Lack Of Confidence, Not Capital, Is Issue

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, September 29, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Rescue: As the financial turbulence in the U.S. spreads, we’ve heard talk, especially from overseas pundits, of a “crisis of capitalism.” But what we really have is a crisis of confidence, and the sooner it’s solved, the better.

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The $700 billion rescue for the troubled global financial system foundered on a 228-205 vote Monday as both sides in the political debate feared being blamed for passing an unpopular bill.

Polls show more than 50% of Americans oppose what the pollsters call a “bailout” (but what we prefer to call a rescue). Meanwhile, a USA Today poll found that nearly a third of Americans think we’re in a depression.

Concern about the financial system is fully justified. But excessive gloom is not. In the most recent quarter, GDP rose 2.1% year over year, 3.1% excluding housing. Hardly a depression. So let’s not talk ourselves into one.

We, too, have qualms about the rescue effort. Washington under Democrat-led Congresses wrote the rules that made this mess possible, and we have little confidence in their ability to get us out of it.

We have even less confidence after watching Democrats try to insert things in the plan — from money for the radical community group ACORN to new taxes on Wall Street — that made no sense at all. We’re glad Republicans opposed these and made the bill better.

But now it’s time for all to hold their noses and vote as soon as possible on a compromise. Both the public and the investment community need to be reassured their leaders aren’t dropping the ball.

Failure won’t just cost billions; it will cost trillions — in lost output, a shrunken job market, smaller retirements and lost productivity. Is this the future we’ll choose for ourselves? We hope not.

Republicans who voted against the bill did so for legitimate reasons. They don’t like government getting too involved in the economy, and this package permits just that. But they also don’t want to be blamed, as the minority party, if the deal turns sour.

That’s already happening. Yes, more than 60% of Republicans voted against the rescue bill, but so did 40% of Democrats. That said, it’s time for Republicans to take a deep breath, pull up their pants and help pass a bill. The nation’s confidence is riding on it.

Americans must be made to realize it’s not Wall Street that’s being “bailed out,” as the media keep putting it. It’s Main Street.

The reason President Bush and Treasury Secretary Paulson moved so quickly and boldly is they fear a “seizing up” of financial markets. That means banks will stop lending to one another. It means companies that finance in the money markets — as many medium- and large-size businesses do — will be frozen out.

No lending, no business. Here’s where Main Street comes in. Thousands and maybe millions will be laid off as commerce grinds to a halt. That’s a real threat. Republicans will never get a perfect bill out of this Congress; compromises must be made by both sides.

We hope the $700 billion requested of Congress is enough to cover the problem. But we also note that on Monday, without Congress’ interference, the Fed made $630 billion available to world financial markets. That brings this rescue to $1.4 trillion.

The ability of the nation’s and the world’s financial markets to finance this shouldn’t be questioned. As the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office noted Monday, the cost of any eventual rescue plan would likely be “substantially smaller” than $700 billion because of asset resales. And, around the world, there’s some $70 trillion or so in investment capital, according to estimates.

We’re not short on capital, as we said, but on confidence. Passing a bill, even if flawed, would go a long way to restoring the latter.

 

Bungle & Bust

British banking

 

Another small bank capsizes in a storm-tossed sea

AFTER a frenetic weekend spent trying to rustle up a buyer for Bradford & Bingley, a small British bank down on its luck, Britain’s government was poised, late on Sunday September 28th, to nationalise its second bank in a year. To the last minute talks were continuing to find buyers for some parts the bank. Potential purchasers included Spain’s Santander and a clutch of big British banks. But efforts to find a buyer for all of it had foundered, leaving little choice but to take it into public ownership to prevent a run on deposits, which had already started at the weekend, gathering pace when branches reopened.

This is the fourth British bank to have crumpled in the face of ongoing turmoil in the credit markets. Northern Rock was nationalised in February and both HBOS, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, and Alliance & Leicester, a small bank, have since sought refuge in takeovers by bigger banks amid worries that they would not be able to raise new loans to repay existing debts.

This particular failure, however, is a sign of more than just the fear and uncertainty roiling international credit markets. It also marks another worrying point in the credit crisis. For much of the past year attention has been on bad debts arising from American mortgages and how losses on them have been spread around the world’s financial system by a bewildering array of credit derivatives. Bradford & Bingley’s problems, in contrast, are largely homegrown and raise the worrying possibility that the international banking system will face a second wave of losses as housing markets and economies wilt around the world.

To some extent Bradford & Bingley’s injuries were self-inflicted. The institution was a boring mortgage lender that was owned by its members until it transformed itself into a private company in 2000. It then became an early and enthusiastic proponent of the raciest type of mortgage lending in Britain. Last year more than three-quarters of its new loans were either made to landlords or were “self-certified” mortgages, which are commonly known as “liars’ loans” because borrowers are not asked to prove their income or employment. Moreover it was a keen buyer of mortgages that other banks had written. Even so, its failure sounds a warning for large mortgage lenders and for regulators in countries such as Spain and Ireland, where housing bubbles have also been pricked.

During Britain’s long housing boom Bradford & Bingley seemed to do no wrong. Losses on its loans were trifling because borrowers, often landlords, had every reason to avoid foreclosure and could always sell their properties at a profit if they struggled with repayments. Now that Britain’s housing markets has turned, however, the bank’s strategy is unravelling. Arrears are rising with alarming speed and the values of homes underpinning mortgages are falling just as quickly. The bank has also struggled to borrow from anyone but the central bank as credit-rating agencies have repeatedly cut its rating, most recently last week, on worries about the quality of its loan book. A crucial point was reached last week when, amid worries over its ability to keep funding itself and, if needed, raise additional capital, its share price slumped. At one point the bank was valued at just £289m ($533m), less than a tenth of its peak of £3.2 billion in 2006. By Saturday depositors were bombarding its website and starting to queue at its branches.

The government’s (likely) swift action suggests that it has learned some important lessons from the failure of Northern Rock. A year ago regulators at the Financial Services Authority seemed to have been asleep at the wheel. This time they have been watching closely. The Treasury, which dithered as Northern Rock floundered, letting worries about the funding of one of Britain’s smaller lenders develop into a full-blown bank run that threatened the stability of all banks, is also moving swiftly. A quick nationalisation should halt a run on the bank and avert wider panic. Just as regulators and governments studied the Northern Rock fiasco closely as an example of how not to rescue banks, this nationalisation will also be examined in countries that may soon have to put its lessons into practice.

Covert Nationalization of the Banking System (Naked Capitalism)

Saturday, March 8, 2008

Covert Nationalization of the Banking System

One of the upsides of blogging is sometimes other inquiring minds get to the bottom of matters that have been nagging at you.

We had warned a couple of months ago that a colleague with serious connections into the Treasury and Fed told us they were working on plans for a quasi-nationalization of the banking system. Their view was that while banks would technically be solvent, they’d have enough bad credits that they would be unable to extend new loans.

Steve Waldman, in a terrific post at Interfluidity, concludes that nationalization is underway, via the expansion of the Term Auction Facility and Fed’s new 28 day repo program.

Readers may know that there has been a lot of disquiet regarding the negative non-borrowed banking reserves that resulted form the TAF. Bond market mavens, such as commentator Caroline Baum at Bloomberg, dismissed those worries as reflecting a lack of understanding of Fed operations.

I remained troubled, not by the negative non-borrowed reserves figures per se, but by the fact that the Fed was downplaying an operation which was extraordinary. The TAF is a discount window of sorts, but with somewhat longer-term loans and no stigma. Note the TAF accepts the same types of collateral at the same haircuts as the discount windows.

But the discount window is a “break glass in case of emergency” facility. It’s when liquidity is so scarce that banks can’t borrow on normal terms, so they go to the Fed, post collateral, and get dough. The fact that a supposedly temporary operation has become semi-permanent and was increased (it was initially $40 billion, then it was quietly increased to $60 billion) was a troubling sign, yet the Fed acted as if this was business as normal.

Waldman does a thorough job of parsing the two initiatives announced Friday, the further expansion of the TAF, plus the establishment of the new repo facility.

Differences in degree can be differences in kind, and that’s what Waldman argues has happened. The US banking system is on life support. The Fed has now become a very big prop, far more significant than the highly publicized sovereign wealth fund investors.

From Interfluidity:

The Fed announced that it would auction off $100B in loans this month rather than the previously announced $60B via its TAF facility. In the same press release, the FRB announced plans to offer $100B worth of 28 day loans via repurchase agreements against “any of the types of securities — Treasury, agency debt, or agency mortgage-backed securities — that are eligible as collateral in conventional open market operations”.

The second announcement puzzled me. After all, the Fed conducts uses repos routinely in the open market operations by which they try to hold the interbank lending rate to the Federal Funds target. In aggregate, the quantity of funds that the Fed makes available is constrained by the Fed Funds target. So, what do we learn from this? Fortunately, the New York Fed provides more details:

The Federal Reserve has announced that the Open Market Trading Desk will conduct a series of term repurchase (RP) transactions that are expected to cumulate to $100 billion outstanding… These transactions will be conducted as 28-day term RP agreements.. When the Desk arranges its conventional RPs, it accepts propositions from dealers in three collateral “tranches.” In the first tranche, dealers may pledge only Treasury securities. In the second tranche, dealers have the option to pledge federal agency debt in addition to Treasury securities. In the third tranche, dealers have the option to pledge mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies in addition to federal agency debt or Treasury securities. With the special “single-tranche” RPs announced today, dealers have the option to pledge either mortgage-backed securities issued or fully guaranteed by federal agencies, federal agency debt, or Treasury securities. The Desk has arranged single-tranche transactions from time to time in the past.

There are a couple of differences, then, between this new program and typical repo operations:

1. The loans are of a longer-term than usual. Ordinarily, the Fed lends on terms ranging from overnight to two weeks in its “temporary open market operations”. The Fed will now offer substantial funding on a 28 day term.

2, The Fed is effectively broadening its collateral requirements by collapsing what are usually 3 distinct levels of collateral which are lent against at different rates to a single category within which no distinctions are made.

The Fed offered the first $15B of repo loans under the program today, so we can see how things are going to work. First, how did the Fed square the circle of ramping up its repos without pushing down the Federal Funds rate? Just as it had done with TAF, the Fed offset the “temporary” injection of funds with a “permanent open market operation”. The Fed purchased outright $10B of Treasury securities today at the same time as it offered $15B in exchange for mortgage-backed securities under the new program (at a low interest rate than in traditional repos against MBS collateral). The net cash injection was small, but the composition of securities on bank balance sheets changed markedly, as illiquid securities were exchanged for liquid Treasuries.

In James Hamilton’s wonderful coinage, the Fed is conducting monetary policy on the asset side of the balance sheet. This is an innovation of the Bernanke Fed. Conventionally, monetary policy is about managing the quantity of the central bank’s core liability, currency outstanding. When the Fed wants to loosen, it expands its liabilities by issuing cash in exchange for securities. When it wants to tighten, it redeems cash for securities, reducing Fed liabilities. The asset side is conventionally an afterthought, “government securities”. But the Bernanke Fed has branched out. It has sought to lend against a wide-range of assets, actively seeking to replace securities about which the market seems spooked with safe-haven Treasuries on bank balance sheets without creating new cash. By doing this, the Fed hopes to square the circle of helping banks through their “liquidity crisis” without provoking a broad inflation.

“Monetary policy on the asset side of the balance sheet” is a bit too anodyne a description of what’s going on here though. The Fed has gotten into an entirely new line of business, and on a massive scale. Prior to the introduction of TAF, direct loans from the Fed to banks, including the discount window lending and repos, amounted to less than $40B, the majority of which were repos collateralized by Treasury securities. By the end of this month, the Federal Reserve will have more than $200B of exposure in its new role as Wall Street’s genial pawnbroker. Assuming the liability side of the Fed’s balance sheet is held roughly constant, more than a fifth of the Fed’s balance sheet will be direct loans to banks, almost certainly against collateral not backed by the full faith and credit of the US government (and beyond that we just don’t know). This raises a whole host of issues.

Caroline Baum wrote a column last week poopooing concerns about the Fed taking on credit risk via TAF lending. (Hat tip Mark Thoma.) I usually enjoy Baum’s work, but this column was poorly argued. In it, she points out that the Fed has all the tools it needs to manage credit risk. The Fed offers loans only against collateral, and requires that loans be overcollateralized. If the collateral has no clear market value or if there are questions about an asset’s quality, the Fed has complete discretion to force a “haircut”, writing down the asset (for the purpose of the loan) to whatever value it sees fit. And the Fed can always just say no to any collateral it deems sketchy.

All of that is quite true, and (as Baum snarkily points out) not hard to find on FRB websites. But it fails to address the core issue. Sure the Fed has all the tools it needs to manage credit risk. But does it have the will to use those tools? In word and deed, the Fed’s primary concern since August has been to “restore normal functioning” to financial markets. The Fed has chosen to accept some inflation risk in its fight against macroeconomic meltdown. Why wouldn’t it knowingly accept some credit risk as well? No one has suggested that the Fed is being “snookered”. Skeptics think the Fed is intentionally taking on bank credit risk while still lending at very low rates. Some of us find that troubling.

Which brings us to the more postmodern issue of what credit risk even means to a lender with unlimited cash and an overt unwillingness to let those it lends to default. In a way, I agree with Baum. Until the current crisis is long past, I think it unlikely that any large bank will default and stiff the Fed with toxic collateral. Why not? Because for that to happen, the Fed would have to pull the trigger itself, by demanding payment on loans rather than offering to roll them over. Since TAF started last fall, on net, the Fed has not only rolled over its loans to the banking system, but has periodically increased banks’ line of credit as well. In an echo of the housing bubble, there’s no such thing as a bad loan as long as borrowers can always refinance to cover the last one.

The distinction between debt and equity is much murkier than many people like to believe. Arguably, debt whose timely repayment cannot be enforced should be viewed as equity. (Financial statement analysts perform this sort of reclassification all the time in order to try to tease the true condition of firms out of accounting statements.) If you think, as I do, that the Fed would not force repayment as long as doing so would create hardship for important borrowers, then perhaps these “term loans” are best viewed not as debt, but as very cheap preferred equity.

Let’s go with that for a minute, and think about the implications. One much discussed story of the current crisis is the role of sovereign wealth funds in helping to capitalize struggling banks. Will they, won’t they, should we worry? Sovereign wealth funds have invested about $24B in struggling US financials. Meanwhile, the Fed is quietly providing eight times that on much easier terms.

If we view TAF and the new 28-day, broad-collateral repos as equity, what fraction of bank capitalization would they represent? I haven’t been able to find current numbers on aggregate bank capitalization in the US. In June of 2006, the accounting net worth of U.S. Commercial Banks, Thrift Institutions and Credit Unions was 1.25 trillion dollars. Putting together remarks by Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn and data on bank equity to total assets from the St. Louis Fed yields a more recent estimate of about 1.6 trillion. The average price to book among the top ten US banks is about 1.3. So, a reasonable estimate for the current market value of bank equity is 2 trillion dollars. The $200B in “equity” the Fed will have supplied by the end of March will leave the Federal Reserve owning roughly 9.1% of the total bank equity. Obviously, the Fed isn’t investing in the entire bank sector uniformly. Some banks will be very substantially “owned” by the central bank, whereas others will remain entirely private sector entities. As Dean Baker points out, the Fed is giving us no information by which to tell which is which.

What we are witnessing is an incremental, partial nationalization of the US banking system. Northern Rock in the UK is peanuts compared to what the New York Fed is up to.

You may object, and I’m sure many of you will, that our little thought experiment is bunk, debt is debt and equity is equity, these are 28-day loans, and that’s that. But notionally collateralized “term” loans that won’t ever be redeemed unless and until it is convenient for borrowers are an odd sort of liability. Central banks are very familiar with the ruse of disguising equity as liability. Currency itself is formally a liability of the central bank, but in every meaningful sense fiat money is closer to equity.

I do not, by the way, object to nationalizing failing banks. There are (unfortunately) banks that are “too big to fail”, whose abrupt disappearance could cause widespread disruption and harm. These should be nationalized when they fall to the brink. But they should be nationalized overtly, their equity written to zero, and their executives shamed. That sounds harsh. It is harsh. One hates to see bad things happen to nice people, and these are mostly nice people. But running institutions with trillions dollar balance sheets is a serious business. Accountability matters. These people were not stupid. They knew, in Chuck Prince’s now infamous words, that “when the music stops… things will be complicated.”, and they kept dancing anyway.

But accountability has gone out of style. The Federal Reserve is injecting equity into failing banks while calling it debt. Citibank is paying 11% to Abu Dhabi for ADIA’s small preferred equity stake, while the US Fed gets under 3% now for the “collateralized 28-day loans” it makes to Citi. Pace Accrued Interest (whom I much admire), I still think this all amounts to a gigantic bail-out. And that it is a brilliantly bad idea from which financial capitalism may have a hard time recovering. Like a well-meaning surgeon slicing up arteries to salvage the appendix, the Federal Reserve is only trying to help.

From a corporate finance perspective, Waldmans’ argument about the Fed effectively being an equity provider isn’t as off base as it sounds. If you as a creditor are unable to call in your loans or otherwise exercise your contractual rights, your position is so badly subordinated that you are effectively equity. And there is no indication that the Fed will take any more action relative to the banks that become dependent on it beyond its normal supervisory role. To behave otherwise, after all, would make it even more difficult for those organizations to function in the marketplace, which risks damaging their ability to function even further.

Topics: Banking industry, Credit markets, Federal Reserve

Posted by Yves Smith at 4:29 AM

Who’s Afraid of a Big, Bad Bailout? – John Mauldin’s Weekly E-Letter

Flying last Tuesday, overnight from Cape Town in South Africa to London, I read in the Financial Times that Republican Congressman Joe Barton of Texas was quoted as saying (this is from memory, so it is not exact) that he had difficulty voting for a bailout plan when none of his constituents could understand the need to bail out Wall Street, didn’t understand the problem, and were against spending $700 billion of taxpayer money to solve a crisis for a bunch of (rich) people who took a lot of risk and created the crisis. That is a sentiment that many of the Republican members of the House share.
As it happens, I know Joe. My office is in his congressional district. I sat on the Executive Committee for the Texas Republican Party representing much of the same district for eight years. This week, Thoughts from the Frontline will be an open letter to Joe, and through him to Congress, telling him what the real financial problem is and how it affects his district, helping explain the problem to his constituents , and explaining why he has to hold his nose with one hand and vote for a bailout with the other.
Just for the record, Joe has been in Congress for 24 years. He is the ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is one of the three most important committees and is usually considered in the top five of Republican House leadership. He is quite conservative and has been a very good and effective congressman. I have known Joe for a long time and consider him a friend. He has been my Congressman at times, depending on where they draw the line. I called his senior aide and asked him how the phone calls were going. It is at least ten to one against supporting this bill, and that is probably typical of the phones all across this country. People are angry, and with real justification. And watching the debates, it reminds us that one should never look at how sausages and laws are made. It is a very messy process.
I think what follows is as good a way as any to explain the crisis we are facing this weekend. This letter will print out a little longer, because there are a lot of charts, but the word length is about the same. Let’s jump right in.
It’s the End of the World As We Know It
Dear Joe,
I understand your reluctance to vote for a bill that 90% of the people who voted for you are against. That is generally not good politics. They don’t understand why taxpayers should spend $700 billion to bail out rich guys on Wall Street who are now in trouble. And if I only got my information from local papers and news sources, I would probably agree. But the media (apart from CNBC) has simply not gotten this story right. It is not just a crisis on Wall Street. Left unchecked, this will morph within a few weeks to a crisis on Main Street. What I want to do is describe the nature of the crisis, how this problem will come home to your district, and what has to be done to avert a true, full-blown depression, where the ultimate cost will be far higher to the taxpayers than $700 billion. And let me say that my mail is not running at 10 to 1 against, but it is really high. I am probably going to make a lot of my regular readers mad, but they need to hear what is really happening on the front lines of the financial world.
First, let’s stop calling this a bailout plan. It is not. It is an economic stabilization plan. Run properly, it might even make the taxpayers some money. If it is not enacted very soon (Monday would be fine), the losses to businesses and investors and homeowners all over the US (and the world) will be enormous. Unemployment will jump to rates approaching 10%, at a minimum. How did all this come to pass? Why is it so dire? Let’s rewind the tape a bit.
We all know about the subprime crisis. That’s part of the problem, as banks and institutions are now having to write off a lot of bad loans. The second part of the problem is a little more complex. Because we were running a huge trade deficit, countries all over the world were selling us goods and taking our dollars. They in turn invested those excess dollars in US bonds, helping to drive down interest rates. It became easy to borrow money at low rates. Banks, and what Paul McCulley properly called the Shadow Banking System, used that ability to borrow and dramatically leverage up those bad loans (when everyone thought they were good), as it seemed like easy money. They created off-balance-sheet vehicles called Structured Investment Vehicles (SIVs) and put loans and other debt into them. They then borrowed money on the short-term commercial paper market to fund the SIVs and made as profit the difference between the low short-term rates of commercial paper and the higher long-term rates on the loans in the SIV. And if a little leverage was good, why not use a lot of leverage and make even more money? Everyone knew these were AAA-rated securities.
And then the music stopped. It became evident that some of these SIVs contained subprime debt and other risky loans. Investors stopped buying the commercial paper of these SIVs. Large banks were basically forced to take the loans and other debt in the SIVs back onto their balance sheets last summer as the credit crisis started. Because of a new accounting rule (called FASB 157), banks had to mark their illiquid investments to the most recent market price of a similar security that actually had a trade. Over $500 billion has been written off so far, with credible estimates that there might be another $500 billion to go. That means these large banks have to get more capital, and it also means they have less to lend. (More on the nature of these investments in a few paragraphs.)
Banks can lend to consumers and investors about 12 times their capital base. If they have to write off 20% of their capital because of losses, that means they either have to sell more equity or reduce their loan portfolios. As an example, for every $1,000 of capital, a bank can loan $12,000 (more or less). If they have to write off 20% ($200), they either have to sell stock to raise their capital back to $1,000 or reduce their loan portfolio by $2,400. Add some zeroes to that number and it gets to be huge.
And that is what is happening. At first, banks were able to raise new capital. But now, many banks are finding it very difficult to raise money, and that means they have to reduce their loan portfolios. We’ll come back to this later. But now, let’s look at what is happening today. Basically, the credit markets have stopped functioning. Because banks and investors and institutions are having to deleverage, that means they need to sell assets at whatever prices they can get in order to create capital to keep their loan-to-capital ratios within the regulatory limits.
Remember, part of this started when banks and investors and funds used leverage (borrowed money) to buy more assets. Now, the opposite is happening. They are having to sell assets into a market that does not have the ability to borrow money to buy them. And because the regulators require them to sell whatever they can, the prices for some of these assets are ridiculously low. Let me offer a few examples.
Today, there are many municipal bonds that were originally sold to expire 10-15 years from now. But projects finished early and the issuers wanted to pay them off. However, the bonds often have a minimum time before they can be called. So, issuers simply buy US Treasuries and put them into the bond, to be used when the bond can be called. Now, for all intents and purposes this is a US government bond which has the added value of being tax-free. I had a friend, John Woolway, send me some of the bid and ask prices for these type of bonds. One is paying two times what a normal US Treasury would pay. Another is paying 291% of a normal US Treasury. And it is tax-free! Why would anyone sell what is essentially a US treasury bond for a discount? Because they are being forced to sell, and no one is buying! The credit markets are frozen.
Last week, I wrote about a formerly AAA-rated residential mortgage-backed security (RMBS) composed of Alt-A loans, better than subprime but less than prime. About 5% of the loans were delinquent, and there are no high-risk option ARMs in the security. It is offered at 70 cents on the dollar. If you bought that security, you would be making well over 12% on your money, and 76% of the loans in the portfolio of that security would have to default and lose over 50% of their value before you would risk even one penny. Yet the bank which is being forced to sell that loan has had to write down its value. As I wrote then, that is pricing in financial Armageddon. (You can read the full details here.)
Let’s look at the following graph. It is an index of AAA-rated mortgage bonds, created by www.markit.com. It is composed of RMBSs similar to the one I described above. Institutions buy and sell this index as a way to hedge their portfolios. It is also a convenient way for an accounting firm to get a price for a mortgage-backed security in a client bank’s portfolio. With the introduction of the new FASB 157 accounting rule, accountants are very aggressive about making banks mark their debt down, as they do not want to be sued if there is a problem. Notice this index shows that bonds that were initially AAA are now trading at 53 cents on the dollar, which is up from 42.5 cents two months ago.
Accountants might look at the bond I described above, look at this index, and decide to tell their clients to mark the bonds down to $.53 on the dollar. The bank is offering the bond at $.70 because it knows there is quality in the security. They are being forced to sell. And guess what? There are no buyers. An almost slam-dunk 12% total-return security with loss-coverage provisions that suggest 40% of the loans could default and lose 50% before your interest rate yields even suffered, let alone risk to your principal – and it can’t find a buyer.
 
One of the real reasons these and thousands of other good bonds are not selling now is that there is real panic in the markets. The oldest money market fund “broke the buck” last week, because they had exposure to Lehman Brothers bonds. We are seeing massive flights of capital from money market funds, including by large institutions concerned about their capital. What are they buying? Short-term Treasury bills. Three-month Treasury bills are down to 0.84%.
It gets worse. Last week one-month Treasury bills were paying a negative 1%!!! That means some buyers were so panicked that they were willing to buy a bond for $1 that promised to pay them back only $.99 in just one month. The rate is at 0.16% today. If something is not done this weekend, it could go a lot lower over the next few days. That is panic, Joe.
I don’t want to name names, as this letter goes to about 1.5 million people and I don’t want to make problems for some fine banking names; but there is a silent bank run going on. There are no lines in the street, but it is a run nevertheless. It is large investment funds and corporations quietly pulling their money from some of the best banks in the country. They can do this simply by pushing a button. We are watching deposit bases fall. It does not take long. Lehman saw $400 billion go in just a few months this summer. Think about that number. Any whiff of a problem and an institution that is otherwise sound could be brought low in a matter of weeks. And the FDIC could end up with a large loss that seemed to have come from out of nowhere.
The TED Spread Flashes Trouble
There is something called the TED spread, which is the difference between three-month LIBOR (the London Inter Bank Offered Rate which is in euro dollars, also called The Euro Dollar Spread, thus TED) and three-month US Treasury bills. Three-month LIBOR is basically what banks charge each other to borrow money. Many mortgages and investments are based on various periods of LIBOR. Look at the chart below. Typically the TED spread is 50 basis points (0.50%) or less. When it spikes up, it is evidence of distress in the financial markets. The last time the TED spread was as high as it is now was right before the market crash of 1987. This is a weekly chart, which does not capture tonight’s (Friday) change, which would make it look even worse. Quite literally, the TED spread is screaming panic.
 
The Fed has lowered rates to 2%. Typically, three-month LIBOR tracks pretty close to whatever the Fed funds rate is. Starting with the credit crisis last year, that began to change. Look at the chart below.
 
Remember, LIBOR is what banks charge to each other to make loans. Lower rates are supposed to help banks improve their capital and their ability to make loans at lower interest rates to businesses and consumers. Look at what has happened in the past few weeks, in the chart above. The spread between three-month LIBOR and the Fed funds rate is almost 200 basis points, or 2%! That is something that defies imagination to market observers. On the chart above, it looks like it has not moved that much, but in the trading desks of banks all over the world it is a heart-pounding, scare-you-to-death move. The chart below reflects what traders have seen in the past two weeks, and it moved up more today.
 
Now let’s look at the next chart. This is the amount of Tier 1 commercial paper issued. This is the life blood of the business world. This is how many large and medium-sized businesses finance their day-to-day operations. The total amount of commercial paper issued is down about 15% from a year ago, with half of that drop coming in the last few weeks. Quite literally, the economic body is hemorrhaging. Unless something is done, businesses all over the US are going to wake up in a few weeks and find they simply cannot transact business as usual. This is going to put a real crimp in all sorts of business we think of as being very far from Wall Street.
 
I could go on. Credit spreads on high-yield bonds that many of our best high-growth businesses use to finance their growth are blowing out to levels which make it impossible for the companies to come to the market for new funds. And that is even if they could find investors in this market! There are lots of other examples (solid corporate loans selling at big discounts, asset-backed securities at discounts, etc.), but you get the idea. Suffice it to say that the current climate in the financial market is the worst since the 1930s. But how does a crisis in the financial markets affect businesses and families in Arlington, Texas, where my office and half of your district is?
The Transmission Mechanism
The transmission in a car takes energy from the engine and transfers it to the wheels. Let’s talk about how the transmission mechanism of the economy works.
Let’s start with our friend Dave Moritz down the street. He needs financing to be able to sell an automobile. To get those loans at good prices, an auto maker has to be able to borrow money and make the loans to Dave’s customers. But if something does not stop the bleeding, it is going to get very expensive for GM to get money to make loans. That will make his cars more expensive to consumers. Cheap loans with small down payments are the life blood of the auto selling business. That is going to change dramatically unless something is done to stabilize the markets.
Credit card debt is typically packaged and sold to investors like pension funds and insurance companies. But in today’s environment, that credit card debt is going to have to pay a much higher price in order to find a buyer. That means higher interest rates. Further, because most of the large issuers of credit cards are struggling with their leverage, they are reducing the amount of credit card debt they will give their card holders. If they continue to have to write down mortgages on their books because of mark-to-market rules which price assets at the last fire-sale price, it will mean even more shrinkage in available credit.
Try and sell a home above the loan limits of Fannie and Freddie today with a nonconforming jumbo loan. Try and find one that does not have very high rates, because many lenders who normally do them simply cannot afford to keep them on their balance sheets. And a subprime mortgage? Forget about it. This is going to get even worse if the financial markets melt down.
We are in a recession. Unemployment is going to rise to well over 6%. Consumer spending is going to slow. This is an environment which normally means it is tougher for small businesses and consumers to get financing in any event. Congress or the Fed cannot repeal the business cycle. There are always going to be recessions. And we always get through them, because we have a dynamic economy that figures out how to get things moving again.
Recessions are part of the normal business cycle. But it takes a major policy mistake by Congress or the Fed to create a depression. Allowing the credit markets to freeze would count as a major policy mistake.
I have been on record for some time that the economy will go through a normal recession and a slow recovery, what I call a Muddle Through Economy. This week I met with executives of one of the larger hedge funds in the world. They challenged me on my Muddle Through stance. And I had to admit that my Muddle Through scenario is at risk if Congress does not act to stabilize the credit markets.
Let’s Make a Deal
Why do we need this Stabilization Plan? Why can’t the regular capital markets handle it? The reason is that the problem is simply too big for the market to deal with. It requires massive amounts of patient, long-term money to solve the problem. And the only source for that would be the US government.
There is no reason for the taxpayer to lose money. Warren Buffett, Bill Gross of PIMCO, and my friend Andy Kessler have all said this could be done without the taxpayer losing money, and perhaps could even make a profit. As noted above, these bonds could be bought at market prices that would actually make a long-term buyer a profit. Put someone like Bill Gross in charge and let him make sure the taxpayers are buying value. This would re-liquefy the banks and help get their capital ratios back in line.
Why are banks not lending to each other? Because they don’t know what kind of assets are on each other’s books. There is simply no trust. The Fed has had to step in and loan out hundreds of billions of dollars in order to keep the financial markets from collapsing. If you allow the banks to sell their impaired assets at a market-clearing fair price (not at the original price), then once the landscape is cleared, banks will decide they can start trusting each other. The commercial paper market will come back. Credit spreads will come down. Banks will be able to stabilize their loan portfolios and start lending again.
Again, the US government is the only entity with enough size and patience to act. We do not have to bail out Wall Street. They will still take large losses on their securities, just not as large a loss as they are now facing in a credit market that is frozen. As noted above, there are many securities that are being marked down and sold far below a rational price.
If we act now, we will start to see securitization of mortgages, credit cards, auto loans, and business loans so that the economy can begin to function properly.
What happens if we walk away? Within a few weeks at most, financial markets will freeze even more. We will see electronic runs on major banks, and the FDIC will have more problems than you can possibly imagine. The TED spread and LIBOR will get much worse. Businesses which use the short-term commercial paper markets will start having problems rolling over their paper, forcing them to make difficult cuts in spending and employment. Larger businesses will find it more difficult to get loans and credit. That will have effects on down the economic food chain. Jim Cramer estimated today that without a plan of some type, we could see the Dow drop to 8300. That is as good a guess as any. It could be worse. Home valuations and sales will drop even further.
The average voter? They will see stock market investments off another 25% at the least. Home prices will go down even more. Consumer spending will drop. What should be a run-of-the-mill recession becomes a deep recession or soft depression. Yes, that may be worst-case scenario. But that is the risk I think we take with inaction.
A properly constructed Stabilization Plan hopefully avoids the worst-case scenario. It should ultimately not cost the taxpayer much, and maybe even return a profit. The AIG rescue that Paulson arranged is an example of how to do it right. My bet is that the taxpayer is going to make a real profit on this deal. We got 80% of AIG, with what is now a loan paying the taxpayer over 12%, plus almost $2 billion in upfront fees for doing the loan. That is not a bailout. That is a business deal that sounds like it was done by Mack the Knife.
This deal needs to be done by Monday. Every day we wait will see more and more money fly out the doors of the banks, putting the FDIC at ever greater risk. Panic will start to set in, moving to ever smaller banks. Frankly, we are at the point where we need to consider raising the FDIC limits for all deposits for a period of time, until the Stabilization Plan quells the panic.
I understand that this is a really, really bad idea according classical free-market economic theory. You know me; I am as free market as it comes. But I also know that without immediate action a lot of people are really going to be hurt. Unemployment is not a good thing. Losses on your home and investments hurt. It is all nice and well to talk about theories and contend the market should be allowed to sort itself out; and if we have a deep recession, then that is what is needed. But the risk we take is not a deep recession but a soft depression. The consequences of inaction are simply unthinkable.
Joe, I am telling you that the markets are screaming panic. Yes, Senator Richard Shelby has his 200 economists saying this is a bad deal. But they are ivory tower kibitzers who have never sat at a trading desk. They have never tried to put a loan deal together or had to worry about commercial paper markets collapsing. I am talking daily with the people on the desks who are seeing what is really happening. Shelby’s economists are armchair generals far from the front lines. I am talking to the foot soldiers who are on the front lines.
Every sign of potential disaster is there. You and the rest of the House have to act. It has to be bipartisan. This should not be about politics (even though Barney Frank keeps talking bipartisan and then taking partisan shots, but I guess he just can’t help himself). It should be about doing the right thing for our country and the world. I know it will not be fun coming back to the district. Talking about TED spreads and LIBOR will not do much to assuage voters who are angry. But it is the right thing to do. And I will be glad to come to the town hall meeting with you and help if you like.
With your help, we will get through this. In a few years, things will be back to normal and we can all have stories to tell to our grandkids about how we lived through interesting times. But right now we have to act.
Colorado, California, London, and Sweden
It is time to hit the send button. This was personally a great week. For whatever reason, I did not suffer jet lag flying to South Africa for just two days, then overnight to London, and back the next day. It was a good trip. I will report more about South Africa in a later letter, but this e-letter is already a little long.
I leave Sunday for a quick trip to Longmont, Colorado (near Boulder) to look at a very interesting technology company (InPhase) that makes holographic memory disks, with good friend Dr. Bart Stuck of Signal Lake Partners.
I will be in San Diego and Orange County the 16th and 17th of October for back-to-back speeches, then I leave Sunday for London for two days and then on to Sweden for a conference and speeches there, a quick trip to Malta, and then back home, where I will be chained to my desk by daughter Tiffani as we do interviews and write a book.
I do enjoy traveling from time to time, seeing the rest of the world. One of my secret pleasures is reading International Living and thinking about what it would be like to have another home somewhere. Cheap thrills. You can subscribe if you like by following this link.
Have a great week. I fully believe (OK, deeply hope) that Congress will act. We can all breathe a collective sigh when they do.
Your still believing in Muddle Through analyst,

John Mauldin
John@FrontLineThoughts.com
Copyright 2008 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved

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Leaders Without Followers – The Paulson Plan and the week that was.

by Lawrence B. Lindsey 10/06/2008, Volume 014, Issue 04 The Weekly Standard

Just over a week ago the collapse in credit markets forced the secretary of the Treasury to assemble a bipartisan group from both houses of Congress to sell a record-setting government-bailout plan of the financial industry. Trouble was no such plan existed at the time of the meeting. He set off a mad scramble to come up with the barest outlines of a plan on Saturday followed by two Democratic outlines, one for the House and one for the Senate, on Sunday.

By Monday the 22nd, it was obvious to markets and most other observers that, when it came to the plans, there was not a lot of “there” there. Unintended consequences multiplied. So, when Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke began their gauntlet of testimonies on Tuesday, the mood was intensely skeptical, even bordering on hostile. Equity markets crashed. Credit markets seized up again on Wednesday, even though stocks stabilized.

By Thursday stocks had rallied on expectations that Congress would pass a bill by the end of the weekend. Democrats announced they had an agreement amongst themselves, but their rank and file were decidedly not on board. Nonetheless, the president arranged a seal-the-deal ceremony for Thursday afternoon at the White House with the congressional leadership and both McCain and Obama present. It was to be followed by a photo opportunity with the current president and the two men who might succeed him collectively blessing a bailout package.

It was not to be.

Senator Richard Shelby, deeply suspicious of the Paulson plan, left the meeting early and declared there was no deal. Obama headed for the Mayflower Hotel to hold his own press conference. The Democratic leadership focused on mocking McCain, blaming him for the failure, a narrative that the media parroted, ignoring the fact that if what the Democrats claimed was true, they had the votes to pass the law.

Still, as of this writing on Friday night, a bill was almost certain to get passed. The Democratic congressional leadership and the White House have had a “Continuing Resolution” strategy in their back pocket all along. The plan was to roll goodies for the auto industry and other special interests, a “safety net” package, and the latest version of the Paulson plan in with authority for the government to spend money after midnight on Tuesday. The alternative would be a government shut down.

Thus stands the state of governance of the greatest economic power in the history of the world. And on this basis politicians claim that what is needed is more regulation by government.

The central problem of the deal was that it takes a commanding heights approach. The key beneficiaries are to be the very largest New York-based financial institutions and a few billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gross. Buffet even said as much. He plunked down a cool $5 billion to buy preferred stock yielding 10 percent in Paulson’s old firm, Goldman Sachs, saying he was confident that Congress would pass the Paulson bailout bill.

The plan had a commanding heights problem in the Congress as well. The Democratic leadership, including committee chairmen Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and Chuck Schumer, were enthusiastic. But it was hard to find an ordinary member who exuded confidence. The president gave a prime-time speech to push the bill on Wednesday night. It was a good performance, but on Thursday morning it wasn’t any easier to find Republican congressmen who supported the plan.

 But the greatest commanding heights problem was that the plan had virtually no public support. Congressmen reported record-breaking email and phone calls from constituents, running as much as 300 to 1 against. The public saw it as a bailout of Wall Street. What had not been explained was how bailing out Wall Street would also help them. There is a good case that could be made on that score, but it hasn’t been.

 

Ultimately the bill will be a missed opportunity. No one with experience in these matters believes the Treasury purchase plan is workable. It will take weeks, maybe months, to set up-not something that makes sense when the country is allegedly teetering on a precipice. The plan, moreover, should have been accompanied with measures that would stabilize the banking sector and prevent any possiblity of a bank run. On Thursday night the FDIC did a forced sale of Washington Mutual to J.P. Morgan just to avoid the potential disaster of the bank runs that would follow if uninsured depositors were not protected. Eighteen billion had left WaMu in the days leading up to the purchase. On Friday a similar run began on Wachovia. In this environment, not removing the deposit insurance cap could be a recipe for disaster, more than undoing any possible benefits from the legislation.

When the people atop the commanding heights of the economy think that they know best, and their followers’ concerns are ignored, problems inevitably follow. We can only hope that America will be spared relearning this lesson of history, too painfully, this time around.

–Lawrence B. Lindsey, for the Editors

 

© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

Day of Reckoning

 

by  Patrick J. Buchanan

09/26/2008

How did the United States of America, the richest nation on earth, whose economy represents 30 percent of the Global Economy, arrive at the precipice of a financial panic and collapse?

The answer lies in the abject failure of both America’s financial elite and the political elite of both parties — the same elites now working together to determine how much of our wealth will be needed to bail the nation out of the crisis of their own creation.

Big Government is riding to the rescue — saddlebags full of our tax dollars — to save us from the consequences of the stupidity and folly of Big Government. New York and Washington, the twin cities responsible for the crisis, are now being hailed by the media as the 7th Cavalry, coming to rescue a beleaguered nation.

 

Had there not been a steady and constant infusion of easy money and credit into the U.S. economy by the Fed, for years on end, a housing bubble of the magnitude of the one that has just exploded could never have been created.

Had the politicians of both parties not coerced and pressured banks, S&Ls, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make all those sub-prime mortgages, then to tie this rotten paper to good paper, convert it into securities and sell to banks all over the world, there would have been no global financial crisis.

Had they seen this coming and acted sooner, the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury would not today, like Henny Penny, be crying, “The sky is falling!” and the end times are at hand, unless we give them 5 percent of our gross domestic product to buy up suspect securities backed by sub-prime mortgages.

Consider what the “Paulson Plan” of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, against which Sen. Richard Shelby and the House Republicans rebelled, entails.

Since Americans save nothing and have to borrow from abroad to finance our trade and budget deficits, wars and foreign aid, what the secretary proposes is this: that Congress authorize the Treasury to spend $700 billion to buy up the toxic paper on the books not only of U.S. banks, but of foreign banks operating in the United States. According to The Washington Times, the Treasury would also be authorized to buy up securities backed by rotten auto loans, student loans and credit card debts.

Thus America would be borrowing from China, Japan and the Middle East to tidy up the balance sheets of the banks of China, Japan and the Middle East. And all the rotten paper will be offloaded onto U.S. taxpayers, who hopefully will be able to recoup some of their losses, because some of the paper will be good.

Why should we do this? Because otherwise there will be a financial panic, followed by a market collapse, wiping out pensions, 401Ks, portfolios and defined benefit plans of Middle America, forcing millions into bankruptcy and millions more to put off retirement and continue working until they drop.

In a democracy, it is said, you get the kind of government you deserve. But what did the American people do to deserve this? What did they do to deserve the quality of financial, corporate and political leadership that marched them into this mess — and that today postures as their rescuers?

Consider what this mess has already cost taxpayers: $29 billion to buy the rotten paper of Bear Stearns so J.P. Morgan would buy the investment bank; $85 billion for 80 percent of AIG to nationalize it; $150 billion in a stimulus package to flood the nation with cash; perhaps $300 billion to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and now $700 billion to begin taking the toxic paper off the hands of America’s big banks.

And even if this is passed, say Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, there is no guarantee this will resolve the crisis. If the $700 billion is not provided and the toxic paper is not pulled off the books of the world’s banks by U.S. taxpayers, however, we face an almost certain collapse, surging bankruptcies, rising unemployment, a shrinkage of GDP and a recession, if not worse.

Yet, the fellows who tell us we face a financial mushroom cloud over every American city if we do not act at once to provide the $700 billion did not see this coming and can make no guarantee that this will succeed and end the crisis.

Nevertheless, it must be done, and done now, as collapse is imminent.

Looking at all the money being ladled out by the U.S. government to prevent a collapse, and the diminished revenue coming in, it is hard to see how America avoids future deficits that reach $1 trillion a year. These will imperil both the dollar itself and the ability of the United States, which saves nothing, to borrow from the rest of the world. The downsizing of America is at hand.

Yes, indeed, we have arrived at the Day of Reckoning for Uncle Sam.

---

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, “The Death of the West,”, “The Great Betrayal,” “A Republic, Not an Empire” and “Where the Right Went Wrong.”

Troubled Wachovia Seeks Out a Merger

By ROBIN SIDEL, DAVID ENRICH and DAN FITZPATRICK

Wachovia Corp. has entered into preliminary talks with a handful of possible buyers — the latest in a parade of banks to look for safety in the arms of a suitor amid concerns that the weak economy is pushing them deeper into peril.

The talks came as Washington Mutual Inc.’s late-Thursday failure rattled the shares of other troubled banks. Shares in Wachovia fell 27% on Friday as investors fretted about its massive mortgage portfolio.

Getty Images

People walk by a Wachovia branch in New York City.

Investors are growing concerned that a host of banks nationwide, both large and small, could come under fresh pressure to either raise more capital or else find someone willing to buy them. The trouble stems in part from the fact that a broad range of borrowers, not just mortgage holders, are now starting to default on their debt. For instance, about 2.4% of payments on credit cards are more than 90 days overdue, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the highest level since 1991.

Wachovia is talking to potential buyers including Wells Fargo & Co., Banco Santander SA of Spain and Citigroup Inc., according to people familiar with the situation. Wachovia officials don’t believe they need to rush into a deal, and the bank isn’t feeling immediate pressure on its financial condition, people familiar with the company said.

Wachovia declined to comment on the discussions. Earlier Friday, a spokeswoman said the bank is “aggressively addressing our challenges.” Since June, Wachovia has opened 745,000 new checking accounts, she added, indicating confidence among its customers.

Banco Santander, Citigroup and Wells Fargo declined to comment.

In a sign of the depth of tension among financial institutions broadly, banks on Friday remained very skittish about making short-term loans to each other — a crucial ingredient in the banking business. The rate on three-month loans between banks eased slightly, to 3.7%, on Friday. Still, that’s almost double the level that would be expected if the market were more stable.

This reluctance to lend has implications for a broad swath of the business community: Interest rates on short-term loans that corporations routinely use to fund day-to-day expenses also remain extremely elevated.

For financial institutions, “the clock is ticking a heck of a lot faster today,” said Matthew Kelley, a bank analyst at investment-banking firm Sterne, Agee & Leach Inc. The federal government’s seizure of WaMu in the largest bank failure in U.S. history shows that regulators are “not going to mess around” with shaky banks and thrifts, especially given the chaos gripping financial markets.

The structure of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.’s purchase of WaMu’s banking operations also sent shudders through the market for investment-grade bonds. In the deal, bondholders — who typically have a priority claim over common-stock shareholders — are likely to recover only between zero and 50 cents on the dollar, according to an analysis by independent research firm CreditSights. That could sour investors’ appetite for a wide range of financial-industry bonds.

Washington Mutual’s seizure by the government late Thursday helped push financial stocks lower on Friday. Some of the hardest hit stocks included BankUnited Financial Corp., of Coral Gables, Fla., which fell 21% to 79 cents on Nasdaq and Downey Financial Corp., Newport Beach, Calif., down 48% on the New York Stock Exchange.

Tom Richlovsky, chief financial officer at National City, said the Cleveland-based bank’s 44% stock-price drop Friday is “a temporary, irrational phenomenon.” The decline “ignores the fact that the difference between [National City and WaMu] is like night and day,” he said. National City’s woes relate to its abandoned push into mortgages in places like Florida, far from its home turf.

Overall, stocks jumped in Friday trading, largely on renewed hopes that a proposed $700 billion government bailout of the financial sector might be back on track.

U.S. leaders and bank executives hope that the federal bailout package being hammered out in Washington will help steady the industry by giving banks a way to shed some of their most toxic mortgage assets. The vast majority of U.S. banks also remain well-capitalized, giving them a cushion against the sluggish economy and further declines in housing prices.

Across the country, WaMu’s branches opened as usual Friday morning, albeit under new owner J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., which bought WaMu’s banking operations for $1.9 billion.

At a Chicago WaMu branch on Friday, Catriona Johnson, 27 years old, said she had come intending to take out all her money. “I wanted to close my account and hold it in my bra or something,” she said. However, after being told that her account balance is federally insured, Ms. Johnson, the administrative coordinator at a Chicago company that tests homes for the presence of toxins, decided to leave the money alone for now.

WaMu’s seizure by the government eliminated one of the shakiest institutions. But the fact that no one was willing to buy its vast consumer-banking business until the institution actually failed shows how deep the industry’s woes are. In recent years, its prized network of more than 2,200 branches would likely have triggered a bidding war among suitors.

In recent weeks, Wachovia had been talks about a potential merger with Morgan Stanley. But that scenario was apparently put on hold by Morgan’s move Sunday night to convert into a bank holding company instead of an investment bank.

In addition to the problem of widening defaults on credit-card debt, delinquent loans on non-residential real estate rose 20% in the second quarter from a year earlier. Late payments on bread-and-butter business loans, which account for the bulk of the loan portfolios at many banks, jumped 15%. All those percentages are expected to keep rising.

“The housing thing is kind of behind us” in terms of the write-downs, said Ted Salter, chief financial officer of Gateway Financial Holdings Inc., a bank-holding company in Virginia Beach, Va. Now it has “moved into commercial loans, construction loans, development loans,” he said. “Next week, it’ll be something else.”

The 13 bank failures so far this year don’t come close to the savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980s, when hundreds of shaky institutions failed, costing taxpayers about $130 billion. By other measures, though, some bank executives say the current turmoil is worse, since it is more geographically widespread and involves a broader mix of loans.

Alan Worrell, chief executive of Sterling Bank, a Montgomery, Ala.-based unit of Synovus Financial Corp., says the industry’s problems now are “far worse” because the real-estate market is so backlogged with unfinished homes and other construction projects that it will haunt lenders and borrowers for years.

After generating record profits during the housing boom, it has taken only a year for the banking industry’s profitability to evaporate. Second-quarter profit fell to just $5 billion from $36.8 billion a year earlier, its second-lowest level since 1991.

About 18% of federally insured lenders lost money in the second quarter. Dividends paid to bank-stock investors plunged by $35 billion in first six months of 2008.

Third-quarter results could show the industry’s first overall loss since the fourth quarter of 1990. One big reason: Banks need to set aside more money to cover loans that have gone sour, a move that cuts deeply into profitability.

Forced to conserve capital in order to cover ballooning losses, commercial banks are far more reluctant to lend money than they were just even a few months ago. Of 3,000 companies surveyed by RBC Capital Markets, 25% said it is harder to borrow money than 90 days ago.

There isn’t a clear way out of trouble. There aren’t many investors willing to take a bet on banks right now, particularly given WaMu’s example: In April, it received a $1.35 billion investment from the giant investment firm TPG — which lost the entire amount this week when WaMu failed.

Aside from J.P. Morgan’s purchase of WaMu, few weak banks have been snapped up by stronger ones, partly because would-be buyers have their own headaches.

Some banks are paying unusually high interest rates on deposits to replenish their capital levels. That strategy raises red flags with many bankers because it is often viewed as a sign of desperation.

It can also be a double-edged sword: Banks that don’t want to compete on rates can’t attract deposits that are critical to making loans. In any case, that strategy didn’t work for WaMu, which paid some of the highest rates in the country.

Saddled with a mountain of troubled adjustable-rate mortgages inherited through its 2006 takeover of Golden West Financial Corp., Wachovia has seen its financial condition weaken. The bank’s CEO, Robert Steel, has said the bank has ample capital, noting that it added $20 billion to its certificate-of-deposit balances last summer due in part to a high-interest-rate promotion that began in June.

“I spend a lot of time trying to lay out the fact that we believe we’re liquid,” he said earlier this month. “We believe we have the ability with our current financial position to respond to issues, and we also have some other levers to pull” to improve its financial position, he said.

—Carrick Mollencamp, Ilan Brat and Liz Rappaport contributed to this article.

Write to Robin Sidel at robin.sidel@wsj.com, David Enrich at david.enrich@wsj.com and Dan Fitzpatrick at dan.fitzpatrick@wsj.com

Wachovia, Looking for Help, Turns to Citigroup

By BEN WHITE and ERIC DASH

 

Published: September 26, 2008

As concern spread Friday that more banks might run into trouble even with a $700 billion rescue for the financial system, Wachovia, one of those hardest hit by the housing crisis, became the latest to reach for a lifeline.

Weighed down by a huge portfolio of troubled mortgage loans, the nation’s fourth-largest bank by assets entered into preliminary deal talks with Citigroup, and extended feelers to Wells Fargo and Banco Santander of Spain, people briefed on the matter said. The talks are early, and no deal may emerge from them. But it appeared Wachovia was seeking potential alternatives should the bailout plan being debated in Washington not pass quickly, or fail to provide enough help.

Wachovia has a $120 billion portfolio of mortgages loaded with adjustable interest-rate loans that allow borrowers to skip part of their monthly payments, much of which it inherited from its ill-timed acquisition of Golden West, the big California lender, at the end of the housing boom in 2006.

In July, the bank hired Robert K. Steel, 56, a former vice chairman at Goldman Sachs, from the Treasury Department, where he worked with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., trying to resolve the mortgage market crisis. Mr. Steel vowed to keep Wachovia independent and sought to raise $5 billion in capital over the next year by selling noncore assets.

But the bank’s shares, which are down nearly 80 percent in the last year, plunged 27 percent Friday, to $10, as investors wondered about its health after the government’s seizure of Washington Mutual on Thursday.

“Wachovia has a real problem,” said Len Blum of the investment bank Westwood Capital. “Option ARMs are probably the worst mortgage products out there and Wachovia has a lot more of them than it has in tangible equity.”

A spokeswoman for Wachovia, Christie Phillips-Brown, said: “We are aggressively addressing our challenges and are working to strategically strengthen and manage capital and liquidity in this challenging environment.” The bank, she added, expects “that the Treasury plan under consideration by Congress is a constructive and important step toward restoring confidence and stability in our financial system.”

The discussions involving Wachovia and other banks came as Congress sought to break an impasse over the rescue plan proposed by Mr. Paulson, which would buy soured assets from troubled banks to prevent further failures. But no matter what a final package contains, analysts say it is unclear how much it would help a number of regional and community banks stretched by falling home prices.

“The Treasury Department plan will not prevent more bank failures,” said Chip MacDonald, a lawyer who advises banks at the law firm Jones Day. “The plan proposes to make purchases based on market prices, which are likely to be at a loss to the sellers. Such losses will deplete the sellers’ capital, which only strongly capitalized institutions can absorb without raising additional capital or a merging with a stronger bank.”

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation deemed 117 banks “troubled” at the end of June, up from 90 in the first quarter. Sheila C. Bair, the F.D.I.C. chairwoman, said Thursday that more failures are likely, although they would constitute only a handful of the nation’s 8,400 banks.

Many small and midsize banks do not have much exposure to the assets that are hardest to sell. “The sludge is primarily in the structured products, exotic residential mortgages and commercial mortgage-backed securities,” said Gerard Cassidy, a banking analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

Those securities have tended to be held by big banks and Wall Street firms. Small and midsize banks, by contrast, have built up big positions of corporate and commercial real estate loans for which there is a market, albeit a depressed one. Unless the government offers higher prices, it is unclear how many of them would use the fund.

What the bailout might do, however, is relieve pressure on the government’s insurance fund, which guarantees deposits of up to $100,000 per account holder if a bank fails. As of the end of June, the F.D.I.C. fund stood at about $45.2 billion after suffering a nearly $9 billion loss from IndyMac Bank’s sudden collapse.

“It’s not exactly a panacea,” said Mr. MacDonald. “For stronger banks, the plan will help them reduce risk, attract new capital or merger partners. For failing banks, it will help the F.D.I.C. resolve them at a lower cost to its deposit fund.” Instead, the Treasury Department coffers would directly absorb more of the losses.

Those concerns were reflected in the stock market Friday, where investors pushed down financial shares as conditions for banks continued to worsen. In addition to mortgage defaults, losses tied to auto loans, credit cards and commercial real estate are increasing along with unemployment. Analysts now project that several hundred banks could fail over the next three years, far more than the roughly 150 or so that they estimated this summer.

Smaller regional banks with troubled loan portfolios came under particular assault. Shares in National City, based in Cleveland, sank 25.7 percent to $3.71 even as the bank sought to assure investors that it remained well-capitalized and had not had an outflow of customer deposits, as Washington Mutual did.

Thomas A. Richlovsky, National City’s chief financial officer, said in an interview that investors had the impression his bank was a savings and loan institution regulated by the Office of Thrift Supervision, as Washington Mutual was. “That is like saying Tina Fey is Sarah Palin,” he said. “We are not a thrift, we are not a mortgage company, we are a bank. National City has no option-ARM mortgages on its books but is selling off a portfolio of troubled home equity, subprime mortgage and other bad loans.”

Downey Financial Corporation, a $13 billion savings and loan saddled with option-ARM mortgages, slid 48 percent to $2.03 Friday. Earlier this month, the Office of Thrift Supervision told Downey to provide a detailed plan to reduce its assets and strengthen management.

Shares in Morgan Stanley, which suspended merger talks with Wachovia last week after the investment bank changed into a bank holding company, also dropped 8.7 percent to $24.75, after investors began to doubt that the Mitsubishi UFJ Financial group of Japan would follow through on a commitment to pump around $8 billion in fresh capital into the bank.

In a memo to employees Friday, John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chief executive, said that the Mitsubishi deal was moving ahead “as anticipated” and that the two banks were exploring different ways in which they could collaborate.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

Wachovia Credit-Default Swaps Soar to Record After WaMu Failure

By Shannon D. Harrington and Abigail Moses

Sept. 26 (Bloomberg) — The cost to protect against a default by Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. bank, soared to distressed levels after Washington Mutual Inc. was seized by regulators and its deposits sold off to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Credit-default swaps protecting $10 million of Wachovia bonds from default for five years traded for as much as the equivalent of $3.5 million initially and $500,000 a year, according to broker Phoenix Partners Group. That compares with $670,000 a year and no upfront payment yesterday.

Wachovia’s 2006 purchase of Golden West Financial Corp. saddled the company with option adjustable-rate home loans that allow borrowers to make minimum payments less than what they owe, which is then added to their total debt balance. With JPMorgan saying they expect 20 percent losses on WaMu’s option ARM portfolio, Wachovia may need to raise $11 billion in capital to protect against losses from its loans, Deutsche Bank AG equity analyst Mike Mayo said in a note to clients today.

Wachovia is an “attractive target,” though “it’s not clear who wants to take them on at this time,” Bert Ely, president of consulting firm Ely & Co. in Alexandria, Virginia, said today in a Bloomberg Television interview.

Seattle-based Washington Mutual was taken over by the government yesterday after customers had withdrawn $16.7 billion from accounts since Sept. 16. New York-based JPMorgan acquired WaMu’s branch network for $1.9 billion.

Potential Suitors

The initial cost for credit-default swaps on Wachovia bonds dropped back to 25 percentage points, or $2.5 million, after the New York Times reported the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank is in preliminary talks to merge with Citigroup Inc.

Wachovia has entered into preliminary discussions with banks including Spain’s Banco Santander SA, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. and New York-based Citigroup, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing a person familiar with the situation.

Morgan Stanley broke off merger talks with Wachovia to focus on a partnership with Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., CNBC reported earlier this week.

“We may yet see that type of deal,” Ely said. Morgan Stanley, along with Goldman Sachs Group Inc., “at some point in time need to acquire a large banking franchise, and Wachovia certainly becomes a very attractive target.”

Wachovia Bonds

Wachovia’s credit-default swaps are trading at levels that imply a 63 percent chance the company will fail within five years, according to a JPMorgan valuation model. That assumes bondholders would receive 30 cents on the dollar in the case of a default.

Wachovia’s $750 million of 4.375 percent bonds due in 2010 plunged 29 cents to 51 cents on the dollar, as of 1:03 p.m. in New York, according to Trace, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s bond-pricing service. The yield increased to 51.6 percent, or 49.6 percentage points more than Treasuries with similar maturities.

“We are focused on managing our company and serving our customers with excellence,” Wachovia spokeswoman Christy Phillips-Brown said. “Our core franchises — retail banking, the nation’s third largest brokerage firm, wealth management and our commercial and corporate banking activities — are extremely valuable and continue to operate well relative to our competition.”

Chief Executive Officer Robert Steel, a former Treasury official who was hired to replace Kennedy Thompson in July, has said he’s firing workers and cutting more than $1.5 billion in annual costs to cope with losses from the loan portfolio.

Morgan Stanley

Credit-default swaps on Morgan Stanley also rose to distressed levels today, coming close to a record high reached last week after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection. Morgan Stanley and Goldman both won approval from the Federal Reserve to become bank holding companies, moving away from a business model that investors have deemed too dependent on borrowed money, or leverage.

Morgan Stanley contracts traded at 17.5 percentage points upfront in addition to 5 percentage points a year, according to Phoenix Partners. That compares with 783 basis points a year and no upfront payment yesterday, CMA data show. They earlier traded at a record 22 percentage points upfront, Phoenix prices show.

Credit-default swaps are financial instruments based on bonds and loans that are used to speculate on a company’s ability to repay debt. They were conceived to protect bondholders against default and pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities should the company fail to adhere to its debt agreements.

Goldman, Citigroup

Credit-default swaps on other banks also rose today. Contracts on Merrill Lynch & Co., which agreed to sell itself to Bank of America Corp. last week as Lehman collapsed, rose 94 basis points to 415, according to CMA. Goldman contracts rose 86 to 449.

Contracts on Citigroup jumped 115 basis points to 325 basis points, CMA data show. Bank of America rose 13 basis points to 161 basis points, Wells Fargo increased 38 to 159 and JPMorgan climbed 34 basis points to 156 basis points.

Contracts on the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index, a benchmark gauge of credit risk linked to 125 companies in the U.S. and Canada increased 2.5 basis points to 163.5 basis points, Phoenix prices show.

Contracts on WaMu traded at 61 percentage points upfront today, Phoenix prices show, down from 74 percentage points earlier.

To contact the reporters on this story: Shannon D. Harrington in New York at sharrington6@bloomberg.net; Abigail Moses in London Amoses5@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: September 26, 2008 18:13 EDT

Anti-White Attacks in Yorkshire: Gangs of Asian Youths Terrorise Pensioners

 

Gangs of Asian youths are tormenting elderly and disabled people in Staincliffe, Yorkshire, with foul-mouthed racist abuse, according to local newspaper The Press.
Residents living in a cul-de-sac on the edge of Staincliffe Estate say they are at the end of their tether after months of abuse.
The youths, aged from about 15 upwards, start congregating in Manor Way, close to Manorfields Infants School, from 4.10pm and hang around for hours on end, often up to midnight.
The yobs hurl abuse at passers-by, spitting racist comments at the elderly residents – all of whom are in their 70s and 80s.
The gang also makes lewd suggestions to girls and young women and on Saturday mocked a disabled man and threatened to tip him out of his wheelchair. In the past street signs have been pulled down and bins overturned. Cars have also been vandalised.
Police have been repeatedly called out but residents say nothing gets done. Now the residents, most of whom are too afraid to speak out publicly, are fighting back.
Residents’ spokesman Tony Gott, 71, said old people shouldn’t have to put up with the abuse.
“It has gone too far,” he said. “People are at the end of their tether and don’t know where to turn.”
“No one should have to live their lives in fear like this and when we go out to ask these youths to move on all we get is abuse.”
“They called me a ?fat, white bastard’ and the other day I was showered with a pile of bricks.”
“We had the police up here the other day and they spoke to this gang but they denied everything and the police said there was nothing they could do.”
“The police say ?we’ve taken their names’ but all that is a slap on the wrist. It doesn’t stop them.”
Retired builder Mr Gott, who has four sons, 11 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, has lived in the street for almost 15 years.
On Saturday teatime Mr Gott heard the youths hurling abuse at a disabled man in a wheelchair who lives further down the estate.
“They were wanting to have a fight with him so I went out and told them to stop picking on people in wheelchairs.”
“All I got was abuse and that it was nothing to do with me. They threatened to turn the wheelchair over.”
“The police think we are exaggerating but we are not. We are all poorly people up here and two of the residents have cancer. We just can’t go to bed and have a good night’s sleep anymore.”
The cul-de-sac is also a magnet for drug dealers and users who lurk in dark corners behind Manorfields school but it is the gangs that make residents most afraid.
“I think there should be a curfew to get them off the streets,” said Mr Gott. “Something has to be done.”
Insp Neil Money, of the Batley Neighbourhood Policing Team, said “We are working very closely with local schools, mosques, shopkeepers and our partner agencies in order to ensure that the quality of life for residents is improved.”
Something tells us they are not addressing the real cause of the problem.

Drilling Forward

By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 24, 2008 4:20 PM PT

Energy: In a stunning defeat, congressional Democrats were forced to allow the quarter-century-old offshore drilling ban to expire. But the fight has only begun, with the struggle now shifting to state legislatures.

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Read More: Energy

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Funny how the Democrat-controlled Congress can’t get the things it wants enacted, can’t even get a single appropriations bill passed, yet minority Republicans this week succeeded in ending a supposedly sacrosanct ban on oil and gas offshore drilling that dates back to the early 1980s.

It was an unexpectedly powerful knockdown of Democrats and their enviro-extremist allies, but they are not yet counted out.

GOP Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina noted in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., the possibility that Democrats would “use environmental lawsuits to block exploration until they can reinstate these energy bans after the November elections.” DeMint warned Reid that it “would be a major mistake.”

So with the ban ending, what are the next moves toward reducing America’s dependence on oil from hostile regimes in places such as the Middle East, Russia and leftist Venezuela?

DeMint has introduced a bill to expedite drilling leases, ensure that states share in oil and gas revenues, and prevent frivolous litigation designed to delay exploration for and production of oil.

Meanwhile, some state officials are already looking forward to the benefits for their citizens.

“The potential royalties to our state could be significant and could jump-start our economy in the midst of rising unemployment rates,” South Carolina State Sen. Shane Massey, a Republican, told the Greenville News.

Massey noted that Virginia has already made moves to get into the U.S. Interior Department’s five-year offshore drilling plan.

In California, where Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and leading Golden State Democrats adamantly oppose offshore production, a majority of Californians now favor drilling. Even the board of supervisors of Santa Barbara County, site of an infamous 1969 oil spill, last month voted to support drilling.

There are tens of billions of barrels of oil and hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of natural gas in our Outer Continental Shelf waiting for American consumers. That doesn’t include the 10 billion barrels of oil in the North Slope of Alaska. The oil shale in our Western states could provide hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of barrels of oil, dwarfing the crude reserves of current No. 1 Saudi Arabia.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, is calling the end of the ban just the beginning of a new comprehensive energy policy. The House Republicans’ American Energy Act would expand drilling in remote areas, both on land and at sea, plus employ conservationist measures and promote alternative fuels.

It would also establish a “renewable energy trust fund” financed by oil revenues and use revenue sharing to give states an incentive for increased oil production.

According to Boehner, “If Democrats continue to block a vote on this plan, just as they blocked a real debate and vote on the outdated drilling bans for months on end, Republicans and the American people will hold them accountable.”

Republicans are obviously basking in a congressional victory few expected. With public opinion so transformed, and oil drilling now an issue that Republicans have proved they can use to embarrass Democrats, can this year’s presidential and congressional elections also be transformed to the GOP’s advantage?

The answer will have huge implications not just for energy, but for both our economy and our national security.

 

Fwd: Denmark-cost of Social liberalism & Islam

Salute the Danish Flag – It’s a Symbol of Western Freedom

 By Susan MacAllen

 

In 1978-1979, I was living and studying in  Denmark ..
But in 1978 – even in  Copenhagen , one didn’t see Muslim immigrants.

The Danish population embraced visitors, celebrated the exotic, went out of its way to protect each of its citizens. It was proud of its new brand of socialist liberalism, one in development since the conservatives had lost power in 1929 – a system where no worker had to struggle to survive, where one ultimately could count upon the state as in, perhaps, no other western nation at the time.

The rest of  Europe  saw the Scandinavians as free-thinking, progressive and infinitely generous in their welfare policies. Denmark boasted low crime rates, devotion to the environment, a superior educational system and a history of humanitarianism.

Denmark was also most generous in its immigration policies – it offered the best welcome in Europe to the new immigrant: generous welfare payments from first arr ival plus additional perks in transportation, housing and education. It was determined to set a world example for inclusiveness and multiculturalism.

How could it have predicted that one day in 2005 a series of political cartoons in a newspaper would spark violence that would leave dozens dead in the streets – all because its commitment to multiculturalism would come back to bite?

By the 1990’s the growing urban Muslim population was obvious – and its unwillingness to integrate into Danish society was obvious.

Years of immigrants had settled into Muslim-exclusive enclaves. As the Muslim leadership became more vocal about what they considered the decadence of  Denmark ’s liberal way of life, the Danes – once so welcoming – began to feel slighted. Many Danes had begun to see Islam a s incompatible with their long-standing values: belief in personal liberty and free speech, in equality for women, in tolerance for other ethnic groups, and a deep pride in Danish heritage and history.

The  New York  Post in 2002 ran an article by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard, in which they forecasted accurately that the growing immigrant problem in  Denmark  would explode In the article they reported:

‘Muslim immigrants constitute 5 percent of the population but consume upwards of 40 percent of the welfare spending.’ ‘Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark’s 5.4 million people but make up a majority of the country’s convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes.

”Over time, as Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish less to mix with the indigenous population.

A recent survey finds that only 5 percent of young Muslim immigrants would readily marry a Dane.’ ‘Forced marriag es – promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male cousin in the home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on pain of death – are one problem’

‘Muslim leaders openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once Denmark ’s Muslim population grows large enough – a not-that-remote prospect. If present trends persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant of  Denmark  in 40 years will be Muslim.’

It is easy to understand why a growing number of Danes would feel that Muslim immigrants show little respect for Danish values and laws.

An example is the phenomenon common to other European countries and the  US  : some Muslims in  Denmark  who opted to leave the Muslim faith have been murdered in the name of Islam, while20others hide in fear for their lives. Jews are also threatened and harassed openly by Muslim leaders in Denmark , a country where once Christian citizens worked to smuggle out nearly all of their 7,000 Jews by night to  Sweden  – before the Nazis could invade. I think of my Danish friend Elsa – who as a teenager had dreaded crossing the street to the bakery every morning under the eyes of occupying Nazi soldiers – and I wonder what she would say today.

In 2001,  Denmark  elected the most conservative government in some 70 years – one that had some decidedly non-generous ideas about liberal unfettered Immigration. Today  Denmark  has the strictest immigration policies in  Europe  . ( Its effort to protect itself has been met with accusations of ‘racism’ by liberal media across Europe – even as other governments struggle to right the social problems wrought by years of too-lax immigration.)

If you wish to become Danish, you must attend three years of language classes.. You must pass a test on  Denmark ’s history, culture, and a Danish language test.

You must live in  Denmark  for 7 years before applying for citizenship.. You must demonstrate an intent to work, and have a job waiting. If you wish to bring a spouse into  Denmark  , you must both be over 24 years of age, and you won’t find it so easy any more to move your friends and family to  Denmark  with you.

You will not be allowed to build a mosque in  Copenhagen  . Although your children have a choice of some 30 Arabic culture and language schools in  Denmark  , they will be strongly encouraged to assimilate to Danish society in ways that past immigrants weren’t..

In 2006, the Danish minister for employment, Claus Hjort Frederiksen, spoke publicly o f the burden of Muslim immigrants on the Danish welfare system, and it was horrifying: the government’s welfare committee had calculated that if immigration from Third World countries were blocked, 75 percent of the cuts needed to sustain the huge welfare system in coming decades would be unnecessary. In other words, the welfare system as it existed was being exploited by immigrants to the point of eventually bankrupting the government. ‘We are simply forced to adopt a new policy on immigration.

The calculations of the welfare committee are terrifying and show how unsuccessful the integration of immigrants has been up to now,’ he said..
 

A large thorn in the side of  Denmark  ’s imams is the Minister of Immigration and Integration, Rikke Hvilshoj. She makes no bones about the new policy toward immigration, ‘The number of foreigners coming to the country makes a difference,’ Hvilshøj says, ‘There is an inverse correlation between how many come here and how well we can receive the foreigners that come.’ And on Musl im immigrants needing to demonstrate a willingness to blend in, ‘In my view,  Denmark  should be a country with room for different cultures and religions. Some values, however, are more important than others. We refuse to question democracy, equal rights, and freedom of speech.’

Hvilshoj has paid a price for her show of backbone. Perhaps to test her resolve, the leading radical imam in Denmark , Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, demanded that the government pay blood money to the family of a Muslim who was murdered in a suburb of Copenhagen , stating that the family’s thirst for revenge could be thwarted for money. When Hvilshoj dismissed his demand, he argued that in Muslim culture the payment of retribution money was common, to which Hvilshoj replied that what is done in a Muslim country is not necessarily what is done in Denmark. The Muslim reply came soon after: her house was torched while she, her husband and children slept. All managed to escape unharmed, but she and her family were moved to a secret location and she and other ministers were assigned bodyguards for the first time – in a country where such murderous violence was once so scarce.&n bsp;

Her government has slid to the right, and her borders have tightened. Many believe that what happens in the next decade will determine whether  Denmark  survives as a bastion of good living, humane thinking and social responsibility, or whether it becomes a nation at civil war with supporters of Sharia law.

And meanwhile, Americans clamor for stricter immigration policies, and demand an end to state welfare programs that allow many immigrants to live on the public dole. As we in America look at the enclaves of Muslims and illegal Hispanics amongst us, and see those who enter our shores too easily, dare live on our taxes, yet refuse to embrace our culture, respect our traditions, participate in our legal system, obey our laws, speak our language, appreciate our history. We would do well to look to  Denmark , and say a prayer for her future and for our own.

Betting on Financial Armageddon (John Mauldin)

In this issue: Pricing in Financial Armageddon Inside a RMBS Ratings to Collateral to Ratings: A Vicious Cycle This Too Shall Pass South Africa, Boulder and Stand Up to Cancer

My Dad used to tell me there is no accounting for standards when looking at something that seemed odd. Today, we have faulty standards for accounting that are ripping apart the fabric of the world’s economy. How can a security that has a high probability of full repayment be downgraded from AA to junk levels? What we will explore today tell us a lot about why we are in the crisis state of affairs. Since I wrote you last Friday, the financial landscape of the world has changed even more. And what will happen this weekend will change it even more. And our kids will be paying for it for a long, long time. At the end I offer a few thoughts on the events, and if there is time my thoughts on the new short covering rules. All in all, it should make for an instructive and interesting letter. We’ll jump right in with no “but first.” I was invited to an invitation only presentation to a room of chief executives of a number of small Texas banks made by Rich Berg of Performance Trust Capital Partners this week (http://ptcp.performancetrust.com). He graciously gave me permission to go over the main points of his presentation. I think you will find it eye-opening to say the least. You probably have seen Rich, as he is all over the media lately. Let’s jump back 18 months. I spent several letters going over how subprime mortgages were sold and then securitized. Let’s quickly review. Huge Investment Bank (HIB) would encourage mortgage banks all over the country to make home loans, often providing the capital, and then HIB would purchase these loans and package them into large securities called Residential Mortgage Backed Securities or RMBS. They would take loans from different mortgage banks and different regions. They generally grouped the loans together as to their initial quality as in prime mortgages, ALT-A and the now infamous subprime mortgages. They also grouped together second lien loans, which were the loans generally made to get 100% financing or cash-out financing as home owners borrowed against the equity in their homes. Typically, a RMBS would be sliced into anywhere from 5 to 15 different pieces called tranches.  They would go to the ratings agencies, who would give them a series of ratings on the various tranches, and who actually had a hand in saying what the size of each tranche could be. The top or senior level tranche had the rights to get paid back first in the event there was a problem with some of the underlying loans. That tranche was typically rated AAA. Then the next tranche would be rated AA and so on down to junk level. The lowest level was called the equity level, and this lowest level would take the first losses. For that risk, they also got any residual funds if everyone paid. The lower levels paid very high yields for the risk they took. Then, since it was hard to sell some of the lower levels of these securities, HIB would take a lot of the lower level tranches and put them into another security called a Collateralized Debt Obligation or CDO. And yes, they sliced them up into tranches and went to the rating agencies and got them rated. The highest tranche was typically again AAA. Through the alchemy of finance, HIB took subprime mortgages and turned 96% (give or take a few points depending on the CDO) of them into AAA bonds. At the time, I compared it with taking nuclear waste and turning it into gold. Clever trick when you can do it, and everyone, from mortgage broker to investment bankers was paid handsomely to dance at the party. Will we ever forget Charlie Prince’s line, the CEO of Citigroup, saying that “As long as they are playing music, you have to get up and dance?” just a few weeks before the market imploded? Apart from having his rhythm being proven totally horrendous and overseeing an implosion which cost Citigroup tens of billions, it was a great statement of the zeitgeist of the financial world at the time. The key word here is model. The ratings agencies used data supplied by the investment banks on what the likely default rates would be. It was something like taking an open book test where you get to write the questions. And since home values had only gone up, default rates were low. And of course, the data was from an ear when bankers lent money actually expecting to get paid back. Inside a RMBS Let’s look at a RMBS. As Berg points out, when you are buying a mortgage backed security, there are really only three questions you need to know the answers to: How many mortgages will default? How much will I get back on a defaulted loan? How much credit enhancement is there in the security? Let’s set the table by looking at a few terms and definitions. Using his example, let’s take a mortgage where the home was originally appraised for $400,000 and there is a $300,000 mortgage on the home. Let’s assume a default and the bank takes back the home. If they sell the home and recover $240,000 that means they lose $60,000. This is called a 20% severity. If they sold and recovered $150,000 it would be said to have a 50% severity. Next, let’s look at how the rating agencies come up with the AAA rating. First they model the expected losses, with emphasis on the word model. If they figure that worst case that 8% of the loans default at a severity of 50%, then the security would lose 4% of its value. To get an AAA rating you have to have at least two times the coverage of the “modeled” loss. In this illustration, that means that 92% of the loans would be put into the AAA tranche. An A rating assumes a coverage of more than 1 times but less than 2. B means you expect to get your money back and if they model that you will get below 100% back then the rating would be at junk levels. Now, this next fact is important. All ratings assume a par value of 100. The rating of these bonds has nothing to do with price. After the presentation, Rich sat down with me and pulled up an actual mortgage backed security that was being offered that day on his screen. It was once a AAA rated Alt-A security. If I remember correctly it was a 2006 vintage security. As of the latest reporting, a little over 5% of the mortgages were over 60 days past due or in foreclosure. In this security, there are no toxic option ARMS. The numbers of mortgages in this security that are in trouble are rising. S&P has downgraded that AAA tranche to BBB, which of course means its value is going down. And sure enough, the offered price of the security is 70 cents on the dollar, or 70% of the original par value. Now remember, this particular AAA bond will only start to lose money after the lower tranches take up the first 8% of losses. Thus, this bond can be said to have an 8% credit enhancement. Pricing in Financial Armageddon Now, let’s stress test that loan. For the AAA portion of the loan to lose money, that would mean that 16% of the loans would have to default with a severity of 50% losses. Could that happen? Sure. But let’s look at what buying that loan at 70 cents on the dollar does for the new owner. First, you are getting a much higher yield (interest rate) because you are buying the security at a lower valuation. But something else even more interesting happens. Even though the security sold at 70 cents, it still gets all of the first of the proceeds of the home owners who pay their mortgages, up to 92% of the original value in the security. How many loans would have to default in order to make the buyer at 70 cents lose money? Remember, we already had credit enhancement of 8%. But at 70 cents, we just “bought” or priced in another 30%. Let’s think Armageddon and that 50% of the mortgages default and they only recover 50% of the loans. That would only be a total loss of 25% to the entire collateral of the deal, but it would mean that the new investor still get all of my 70 cents plus another 13% back! The proud new owner could get up to 92% of the monies paid. Even in a pretty bad scenario, you get more than you paid for the security. Let’s walk through the math. Let’s say the original security was $100 million (which would be a very small RMBS). The AAA tranche would have cost $92 billion. If you have it at 70 cents on the dollar you paid approximately $64 billion. In my Armageddon scenario above, the security loses 25% or $250 million. The lower rated tranches are completely wiped out losing $8 billion. Your tranche loses the remaining $17 billion which means you get $75 billion and you only paid $64 billion. So, how bad would things have to get to lose money on this security? If I am doing the math right, 72% of the loans would have to default with a severity of 50% before your investment of $64 billion was impaired by even so much as 1 dollar. If that happened, it would be Armageddon. So, why is it rated BBB? Because the rating is over the entire tranche and it is made at a par price of 100. The rating is not affected by the current price. As of today, assuming that even double the number of mortgages currently delinquent default with a 50% severity, your returns over the life of the security would be well over 12%. You would get back $92 million for your $64 billion dollar investment along with interest payments. The reason this presentation was being made to banks and institutions? Because if you are a bank, you can generally only get prime plus 2% on a loan you make. But if you buy this security with your capital, you can make prime plus 6%. That is a large difference to a bank. Performance Trust has sold billions of this type of paper to banks and institutions. If this is such a good deal, then why isn’t everyone hitting the bid? Because these securities are very difficult to analyze. It is time consuming. You need to analyze every loan and develop your own valuations. You simply can’t trust the ratings, as they are measuring something completely different. And the real truth is that many of the various RMBS securities will in fact be totally wiped out or lose a great deal. Many are seeing default rates of 30% or more. You have to be very careful when you walk through this minefield. And in a time of crisis, it is not clear what the new rules will be. What if the government forces lenders to re-set mortgages at some loss level? What if the housing crisis gets worse? On the other hand, what if the government comes in and buys up all the bad mortgages in an attempt to stop the erosion in the home markets. The level of uncertainty in these times makes people a lot more cautious. There are Alt-A RMBS like the one mentioned above that are probably not worth even 70 cents on the dollar. These things are marked to a market that is frozen. Everything gets lumped into the same basket and it all has to be marked to market by the new accounting rules called FASB 157. The institution selling the above mentioned security is being forced to do so, either because they are in financial trouble or they are not allowed to hold BBB securities in their portfolios and by law are required to sell. And in times of crisis, the selling price is not that of normal times. Ratings to Collateral to Ratings: A Vicious Cycle What’s a recipe for a perfect financial storm? Let’s make a massive amount of bad loans and get them on the books of most of the major financial institutions because they are rated investment grade. Then let’s have the loans start to go bad. Throw in some general panic as everyone tries to sell the loans. No one is buying. Let’s make a new rule that you have to mark your illiquid securities to the last price paid by someone desperate to sell. That means that many institutions now have to mark their capital down and that means those pesky rating agencies must by their own rules mark down the ratings of the institutions which of course means that it costs them more to raise capital at a time when they can’t get it which means they get lower ratings and so on. It becomes a vicious cycle. In the early 80’s, every major US bank was bankrupt because they had loaned Latin American countries far more than their capital they had on their books. The Latin American countries defaulted. If the US banks had been forced to mark to market, they would have all gone down taking the US economy along with them. So, the Fed simply allowed them to carry the loans at book value, offering liquidity and allowing the banks to buy time to make enough money to eventually write off the loans. The current mark to market rule, while nice in theory, works in normal times. But it has the unintended consequence of making things worse in crisis times. Why should an institution have to write down a security which over time is going to pay back the lion’s share or more of its value just because a severely stressed institution was forced to sell that security at a very low price in a time of crisis? Yes, there needs to be transparency and we as investors need to know what is on the books of the companies that we invest in. But it is somewhat like my bank asking me to mark to market my home and pricing my loan daily based on that new price. If my neighbor loses his job and sells his home at auction, does that mean my home is now worth less two years from now. Maybe an even better analogy, if I am renting that home to a very good tenant, does my neighbor’s price impair my income? I was, and am, a fan of mark to market pricing. But we need to think through what a market price is. Not all things can be easily marked to market. This is doubly true when “market price” is a nebulous index of mortgage securities which may or not have a fundamental relationship with an illiquid security on the books of an institution which has no intention of selling, especially in a time of credit crisis. It is one thing to require that you mark your stocks or bonds to market values. It is another thing entirely to require all mortgage backed securities, which are extremely complex things, can be very different one from another and which require a lot of time and effort to value, to be priced as though they are all the same. FASB 157 needs to be amended this week. If Congress can create a new Resolution Trust Corp in a week, the surely the accounting board, with the suggestion of Treasury, can figure out a better way to price illiquid securities. This Too Shall Pass I know that you probably are reeling from all that has happened the past few months and especially the past two weeks. Lehman and Mother Merrill gone? We the people own AIG? Fannie and Freddie? A new housing bailout which will cost hundreds of billions? The Fed creating whole new programs to provide liquidity? Did you notice they loaned some $250 billion this last week to banks all over the world? Stopping short selling? Want to see in graph form how bad it got and what spooked Paulson, Bernanke and company to act so quickly? Look at these graphs from my friends at Casey Research (http://www.caseyresearch.com/crpmkt/crpSolo.php?id=119&ppref=JMD119ED0908A). 30 day commercial paper went to 5% from 3% a week ago. The market was literally freezing. And the amount of paper issued is in free fall. Commercial paper is the life blood of the financial and business world. Without it commerce will soon grind to a halt. It simply takes your breathe away. As President Bush said today, it does not help to find who is at fault today, we have to figure out how to get out of this mess. It is going to cost the taxpayers a lot of money. While I think the losses on AIG will be rather minor in the grand scheme of things, if you add up Fannie and Freddie and a new RTC, coupled with the stimulus package, you can easily get to $500 billion, and that is probably a low number. For such a price, we had better get a new regulatory scheme which requires reduced leverage. Want to get really mad? Up until 2003, all investment banks were allowed only 12 to 1 leverage. Then in 2004, the SEC basically gave five banks (and only five banks) the ability to lever up 30 or even 40 to 1. Bet you can guess the five banks. Bear, Lehman, Merrill, Morgan and Goldman. Three down. As Barry Ritholtz wrote: “So while the SEC runs around reinstating short selling rules, and clueless pension fund managers mindlessly point to the wrong issue, we learn that it was the SEC who was in large part responsible for the reckless leverage that led to the current crisis.“  (Don’t get me started on blaming the short sellers. Let’s not blame the people who leveraged up their companies 40 to 1 with bad investments.) We absolutely must move credit default swaps to a regulated exchange, no matter how much investment banks and hedge funds scream. Must be done. Do it now. Real rules about writing mortgages, although now that losses are in the hundreds of billions, underwriting rules are already becoming quite restrictive. And while we are at it, a thorough revamping of the rating agencies and the rules they use should be at the top of someone’s list. South Africa, Boulder and Stand Up to Cancer It is time to hit the send button. Chuck Butler of Everbank and Thomas Fischer of Jyske Bank just walked into the office to watch the Texas Rangers play Anaheim from my balcony (which is inside the Ballpark where the Rangers play). That would be baseball to those not from the states. Chuck is a huge baseball fan and when I heard he was going to be in town I had to have him come, even on a writing day. Everbank is known for letting clients open CDs denominated in scores of different currencies. If you are interested in diversifying away from the dollar, you can go to Everbank.com. Or call EverBank at 800-926-4922. Chuck has had some very serious cancer, and has been going through lots of chemo. He just told me that his latest scan shows him 100% cancer free, and he is going off the chemo. Sometimes good things do happen to good guys. And speaking of cancer, Stand Up to Cancer is a charity formed to raise money to find cures for cancer and fund innovative new therapies and research. SU2C is going to make a difference in how cancer research is conducted over the next five years, with its focus on targeted treatments that interrupt the mechanisms of uncontrolled cell growth.  This is the kind of emphasis that can make cancer into a disease patients live with, rather than one they die from (sort of like AIDS has become for most of its victims in developed countries). You can and should see the program broadcast live a few weeks ago on most major networks. And then send money. Their web site, with tons of information is http://www.standup2cancer.org/ and the TV show is at http://www.nbc.com/Movies_Specials_More/Stand_Up_To_Cancer/video/episodes/. I leave for Cape Town in South Africa tomorrow morning. I will be speaking at the ABSIP (Association for Black Securities & Investment Professionals) Annual Conference in Cape Town on September 23. Then that evening I fly to London for meetings with my partners and clients there and fly back to Dallas on Thursday. I hope to be able to keep up with what is going on and write the letter next Friday. And then Sunday I fly to Boulder to meet with Dr. Bart Stuck and learn about a company called InPhase which is making holographic memory. Pretty cutting edge stuff. I mention this because it is companies like InPhase, and a thousand more like them, which will power the next big wave of change. The crisis on Wall Street will pass and the world will continue to change. I think it is going to change for the better for most people. The game ahs started, so I think I am going to find an adult beverage and really, truly celebrate with Chuck, who was on the road when he got the news. I know he will be celebrating with his family when he gets home. Your not looking forward to a 15 hour flight analyst, John Mauldin John@FrontLineThoughts.com Copyright 2008 John Mauldin. All Rights Reserved Note: The generic Accredited Investor E-letters are not an offering for any investment. It represents only the opinions of John Mauldin and Millennium Wave Investments. It is intended solely for accredited investors who have registered with Millennium Wave Investments and Altegris Investments at www.accreditedinvestor.ws or directly related websites and have been so registered for no less than 30 days. The Accredited Investor E-Letter is provided on a confidential basis, and subscribers to the Accredited Investor E-Letter are not to send this letter to anyone other than their professional investment counselors. Investors should discuss any investment with their personal investment counsel. John Mauldin is the President of Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC (MWA), which is an investment advisory firm registered with multiple states. John Mauldin is a registered representative of Millennium Wave Securities, LLC, (MWS), an FINRA registered broker-dealer. MWS is also a Commodity Pool Operator (CPO) and a Commodity Trading Advisor (CTA) registered with the CFTC, as well as an Introducing Broker (IB). Millennium Wave Investments is a dba of MWA LLC and MWS LLC. Millennium Wave Investments cooperates in the consulting on and marketing of private investment offerings with other independent firms such as Altegris Investments; Absolute Return Partners, LLP; Pro-Hedge Funds; EFG Capital International Corp; and Plexus Asset Management. Funds recommended by Mauldin may pay a portion of their fees to these independent firms, who will share 1/3 of those fees with MWS and thus with Mauldin. Any views expressed herein are provided for information purposes only and should not be construed in any way as an offer, an endorsement, or inducement to invest with any CTA, fund, or program mentioned here or elsewhere. Before seeking any advisor’s services or making an investment in a fund, investors must read and examine thoroughly the respective disclosure document or offering memorandum. Since these firms and Mauldin receive fees from the funds they recommend/market, they only recommend/market products with which they have been able to negotiate fee arrangements.

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You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print as long as the following is included: John Mauldin, Best-Selling author and recognized financial expert, is also editor of the free Thoughts From the Frontline that goes to over 1 million readers each week. For more information on John or his FREE weekly economic letter go to: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/learnmore To subscribe to John Mauldin’s E-Letter please click here: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/subscribe.asp To change your email address please click here: http://www.frontlinethoughts.com/change.asp If you would ALSO like changes applied to the Accredited Investor E- Letter, please include your old and new email address along with a note requesting the change for both e-letters and send your request to wave@frontlinethoughts.com To unsubscribe please refer to the bottom of the email. PAST RESULTS ARE NOT INDICATIVE OF FUTURE RESULTS. THERE IS RISK OF LOSS AS WELL AS THE OPPORTUNITY FOR GAIN WHEN INVESTING IN MANAGED FUNDS. WHEN CONSIDERING ALTERNATIVE INVESTMENTS, INCLUDING HEDGE FUNDS, YOU SHOULD CONSIDER VARIOUS RISKS INCLUDING THE FACT THAT SOME PRODUCTS: OFTEN ENGAGE IN LEVERAGING AND OTHER SPECULATIVE INVESTMENT PRACTICES THAT MAY INCREASE THE RISK OF INVESTMENT LOSS, CAN BE ILLIQUID, ARE NOT REQUIRED TO PROVIDE PERIODIC PRICING OR VALUATION INFORMATION TO INVESTORS, MAY INVOLVE COMPLEX TAX STRUCTURES AND DELAYS IN DISTRIBUTING IMPORTANT TAX INFORMATION, ARE NOT SUBJECT TO THE SAME REGULATORY REQUIREMENTS AS MUTUAL FUNDS, OFTEN CHARGE HIGH FEES, AND IN MANY CASES THE UNDERLYING INVESTMENTS ARE NOT TRANSPARENT AND ARE KNOWN ONLY TO THE INVESTMENT MANAGER. John Mauldin is also president of Millennium Wave Advisors, LLC, a registered investment advisor. All material presented herein is believed to be reliable but we cannot attest to its accuracy. All material represents the opinions of John Mauldin. Investment recommendations may change and readers are urged to check with their investment counselors before making any investment decisions. Opinions expressed in these reports may change without prior notice. John Mauldin and/or the staff at Thoughts from the Frontline may or may not have investments in any funds cited above. Mauldin can be reached at 800-829-7273.

Poll: McCain has slight lead in Ohio over Obama

By The Associated Press – 6 hours agoTHE POLL: The Ohio Newspaper Poll, presidential race, likely Ohio voters (20 electoral votes).

THE NUMBERS: John McCain 48 percent, Barack Obama 42 percent.

OF INTEREST: Almost half of Ohio voters, or 47 percent, say they are worse off than four years ago. About one-third, 34 percent, said they were the same, while 19 percent said they were better off. The candidates have lined up support within their own party, with 85 percent of Republicans saying they would vote for McCain and 81 percent of Democrats in favor of Obama. Obama has the edge among independent voters, 38 percent to 33 percent for McCain, with 19 percent still undecided.

DETAILS: Conducted from Sept. 12-16 by landline telephones among 869 likely Ohio voters. Sampling error plus or minus 3.3 percent.

MORE: http://blog.cleveland.com/openers/2008/09/ONOpoll.pdf

Tolerance and Diversity

Tolerance is a false label to promote double standards. Otherwise, the use of the word tolerance – usually in connexion with another word: diversity – would not mean what it is ostensibly connoted for. That is, tolerance without diversity means forebearance. On the other hand, tolerance with diversity means parallel or ‘double’ standards. In the sense that tolerance is a good thing in and of itself, lobbyists for the same might as well be promoting lawlessness, because that is what tolerance is in the context in which it is used – i.e., in terms of social standards. However, when tolerance is coupled with diversity – i.e., ethnic and cultural – it refers to multiple standards for judging social behavior.

Huge shifts ahead after financial titans fall (Wash Post)

Investment banks took ever-greater risks on esoteric investment

Employees leave the New York Stock Exchange on Friday after a tumultuous week. Stocks rallied Friday with the Dow rising 369 points.

The credit crisis shaking the global economy is forcing a dramatic reconfiguration of Wall Street, where the financial industry in recent years has been driven to take ever-greater risks on increasingly esoteric investments.

The fragility of Wall Street’s architecture was exposed this week when two icons of investment banking and the world’s largest insurance company were fed into the maw as their competitors pushed for a historic government bailout to help salvage their own shaky businesses.

It is too early to tell whether Wall Street has truly been transformed by the series of upheavals or is simply witnessing a shuffling of its players. But as dealmakers and policymakers now sift through the debris, some shifts are already evident, both in the structure of high finance and the culture of those who practice it.

“The competitive landscape of finance is changing before our eyes and the losers are the investment banks,” said Roger Leeds, director of the Center for International Business and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University. “What we’re having now is a fundamental correction, not only of the market but of the institutions themselves.”

Three out of five fallen
Three of the five free-standing investment banks have fallen. Bear Stearns was sold at a fire sale, 158-year-old Lehman Brothers went bankrupt and Merrill Lynch is being acquired by Bank of America. The surviving titans, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, remain under pressure and have been weighing their options.

As financial analysts survey the horizon, they see the emergence of a handful of giant, global firms that manage a wide range of business activities alongside several boutique advisory firms that court blue-chip clients. Newer players will remain on the scene, including hedge funds and private-equity firms — both lightly regulated entities that manage pools of money for wealthy investors and often buy large holdings in securities or sometimes directly invest in companies.

These changes could be accompanied by a cultural shift as the sheen comes off a longtime career destination for those with the brains, ambition and fortitude to place high-stakes wagers in return for outsize paydays.

Already, the shakeout is costing jobs and ruining fortunes. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg estimates 40,000 workers in New York state, including many well beyond Wall Street, could lose their jobs as a result of the financial crisis.

Birth of a new system?
Whether these changes portend a permanent remaking of Wall Street remains uncertain. The answer could turn in part on whether the government’s rescue plan announced Friday succeeds. If the massive bailout fails, the destruction wrought on global financial markets could be staggering, ultimately clearing the way for the birth of a new system.

If the federal plan works, most of Wall Street could be spared and the business model that has powered it in recent years — centered on complex securities, tremendous borrowing and opaque dealings — could resume much as before. That is, unless the inevitable excesses are tamed by new regulation.

The fall of the investment bank was of its own making, analysts said. Starting in the 1980s, investment banks began straying from their traditional roles as intermediaries to mergers and acquisitions, investment advisers to corporations and individuals, traders of securities and portfolio managers for wealthy clients.

Driven by competition and the hunger for bigger profits, they began to aggressively push exotic products like asset-backed securities and other derivatives.

The investment banks not only sold these instruments to investors but also began purchasing them for the firms’ own accounts, using larger and larger amounts of borrowed money. The more risks investment bankers took, the more money they made. Internal controls were lax.

“I don’t think they had a good appreciation of the risks they were taking,” said Ray Hill, a finance professor at Emory University.

Balkanized oversight

Nor were government regulators fully aware of the gathering storm. They were hobbled by balkanized oversight and gaps in disclosure rules.

“The problem is transparency because regulators weren’t able to assess risks at investment banks in the way they are able to with commercial banks,” said Mark Gertler, an economics professor at New York University.

Two of the big five investment houses have landed in the arms of commercial banks with Bank of America’s purchase of Merrill and J.P. Morgan Chase’s takeover of Bear Stearns. Meanwhile, the British bank Barclays is acquiring choice bits of Lehman (a bankruptcy judge in New York yesterday approved the sale of nearly all Lehman’s assets), and Morgan Stanley is considering a merger with Wachovia, one of the country’s largest commercial banks.

With the merger of investment banks into commercial banks and leaders of both political parties pressing for new regulations to enhance transparency and control over banks’ investments, analysts say the new Wall Street could be a throwback to previous decades.

Investment and commercial banking was separated by law in 1933, when Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act in response to a banking crisis that ushered in the Great Depression. By banning banks from selling stocks and bonds, the government aimed to end abuses that caused the collapse of thousands of banks across the country, wiping out the deposits of millions of customers who, at the time, did not have the benefit of federally guaranteed deposit insurance.

In recent decades U.S. banks, facing competition from foreign counterparts that had no restrictions barring them from owning brokerages, found loopholes in the law to open or acquire new business lines. In 1999, Congress conceded to the new reality, repealing the 1933 law with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

Commercial banks moved increasingly into the traditional domain of investment houses, in some cases acquiring them outright, such as the marquee purchase of Chase Manhattan Bank by J.P. Morgan in 2000. As investment banks faced heightened competition in their traditional business lines, these enterprises leveraged up with borrowed money and went looking for profits, betting on ever-riskier securities and derivatives. That is the trend the crisis of 2008 may reverse, at least for a time.

“It will tend to tone down some of the behaviors,” said Thomas Atteberry, a partner in First Pacific Advisors, who moved 5 percent of his company’s portfolio out of mortgage-related securities in 2006 in anticipation of a credit market meltdown.

‘Take risks to get paid’
But even as the formal line between different stripes of banks became blurry, investment and commercial banking remained divided by culture.

“Investment bankers get paid for performance, so they take risks to get paid,” said Sam Weiser, a former Citigroup employee who now is chief operating officer of the Chicago-based hedge fund Sellers Capital. “The prevailing goals of commercial bankers are to protect assets.”

Investment banks also tend to be more decentralized. “What makes Merrill’s investment banking model work is that they attract high-powered, entrepreneurial people who build businesses within a business, and commercial banks do not work that way,” said Hill, the Emory finance professor. “The question is: Does the culture of Merrill that made it so successful, is that going to survive in a huge organization?”

Traditionally, many investment bankers shunned their colleagues on the commercial side as stodgy and risk-averse. But now, as institutions meld so must the psychology, analysts say.

“There will be a merger of two ways of doing business,” said Seamus McMahon, a financial services partner at Booz & Co., a global management consulting firm. “The stand-alone investment bank may have been an accident of history. It had its run and it’s over or at least vastly diminished.”

The new management, analysts say, will emerge from the ranks of commercial bankers.

“That is the superior force, and that changes the nature of how things are approached,” said Len Rushfield, adjunct professor of finance at Pepperdine University. “The commercial banking world is built on relationships and continuity and not on high levels of incentive compensation.”

Future for compensation levels
The first test for the future of Wall Street banking could come over compensation levels: whether the investment banking stars who placed big bets and were awarded big salaries and bonuses in return continue to get paid.

When John Thain was still Merrill’s chief executive earlier this year, for example, he hired a legendary trading manager from Goldman Sachs named Thomas K. Montag. The tab, disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission: annual salary of $600,000, signing bonus of $39.4 million plus a promise to reimburse him for Goldman shares he forfeited for an estimated total of $50 million.

Analysts wonder if Bank of America Chairman Kenneth D. Lewis would agree to pay that amount.

If Wall Street loses its lure of big riches, it could have trouble attracting top talent.

“Most business students don’t go into investment banking because they love finance so much, but because it pays well,” said Francisco Cabeza, a student at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business who has a job offer at a private-equity firm in London.

Richard X. Bove, an analyst at Ladenburg Thalmann & Co., predicted that the crisis could spark a start-up boom on Wall Street, with hot demand for small boutique investment firms focused on one or two specialties. He said these firms could fill a niche as behemoths like Bank of America and Citigroup grow so large that they cannot serve all their corporate clients because of conflicts of interest.

World centers to benefit
Some analysts also see some of Wall Street’s influence being redistributed overseas as business migrates to other places with money. “New York will be the first among equals but absolutely not the place. Normally it was London and New York,” said McMahon, the management consultant. “I think we’ll see Abu Dhabi grow. Singapore. I think we’ll see India if they can get their regulations straightened out.”

Nor was the earthquake that rocked U.S. financial markets a tragedy for all involved. For those with strong enough balance sheets and money to spend, the recent weeks have presented a unique chance to buy. Bank of America’s Lewis was one notable winner.

Even Lewis posits that a chastened financial industry is entering a new phase.

“It seems unlikely that most companies would simply volunteer to pull back the reins on profit and growth in a hot market. But, in fact, that’s precisely what needs to happen,” said Lewis, according to a prepared text of a speech he gave Friday in Washington. “We must embrace the reality of what will be, at least in the short term, a smaller industry with a simpler approach to finance.”

Special Correspondent Heather Landy in New York and staff writer Robin Shulman contributed.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company

Campaigns have to face financial mess

Obama, McCain say they have a solution

By TODD SPANGLER
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF

WASHINGTON –There’s more to it than lipstick on pigs.

The defining issue of the presidential campaign — the economy — confronted the nominees this week in the starkest of terms. This came about as the meltdown on Wall Street and government bailouts sent Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama scrambling to find footing on uncertain terrain where any misstep could end their hopes for the White House.

It sets the stage for a six-week run to Nov. 4 that promises to look more like off-road racing in mud-covered monster trucks than a dignified dash between two thoroughbreds.

Today, as Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson talked up a still-vague program — expected to be finalized and approved as early as next week — potentially committing hundreds of billions of tax dollars to buy up bad loans and stabilize housing and financial markets, both candidates honed their messages with the possibility the U.S. economy could collapse before Election Day. “This is just an incredible outcome,” said Dana Johnson, Comerica’s chief economist, based in Dallas. “The only precedent that comes close is the bank failures of the 1930s.”

Now voters can add to the long list of issues — the solvency of Social Security, health care, energy policies, tax policies and the war in Iraq — this big one: who has the best plan to bring regulatory reform to the financial markets.

“The array of economic issues that are going to have to be dealt with by the next president is just mind-boggling,” Johnson said. That doesn’t make the choice easier for voters, but it sharpens campaign strategy.

It also adds import to next Friday’s first of three presidential debates. It is to focus on domestic issues. “The first debate may well decide the whole thing,” said Joe Trippi, who ran Howard Dean’s unsuccessful 2004 presidential campaign, but also helped provide a model for the grassroots support Obama has tapped this year.

Accusations fly both ways

A week ago it seemed the bright shiny object in the campaign — McCain’s pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate — might divert attention from tough issues. It all changed with Wall Street’s meltdown and the Bush administration’s response — a rush toward federal intervention that may have seemed surprising for the Republican White House but was generally supported by both nominees.

Obama should have an advantage on economic doubts in battleground states like Michigan and Ohio precisely because a Republican is president and a backlash could be expected.

But that edge is dubious, especially in Michigan where a Democratic governor has been unable to steer the economy into safer harbor.

The Wall Street turmoil gives McCain an opportunity — as long as he can avoid serious missteps like early this week when he said the economy was “fundamentally strong.”

Already staking a claim to being “the original maverick” for bolting his party at times — on immigration and tax cuts, for example — the financial crisis gives him a chance to appear strong and bipartisan, as well as well-prepared to moderate a free-market philosophy for the good of the country.

Obama, of course, has the same chance to make his case as the agent of clear-thinking change.

McCain called today for more investment transparency, regulatory reform and creation of a trust to bolster mortgage holders and financial institutions. On Thursday, he said he’d fire the Securities and Exchange Commission chair (though there’s a question whether the president can).

But he also sounded a partisan note, taking to task Democrats leading a “do-nothing Congress” and Obama, whom he linked to the excesses of mortgage backers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The problem is it set off a new round of finger-pointing. Democrats sent reporters a newspaper article listing McCain’s campaign links with Fannie, Freddie and the mortgage meltdown — while Obama, after meeting with his economic advisers in Florida, suggested that what the markets need is confidence that “partisan wrangling” won’t slow reform.

Obama set down the tenets he believes need to guide Washington — saying whatever happens needs to help people on Main Street as well as Wall Street, be coupled with new regulations and be developed to stabilize global markets as well.

“John McCain and I can continue to argue about our different economic agendas for next year, but we should come together now to work on what this country urgently needs this year,” he said.

Partisans take their sides

The reality is that it is difficult for either party or candidate to win the blame game except with their partisans.

McCain is an unapologetic free market believer who has voted for deregulating markets in the past (though he also supported regulation at times as necessary). His friend and former adviser Phil Gramm helped to create a system to deregulate financial institutions — but it was approved by Democrat Bill Clinton’s White House and supported by some of the same people now advising Obama.

Unless there’s a major misstep, the race probably won’t come down to specific proposals. The intricacies of the market don’t, as Comerica’s Johnson said, lend themselves “to sound bites.”

McCain will smear Obama as the president who’ll raise your taxes. Obama has said he wants to keep middle-class tax cuts and raise taxes only on people making more than $250,000 a year and on oil company profits. Obama will smear McCain as a tool of rich corporate interests and their lobbyists, which, if nothing else, his support for financial reform this week seems to throw into doubt.

Which brings the campaign back — albeit more urgently — to where it was.

Can Obama lure the new voters who seem to be registering in battleground states, convince blue-collar voters that he will protect their interests and win the argument that McCain represents four more years of President George W. Bush’s policies?

Or can McCain keep his conservative base energized (without Palin in the forefront), swing the same blue-collar voters and, critically, women, to his side by getting them to find their comfort level with him?

The battle lines may not have changed, but now we’re talking about the cut and quality of the pork, instead of the shade of the makeup.

Contact TODD SPANGLER at tspangler@freepress.com.

Financial Repression Dogs China (Cato Institute)

by James A. Dorn  James A. Dorn is a China specialist at the Cato Institute and coeditor of China’s Future: Constructive Partner or Emerging Threat?  Added to cato.org on October 10, 2006  This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review on October 3, 2006.

Since the start of the reform movement in late 1978, China’s leaders have declared that their top priority should be to achieve robust economic growth and improve the standard of living. They chose this path of ”peaceful development” to minimise the likelihood of civil and economic unrest that dominated the Mao regime. China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in December 2001 was evidence of the commitment to liberalise trade and the financial sector.

Progress has been made since 2001, but much remains to be done. It is clear that opening capital markets without reforming state-owned banks and without maintaining monetary stability could lead to substantial capital flight and exacerbate the problem of non-performing loans. Moreover, there must be an effective legal system to protect newly acquired private property rights.

If Beijing chooses to keep the yuan, also known as the renminbi (RMB), undervalued and maintains capital controls, China will continue to experience stop-go monetary policy as the domestic money supply responds to the balance of payments and the People’s Bank of China tries to sterilise capital inflows–that is, withdraw excess base money.

The State Council announced earlier this year that it wanted to achieve an external balance in 2006, but China’s overall trade surplus will match or exceed last year’s historic high of $US102 billion. Likewise, the PBC constantly says its goal is to pursue a ‘’sound monetary policy” and ”keep the RMB exchange rate basically stable at an adaptive and equilibrium level”. Yet, money and credit continue to grow at rates inconsistent with long-run price stability, and the exchange rate is still pegged at a disequilibrium level.

In a May 23, 2006 press release, the PBC recommended ”better coordination among the various macro-policies, transformation of government functions, and institutional innovation”. It also promised that the ”foreign exchange system reform will be deepened”, and committed itself to ”preserve the continuity and stability of monetary policy, and promote appropriate growth of money and credit, in order to provide a stable monetary and financial environment for economic restructuring”.

Those objectives are laudable, but the rhetoric has failed to match the reality. In its monetary policy report for 2003, the PBC said it would maintain the yuan exchange rate ”at an adaptive and equilibrium level”. Yet, the yuan/dollar rate remained fixed at 8.28 from 1994 until July 21, 2005, when it was revalued by 2.1 per cent, and has only appreciated slightly since then to about 7.98 yuan.

As a result, China’s foreign exchange reserves have more than doubled since 2003. Clearly, financial repression is the hallmark of China’s state-directed financial regime. If China is to carry out its plans for financial liberalisation and have a flexible exchange rate regime, the PBC must have greater independence.

Are You Conservative or Liberal?

Here’s your litmus test:

1. If you say: “I’m concerned about where my money goes when the government takes it,” you are conservative.

2. If you say: “I’m concerned that other people have more money than me,” you are liberal.

Bailout of Money Funds Seems to Stanch Outflow (WSJ)

Fear That Had Gripped $3.4 Trillion Market Abates,
Ending the Reluctance of Funds to Buy Vital Commercial Paper

By DIYA GULLAPALLI and SHEFALI ANAND

The federal bailout of money-market funds seems to have stanched the outflow of investments that bedeviled the industry this past week — and ended the economy-threatening reluctance of the funds to buy vital commercial paper.

As news broke that the government will insure fund assets and the Federal Reserve will lend to funds, the fear that had gripped the $3.4 trillion money-fund realm abated. Larry Fink, chief executive of asset manager BlackRock Inc., which sponsors nine money funds, said the situation “is stabilizing.” The investor rush out of money funds appeared to end, and the commercial-paper market came back to life.

The news came too late for the embattled Reserve Primary Fund, which had helped touch off the crisis. Almost all the fund’s investors have requested withdrawals. On Friday, the fund, run by Reserve Management Co., announced it is suspending redemptions and delaying payment for longer than its previously disclosed seven-day hiatus.

On Friday, the U.S. Treasury said it was establishing a temporary guaranty program for the money-fund industry. For the next year, it is insuring retail and institutional funds, though not those investing exclusively in municipal and government debt. Funds must pay a fee to participate in the program.

The insurance program will be financed with as much as $50 billion from the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which was created in 1934. President George W. Bush had to sign off on Treasury’s use of the fund. Also, the Federal Reserve said it will essentially lend as much as $230 billion to the industry, via banks, to be used against their illiquid asset-backed holdings.

The withdrawals from money funds were stunning. They generated by far the highest redemptions on record, losing $144.5 billion through earlier this past week, according to AMG Data Services. The industry had only $7.1 billion in redemptions the week before.

The redemptions subsequently created huge problems for the $1.7 trillion commercial-paper market. Money funds weren’t buying the paper anymore and were dumping it to cash out fleeing investors. This threatened to tip the economy into recession by cutting off a vital funding source for U.S. business.

The funds’ push into Treasurys helped pull their short-term yields down to zero, which backfired on the money funds. On Friday, fund tracker Lipper said that more than 40% of the 1,263 U.S. taxable money-market mutual funds it tracks posted zero returns amid their negligible returns from their concentration in government paper.

As a result of money funds’ buyers strike, commercial paper became increasingly expensive, soaring to 8% yields from a little more than 2% the week before as investors demanded to get paid more for taking on increasing risk. Companies like International Business Machines Corp. had to pay as much as 6% for such borrowing this week.

The possibility of businesses shutting down for want of funding, said Paul Schott Stevens, the Investment Company Institute president, was bracing for the government. He told Washington officials of the worry conveyed by his talks with executives this past week at dozens of fund firms.

Although system-wide statistics for money funds weren’t immediately available Friday, anecdotal evidence suggests that the investor exodus was receding, barring some new eruption.

Some money-fund customers canceled plans to redeem their investments in cash, according to Legg Mason, which manages $187 billion in money funds. Meanwhile, funds across the industry that had charged into the relative safety of Treasurys reversed course.

At Federated Investors Inc., which manages more than $240 billion in money funds, fund manager Deborah Cunningham noticed a swift decline in calls from worried clients on Friday. The tone of money-fund investors who did call, she said, “is a thousand times lighter.” Instead of asking about the funds’ exposure to troubled names like Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc., “today’s question is: are you going to participate in the insurance,” she says. Federated money funds don’t own Lehman or AIG paper.

Investors’ historic run on money funds began after one of the largest, Reserve Primary Fund, on Tuesday “broke the buck,” or went under the sacrosanct $1-a-share net asset value. The cause was its debt holdings in Lehman, which went to zero when the firm filed for bankruptcy. The fund’s dip under $1 NAV eroded investors’ confidence, causing them to pull out in droves across money funds on Wednesday and Thursday. That stampede out the door caused another prominent fund, the $12.3 billion Putnam Prime Money Fund (Institutional) to shut down on Thursday.

While the stock market cheered the federal rescue plan, small bankers decried the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-like protection extended to money funds. Camden R. Fine, head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, cautioned that the federal plan risked draining funding from small banks.

Fallout from the Reserve fund debacle continued. Ameriprise Financial announced on Friday that it has filed a suit in U.S. District Court in Minnesota against the fund’s parent, Reserve Management. Ameriprise and a subsidiary hold more than 300,000 retail-client accounts in the fund. Third Avenue Institutional International Value Fund also filed a suit on Friday in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York alleging, among other things, that Reserve misled investors earlier in the week about its ability to preserve $1 net asset value. Reserve declined requests for comment.

—Anusha Shrivastava contributed to this article.

Write to Diya Gullapalli at diya.gullapalli@wsj.com and Shefali Anand at shefali.anand@wsj.com

The Nation – A Financial Drama With No Final Act in Sight (NYT)

By ALEX BERENSON

Published: September 13, 2008

A lot of smart people have tried to call the bottom on Wall Street this year.

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A Drama With New Twists and Turns

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Times Topics: Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Times Topics: Washington Mutual Inc.

So far, they have all been wrong.

Since the financial crisis first hit in August 2007, markets — and the financial industry — have gone through a series of swoons, each more dizzying than the last. Last week, the crisis reached a new pitch, as Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest United States investment bank, struggled to avoid joining Bear Stearns on the trash heap, and Washington Mutual, the largest savings and loan, saw its shares briefly fall below $2.

Now even Wall Street’s professional optimists have given up predicting exactly when their industry might stabilize. One senior executive at a top investment bank, speaking anonymously so he could speak freely, recently observed that the crisis was entering its “19th inning,” with no ending in sight.

Until now, the cataclysm in the banking and securities industry has damaged but not derailed the rest of the economy and the Fed and the Treasury signalled last week that they were not ready to bail out Lehman Brothers with taxpayer money. Economists generally predict that the United States will grow slowly over the next few months but avoid a deep recession, especially if oil prices fall further, easing pressure on consumers, and exports remain strong.

But as the Wall Street crisis moves into its second year, the risks to the overall economy are increasing. While the economy grew during the first half of the year, businesses are cutting jobs and consumers reducing spending. In August, the unemployment rate reached 6.1 percent, compared with 4.7 percent less than a year ago.

Until the worst turmoil on Wall Street ends, the economy will struggle, said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at California State University, Channel Islands, who studies financial markets.

“Until and unless we have financial markets stabilize, I don’t think we will see a meaningful recovery in housing, and therefore in the economy,” Dr. Sohn said. He said he expected economic growth to remain close to zero through the middle of 2009 before finally beginning to accelerate.

Steven Wieting, the United States economist for Citigroup, said: “We’re describing the U.S. economy as recessionary.”

Unfortunately, Mr. Wieting — and other economists — say that the Federal Reserve and the government have few good options left to ease the pressure on financial firms or the economy. The Fed has already cut short-term interest rates to 2 percent, below the rate of inflation, and the government has offered consumers and businesses $150 billion in tax rebates and cuts this year.

The Fed has also taken several measures to buoy the financial industry, such as allowing more banks access to low-interest, short-term loans. Yet Wall Street continues to struggle through the aftereffects of the biggest speculative bubble in history.

Financial services companies have cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an executive placement firm, and deeper layoffs may come this fall.

Yet the picture may not be entirely bleak. When the chaos finally ends, Wall Street will almost certainly be smaller and more risk-averse. That change could eventually put the economy on firmer footing.

This year’s crisis appears to mark the end of a bubble in the financial markets that has lasted nearly two decades. The speculation began in technology stocks in the 1990s and turned to real estate, commodities and private equity buyouts this decade. Along the way it powered the New York City economy and helped drive income inequality nationally.

While the stock market has not been as frenzied this decade as it was at the end of the 1990s, rampant speculation took over many other financial markets, Mr. Wieting said. “In the last couple of years, financial activity became less related than we’ve seen before to real economic developments,” he said.

Now Wall Street is reeling, as a significant fraction of the speculative real estate loans that banks made during the boom years are underwater. Because banks have limited capital to absorb losses, investors worry that those losses will overwhelm them.

The problem has been worsened by the financial instruments that banks and hedge funds and insurance companies have created to swap loans and risk with each other. In theory, those products can help investors and companies diversify risk, but they are nearly impossible to value.

“Investors just don’t know what these assets are worth,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “There’s no transparency. It’s totally up to management to decide what these assets are worth and tell their accountants.”

For example, Lehman said last week that it had $20 billion in tangible equity— money that would theoretically be available to its shareholders if Lehman had to be liquidated. But those same shareholders valued Lehman at only $2 billion as of Friday, proof that they do not have confidence in the way Lehman has calculated its assets.

Now investors are demanding that banks like Lehman and Washington Mutual raise capital or sell their assets to raise cash and prove that they are solvent. But when banks are under pressure, they cannot easily find new investors or purchasers for their assets. It is as if a family were told to sell their home overnight, for cash, or lose it. They would surely receive a far lower price than the property would generate in a more orderly sale.

So, one by one, the banks that took on the most risk are facing the real possibility of going under. Those with stronger balance sheets, such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, are suffering much less.

For Wall Street, the lesson has been sobering — and unlikely to be forgotten for several years, said Dr. Sohn, the California State economist.

“The restraint in the credit markets will last quite some time,” Dr. Sohn said. In the mortgage business, which saw the worst excesses, loan practices may remain stricter for at least a decade, he said. The results will be both positive and negative, he said.

The speculation that has produced wide swings in commodities prices and vacant subdivisions across California and Florida may become less prominent. But people who want to buy homes may continue to struggle to get mortgages, even if they have excellent credit. Companies who need loans to expand, or just to survive rough economic patches, will also have a harder time finding financing.

“We went overboard,” Dr. Sohn said. “As a result, the financial market is imposing some discipline on our behavior, and it’s painful. But that’s how the system works.”

Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research group in Washington, said that, in a best-case scenario, greater risk aversion in the financial markets might eventually encourage the United States to rely less on bubbles and speculative lending to drive economic growth.

Instead, the government could pursue policies designed to drive wages higher for middle- and lower-class Americans, he said, allowing them to buy homes and cars without taking on ruinous debt.

“We have to find a new way — or maybe it’s an old way — to stimulate enough demand for the economy to do what it’s supposed to do without speculative excess,” Mr. Bernstein said. “A recovery that’s driven by more broadly shared prosperity, where consumption is fairly evenly shared through the economy, that kind of growth is more sustainable.”

Even so, Mr. Bernstein said he was not cheering Wall Street’s deep struggles. “The financials are the heart of the credit system, and credit is the lifeblood of our economy,” he said. “There’s no question that we will pay a cost in terms of much diminished growth if this continues.”

A Prediction on the’08 Election – Insight into Obama’s Candidacy

by Survivor @ 6:18pm – Sat Sep 13th, 2008

It’s time to throw my hat in the ring as regards predicting the election results. So here it is: Barack Obama will be defeated. Seriously and convincingly defeated. Not due to racism, not due to the forces of reaction, not even due to Karl Rove sending out mind rays over the national cable system. He will lose for one reason above all, one that has been overlooked in any analysis that I’ve yet seen. Barack Obama will lose because he is a flake.

I’m using the term in its generally accepted sense. A flake is not only a screwup, but someone who truly excels in making bizarre errors and creating incredibly convoluted disasters. A flake is a “fool with energy”, as the Russian proverb puts it. (“A fool is a terrible thing to have around, but a fool with energy is a nightmare”.)

Barack Obama is a flake, and the American people have begun to see it. The chief characteristic of a flake is that he makes choices that are impossible to either understand or explain. These are not the errors of the poor dope who can’t grasp the essentials of a situation, or the neurotic who ruins things out of compulsion, or the man suffering chronic bad luck.

The flake has a genius for discovering solutions at perfect right angles to the ordinary world. It’s as if he’s the product of a totally different evolutionary chain, in a universe where the laws are slightly but distinctly at variance to ours. When given a choice between left and right, the flake goes up — if not through the 8th dimension. And although there’s plenty of rationalization, there’s never a logical reason for any of it. After awhile, people stop asking.

Obama’s rise has been widely portrayed as a kind of millennial Horatio Alger story — young lad from a new state on the outskirts of the American polity, a member of once-despised minority, works his way by slow degrees to within arm’s length of the presidency itself. That’s all well and good — we need national myths of exactly that type.

But what has been overlooked is the string of faux pas marking each step of Obama’s journey, a series of strange, inexplicable actions, actions bizarre enough to require some effort at explanation, through such efforts have rarely been offered. It’s as if the new Horatio made it to the top by stepping into every last manhole and open trapdoor in his path. And we, the onlookers, the voters who are being asked to put this man in the White House, are supposed to take this as the normal career path for a successful chief executive.

What are these incidents? I’m sure many of you are way ahead of me, but let’s go to the videotape.

Here’s a young man who graduated from Columbia with high marks, with a choice of positions anywhere in the country. He comes from a state generally held to be a close match to Paradise. One, furthermore, that can be characterized as the most successful multiracial society in the world, with harmonious relations not only between whites and blacks, but also Japanese-Americans and native Hawaiians as well. To top it off, a state controlled in large part by a smoothly-functioning Democratic machine. So where does he choose to go?

To Chicago. One of the windiest, coldest, most brutal cities in the country. One that is also infinitely corrupt in a sense that Hawaii is not. One that remains one of the most racist large cities in the U.S. (Cicero, Al Capone’s old stomping grounds, a suburb that is effectively part of the city, is completely segregated to this day.) It would be nice to learn which of these aspects most attracted young Obama to the city. But if you’d asked at the beginning of the campaign, you’d still be waiting.

And what does he do when he reaches the city? Why, he joins a cult. Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church has been turned inside out since the videotaped sermons appeared early this year, without anyone ever quite explaining exactly what Obama was thinking of when he joined up in the first place. Street cred, so it’s claimed. But there are a plethora of black churches that would have provided him that without the taint of demented racism that Wright’s church offered.

Obama apparently had to swear an oath of belief in “black liberation theology” when he joined the church. (It is the little touches of that sort that make it a “cult”, and not simply a “church”.) Did the thought of his career ever cross his mind? Didn’t he realize that church would inevitably cause him trouble somewhere down the line? That he’d be required to repudiate it and its ideas eventually? We can ask — but we won’t get an answer.

Back at school, Obama got himself named editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is a signal achievement, no question about it. The kind of thing that would be mentioned about a person for the rest of his life, as has been the case with Obama. But then… he writes nothing for the journal.

Now, let’s get this straight: here we have one of the leading university law journals in the country, one widely cited and read. Entire careers in legal analysis and scholarship have been founded on appearances in the Review, including some that have led to the highest courts in the country. Yet here’s an individual who, as editor, could easily place his own work in the journal — standard practice, nothing at all wrong with it. But he fails to do so. And the explanation? There’s none that I’ve heard. We can go even farther than that, to say that there is no explanation that makes the least rational sense.

We follow Obama down to Springfield, where as a state legislator, he voted “present” over 120 times. What this means, as far as I’ve been able to discover, is that he voted “present” nearly as much as he voted “yes” or “no”.

Now, statehouses work very simply: a member approaches his colleagues and asks them them to vote for his bill. Some comply, some do not. Some ask, “Is it a good bill?” and some don’t. Either way, they customarily, except in unusual circumstances, vote “yes’ or “no”. All except for Barack Obama. And how did get away with it? How did mollify his colleagues? How did he square himself with the party bosses? Echo answereth not.

(A good slogan could be made of this: “You can’t vote present in the Oval Office.” I hereby commend it to the McCain campaign.)

We turn eagerly to learn what his term in the U.S. Senate will reveal, only to be disappointed. But it’s not surprising, really. After all, he was only there for 143 days.

And there lies one of the keys to Obama’s rise. David Brooks pointed out in a recent New York Times column that Obama spent too little time in any of his positions to make an impact one way or another. This is what saved him from the normal fate of the flake: he was never around long enough for his errors and strange behavior to catch up with him.

But a presidential campaign is a different matter. A man running for president is under the microscope, and can’t duck anything, as many a candidate has had reason to learn. If Obama is a flake in the classic mode, now is when it would come out. And has it?

The case could be made. Here we have a campaign with everything going for it — the opposition party in a shambles, a seriously undervalued president, the media in the candidate’s pocket, the candidate himself being worshiped as nothing less than the new messiah. And yet the results have comprised little more than one fumble after another.

First came the Wright affair. Obama apparently thought he was above it all — a not-uncommon phenomenon with flakes — and allowed the revelations to take on a life of their own before bothering to respond. Even then, his thoughtful and convincing explanation (that he hadn’t been listening for twenty years) did little to settle the crisis, which instead guttered out on its own after nearly crippling his campaign. Even months afterward it threatens to pop back up at any time. The latest word is that Wright — now a deadly enemy of his onetime protégé — has written a book. I can’t wait.

Obama learned his lesson, and confronted the next threat immediately, tackling The New Yorker cover with the avidity of a man having discovered zombies in the basement. A development that could have been defused with a chuckle and a quip (the customary method is for the politician to ask the cartoonist for the original) was allowed to explode into a major issue. The campaign’s relentless attacks on one of the oldest liberal magazines extant merely perplexed the country at large. After all, any Republican has had to endure far worse.

Almost simultaneously, the birth certificate saga was unfolding. On no reasonable grounds, the campaign blew off requests for a copy of the document, at last releasing it through one of the least reputable sites on the Internet, and so badly copied that literally anything could be read into it — and was. I’m not one of those who believes that Obama was actually born in Indonesia/Kenya/Moscow/the moon, but I still have plenty in the way of questions, almost all of them arising from how the matter was handled. Well played.

The latest pothole (or one of them, anyway) involves Jerome Corsi’s The Obama Nation. Corsi has been given the full New Yorker treatment, with the campaign hoping to avoid John Kerry’s “error” in not challenging Corsi’s 2004 book, Unfit for Command. What Obama missed was the fact that Kerry’s major problem was not with Corsi but with the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who were disgusted with Kerry’s hypocrisy in running as an experienced military veteran, and set out to take him down. Corsi’s effort dovetailed with the veteran’s campaign and to a large extent was swept up with it. No such campaign is in operation against Obama. The smart method of answering Corsi would have been to allow the media to handle it, instead of drawing attention to the book and raising it to level of an issue. This appears to be a real talent for the Obama campaign.

We could go on. The victory tour of Europe, and the speech in which Obama declared himself “citizen of the world”, a trope guaranteed to focus the attention of Middle America. His inept handling of Hillary, in which he wound up appearing frightened of the opponent he’d just beaten. Allowing Hillary (and her husband there, what’s-his-name) a starring role in the Democratic convention is not a solution any sane individual would be comfortable with — much less a roll-call vote. This threatens the near-certainty of turning the entire affair into BillandHillarycon, with the nominee winding up as a footnote. But it’s all of a piece with the campaign Obama has waged up until now.

We’ve never had a flake as president. We’ve had drunks, neurotics, cripples, louts, and fools, but never a career screwup. (I except Jimmy Carter, whose errors arose from sincere, misguided goodwill.) And I don’t think we’re going to get one now. Another three months of flailing, incompetence, and a collapsing image will do little to assure voters concerned with terrorism, the oil crunch, a gyrating economy, and a bellicose Russia. (Anyone doubting that Obama will go exactly this route can consider the Saddleback church fiasco, which unfolded as this piece was being wrapped up. Evidently, the campaign goaded NBC news personality Andrea Mitchell into all but accusing John McCain of “cheating” by failing to take his place within the “cone of silence” during Obama’s part of the program. The grotesque element here is that Obama’s people and much of the liberal commentariat — including Mitchell — apparently believe that the “cone of silence”, a gag prop for the old Get Smart! comedy series, actually exists and was in use at Saddleback.)

Many of us have dealt with flakes at one time or another, often in settings involving jobs and careers, and not uncommonly in positions of some authority. We all know of the nephew, the fiancé, the boyfriend, whose whims must be catered to, whose reputation must be protected, who must be constantly worked around if anything at all is to be accomplished, always at the cost of time, money, efficiency, and personal stress.

In the fullness of time, we will inevitably see such a figure in the White House. But not this year, and not this candidate. Such acts of national flakery occur only when there’s no real alternative. In this election, an alternative exists. Whatever his shortcomings, nobody ever called John McCain a flake.