Life Since The Lehman's Collapse

This is a bit moot by now, but the fact that Lehman Brothers was "allowed" to fail probably triggered the massive panic and risk aversion which clouded all assets for the following 4-5 months. Lehman basically closed shop on 9th September 2008. Bespoke had a look at how global markets have performed since then.

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Saturday, October 25, 2008

Lehman Brothers, The Rosetta Stone

The 'Rosetta Stone' is an Ancient Egyptian artifact (حجر رشيد in Arabic) which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing.

Lehman Brothers' demise probably caused the "banking crisis of confidence", which brought about the present state of financial markets. The massive deleveraging by funds of all kinds, the downgrading of emerging markets' debts and currencies, the flight to USD and yen, the numerous injection of liquidity into the system by central banks, the guaranteeing of deposits to prevent bank runs, the notion that nothing has real value anymore... may all be traced to Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, or rather Paulson's refusal to save the company. Lehman Brothers may be the Rosetta Stone which helps us better understand why things are the way they are now.

Though Lehman was the smallest investment bank when it failed — and regulators decided it was not too big to fail — its demise set off tremors throughout the financial system that reverberate to this day. The uncertainty surrounding its billions of dollars of transactions with banks and hedge funds exacerbated a crisis of confidence. That contributed to the freezing of credit markets that has forced governments around the globe to take steps to try to calm panicked markets, including guaranteeing bank deposits.
The list of creditors with material exposure to Lehman Brothers is long. There will be dozens of holders of senior notes, sub debt and junior sub debt, so you can’t make too much of the fact that it looks as though the Japanese banks were laid out. We’d need to see the signatories to the Trust Indentures of the three sets of Notes to see just how many financial institutions and debt funds were exposed to Lehman’s various debt pieces:

• $138 billion of senior notes, which have Citibank and BONY listed as indenture trustees
• $12 billion of subordinated debt, with BONY listed as indenture trustee
• $5 billion of junior subordinated debt, also with BONY as indenture trustee
• $463 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s AOZORA
• $289 billion of bank debt provided by Japan’s Mizuho Corporate Bank
• $275 million of bank debt provided by Citibank N.A.’s Hong Kong Branch
• $250 million of bank debt provided by BNP Paribas
• $231 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Shinsei Bank
• $185 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s UFJ Bank
• $177 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsubishi
• $140 million L/C provided by Svenska Handelsbanken
• $93 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Mizuho
• $93 million of bank debt provided by Canada’s ScotiaBank branch in Singapore via NYC
• $75 million of bank debt provided by Lloyds Bank

Paulson obviously did not appreciate Lehman's involvement. Lehman is a leveraged brokerage shop that was the counterparty to trades sized in billions, including interest rate swaps, commodity futures, corporate bonds, international equities and real estate loans, currency swaps, and private equities. The counterparty risk created fear and triggered domino selling. Banks refused to lend to one another fearing the other end to be infested with Lehman's positions. Insiders claim that it could take over a decade to fully unwind Lehman's positions.The scary bit is that Citigroup and Bank of NY may not be out of the woods yet as things stand.

What's more, Lehman was one of the largest prime brokers to international hedge funds. Lehman's bankruptcy immediately caused wholesale panic within the hedge fund industry as funds tried to close/transfer/pull their money out of their Lehman custodian. Today over $60 billion is still locked up in Lehman's London brokerage unit. Given the leveraging nature of hedge funds, the effect on global equity markets was catastrophic as trillions of dollars were wiped off global equity markets. If you were to leverage the $60 billion twenty times (about right) it comes to $1,200 billion worth of positions that needed to be unwound.

Maybe now we can get a better grip on why so many injections of liquidity and bailouts still failed to calm the markets. The injection of capital is more than sufficient, its just that those with fresh capital are not really lending, except to very solid names. Maybe Paulson would be better off addressing the root, i.e. unwind those institutions and creditors affected by Lehman's failure. The escalating domino effect from Lehman's failure is already cascading across the globe. I hope its not too late for Paulson and the global financial leaders to stem the tide.
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What the table shows is that investors have been discriminating. During the height of the panic, everything got sold down massively, even markets in Malaysia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Taiwan, etc... which had very little exposure to the subprime debacle. Yes, these markets should be sold down as a major financial crisis such as the subprime thingy would drastically affect global trade, global demand in particular. Many were fretting that everything gets sold down in a major crisis, even when the "real effects" may be not as severe in some far flung or more disciplined economies. Many were shrugging and throwing their hands in the air, not know why the selldown had to be so "wholesale" in nature.

This table shows clearly that investors do differentiate, and will punish accordingly over time. The right rewards and punishments for the right markets. This table should give us all a lot of comfort in that in the event of a major crisis, the kneejerk reaction would be risk aversion and a wholese-type sell down. It is during the initial first few weeks that those with tough stomachs will benefit in the long run. Yes, investors do differentiate, yes investors do appreciate the differences, yes investors do know the real culprits, yes they know the real effects on each economy and the resilience of each smaller economy, yes they do know that the same crisis affects everyone differently, yes they appreciate the fact that some economies are better managed and are more disciplined in their fiscal and monetary policies ... This is an important point because if all markets get sold down in a major crisis, then its pointless to look at specific sectors, specific stocks, specific countries ... as all will get whacked anyway. The table showed us that doing your homework counts, it pays to know more, it pays to understand more regions ... because if not, we might as well sack all analysts and just hire the few strategists to monitor and anticipate major financial crisis.


p/s photo: Keiko Kitagawa

Brazen Commentary By BIS

The latest commentary by the highly respected Bank of International Settlements:

Overview: global financial crisis spurs unprecedented policy actions Financial stability concerns took centre stage once again over the period between end-August and end-November. In the wake of the mid-September failure of Lehman Brothers, global financial markets seized up and entered a new and deeper state of crisis. As money market funds and other investors were forced to write off their Lehman-related investments, counterparty concerns mounted in the context of large-scale redemption-driven asset sales. The ensuing sell-off affected all but the safest assets and left key parts of the global financial system dysfunctional. With credit and money markets essentially frozen and equity prices plummeting, banks and other financial firms saw their access to funding eroded and their capital base shrink, owing to accumulating mark to market losses. Credit spreads surged to record levels, equity prices saw historic declines and volatilities soared across markets, indicating extreme financial market stress. Government bond yields declined in very volatile conditions, as recession concerns and safe haven flows increasingly outweighed the impact of anticipated increases in fiscal deficits. At the same time, yield curves steepened from the front end, reflecting repeated downward adjustments in policy rates.

Emerging market assets also experienced broad-based price declines, as depressed levels of risk appetite and associated pressures in the industrialised world spilled over into emerging financial markets. With confidence in the continued viability of key parts of the international banking system collapsing, the authorities in several countries embarked on an unprecedented wave of policy initiatives to arrest the plunge in asset prices and contain systemic risks. Market developments over the period under review went through four more or less distinct stages. Stage one, which led into the Lehman bankruptcy in mid-September, was marked by the takeover of two major US housing finance agencies by the authorities in the United States. Stage two encompassed the immediate implications of the Lehman bankruptcy and the wide-spread crisis of confidence it triggered. Stage three, starting in late September, was characterised by fast-paced and increasingly broad policy actions, as responses to the crisis evolved from case by case reactions to a more international, system-wide approach. In the fourth and final stage, from mid-October, pricing patterns were increasingly dominated by recession fears, while markets continued to struggle with the uncertainties surrounding the large number of newly announced policy initiatives.

Lehman Brothers bankruptcy triggers confidence crisis In this environment of tension over the continued viability of Lehman Brothers, financial market developments entered a completely new phase. The spotlight was now being turned on the ability of key financial institutions to maintain solvency in the face of accumulating losses. The trigger for this new and intensified stage of the credit crisis came on Monday 15 September. That day, following failed attempts by the US authorities to broker a takeover by another financial institution over the weekend, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc filed for bankruptcy protection, one of the biggest credit events in history.

p/s photos: Janet Hsieh Yi Fen

Phew! CDS, Its Just $33.6 Trillion Not $50 Trillion!!!

Dealbook: In the first of a series of weekly reports, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation said late Tuesday afternoon that there were a total of $33.6 trillion in credit default swaps outstanding on corporate, government and asset-backed securities. That is less than some earlier estimates of $50 trillion or more.

The company’s data provides a clearer picture of the money bet on the creditworthiness of the world’s companies and governments. The largest dollar amount of credit default swaps were written for protection against the debts of Turkey, Italy, Brazil, Russia and GMAC as of Oct. 31.

Others at the top of the D.T.C.C. list of 1,000 were Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, GE Capital and Countrywide Home Loans. In all those cases, however, the net notional values of the swaps were reduced considerably by hedging.

For example, Turkey was the leader in gross notional credit default swaps, at $188.6 billion, but its net notional exposure after hedging was $7.6 billion.

D.T.C.C.’s figures are available at Deriv/SERV on the D.T.C.C. Web site.

D.T.C.C. said that after this week the data would be shown in two sections. The first section shows the outstanding notional values at a given point in time (the end of each week). Starting next week, the second section will show data relating to the weekly confirmed trade volume, or “turnover,” with respect to the same underlying reference entities and indexes, as well as similar aggregations of such data.

The financial industry is trying to counter lawmakers, regulators and other critics who argue that the lack of transparency in the market for credit default swaps made the financial crisis worse.

“Publishing this data will provide greater transparency in a critical market,” said Tim Ryan, president and chief executive of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, in a statement Tuesday. “This is an important initiative upon which the industry will continue to build.”

The collapse of Lehman Brothers contributed to a sharp drop in financial markets last month because no one knew how many credit default contracts were outstanding on the securities firm. Estimates ranged as high as $400 billion, although the actual amount turned out to be $72 billion, the DTCC said.

Comments: Well, its a very good start. Once you know the figures, its not a guessing game anymore. Then you isolate the top contracts and assess their likelihood of default. As we can see most of the trouble companies have been absorbed by other companies. There is one main danger I see, that is GE Capital, which will work its way back to General Electric. Its still a AAA company but if you were to examine its way of doing business, its a highly leveraged way, and more than 60% of profits are from the 100-200 basis points financing spread that they use to do business with clients, be it funding them or funding the transactions - e.g. consumer loans or even aircrafts (you want to buy an aircraft, let me lend you 90%).

As for country defaults, while its hyped up, only Iceland risk real default and maybe Turkey and Venezuela. The rest have to just tighten their balance sheets, get some billions from IMF and get on with it. Even Russia's demise is not exactly catastrophic, its bad no doubt, but not debilitatingly so.

Just a heads up, I am quite nervous on GE's near term prospects. Its $15 billion capital raising a few weeks back should raise alarm bells. Ratings agencies are again probably too slow to look deeply into how GE's business model is affected by the cascading impact on de-leveraging.

p/s photos: Izumi Mori

The Vital Signs Are Good, Even Though Patient Is In ICU

There are signs that the financial regulators and leaders know what is troubling the global capital markets. If they know, then we are on the way to properly restoring calm and sensibility. More importantly, it will ensure a properly functioning capital markets - which is still not evident now as many stocks have dipped below way past what is considered as fair value. Its pointless to point out which stocks are worth buying as there are too many to mention. You would be better off to try and see the road signs that say that the root problems are being addressed. If they are not doing that, then we will be in the doldrums for a while. However, I can see two major signs which say we should be on the right path. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s comments that signaled he wouldn’t let another large bank fail, large institutional traders began doubling down on bets that large banks would skyrocket. At a time when almost everyone is deleveraging, several funds were in essence doubling their leverage on one trade. This is essential as the statement indicates that Paulson now knows what a catastrophe it was to let Lehman Brother fail (please read recent posting on Lehman Brother, The Rosetta Stone). That will be as close you can get to an admission of grave fault by Paulson.

The major hedge fund Citadel had a conference call over the weekend and agreed with my take on Lehman Brothers:

3:55 p.m.: “One effect we’ve all seen is about the diversity of counterparties. Given the diversity of counterparties around the world, clearly the diversity isn’t enough to deal with some of what we’ve seen in the past few weeks.”

3:54 p.m.: Lehman’s bankruptcy caused “the greatest dislocation we’ve seen in money market history”

The second major issue is the flight to safe currencies such as yen and USD. But, this is not a currency crisis. This is a liquidity crisis, a growth crisis, a confidence crisis. As such, probably the first step should not be to intervene to save currencies. People calling for their central bankers to protect their currencies are calling for the wrong antidote. At a time like this, you don't need or rather you don't want a strong currency. Look at the OZ dollar, there is no way the Reserve Bank of Australia can do much to stem the reversal of the massive yen carry trade effects. The RBA can only do one thing to protect the OZ dollar and that is to raise the interest rates, which is already crippling in light of the over speculated property market there. What good is it to bump up rates and protect your currency and then find your economy in tatters with property markets there compounding. You would have a graver, and longer term disaster in the works. Better to allow the currency to find its own footing. At current levels, the OZ should start attracting some FDI into property for sure and should see a strong boost to tourism. I mean the OZ dollar is even cheaper than the Singapore dollar now by nearly 10%.

The source of aggressive capital flows into the dollar and yen is emerging markets, and it is the emerging market central banks, flush with dollar reserves, who could take action to stem the market frenzy. Naturally this cannot be allowed to continue, especially for Japan, which needs a weaker currency to prevent a more severe deflation in its economy. Emerging markets “need to act the same way the U.S. and European Union has acted. That will address the root of the problem. However, those governments’ assertiveness is limited by their experience.

Ahead of the Asia Europe Meeting, which began Friday, Japan and other East Asian leaders agreed to establish an $80-billion joint fund aimed at fighting the global financial crisis. Much of the movement into yen and USD can be said to be coming from emerging markets themselves, and that needed to be reversed. The setting up of the "fund" is a good start. More collaboration will go some way to slowly unwind the weakness in emerging markets' currencies.

p/s photos: Deepika Padukone

Lehman Brothers, The Rosetta Stone

The 'Rosetta Stone' is an Ancient Egyptian artifact (حجر رشيد in Arabic) which was instrumental in advancing modern understanding of hieroglyphic writing.

Lehman Brothers' demise probably caused the "banking crisis of confidence", which brought about the present state of financial markets. The massive deleveraging by funds of all kinds, the downgrading of emerging markets' debts and currencies, the flight to USD and yen, the numerous injection of liquidity into the system by central banks, the guaranteeing of deposits to prevent bank runs, the notion that nothing has real value anymore... may all be traced to Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, or rather Paulson's refusal to save the company. Lehman Brothers may be the Rosetta Stone which helps us better understand why things are the way they are now.

Though Lehman was the smallest investment bank when it failed — and regulators decided it was not too big to fail — its demise set off tremors throughout the financial system that reverberate to this day. The uncertainty surrounding its billions of dollars of transactions with banks and hedge funds exacerbated a crisis of confidence. That contributed to the freezing of credit markets that has forced governments around the globe to take steps to try to calm panicked markets, including guaranteeing bank deposits.
The list of creditors with material exposure to Lehman Brothers is long. There will be dozens of holders of senior notes, sub debt and junior sub debt, so you can’t make too much of the fact that it looks as though the Japanese banks were laid out. We’d need to see the signatories to the Trust Indentures of the three sets of Notes to see just how many financial institutions and debt funds were exposed to Lehman’s various debt pieces:

• $138 billion of senior notes, which have Citibank and BONY listed as indenture trustees
• $12 billion of subordinated debt, with BONY listed as indenture trustee
• $5 billion of junior subordinated debt, also with BONY as indenture trustee
• $463 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s AOZORA
• $289 billion of bank debt provided by Japan’s Mizuho Corporate Bank
• $275 million of bank debt provided by Citibank N.A.’s Hong Kong Branch
• $250 million of bank debt provided by BNP Paribas
• $231 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Shinsei Bank
• $185 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s UFJ Bank
• $177 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Sumitomo Mitsubishi
• $140 million L/C provided by Svenska Handelsbanken
• $93 million of bank debt provided by Japan’s Mizuho
• $93 million of bank debt provided by Canada’s ScotiaBank branch in Singapore via NYC
• $75 million of bank debt provided by Lloyds Bank

Paulson obviously did not appreciate Lehman's involvement. Lehman is a leveraged brokerage shop that was the counterparty to trades sized in billions, including interest rate swaps, commodity futures, corporate bonds, international equities and real estate loans, currency swaps, and private equities. The counterparty risk created fear and triggered domino selling. Banks refused to lend to one another fearing the other end to be infested with Lehman's positions. Insiders claim that it could take over a decade to fully unwind Lehman's positions.The scary bit is that Citigroup and Bank of NY may not be out of the woods yet as things stand.

What's more, Lehman was one of the largest prime brokers to international hedge funds. Lehman's bankruptcy immediately caused wholesale panic within the hedge fund industry as funds tried to close/transfer/pull their money out of their Lehman custodian. Today over $60 billion is still locked up in Lehman's London brokerage unit. Given the leveraging nature of hedge funds, the effect on global equity markets was catastrophic as trillions of dollars were wiped off global equity markets. If you were to leverage the $60 billion twenty times (about right) it comes to $1,200 billion worth of positions that needed to be unwound.

Maybe now we can get a better grip on why so many injections of liquidity and bailouts still failed to calm the markets. The injection of capital is more than sufficient, its just that those with fresh capital are not really lending, except to very solid names. Maybe Paulson would be better off addressing the root, i.e. unwind those institutions and creditors affected by Lehman's failure. The escalating domino effect from Lehman's failure is already cascading across the globe. I hope its not too late for Paulson and the global financial leaders to stem the tide.

p/s photos: Jiang Yu Chen