"The ultimate form of moral hazard" or the Federal Reserve's "finest hour"?
The article titled "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 trillion in Fed's Secret Loans," was the result of Bloomberg business news agency's relentless quest involving numerous Freedom of Information Act requests and an act of Congress over a 3-year period. The article is destined to be famous in the annals of American journalism and will be a fundamental document of a history of these times.
It is not easy to read and demands study, rewards study.
We have included a 2009 article by Mark Pittman, who filed the first FOIA with the Fed and has since passed away. Below Pittman's article we have included two opposing views on what "Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 trillion" means. At the very bottom we have included a passage from a Swedish novel about a financial investigative reporter about the importance of financial journalism to the future of that nation or any other.
In the case of the US financial crash and bailout, regardless of the divergence of views on the Federal Reserve's actions, perhaps a majority of the nation would now reply -- if polled -- that investigative reporting on the financial system was "too little and too late." and had a nearly impossible task bucking the headwinds of hot air from the 450 high priests of the Free Market.
If Jezebel were alive today, she would call Elijah a "commoonist" and maybe even an "enviro-mentalist." When the people are once again thinking about "a chicken for every pot," the Republicans new leader, Rick Perry, offers "a pot of gold in every yacht."
Badlands Journal editorial board
8-22-11
Bloomberg.com
Wall Street Aristocracy Got $1.2 Trillion in Fed’s Secret Loans
By Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-08-21/wall-street-aristocracy-got-1-2-trillion-in-fed-s-secret-loans.html
Citigroup Inc. (C) and Bank of America Corp. (BAC) were the reigning champions of finance in 2006 as home prices peaked, leading the 10 biggest U.S. banks and brokerage firms to their best year ever with $104 billion of profits.
By 2008, the housing market’s collapse forced those companies to take more than six times as much, $669 billion, in emergency loans from the U.S. Federal Reserve. The loans dwarfed the $160 billion in public bailouts the top 10 got from the U.S. Treasury, yet until now the full amounts have remained secret.
Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s unprecedented effort to keep the economy from plunging into depression included lending banks and other companies as much as $1.2 trillion of public money, about the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The largest borrower, Morgan Stanley (MS), got as much as $107.3 billion, while Citigroup took $99.5 billion and Bank of America $91.4 billion, according to a Bloomberg News compilation of data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, months of litigation and an act of Congress.
“These are all whopping numbers,” said Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official who in the 1990s served on a commission probing the causes of the savings and loan crisis. “You’re talking about the aristocracy of American finance going down the tubes without the federal money.”
Foreign Borrowers
It wasn’t just American finance. Almost half of the Fed’s top 30 borrowers, measured by peak balances, were European firms. They included Edinburgh-based Royal Bank of Scotland Plc, which took $84.5 billion, the most of any non-U.S. lender, and Zurich-based UBS AG (UBSN), which got $77.2 billion. Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG borrowed $28.7 billion, an average of $21 million for each of its 1,366 employees.
The largest borrowers also included Dexia SA (DEXB), Belgium’s biggest bank by assets, and Societe Generale SA, based in Paris, whose bond-insurance prices have surged in the past month as investors speculated that the spreading sovereign debt crisis in Europe might increase their chances of default.
The $1.2 trillion peak on Dec. 5, 2008 -- the combined outstanding balance under the seven programs tallied by Bloomberg -- was almost three times the size of the U.S. federal budget deficit that year and more than the total earnings of all federally insured banks in the U.S. for the decade through 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Peak Balance
The balance was more than 25 times the Fed’s pre-crisis lending peak of $46 billion on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon. Denominated in $1 bills, the $1.2 trillion would fill 539 Olympic-size swimming pools.
The Fed has said it had “no credit losses” on any of the emergency programs, and a report by Federal Reserve Bank of New York staffers in February said the central bank netted $13 billion in interest and fee income from the programs from August 2007 through December 2009.
“We designed our broad-based emergency programs to both effectively stem the crisis and minimize the financial risks to the U.S. taxpayer,” said James Clouse, deputy director of the Fed’s division of monetary affairs in Washington. “Nearly all of our emergency-lending programs have been closed. We have incurred no losses and expect no losses.”
While the 18-month U.S. recession that ended in June 2009 after a 5.1 percent contraction in gross domestic product was nowhere near the four-year, 27 percent decline between August 1929 and March 1933, banks and the economy remain stressed.
Odds of Recession
The odds of another recession have climbed during the past six months, according to five of nine economists on the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an academic panel that dates recessions.
Bank of America’s bond-insurance prices last week surged to a rate of $342,040 a year for coverage on $10 million of debt, above where Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. (LEHMQ)’s bond insurance was priced at the start of the week before the firm collapsed. Citigroup’s shares are trading below the split-adjusted price of $28 that they hit on the day the bank’s Fed loans peaked in January 2009. The U.S. unemployment rate was at 9.1 percent in July, compared with 4.7 percent in November 2007, before the recession began.
Homeowners are more than 30 days past due on their mortgage payments on 4.38 million properties in the U.S., and 2.16 million more properties are in foreclosure, representing a combined $1.27 trillion of unpaid principal, estimates Jacksonville, Florida-based Lender Processing Services Inc.
Liquidity Requirements
“Why in hell does the Federal Reserve seem to be able to find the way to help these entities that are gigantic?” U.S. Representative Walter B. Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, said at a June 1 congressional hearing in Washington on Fed lending disclosure. “They get help when the average businessperson down in eastern North Carolina, and probably across America, they can’t even go to a bank they’ve been banking with for 15 or 20 years and get a loan.”
The sheer size of the Fed loans bolsters the case for minimum liquidity requirements that global regulators last year agreed to impose on banks for the first time, said Litan, now a vice president at the Kansas City, Missouri-based Kauffman Foundation, which supports entrepreneurship research. Liquidity refers to the daily funds a bank needs to operate, including cash to cover depositor withdrawals.
The rules, which mandate that banks keep enough cash and easily liquidated assets on hand to survive a 30-day crisis, don’t take effect until 2015. Another proposed requirement for lenders to keep “stable funding” for a one-year horizon was postponed until at least 2018 after banks showed they’d have to raise as much as $6 trillion in new long-term debt to comply.
‘Stark Illustration’
Regulators are “not going to go far enough to prevent this from happening again,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now an economics professor at Harvard University.
Reforms undertaken since the crisis might not insulate U.S. markets and financial institutions from the sovereign budget and debt crises facing Greece, Ireland and Portugal, according to the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council, a 10-member body created by the Dodd-Frank Act and led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.
“The recent financial crisis provides a stark illustration of how quickly confidence can erode and financial contagion can spread,” the council said in its July 26 report.
21,000 Transactions
Any new rescues by the U.S. central bank would be governed by transparency laws adopted in 2010 that require the Fed to disclose borrowers after two years.
Fed officials argued for more than two years that releasing the identities of borrowers and the terms of their loans would stigmatize banks, damaging stock prices or leading to depositor runs. A group of the biggest commercial banks last year asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep at least some Fed borrowings secret. In March, the high court declined to hear that appeal, and the central bank made an unprecedented release of records.
Data gleaned from 29,346 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and from other Fed databases of more than 21,000 transactions make clear for the first time how deeply the world’s largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls. Even as the firms asserted in news releases or earnings calls that they had ample cash, they drew Fed funding in secret, avoiding the stigma of weakness.
Morgan Stanley Borrowing
Two weeks after Lehman’s bankruptcy in September 2008, Morgan Stanley countered concerns that it might be next to go by announcing it had “strong capital and liquidity positions.” The statement, in a Sept. 29, 2008, press release about a $9 billion investment from Tokyo-based Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc., said nothing about Morgan Stanley’s Fed loans.
That was the same day as the firm’s $107.3 billion peak in borrowing from the central bank, which was the source of almost all of Morgan Stanley’s available cash, according to the lending data and documents released more than two years later by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. The amount was almost three times the company’s total profits over the past decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Mark Lake, a spokesman for New York-based Morgan Stanley, said the crisis caused the industry to “fundamentally re- evaluate” the way it manages its cash.
“We have taken the lessons we learned from that period and applied them to our liquidity-management program to protect both our franchise and our clients going forward,” Lake said. He declined to say what changes the bank had made.
Acceptable Collateral
In most cases, the Fed demanded collateral for its loans -- Treasuries or corporate bonds and mortgage bonds that could be seized and sold if the money wasn’t repaid. That meant the central bank’s main risk was that collateral pledged by banks that collapsed would be worth less than the amount borrowed.
As the crisis deepened, the Fed relaxed its standards for acceptable collateral. Typically, the central bank accepts only bonds with the highest credit grades, such as U.S. Treasuries. By late 2008, it was accepting “junk” bonds, those rated below investment grade. It even took stocks, which are first to get wiped out in a liquidation.
Morgan Stanley borrowed $61.3 billion from one Fed program in September 2008, pledging a total of $66.5 billion of collateral, according to Fed documents. Securities pledged included $21.5 billion of stocks, $6.68 billion of bonds with a junk credit rating and $19.5 billion of assets with an “unknown rating,” according to the documents. About 25 percent of the collateral was foreign-denominated.
‘Willingness to Lend’
“What you’re looking at is a willingness to lend against just about anything,” said Robert Eisenbeis, a former research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and now chief monetary economist in Atlanta for Sarasota, Florida-based Cumberland Advisors Inc.
The lack of private-market alternatives for lending shows how skeptical trading partners and depositors were about the value of the banks’ capital and collateral, Eisenbeis said.
“The markets were just plain shut,” said Tanya Azarchs, former head of bank research at Standard & Poor’s and now an independent consultant in Briarcliff Manor, New York. “If you needed liquidity, there was only one place to go.”
Even banks that survived the crisis without government capital injections tapped the Fed through programs that promised confidentiality. London-based Barclays Plc (BARC) borrowed $64.9 billion and Frankfurt-based Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) got $66 billion. Sarah MacDonald, a spokeswoman for Barclays, and John Gallagher, a spokesman for Deutsche Bank, declined to comment.
Below-Market Rates
While the Fed’s last-resort lending programs generally charge above-market interest rates to deter routine borrowing, that practice sometimes flipped during the crisis. On Oct. 20, 2008, for example, the central bank agreed to make $113.3 billion of 28-day loans through its Term Auction Facility at a rate of 1.1 percent, according to a press release at the time.
The rate was less than a third of the 3.8 percent that banks were charging each other to make one-month loans on that day. Bank of America and Wachovia Corp. each got $15 billion of the 1.1 percent TAF loans, followed by Royal Bank of Scotland’s RBS Citizens NA unit with $10 billion, Fed data show.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), the New York-based lender that touted its “fortress balance sheet” at least 16 times in press releases and conference calls from October 2007 through February 2010, took as much as $48 billion in February 2009 from TAF. The facility, set up in December 2007, was a temporary alternative to the discount window, the central bank’s 97-year-old primary lending program to help banks in a cash squeeze.
‘Larger Than TARP’
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), which in 2007 was the most profitable securities firm in Wall Street history, borrowed $69 billion from the Fed on Dec. 31, 2008. Among the programs New York-based Goldman Sachs tapped after the Lehman bankruptcy was the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, or PDCF, designed to lend money to brokerage firms ineligible for the Fed’s bank-lending programs.
Michael Duvally, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, declined to comment.
The Fed’s liquidity lifelines may increase the chances that banks engage in excessive risk-taking with borrowed money, Rogoff said. Such a phenomenon, known as moral hazard, occurs if banks assume the Fed will be there when they need it, he said. The size of bank borrowings “certainly shows the Fed bailout was in many ways much larger than TARP,” Rogoff said.
TARP is the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program, a $700 billion bank-bailout fund that provided capital injections of $45 billion each to Citigroup and Bank of America, and $10 billion to Morgan Stanley. Because most of the Treasury’s investments were made in the form of preferred stock, they were considered riskier than the Fed’s loans, a type of senior debt.
Dodd-Frank Requirement
In December, in response to the Dodd-Frank Act, the Fed released 18 databases detailing its temporary emergency-lending programs.
Congress required the disclosure after the Fed rejected requests in 2008 from the late Bloomberg News reporter Mark Pittman and other media companies that sought details of its loans under the Freedom of Information Act. After fighting to keep the data secret, the central bank released unprecedented information about its discount window and other programs under court order in March 2011.
Bloomberg News combined Fed databases made available in December and July with the discount-window records released in March to produce daily totals for banks across all the programs, including the Asset-Backed Commercial Paper Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, Commercial Paper Funding Facility, discount window, PDCF, TAF, Term Securities Lending Facility and single-tranche open market operations. The programs supplied loans from August 2007 through April 2010.
Rolling Crisis
The result is a timeline illustrating how the credit crisis rolled from one bank to another as financial contagion spread.
Fed borrowings by Societe Generale (GLE), France’s second-biggest bank, peaked at $17.4 billion in May 2008, four months after the Paris-based lender announced a record 4.9 billion-euro ($7.2 billion) loss on unauthorized stock-index futures bets by former trader Jerome Kerviel.
Morgan Stanley’s top borrowing came four months later, after Lehman’s bankruptcy. Citigroup crested in January 2009, as did 43 other banks, the largest number of peak borrowings for any month during the crisis. Bank of America’s heaviest borrowings came two months after that.
Sixteen banks, including Plano, Texas-based Beal Financial Corp. and Jacksonville, Florida-based EverBank Financial Corp., didn’t hit their peaks until February or March 2010.
Using Subsidiaries
“At no point was there a material risk to the Fed or the taxpayer, as the loan required collateralization,” said Reshma Fernandes, a spokeswoman for EverBank, which borrowed as much as $250 million.
Banks maximized their borrowings by using subsidiaries to tap Fed programs at the same time. In March 2009, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America drew $78 billion from one facility through two banking units and $11.8 billion more from two other programs through its broker-dealer, Bank of America Securities LLC.
Banks also shifted balances among Fed programs. Many preferred the TAF because it carried less of the stigma associated with the discount window, often seen as the last resort for lenders in distress, according to a January 2011 paper by researchers at the New York Fed.
After the Lehman bankruptcy, hedge funds began pulling their cash out of Morgan Stanley, fearing it might be the next to collapse, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission said in a January report, citing interviews with former Chief Executive Officer John Mack and then-Treasurer David Wong.
Borrowings Surge
Morgan Stanley’s borrowings from the PDCF surged to $61.3 billion on Sept. 29 from zero on Sept. 14. At the same time, its loans from the Term Securities Lending Facility, or TSLF, rose to $36 billion from $3.5 billion. Morgan Stanley treasury reports released by the FCIC show the firm had $99.8 billion of liquidity on Sept. 29, a figure that included Fed borrowings.
“The cash flow was all drying up,” said Roger Lister, a former Fed economist who’s now head of financial-institutions coverage at credit-rating firm DBRS Inc. in New York. “Did they have enough resources to cope with it? The answer would be yes, but they needed the Fed.”
While Morgan Stanley’s Fed demands were the most acute, Citigroup was the most chronic borrower among the largest U.S. banks. The New York-based company borrowed $10 million from the TAF on the program’s first day in December 2007 and had more than $25 billion outstanding under all programs by May 2008, according to Bloomberg data.
Tapping Six Programs
By Nov. 21, when Citigroup began talks with the government to get a $20 billion capital injection on top of the $25 billion received a month earlier, its Fed borrowings had doubled to about $50 billion.
Over the next two months the amount almost doubled again. On Jan. 20, as the stock sank below $3 for the first time in 16 years amid investor concerns that the lender’s capital cushion might be inadequate, Citigroup was tapping six Fed programs at once. Its total borrowings amounted to more than twice the federal Department of Education’s 2011 budget.
Citigroup was in debt to the Fed on seven out of every 10 days from August 2007 through April 2010, the most frequent U.S. borrower among the 100 biggest publicly traded firms by pre- crisis market valuation. On average, the bank had a daily balance at the Fed of almost $20 billion.
‘Help Motivate Others’
“Citibank basically was sustained by the Fed for a very long time,” said Richard Herring, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia who has studied financial crises.
Jon Diat, a Citigroup spokesman, said the bank made use of programs that “achieved the goal of instilling confidence in the markets.”
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a letter to shareholders last year that his bank avoided many government programs. It did use TAF, Dimon said in the letter, “but this was done at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.”
The bank, the second-largest in the U.S. by assets, first tapped the TAF in May 2008, six months after the program debuted, and then zeroed out its borrowings in September 2008. The next month, it started using TAF again.
On Feb. 26, 2009, more than a year after TAF’s creation, JPMorgan’s borrowings under the program climbed to $48 billion. On that day, the overall TAF balance for all banks hit its peak, $493.2 billion. Two weeks later, the figure began declining.
“Our prior comment is accurate,” said Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for JPMorgan.
‘The Cheapest Source’
Herring, the University of Pennsylvania professor, said some banks may have used the program to maximize profits by borrowing “from the cheapest source, because this was supposed to be secret and never revealed.”
Whether banks needed the Fed’s money for survival or used it because it offered advantageous rates, the central bank’s lender-of-last-resort role amounts to a free insurance policy for banks guaranteeing the arrival of funds in a disaster, Herring said.
An IMF report last October said regulators should consider charging banks for the right to access central bank funds.
“The extent of official intervention is clear evidence that systemic liquidity risks were under-recognized and mispriced by both the private and public sectors,” the IMF said in a separate report in April.
Access to Fed backup support “leads you to subject yourself to greater risks,” Herring said. “If it’s not there, you’re not going to take the risks that would put you in trouble and require you to have access to that kind of funding.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net; Phil Kuntz in New York at Pkuntz1@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: David Scheer in New York at dscheer@bloomberg.net.
---------------------------------------
1-10-09
Bloomberg.com
Paulson Bank Bailout in ‘Great Stress’ Misses Terms Buffett Won
By Mark Pittman
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aAvhtiFdLyaQ&refer=home
Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Henry Paulson’s bank bailouts, done under “great stress” during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, failed to win for U.S. taxpayers what Warren Buffett received for his shareholders by investing in Goldman Sachs Group Inc.
The Treasury secretary made 174 purchases of banks’ preferred shares that include warrants to buy stock at a later date. While he invested $10 billion in Goldman Sachs in October, twice as much as Buffett did the month before, Paulson gained certificates worth one-fourth as much as the billionaire, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Goldman Sachs terms were repeated in most of the other bank bailouts.
Paulson’s decisions to prop up the financial system included purchasing shares in institutions from Goldman Sachs, the most profitable Wall Street firm last year, to Saigon National Bank, a Westminster, California, lender whose market value is $3.8 million.
“We were not looking to replicate one-off private deals” in the transactions, made under the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, Paulson said in a Bloomberg TV interview yesterday.
“The market was under great stress and the private sector was extracting very, very severe terms. What we were attempting to do, which I think we did successfully, was design a program that would be accepted by a large group of healthy banks with terms that would replicate what you would get in normal market conditions,” he said.
‘20-20 Hindsight’
“With 20/20 hindsight,” the bank-capital injections have achieved their objectives and the decisions on TARP will “prove to be the right ones,” the Treasury secretary said.
Paulson’s warrant deals may give taxpayers less profit from any recovery in financial stocks than shareholders such as Goldman Sachs Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein and Saudi Arabian Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owner of 4 percent of Citigroup Inc., said Simon Johnson, former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund.
The transactions are “just egregious,” said Johnson, a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington. “You want to do it the way Warren does it.”
Paulson said “he had to make it attractive to banks, which is code for ‘I’m going to give money away,’” said Joseph Stiglitz, who won a Nobel Prize in 2001 for his work on the economic value of information.
‘Giveaway’
“The worst aspect of this is that they were designed not to do what they were supposed to do,” he said in a telephone interview from Paris Jan. 7. “In many ways, it’s not only a giveaway, but a giveaway that was designed not to work.”
The Treasury would have held warrants for 116 million shares of Goldman Sachs under Buffett’s terms, which would be equivalent to a 21 percent stake when added to those currently outstanding. Instead, the dilution is 2.7 percent under the Treasury plan. Blankfein is the company’s biggest individual investor, with 2.08 million shares worth about $178 million today, according to Bloomberg data. His 0.47 percent interest would have declined to 0.36 percent under Buffett’s terms and would be 0.44 percent if the Treasury’s warrants were exercised.
Senator Judd Gregg, a New Hampshire Republican, estimated in a Jan. 4 Wall Street Journal opinion article that TARP investments have earned about $8 billion while recapitalizing the banking system.
Changes to TARP
Government agencies have committed more than $8.5 trillion to shoring up the financial system, including TARP, signed into law Oct. 3 by President George W. Bush. The program was sold to Congress as a way to buy securities that had fallen in market value. Paulson shifted his emphasis to direct capital injections to banks to prevent the financial sector from foundering.
The House Financial Services Committee and TARP Congressional Oversight Panel plan hearings on how federal bailout money will be used during the administration of President-elect Barack Obama. The financial services panel scheduled its meeting for Jan. 13.
The oversight panel has contracted an independent analyst to examine the terms of TARP investments and is scheduled to deliver a report by Jan. 30, said Elizabeth Warren, chairwoman of the oversight panel, in an interview today. The question matters, Warren said, because shareholders are now being protected by taxpayer dollars.
“Supporting equity is such a profound shift in American economic policy that we must take a hard look at that decision,” said Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who specializes in bankruptcy.
‘Something Worth Nothing’
Stiglitz said finance professionals at Treasury possessed expertise on warrant pricing that members of Congress didn’t. As a result, Paulson gave lip service to the lawmakers’ intent on TARP without gaining much value for taxpayers, said Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who described the pricing mechanism as “a gimmick to make sure that they were giving away something worth nothing.”
“If Paulson was still an employee of Goldman Sachs and he’d done this deal, he would have been fired,” he said.
A $5 billion U.S. loan last week to GMAC LLC, the Detroit- based finance affiliate of General Motors Corp., was made under the Treasury program and was part of $6 billion advanced to keep the automaker afloat.
In advancing the $5 billion, Paulson accepted warrants that reward taxpayers with an additional $250 million, or 5 percent of the stake. That compares with 15 percent on the 174 completed bank rescues as well as the 100 percent Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Buffett obtained on an investment in Goldman Sachs in September, Bloomberg data show. A warrant is a company-issued certificate that represents an option to buy a certain number of shares at a specific price by a predetermined date.
‘Stronger Terms’
“You’d certainly hope that the trend would be in the other direction, for stronger terms,” said Rep. Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican on the House Financial Services panel, in a telephone interview Dec. 26. “I don’t buy the methodology that they have to be circumspect to protect the parties involved. Ultimately their position has to be to protect the American taxpayer.”
While the government has pledged to recover its investments, Congress provided little guidance on how to accomplish that. Legislation mandated that the Treasury receive warrants to acquire shares in companies tapping the program to potentially reward taxpayers. The law didn’t specify how many warrants or how they should be priced, factors that will determine how much money, if any, taxpayers get in exchange for their risk.
Buffett’s Warrants
The government has received warrants valued at $13.8 billion in the 25 biggest capital injections from TARP, according to Bloomberg data. Under the terms Buffett negotiated for his $5 billion stake in Goldman Sachs, the TARP certificates would have been worth $130.8 billion.
Buffett received 43.5 million Goldman Sachs warrants valued at $82.18 apiece on the date of the transaction, or $3.6 billion, Bloomberg analytics show. Paulson, who served as the New York- based bank’s chief executive officer until 2006, injected twice as much taxpayer money into Goldman Sachs a month later and got 12.2 million warrants worth $72.33 each, or $882 million.
If the Treasury had received the same terms as Buffett, taxpayers would have become the biggest investors in most of the bailed-out banks and existing stakes would have been diluted, Bloomberg data show.
No Confidence
“I halfway believed that the taxpayers would make money in September, but I really don’t believe it now,” Rep. Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services committee, said in a telephone interview last month.
“We have to have confidence in Treasury to run the program in a way that protects taxpayers, and there’s very little in the way they’ve run it that inspires confidence,” he said.
Congress left it to Paulson and his staff to decide how warrants would be priced and how many the U.S. would receive under the TARP, according to Caleb Weaver, a spokesman for the program’s oversight board. Treasury imposed identical terms for 140 capital injections. Thirty-four closely held lenders issued certificates to the government for preferred stock instead of common shares and one community development institution wasn’t required to issue warrants, according to the Jan. 6 Treasury report on TARP.
Bailouts for American International Group Inc., GMAC, GM and the second of two infusions into Citigroup were reported separately in the Treasury statistics.
‘Not Day Traders’
Paulson and former Goldman Sachs banker Neel Kashkari, who runs TARP as the interim assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial stability, have said the bank bailout will pay off.
“We’re not day traders, and we’re not looking for a return tomorrow,” Kashkari told a Mortgage Bankers Association conference on Dec. 5 in Washington. “We are looking to try to stabilize the financial system, get credit flowing again, and over time, we believe that the taxpayers will be protected and have a return on their investment.”
Jackie Wilson, a spokeswoman for Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire Hathaway, didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone messages seeking comment. Goldman Sachs spokesman Michael DuVally declined to comment, as did Citigroup spokesman Michael Hanretta.
Paulson left money on the table in three ways, according to economist Johnson: accepting fewer warrants than Buffett did; setting the certificates’ price trigger, or strike, above market values; and receiving an annual yield on the preferred shares that is half of what Buffett will get for the first five years.
Dividend Payments
The government will forgo almost $48 billion over the next five years in preferred stock dividend payments from the 25 biggest TARP infusions, as compared with Buffett, according to the terms of the deals.
Buffett’s five-year warrants for 43.5 million shares of Goldman Sachs were valued at $82.18 each using the Black-Scholes option pricing model developed by Fischer Black and Myron Scholes to estimate the fair market value of such contracts. The model uses, among other data, the implied price volatility of the underlying security. The Treasury received 10-year warrants for 12.2 million Goldman shares priced at $72.33 on Oct. 28 using the same method.
The taxpayers’ certificates were set at the 20-day trailing average of the share price, which for Goldman Sachs was $122.90 on Oct. 28, when the company closed almost $30 cheaper at $93.57. The trailing average ensured a higher strike price, and lower value for the warrants, because bank stocks were plummeting.
8 Percent
By contrast, Buffett received an 8 percent discount to the market price at $115 a share on Sept. 23, when the stock closed at $125.05.
Taxpayers also acquired preferred shares as part of the bailout. These securities, which can’t vote unless the issue at hand is the creation of a more senior preferred stake, carry an interest payment of 5 percent that increases to 9 percent in five years. Buffett’s preferred shares in Goldman Sachs pay a 10 percent yield.
If Goldman Sachs rises to its five-year average price of $147, Buffett will be able to profit by $1.4 billion from exercising his warrants. The government warrants will be in the money for $294 million, or about a fifth as much for twice the investment.
TARP was set up to recapitalize banks and other financial institutions that lost money on subprime mortgages and commercial lending. It allocated $125 billion to nine of the largest banks and securities firms, and then invited all banks or savings and loans to apply for part of another $125 billion.
Saigon National
Recipients range from JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York, which got $25 billion, to Saigon National, which received $1.2 million.
The government plans billions more in cash injections to companies including credit-card networks Discover Financial Services and American Express Co.
Under Buffett’s terms, the Treasury’s investment in Citigroup would also have brought greater potential for profit to taxpayers. The two cash infusions totaling $45 billion would have resulted in warrants for about 5.6 billion shares, which would more than double the 5.4 billion of existing shares. The Treasury’s warrants call for 464 million shares, or 8 percent of the number under Buffett’s terms.
None of the bank warrants for the biggest 25 capital injections from TARP funds can be exercised profitably now. Goldman Sachs closed in New York Stock Exchange composite trading at $83.92 yesterday, 32 percent less than its $122.90 strike price. Citigroup closed at $6.75, or 62 percent less than its highest exercise price of $17.85.
Exercising Warrants
Four of the 25 bank warrants could be exercised in the next year, based on Bloomberg surveys of analysts’ 12-month share- price forecasts. The average projection for Morgan Stanley at $26.46 is more than $3 higher than its strike price.
Analysts also expect American Express Co., Bank of New York- Mellon Corp. and the second capital injection for SunTrust Banks Inc. to rise above their strike prices, according to the surveys.
Congress may have another chance to get money back. The TARP legislation includes a requirement that lawmakers find a way in five years for taxpayer losses to be recouped from the financial industry.
To contact the reporter on this story: Mark Pittman in New York at mpittman@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: William Glasgall at wglasgall@bloomberg.net.
8-22-11
The Atlantic
Close The Fed's 'Secret' $1.2 Trillion Bailout of Wall Street
By Derek Thompson
37 http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/the-feds-secret-12-trillion-bailout-of-wall-street/243938/
It's a bad time to be a central banker. The Federal Reserve faces heat from the left for printing too little money, while members of the right float treason accusations for the printing of too much money. Meanwhile in Europe, the ECB stands charged of dithering on Greece's debt crisis and allowing a contagion of declining confidence to spread all the way to French and German banks.
For perspective, it's worth remembering that in the darkest days of the Great Recession, the U.S. central bank had perhaps its finest hour. By increasing its balance sheet to more than 25 times its previous record, the Federal Reserve was the first and last resort for liquidity for national and international banks when the mortgage crisis all but shut down private lending.
Bloomberg reporters Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz catalog the Fed's $1.2 trillion in "secret loans" to banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan, and Goldman Sachs. Morgan Stanley accepted as much as $107 billion, with Citigroup and Bank of America taking more than $90 billion each in public money to finance their operations amid the private lending freeze. A beautiful interactive chart provided by Bloomberg lets you watch the bank's loans pile up in the nadir of the credit crunch, September 2008, and wind down through 2009.
The juiciest nugget you're most likely to hear from cable news tonight is that the Fed's secret bailout comes out to the same amount U.S. homeowners currently owe on 6.5 million delinquent and foreclosed mortgages. The progressive take on this story will be that the Fed has preferenced Wall Street over Main Street by using its exceptional authority to extend trillions in loans to banks without offering similar guarantees to underwater home owners.
The Fed might respond by pointing out the difference between solvency and liquidity. Liquidity is about cash flow. Solvency is about the ability to pay back debts. In 2008, the banks had no access to private lending. This was a liquidity crisis. The Fed guessed that with access to federal lending, they would survive. So far, the bet paid off. The Fed claims their emergency programs yielded "no credit losses."
Meanwhile, millions of homeowners have lost their source of income. They've seen their wages decline, as they fall behind on their mortgage payments. This doesn't offer a similar opportunity for the Federal Reserve to recoup loans -- and certainly not over a 24-month time frame. It's more like a solvency problem. If homeowners' salaries don't match their debts, they don't need another loan so much as a cash transfer. The Fed's only option is to seek higher inflation to reduce the value of theirdebts.
8-24--11
New American.com
Forget TARP — the Real Bailout Came from the Fed ... Charles Scaliger
http://www.thenewamerican.com/economy/commentary-mainmenu-43/8725-forget-tarp-the-real-bailout-came-from-the-fed
3Since its inception almost a century ago, the Federal Reserve has enjoyed a cloak of secrecy that has grown more opaque over the years. When the economy imploded in 2008, Bernanke’s Fed swung into action behind the scenes, handing out immense sums in bailouts to a host of ailing financials, through direct loans to the very biggest banks — what Robert Litan, a former Justice Department official, called “the aristocracy of American finance.” The exact figures, however, have been a closely guarded secret, until now.
It took a Freedom of Information Act request, months of litigation, and even an act of Congress, but dogged investigators at Bloomberg News finally gained access to the figures, and, after crunching the numbers, concluded that the Fed — unilaterally and with zero congressional oversight — had doled out as much as $1.2 trillion in taxpayer monies. That's about $500 billion more than the separate, hotly contested, and widely publicized $700 billion bailout pushed through Congress at the same time.
Small wonder, then, that a firm like Morgan Stanley, widely expected during the crisis to be the next big financial to fall after the demise of Lehmann Brothers, suddenly announced, on September 29, 2008, that it had “strong capital and liquidity positions.” The markets heaved a sigh of relief and Morgan Stanley was able to hang on. What Morgan Stanley did not disclose was that it had received more than $107 billion from the Federal Reserve, a figure that, according to Bloomberg’s Bradley Keoun and Phil Kuntz, “was the source of almost all of Morgan Stanley’s available cash, according to the lending data and documents released more than two years later by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.” What’s more, Keoun and Kuntz note, “the amount was almost three times the company’s total profits over the past decade.”
While Morgan Stanley got the biggest Fed bailout, other banking behemoths were not far behind. Bank of America got $91.4 billion and Citigroup took in $99.5 billion. Nor was the Fed’s largesse restricted to American banks. In confirmation of long-held (and publicly voiced) suspicions on the part of Congressman Ron Paul and other adversaries of the Federal Reserve, Bloomberg was able to determine that, of the top borrowers from the Fed, nearly half were European banks like the Royal Bank of Scotland ($84.5 billion), Switzerland’s UBS AG ($77.2 billion), and Germany’s Hypo Real Estate Holding AG ($28.7 billion, or roughly $21 million per employee). London’s Barclay’s Plc borrowed $64.9 billion and Frankfurt’s Deutsche Bank AG got $66 billion. Other European firms that benefited from the Fed’s largesse include Dexia SA (Belgium’s largest bank) and Societe Generale SA (France).
The Federal Reserve fought fiercely to keep these and many other similar bailouts secret, using the self-serving argument that publicizing the names of institutions that received bailouts would jeopardize public trust by raising the specter of insolvency. Write Keoun and Kuntz:
Fed officials argued for more than two years that releasing the identities of borrowers and the terms of their loans would stigmatize banks, damaging stock prices or leading to depositor runs. A group of the biggest commercial banks last year asked the U.S. Supreme Court to keep at least some Fed borrowings secret. In March, the high court declined to hear that appeal, and the central bank made an unprecedented release of records.
Data gleaned from 29,346 pages of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and from other Fed databases of more than 21,000 transactions make clear for the first time how deeply the world’s largest banks depended on the U.S. central bank to stave off cash shortfalls. Even as the firms asserted in news releases or earnings calls that they had ample cash, they drew Fed funding in secret, avoiding the stigma of weakness.
As if loaning out such an enormous sum in taxpayer dollars to both domestic and foreign banks were not outrage enough, the Federal Reserve dramatically relaxed its own standards for collateral, in effect permitting borrowing institutions to dump junk assets as collateral for bailout monies. As Keoun and Kuntz explain:
Typically, the central bank accepts only bonds with the highest credit grades, such as U.S. Treasuries. By late 2008, it was accepting “junk” bonds, those rated below investment grade. It even took stocks, which are first to get wiped out in a liquidation.
Morgan Stanley borrowed $61.3 billion from one Fed program in September 2008, pledging a total of $66.5 billion of collateral, according to Fed documents. Securities pledged included $21.5 billion of stocks, $6.68 billion of bonds with a junk credit rating and $19.5 billion of assets with an “unknown rating,” according to the documents. About 25 percent of the collateral was foreign-denominated.
It is unclear how much of the $1.2 trillion has been repaid or was adequately collateralized. But the clear lesson to be gleaned from this unprecedented window into the workings of the Fed is that the international banking cartel, anchored by central banks empowered to print money as needed to paper over financial debacles like the crash of 2008, does not scruple to put others’ money at risk. This is the ultimate form of moral hazard, in which the entire financial sector is systematically shielded from the consequences of its own follies. This “too-big-to-fail” mentality extends far and wide among the institutions that make up America’s de facto financial aristocracy. Unfortunately, it also reaches overseas to their allies in Europe, whose interests are so interlocked with those of Wall Street that our own government is willing to put American taxpayers on the hook for bankers in London, Paris, and Brussels.
If a parliamentary reporter handled his assignment by uncritically taking up a lance in support of every decision that was pushed through, no matter how preposturous, or if a political reporter were to show a similar lack of judgement -- that reporter would be fired or at least reassigned to a department where he or she could not do so much damage. In the world of financial reporting, however, the normal journalistic mandate to undertake critical investigations and objectively report finding to the readers appears not to apply. Instead the most successful rogue is applauded. In this way the future of Sweden is also being created, and all remaining trust in journalists as a corps of professionals is being compromised. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Stieg Larsson, Vintage Books, New York, 2008, p. 112.