Social Security Goes The Way of China and Japan

At present the Social Security Administration holds 20% or $2.4 trillion of the $12 trillion that the U.S. now owes. That means that the government will soon lose its single biggest customer of U.S. debt. No one is saying exactly when this will occur but I’ll guess that the party is winding down and will end in the next two years. At the same time the next two largest purchasers of U.S. debt, China and Japan, are trimming their purchases of U.S. debt by 15% a year.


As I wrote last May in, The Honeymoon Is Over And I Want A Divorce - Obama’s Interest Rate Quagmire, there are pressures coming from all directions that will push interest rates up. The dollar has been losing value against all currencies except the Euro and the Pound, which are having their own fiscal problems. As soon as the problems in the EU start to subside the demand for the safe-haven dollar will also decrease.

When the above circumstances are combined with the need to fund an extra trillion a year in spending, interest rates have to move and move big. The first casualty will be a housing market that, because of government intervention, has not been able to work through its current downturn. Higher mortgage rates mean less affordability putting pressure on both home sales and home values that have little room for bad news.

The major money center banks like Goldman and Chase-Morgan have been thriving because the fed has kept the money flow to these guys at full blast and at little or no cost. They have been using that flood of short term money for everything but small business lending. For them it has been the perfect storm. When their interest rates raise the major money center banks will be in the exact place that stated this mess; an immediate cash squeeze.

As the government issues massive amounts of debt, corporate debt will also be entering the peak of their debt cycle. As stated in the Times article below, corporations will be bringing $700 billion of debt to the market. Competition for money is another factor for an increase in rates.

Currently the only positives for the future of interest rates would be if a if the U.S. has a phenomenal economic turnaround or if a war breaks out somewhere leading to another flight-to-safety.
 Posted on HOT AIR by ED MORRISSEY: Social Security starts cashing in US debt

An AP article by STEPHEN OHLEMACHER: Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam's IOUs

An AP article by MARTIN CRUTSINGER: China trims holdings of Treasury securities

A New York Times article by NELSON D. SCHWARTZ: Corporate Debt Coming Due May Squeeze Credit

Cramer Nailed It - The Perfect Bank Bailout Plan A Parody

Tonight on his CNBC show Mad Money, Cramer presented his own bailout plan that should take care of both the housing crisis and a weakened financial system.

The first step that Obama should do is to purchase preferred non-voting stock from banks that require additional cash to meet a conservative asset-to-liability ratio. These preferred would carry a low percentage of interest and would be repurchased by the bank and not converted to common. That would protect shareholders from having their investment diluted and the banks from Nationalization.

The second phase would be to offer current and new home owners a 40 year fixed-rate government backed mortgage at 4%. This would reduce mortgage payments sufficiently so that most people could afford their payment even if they currently have negative equity. This would give those home owners time to turn negative equity around, bring new life to the housing market and make home ownership available to a wider range of people.

Obama at first dismissed these ideas as just chatter from the Chattering Class. But no one can accuse Obama of not being sharp. We’ll let the banks issue newly printed preferred non-voting stock and in exchange they will get newly printed dollars. Both the newly printed dollars and the newly shares will have about the same value that would make it an even trade. Besides, when the time comes he’ll just change his mind, a politician’s prerogative, and convert those preferred and we’ll end up owning those banks for next to nothing.

The government backed mortgage program had him confused for only a moment, he soon realized that this program could achieve the pinnacle of his dreams. As long as these sponsored mortgages had an inflation clause, when the dollar tanks by the endless printing of greenbacks, almost all families in America would be living in government owned housing.

There is no Housing Crisis

There is no real estate crisis. There is a wash-out of speculators in the areas where prices were driven by that speculation along with a serious lack of interest for property in the great shrinking rust-belt. Quality loans at extremely low rates are readily available to “A” borrowers.

What it should be called is the “bad exotic vehicle bubble”. The investment banks made a ton by repackaging high-risk/high-interest mortgages into a more complicated structured investment vehicles like CDO’s and SIV’s. When a mortgage becomes part of one of these, the normally straight forward mortgage accounting rules get fuzzed-up, allowing the bank to book a greater portion of the anticipated interest as an asset. This became the trough that the fattest of the hogs ate.

The write-downs that are dominating the financial media space are just a reversal of the “profits” that these investments banks have already booked that would of never happened if normal accounting rules had applied in the first place. The 25 top players in this game lost more than $100 billion in 2007 and that number could be doubled if you add in the next 100 or so regional banks, retirement funds and investment trusts that bought into the higher rates that the CDO’s and the SIV’s offered.

As the default rate for exotic mortgages started to increase and the market for these securities dried up, the speculators lost their biggest tool that allowed them to acquire their properties. When the speculators were stymied, housing prices flattened out and in the most active areas, declined. This gave the creators of these investment vehicles, having New York as their play ground, an opportunity to blame their potential negative exposure on a housing crisis.

Our largest investment banks enticed the financial media by leaking the assumption that they had billions in exposure, all because of unscrupulous and corrupt mortgage brokers. The fact that none of these brokers would exist if it weren’t for the eagerness of the investment banks to purchase these loans, with very lucrative commissions attached, from the very brokers they now blamed. With sub-prime, alt-a and jumbo mortgages becoming prohibitively expensive, the housing market produced a constant supply of bad news that eventually sucked in even Congress. As expected they produced a landmark deal with the Treasury that accomplishes nothing, a months grace after three months of non activity is just the solution that will definitively save the market.

The financial media was also instrumental in determining the Feds current disposition. By presenting one economist, guru, potentate and mogul after another calling for rate cuts, they created a public ground swell that anything but substantial cuts would have demonstrated that the Fed was out of touch with the real world. This frenzy to inject liquidation into the economy has little to do with the housing crisis and all to do with the fact that Wall Street loves cheap money. These same investment banks are now able to book enormous profits because their cost of capital has come down so low.

When thecost of money comes down and liquidity is added to our system, the banks have money to put to work and credit standards loosen. The resulting effect of “easy credit” is always an upturn in the default rate and the banks respond by tightening those same standards. Our economy has always had swings from loose credit to tight credit and back again, the difference here is we are just entering a period where credit is starting to tighten and the Fed is literally dumping liquidity on top of a tightening market. At this point it just doesn’t matter how much money is available, if someone doesn’t qualify they will not get the loan.

The credit crunch is definitely spreading; lenders are tightening standards on all types of loans and investors have lost their appetite for “exotic” instruments that can’t be accurately valued. This is just a normal swing that happens after an abuse. The fact that “UBS AG and Credit Suisse Group last week announced the write-down of a combined $400 million” should not come as a surprise. In this atmosphere where write-downs are expected there will never be a better time to clean-up your books. They could even be tilting the books to favor future profits; this is not an unknown concept to investment banks.

As far as these write-downs being a forward looking indicator of the future doom that our corporations will experience, is quite a stretch. Our economic slow-down will have it’s casualties but for the most part our corporations are sitting on enormous cash positions, the street anticipates them to start spending these cash hoards providing the impetuses for another growth cycle in our economy.

CitiGroup Puts Our Oil Money To Work

Yesterday CitiGroup announced the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority will invest $7.5 billion in our nation's largest bank. The investment was made through the purchase of convertible bonds that pay 11% and will convert to common shares, at a maximum price of $37.42, anytime during the fourth year of the note.

Citi must need that money fast because under the above terms an 11% convertible (2% over junk bonds) would have been grabbed up by US investors. Then again there is the possibility of doing significant business with the sovereign investment trust in the future. With Citi pointing the way, many more opportunities should open up for the group.

Still, if CitiGroup’s stock regains half of its value, then these convertibles are extremely valuable and I would rather see Americans rewarded for their years of investment into CitiGroup.
If the company announces layoffs of in the 40,000 neighborhood, then their stock should take a good jump on the strong cost cutting news. There is also a consensus that CitiGroup would release significant value to shareholders if the company were broken up.

Joseph Altman, AP Business Writer wrote an interesting article: Citi Sells Stake to Abu Dhabi Fund

Pimco Financial And Bill Gross

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Pimco Financial: Bill Gross is the chief investment officer for Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund. When interviewed on CNBC he said: "A Fed cannot afford to let homes go down by 10 to 15 percent like we saw in Japan," Mr. Gross saw the turmoil our markets are experiencing more than a year ago and steered his fund away from the troubled sectors. The result is that Morningstar has listed his fund in the top 2 percent of all bond funds.

From a Brett Arends article on theStreet.com:

“Last week, Gross grabbed the headlines by warning that the housing slump could lead to devastating economic consequences. He argued that a 10% fall in prices nationwide could set off price deflation of a kind not seen since the Great Depression, while waves of mortgage defaults could undermine confidence in the financial system here and abroad.”

Mr. Gross sees the problem as being much worse than reported and is calling for immediate federal action to directly aid troubled home owners.

Jim Jubak describes the environment the bond market is in these days in his article, The Bond Market's Shaky Foundation on theStreet.com:

“The unstable foundation is built on overseas cash flows and currency manipulation by foreign central banks. Dry rot threatens the whole system of ratings. And some of the banks propping up the market for credit derivatives shake at the slightest touch.”

“The professionals in this market -- the traders, the underwriters and the more sophisticated investment banks -- know exactly how shaky the whole edifice has become. They're determined not to be the last out the door.”

Articles:
Housing bubble bust helps Pimco's Gross rebound
UPDATE 2-PIMCO: Fed "can't afford" to let housing crack
FACTBOX-Writedowns and losses at major global banks

Bank of America

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Bank of America, (BAC) the nation’s second largest bank, said they will take a $3 billion write-down in the fourth quarter. When they announced that profits had dropped 32 percent for the third quarter they also had to include that they were going to let 3,000 staff go.

Every time a financial institution releases negative financials they feel that the next thing to say is that we are on top of things by letting people go. Of course 3,000 is a very safe number to throw out, with 198,000 employees, 3,000 can be done with little effort. What irks me is that Reuters out of London wrote that less than 100 of the cuts will come from Europe, Middle East or Africa, which leaves the good old US of A as the likely cutting field.

Articles:
UPDATE 2-Analysts cautious on Citigroup; BofA downgrades stock
BofA to take $3B write-down
Fewer than 100 BofA cuts planned for EMEA -sourcesFTC Clears $21 Billion Purchase: BofA deal could cost Chicago jobs

Bear Stearns

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Bear Stearns (BSC) wrote $820 million off in the third quarter and will take another writedown of $1.2 billion in the fourth. Moody’s and Fitch have stated that Bear Sterns still has too much exposure to subprime and CDOs.

Articles:
Ex Bear Stearns co-president Spector gets no severance
Bear Stearns sued over mortgage losses
UPDATE 2-Moody's warns on Bear Stearns, Fitch cuts

CapitalOne

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

CapitalOne (COF) In June CapitalOne had a reported that they were writing off $300 million for the second quarter and stating that they are laying off 2,000. Now that they are reporting their results for an abysmal third quarter, they included another 1,900 to the chopping block. Since I couldn’t find a Press Release on their website I’ll assume that it’s an additional 1,900 and not part of the original 2,000.

I did find one item of interest in their Press Released was one titled Capital One Makes Pigs Fly!

For the third quarter CapitalOne had an $81.6 million loss as compared to a $587 million profit in the third quarter of 2006. That loss was made more drastic by the fact that revenues had increased by a whopping 23 percent.

Articles:
UPDATE 2-Capital One posts third quarter net loss
Capital One cuts 1,900 jobs, slashes profit forecast
UPDATE 1-Capital One cutting 2,000 jobs, sees charge

CitiGroup

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

CitiGroup (C) wrote $2.2 billion off in the third quarter and estimates for the next two quarters are in the range from a low of $8 billion to a high of $21 billion.

CitiGroup just made an announcement that there would be a new round of cuts. The company has said that they have no numbers as of yet but estimates are that as many as 45,000 may lose their jobs. CitiGroup has 330,000 employees.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but I view the correlation between the companies that have aggressively off-shored, in the past three years, are also the companies that are experiencing the largest losses. I just believe that it’s a win-at-any-cost mentality.

Articles:
Citigroup Writedowns May Top $13.7 Billion
Citigroup debt protection costs hit new highs
Citigroup falls on "sell" after $15 bln writeoff seen
US STOCKS-Citigroup downgrade sinks Wall St
Citigroup Mixed Signals & None Good
Do You Work For Citigroup?

CountryWide

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

CountryWide (CFC) In October CountryWide posted a $1.2 billion dollar loss, their first loss in 25 years. At the same time the company also put out a statement saying that the worst was behind them and predicted profits for the fourth quarter and 2008. The market bought into it and their stock jumped 32 percent.

From the beginning of the housing downturn Chairman and CEO Mozilo has viewed it as an economic correction; an opportunity to snatch up people and accounts from the hundreds of weaker mortgage firms closing up shop. They have been able to obtain much needed cash from Bank of America and George Soros.

It shouldn’t take to much time to find out if Mozilo is truly a wizard or charlatan. I’m voting for the later.

Articles:
Countrywide Shifting Gears But Still Aggressive
UPDATE 1-Countrywide shares plunge, default swaps surge
Schubert & Reed LLP Issues Notice of Pendency of Class Action Against Countrywide Capital V and Others
Countrywide shareholders sue CEO Mozilo, board
UPDATE 8-Countrywide posts $1.2 bln loss, stock soars on outlook

E-Loans

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

E-Loans is the mortgage division of E-Trade (ETFC) wrote $197 million off their books this month and made no forecasts for what is going to happen in the near future. The rumor mill has it that the problem may be significant enough to bring down the entire company. Only time will answer that one but their survival is not going to be painless.

Articles:
UPDATE 1-E*Trade CEO rules out bankruptcy-CNBC
Shares of E-Trade Fall on Plans for Mortgage-Related Writedowns in the Fourth Quarter

Fannie Mae

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Fannie Mae (FNM) had a $1.4 billion loss in the third quarter and they are scrambling; issuing bonds and floating addition shares to shore up their ailing finances.

Articles:
The Mess Won’t Stop At Fannie Mae
Freddie, Fannie to the housing rescue - not so fast
UPDATE 2-Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac debt protection costs rise
Big Ben's Dumb Idea for Fannie and FreddieFannie Mae Practices a Bit of Accounting Legerdemain

Freddie Mac

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Freddie Mac (FRE) reported a $2 billion loss in the third quarter, the TIMESONLINE.COM report that Freddie’s losses are $4.8 billion. From there Press Release Freddie lost $4.6 billion in the first three quarters of 2007. What isn’t getting press is that they lost $8.1 billion in net asset value in just the third quarter. Another quarter like that and they will be in non-compliance of the regulatory minimum capital requirement of $8.5 billion in excess capital. Just another $600 million and they will break the 30 percent mandatory target capital surplus directed by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO. They are also in need of immediate funding putting their dividend at risk; both Freddie and Fannie are contemplating issuing convertibles or more stock, further diluting their shares value.

Articles:
Freddie Mac Reports Third Quarter 2007 Net Loss of $2.0 Billion or $3.29 Per Diluted...
Fannie, Freddie rout seen hurting major investorsUPDATE 1-Freddie Mac sued over mortgage problems

GE Asset Management

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

GE Asset Management is the arm of GE that takes care of the $60 billion GE U.S. pension fund for 530,000 active employees, vested former employees and retirees and their beneficiaries. One of their funds, a short-term cash fund recently had a run and redemptions trimmed $600 million from the funds value. The management of the pension seems unconcerned but the part of all these write-downs that bothers me is that as these assets are disappearing, where exactly are they disappearing from. Me thinks that the losses will ultimately end up draining our massive pension accounts.

Articles:
GE: Investors took $600 million out of fund after subprime losses
Mortgage Woes Damage a GE Bond Fund

GMAC

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

GMAC Last year Cerberus Capital bought a 51 percent stake in GMAC. Their mortgage lending unit, ResCap, lost $2.2 billion (25 percent) in value last quarter. GM was required by the sale covenants to capitalize ResCap with up to $1 billion if needed. They have done that but the company will still require additional funds to maintain a net worth level of $5.4 billion, also required in those sale covenants. Besides issuing $750 million in new bonds GMAC is considering purchasing a non-US mortgage company that will dilute the losses into a larger pool of mortgages.

Articles:
Now, What's Bad for GMAC Is Bad for the U.S.A.
GMAC Bids to Rescue ResCap
UPDATE 2-GMAC targets Northern Rock; sale of ResCap parts

Goldman Sacks

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Goldman Sacks (GS) wrote off $2.4 billion in the third quarter and no estimates have been made for the future.

The overall opinion is that Goldman is best positioned and have made the correct moves to weather this storm.

Huntington Bank

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Huntington Bank (HBAN) Huntington will have to cover about $300 million in the fourth quarter. Besides being hammered by the housing situation, Huntington let First Franklin Financial Corp borrow $1.5 billion that are secured by mortgages. Since Merrill Lynch now owns First Franklin I have to wonder how they plan to handle this.

Articles:
Huntington Bancshares Taking $300M Charge
Huntington sees surprise loss from mortgage client

IndyMac Bancorp

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

IndyMac Bancorp (IMB). The third quarter was a rough one for IndyMac, posting a loss of $202 million or five times company estimates. Their credit rating is now BBB-minus, one more cut and they will have obtained junk status.

Articles:
IndyMac outlook now negative, was stable - S&P
IndyMac Bancorp posts 3rd-quarter loss
IndyMac loss dwarfs own forecast

JP Morgan

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

JP Morgan (JPM) CreditSights Inc. has stated that JP Morgan might have to write-down as much as $4.1 billion. The company has been very silent about their own holdings while being quick to point to others.

Articles:
Moody's cuts 23 JP Morgan Alt-A RMBS classes
UPDATE 1-US mortgage-related losses up to $300 bln-OECD

Lehman Bros.

Part of a series The Great American Write-Down

Lehman Bros. (LEH) Lehman wrote $700 million off in the third quarter and have stated that any further write-downs should be neutralized by their hedges. It appears that they were quickest of the big nameplates to start shorting their mortgage exposure.

Articles:
Stock Market Update - Thu Nov 15 09:35:48 EST 2007