informed Bear CEO Schwartz that
the Fed loan to JP Morgan would not be available after the weekend. Without that
loan, Bear could not conduct business. In fact, Bear Stearns had to find a buyer before the Asian markets opened Sunday night or the game would be over. Schwartz,
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
Molinaro, Alix, and others spent the weekend in due diligence meetings with JP
Morgan and other potential buyers, including the private equity firm J.C. Flowers
and Co. According to Schwartz, the participants determined JP Morgan was the
only candidate with the size and stature to make a credible offer within hours.
As Bear Stearns’s clearing bank for repo trades, JP Morgan held much of Bear
Stearns’s assets as collateral and had been assessing their value daily. This knowledge let JP Morgan move more quickly.
On Sunday, March , JP Morgan informed the New York Fed and the Treasury
that it was interested in a deal if it included financial support from the Fed. The
Federal Reserve Board, again finding “unusual and exigent circumstances” as required under section () of the Federal Reserve Act, agreed to purchase . billion of Bear’s assets to get them off the firm’s books through a new entity called
Maiden Lane LLC (named for a street alongside the New York Fed). Those assets—
mostly mortgage-related securities, other assets, and hedges from Bear’s mortgage
trading desk—would be under New York Fed management. To finance the purchases,
JP Morgan made a . billion subordinated loan and the New York Fed lent .
billion. Because of its loan, JP Morgan bore the risk of the first . billion of losses;
the Fed would bear any further losses up to . billion. The Fed’s loan would be
repaid as Maiden Lane sold the collateral.
On Sunday night, with Maiden Lane in place, JP Morgan publicly announced a
deal to buy Bear Stearns for a share. Minutes of Bear’s board meeting indicate that
JP Morgan had considered but cut it to “because the government would not
permit a higher number. . . . The Fed and the Treasury Department would not support a transaction where [Bear Stearns] equity holders received any significant consideration because of the ‘moral hazard’ of the federal government using taxpayer
money to ‘bail out’ the investment bank’s stockholders.”
Eight days later, on March , Bear Stearns and JP Morgan agreed to increase the
price to . John Chrin, co-head of the financial institutions mergers and acquisitions group at JP Morgan, told the FCIC they increased the price to make Bear shareholders’ approval more likely. Bear CEO Schwartz told the FCIC the increase let
Bear preserve the company’s value “to the greatest extent possible under the circumstances for our shareholders, our , employees, and our creditors.”
“IT WAS HEADING TO A BLACK HOLE”
The SEC regulators Macchiaroli and Eichner were as stunned as everyone else by the
speed of Bear’s collapse. Macchiaroli had had doubts as far back as August, he told
the FCIC, but he and his colleagues expected Bear would be able to fund itself
through the repo market, albeit at higher margins.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke later called the Bear Stearns decision the toughest of
the financial crisis. The . trillion tri-party repo market had “really [begun] to
break down,” Bernanke said. “As the fear increased,” short-term lenders began demanding more collateral, “which was making it more and more difficult for the financial firms to finance themselves and creating more and more liquidity pressure on
M A R C H : T H E FA L L
OF
BEAR STEARNS
them. And, it was heading sort of to a black hole.” He saw the collapse of Bear Stearns
as threatening to freeze the tri-party repo market, leaving the short-term lenders
with collateral they would try to “dump on the market. You would have a big crunch
in asset prices.”
“Bear Stearns, which is not that big a firm, our view on why it was important to
save it—you may disagree—but our view was that because it was so essentially involved in this critical repo financing market, that its failure would have brought
down that market, which would have had implications for other firms,” Bernanke
told the FCIC.
Geithner explained the need for government support for Bear’s acquisition by JP
Morgan as follows: “The sudden discovery by Bear’s derivative counterparties that
important financial positions they had put in place to protect themselves from financial risk were no longer operative would have triggered substantial further dislocation in markets. This would have precipitated a rush by Bear’s counterparties to
liquidate the collateral they held against those positions and to attempt to replicate
those positions in already very fragile markets.”
Paulson told the FCIC that Bear had both a liquidity problem and a capital problem. “Could you just imagine the mess we would have had? If Bear had gone there
were hundreds, maybe thousands of counterparties that all would have grabbed their
collateral, would have started trying to sell their collateral, drove down prices, create
even bigger losses. There was huge fear about the investment banking model at that
time.” Paulson believed that if Bear had filed for bankruptcy, “you would have had
Lehman going . . . almost immediately if Bear had gone, and just the whole process
would have just started earlier.”
COMMISSION CONCLUSIONS ON CHAPTER 15
The Commission concludes the failure of Bear Stearns and its resulting government-assisted rescue were caused by its exposure to risky mortgage assets, its reliance on short-term funding, and its high leverage. These were a result of weak
corporate governance and risk management. Its executive and employee compensation system was based largely on return on equity, creating incentives to use excessive leverage and to focus on short-term gains such as annual growth goals.
Bear experienced runs by repo lenders, hedge fund customers, and derivatives
counterparties and was rescued by a government-assisted purchase by JP Morgan
because the government considered it too interconnected to fail. Bear’s failure
was in part a result of inadequate supervision by the Securities and Exchange
Commission, which did not restrict its risky activities and which allowed undue
leverage and insufficient liquidity.
16
MARCH TO AUGUST 2008:
SYSTEMIC RISK CONCERNS
CONTENTS
The Federal Reserve: “When people got scared”.................................................
JP Morgan: “Refusing to unwind . . . would be unforgivable” ............................
The Fed and the SEC: “Weak liquidity position” ................................................
Derivatives: “Early stages of assessing the potential systemic risk” ......................
Banks: “The markets were really, really dicey” ...................................................
JP Morgan’s federally assisted acquisition of Bear Stearns averted catastrophe—for
the time being. The Federal Reserve had found new ways to lend cash to the financial
system, and some investors and lenders believed the Bear episode had set a precedent
for extraordinary government intervention. Investors began to worry less about a recession and more about inflation, as the price of oil continued to rise (hitting almost
per barrel in July). At the beginning of , the stock market had fallen almost
from its peak in the fall of . Then, in May , the Dow Jones climbed to
,, within of the record , set in October . The cost of protecting
against the risk of default by financial institutions—reflected in the prices of credit
default swaps—declined from the highs of March and April. “In hindsight, the markets were surprisingly stable and almost seemed to be neutral a month after Bear
Stearns, leading all the way up to September,” said David Wong, Morgan Stanley’s
treasurer. Taking advantage of the brief respite in investor concern, the top ten
American banks and the four remaining big investment banks, anticipating losses,
raised just under billion and billion, respectively, in new equity by the end
of June.
Despite this good news, bankers and their regulators were haunted by the speed of
Bear Stearns’s demise. And they knew that the other investment banks shared Bear’s
weaknesses: leverage, reliance on overnight funding, dependence on securitization
markets, and concentrations in illiquid mortgage securities and other troubled assets.
In particular, the run on Bear had exposed the dangers of tri-party repo agreements
and the counterparty risk caused by derivatives contracts.
And the word on the street—despite the assurances of Lehman CEO Dick Fuld at
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A U G U S T : S YS T E M I C R I S K C O N C E R N S
an April shareholder meeting that “the worst is behind us”—was that Bear would not
be the only failure.
THE FEDERAL RESERVE: “WHEN PEOPLE GOT SCARED”
The most pressing danger was the potential failure of the repo market—a market that
“grew very, very quickly with no single regulator having a purview of it,” former
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson would tell the FCIC. Market participants believed
that the tri-party repo market was a relatively safe and durable source of collateralized short-term financing. It was on precisely this understanding that Bear had
shifted approximately billion of its unsecured funding into repos in . But
now it was clear that repo funding could be just as vulnerable to runs as were other
forms of short-term financing.
The repo runs of , which had devastated hedge funds such as the two Bear
Stearns Asset Management funds and mortgage originators such as Countrywide,
had seized the attention of the financial community, and the run on Bear Stearns was
similarly eye-opening. Market participants and regulators now better appreciated
how the quality of repo collateral had shifted over time from Treasury notes and securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to highly rated non-GSE mortgage–
backed securities and collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). At its peak before the
crisis, this riskier collateral accounted for as much as of the total posted. In
April , the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of
had dramatically expanded protections for repo lenders holding collateral, such as
mortgage-related securities, that was riskier than government or highly rated corporate debt. These protections gave lenders confidence that they had clear, immediate
rights to collateral if a borrower should declare bankruptcy. Nonetheless, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, told the FCIC, “When people got scared, they wouldn’t
finance the nonstandard stuff at all.”
To the surprise of both borrowers and regulators, high-quality collateral was not
enough to ensure access to the repo market. Repo lenders cared just as much about
the financial health of the borrower as about the quality of the collateral. In fact, even
for the same collateral, repo lenders demanded different haircuts from different borrowers. Despite the bankruptcy provisions in the act, lenders were reluctant to
risk the hassle of seizing collateral, even good collateral, from a bankrupt borrower.
Steven Meier of State Street testified to the FCIC: “I would say the counterparties are
a first line of defense, and we don’t want to go through that uncomfortable process of
having to liquidate collateral.” William Dudley of the New York Fed told the FCIC,
“At the first sign of trouble, these investors in tri-party repo tend to run rather than
take the collateral that they’ve lent against. . . . So high-quality collateral itself is not
sufficient when and if an institution gets in trouble.”
Moreover, if a borrower in the repo market defaults, money market funds—frequent lenders in this market—may have to seize collateral that they cannot legally
own. For example, a money market fund cannot hold long-term securities, such as
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
agency mortgage–backed securities. Typically, if a fund takes possession of such collateral, it liquidates the securities immediately, even—as was the case during the crisis—into a declining market. As a result, funds simply avoided lending against
mortgage-related securities. In the crisis, investors didn’t consider secured funding to
be much better than unsecured, according to Darryll Hendricks, a managing director
and global head of risk methodology at UBS, as well as the head of a private-sector
task force on the repo market organized by the New York Fed.
As noted, the Fed had announced a new program, the Term Securities Lending
Facility (TSLF), on the Tuesday before Bear’s collapse, but it would not be available
until March . The TSLF would lend a total of up to billion of Treasury securities at any one time to the investment banks and other primary dealers—the securities affiliates of the large commercial banks and investment banks that trade with the
New York Fed, such as Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, or Merrill Lynch—for up to
days. The borrowers would trade highly rated securities, including debt in government-sponsored enterprises, in return for Treasuries. The primary dealers could then
use those Treasuries as collateral to borrow cash in the repo market. Like the Term
Auction Facility for commercial banks, described earlier, the TSLF would run as a
regular auction to reduce the stigma of borrowing from the Fed. However, after
Bear’s collapse, Fed officials recognized that the situation called for a program that
could be up and running right away. And they concluded that the TSLF alone would
not be enough.
So, the Fed would create another program first. On the Sunday of Bear’s collapse,
the Fed announced the new Primary Dealer Credit Facility—again invoking its authority under () of the Federal Reserve Act—to provide cash, not Treasuries, to
investment banks and other primary dealers on terms close to those that depository
institutions—banks and thrifts—received through the Fed’s discount window. The
move came “just about minutes” too late for Bear, Jimmy Cayne, its former CEO,
told the FCIC.
Unlike the TSLF, which would offer Treasuries for days, the PDCF offered
overnight cash loans in exchange for collateral. In effect, this program could serve as
an alternative to the overnight tri-party repo lenders, potentially providing hundreds
of billions of dollars of credit. “So the idea of the PDCF then was . . . anything that the
dealer couldn’t finance—the securities that were acceptable under the discount window—if they couldn’t get financing in the market, they could get financing from the
Federal Reserve,” said Seth Carpenter, deputy associate director in the Division of
Monetary Affairs at the Federal Reserve Board. “And that way, you don’t have to
worry. And by providing that support, other lenders know that they’re going to be
able to get their money back the next day.”
By charging the Federal Reserve’s discount rate and adding additional fees for regular use, the Federal Reserve encouraged dealers to use the PDCF only as a last resort. In its first week of operation, this program immediately provided over
billion in cash to Bear Stearns (as bridge financing until the JP Morgan deal officially
closed), Lehman Brothers, and the securities affiliate of Citigroup, among others.
However, as the immediate post-Bear concerns subsided, use of the facility declined
MARCH
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A U G U S T : S YS T E M I C R I S K C O N C E R N S
after April and ceased completely by late July. Because the dealers feared that markets would see reliance on the PDCF as an indication of severe distress, the facility
carried a stigma similar to the Fed’s discount window. “Paradoxically, while the
PDCF was created to mitigate the liquidity flight caused by the loss of confidence in
an investment bank, use of the PDCF was seen both within Lehman, and possibly by
the broader market, as an event that could trigger a loss of confidence,” noted the
Lehman bankruptcy examiner.
On May , the Fed broadened the kinds of collateral allowed in the TSLF to include other triple-A-rated asset-backed securities, such as auto and credit card loans.
In June, the Fed’s Dudley urged in an internal email that both programs be extended
at least through the end of the year. “PDCF remains critical to the stability of some of
the [investment banks],” he wrote. “Amounts don’t matter here, it is the fact that the
PDCF underpins the tri-party repo system.” On July , the Fed extended both programs through January , .
JP MORGAN: “REFUSING TO UNWIND . . .
WOULD BE UNFORGIVABLE”
The repo run on Bear also alerted the two repo clearing banks—JP Morgan, the main
clearing bank for Lehman and Merrill Lynch, as it had been for Bear Stearns, and
BNY Mellon, the main clearing bank for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—to the
risks they were taking.
Before Bear’s collapse, the market had not really understood the colossal exposures that the tri-party repo market created for these clearing banks. As explained
earlier, the “unwind/rewind” mechanism could leave JP Morgan and BNY Mellon
with an enormous “intraday” exposure—an interim exposure, but no less real for its
brevity. In an interview with the FCIC, Dimon said that he had not become fully
aware of the risks stemming from his bank’s tri-party repo clearing business until the
Bear crisis in . A clearing bank had two concerns: First, if repo lenders abandoned an investment bank, it could be pressured into taking over the role of the
lenders. Second, and worse—if the investment bank defaulted, it could be stuck with
unwanted securities. “If they defaulted intraday, we own the securities and we have to
liquidate them. That’s a huge risk to us,” Dimon explained.
To address those risks in , for the first time both JP Morgan and BNY Mellon
started to demand that intraday loans to tri-party repo borrowers—mostly the large
investment banks—be overcollateralized.
The Fed increasingly focused on the systemic risk posed by the two repo clearing
banks. In the chain-reaction scenario that it envisioned, if either JP Morgan or BNY
Mellon chose not to unwind its trades one morning, the money funds and other repo
lenders could be stuck with billions of dollars in repo collateral. Those lenders would
then be in the difficult position of having to sell off large amounts of collateral in order to meet their own cash needs, an action that in turn might lead to widespread fire
sales of repo collateral and runs by lenders.
The PDCF provided overnight funding, in case money market funds and other
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
repo lenders refused to lend as they had in the case of Bear Stearns, but it did not protect against clearing banks’ refusing exposure to an investment bank during the day.
On July , Fed officials circulated a plan, ultimately never implemented, that addressed the possibility that one of the two clearing banks would become unwilling or
unable to unwind its trades. The plan would allow the Fed to provide troubled investment banks, such as Lehman Brothers, with billion in tri-party repo financing during the day—essentially covering for JP Morgan or BNY Mellon if the two
clearing banks would not or could not provide that level of financing. Fed officials
made a case for the proposal in an internal memo: “Should a dealer lose the confidence of its investors or clearing bank, their efforts to pull away from providing
credit could be disastrous for the firm and also cast widespread doubt about the instrument as a nearly risk free, liquid overnight investment.”
But the New York Fed’s new plan shouldn’t be necessary as long as the PDCF was
there to back up the overnight lenders, argued Patrick Parkinson, then deputy director of the Federal Reserve Board’s Division of Research and Statistics. “We should tell
[JP Morgan] that with the PDCF in place refusing to unwind is unnecessary and
would be unforgiveable,” he emailed Dudley and others.
A week later, on July , Parkinson wrote to Fed Governor Kevin Warsh and Fed
General Counsel Scott Alvarez that JP Morgan, because of its clearing role, was
“likely to be the first to realize that the money funds and other investors that provide
tri-party financing to [Lehman Brothers] are pulling back significantly.” Parkinson
described the chain-reaction scenario, in which a clearing bank’s refusal to unwind
would lead to a widespread fire sale and market panic. “Fear of these consequences is,
of course, why we facilitated Bear’s acquisition by JPMC,” he said.
Still, it was possible that the PDCF could prove insufficient to dissuade JP Morgan
from refusing to unwind Lehman’s repos, Parkinson said. Because a large portion of
Lehman’s collateral was ineligible to be funded by the PDCF, and because Lehman
could fail during the day (before the repos were settled), JP Morgan still faced significant risks. Parkinson noted that even if the Fed lent as much as billion to
Lehman, the sum might not be enough to ensure the firm’s survival in the absence of
an acquirer: if the stigma associated with PDCF borrowing caused other funding
counterparties to stop providing funding to Lehman, the company would fail.
THE FED AND THE SEC: “WEAK LIQUIDITY POSITION”
Among the four remaining investment banks, one key measure of liquidity risk was
the portion of total liabilities that the firms funded through the repo market: to
for Lehman and Merrill Lynch, to for Morgan Stanley, and about
for Goldman Sachs. Another metric was the reliance on overnight repo (which mature in one day) or open repo (which can be terminated at any time). Despite efforts
among the investment banks to reduce the portion of their repo financing that was
overnight or open, the ratio of overnight and open repo funding to total repo funding still exceeded for all but Goldman Sachs. Comparing the period between
March and May to the period between July and August, Lehman’s percentage fell
MARCH
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A U G U S T : S YS T E M I C R I S K C O N C E R N S
from to , Merrill Lynch’s fell from to , Morgan Stanley’s fell from
to , and Goldman’s fell from to . Another measure of risk was the
haircuts on repo loans—that is, the amount of excess collateral that lenders demanded for a given loan. Fed officials kept tabs on the haircuts demanded of investment banks, hedge funds, and other repo borrowers. As Fed analysts later noted,
“With lenders worrying that they could lose money on the securities they held as collateral, haircuts increased—doubling for some agency mortgage securities and increasing significantly even for borrowers with high credit ratings and on relatively
safe collateral such as Treasury securities.”
On the day of Bear’s demise, in an effort to get a better understanding of the investment banks, the New York Fed and the SEC sent teams to work on-site at
Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley. According to
Erik Sirri, director of the SEC’s Division of Trading and Markets, the initial rounds of
meetings covered the quality of assets, funding, and capital.
Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke would testify before a House committee that the
Fed’s primary role at the investment banks in was not as a regulator but as a
lender through the new emergency lending facilities. Two questions guided the
Fed’s analyses: First, was each investment bank liquid—did it have access to the cash
needed to meet its commitments? Second, was it solvent—was its net equity (the
value of assets minus the value of liabilities) sufficient to cover probable losses?
The U.S. Treasury also dispatched so-called SWAT teams to the investment banks
in the spring of . The arrival of officials from the Treasury and the Fed created a
full-time on-site presence—something the SEC had never had. Historically, the SEC’s
primary concern with the investment banks had been liquidity risk, because these
firms were entirely dependent on the credit markets for funding. The SEC already
required these firms to implement so-called liquidity models, designed to ensure that
they had sufficient cash available to sustain themselves on a stand-alone basis for a
minimum of one year without access to unsecured funding and without having to
sell a substantial amount of assets. Before the run on Bear in the repo market, the
SEC’s liquidity stress scenarios—also known as stress tests—had not taken account of
the possibility that a firm would lose access to secured funding. According to the
SEC’s Sirri, the SEC never thought that a situation would arise where an investment
bank couldn’t enter into a repo transaction backed by high-quality collateral including Treasuries. He told the FCIC that as the financial crisis worsened, the SEC began
to see liquidity and funding risks as the most critical for the investment banks, and
the SEC encouraged a reduction in reliance on unsecured commercial paper and an
extension of the maturities of repo loans.
The Fed and the SEC collaborated in developing two new stress tests to determine
the investment banks’ ability to withstand a potential run or a systemwide disruption
in the repo market. The stress scenarios, called “Bear Stearns” and “Bear Stearns
Light,” were developed jointly with the remaining investment banks. In May,
Lehman, for example, would be billion short of cash in the more stringent Bear
Stearns scenario and billion short under Bear Stearns Light.
The Fed conducted another liquidity stress analysis in June. While each firm ran
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
different scenarios that matched its risk profile, the supervisors tried to maintain
comparability between the tests. The tests assumed that each firm would lose of
unsecured funding and a fraction of repo funding that would vary with the quality of
its collateral. The stress tests, under just one estimated scenario, concluded that
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were relatively sound. Merrill Lynch and
Lehman Brothers failed: the two banks came out billion and billion short of
cash, respectively; each had only of the liquidity it would need under the stress
scenario.
The Fed’s internal report on the stress tests criticized Merrill’s “significant amount
of illiquid fixed income assets” and noted that “Merrill’s liquidity pool is low, a fact
[the company] does not acknowledge.” As for Lehman Brothers, the Fed concluded
that “Lehman’s weak liquidity position is driven by its relatively large exposure to
overnight [commercial paper], combined with significant overnight secured [repo]
funding of less liquid assets.” These “less liquid assets” included mortgage-related
securities—now devalued. Meanwhile, Lehman ran stress tests of its own and passed
with billions in “excess cash.”
Although the SEC and the Fed worked together on the liquidity stress tests, with
equal access to the data, each agency has said that for months during the crisis, the
other did not share its analyses and conclusions. For example, following Lehman’s
failure in September, the Fed told the bankruptcy examiner that the SEC had declined to share two horizontal (cross-firm) reviews of the banks’ liquidity positions
and exposures to commercial real estate. The SEC’s response was that the documents
were in “draft” form and had not been reviewed or finalized. Adding to the tension,
the Fed’s on-site personnel believed that the SEC on-site personnel did not have the
background or expertise to adequately evaluate the data. This lack of communication was remedied only by a formal memorandum of understanding (MOU) to govern information sharing. According to former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox,
“One reason the MOU was needed was that the Fed was reluctant to share supervisory information with the SEC, out of concern that the investment banks would not
be forthcoming with information if they thought they would be referred to the SEC
for enforcement.” The MOU was not executed until July , more than three
months after the collapse of Bear Stearns.
DERIVATIVES: “EARLY STAGES OF ASSESSING
THE POTENTIAL SYSTEMIC RISK”
The Fed’s Parkinson advised colleagues in an internal August email that the systemic risks of the repo and derivatives markets demanded attention: “We have given
considerable thought to what might be done to avoid a fire sale of tri-party repo collateral. (That said, the options under existing authority are not very attractive—lots
of risk to Fed/taxpayer, lots of moral hazard.) We still are at the early stages of assessing the potential systemic risk from close-out of OTC derivatives transactions by an
investment bank’s counterparties and identifying potential mitigants.”
The repo market was huge, but as discussed in earlier chapters, it was dwarfed by
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Notional Amount and Gross Market
Value of OTC Derivatives Outstanding
IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, SEMIANNUAL
Gross Market Value
Notional Amount
$800
$40
700
35
600
30
500
25
400
20
300
15
200
10
100
5
0
0
1999
2001
2003
SOURCE: Bank for International Settlements
2005
2007
2009
June 2010
Figure .
the global derivatives market. At the end of June , the notional amount of the
over-the-counter derivatives market was trillion and the gross market value was
trillion (see figure .). Adequate information about the risks in this market was
not available to market participants or government regulators like the Federal Reserve. Because the market had been deregulated by statute in , market participants were not subject to reporting or disclosure requirements and no government
agency had oversight responsibility. While the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency did report information on derivatives positions from commercial banks and
bank holding companies, it did not collect such information from the large investment banks and insurance companies like AIG, which were also major OTC derivatives dealers. During the crisis the lack of such basic information created heightened
uncertainty.
At this point in the crisis, regulators also worried about the interlocking relationships that derivatives created among the small number of large financial firms that
act as dealers in the OTC derivatives business. A derivatives contract creates a credit
relationship between parties, such that one party may have to make large and unexpected payments to the other based on sudden price or rate changes or loan defaults.
If a party is unable to make those payments when they become due, that failure may
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
cause significant financial harm to its counterparty, which may have offsetting obligations to third parties and depend on prompt payment. Indeed, most OTC derivatives dealers hedge their contracts with offsetting contracts; thus, if they are owed
payments on one contract, they most likely owe similar amounts on an offsetting
contract, creating the potential for a series of losses or defaults. Since these contracts
numbered in the millions and allowed a party to have virtually unlimited leverage,
the possibility of sudden large and devastating losses in this market could pose a significant danger to market participants and the financial system as a whole.
The Counterparty Risk Management Policy Group, led by former New York Fed
President E. Gerald Corrigan and consisting of the major securities firms, had
warned that a backlog in paperwork confirming derivatives trades and master agreements exposed firms to risk should corporate defaults occur. With urging from
New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, by September , major market
participants had significantly reduced the backlog and had ended the practice of assigning trades to third parties without the prior consent of their counterparties.
Large derivatives positions, and the resulting counterparty credit and operational
risks, were concentrated in a very few firms. Among U.S. bank holding companies,
the following institutions held enormous OTC derivatives positions as of June ,
: . trillion in notional amount for JP Morgan, . trillion for Bank of
America, . trillion for Citigroup, . trillion for Wachovia, and . trillion for
HSBC. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which began to report their holdings
only after they became bank holding companies in , held . and . trillion, respectively, in notional amount of OTC derivatives in the first quarter of
. In , the current and potential exposure to derivatives at the top five U.S.
bank holding companies was on average three times greater than the capital they had
on hand to meet regulatory requirements. The risk was even higher at the investment
banks. Goldman Sachs, just after it changed its charter, had derivatives exposure
more than times capital. These concentrations of positions in the hands of the
largest bank holding companies and investment banks posed risks for the financial
system because of their interconnections with other financial institutions.
Broad classes of OTC derivatives markets showed stress in . By the summer
of , outstanding amounts of some types of derivatives had begun to decline
sharply. As we will see, over the course of the second half of , the OTC derivatives market would undergo an unprecedented contraction, creating serious problems for hedging and price discovery.
The Fed was uneasy in part because derivatives counterparties had played an important role in the run on Bear Stearns. The novations by derivatives counterparties
to assign their positions away from Bear—and the rumored refusal by Goldman to
accept Bear as a derivatives counterparty—were still a fresh memory across Wall
Street. Chris Mewbourne, a portfolio manager at PIMCO, told the FCIC that the
ability to novate ceased to exist and this was a key event in the demise of Bear
Stearns.
Credit derivatives in particular were a serious source of worry. Of greatest interest
were the sellers of credit default swaps: the monoline insurers and AIG, which back-
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stopped the market in CDOs. In addition, the credit rating agencies’ decision to issue
a negative outlook on the monoline insurers had jolted everyone, because they guaranteed hundreds of billions of dollars in structured products. As we have seen, when
their credit ratings were downgraded, the value of all the assets they guaranteed, including municipal bonds and other securities, necessarily lost some value in the market, a drop that affected the conservative institutional investors in those markets. In
the vernacular of Wall Street, this outcome is the knock-on effect; in the vernacular
of Main Street, the domino effect; in the vernacular of the Fed, systemic risk.
BANKS: “THE MARKETS WERE REALLY, REALLY DICEY”
By the fall of , signs of strain were beginning to emerge among the commercial
banks. In the fourth quarter of , commercial banks’ earnings declined to a year low, driven by write-downs on mortgage-backed securities and CDOs and by
record provisions for future loan losses, as borrowers had increasing difficulty meeting their mortgage payments—and even greater difficulty was anticipated. The net
charge-off rate—the ratio of failed loans to total loans—rose to its highest level since
, when the economy was coming out of the post-/ recession. Earnings continued to decline in —at first, more for big banks than small banks, in part because of write-downs related to their investment banking–type activities, including
the packaging of mortgage-backed securities, CDOs, and collateralized loan obligations. Declines in market values required banks to write down the value of their
holdings of these securities. As previously noted, several of the largest banks had also
provided support to off-balance-sheet activities, such as money market funds and
commercial paper programs, bringing additional assets onto their balance sheets—
assets that were losing value fast. Supervisors had begun to downgrade the ratings of
many smaller banks in response to their high exposures in residential real estate construction, an industry that virtually went out of business as financing dried up in
mid-. By the end of , the FDIC had banks, mainly smaller ones, on its
“problem list”; their combined assets totaled . billion. (When large banks
started to be downgraded, in early , they stayed off the FDIC’s problem list, as
supervisors rarely give the largest institutions the lowest ratings.)
The market for nonconforming mortgage securitizations (those backed by mortgages that did not meet Fannie Mae’s or Freddie Mac’s underwriting or mortgage size
guidelines) had also vanished in the fourth quarter of . Not only did these nonconforming loans prove harder to sell, but they also proved less attractive to keep on
balance sheet, as house price forecasts looked increasingly grim. Already, house
prices had fallen about for the year, depending on the measure. In the first quarter
of , real estate loans in the banking sector showed the smallest quarterly increase
since . IndyMac reported a decline in loan production for that quarter
from a year earlier, because it had stopped making nonconforming loans. Washington Mutual, the largest thrift, discontinued all remaining lending through its subprime mortgage channel in April .
But those actions could not reduce the subprime and Alt-A exposure that these
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
large banks and thrifts already had. And on these assets, the markdowns continued
in . Regulators began to focus on solvency, urging the banks to raise new capital.
In January , Citigroup secured a total of billion in capital from Kuwait, Singapore, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and others. In April, Washington Mutual
raised billion from an investor group led by the buyout firm TPG Capital. Wachovia raised billion in capital at the turn of the year and then an additional billion in April . Despite the capital raises, though, the downgrades by banking
regulators continued.
“The markets were really, really dicey during a significant part of this period,
starting with August ,” Roger Cole, then-director of the Division of Banking Supervision and Regulation at the Federal Reserve Board, told the FCIC. The same
was true for the thrifts. Michael Solomon, a managing director in risk management
manager in the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS), told the FCIC, “It was hard for
businesses, particularly small, midsized thrifts—to keep up with [how quickly the
ratings downgrades occurred during the crisis] and change their business models
and not get stuck without the chair when the music stopped . . . They got caught. The
rating downgrades started and by the time the thrift was able to do something about
it, it was too late . . . Business models . . . can’t keep up with what we saw in .”
As the commercial banks’ health worsened in , examiners downgraded even
large institutions that had maintained favorable ratings and required several to fix
their risk management processes. These ratings downgrades and enforcement actions came late in the day—often just as firms were on the verge of failure. In cases
that the FCIC investigated, regulators either did not identify the problems early
enough or did not act forcefully enough to compel the necessary changes.
Citigroup: “Time to come up with a new playbook”
For Citigroup, supervisors at the New York Fed, who examined the bank holding
company, and at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, who oversaw the national bank subsidiary, finally downgraded the company and its main bank to “less
than satisfactory” in April —five months after the firm’s announcement in November of billions of dollars in write-downs related to its mortgage-related
holdings. The supervisors put the company under new enforcement actions in May
and June. Only a year earlier, both the Fed and the OCC had upgraded the company,
after lifting all remaining restrictions and enforcement actions related to complex
transactions that it had structured for Enron and to the actions of its subprime subsidiary CitiFinancial, discussed in an earlier chapter. “The risk management assessment for is reflective of a control environment where the risks facing Citigroup
continue to be managed in a satisfactory manner,” the New York Fed’s rating upgrade,
delivered in its annual inspection report on April , , had noted. “During ,
all formal restrictions and enforcement actions between the Federal Reserve and
Citigroup were lifted. Board and senior management remain actively engaged in improving relevant processes.”
But the market disruption had jolted Citigroup’s supervisors. In November ,
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the New York Fed led a team of international supervisors, the Senior Supervisors
Group, in evaluating of the largest firms to assess lessons learned from the financial crisis up to that point. Much of the toughest language was reserved for Citigroup.
“The firm did not have an adequate, firm-wide consolidated understanding of its risk
factor sensitivities,” the supervisors wrote in an internal November memo describing meetings with Citigroup management. “Stress tests were not designed for this
type of extreme market event. . . . Management had believed that CDOs and leveraged loans would be syndicated, and that the credit risk in super senior AAA CDOs
was negligible.”
In retrospect, Citigroup had two key problems: a lack of effective enterprise-wide
management to monitor and control risks and a lack of proper infrastructure and internal controls with respect to the creation of CDOs. The OCC appears to have identified some of these issues as early as but did not effectively act to rectify them.
In particular, the OCC assessed both the liquidity puts and the super-senior tranches
as part of its reviews of the bank’s compliance with the post-Enron enforcement action, but it did not examine the risks of these exposures. As for the issues it did spot,
the OCC failed to take forceful steps to require mandatory corrective action, and it
relied on management’s assurances in that the executives would strive to meet
the OCC’s goals for improving risk management.
In contrast, documents obtained by the FCIC from the New York Fed give no indication that its examination staff had any independent knowledge of those two core
problems. An evaluation of the New York Fed’s supervision of Citigroup, conducted
by examiners from other Reserve Banks (the December Operations Review of
the New York Fed, which covered the previous four years), concluded:
The supervision program for Citigroup has been less than effective. Although the dedicated supervisory team is well qualified and generally
has sound knowledge of the organization, there have been significant
weaknesses in the execution of the supervisory program. The team has
not been proactive in making changes to the regulatory ratings of the
firm, as evidenced by the double downgrades in the firm’s financial
component and related subcomponents at year-end . Additionally,
the supervisory program has lacked the appropriate level of focus on the
firm’s risk oversight and internal audit functions. As a result, there is
currently significant work to be done in both of these areas. Moreover,
the team has lacked a disciplined and proactive approach in assessing
and validating actions taken by the firm to address supervisory issues.
Timothy Geithner, secretary of the Treasury and former president of the Federal
Reserve Bank of New York, reflected on the Fed’s oversight of Citigroup, telling the
Commission, “I do not think we did enough as an institution with the authority we
had to help contain the risks that ultimately emerged in that institution.”
In January , an OCC review of the breakdown in the CDO business noted
that the risk in the unit had grown rapidly since , after the OCC’s and Fed’s
F I N A N C I A L C R I S I S I N Q U I RY C O M M I S S I O N R E P O R T
lifting of supervisory agreements associated with various control problems at Citigroup. In April , the Fed and OCC downgraded their overall ratings of the company and its largest bank subsidiary from (satisfactory) to (less than satisfactory),
reflecting weaknesses in risk management that were now apparent to the supervisors.
Both Fed and OCC officials cited the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of as an obstacle that prevented each from obtaining a complete understanding of the risks
assumed by large financial firms such as Citigroup. The act made it more difficult—
though not impossible—for regulators to look beyond the legal entities under their
direct purview into other areas of a large firm. Citigroup, for example, had many regulators across the world; even the securitization businesses were dispersed across subsidiaries with different supervisors—including those from the Fed, OCC, SEC, OTS,
and state agencies.
In May and June , Citigroup entered into memoranda of understanding with
both the New York Fed and OCC to resolve the risk management weaknesses that the
events of had laid bare. In the ensuing months, Fed and OCC officials said, they
were satisfied with Citigroup’s compliance with their recommendations. Indeed, in
speaking to the FCIC, Steve Manzari, the senior relationship manager for Citigroup
at the New York Fed from April to September , complimented Citigroup on its
assertiveness in executing its regulators’ requests: aggressively replacing management, raising capital from investors in late , and putting in place a number of
much needed “internal fixes.” However, Manzari went on, “Citi was trapped in what
was a pretty vicious . . . systemic event,” and for regulators “it was time to come up
with a new playbook.”
Wachovia: “The Golden West acquisition was a mistake”
At Wachovia, which was supervised by the OCC as well as the OTS and the Federal
Reserve, a end-of-year report showed that credit losses in its subsidiary Golden
West’s portfolio of “Pick-a-Pay” adjustable-rate mortgages, or option ARMs, were expected to rise to about of the portfolio for ; in , losses in this portfolio
had been less than .. It would soon become clear that the higher estimate for
was not high enough. The company would hike its estimate of the eventual
losses on the portfolio to by June and to by September.
Facing these and other growing concerns, Wachovia raised additional capital.
Then, in April, Wachovia announced a loss of million for the first three months
of the year. Depositors withdrew about billion in the following weeks, and
lenders reduced their exposure to the bank, shortening terms, increasing rates, and
reducing loan amounts. By June, according to Angus McBryde, then Wachovia’s
senior vice president for Treasury and Balance Sheet Management, management had
launched a liquidity crisis management plan in anticipation of an even more adverse
market reaction to second-quarter losses that would be announced in July.
On June , Wachovia’s board ousted CEO Ken Thompson after he had spent
years at the bank, of them at its helm. At the end of the month, the bank announced that it would stop originating Golden West’s Pick-a-Pay products and would
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waive all fees and prepayment penalties associated with them. On July , Wachovia
reported an . billion second-quarter loss. The new CEO, Robert Steel, most recently an undersecretary of the treasury, announced a plan to improve the bank’s financial condition: raise capital, cut the stock dividend, and lay off to of the
staff.
The rating agencies and supervisors ignored those reassurances. On the same day
as the announcement, S&P downgraded the bank, and the Fed, after years of “satisfactory” ratings, downgraded Wachovia to , or “less than satisfactory.” The Fed
noted that projections showed losses that could wipe out the recently raised
capital: losses alone could exceed billion, an amount that could cause a further ratings downgrade. The Fed directed Wachovia to reevaluate and update its
capital plans and its liquidity management. Despite having consistently rated Wachovia as “satisfactory” right up to the summer meltdown, the Fed now declared that
many of Wachovia’s problems were “long-term in nature and result[ed] from delayed
investment decisions and a desire to have business lines operate autonomously.”
The Fed bluntly criticized the board and senior management for “an environment
with inconsistent and inadequate identification, escalation and coverage of all risktaking activities, including deficiencies in stress testing” and “little accountability for
errors.” Wachovia management had not completely understood the level of risk
across the company, particularly in certain nonbank investments, and management
had delayed fixing these known deficiencies. In addition, the company’s board had
not sufficiently questioned investment decisions. Nonetheless, the Fed concluded
that Wachovia’s liquidity was currently adequate and that throughout the market disruption, management had minimized exposure to overnight funding markets.
On August , the OCC downgraded Wachovia Bank and assessed its overall risk
profile as “high.” The OCC noted many of the same issues as the Fed, and added particularly strong remarks about the acquisition of Golden West, identifying that mortgage portfolio and associated real estate foreclosures as the heart of Wachovia’s
problem. The OCC noted that the board had “acknowledged that the Golden West
acquisition was a mistake.”
The OCC wrote that the market was focused on the company’s weakened condi