Monoline Death Watch

Felix Salmon discusses some recent JPM research on MBIA:

in a note issued this morning they said that MBIA’s tangible book value is actually negative, to the tune of about -$40 per share.

OK, the full article has some caveats. But the mere fact that a reputable investment bank (if that is not an oxymoron) can suggest that MBIA is insolvent should raise some warning signs about the extended historical fiction that is insurance accounting.

Monoline death watch, day 1000

(The fate of the monolines was sealed by the risk they wrote in 2005-2007, so day 1000 is if anything conservative - it takes insurers a long time to die thanks to their accounting and the pay as you go nature of the claims against them.)

In a move so predictable it hardly raises a yawn, Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan and 15 other large financial institutions filed suit on Wednesday against MBIA, claiming the bond insurer reduced its ability to pay policyholders by splitting its business in two.

It is difficult to think of how a monoline could split without generating lawsuits. If x of capital and y of investments support z of risk, and you split z into to pieces, how do you divide x and y? There is not widely agreed answer, so someone is going to think that the credit quality of the piece they end up with a claim against is lower that it should be - and they will sue. Moreover since there are clearly diversification benefits between risks, even if the split is entirely fair, the capital needed for the two pieces is larger than that for the original whole.

The lesson? Agree collateral upfront, based on your marks.

Monoline death watch, continued

Watching the monolines die is a bit like listening to Fidelio. Intellectually you know that it going to end, but there are times when it feels like it cannot happen fast enough. Now we seem to have moved past the Komm, Hoffnung of Act 1 - there is no hope - and the protagonists are in chains. Specifically Syncora (which used to be called SCA - the name swapping in monoline land is as bad as that in a Shakespearean comedy, and a lot less funny) has stopped paying claims. This is of course a default event for CDS written on it. The FT story is here.

Entirely expected lawsuit of the day

From Bloomberg:

MBIA Inc. was sued by Third Avenue Management LLC... over claims the insurer’s split of its bond-insurance businesses hurts debt holders.

Three mutual funds managed by Third Avenue bought notes issued by MBIA Insurance Corp. in February 2008 based on assurances that the company was recapitalizing following losses in its structured finance insurance business...

MBIA, the largest bond insurer by outstanding guarantees, said in February it was transferring $5 billion in cash and its public finance business to another entity that has no obligation to the notes, Third Avenue said in its statement.

Monoline death watch

The slow slide continues. Following S&P and in response to MBIA’s restructuring plan, Moody’s downgraded MBIA to B- from BBB+ on Wednesday. The best bit is on Bloomberg:

Credit-default swaps tied to MBIA Insurance Corp. jumped 7 percentage points to 60.5 percent upfront, according to CMA DataVision in London. That’s in addition to 5 percent a year. It means it would cost $6.05 million initially and $500,000 a year to protect $10 million for five years.

Given more than half a chance of failing within five years, according to the CDS market, you would have thought it wasn't worth printing stationary for the new company. Maybe they could just cross out MBIS and write in National Public Finance Guarantee Corporation by hand.

EXceLent Failure

From Bloomberg:

XL Capital Ltd., the biggest Bermuda- based insurer by assets, is seeking a buyer after reporting investment losses larger than its market value, four people with knowledge of the matter said.

Big oops. I could be mean about actuaries. I could be mean about monoline-type business models. But for now I just want to raise a glass to a company that was mostly a sophisticated risk taker. Sadly `mostly' and `not enormously hugely massively well-capitalised - more capital than you can shake a stick at' can be a toxic mixture.

The long tail of the monolines

Accrued Interest picked up something that I had missed, namely the continuing long slow death of the monolines. In particular Moody's downgraded the last of the AAAs, FSA and Assured Guaranty, on Friday. Read about it here. This is rather like that poignant moment when the last of bottle of 1970 Lafite is drunk - although the smiles are a little less broad.

MBIA sues Countrywide

Confirming the insurance industry habit of substituting claims adjustment for underwriting diligence, MBIA is suing Countrywide according to Housing Wire:

The breach-of-contract lawsuit, filed in New York State’s Supreme Court, suggested that Countrywide developed a “systematic pattern and practice of abandoning its own guidelines for loan origination,” in effort to inflate its market share during the mortgage-lending boom. MBIA accused Countrywide of knowingly negotiating riskier loans “no matter the cost to borrowers, investors or guarantors like MBIA.”...

Overall, the case involves 10 residential mortgage-backed securitizations of more than $14B in mortgage loans.

This is going to be interesting. On the one hand, it seems obvious that mortgage quality did decline in the last years of the Greenspan boom. But can MBIA really prove that Countrywide abandoned its own loan underwriting standards - rather than simply changing them to adjust to `market conditions' - and that that was a breach of contract of the financial guarantees? If it can, we are going to see a lot more wriggling from the wrappers, and the lesson from Hollywood Funding - that insurers can't always be trusted to pay when you think they have written protection - will be driven home to a lot more people.

Good insurer bad insurer

Lawyers to your keyboards. Ambac is pushing ahead with the good insurer/bad insurer model. From Bloomberg:

Ambac rose as much as 15 percent in late trading as Wisconsin regulators, which have jurisdiction over the New York-based company, approved a plan to move $850M out of Ambac Assurance Corp. into the new business, according to a statement today. Ambac is seeking to obtain an AAA credit rating ... for Connie Lee.

Apart from the obvious questions -- who gets the capital, who gets the muni derivatives, and why anyone thinks structured finance counterparties might be remotely comfortable with all this -- don't we have a bad enough history with two syllable first name one syllable second name companies? I mean, Indy Mac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, ... Connie Lee -- it is not encouraging, is it?

Ball of steel or brains of lead?

In what is either a strong buy signal for the market or a strong sell signal on the stock, MBIA has announcing that it was not changing its projection of losses on its mortgage-related exposures. The FT story is here. Yes, they had some bizarre FAS 159 gains (CNN is here and my take on the rules is here): yes, they resumed a share buy-back programme. But ignoring all that, if their actuarial loss estimates for RMBS have not changed, either that is a very useful datapoint on where realised default losses actually will be, or their actuaries are fools and it is time to short the stock again. It will be interesting to see which.

Update. John Dizard has pointed out the possible value in the monolines as a vulture play on the eventual losses on RMBS. I can see the idea, but I'd like to know more about the implied residual value of the monolines given the current equity price. Are they really cheap yet?

And now you die...

This was my favourite blog title of the day: And now young monoline... you will die. Accrued Interest makes some good points, and indeed it must be frustrating trying to run a monoline when one's de facto regulator, the ratings agencies, keep changing the capital model. However:

• It was clear that the capital models used up to mid 2008 were flawed, and so volatility in capital required for a AAA was to be expected.
  
• One of the key parts of an insurer's business model is time diversification. Business underwritten in one year diversifies that written in another, and losses in one year - subject to enough capital being available to continue - can be offset by higher premiums the next year. For the monolines though this does not work any more as there is much lower demand for muni wraps and those that are getting done are mostly being written by Berkshire. So the agencies are right to account for this change in their re-rating of the monolines.

Anyway, Bill Ackman might fancy being able to buy another small country, so it is about time for another wave of monoline downgrades.

Blame the actuaries

Yet another story about the travails of the monolines - this time on guaranteed investment contracts - made me think about who is really to blame for the mess these companies are in. It's the people who made their underwriting decisions: their actuaries. They decided that there was little risk in guaranteeing investment returns for extended periods. They decided writing hundreds of billions of dollars of financial guarantees on ABS was a good risk return tradeoff. For that matter their colleagues in the life companies decided that variable annuity life policies were a good idea. (These policies, like a GIC, guarantee a return on a risky investments so they act a lot like long dated written puts: needless to say, the actuaries did not price them that way. Now that the equity markets are tumbling you can expect to see some life companies getting into distress...)

So perhaps one lesson that shines out of this mess is do not let an actuary price or risk manage a financial contract without help from a professional. They are not certain to screw it up. But the evidence of the last few years suggests that there is a real risk that they might get it very wrong indeed.

Default and CDS written by or referencing monolines

Recent articles (see for instance here, here, here, and here) have spurred a concern that I confess should have occurred to me earlier. What can cause an event of default by a monoline, and what happens next.

The first issue concerns the effective recovery for ISDA claims against a monoline. Here the crux is the relationship between the holding company and the insurer. As I understand it, most monolines are structured with a listed holding company and a regulated insurance sub. Obviously insurance contracts, including financial guarantee policies (whether transformed into CDS or not), are written by the insurance company, and so the insurance company has most (but not all) of the group's capital to support this risk.

Which group company writes CDS? My suspicion is that it has often been the holding company. If the regulator seizes the insurer, it is almost certainly (but check your docs) an event of default on the CDS. But in that case the regulator will almost certainly not permit CDS counterparties to be paid at the expense of claims paying ability for the insurance business - they won't let the money out of the insurer. The holding company will be left with a whole lot of liabilities and essentially no assets beyond a worthless stake in an insurer the regulator has taken over.

This is of course also an issue if you have debt issued by the holding company, or if you have transacted CDS referencing that debt. As Linklaters pointed out a few months ago, credit events can include quite minor regulatory intervention. I suspect that after such an event recoveries might be very low even if the operating sub is still perfectly capable of paying insurance claims.

Update. FT alphaville has additional reporting on FSA, CIFG and FGIC here, following their earlier story on MBIA. What I can't see in the material I have read so far is whether a breach of regulatory capital requirement of the insurance sub is likely to be credit event on (a) CDS written by the parent and/or (b) CDS referencing the parent.

TGIF...

... or perhaps not if you are a monoline. Especially a press officer at a monoline. There's lot's of steam to generate as this list of current press releases from Bloomberg admirably demonstrates. Oh yes. Long coal, short insurers.

Bill Ackman I salute you

S&P lowered Ambac and MBIA to AA today. They are under review from Moody's. Fitch, only six months late rather than the year or so of the other two agencies, downgraded them in January. Bill Ackman made another big pot of money. And there's a nice opportunity opening in zombie monoline runoff...

I still prefer 157, but 163 is a good one too...

From the FASB:

Statement 163 requires that an insurance enterprise recognize a claim liability prior to an event of default (insured event) when there is evidence that credit deterioration has occurred in an insured financial obligation.

Specifically, from the standard itself:

The recognition approach for a claim liability relating to a financial guarantee insurance contract requires that an insurance enterprise recognize a claim liability when the insurance enterprise expects, based on the present value of expected net cash outflows to be paid under the insurance contract discounted using a risk-free rate, that a claim loss will exceed the unearned premium revenue.

For the monolines, of course, that means a realistic assessment of eventual credit losses. Now that isn't an easy thing to do, and there is still a lot of wriggle room in how that standard is applied, but at least sticking their heads in the sand is no longer a sanctioned accounting standard.

Not dead (just)

Bloomberg reports MBIA had a substantial first quarter loss yet the stock went up:

MBIA Inc., the ailing bond insurer, rose in New York Stock Exchange trading after saying it will pump $900 million into its insurance unit and reporting a first-quarter loss that was narrower than some analysts' estimates.

(The $900M is a downstreaming of cash from the parent into the insurer. That money cannot now be dividended to shareholders unless regulators are comfortable with the capital adequacy of the insurer: the funds came from a $1.1B capital raising in February.)

MBIA, whose market value has slumped 87 percent in the past year, gained as much as 9.8 percent as the company reported a net loss of $2.4 billion and an operating loss of $3.01 a share.

It seems that anything less than a cataclysm is a cause for celebration with the monolines at the moment.

Update. Bloomberg now reports:

MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc. had ``meaningfully'' higher losses on home-equity loans and collateralized debt obligations than anticipated, raising concern about their Aaa status, Moody's Investors Service said.

The losses elevate ``existing concerns about capitalization levels relative to the Aaa benchmark,'' Moody's said in a statement today.

So instead of being, say, $10B short of AAA they are now $12 1/2 ? Big deal. Sabre rattling won't make up for the downgrade that should have come months ago.

The Warren of Wrapped Wraps

Warren Buffett's new monoline is doing well, partly through writing wraps on already wrapped paper. From the FT:

Berkshire Hathaway’s fledging bond insurer generated $400m in premiums during the first quarter, outstripping all the established, but troubled, operators in the so-called US monoline insurance market.

Many of the 278 contracts the unit wrote were for clients who already held policies from other triple-A rated insurers, Berkshire’s Warren Buffett said at the annual shareholder meeting in Omaha on Saturday. “They’re paying us a [higher] fee to write insurance that will only be paid if the principal [insured party] and insurer didn’t pay,” Mr Buffett said. “It tells you something about the meaning of triple-A in the bond-insurance field.”

I guess if you need a real AAA BHAC is one of the few places you can go. The interesting question is why people want that degree of credit protection on muni risk given the low underlying default probability.

Ambac posts a $1.6B Q1 loss

From Bloomberg:

The first-quarter net loss was $1.66 billion, or $11.69 a share, New York-based Ambac said today in a statement.

That is over 10% of their claims paying ability (as stated in the 2007 annual report) in one hit.

Ambac fell as much as 22 percent in early New York Stock Exchange trading as new business slumped 87 percent after states and municipalities shunned its insurance and the market for mortgage securities dried up.

Looking into the detail, we find two major components of the loss: $1.7B mark to market loss on written credit derivatives held at fair value (primarily CDOs of ABS), and a $1B increase in reserving for written financial guarantees on RMBS accounted for as insurance. What I would really like to know is the balance of Ambac's subprime risk taken via CDS vs. that taken financial guarantees. In other words, how does Ambac's fair value write-down compare with its reserves? If $100M of 'average' (whatever that means) exposure taken via CDS generated $20M of write-down, say, how much did Ambac increase its reserves for $100M of average exposure taken via writing financial guarantees?


If things keep on going down like this it is going to get very messy. Still, at least Bill Ackman had a good day.

Update. Meanwhile other market participants old (FSA) and new are queueing to eat Ambac and MBIA's lunch. The FT reports:

Two companies are considering opening new bond insurance firms – a large US bank and a large private equity firm – according to New York’s insurance industry regulator.

Finally, Calculated Risk has a post on adverse selection in the monoline's portfolio: see also slides 31 & 32 of Ambac's Q1 presentation. I'm not sure what exactly if anything one can conclude from the information, but it is interesting.

The IMF Financial Stability Review: Chapter 1

I have held off for a couple of days on commenting on this document not least because it is large, dense, and worth reading carefully. There is an awful lot of information in the full text here -- the executive summary is here. In this post I will comment on chapter 1: posts on subsequent chapters will follow later in the week.

My tuppence ha'penny:

• The headline credit crunch loss predicted by the IMF of $1T has received a lot of press, not least because it is rather larger than the $460B some other commentators have been focussed on. Firstly no one really has any idea at this stage, and secondly it is half the estimated value destruction in the 1994 bond market crisis; so while it is a large number, we should not be too freaked by it.
  
• There is a lot of good information in the report. For instance this table showing the dependence of a number of European banks on wholesale funding, may be of use in selecting your next short. Just remember it is hard to make money shorting the Republic of France or its wholly controlled subsidiaries.
  
  
• According to the IMF there has been a massive rise in leverage of global banks. The report has this picture showing the growth of Bank assets and Basel 1 risk weighted assets, which I don't understand.
  
  Here's my problem. Consider the Basel 1 risk weights:
  
  

  Asset Class	Risk Weight
  Cash, Good quality sovereigns, Insured residential mortgages, short term commitments	0%
  Loans to banks and muni risk	20%
  Uninsured residential mortgages	50%
  Loans to banks and muni risk	20%
  All other loans	100%

  
  If assets are above 15T and RWA are at 5T the average risk weight is roughly 35%. How can that be given the preponderance of corporate and retail risk in the system? Remember RWA also includes derivatives risk which is off balance sheet and not included as an asset, so this number makes even less sense. If anyone can explain how the average Basel 1 risk weight for the banking system comes out at less than 50%, I should be very grateful. Certainly if the data above is correct, the IMF's conclusion makes a lot of sense:

  Bank supervisors need to take more account of balance sheet leverage as they assess capital adequacy.

  
  
• The IMF seems to take a rather optimistic view of the effect of the credit crunch on the availability of credit. They forecast a slowing of the rate of growth of credit but not an outright contraction:

  The pace of credit growth in a squeeze would be reduced to a little over 4 percent of the outstanding private sector debt stock in the United States.

  I think that is wildly optimistic. Everything we are seeing from the retail and commercial mortgage markets, for instance, suggests that credit growth will be negative for the next half year at least.
  
• The IMF administers a richly deserved kicking to the monolines and their system of regulation:

  In the United States, the experience of the financial guarantors argues for reforms to U.S. insurance regulation.
  
  Responsibility currently resides with the states, which has impeded coordination of regulatory efforts across states and with federal bank and securities regulators where spillovers are now evident. A new strategy for regulation of the financial guarantor sector needs to be implemented, including a coherent approach to capital adequacy and new limits on financial guarantors’ activities.