How U.S. Missteps Triggered Global Margin Calls And Deepened The Financial Crisis

In the mid-80s, I ran a private partnership - call it a hedge fund - from the floor of the Chicago Board of Options Exchange Inc. (CBOE). I was an independent market maker, meaning I could walk into any trading pit on the floor and trade any options and any stocks. More often than not, one of my principal trading plans was to play the crowd.

My approach was to walk into the pit and chat up the crowd. My intention was to gauge whether the other market makers and locals were net long (bullish) or net short (bearish). Most of the locals are independents and not extremely well capitalized. But I was.

If I gauged the locals to be bullish, meaning they had positioned themselves in anticipation of the underlying stock rising in price, by either being long “calls,” short “puts,” or engaged in bullish “spread” trades, I would start by buying some calls. I would use coded signals to my clerks to start buying the underlying stock. The locals would see stock “prints” go up on the New York Stock Exchange (now the NYSE EuroNext (NYX)) at higher prices. I was moving the stock higher. Usually, the locals would start adding to their bullish positions.

At the same time, I would have my clerks send in orders to the post where I was trading to buy puts - a lot of puts. Usually, it was the bullish locals selling the puts to my broker.

When I had the bearish position I wanted, I would offer to sell my calls to the crowd. Shortly after that, I would signal my clerks to start selling my long stock positions on the Big Board. I wasn’t trying to get the best price. I was “hitting bids” on the NYSE. After I had sold my long stock position, I started to short the stock. In the meantime, I was doing nothing visible in the pit.

I knew the stocks I traded very well. I knew my capital and leverage. I gauged the psychology of the crowd. My plan was to cause the stock to drop, triggering the locals and others to panic out of their positions. They would sell their calls and if the price of calls fell too quickly, they would start buying puts to hedge themselves. As the stock fell and the price of puts rose higher and higher, guess who would be selling the locals puts?

Since I had bought a lot of puts and their price was rising, I would leave the crowd and have a broker in the pit sell my now-profitable put position to the eager crowd.

I am not a bad guy. I am a trader. That’s my job. I trade to make money. That’s what everyone else does. But I succeeded much more often than most of the traders I competed against - because I followed these four basic rules of trading:

• Know the instruments you are trading.
• Know your capital and leverage limitations.
• Gauge the psychology of the market.
• And have a plan.

Unfortunately, the story is much different for the U.S. Treasury Department, under the command of Treasury Secretary Henry M. “Hank” Paulson Jr., and the U.S. Federal Reserve, under the command of Chairman Ben S. Bernanke. Although these two top Bush Administration officials are the key architects of the bailout plan that’s being deployed even as you read this, they have violated all four of those basic trading rules. In short, neither official:

• Has proven his grasp of the complexity of the instruments causing the credit crisis.
• Understands the extent of leverage used by the players who are central to this financial mess.
• Grasps the psychology of the markets.
• Or has a workable plan to fix the problem at hand.

The Genesis of a Global Financial Crisis

The Treasury and the Fed have several problems. First, they don’t understand the instruments that are at the root of this crisis. The complexity of collateralized mortgage-backed securities (CMBS) is beyond any simple explanation, though I offered one a few weeks ago. Second, and exponentially worse is that there is a “multiplier catalyst” in this devastating deleveraging and worldwide slaughter that isn’t understood, and isn’t regulated - by anyone.

I’m talking, of course, about credit default swaps.

Yes, collateralized mortgage-backed securities are at the bottom of the crisis. But, the frightening truth is that we can’t even get to them because they are covered so completely by what I’m calling the multiplier catalyst - credit default swaps. I also have offered a simple primer on credit default swaps.

These two instruments collided when traders wanted to either hedge their CMBS positions, or when they sought exposure to mortgage-backed securities, either by mimicking being long them or, in effect, shorting them. A credit default swap is a bilateral contract between, for example, you and me, under which we agree to a deal to insure a position you have because you own these dreaded CMBS. You agree to pay me a premium, up front and yearly, for the next five years. And I agree that if the CMBS you own defaults, I will pay you its full value. This is a good deal for you, right?

In fact it’s such a good deal that you ask me if I’ll insure you for the value of several different companies’ bonds and debts, in case they default. I agree. Pay me my premiums, please.

Your friend, who doesn’t own any CMBS, hears about the deal and asks me to insure them if the same CMBS securities default, even though they don’t own any themselves. I agree.

Pay me my premiums, please.

It didn’t matter to you that I’m not an insurance company. It didn’t matter to you that I never set aside any capital to pay you in the event that the instruments I was insuring you against actually did default. It’s a game - a trading game. Get it?

Unfortunately for the worldwide financial markets, I’m not the only one to play this game. Real insurance companies, investment banks, hedge funds, banks and lots of others have played this game. And, there’s a caveat. A big one.

All the bilateral contracts have a provision for margin to be posted; that is, collateral must be posted by me, or by American International Group Inc. (AIG), if they wrote these virtual-insurance-contracts and they start to go against us … which means that those instruments we insured actually might go into default.

AIG was bailed out to the tune of $80 billion, because it had margin calls on CDS contracts it wrote. Do you know why they now need an additional $38 billion in help? Because they are experiencing more margin calls on their credit default swaps. The Treasury and Fed never understood these instruments, let them run wild and now we are all paying the price.

That’s the story, but - as always - there’s also the story behind the story.

The leverage that was employed when CMBS and CDS contracts were bought and sold is not even known. How much did banks, investment banks, insurance companies, hedge funds and traders borrow to initiate their trades?  There are no accurate figures and not even any accurate estimates.

Now we come to the psychology of the market. No one - save my new idol, hedge-fund-manager extraordinaire and mega-billionaire John A. Paulson (who deserves every penny he made) - understood what “the crowd” was thinking. What they were thinking was that housing prices aren’t going to fall, companies aren’t going to default, and everything is under control because we’ve all calculated our Value at Risk and go merrily skipping along.

We’re not going to be okay because the plans that Treasury and the Fed have put forth weren’t plans to begin with. They are reacting, moment-by-moment to the markets.

With all due respect to Interim Assistant Secretary for Financial Stability, Neel Kashkari, he’s a “rocket scientist” and not a trader. And it was the rocket scientists who devised these securities for traders in the first place and neither group ever understood the instability and combustibility of the solid rocket fuel they were mixing. How is it possible for the talented Kashkari to gauge the markets and traders worldwide, when he’s never traded anything?

The global contagion is the direct result of margin calls that seeminglycrosses every security type (especially credit-default-swap positions), in very market, and seemingly in every country.

And the worst of it? As companies’ stock prices fall, as the value of their bonds fall and their debts mount, as they get closer and closer to actual default, the sellers of credit default swaps are getting bigger and bigger margin calls. Everyone is selling whatever they have to meet margin calls. It’s a worldwide de-leveraging - to an extent that we’ve never before conceived.

The Only Real ‘Exit Strategy’

Enough bad news. There is a way out: Shut down the CDS market. Net out all existing positions. Cancel contracts. Let CMBS holders keep their positions. And here’s why: There’s not enough money in the Treasury plan to buy them all up. Adjust the cost accounting basis on the books of holders so that they don’t have to mark those securities down. Give the Fed and Treasury unlimited transparency into every financial firm’s books on a strictly private basis and let them manage, merge and close down the insolvent “basket cases,” while guaranteeing every depositor in every bank and money-market fund.

And there’s more. Provide incentives for depositors and investors to stay with salvageable institutions by eliminating any capital gains on net new investments into these government-backstopped institutions.

Who are we kidding? Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE) insure most of the troubled mortgages already. And that means the government. So allow all mortgages - after a certain date - to be refinanced by healthy banks whose cost of funds to make new loans should come directly from the Treasury at the Federal Funds rate. This will allow banks that write new loans to make them cheap and still have good profit margins. Make those homeowners pay back the favor by sharing the appreciation on those homes with the taxpayers who bailed them out, when they sell them.

Also absolutely necessary: Make key cuts. Cut taxes. And cut all wasteful government spending on all earmarked and pork barrel projects.

And last, but not least, put all the lobbyists in jail - especially the former legislators and their staffs who sold the American people short just to feed their own disgusting greed and avarice.

Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by Email