Will Banks' $80 Billion Super-SIV Provide At Least A Temporary Fix?
Even as heads roll on Wall Street, the nation's largest banks — Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America — are preparing to launch their newest exotic investment vehicle: a massive desecuritization.
The banks and the Treasury Department didn't describe it that way when they announced the plan last month, but that's what their upcoming, roughly $80 billion "Super Structured Investment Vehicle" amounts to.
The plan could have implications that last far beyond the current "credit crunch."
The banks are creating the Super SIV in an effort to prevent ordinary "structured investment vehicles," or SIVs, from dumping the hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed and other asset-backed securities that they hold.
Banks — most notably Citi, which fired its CEO last weekend for hugely miscalculating the bank's risk taking — as well as other investment institutions manage these SIVs in return for fees or a portion of investment gains, although the SIV funds have their own outside investors and lenders and aren't officially guaranteed by the banks or other sponsoring institutions.
Now, the SIVs are in trouble. They, and their sponsoring institutions, thought that they could use short-term debt to fund their long-term mortgage-backed assets and similar securities. However, this strategy can be risky — far riskier than funding long-term assets with long-term debt.
Why? Because if a long-term asset runs into trouble, short-term lenders who fund that asset will take their money out as soon as the trouble becomes apparent — and the fund won't be able to find a new short-term lender to replace the departing one.
Poor Assets
The SIV managers, as well as many other institutions that invest in mortgage-backed securities, weren't worried about that scenario because they thought they had transformed their long-term assets into short-term assets through the magic of securitization.
The financial world has done spectacularly well in recent years partly because of its increasing sophistication in making a marketable security out of almost any loan or other long-term payment obligation. This meant that the banks could free up more of their own money for other uses, rather than tying it to mortgages that wouldn't be paid off for 30 years.
Since the securitization of 30-year, fixed-rate mortgages began, banks have gone on to structure marketable securities out of almost every conceivable future payment flow, from mortgages to corporate loans to tobacco companies' promises to pay state governments billions of dollars a decade ago. Most recently, the banks aggressively securitized debt backed by adjustable-rate-loans approved for low-credit home buyers.
Crucially, the banks could do all this only by turning once long-term, hard-to-sell investments into continually repriced securities that were easy to sell and resell. If an investment manager got tired of one security in his SIV, the thinking went, he wouldn't have to wait 15 or 30 years for the ultimate borrowers to pay off the mortgages that constituted that security; he could just sell it to another buyer.
But the banks ran the risk that at some future point, a security or a given class of security would be worth little or nothing at current market prices. This summer, that possibility became reality. Since then, few short-term debt providers have wanted to make loans to SIVs; they're worried, for good reason, about the quality of the assets that their money is backing.
Unknown Value
Because investors have gotten a glimpse of how tenuous some of the models that drove the securitizations were — including, seemingly, the expectations that real estate values would keep rising and that interest rates would stay low — they have balked at buying some other types of asset-backed securities.
Today, nobody knows what these mortgage-backed securities, and other securities made out of them, are worth. But certainly their value is not what financial institutions and SIV investors believed a few months back.
To avoid a mass-scale sell-off of the SIVs' securities at "distressed" prices so that SIVs can pay off short-term lenders, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America, under the benign gaze of the Treasury Department, are creating the $80 billion Super SIV fund to buy the best assets from the SIVs. The SIVs can then use the proceeds to pay off at least some of their short-term debt so that they don't have to dump everything all at once.
Proponents of the new fund point out that it isn't a bailout, because no federal money is involved; it's the banks that will be putting their names on the line. But it is a bailout: a chance for banks and investors to rethink having structured, sold and bought all of these assets without having done much analysis of the underlying debt.
The banks — and Treasury — think that, because nobody will buy these securities right now, the market has stopped working. In fact, the market may be working just fine, while brutally: If nobody wants to buy these securities at "reasonable" prices, perhaps there's a good reason.
After all, cookie-cutter, easily marketable securities in most sectors are usually worth only what a buyer — optimally, an unrelated third party, not a bank-controlled Super SIV — will pay for them at a given time. The banks are coming to understand the implications of real-time accounting of assets when such assets are backed by such short-term liabilities.
Just as you can't put a scrambled egg back into its shell, the banks can't simply "desecuritize" scrambled investments now. But they can try to use the new Super SIV to house at least some of the "best" such investments for an undetermined amount of time, while giving the worst such assets more of a chance to recover while sequestered cozily in their SIVs, instead of being "dumped" on an uncooperative market.
This massive desecuritization effort doesn't mean that it's curtains for securitization. The plummeting in value of pets.com stock nearly a decade ago didn't kill confidence in, say, GE's stock.
But without the new Super SIV, "current market conditions" likely would have made many financial institutions, particularly Citigroup, even more terrified than they are now.
Even though Citi and other brand-name institutions have no contractual or legal obligation to support their SIVs if something goes wrong, it's quite likely that to save their own reputations, they would step in and pay back the SIVs' short-term lenders if the SIVs couldn't sell the funds' assets to third parties at high enough values.
The potential for such action is already worrying shareholders at publicly traded institutions like Citi. It also is raising tough questions about whether publicly traded banks that run SIVs accounted for these massive jack-in-the-box liabilities properly, disclosing the possible risks to shareholders who would bear the loss.
Lingering Crunch
It still is not obvious that the Super SIV, which should launch within the next few weeks, will work. First, if the Super SIV is going to buy the smaller SIVs' best assets, who on Earth will buy a security left behind in a smaller SIV without assigning a deep discount to its price? Second, how can investors be confident that the Super SIV's purchases reflect true market prices, since it won't be an independent, arm's-length "market" buyer?
But even if the Super SIV succeeds in reducing, rather than simply stalling, deep losses, institutions already may have learned that not everything can be securitized and backed by short-term liabilities, at least not without incurring significant, uncontrollable market risk.
This realization could alter indefinitely the demand for future securitizations, which was relentless before summer. Lower demand would sharply cut activity in what has been one of Wall Street's biggest bread-and-butter operations for the past decade. It also would make it harder for all but the most desirable borrowers to get loans on terms to which they have grown accustomed — well past the few months that the term "credit crunch" implies.
This piece originally appeared in Investor's Business Daily
This piece originally appeared in Investor's Business Daily