This is the stuff that scares me, as an ex-credit guy I find it incredible that anyone would put together a package like that and try to sell it, that the rating agency could rate any portion of this stuff tiple-A, and that fund managers were so naive as to believe these ratings. There will be many innocent people relying on fiduciaries to protect them who suffer severe losses because of this. I would not want to own any of the rating agencies, I think they will be sued to the moon over these flawed rating, which im sure no credit guy would knowingly invest a dime of his own money in, I also think all the investment banks will face lawsuits galore over this stuff. it will probably take a decade to sort this all out. meanwhile im trying to make sure my short term funds are either in fdic banks or tbills.
GSAMP Trust 2006-S3
A PIGMAN Story
In the spring of 2006, Goldman assembled 8,274 second-mortgage loans originated by Fremont Investment & Loan, Long Beach Mortgage Co., and assorted other players. More than a third of the loans were in California, then a hot market. It was a run-of-the-mill deal, one of the 916 residential mortgage-backed issues totaling $592 billion that were sold last year.
The average equity that the second-mortgage borrowers had in their homes was 0.71%. (No, that's not a misprint - the average loan-to-value of the issue's borrowers was 99.29%.)
It gets even hinkier. Some 58% of the loans were no-documentation or low-documentation. This means that although 98% of the borrowers said they were occupying the homes they were borrowing on - "owner-occupied" loans are considered less risky than loans to speculators - no one knows if that was true. And no one knows whether borrowers' incomes or assets bore any serious relationship to what they told the mortgage lenders.
You can see why borrowers lined up for the loans, even though they carried high interest rates. If you took out one of these second mortgages and a typical 80% first mortgage, you got to buy a house with essentially none of your own money at risk. If house prices rose, you'd have a profit. If house prices fell and you couldn't make your mortgage payments, you'd get to walk away with nothing (or almost nothing) out of pocket. It was go-go finance, very 21st century.
Goldman acquired these second-mortgage loans and put them together as GSAMP Trust 2006-S3. To transform them into securities it could sell to investors, it divided them into tranches - which is French for "slices," in case you're interested.
In this case, Goldman sliced the $494 million of second mortgages into 13 separate tranches. The $336 million of top tranches - named cleverly A-1, A-2, and A-3 - carried the lowest interest rates and the least risk. The $123 million of intermediate tranches - M (for mezzanine) 1 through 7 - are next in line to get paid and carry progressively higher interest rates.
Finally, Goldman sold two non-investment-grade tranches. The first, B-1 ($13 million), went to the Luxembourg-based UBS (Charts) Absolute Return fund, which is aimed at non-U.S. investors and thus spread GSAMP's problems beyond our borders. The second, B-2 ($8 million), went to the Morgan Keegan Select High Income fund. (Like most of this article, this information is based on our reading of various public filings; UBS and Morgan Keegan both declined to comment.)
Even though the individual loans in GSAMP looked like financial toxic waste, 68% of the issue, or $336 million, was rated AAA by both agencies - as secure as U.S. Treasury bonds. Another $123 million, 25% of the issue, was rated investment grade, at levels from AA to BBB--.
Thus, a total of 93% was rated investment grade. That's despite the fact that this issue is backed by second mortgages of dubious quality on homes in which the borrowers (most of whose income and financial assertions weren't vetted by anyone) had less than 1% equity and on which GSAMP couldn't effectively foreclose.
These loans, which are fixed-rate, carried an average interest rate of 10.51%. After paying the people who collected the payments and handled all the other paperwork, the GSAMP Trust had ten percentage points left. However, the interest on the securities that GSAMP issued ran to only about 7%. (We say "about" because some of the tranches are floating-rate rather than fixed-rate.)
The difference between GSAMP's interest income and interest expense was projected at 2.85% a year. That spread was supposed to provide a cushion to offset defaults by borrowers. In addition, the aforementioned X piece didn't get fixed monthly payments and thus provided another bit of protection for the 12 tranches ranked above it.
Remember that we're dealing with securities, not actual loans. Thus losses aren't shared equally by all of GSAMP's investors. Any loan losses would first hit the X tranche. Then, if X were wiped out, the losses would work their way up the food chain tranche by tranche: B-2, B-1, M-7, and so on.
The $241 million A-1 tranche, 60% of which has already been repaid, was designed to be supersafe and quick-paying. It gets first dibs on principal paydowns from regular monthly payments, refinancings, and borrowers paying off their loans because they're selling their homes. Then, after A-1 is paid in full, it's the turn of A-2 and A-3, and so on down the line.
Moody's projected in a public analysis of the issue that less than 10% of the loans would ultimately default. S&P, which gave the securities the same ratings that Moody's did, almost certainly reached a similar conclusion but hasn't filed a public analysis and wouldn't share its numbers with us. As long as housing prices kept rising, it all looked copacetic.
Goldman peddled the securities in late April 2006. In a matter of months the mathematical models used to assemble and market this issue - and the models that Moody's and S&P used to rate it - proved to be horribly flawed. That's because the models were based on recent performances of junk-mortgage borrowers, who hadn't defaulted much until last year thanks to the housing bubble.
As a second-mortgage holder, GSAMP couldn't foreclose on deadbeats unless the first-mortgage holder also foreclosed. That's because to foreclose on a second mortgage, you have to repay the first mortgage in full, and there was no money set aside to do that. So if a borrower decided to keep on paying the first mortgage but not the second, the holder of the second would get bagged.
If the holder of the first mortgage foreclosed, there was likely to be little or nothing left for GSAMP, the second-mortgage holder. Indeed, the monthly reports issued by Deutsche Bank (Charts), the issue's trustee, indicate that GSAMP has recovered almost nothing on its foreclosed loans.
By February 2007, Moody's and S&P began downgrading the issue. Both agencies dropped the top-rated tranches all the way to BBB from their original AAA, depressing the securities' market price substantially.
In March, less than a year after the issue was sold, GSAMP began defaulting on its obligations. By the end of September, 18% of the loans had defaulted, according to Deutsche Bank.
As a result, the X tranche, both B tranches, and the four bottom M tranches have been wiped out, and M-3 is being chewed up like a frame house with termites. At this point, there's no way to know whether any of the A tranches will ultimately be impaired.
Goldman said it made money in the third quarter by shorting an index of mortgage-backed securities. That prompted Fortune to ask the firm to explain to us how it had managed to come out ahead while so many of its mortgage-backed customers were getting stomped.
Goldman's profits came from hedging the mortgage securities it keeps in inventory in order to make trading markets. It said in a recent SEC filing, "Although we recognized significant losses on our non-prime mortgage loans and securities, those losses were more than offset by gains on short mortgage positions."
As we interpret this - the firm declined to elaborate - Goldman made more on its hedges than it lost on its inventory because junk mortgages fell even more sharply than Goldman thought they would.
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