Joe Cassano, A.I.G. şi criza financiară
Revista Vanity Fair a publicat în numărul său din August o investigaţie efectuată de către reporterul Michael Lewis cu privire la colapsul companiei de asigurări A.I.G. acum un an şi la cauzele acestui colaps. Principalele cauze prezentate de Lewis sunt lăcomia, ignoranţa, vanitatea şi un anume Joseph Cassano, fostul director al diviziei de produse financiare a A.I.G., care pare să întrunească un cumul de cauze.
Nu-i aşa că sunt lacom?
Practic, divizia A.I.G. F.P. a fost creată în 1987 şi s-a distins prin dezvoltarea şi tranzacţionarea de produse financiare din ce în ce mai exotice. În acest context, termenul "exotic" denotă un tip de produs financiar complex, al cărui scop este să producă profit pe termen scurt şi dezastre pe termen lung. Un exemplu în acest sens este:
Once upon a time Chrysler issued a bond through Morgan Stanley, and the only people who wound up with credit risk were the investors who had bought the Chrysler bond. Now Chrysler might sell its bonds and simultaneously enter into a 10-year interest-rate-swap transaction with Morgan Stanley—and just like that Chrysler and Morgan Stanley were exposed to each other. If Chrysler went bankrupt, its bondholders obviously lost; depending on the nature of the swap and the movement of interest rates, Morgan Stanley might lose, too. If Morgan Stanley went bust, Chrysler along with anyone else who had done interest-rate swaps with Morgan Stanley stood to suffer. Financial risk had been created, out of thin air, and it begged to be either honestly accounted for or disguised.
Pentru că, la început riscurile păreau mari, dar nu foarte probabile,
[...] A.I.G. F.P. became a huge swallower of those risks. In the early days it must have seemed as if it was being paid to insure against events extremely unlikely to occur—how likely was it that all sorts of companies and banks all over the globe would go bust at the same time? Its success bred imitators: Zurich Re F.P., Swiss Re F.P., Credit Suisse F.P., Gen Re F.P. All of these places were central to what happened in the last two decades; without them the new risks being created would have had no place to hide, but would have remained in full view of bank regulators.
Dar de ce era nevoie ca aceste riscuri să fie ascunse? Ah, aici este adevărata problemă:
In 1998, A.I.G. F.P. had entered the new market for credit-default swaps: it sold insurance to banks against the risk of defaults by huge numbers of investment-grade public corporations. As Gillian Tett tells it in her new book, Fool’s Gold, bankers at J. P. Morgan, having invented credit-default swaps, went looking for an AAA-rated company to assume the bulk of the risk associated with them, and discovered A.I.G. [...] But it made explicit what until then had only been implicit: A.I.G. F.P. was the most receptive dumping ground for new risks created by big Wall Street firms.
Pentru ca o bancă să facă investiţii riscante, aceasta este obligată să pună deoparte bani care să acopere respectiva investiţie, în caz că lucrurile merg prost. Dar băncilor nu le place să pună bani deoparte pentru că respectivii bani nu aduc profituri. Provizioanele blochează o parte din capitalul băncilor pe timpul investiţiei. Teoretic, acest lucru ar trebui să descurajeze finanţarea investiţiilor riscante. Practic.... suntem în mijlocul unei crize de mari proporţii.
Sub conducerea nu foarte expertă a lui Joseph Cassano, A.I.G. a intrat până în gât în capcana pe care băncile de pe Wall Street, în căutare de profituri, literalmente, cu orice preţ, i-au întins-o.
And in the early 2000s, the big Wall Street firms performed this fantastic bait and switch in two stages. Stage One was to apply technology that had been dreamed up to re-distribute corporate credit risk to consumer credit risk. The banks that used A.I.G. F.P. to insure piles of loans to IBM and G.E. now came to it to insure much messier piles that included credit-card debt, student loans, auto loans, prime mortgages, and just about anything else that generated a cash flow. “The problem,” as one trader puts it, “is that something else came along that we thought was the same thing as what we’d been doing.” [...] But then, these piles, at least at first, contained almost no subprime-mortgage loans.
The combination of the dot-com bust and the 9/11 attacks had led Alan Greenspan to pump money into the system, and to lower interest rates. In June 2004 the Fed began to contract the money supply, and interest rates rose. In a normal economy, when interest rates rise, consumer borrowing falls—and in the normal end of the U.S. economy that happened: from June 2004 to June 2005 prime-mortgage lending fell by half. But in that same period subprime lending doubled—and then doubled again. In 2003 there had been a few tens of billions of dollars of subprime-mortgage loans. From June 2004 until June 2007, Wall Street underwrote $1.6 trillion of new subprime-mortgage loans and another $1.2 trillion of so-called Alt-A loans—loans which for some reason or another can be dicey, usually because the lender did not require the borrower to supply him with the information typically required before making a loan. The subprime sector of the financial economy clearly was responding to different signals than the others—and the result was booming demand for housing and a continued rise in house prices. Perhaps the biggest reason for this was that the Wall Street firms packaging the loans into bonds had found someone to insure against what turned out to be the rather high risk that they’d go bad: Joe Cassano.
A.I.G. F.P. was already insuring these big, diversified, AAA-rated piles of consumer loans; to get it to insure subprime mortgages was only a matter of pouring more and more of the things into the amorphous, unexamined piles. They went from being 2 percent subprime mortgages to being 95 percent subprime mortgages. And yet no one at A.I.G. said anything about it—not C.E.O. Martin Sullivan, not Joe Cassano, not Al Frost, the guy in A.I.G. F.P.’s Connecticut office in charge of selling his firm’s credit-default-swap services to the big Wall Street firms. The deals, by all accounts, were simply rubber-stamped by Cassano and then again by A.I.G. brass—and, on the theory that this was just more of the same, no one paid them special attention. It’s hard to know what Joe Cassano thought and when he thought it, but the traders inside A.I.G. F.P. are certain that neither Cassano nor the four or five people overseen directly by him, who worked in the unit that made the trades, realized how completely these piles of consumer loans had become, almost exclusively, composed of subprime mortgages.
În acest punct al poveştii se poate spune că sistemul mergea de la sine şi că toate firmele implicate aveau prea mulţi bani investiţi în încercarea disperată de a menţine profiturile pe termen scurt la acelaşi nivel pentru a se mai opri. Din nefericire, nici măcar nu au încercat să o facă.
Gene Park worked in the Connecticut office and sat close enough to the credit-default-swap traders to have a general idea of what they were up to. In mid-2005 he’d read a front-page story in The Wall Street Journal about the mortgage lender New Century. He noted how high its dividend was and thought he might like to buy some of its stock for himself. As he dug into New Century, however, Park saw that it owned all these subprime mortgages—and he could see from its own statements that the quality of the loans was frightening. [...] Park put two and two together and guessed that the nature of these piles of consumer loans insured by A.I.G. F.P. was changing, that they contained a lot more subprime mortgages than anyone knew, and that if U.S. homeowners began to default in sharply greater numbers A.I.G. didn’t have anywhere near the capital required to cover the losses. He told Andy Forster, Cassano’s right-hand man in London, who brought this up at a meeting, but Cassano dismissed the concerns as overblown.
Joe Cassano
Iar Joseph Cassano...
Toward the end of 2005, Cassano promoted Al Frost, then went looking for someone to replace him as the ambassador to Wall Street’s subprime-mortgage-bond desks. As a smart quant who understood abstruse securities, Gene Park was a likely candidate. That’s when Park decided to examine more closely the loans that A.I.G. F.P. had insured. He suspected Joe Cassano didn’t understand what he had done, but even so Park was shocked by the magnitude of the misunderstanding: these piles of consumer loans were now 95 percent U.S. subprime mortgages. Park then conducted a little survey, asking the people around A.I.G. F.P. most directly involved in insuring them how much subprime was in them. He asked Gary Gorton, a Yale professor who had helped build the model Cassano used to price the credit-default swaps. Gorton guessed that the piles were no more than 10 percent subprime. He asked a risk analyst in London, who guessed 20 percent. He asked Al Frost, who had no clue, but then, his job was to sell, not to trade. “None of them knew,” says one trader. Which sounds, in retrospect, incredible. But an entire financial system was premised on their not knowing—and paying them for their talent!
Şi, după ce Gene Park a reuşit să îl convigă pe Cassano că a sosit momentul să se termine balul,
"The A.I.G. F.P. executives present were shocked by how little actual thought or analysis seemed to underpin the subprime-mortgage machine: it was simply a bet that U.S. home prices would never fall. Once he understood this, Joe Cassano actually changed his mind. He agreed with Gene Park: A.I.G. F.P. shouldn’t insure any more of these deals."
"djin-ul" creditării iresponsabile a reuşit să distrugă sistemul înainte de a fi băgat înapoi, în lampă, pentru un timp:
The big Wall Street firms solved the problem by taking the risk themselves. The hundreds of billions of dollars in subprime losses suffered by Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and the others were hundreds of billions in losses that might otherwise have been suffered by A.I.G. F.P. Unwilling to take the risk of subprime-mortgage bonds in 2004 and 2005, the Wall Street firms swallowed the risk in 2006 and 2007. Lending standards had fallen, property values had risen, and the more recent loans were thus far riskier than the earlier ones, but still they gobbled them up—for if they didn’t, the machine would have ceased to function. The people inside the big Wall Street firms who ran the machine had made so much money for their firms that they were now, in effect, in charge. And they had no interest in anything but keeping it running. A.I.G. F.P. wasn’t an aberration; what happened at A.I.G. F.P. could have happened anywhere on Wall Street … and did.
[...] In the summer of 2007, the value of everything fell, but subprime fell fastest of all. The subsequent race by big Wall Street banks to obtain billions in collateral from A.I.G. was an upmarket version of a run on the bank. Goldman Sachs was the first to the door, with shockingly low prices for subprime-mortgage bonds—prices that Cassano wanted to dispute in court, but was prevented by A.I.G. from doing so when he was fired. A.I.G. couldn’t afford to pay Goldman off in March 2008, but that was O.K. The U.S. Treasury, led by the former head of Goldman Sachs, Hank Paulson, agreed to make good on A.I.G.’s gambling debts. One hundred cents on the dollar.
La sfârşit, ca de obicei, rămân întrebările la care viitori istorici se vor chinui să găsească răspunsuri.
"It would be nice if Joe Cassano came out of hiding and tried to explain what he did and why, but there is little chance of that. [...] And yet the A.I.G. F.P. traders left behind, much as they despise him personally, refuse to believe Cassano was engaged in any kind of fraud. The problem is that they knew him. And they believe that his crime was not mere legal fraudulence but the deeper kind: a need for subservience in others and an unwillingness to acknowledge his own weaknesses. “When he said that he could not envision losses, that we wouldn’t lose a dime, I am positive that he believed that,” says one of the traders. The problem with Joe Cassano wasn’t that he knew he was wrong. It was that it was too important to him that he be right. More than anything, Joe Cassano wanted to be one of Wall Street’s big shots. He wound up being its perfect customer."