Black Is White, Hedges Are Bets, And Your Money Is Mine: Guest Post
By Tyler Durden
Published on ZeroHedge ( http://www.zerohedge.com)
Created 06/14/2012 - 11:52
 [1]
Submitted by Tyler Durden [1] on 06/14/2012 11:52 -0400
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Black Is White, Hedges Are Bets, And Your Money Is Mine
From Of Two Minds [22]contributor Zeus Yiamouyiannis
Once again we turn to frequent contributor Zeus Yiamouyiannis for a sharp analysis of why our "profits are private, losses are public" crony-capitalism is self-destructing and what is needed to move forward to a sustainable, adaptable, wealth-generating capitalism.
As we witness the riotous dissolution of corrupted capitalism, we need not wait for the history books to identify the mile markers of self-destruction. If we are to rebuild capitalism, even as it is tearing itself down, then we will need to become street-smart detectives in analyzing the current economic murder-suicide in progress.
Every fall has its tell-tale confirmations and corrupt capitalism is no exception. There arrive key points where a system’s own contradictions become so evident and self-damaging, where motive, means, and opportunity become so clear, that one can mount an informed, effective counter-offensive.
Two notable recent contradictions have surfaced in the ongoing debacle called big banking.
1) Hedges for big banks have evolved into gambling vehicles that increase risk rather than reduce risk.
2) Guaranteed savings deposits in those same big banks are being used as fodder in the high-risk investment casinos of global finance. There are no longer effective firewalls or truly secure funds.
Capitalism now means big banks profit from their so-called successes, and others pay for their failures: “Black is white.” JP Morgan has recently lost $3 billion dand counting on a ‘sure thing’: “Hedges are bets.” Investment banks are now merged with conventional banking and secured by taxpayer and depositor money: “Your money is mine.”
These capitalist tumors grow from assumptions that all gains shall be privatized, all stakes shall be “other people’s money,” and all liabilities will fall upon the patsies formerly known as represented citizens.
Everything for reckless, ill-gotten profit; nothing for prudent management
I felt like I was in the twilight zone when reading a New York Times anatomy of JP Morgan’s recent multi-billion dollar losses [23]on some of its hedge positions.
First, these so-called hedge positions were never designed as buffers against loss. They were driven by greed, risk, and desire for profit. Genuine hedges are supposed to buffer against, rather than accentuate, loss, excess, and unwise decision-making.
“What this hedge morphed into violates our own principles,” said JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, citing their recent multi-billion dollar loss. “Morphed into?” C’mon! You played the market from the start. This was no hedge. It was a gamble, and one that you lost. Capitalism that relies upon sound judgment is apparently a throwback to the time when consequences fell upon the company making bad decisions.
Ironically, the more traders stampede to a “sure profit” in certain hedges, the riskier they get. With the advent of high frequency trading and hyper-speed information access, these stampedes are more likely to occur. Risk is also amplified by converse positions. In today’s reality, those who bet against these “sure profit” moves can now employ methods to enhance their position by artificially manipulating buying and selling (naked shorts anyone?). Prospective gold mines can quickly turn into dry holes.
Nobody seems to learn when there are no meaningful consequences. Almost the same exact scenario befell Long Term Capital Management (LCTM). Both LCTM in 1998 and JP Morgan in 2012 bet on the “sure” convergence of newly issued and older treasury bond interest rates, hoping to amplify a small but relatively guaranteed profit into a huge profit by creating a large position through leveraged borrowing.
This very action and the actions of others piling on actually increased divergences by straining the Treasury market. Leveraged hedges built around amplified, “safe” profits create a fertile climate for significantly increased risk and billions of dollars of loss.
Genuine hedges increase operating profit over time by anticipating and reducing possible loss. These latest hedge mutations used by JP Morgan and others have sought to increase profit directly through betting. By using access to data and resources that others now share in the information age, LCTM and JP Morgan failed to anticipate the effects their very actions would have on the market. They needed a genuine hedge against their mutated hedge. (Maybe they should have consulted Goldman Sachs, the experts in betting against their own advice and their own customers for profit.)
When moves to create stability and safety are themselves more gambling, there is no coherence to the system, no buffer, no feedback loop. Excess is rewarded and prudence is punished. With such an operating premise, finance can only spiral into a senseless spectacle. The din is still off in the distance but getting louder as the hounds of reality refuse to be kept at bay.
Savings deposits in big banks have effectively become market casino fodder
Investment involves gambling plain and simple. Risk-return assets are not simply product purchases. If investment were just a consumable, the buyer would use the product for personal needs and see its value depreciate gradually through use. Investors have much different expectations. They are seeking a stake in an enterprise, not just a product, that will generate financial return and appreciate in value. However, this enterprise can also lose its value and leave the investor with nothing.
Even entrepreneurs who invest in their own business, as laudable as that may be, are gambling. They can lose their money for a variety of reasons, even if their business plans are well conceived, organized, and executed. There should be no guarantees with investment except those legal protections against fraud, theft, abuse, manipulation, and corruption that maintain a free enterprise system of risk and return on a transparent, accountable, and enforceable playing field. Bad luck, bad timing, and even bad management are all a fair part of free enterprise.
What happens, however, when big banks, unleashed by the abolishment of the Glass-Steagall Act, are allowed to link their unregulated investment gambling activity with regulated and guaranteed deposit taking? A sham of a free enterprise system emerges, where public funds and guaranteed private savings are nothing more than backstopping fodder for irresponsible gambling.
Here is the key question: Is money that I deposit to a bank, money that I give to a bank? The big bank’s answer is, “Yes. We will use your money or lose it any way we choose.” My answer is, “No. Deposit means deposit. I am not lending it. I am not investing it. I am not agreeing to get a below-inflation return so I can lose my money outright. (For a too-close-for-comfort parody on this see: The Important of Saving Money)
Savings is supposed to be secure dollar storage in a financial lending service. In consideration for lenders circulating my deposited funds at higher interest, I am given a modest user fee. I am parking my money with a bank or credit union to use in safe, vigilantly underwritten lending activities. The lending institutions I patronize garner a higher interest return than they are paying out to me. Interest rates they charge others vary to compensate for default risk. Of course this does not maximize profit! It maximizes stability. That’s its purpose, and that is the purpose of guaranteeing my deposit.
This is why savings is distinct from investment. Investment is a gamble. Its purpose is to maximize profit (including minimizing loss) by wisely supporting enterprises that are managed well and that return well. At least that is the way it is supposed to be. Not so today. Big banks are treating my deposit money like an investment in a greed-driven empire with no upside for me. If banks’ stocks go up, I'm not getting a dividend. If these banks go bankrupt through unwise or unlucky gambling, either I don't get my money back, or taxpayers ending up bearing the costs.
The global financial system has turned into a rigged Las Vegas minus the neon. Instead of the gambling addict going broke and being escorted out of the casino, my livelihood and my children’s is being put on the table to allow these addicts not only to win back their money but make a killing in the process. (Of course big banks are also the gambling houses themselves, as well as the addicts, charging fees for every transaction, giving themselves hundreds of billions of dollars in bonuses, and skimming profits.)
This same condition extends not just to savings, but to the way assets and future public entitlement payments are being annexed through taxpayer bailouts and increased national debt. In fact, the present and future wealth of the entire planet is being put up for chips. “Don’t worry,” say the big banks in a slurred voice, “My rich uncles, the central banks, will make good. Deal me another hand! Hey, bring on mortgages and Social Security and put them on the betting block too.”
We are so far down the rabbit hole that even reinstituting Glass-Steagall will not be sufficient. Big banks are simply reshuffling practices in such a way that investment banking is not labeled as such. Enforced separation between investment brokering and traditional deposit taking means little if I can simply "rename" my investment brokering as something else or if I can classify my deposit taking so it is guaranteed by the FDIC even as I funnel and gamble that money. Heads I win, tails you lose again.
What can be done
The answer to this hijacking of private savings and public funds is public refusal to redeem gambling debts. This can be done in several ways:
Financially, citizens en masse need to coordinate taking their money out of corrupt big banks and put that money into financially strong community banks and credit unions that don’t gamble with other people’s money. If I decide to gamble with my own money with a bank-serviced investment portfolio, fine. If an investment bank decides to gamble, it can use its own capital and not mine. If I decide to let a hedge fund gamble my money for me, I should be prepared to lose it all.
Politically, we need to push for an enforced law with a very simple rule: “No public guarantees for private gambling” and do a much better job of ensuring that no guarantees of public funds go to any activity that is even associated with investment gambling.
We could charter and support state or regional banks from the national level to provide low-cost liquidity (an alternative “Fed window) to small banks and credit unions--organizations that actually make their money lending prudently to communities and enhancing the economic health of the nation and local populations. These organizations would then more effectively compete with the current corporate financial monopolies holding this country hostage.
Policy-wise, we could limit counter-party risk and the systemic damage caused by Big Finance’s investment gambling. (Karl Denninger has a good suggestion in these two posts: Why The JPM Trade Matters [24]and Solution: ONE DOLLAR OF CAPITAL [25]). Denninger’s "One Dollar of Capital" rule would “Prohibit as a matter of Federal Law… the lending of money unsecured that exceeds the firm’s capital.” However, if firms, like MF Global, can gamble with segregated customer accounts as if these accounts were their own money, this suggestion won't work for a particular bank or investment company. Hence the need for the previous strategies.
We have a long way to go, but the hounds of reality strain closer. Instead of running from them, let’s grab their leashes and turn the hounds on the banks.
Similar Articles You Might Enjoy:
Bond Central Banks Corruption credit union default Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Gambling Goldman Sachs goldman sachs Guest Post High Frequency Trading High Frequency Trading Jamie Dimon Karl Denninger Las Vegas MF Global National Debt New York Times Reality Regional Banks
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*** *** ***
Lessons From Trades Big and Bad [JPM]
By FLOYD NORRIS
NYT
May 17, 2012
Too big to hedge.
That may be the lesson of the debacle at JPMorgan Chase. And if regulators take the lesson to heart, they could close a gaping loophole in the Volcker Rule, which is supposed to ban speculative trading by banks that take insured deposits.
When he disclosed a $2 billion trading loss last week, Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan, said the trades were intended to hedge the firm’s credit exposure — that is, reduce the risk of investments it had made. This week, speaking to shareholders, he modified that, saying: “What this hedge morphed into violates our own principles.”
We still don’t know exactly what the trades were, other than that they were complicated, very large and apparently difficult to unwind. It appears the loss is growing rapidly.
A former top risk manager on Wall Street, who asked not to be named because his current employer had not authorized him to talk about JPMorgan, told me he thought some kind of problem like this was inevitable. Big banks are just too big to be able to safely hedge huge investment positions.
The JPMorgan debacle is reminiscent in some ways of the first big disaster of the supposedly sophisticated era of derivatives, that of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund in 1998. The trades that firm did were supposed to be all but risk-free, since they were simply bets that long-term relationships in prices of various securities would hold, even if there were temporary gyrations that created opportunities for traders who understood the relationships.
It helps to understand what was in many ways the simplest — and seemingly among the surest — trades that got Long Term Capital into trouble. It was a bet that yields on the newly issued 30-year Treasury bond would converge with those of the 30-year bond issued three months earlier. When the bonds’ interest rates diverged, for what were surely temporary market reasons, the obvious trade was to buy the higher-yielding Treasury and short the lower-yielding one. When they came together, that strategy would produce a certain — but small — profit.
But the profit would be large if the fund borrowed a lot of money to take a large position.
What happened then was that so many people put on the trade that even the large and liquid market in Treasury securities was strained. The divergence grew larger. If you could be sure the yields would eventually converge, the obvious course was to increase your bet, which is what Long Term did.
In the long run, that trade would have worked. But the margin calls mounted and it ran out of capital.
It seems likely that something similar — if far more complicated — happened at JPMorgan. At first, when prices diverged in unexpected ways, JPMorgan raised its bet. Managers accepted assurances that the market had to turn around. But it did not. Perhaps market rumors spread about the risks the bank was taking, and others sought to take advantage of it, increasing the divergences. Eventually, JPMorgan blinked.
Immediately after the losses were disclosed, officials of the Comptroller of the Currency, JPMorgan’s principal regulator, assured a Republican senator that all was fine. “They were adamant that hedges like these are there to make the bank safer,” Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee told my colleague, Ben Protess. The officials were said to have opined that the Volcker Rule, whose details are still being debated by regulators, would not have prohibited the trade.
It appears that the unnamed officials were right about the rule, but very wrong about the wisdom of the trading. As proposed by a panel of regulators, the Volcker Rule contains two provisions that are quite reasonable on their own, but that together can create a toxic mix.
The first provision, which is in the Dodd-Frank law, specifies that banks can maintain investment portfolios. The second says it is acceptable to trade securities for the purpose of hedging other holdings, even if it would not be O.K. to buy the same security as a speculative investment.
For market makers, who may buy unwanted securities that customers want to sell, hedging may be wise and prudent. But it will also be short term, until the bank trades out of whatever position it took on in the course of making the market.
But if banks hedge long-term investments, as JPMorgan evidently did, the hedge is also likely to be long term. It will consist of buying something that, in normal times, should move in the opposite direction of their investment. The result is that they will be making convergence trades that are indistinguishable from what Long Term Capital Management did. Given the size of the big banks, they will have to do so in huge volumes that can come back to haunt them if markets move the wrong way.
“This could have been much worse,” said the former risk manager. “Imagine what would have happened if three big banks had pursued the same strategy,” either because they figured out how JPMorgan was making money or because they thought it up on their own. “Then the losses would not have been three times as great,” he said, “but maybe 10 times.” That is because the market used to hedge the position would become completely illiquid, with opportunistic hedge funds trading against the big banks and causing the divergence to grow larger than ever before.
A proposal that regulators are said to have considered, but rejected, would have made it clear that the hedging exception applied for trading assets, not long-term investments. They should reverse that decision.
Sheila C. Bair, the former chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, points out that some reports have indicated that when the first hedge went awry, JPMorgan concluded that it could not liquidate the position without further damaging its position. So it tried to hedge the hedge. “Why,” she asked, “is that going on in an insured bank? Is this safe and sound?”
The point of the Volcker Rule, named for its principal proponent, Paul A. Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, is to leave certain risky activities to those who do not have government-insured deposits and whose failure would not decimate the financial system unless the government stepped up.
To some extent, that used to be accomplished by the Glass-Steagall law, which separated commercial banks from investment banks. That law was repealed by Congress in 1999, but regulators had been whittling away at it for decades. The old law said that a commercial bank could not be affiliated with any firm “engaged principally” in underwriting and trading securities. That seemed to keep brokers away. But the law did not define “engaged principally,” and bank-friendly regulators eventually defined that so narrowly that it was all but meaningless.
It was no surprise that staff members from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency immediately came to JPMorgan’s defense. The current comptroller, Thomas J. Curry, immediately backed away from the position, saying more information was needed, but the O.C.C., like many another institution, has a basic view of the world that rarely changes, whoever is in charge.
That view was wonderfully summarized back in 2000 when the comptroller’s office put out a working paper explaining why Glass-Steagall deserved to be repealed. The paper said that academic research had shown that the tighter the regulation of banks, the more likely a banking crisis was. The evidence, it said, “should give pause to those who advocate regulatory restrictions on the activities, ownership and organizational forms of U.S. banks.”
It dismissed talk that banks enjoy a major advantage from having deposit insurance. The banks also faced regulatory costs, noted the authors, James R. Barth, now a professor at Auburn University; R. Dan Brumbaugh Jr., a former senior fellow at the Milken Institute; and James A. Wilcox, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Most evidence suggests,” they wrote, that on balance the costs for the banks were equal to or greater than the benefits they received from having a federal safety net.
None of the major banks would be alive now without that safety net. But the attitude that regulation is a dead-weight burden persists, both in bank boardrooms and in some parts of the regulatory apparatus.
Mr. Curry has been the comptroller only since March. The JPMorgan fiasco should serve as a warning to him that he needs to clean house, and as a warning to other regulators to be vigilant in assuring the Dodd-Frank law is not effectively nullified by the regulations now being written.
Floyd Norris comments on finance and the economy at nytimes.com/economix.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 19, 2012
A picture caption on Friday with the High & Low Finance column, about the lessons to be learned by the trading debacle at JP Morgan Chase, misstated the federal agency headed by Thomas J. Curry. He is the comptroller of the currency, not the director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which the column referred to incorrectly as the Federal Deposit Insurance Commission. The column also contained an outdated reference to R. Dan Brumbaugh Jr., an author of a working paper from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in 2000 on the merits of repealing the Glass-Steagall law. He is a former senior fellow at the Milken Institute, not a current one.
nytimes.com |
