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Y2 Cliff

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Have you become sick of hearing about it?  The Mayan End of the World is less than three weeks away and the people on the teevee keep talking about the Fiscal Cliff.  I’m still waiting for Comet Kohoutek.  For those of you who are too young to remember, here is what Wikipedia tells us about Comet Kohoutek:

Before its close approach, Kohoutek was hyped by the media as the “comet of the century”.  However, Kohoutek’s display was considered a let-down, possibly due to partial disintegration when the comet closely approached the sun prior to Earth flyby.

Our next media-hyped non-event was the infamous Y2K story.  Thousands of people started hoarding canned food, building shelters and preparing for a Cro-Magnon lifestyle because the computers thought that every year began with the two digits 1 and 9.  Yeah, that happened.

This week, everyone is talking about the Fiscal Cliff.  By now, there have been enough sober reports (and lawsuits by the Mayans) to force people into the realization that the world will not end on the 21st day of this month.  The country has found a better focus for its consensual panic:  The Cliff.  Concerns voiced by Ben Bernanke and others brought our attention to the possibility that if our government resumes its budget standoff – after the can was kicked down the road last summer – our government’s credit rating could face another cut.  As a result, Bernanke invented the cliff metaphor and everyone ran with it – despite the fact that it is not appropriate.

The best Fiscal Cliff Smackdown came from Barry Ritholtz, who wrote a great piece for The Washington Post entitled, “How important is the fiscal cliff for investors?  Hint: Not very.”  The explanation of the cliff contained in the article was quite helpful for those unfamiliar with the details:

Let’s start with a definition:  The term refers to the deal that Congress made in late 2011 to temporarily resolve the debt ceiling debate.  The “sequestration,” as it is known, calls for three elements:  tax increases, spending cuts and an increase to the payroll tax (FICA).  The Washington Post’s Wonkblog has run the numbers and finds “$180 billion from income tax hikes, $120 billion in revenue from the payroll tax, $110 billion from the sequester’s automatic spending cuts and $160 billion from expiring tax breaks and other programs.”

*   *   *

The term “fiscal cliff,” popularized by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, is really a misnomer.  As several analysts have correctly observed, the effects of sequestration are not a Jan. 1, 2013, event.  The impact of the spending cuts and tax hikes would be phased in over time.  A fiscal slope is more accurate. Additionally, as students of history have learned, single-variable analysis for complex financial issues is invariably wrong.  Because of the inherent complexity of economies and markets, we cannot adequately explain or predict their behavior by merely looking at just one variable.

Ritholtz brought our attention to a great article about the fiscal cliff hype, written by Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review.  Chittum blamed CNBC’s “Rise Above” publicity campaign as the primary force driving fiscal cliff anxiety:

Any time you see Wall Street CEOs and CNBC campaigning for what they call the common good, it’s worth raising an eyebrow or two.

*   *   *

You’ll note that CNBC has not Risen Above for the common good on issues like stimulating a depressed economy, ameliorating the housing catastrophe, or prosecuting its Wall Street sources/dinner partners for the subprime fiasco.  But make no mistake:  even if it had, it would have been stepping outside the boundaries of traditional American journalism practice into political advocacy.  And that’s precisely what it’s doing here, at further cost to its credibility as a mainstream news organization instead of some HD version of Wall Street CCTV.

*   *   *

Last but not least is the hypocrisy of CNBC in talking about Rising Above politics.  This is the network, after all, that kicked off the Tea Party, an austerity push that was one of the more damaging political movements in recent memory.

*   *   *

It’s just not CNBC’s job, institutionally, to campaign for anything. Cover the news, as they say, don’t become it.

December 21 will come and go with nothing happening.  It will be January 1, 2000 all over again.  The fiscal cliff “deadline” – January 1, 2013 – will come and go with nothing happening.  The budget can will be kicked down the road again by the “lame duck” Congress.

In the mean time we can entertain ourselves by learning how celebrities are preparing for Armageddon.  After all, they’re here to entertain us.


 

Goldman Sachs Remains in the Spotlight

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Goldman Sachs has become a magnet for bad publicity.  Last week, I wrote a piece entitled, “Why Bad Publicity Never Hurts Goldman Sachs”.  On March 14, Greg Smith (a Goldman Sachs executive director and head of the firm’s United States equity derivatives business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa) summed-up his disgust with the firm’s devolution by writing “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” for The New York Times.  Among the most-frequently quoted reasons for Smith’s departure was this statement:

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.  Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail.

In the wake of Greg Smith’s very public resignation from Goldman Sachs, many commentators have begun to speculate that Goldman’s bad behavior may have passed a tipping point.  The potential consequences have become a popular subject for speculation.  The end of Lloyd Blankfein’s reign as CEO has been the most frequently-expressed prediction.  Peter Cohan of Forbes raised the possibility that Goldman’s clients might just decide to take their business elsewhere:

Until a wave of talented people leave Goldman and go work for some other bank, many clients will stick with Goldman and hope for the best.  That’s why the biggest threat to Goldman’s survival is that Smith’s departure – and the reasons he publicized so nicely in his Times op-ed – leads to a wider talent exodus.

After all, that loss of talent could erode Goldman’s ability to hold onto clients. And that could give Goldman clients a better alternative.  So when Goldman’s board replaces Blankfein, it should appoint a leader who will restore the luster to Goldman’s traditional values.

Goldman’s errant fiduciary behavior became a popular topic in July of 2009, when the Zero Hedge website focused on Goldman’s involvement in high-frequency trading, which raised suspicions that the firm was “front-running” its own customers.   It was claimed that when a Goldman customer would send out a limit order, Goldman’s proprietary trading desk would buy the stock first, then resell it to the client at the high limit of the order.  (Of course, Goldman denied front-running its clients.)  Zero Hedge brought our attention to Goldman’s “GS360” portal.  GS360 included a disclaimer which could have been exploited to support an argument that the customer consented to Goldman’s front-running of the customer’s orders.  One week later, Matt Taibbi wrote his groundbreaking, tour de force for Rolling Stone about Goldman’s involvement in the events which led to the financial crisis.  From that point onward, the “vampire squid” and its predatory business model became popular subjects for advocates of financial reform.

Despite all of the hand-wringing about Goldman’s controversial antics – especially after the April 2010 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hearing, wherein Goldman’s “Fab Four” testified about selling their customers the Abacus CDO and that “shitty” Timberwolf deal, no effective remedial actions for cleaning-up Wall Street were on the horizon.  The Dodd-Frank financial “reform” legislation had become a worthless farce.

Exactly two years ago, publication of the report by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas, pinpointing causes of the Lehman Brothers collapse, created shockwaves which were limited to the blogosphere.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media were not giving that story very much traction.  On March 15 of 2010, the Columbia Journalism Review published an essay by Ryan Chittum, decrying the lack of mainstream media attention given to the Lehman scandal.  This shining example of Wall Street malefaction should have been an influential factor toward making the financial reform bill significantly more effective than the worthless sham it became.

Greg Smith’s resignation from Goldman Sachs could become the game-changing event, motivating Wall Street’s investment banks to finally change their ways.  Matt Taibbi seems to think so:

This always had to be the endgame for reforming Wall Street.  It was never going to happen by having the government sweep through and impose a wave of draconian new regulations, although a more vigorous enforcement of existing laws might have helped.  Nor could the Occupy protests or even a monster wave of civil lawsuits hope to really change the screw-your-clients, screw-everybody, grab-what-you-can culture of the modern financial services industry.

Real change was always going to have to come from within Wall Street itself, and the surest way for that to happen is for the managers of pension funds and union retirement funds and other institutional investors to see that the Goldmans of the world aren’t just arrogant sleazebags, they’re also not terribly good at managing your money.

*   *   *

These guys have lost the fear of going out of business, because they can’t go out of business.  After all, our government won’t let them.  Beyond the bailouts, they’re all subsisting daily on massive loads of free cash from the Fed.  No one can touch them, and sadly, most of the biggest institutional clients see getting clipped for a few points by Goldman or Chase as the cost of doing business.

The only way to break this cycle, since our government doesn’t seem to want to end its habit of financially supporting fraud-committing, repeat-offending, client-fleecing banks, is for these big “muppet” clients to start taking their business elsewhere.

In the mean time, the rest of us will be keeping our fingers crossed.


 

The Lehman Fallout

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March 16, 2010

Everyone is speculating about what will happen next.  The shock waves resulting from the release of the report by bankruptcy examiner Anton Valukas, pinpointing the causes of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, have left the blogosphere’s commentators with plenty to discuss.  Unfortunately, the mainstream media isn’t giving this story very much traction.  On March 15, the Columbia Journalism Review published an essay by Ryan Chittum, decrying the lack of mainstream media attention given to the Lehman scandal.  Here is some of what he said:

Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story — one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis.  I’ll go ahead and say it:  If you’ve wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you’ve been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times.  This on the biggest financial news story of the week — and one of the biggest of the year.  These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal.  The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors.

I’m hardly the only one who has noticed this.  James Kwak of Baseline Scenario wrote this earlier today:

Overall, I’m surprised by how little interest the report has gotten in the media, given its depth and the surprising nature of some of its findings.

At the Zero Hedge website, Tyler Durden reacted to the Columbia Journalism Review piece this way:

Only a few days have passed since its release, and already the Mainstream Media has forgotten all about the Lehman Examiner Report, with barely an occasional mention.  As the CJR points out, this unquestionably massive story of corruption and vice, is being covered up by powered interests controlling all the major news outlets, because just like in the Galleon case, the stench goes not only to the top, (in this case the NewYork Fed and the SEC), but very likely to various corporations that have vested interests in the conglomerates controlling America’s key media organizations.

One probable reason why the Lehman story is being buried is because its timing dovetails so well with the unveiling of Senator “Countrywide Chris” Dodd’s financial reform plan.  The fact that Dodd’s plan includes the inane idea of expanding the powers of the Federal Reserve was not to be ignored by John Carney of The Business Insider website:

Why do we think these are such bad ideas?  At the most basic level, it’s hard to see how the expansion of the scope of the Federal Reserve’s authority to cover any large financial institution makes sense.  The Federal Reserve was not able to prevent disaster at the firms it was already charged with overseeing.  What reason is there to think it will do a better job at regulating a wider universe of firms?

More concretely, the Federal Reserve had regulators in place inside of Lehman Brothers following the collapse of Bear Stearns.  These in-house regulators did not realize that Lehman’s management was rebuking market demands for reduced risk and covering up its rebuke with accounting sleight-of-hand.  When Lehman actually came looking for a bailout, officials were reportedly surprised at how bad things were at the firm.  A similar situation unfolded at Merrill Lynch.  The regulators proved inadequate to the task.

Just think:  It was only one week ago when we were reading those fawning, sycophantic stories in The New Yorker and The Atlantic about what a great guy “Turbo” Tim Geithner is.  This week brought us a great essay by Professor Randall Wray, which raised the question of whether Geithner helped Lehman hide its accounting tricks.  Beyond that, Professor Wray emphasized how this scandal underscores the need for Federal Reserve transparency, which has been so ardently resisted by Ben Bernanke.  (Remember the lawsuit by the late Mark Pittman of Bloomberg News?)  Among the great points made by Professor Wray were these:

Not only did the NY Fed fail to blow the whistle on flagrant accounting tricks, it also helped to hide Lehman’s illiquid assets on the Fed’s balance sheet to make its position look better.  Note that the NY Fed had increased its supervision to the point that it was going over Lehman’s books daily; further, it continued to take trash off the books of Lehman right up to the bitter end, helping to perpetuate the fraud that was designed to maintain the pretense that Lehman was not massively insolvent. (see here)

Geithner told Congress that he has never been a regulator. (see here)  That is a quite honest assessment of his job performance, although it is completely inaccurate as a description of his duties as President of the NY Fed.

*   *   *

More generally, this revelation drives home three related points.  First, the scandal is on-going and it is huge. President Obama must hold Geithner accountable.  He must determine what did Geithner know, and when did he know it.  All internal documents and emails related to the AIG bailout and the attempt to keep Lehman afloat need to be released.  Further, Obama must ask what has Geithner done to favor his clients on Wall Street?  It now looks like even the Fed BOG, not just the NY Fed, is involved in the cover-up.  It is in the interest of the Obama administration to come clean.  It is hard to believe that it does not already have sufficient cause to fire Geithner.  In terms of dollar costs to the government, this is surely the biggest scandal in US history.  In terms of sheer sleaze does it rank with Watergate?  I suppose that depends on whether you believe that political hit lists and spying that had no real impact on the outcome of an election is as bad as a wholesale handing-over of government and the economy to Wall Street.

It remains to be seen whether anyone in the mainstream media will be hitting this story so hard.  One possible reason for the lack of significant coverage may exist in this disturbing point at the conclusion of Wray’s piece:

Of greater importance is the recognition that all of the big banks are probably insolvent.  Another financial crisis is nearly certain to hit in coming months — probably before summer.  The belief that together Geithner and Bernanke have resolved the crisis and that they have put the economy on a path to recovery will be exposed as wishful thinking.

Oh, boy!  Not good!  Not good at all!  We’d better change the subject to March Madness, American Idol or Rielle Hunter!  Anything but this!



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The Legacy Of Mark Pittman

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December 3, 2009

Just a week before the Senate banking committee was to begin confirmation hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Ben Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve, one of the most important watchdogs of the Fed died at the age of 52.  Mark Pittman was the reporter at Bloomberg News whose work was responsible for the lawsuit, brought under the Freedom of Information Act, against the Federal Reserve, seeking disclosure of the identities of those financial firms benefiting from the Fed’s eleven emergency lending programs.  The suit, Bloomberg LP v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, 08-CV-9595, (U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York) resulted in a ruling last August by Judge Loretta Preska, who rejected the Fed’s defense that disclosure would adversely affect the ability of those institutions to compete for business.  The suit also sought disclosure of the amounts loaned to those institutions as well as the assets put up as collateral under the Fed’s eleven lending programs, created in response to the financial crisis.  The Federal Reserve is pursuing an appeal of that decision.

Since September of 2008, we have been overexposed to the specious claims by politicians, regulators and other federal officials, that the financial crisis was “unforeseeable”.  The veracity of such statements is undercut by the fact that on June 29 of 2007, Mark Pittman provided us with this ominous warning from his desk at Bloomberg News:

The subprime meltdown is sending shock waves through the capital markets in part because mortgage bonds are the world’s biggest debt market, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association.

Pittman’s groundbreaking work on the havoc created by the subprime mortgage-backed securities market resulted in his receiving the Gerald Loeb Award in 2008, which he shared with his fellow Bloomberg reporters, Bob Ivry and Kathleen Howley, for a five-part series entitled “Wall Street’s Faustian Bargain”.

On November 30, Bob Ivry wrote what many have described as the “definitive obituary” for Mark Pittman.  Ivry disclosed that although the actual cause of death was not yet known, Pittman had suffered from “heart-related illnesses”.  In addition to providing us with his colleague’s impressive biography, Ivry shared the reactions to Pittman’s death, expressed by several prominent individuals:

“He was one of the great financial journalists of our time,” said Joseph Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia University in New York and the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics. “His death is shocking.”

*   *   *

“Who sues the Fed?  One reporter on the planet,” said Emma Moody, a Wall Street Journal editor who worked with Pittman at Bloomberg News.  “The more complex the issue, the more he wanted to dig into it.  Years ago, he forced us to learn what a credit- default swap was.  He dragged us kicking and screaming.”

*   *   *

“He’s been on this crisis since before the crisis,” said Gretchen Morgenson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning financial columnist for the NewYork Times.  “He was the best at burrowing into the most complex securities Wall Street could come up with and explaining the implications of them to readers of all levels of sophistication.  His investigative work during the crisis set the standard for other reporters everywhere.  He was a giant.”

Congressman Brad Miller of North Carolina wrote an informative remembrance of Pittman for The Huffington Post.  This statement is one of the highlights from that piece:

The financial crisis is a result of a failure of every institution of our democracy.  Regulators failed.  Congress failed.  And the financial press failed abysmally.  Mark was an exception.  Mark’s irreverence allowed him to see the crisis coming when other financial reporters accepted uncritically what the industry said.  Mark’s irreverence was what made him a great reporter.

Mark Pittman was featured in the recent film American Casino, a documentary which analyzed the subprime mortgage catastrophe and the resulting financial crisis.  In September of 2008, when the crisis had most people in the world scratching their heads in confusion, Pittman provided a roadmap to the initial bailouts, shortly after they were distributed.

The interview with Mark Pittman, conducted by Ryan Chittum for the Columbia Journalism Review in February of 2009, gave Pittman the opportunity to share his experiences during the onset of the financial crisis.  The interview is especially informative as to what we can expect to find out about this mess in the future, as the investigations begin to unfold.  Passages like these reveal the magnitude of the loss resulting from Pittman’s death:

TA:  Does there need to be regulation just to simplify things to where it makes sense to more people?

MP:  If it was all transparent the complexity wouldn’t matter.  If the CDO market had had publicly available prospectuses with the contents of the CDO disclosed, we wouldn’t have this issue, because Bloomberg probably would have made fun of anybody who bought anything like this.  But there was this enormous shadow banking system going on.  We did a series about that, too.  A lot of times people don’t see what we do.

*   *   *

The thing that people don’t realize is that the Fed is now the “bad bank.”  That’s just something that people don’t understand.  They’ve taken collateral, and they refuse to tell us how they valued it  …

We have numerous banks — dozens, maybe hundreds that are insolvent.  And they become more insolvent every day because more people quit paying their mortgage loans, and more guys move out of the shopping center, and more people quit paying their credit cards.  But nobody wants to have the adult conversation.  We need to be honest about what the problem is here, how big it is, and how we’re going forward to clean it up, and who’s going to pay for it.

*   *   *

Hopefully, we will be able to inform the people enough to know how badly we’re getting screwed (laughs).  We need to know how to prevent it from happening again, and we need to know who did it.  There’s renewed energy on this front because we’ve staffed up the people who cover banks, the securities firms.  We have a lot more people going at real estate and a bunch of different areas that this involves.  That was a conscious move from meetings we started having in 2007.  We hired people and we moved people from one area to another area.

Pittman’s final statement during the interview underscores the fact that one of the greatest fighters for an informed public has been lost:

This is a big deal and it’s going to be going on — I swear to God I’m going to retire on this story, because it’s just going to keep happening.

Tragically, Mark Pittman was forced to “retire” on terms that were not satisfactory to any of us.  We can only hope that others will be inspired by his work and follow his lead.



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