Bear Stearns. Note Quote.

Like many of its competitors, Bear Stearns saw the rise of the hedge fund industry during the 1990s and began managing its own funds with outside investor capital under the name Bear Stearns Asset Management (BSAM). Unlike its competitors, Bear hired all of its fund managers internally, with each manager specializing in a particular security or asset class. Objections by some Bear executives, such as co-president Alan Schwartz, that such concentration of risk could raise volatility were ignored, and the impressive returns posted by internal funds such as Ralph Cioffi’s High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund quieted any concerns.

Cioffi’s fund was invested in sophisticated credit derivatives backed by mortgage securities. When the housing bubble burst, he redoubled his bets, raising a new Enhanced Leverage High-Grade Structured Credit Strategies Fund that would use 100 leverage (as compared to the 35 leverage employed by the original fund). The market continued to turn disastrously against the fund, which was soon stuck with billions of dollars worth of illiquid, unprofitable mortgages. In an attempt to salvage the situation and cut his losses, Cioffi launched a vehicle named Everquest Financial and sold its shares to the public. But when journalists at the Wall Street Journal revealed that Everquest’s primary assets were the “toxic waste” of money-losing mortgage securities, Bear had no choice but to cancel the public offering. With spectacular losses mounting daily, investors attempted to withdraw their remaining holdings. In order to free up cash for such redemptions, the fund had to liquidate assets at a loss, selling that only put additional downward pressure on its already underwater positions. Lenders to the fund began making margin calls and threatening to seize its $1.2 billion in collateral.

In a less turbulent market it might have worked, but the subprime crisis had spent weeks on the front page of financial newspapers around the globe, and every bank on Wall Street was desperate to reduce its own exposure. Insulted and furious that Bear had refused to inject any of its own capital to save the funds, Steve Black, J.P. Morgan Chase head of investment banking, called Schwartz and said, “We’re defaulting you.”

The default and subsequent seizure of $400 million in collateral by Merrill Lynch proved highly damaging to Bear Stearns’s reputation across Wall Street. In a desperate attempt to save face under the scrutiny of the SEC, James Cayne made the unprecedented move of using $1.6 billion of Bear’s own capital to prop up the hedge funds. By late July 2007 even Bear’s continued support could no longer prop up Cioffi’s two beleaguered funds, which paid back just $300 million of the credit its parent had extended. With their holdings virtually worthless, the funds had no choice but to file for bankruptcy protection.

On November 14, just two weeks after the Journal story questioning Cayne’s commitment and leadership, Bear Stearns reported that it would write down $1.2 billion in mortgage- related losses. (The figure would later grow to $1.9 billion.) CFO Molinaro suggested that the worst had passed, and to outsiders, at least, the firm appeared to have narrowly escaped disaster.

Behind the scenes, however, Bear management had already begun searching for a white knight, hiring Gary Parr at Lazard to examine its options for a cash injection. Privately, Schwartz and Parr spoke with Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. founder Henry Kravis, who had first learned the leveraged buyout market while a partner at Bear Stearns in the 1960s. Kravis sought entry into the profitable brokerage business at depressed prices, while Bear sought an injection of more than $2 billion in equity capital (for a reported 20% of the company) and the calming effect that a strong, respected personality like Kravis would have upon shareholders. Ultimately the deal fell apart, largely due to management’s fear that KKR’s significant equity stake and the presence of Kravis on the board would alienate the firm’s other private equity clientele, who often competed with KKR for deals. Throughout the fall Bear continued to search for potential acquirers. With the market watching intently to see if Bear shored up its financing, Cayne managed to close only a $1 billion cross-investment with CITIC, the state-owned investment company of the People’s Republic of China.

Bear’s $0.89 profit per share in the first quarter of 2008 did little to quiet the growing whispers of its financial instability. It seemed that every day another major investment bank reported mortgage-related losses, and for whatever reason Bear’s name kept cropping up in discussions of the by-then infamous subprime crisis. Exacerbating Bear’s public relations problem, the SEC had launched an investigation into the collapse of the two BSAM hedge funds, and rumors of massive losses at three major hedge funds further rattled an already uneasy market. Nonetheless, Bear executives felt that the storm had passed, reasoning that its almost $21 billion in cash reserves had convinced the market of its long-term viability.

Instead, on Monday, March 10, 2008, Moody’s downgraded 163 tranches of mortgage- backed bonds issued by Bear across fifteen transactions. The credit rating agency had drawn sharp criticism for its role in the subprime meltdown from analysts who felt the company had overestimated the creditworthiness of mortgage-backed securities and failed to alert the market of the danger as the housing market turned. As a result, Moody’s was in the process of downgrading nearly all of its ratings, but as the afternoon wore on, Bear’s stock price seemed to be reacting far more negatively than those of competitor firms.

Wall Street’s drive toward ever more sophisticated communications devices had created an interconnected network of traders and bankers across the world. On most days, Internet chat and mobile e-mail devices relayed gossip about compensation, major employee departures, and even sports betting lines. On the morning of March 10, however, they were carrying one message to the exclusion of all others: Bear was having liquidity problems. At noon, CNBC took the story public on Power Lunch. As Bear’s stock price fell more than 10 percent to $63, Ace Greenberg frantically placed calls to various executives, demanding that someone publicly deny any such problems. When contacted himself, Greenberg told a CNBC correspondent that the rumors were “totally ridiculous,” angering CFO Molinaro, who felt that denying the rumor would only legitimize it and trigger further panic selling, making prophecies of Bear’s illiquidity self-fulfilling. Just two hours later, however, Bear appeared to have dodged a bullet. News of New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s involvement in a high-class prostitution ring wiped any financial rumors off the front page, leading Bear executives to believe the worst was once again behind them.

Instead, the rumors exploded anew the next day, as many interpreted the Federal Reserve’s announcement of a new $200 billion lending program to help financial institutions through the credit crisis as aimed specifically toward Bear Stearns. The stock dipped as low as $55.42 before closing at $62.97. Meanwhile, Bear executives faced a new crisis in the form of an explosion of novation requests, in which a party to a risky contract tries to eliminate its risky position by selling it to a third party. Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs all reported a deluge of novation requests from firms trying to reduce their exposure to Bear’s credit risk. The speed and force of this explosion of novation requests meant that before Bear could act, both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse issued e-mails to their traders holding up any requests relating to Bear Stearns pending approval by their credit departments. Once again, the electronically linked gossip network of trading desks around the world dealt a blow to investor confidence in Bear’s stability, as a false rumor circulated that Credit Suisse’s memo had forbidden its traders from engaging in any trades with Bear. The decrease in confidence in Bear’s liquidity could be quantified by the rise in the cost of credit default swaps on Bear’s debt. The price of such an instrument – which effectively acts as five years of insurance against a default on $10 million of Bear’s debt – spiked to more than $626,000 from less than $100,000 in October, indicating heavy betting by some firms that Bear would be unable to pay its liabilities.

Internally, Bear debated whether to address the rumors publicly, ultimately deciding to arrange a Wednesday morning interview of Schwartz by CNBC correspondent David Faber. Not wanting to encourage rumors with a hasty departure, Schwartz did the interview live from Bear’s annual media conference in Palm Beach. Chosen because of his perceived friendliness to Bear, Faber nonetheless opened the interview with a devastating question that claimed direct knowledge of a trader whose credit department had temporarily held up a trade with Bear. Later during the interview Faber admitted that the trade had finally gone through, but he had called into question Bear’s fundamental capacity to operate as a trading firm. One veteran trader later commented,

You knew right at that moment that Bear Stearns was dead, right at the moment he asked that question. Once you raise that idea, that the firm can’t follow through on a trade, it’s over. Faber killed him. He just killed him.

Despite sentiment at Bear that Schwartz had finally put the company’s best foot forward and refuted rumors of its illiquidity, hedge funds began pulling their accounts in earnest, bringing Bear’s reserves down to $15 billion. Additionally, repo lenders – whose overnight loans to investment banks must be renewed daily – began informing Bear that they would not renew the next morning, forcing the firm to find new sources of credit. Schwartz phoned Parr at Lazard, Molinaro reviewed Bear’s plans for an emergency sale in the event of a crisis, and one of the firm’s attorneys called the president of the Federal Reserve to explain Bear’s situation and implore him to accelerate the newly announced program that would allow investment banks to use mortgage securities as collateral for emergency loans from the Fed’s discount window, normally reserved for commercial banks.

The trickle of withdrawals that had begun earlier in the week turned into an unstoppable torrent of cash flowing out the door on Thursday. Meanwhile, Bear’s stock continued its sustained nosedive, falling nearly 15% to an intraday low of $50.48 before rallying to close down 1.5%. At lunch, Schwartz assured a crowded meeting of Bear executives that the whirlwind rumors were simply market noise, only to find himself interrupted by Michael Minikes, senior managing director,

Do you have any idea what is going on? Our cash is flying out the door! Our clients are leaving us!

Hedge fund clients jumped ship in droves. Renaissance Technologies withdrew approximately $5 billion in trading accounts, and D. E. Shaw followed suit with an equal amount. That evening, Bear executives assembled in a sixth-floor conference room to survey the carnage. In less than a week, the firm had burned through all but $5.9 billion of its $18.3 billion in reserves, and was still on the hook for $2.4 billion in short-term debt to Citigroup. With a panicked market making more withdrawals the next day almost certain, Schwartz accepted the inevitable need for additional financing and had Parr revisit merger discussions with J.P. Morgan Chase CEO James Dimon that had stalled in the fall. Flabbergasted at the idea that an agreement could be reached that night, Dimon nonetheless agreed to send a team of bankers over to analyze Bear’s books.

Parr’s call interrupted Dimon’s 52nd birthday celebration at a Greek restaurant just a few blocks away from Bear headquarters, where a phalanx of attorneys had begun preparing emergency bankruptcy filings and documents necessary for a variety of cash-injecting transactions. Facing almost certain insolvency in the next 24 hours, Schwartz hastily called an emergency board meeting late that night, with most board members dialing in remotely. Bear’s nearly four hundred subsidiaries would make a bankruptcy filing impossibly complicated, so Schwartz continued to cling to the hope for an emergency cash infusion to get Bear through Friday. As J.P. Morgan’s bankers pored over Bear’s positions, they balked at the firm’s precarious position and the continued size of its mortgage holdings, insisting that the Fed get involved in a bailout they considered far too risky to take on alone.

Its role as a counterparty in trillions of dollars’ worth of derivatives contracts bore an eerie similarity to LTCM, and the Fed once again saw the potential for financial Armageddon if Bear were allowed to collapse of its own accord. An emergency liquidation of the firm’s assets would have put strong downward pressure on global securities prices, exacerbating an already chaotic market environment. Facing a hard deadline of credit markets’ open on Friday morning, the Fed and J.P. Morgan wrangled back and forth on how to save Bear. Working around the clock, they finally reached an agreement wherein J.P. Morgan would access the Fed’s discount window and in turn offer Bear a $30 billion credit line that, as dictated by a last-minute insertion by J.P. Morgan general counsel Steven Cutler, would be good for 28 days. As the press release went public, Bear executives cheered; Bear would have almost a month to seek alternative financing.

Where Bear had seen a lifeline, however, the market saw instead a last desperate gasp for help. Incredulous Bear executives could only watch in horror as the firm’s capital continued to fly out of its coffers. On Friday morning Bear burned through the last of its reserves in a matter of hours. A midday conference call in which Schwartz confidently assured investors that the credit line would allow Bear to continue “business as usual” did little to stop the bleeding, and its stock lost almost half of its already depressed value, closing at $30 per share.

All day Friday, Parr set about desperately trying to save his client, searching every corner of the financial world for potential investors or buyers of all or part of Bear. Given the severity of the situation, he could rule out nothing, from a sale of the lucrative prime brokerage operations to a merger or sale of the entire company. Ideally, he hoped to find what he termed a “validating investor,” a respected Wall Street name to join the board, adding immediate credibility and perhaps quieting the now deafening rumors of Bear’s imminent demise. Sadly, only a few such personalities with the reputation and war chest necessary to play the role of savior existed, and most of them had already passed on Bear.

Nonetheless, Schwartz left Bear headquarters on Friday evening relieved that the firm had lived to see the weekend and secured 28 days of breathing room. During the ride home to Greenwich, an unexpected phone call from New York Federal Reserve President Timothy Geithner and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson shattered that illusion. Paulson told a stunned Schwartz that the Fed’s line of credit would expire Sunday night, giving Bear 48 hours to find a buyer or file for bankruptcy. The demise of the 28-day clause remains a mystery; the speed necessary early Friday morning and the inclusion of the clause by J.P. Morgan’s general counsel suggest that Bear executives had misinterpreted it, although others believe that Paulson and Geithner had soured both on Bear’s prospects and on market perception of an emergency loan from the Fed as Friday wore on. Either way, the Fed had made up its mind, and a Saturday morning appeal from Schwartz failed to sway Geithner.

All day Saturday prospective buyers streamed through Bear’s headquarters to pick through the rubble as Parr attempted to orchestrate Bear’s last-minute salvation. Chaos reigned, with representatives from every major bank on Wall Street, J. C. Flowers, KKR, and countless others poring over Bear’s positions in an effort to determine the value of Bear’s massive illiquid holdings and how the Fed would help in financing. Some prospective buyers wanted just a piece of the dying bank, others the whole firm, with still others proposing more complicated multiple-step transactions that would slice Bear to ribbons. One by one, they dropped out, until J. C. Flowers made an offer for 90% of Bear for a total of up to $2.6 billion, but the offer was contingent on the private equity firm raising $20 billion from a bank consortium, and $20 billion in risky credit was unlikely to appear overnight.

That left J.P. Morgan. Apparently the only bank willing to come to the rescue, J.P. Morgan had sent no fewer than 300 bankers representing 16 different product groups to Bear headquarters to value the firm. The sticking point, as with all the bidders, was Bear’s mortgage holdings. Even after a massive write-down, it was impossible to assign a value to such illiquid (and publicly maligned) securities with any degree of accuracy. Having forced the default of the BSAM hedge funds that started this mess less than a year earlier.

On its final 10Q in March, Bear listed $399 billion in assets and $387 billion in liabilities, leaving just $12 billion in equity for a 32 leverage multiple. Bear initially estimated that this included $120 billion of “risk-weighted” assets, those that might be subject to subsequent write-downs. As J.P. Morgan’s bankers worked around the clock trying to get to the bottom of Bear’s balance sheet, they came to estimate the figure at nearly $220 billion. That pessimistic outlook, combined with Sunday morning’s New York Times article reiterating Bear’s recent troubles, dulled J.P. Morgan’s appetite for jumping onto what appeared to be a sinking ship. Later, one J.P. Morgan banker shuddered, recalling the article. “That article certainly had an impact on my thinking. Just the reputational aspects of it, getting into bed with these people.”

On Saturday morning J.P. Morgan backed out and Dimon told a shell-shocked Schwartz to pursue any other option available to him. The problem was, no such alternative existed. Knowing this, and the possibility that the liquidation of Bear could throw the world’s financial markets into chaos, Fed representatives immediately phoned Dimon. As it had in the LTCM case a decade ago, the Fed relied heavily on suasion, or “jawboning,” the longtime practice of attempting to influence market participants by appeals to reason rather than a declaration by fiat. For hours, J.P. Morgan’s and the Fed’s highest-ranking officials played a game of high-stakes poker, with each side bluffing and Bear’s future hanging in the balance. The Fed wanted to avoid unprecedented government participation in the bailout of a private investment firm, while J.P. Morgan wanted to avoid taking on any of the “toxic waste” in Bear’s mortgage holdings. “They kept saying, ‘We’re not going to do it,’ and we kept saying, ‘We really think you should do it,’” recalled one Fed official. “This went on for hours . . . They kept saying, ‘We can’t do this on our own.’” With the hours ticking away until Monday’s Australian markets would open at 6:00 p.m. New York time, both sides had to compromise.

On Sunday afternoon, Schwartz stepped out of a 1:00 emergency meeting of Bear’s board of directors to take the call from Dimon. The offer would come somewhere in the range of $4 to 5 per share. Hearing the news from Schwartz, the Bear board erupted with rage. Dialing in from the bridge tournament in Detroit, Cayne exploded, ranting furiously that the firm should file for bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11 rather than accept such a humiliating offer, which would reduce his 5.66 million shares – once worth nearly $1 billion – to less than $30 million in value. In reality, however, bankruptcy was impossible. As Parr explained, changes to the federal bankruptcy code in 2005 meant that a Chapter 11 filing would be tantamount to Bear falling on its sword, because regulators would have to seize Bear’s accounts, immediately ceasing the firm’s operations and forcing its liquidation. There would be no reorganization.

Even as Cayne raged against the $4 offer, the Fed’s concern over the appearance of a $30 billion loan to a failing investment bank while American homeowners faced foreclosures compelled Treasury Secretary Paulson to pour salt in Bear’s wounds. Officially, the Fed had remained hands-off in the LTCM bailout, relying on its powers of suasion to convince other banks to step up in the name of market stability. Just 10 years later, they could find no takers. The speed of Bear’s collapse, the impossibility of conducting true due diligence in such a compressed time frame, and the incalculable risk of taking on Bear’s toxic mortgage holdings scared off every buyer and forced the Fed from an advisory role into a principal role in the bailout. Worried that a price deemed at all generous to Bear might subsequently encourage moral hazard – increased risky behavior by investment banks secure in the knowledge that in a worst-case scenario, disaster would be averted by a federal bailout – Paulson determined that the transaction, while rescuing the firm, also had to be punitive to Bear shareholders. He called Dimon, who reiterated the contemplated offer range.

“That sounds high tome,” Paulson told the J.P. Morgan chief. “I think this should be done at a very low price.” It was moments later that Braunstein called Parr. “The number’s $2.” Under Delaware law, executives must act on behalf of both shareholders and creditors when a company enters the “zone of insolvency,” and Schwartz knew that Bear had rocketed through that zone over the past few days. Faced with bankruptcy or J.P. Morgan, Bear had no choice but to accept the embarrassingly low offer that represented a 97% discount off its $32 close on Friday evening. Schwartz convinced the weary Bear board that $2 would be “better than nothing,” and by 6:30 p.m., the deal was unanimously approved.

After 85 years in the market, Bear Stearns ceased to exist.

Long Term Capital Management. Note Quote.

Long Term Capital Management, or LTCM, was a hedge fund founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, the former head of Salomon Brothers’s domestic fixed-income arbitrage group. Meriwether had grown the arbitrage group to become Salomon’s most profitable group by 1991, when it was revealed that one of the traders under his purview had astonishingly submitted a false bid in a U.S. Treasury bond auction. Despite reporting the trade immediately to CEO John Gutfreund, the outcry from the scandal forced Meriwether to resign.

Meriwether revived his career several years later with the founding of LTCM. Amidst the beginning of one of the greatest bull markets the global markets had ever seen, Meriwether assembled a team of some of the world’s most respected economic theorists to join other refugees from the arbitrage group at Salomon. The board of directors included Myron Scholes, a coauthor of the famous Black-Scholes formula used to price option contracts, and MIT Sloan professor Robert Merton, both of whom would later share the 1997 Nobel Prize for Economics. The firm’s impressive brain trust, collectively considered geniuses by most of the financial world, set out to raise a $1 billion fund by explaining to investors that their profoundly complex computer models allowed them to price securities according to risk more accurately than the rest of the market, in effect “vacuuming up nickels that others couldn’t see.”

One typical LTCM trade concerned the divergence in price between long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Despite offering fundamentally the same (minimal) default risk, those issued more recently – known as “on-the-run” securities – traded more heavily than those “off-the-run” securities issued just months previously. Heavier trading meant greater liquidity, which in turn resulted in ever-so-slightly higher prices. As “on-the-run” securities become “off-the-run” upon the issuance of a new tranche of Treasury bonds, the price discrepancy generally disappears with time. LTCM sought to exploit that price convergence by shorting the more expensive “on-the-run” bond while purchasing the “off- the-run” security.

By early 1998 the intellectual firepower of its board members and the aggressive trading practices that had made the arbitrage group at Salomon so successful had allowed LTCM to flourish, growing its initial $1 billion of investor equity to $4.72 billion. However, the miniscule spreads earned on arbitrage trades could not provide the type of returns sought by hedge fund investors. In order to make transactions such as these worth their while, LTCM had to employ massive leverage in order to magnify its returns. Ultimately, the fund’s equity component sat atop more than $124.5 billion in borrowings for total assets of more than $129 billion. These borrowings were merely the tip of the ice-berg; LTCM also held off-balance-sheet derivative positions with a notional value of more than $1.25 trillion.

The fund’s success began to pose its own problems. The market lacked sufficient capacity to absorb LTCM’s bloated size, as trades that had been profitable initially became impossible to conduct on a massive scale. Moreover, a flood of arbitrage imitators tightened the spreads on LTCM’s “bread-and-butter” trades even further. The pressure to continue delivering returns forced LTCM to find new arbitrage opportunities, and the fund diversified into areas where it could not pair its theoretical insights with trading experience. Soon LTCM had made large bets in Russia and in other emerging markets, on S&P futures, and in yield curve, junk bond, merger, and dual-listed securities arbitrage.

Combined with its style drift, the fund’s more than 26 leverage put LTCM in an increasingly precarious bubble, which was eventually burst by a combination of factors that forced the fund into a liquidity crisis. In contrast to Scholes’s comments about plucking invisible, riskless nickels from the sky, financial theorist Nassim Taleb later compared the fund’s aggressive risk taking to “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller,” a steamroller that finally came in the form of 1998’s market panic. The departure of frequent LTCM counterparty Salomon Brothers from the arbitrage market that summer put downward pressure on many of the fund’s positions, and Russia’s default on its government-issued bonds threw international credit markets into a downward spiral. Panicked investors around the globe demonstrated a “flight to quality,” selling the risky securities in which LTCM traded and purchasing U.S. Treasury securities, further driving up their price and preventing a price convergence upon which the fund had bet so heavily.

None of LTCM’s sophisticated theoretical models had contemplated such an internationally correlated credit market collapse, and the fund began hemorrhaging money, losing nearly 20% of its equity in May and June alone. Day after day, every market in which LTCM traded turned against it. Its powerless brain trust watched in horror as its equity shrank to $600 million in early September without any reduction in borrowing, resulting in an unfathomable 200 leverage ratio. Sensing the fund’s liquidity crunch, Bear Stearns refused to continue acting as a clearinghouse for the fund’s trades, throwing LTCM into a panic. Without the short-term credit that enabled its entire trading operations, the fund could not continue and its longer-term securities grew more illiquid by the day.

Obstinate in their refusal to unwind what they still considered profitable trades hammered by short-term market irrationality, LTCM’s partners refused a buyout offer of $250 million by Goldman Sachs, ING Barings, and Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway. However, LTCM’s role as a counterparty in thousands of derivatives trades that touched investment firms around the world threatened to provoke a wider collapse in international securities markets if the fund went under, so the U.S. Federal Reserve stepped in to maintain order. Wishing to avoid the precedent of a government bailout of a hedge fund and the moral hazard it could subsequently encourage, the Fed invited every major investment bank on Wall Street to an emergency meeting in New York and dictated the terms of the $3.625 billion bailout that would preserve market liquidity. The Fed convinced Bankers Trust, Barclays, Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, and UBS – many of whom were investors in the fund – to contribute $300 million apiece, with $125 million coming from Société Générale and $100 million from Lehman Brothers and Paribas. Eventually the market crisis passed, and each bank managed to liquidate its position at a slight profit. Only one bank contacted by the Fed refused to join the syndicate and share the burden in the name of preserving market integrity.

That bank was Bear Stearns.

Bear’s dominant trading position in bonds and derivatives had won it the profitable business of acting as a settlement house for nearly all of LTCM’s trading in those markets. On September 22, 1998, just days before the Fed-organized bailout, Bear put the final nail in the LTCM coffin by calling in a short-term debt in the amount of $500 million in an attempt to limit its own exposure to the failing hedge fund, rendering it insolvent in the process. Ever the maverick in investment banking circles, Bear stubbornly refused to contribute to the eventual buyout, even in the face of a potentially apocalyptic market crash and despite the millions in profits it had earned as LTCM’s prime broker. In typical Bear fashion, James Cayne ignored the howls from other banks that failure to preserve confidence in the markets through a bailout would bring them all down in flames, famously growling through a chewed cigar as the Fed solicited contributions for the emergency financing, “Don’t go alphabetically if you want this to work.”

Market analysts were nearly unanimous in describing the lessons learned from LTCM’s implosion; in effect, the fund’s profound leverage had placed it in such a precarious position that it could not wait for its positions to turn profitable. While its trades were sound in principal, LTCM’s predicted price convergence was not realized until long after its equity had been wiped out completely. A less leveraged firm, they explained, might have realized lower profits than the 40% annual return LTCM had offered investors up until the 1998 crisis, but could have weathered the storm once the market turned against it. In the words of economist John Maynard Keynes, the market had remained irrational longer than LTCM could remain solvent. The crisis further illustrated the importance not merely of liquidity but of perception in the less regulated derivatives markets. Once LTCM’s ability to meet its obligations was called into question, its demise became inevitable, as it could no longer find counterparties with whom to trade and from whom it could borrow to continue operating.

The thornier question of the Fed’s role in bailing out an overly aggressive investment fund in the name of market stability remained unresolved, despite the Fed’s insistence on private funding for the actual buyout. Though impossible to foresee at the time, the issue would be revisited anew less than ten years later, and it would haunt Bear Stearns. With negative publicity from Bear’s $38.5 million settlement with the SEC regarding charges that it had ignored fraudulent behavior by a client for whom it cleared trades and LTCM’s collapse behind it, Bear Stearns continued to grow under Cayne’s leadership, with its stock price appreciating some 600% from his assumption of control in 1993 until 2008. However, a rapid-fire sequence of negative events began to unfurl in the summer of 2007 that would push Bear into a liquidity crunch eerily similar to the one that felled LTCM.

Malignant Acceleration in Tech-Finance. Some Further Rumination on Regulations. Thought of the Day 72.1

Regardless of the positive effects of HFT that offers, such as reduced spreads, higher liquidity, and faster price discovery, its negative side is mostly what has caught people’s attention. Several notorious market failures and accidents in recent years all seem to be related to HFT practices. They showed how much risk HFT can involve and how huge the damage can be.

HFT heavily depends on the reliability of the trading algorithms that generate, route, and execute orders. High-frequency traders thus must ensure that these algorithms have been tested completely and thoroughly before they are deployed into the live systems of the financial markets. Any improperly-tested, or prematurely-released algorithms may cause losses to both investors and the exchanges. Several examples demonstrate the extent of the ever-present vulnerabilities.

In August 2012, the Knight Capital Group implemented a new liquidity testing software routine into its trading system, which was running live on the NYSE. The system started making bizarre trading decisions, quadrupling the price of one company, Wizzard Software, as well as bidding-up the price of much larger entities, such as General Electric. Within 45 minutes, the company lost USD 440 million. After this event and the weakening of Knight Capital’s capital base, it agreed to merge with another algorithmic trading firm, Getco, which is the biggest HFT firm in the U.S. today. This example emphasizes the importance of implementing precautions to ensure their algorithms are not mistakenly used.

Another example is Everbright Securities in China. In 2013, state-owned brokerage firm, Everbright Securities Co., sent more than 26,000 mistaken buy orders to the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE of RMB 23.4 billion (USD 3.82 billion), pushing its benchmark index up 6 % in two minutes. This resulted in a trading loss of approximately RMB 194 million (USD 31.7 million). In a follow-up evaluative study, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC) found that there were significant flaws in Everbright’s information and risk management systems.

The damage caused by HFT errors is not limited to specific trading firms themselves, but also may involve stock exchanges and the stability of the related financial market. On Friday, May 18, 2012, the social network giant, Facebook’s stock was issued on the NASDAQ exchange. This was the most anticipated initial public offering (IPO) in its history. However, technology problems with the opening made a mess of the IPO. It attracted HFT traders, and very large order flows were expected, and before the IPO, NASDAQ was confident in its ability to deal with the high volume of orders.

But when the deluge of orders to buy, sell and cancel trades came, NASDAQ’s trading software began to fail under the strain. This resulted in a 30-minute delay on NASDAQ’s side, and a 17-second blackout for all stock trading at the exchange, causing further panic. Scrutiny of the problems immediately led to fines for the exchange and accusations that HFT traders bore some responsibility too. Problems persisted after opening, with many customer orders from institutional and retail buyers unfilled for hours or never filled at all, while others ended up buying more shares than they had intended. This incredible gaffe, which some estimates say cost traders USD 100 million, eclipsed NASDAQ’s achievement in getting Facebook’s initial IPO, the third largest IPO in U.S. history. This incident has been estimated to have cost investors USD 100 million.

Another instance occurred on May 6, 2010, when U.S. financial markets were surprised by what has been referred to ever since as the “Flash Crash” Within less than 30 minutes, the main U.S. stock markets experienced the single largest price declines within a day, with a decline of more than 5 % for many U.S.-based equity products. In addition, the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), at its lowest point that day, fell by nearly 1,000 points, although it was followed by a rapid rebound. This brief period of extreme intraday volatility demonstrated the weakness of the structure and stability of U.S. financial markets, as well as the opportunities for volatility-focused HFT traders. Although a subsequent investigation by the SEC cleared high-frequency traders of directly having caused the Flash Crash, they were still blamed for exaggerating market volatility, withdrawing liquidity for many U.S.-based equities (FLASH BOYS).

Since the mid-2000s, the average trade size in the U.S. stock market had plummeted, the markets had fragmented, and the gap in time between the public view of the markets and the view of high-frequency traders had widened. The rise of high-frequency trading had been accompanied also by a rise in stock market volatility – over and above the turmoil caused by the 2008 financial crisis. The price volatility within each trading day in the U.S. stock market between 2010 and 2013 was nearly 40 percent higher than the volatility between 2004 and 2006, for instance. There were days in 2011 in which volatility was higher than in the most volatile days of the dot-com bubble. Although these different incidents have different causes, the effects were similar and some common conclusions can be drawn. The presence of algorithmic trading and HFT in the financial markets exacerbates the adverse impacts of trading-related mistakes. It may lead to extremely higher market volatility and surprises about suddenly-diminished liquidity. This raises concerns about the stability and health of the financial markets for regulators. With the continuous and fast development of HFT, larger and larger shares of equity trades were created in the U.S. financial markets. Also, there was mounting evidence of disturbed market stability and caused significant financial losses due to HFT-related errors. This led the regulators to increase their attention and effort to provide the exchanges and traders with guidance on HFT practices They also expressed concerns about high-frequency traders extracting profit at the costs of traditional investors and even manipulating the market. For instance, high-frequency traders can generate a large amount of orders within microseconds to exacerbate a trend. Other types of misconduct include: ping orders, which is using some orders to detect other hidden orders; and quote stuffing, which is issuing a large number of orders to create uncertainty in the market. HFT creates room for these kinds of market abuses, and its blazing speed and huge trade volumes make their detection difficult for regulators. Regulators have taken steps to increase their regulatory authority over HFT activities. Some of the problems that arose in the mid-2000s led to regulatory hearings in the United States Senate on dark pools, flash orders and HFT practices. Another example occurred after the Facebook IPO problem. This led the SEC to call for a limit up-limit down mechanism at the exchanges to prevent trades in individual securities from occurring outside of a specified price range so that market volatility will be under better control. These regulatory actions put stricter requirements on HFT practices, aiming to minimize the market disturbance when many fast trading orders occur within a day.

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Regulating the Velocities of Dark Pools. Thought of the Day 72.0

On 22 September 2010 the SEC chair Mary Schapiro signaled US authorities were considering the introduction of regulations targeted at HFT:

…High frequency trading firms have a tremendous capacity to affect the stability and integrity of the equity markets. Currently, however, high frequency trading firms are subject to very little in the way of obligations either to protect that stability by promoting reasonable price continuity in tough times, or to refrain from exacerbating price volatility.

However regulating an industry working towards moving as fast as the speed of light is no ordinary administrative task: – Modern finance is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Artificial intelligence, mathematical models, and supercomputers have replaced human intelligence, human deliberation, and human execution…. Modern finance is becoming cyborg finance – an industry that is faster, larger, more complex, more global, more interconnected, and less human. C W Lin proposes a number of principles for regulating this cyber finance industry:

1. Update antiquated paradigms of reasonable investors and compartmentalised institutions, and confront the emerging institutional realities, and realise the old paradigms of governance of markets may be ill-suited for the new finance industry;
2. Enhance disclosure which recognises the complexity and technological capacities of the new finance industry;
3. Adopt regulations to moderate the velocities of finance realising that as these approach the speed of light they may contain more risks than rewards for the new financial industry;
4. Introduce smarter coordination harmonising financial regulation beyond traditional spaces of jurisdiction.

Electronic markets will require international coordination, surveillance and regulation. The high-frequency trading environment has the potential to generate errors and losses at a speed and magnitude far greater than that in a floor or screen-based trading environment… Moreover, issues related to risk management of these technology-dependent trading systems are numerous and complex and cannot be addressed in isolation within domestic financial markets. For example, placing limits on high-frequency algorithmic trading or restricting Un-filtered sponsored access and co-location within one jurisdiction might only drive trading firms to another jurisdiction where controls are less stringent.

In these regulatory endeavours it will be vital to remember that all innovation is not intrinsically good and might be inherently dangerous, and the objective is to make a more efficient and equitable financial system, not simply a faster system: Despite its fast computers and credit derivatives, the current financial system does not seem better at transferring funds from savers to borrowers than the financial system of 1910. Furthermore as Thomas Piketty‘s Capital in the Twenty-First Century amply demonstrates any thought of the democratisation of finance induced by the huge expansion of superannuation funds together with the increased access to finance afforded by credit cards and ATM machines, is something of a fantasy, since levels of structural inequality have endured through these technological transformations. The tragedy is that under the guise of technological advance and sophistication we could be destroying the capacity of financial markets to fulfil their essential purpose, as Haldane eloquently states:

An efficient capital market transfers savings today into investment tomorrow and growth the day after. In that way, it boosts welfare. Short-termism in capital markets could interrupt this transfer. If promised returns the day after tomorrow fail to induce saving today, there will be no investment tomorrow. If so, long-term growth and welfare would be the casualty.

The Scourge of Ratings Agencies

This is from the archives written over two days in August and September this year and meant as part of the weekly digest for PFPAC (FB).

Some days back, a friend, asked a question on Ratings Agencies (RAs hereafter), and if there is anything viable or subsequently pliable of these? So, this is a delving into the world of RAs, with a due note of caution that the piece is liable to technical morass. I don’t think I can help emaciate that, and so readers not too glued to technicalities can happily “skip” this. Another caveat here is the number of loose ends rooting and branching out to nowhere, or rather everywhere, for, the political of the neoliberal is an all-encompassing compass far larger than adherence to revolutionary struggles of the peripherals, and rooted in nodal points and events that bring such thoughts to fruition in the first place. RAs’ political economy ties in perfectly with the neoliberal and financialisation of capital in stitching these loose ends. So, it is time to go back to man is the political animal (Reasoning) of Aristotle from the present-day cow is the political animal of scores and scores (Pun intended!)….

Lets begin with indemnities, the technical parlance for insurance, wind and wade through probabilities and reach a designated ‘credit police‘, for this is where historical roots of RAs lie. Edmund Halley (Yes, the same astronomer giant credited with the eponymously-named comet!) in 1693 is credited with publishing the first-ever mortality tables based on the parish records for the Polish-German town of Breslau showing a mortality rate of 1 in 30 every year. These figures corroborated to a setting aside of a thirtieth of a company towards life insurance and annuities, whereby anyone investing in to this fraction by a company would be a policyholder, a member of the population subject to patterns of death and disease, and measured, averaged and thus risk-managed. Below is the original table that Halley came out with.

Now, if an insurance company brought together a large enough pool of policyholders, individual uncertainty was almost magically eliminated, so long as the actuary did his math correctly. The math isn’t really subjected to individual vagaries, but culminates in an objective reality, an often debated and nuanced extreme of statistical probability theory based on data analysis. So far, so good. But, how does this augur with banking and finance?  Analogising the death-disease parametric of insurance with bankruptcy and default of banking and finance, there is a relationship of equivalence to be drawn here. Just like insurance is subject to probability over long periods of time, a bank with a loan portfolio is played upon equivalently by probability over long periods of time, and both of these draw parallels in alleviating anxieties, or eliminating risks.

Jumping over from insurance. There is a catch here. Actuaries could potentially be instrumental in reducing risks or anxieties through their mathematical genius, but would that mean a trade-off with risk assessments, or due diligence as the latter is gaining currency? As in the case of insurers, who would require a bonafide ‘health certificate’ before bestowing policies, banks too would require such certification (at least ideally that is how it is supposed to work). Enter “Credit Police“. As Nicholas Dunbar in his The Devil’s Derivatives says of them: these might be the credit officers at a bank or, more ubiquitously, a credit ratings agency paid by the borrower to provide them with “health certificate”. Instead of an actuary counting deaths, lenders can turn to a RA to count defaults and crunch the numbers.

This brings us to the definition of RAs: Rating agencies, or credit rating agencies, evaluate the creditworthiness of organisations that issue debt in public markets.  This includes the debts of corporations, nonprofit organisations, and governments, as well as “securitised assets” – which are assets that are bundled together and sold as a security to investors.  Rating agencies assign a letter grade to each bond, which represents an opinion as to the likelihood that the organisation will be able to repay both the principal and interest as they become due.

The first ratings agent (credit police) in the world is often considered to be a financial journalist, who went by the name John Moody, whose interests in the American railroads in the earliest part of the 1900s led him analytically to opining on uncertainty on bonds, wherein all it required was scouring public records in determining what was really owned and how was it being performed. But, there seemed to be a parallel action in the form of Henry Poor’s firm that had been doing something similar fifty years before Moody sprang on to the scene. But, what really distinguished Moody from Poor and made the former a credit police was categorising the companies into creditworthiness. These categories is what is almost followed universally even today, and were alphabetically-based. 3 As (Triple A) was the elitist of these categories with a credit standing to the mighty USA itself. This was followed by 2 A (Double A), 1 A or just A (Single A), and B (similar sub-divisions), C (similar sub-divisions) and finally D, or Default. But, Moody drew another distinction, viz. Bonds above Ba rating were called investment grade, whereas below Ba were termed speculative grade. It is to be noted that investment graded-Bonds have a minimal risk of default, whereas speculative grade issue or issuer ratings are all ratings below BB+ or Ba+ included, down to CC-. Speculative grade or sub-investment grade issues can be considered “less vulnerable in the short run but face major uncertainties and exposures to adverse business, financial and economic conditions” (BB) or “subject to substantial credit risk” (Ba), to “a marked shortcoming has materialised” or ’typically in default’ (C). Speculative grade ratings are also called junk bonds. Moving on, what Moody did was sort sheep from the goats, in that, he promulgated investment grades as having a less chance of defaulting compared to speculative ones, and sold his bond ratings via a subscription newsletter winning trust through his analysis.

So, how does statistics/probability that tames uncertainty also quantify and qualify the loss? Dunbar makes a compelling argument. A portfolio of bonds of a particular grade would need to pay an annual spread higher than that of a risk-free cash investment, to compensate for the average default rate for bonds. In the same way that life insurance premiums vary according to the age of the policyholder, there is a credit spread for a particular rating of a bond – so, for example, bonds rated Baa by Moody’s should pay about a quarter of a percentage (Caution: pdf) in additional interest to make up for expected defaults over time.  If you make it your business to lend money to a large number of Baa-rated companies, then on average, over time, your business will theoretically break even – as long as you charge these companies at least a quarter of a percent more a year than the loan rate enjoyed by the Government. Investment grade companies re happy to pay this premium in return for borrowing money, and the spread earned on corporate bonds or loans is typically a multiple of the statistical default loss rate. Such actuarial approaches work if investments are not given up on prematurely. Moreover, default rates could fluctuate year-to-year even under the consideration of the stability of long-term average, but helps in riding out a recession by waiting for the good loans in your portfolio balancing out the losses over time. This is where RAs get political, for the actuarial approach set forth by them is through the cycle to describe their ratings, to legitimise their analysis, to reassure the implication  that their actuarial approaches were recession-proof.

This political toning isn’t really a theoretic, as journeying back into history has ample attributions to elevating RAs in tune with their stellar reputations to a sinecure by US regulators. Forwarding by six decades, the integrity of these RAs twisted from charging investors to charging issuers. As the value of the rating agencies derives from their reputation for independent credit analysis and reporting, the issuer-pay model poses definite problems for independence, at least in appearance, starting with the questions of partiality. The perception of such potential conflicts of interest may partly explain why S&P did not choose to follow Moody’s and extend its issuer-pay model to corporate bond issuers in 1970. At the time of Moody’s announcement, S&P declared, “the income from the publications that carry our ratings and the expansion of our commercial paper rating activity enable us to provide corporate bond ratings without charge at this time”. Moody’s and S&P’s ability to successfully implement an issuer-pay model reflects their market power and reputational capital. However, when the SEC (US Securities and Exchange Commission) recognized Moody’s and S&P as Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organizations in 1975, this directly increased the regulatory use of credit ratings and gave the two agencies enormous power and prestige. Very likely, this designation also made the issuer-pay model sustainable. Although many technological and economic factors led to the switch from investor-pay to issuer-pay fees for credit ratings three decades ago, the question of whether this revenue model is associated with actual conflicts of interest remains an empirical one. Recent rating down- grades for bonds rated Aaa prior to the financial crisis have led some to speculate that the issuer-pay model has weakened rating agencies’ due diligence and led to poor quality ratings. Both Congress and the SEC have considered ways to change the issuer-pay model. Although the newly passed Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and ConsumerProtection Act does not address the issuer-pay model, it requires the Government Accountability Office to prepare a study of alternative ways of compensating rating agencies. It also asks the SEC to adopt new rules concerning the conflicts of interest that arise from rating agencies’ sale and marketing practices.

In light of the above controversy, rating agencies contend that their concerns for reputation discourage them from engaging in any short-term opportunistic behavior. Indeed, Moody’s claims, ‘‘We are in the integrity business’’, and S&P takes it one step further, claiming, ‘‘Our reputation is our business’’ The SEC concurs: “The ongoing value of a rating organization’s business is wholly dependent on continued investor confidence in the credibility and reliability of its ratings, and no single fee or group of fees could be important enough.”…….

 

But, what of countries? How are they given sovereign ratings and why should they even matter? Countries are issued sovereign credit ratings. This rating analyzes the general creditworthiness of a country or foreign government. Sovereign credit ratings take into account the overall economic conditions of a country including the volume of foreign, public and private investment, capital market transparency and foreign currency reserves. Sovereign ratings also assess political conditions such as overall political stability and the level of economic stability a country will maintain during times of political transition. Institutional investors rely on sovereign ratings to qualify and quantify the general investment atmosphere of a particular country. The sovereign rating is often the prerequisite information institutional investors use to determine if they will further consider specific companies, industries and classes of securities issued in a specific country. More governments with greater default risk and more companies domiciled in riskier host countries are borrowing in international bond markets. Although foreign government officials generally cooperate with the agencies, rating assignments that are lower than anticipated often prompt issuers to question the consistency and rationale of sovereign ratings. How clear are the criteria underlying sovereign ratings? Moreover, how much of an impact do ratings have on borrowing costs for sovereigns?

 

Ratings Agency is a company that specialises in evaluating a company’s or government’s ability to repay debts, which in a technical jargon is creditworthiness. Although, they mainly give ratings to debt instruments like corporate and sovereign bonds, they could also be involved in doing something similar to commercial loans. These agencies are sustained by charging fees from corporations or governments and selling their analysis to public at large. Although credit rating agencies are private firms, their role in financial regulatory frameworks has expanded since the 1970s – especially as a result of an international agreement to assess bank portfolios based on the risk of their assets and set capital requirements accordingly. This so-called Basel II Accord sought to add nuance to regulatory standards. A key justification for the incorporation of rating agencies’ credit assessments was the belief that they offered a more sophisticated approach to measuring credit risk than did the simpler regulatory practice of basing capital requirements on a fixed percentage of total assets – the approach in the earlier Basel I Accord, which allowed for much less differentiation.

Prior to the era of project financing, debt financing by banks was the mainstay of funding, where the onus of assessing the risks associated with credit lay ultimately with the funders/lenders, i.e. the banks themselves. But, one of the bridges that linked debt financing to project financing was the instrument of bonds, whose meteoric rise has been coterminous with RAs’ density of indispensability. When any prospective bond buyer assesses the risks involved with  transacting bonds, she would rely on the analysis provided by these RAs. So, if one looks keenly into this logic of transactions, it becomes quite sensible to derive the fact that corporations would indeed want to be rated according to their aspirations to stay on in the business. But, when Governments take this leap, it is a slight misnomer to feel it that way common-sensical. But, alas! no, governments become part of the process of ratings simply by way of fact that many of these sovereign entities raise money on capital markets.

A borrower’s economic outlook is taken into consideration by performing industry studies to assess how a particular industry would evolve and how profitable a company will be in future. It is then culled with borrower’s management. For instance, a country with massive debts and a government that is unlikely to take actions to reduce them would attract a lower rating. Now, why is this important is by ascribing to the fact that it affects expressivities of investment climate by fluctuating between borrowing costs. For example, pension funds are often allowed to hold bonds rated at investment grade. A lowering in a na insurer’s rating can thus have an enormous effect if pension funds have to sell those assets. Interestingly, while the talks are on about Basel III, it is the Basel II framework that dictates how banks can use data from RAs to determine how risky loans would be, and thus outline the amount of reserves a bank has to hold against those loans. But, the obvious question being begged here would be: do these RAs never fail? The answer is exactly not as affirmative as it should be. Enron, for instance was never rated to default, but only after a true picture of its financial state emerged, was it lowered. Enron was a giant corporation, and probably didn’t have the domino impact that a country, or a group of countries would have had if these RAs went berserk with their determination. Since, for a country, the loss is gargantuan, as it is likely aggravated by directly impacting investors’ confidence resulting in an immediate pull out of the region.

The postcrisis debate over the role of credit rating agencies in financial regulation has focused primarily on issues such as conflict of interest and adequacy of performance. Among the questions are how the rating agencies assign ratings, what they rate, and whether ratings fueled the precrisis lending boom and resulting asset bubbles and provoked an opposite and pernicious effect after the crisis. These are valid concerns, but they also underscore how credit rating agencies have become an essential part of the financial system – “hardwired” if you will, in such a way that they take the place of due diligence rather than supplement informed decision making. This hardwiring results, in part, from the investment strategies of banks, investment funds, and other private entities. Primarily, though, it stems from credit rating agencies’ institutionalized role in public policy activities – chiefly in banking regulation, but also in areas such as determination of the eligibility of collateral in central bank operations and investment decisions of publicly controlled or operated funds, such as pension funds. The use of agency ratings in financial regulation amounts both to privatization of the regulatory process – inherently a government responsibility – and to abdication by government of one of its key duties in order to obtain purported benefits such as lower regulation costs and greater efficiency and nuance. So, was really is the issue here or what really is the problematic?

1. Credit rating agencies aim to maximize profits and shareholder value. Although they have a powerful incentive to provide trustworthy information, they do not have the same mandate as a regulatory agency charged with providing information in the interest of the public. When the private motive and the public imperative are not fully compatible, there is potential for conflict and confusion. One or both may suffer. If the public imperative suffers, it undermines the credibility of the regulatory process.

2. Even if a rating agency enjoys an excellent track record, the credibility of the regulatory process risks erosion because ratings are inherently fallible; they depend on judgments. In the marketplace, if a credit rating agency crosses a threshold of unreliability, it will lose customers and eventually fail. However, if it is part of the regulatory framework, its mistakes may have severe implications, and even if a poor performer can eventually be removed, how can a credit rating agency fail as long as it is part of the regulatory framework? Who will be liable if the agency’s opinions result in distortions – especially if financial institutions end up holding too little capital?

3. Rating changes move markets, affecting the value of assets and thus capital requirements. They also affect whether those assets can be used as collateral. This is not inherently bad (indeed such changes are intended to affect assessments of riskiness and asset prices), but a change may cause sudden destabilization, unnecessarily raise volatility, and/or lead to overshooting of the asset’s value, particularly in the event of a downgrade. Ratings changes, then, can cause regulation-induced crises. Moreover, the due diligence of investors whose decisions are tied to ratings (for example, certain pension funds) is diminished or even overridden because of the overwhelming importance of credit ratings.

4. Credit rating agencies have long enjoyed considerable influence over market movements because of the faith placed in them by those who demand their services. The enshrinement of their role in regulation multiplies their potential power. It further distorts competition in an industry that has oligopolistic tendencies, because consumers benefit not only by being able to compare different asset classes under one rating system but also by not having to decipher the methodologies of numerous credit rating agencies.

But, then is a reform possible? And if yes, in what direction?

 

a. Regulatory enhancement: This would involve modifying existing rules, but keeping credit rating agencies in essentially the same regulatory role. Regulations could be tighter. For example, authorities might require rating agencies to be more open about how they operate. The way they are remunerated might also be changed to resolve conflicts of interest. Fees might be regulated. Governments could establish more effective evaluation and accreditation processes for rating agencies and their methodologies and enhance quality control. Investor boards could be established to request credit ratings, which would keep clients and rating agencies separate. Regulators could acknowledge fallibility and establish acceptable levels of accuracy, although this would raise questions about recourse or compensation when inaccuracy occurs. An alternative might be to regulate private credit rating agencies so extensively that they would become essentially public utilities. This approach would substantially reduce conflict of interest and would cost much less than establishing a new public credit rating agency. It would also raise important questions about how to select a rating agency. Would prospective borrowers be compelled to use a particular agency? Would agencies be asked to volunteer? Would there be a competitive selection process.

 

b. The public solution: One or more of the private credit rating agencies could be brought under public control, or all private agencies could be excluded from regulatory activity and replaced by a new public agency. The new agency would follow a transparent and approved rating methodology. It would be paid to cover its operating costs, but instead of profit maximization, provision of accurate information to optimize the regulatory process would be its main objective. Setting up such an agency may be beyond the ability of individual countries and could lead to other problems, such as regulatory protectionism. At the same time launching such an agency at the supranational level would be complicated, requiring international cooperation and considerable good faith. The public solution would resolve certain conflict of interest problems, but arguably would generate new ones with respect to the rating of sovereigns, which would be rating themselves or being rated by an entity they own (wholly or partially). Moreover, a public agency would have to establish credibility and independence from political influence and prove itself a reliable source. It would be costly because it would involve establishment of one or more new institutions. It would also not be immune to problems such as regulatory capture, fallibility of ratings, failures of timeliness, moral hazard, and political repercussions emanating from its decisions. Existing rating agencies would likely suffer a drop in business.

 

c. Return to simpler capital rules: The role of rating agencies could also be eliminated and regulators could return to a few simple and predetermined capital requirements for borrowers. What is lost in nuance and sophistication would be offset by greater simplicity, and therefore transparency. It would also be more predictable and easier for regulators to apply and monitor. A return to static ratios would eliminate errors in judgment arising from ratings changes, although determination of the ratios would be a significant point of contention. Without private rating agencies’ conflicts of interest, transparency and predictability would improve. Greater simplicity would also likely reduce the potential for market participants to evade regulations. However, the simplified capital rules could increase the cost of raising funds and make it harder for some entities to do so, which would curtail financial activity and could impair economic growth. Moreover, because the simpler rules would not differentiate among risks, they could create a perverse incentive for banks to lend more to riskier entities, thus increasing the likelihood of future financial crises. So a simple-rules approach would have to be monitored carefully and implemented in conjunction with other regulatory tools and indicators. Its relative simplicity and lack of institutions render it the cheapest proposal for governments to implement. From a political point of view, any return to simple rules could suggest the failure of the Basel II approach, which supported risk-based capital charges.

 

d. Market-linked capital charges: This approach would turn to the market to determine the level of capital an institution must hold to support an asset. Instead of a credit rating, the market price would be used to gauge the asset’s risk profile. In essence, the amount of capital required to hold a fixed-income security would be related to its yield. The capital required for a security would rise in proportion to its spread over a designated benchmark: the market would determine the risk. Such an approach would remove credit rating agencies from regulation while retaining a sophisticated, transparent, and market-friendly process. Indeed, because market determinations change frequently, capital adjustments could be made more often in a more gradual and nuanced fashion than the credit rating agencies’ grade changes, which often lead to sudden, destabilizing movements. But this approach requires deep and liquid markets and might have to be supplemented with minimum and maximum capital charges – turning it into a variant of the simple capital rules option. Additional safeguards during periods of market crisis would require regulators to intervene when prices cross certain thresholds and diverge significantly from underlying values. The market could serve as a guide to regulators, without removing them from the regulatory process – as happens when they rely on credit rating agencies. But there is the potential for manipulation, especially when liquidity is constrained or an asset is traded infrequently and therefore susceptible to volatile movements.

But, who bells the cat after all? Governments have worked to introduce tighter regulation after the Enron collapse in 2001, a case of massive fraud that the rating agencies did not signal. Governments themselves are affected by the ratings they receive from the agencies they regulate. Some suggest this opens up the opportunity for a conflict of interest.The frameworks for bank ratings have become more transparent. When rating government finances, the agencies argue that they are balanced and impartial. Downgrading a country’s rating inevitably puts an agency in the firing line, but this doesn’t mean they are necessarily wrong to do so. No one can predict the future, and it gets really murky on the financial scene. Credit ratings are assessed by modelling risk of default, not by predicting the unforeseeable. Experience, combined with rigorous procedures, can finely tune risk modelling and increase its reliability, but, ultimately, investors act at their own risk and according to their own judgment. However, credit ratings have the potential for significant social, economic and political fall out. Governments are shaken if their ratings drop. The cost of borrowing rises, interest rates may be affected, and it has an impact on the value of a nation’s currency. Many are asking for more transparency in how the agencies evaluate banks and whether this high impact public service should remain in the hands of private operators.

The drawbacks and costs of each option must be weighed against expected benefits—which must be identified and, where possible, quantified. In some ways, it is a case of pick your poison because there will always be risks associated with regulation, and those who are regulated will always find creative ways to evade or subvert rules not to their liking. Any reform of credit rating agencies must be part of a broader revamping of regulation, because many regulatory failings were identified in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Moreover, the transition costs of moving to a new system must be examined carefully, because they will surely be considerable. Cost, however, should not become an excuse for inaction – which would perpetuate government failure and erode the credibility of financial regulation. That could jeopardize the health of the financial sector and the economy – both nationally and globally. There is need to strengthen the accuracy of credit ratings agencies and thus reduce systemic risks, which could be brought about by a regulatory authority required to rate them in terms of their performance; such regulatory bodies facilitating the ability of investors to hold RAs accountable in civil lawsuits for inflated to deflated credit ratings safeguarding against the reckless conduct of these RAs; ensuring that RAs institute internal controls and ratings methodologies; and most importantly, these regulatory bodies ensuring that RAs give higher risks to financial instruments whose performance cannot be reliably predicted due to their novelty or complexity, or that rely on assets from parties with a record of issuing poor quality assets. Until then, we are subject to thee vagaries and accompanying cause-effects.