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Month: May 2016

The AAA bubble, deflated

The AAA bubble, deflated

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Half a decade ago, I wrote a post with a rather eye-catching lede. “This, we think, could well be the most important chart in the world right now,” it said.

AAAratings
It went on to discuss the disappearance of triple-A rated securities in the aftermath of the U.S. housing bubble and trillions of dollars worth of downgraded mortgage-backed securities. The disappearance was short-lived, however. By 2009, highly-rated government debt had more than filled the hole left by increasingly scarce AAA-rated securitizations.

“The AAA bubble re-inflates and suddenly sovereign debt becomes the major force driving the world’s triple-A supply,” said the 2011 post, written when worries over the eurozone debt crisis were in full swing. “It’s one reason why the sovereign crisis is well and truly painful.”

Frances Coppola has a much more recent post that reminded me of this.

It features a chart from the rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which forecasts that triple-A rated sovereign debt will essentially become an endangered species by 2050 thanks to a rise in government borrowing.

sandp

Coppola makes a good point here. “It’s a great chart. But what it is really telling us is that S&P’s way of assessing the creditworthiness of sovereigns belongs to a bygone age. In the new world, junk is safe, debt is an asset and investors fear governments. So ratings will be meaningless in future, and ratings agencies, redundant,” she concludes.

That said, I do wonder about the need and ability of the financial industry to re-engineer ‘safe’ securities with top-tier credit ratings, given the degree to which such ratings are still (incredibly!) embedded in our financial system – from liquidity buffers to central bank asset purchase programmes. For this reason, I would dearly love to see an updated chart encompassing all fixed income.

Update: A few days after this post, Gary Gorton and Tyler Muir published a related BIS paper on collateral shortages. Check out the write-up here.

Peer-to-Fear

Peer-to-Fear

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In January of this year I resurfaced some of my older reporting on the peer-to-peer, or marketplace, lending industry and wrote this line in the first article about Lending Club raising interest rates for the riskiest borrowers on its platform:

It’s worth recalling the words of some investors at the time who criticized LendingClub’s lofty $8.9 billion valuation—reached partly because of overwhelming enthusiasm for all things tech-related.  “These companies are really specialty finance companies, but look at where specialty finance companies trade in the public markets,” said one major marketplace lending investor at the time [of LendingClub’s late 2014 IPO].

It’s a point that, like much of my coverage, has been oft-repeated since – especially in the wake of recent news that Renaud Laplanche, LendingClub’s CEO, resigned following allegations of internal control issues and a rather sloppy ABS deal with Jefferies. My interest in marketplace lending has always been its overlap with traditional finance and the degree to which – as I’ve often written – the disruptive sector has been  co-opted by the very thing it sought to disrupt. In fact, one of the earliest enterprise pieces I wrote on the nascent industry, from January 2013, included the following gems:

“The one thing about peer-to-peer lending is it’s still a relatively manual process. This business needs a lot of scale to be profitable,” said a P2P analyst.

“In order to grow this business one must really have made relationships on the institutional side,” said a P2P CEO.

“On the surface it really almost comes across as too good to be true,” said a P2P institutional investor.

More than three years later and the pressures of scaling a ‘technology’ business that still relies on direct mail for advertising, and which derives much of its value from avoiding the legacy costs (including regulation) of traditional banks, seems to have come to a head viz LendingClub’s apparently lax internal controls, funding and securitization processes.

For those interested, here’s my more recent coverage of the industry’s travails.

When credit market concerns arrive at the marketplace lenders, January 2016 – Recall that the bear case for marketplace lenders was always a turning of the credit cycle that would either produce a rise in borrower defaults or result in a dearth of funding as skittish investors cut their lending on the platform. At the beginning of this year, credit markets spasmed,and LendingClub raised rates on lower-quality loans on its platform by about 67bps as it sought to better compensate nervous investors.

More trouble in bonds backed by peer-to-peer loans, March 2016 – A rating agency slapping a credit rating on a securitization only to downgrade it eight weeks later because of faster-than-expected-delinquencies seems … reminiscent of something.

A new class action suit wants to treat peer-to-peer lenders like mobsters, April 2016 – A scoop about a class action suit that strikes at the heart of the marketplace lending model and came on top of the already troublesome Madden vs Midland Funding decision, completed the ‘doomsday duo’ of funding concerns and regulatory scrutiny for the industry.

LendingClub is turning out to be anything but a direct lender, May 2016 – The resignation of Laplanche sent LendingClub shares plunging and, more significantly, exposed one of the biggest oddities at the center of the company’s business model. While promising to democratize finance by using new technology to directly match borrowers with lenders, LendingClub has turned to a complicated network of middlemen and professional investors to fund its rapid expansion and disintermediate traditional banks.

And the latest edition of our Odd Lots podcast, which sums up some of my thoughts on the matter:

https://soundcloud.com/bloomberg-business/28-how-finances-hot-new-thing-ended-up-in-an-old-school-scandal

Welcome to the Age of Asset Management

Welcome to the Age of Asset Management

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This was a wide-ranging discussion that I was fortunate enough to moderate at the most recent Milken conference.

I’m told that this post on cross-border deleveraging, combined with some previous work on asset managers, was the inspiration for it. In any case it was a pleasure to discuss everything from capital controls to passive investing and, of course, market liquidity with David Hunt, Jim McCaughan, Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, Ronald O’Hanley, and Nouriel Roubini.

Related link:
It’s the cross-border deleveraging, stupid! – Bloomberg

It SIVs! It SIVs!

It SIVs! It SIVs!

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These are the kind of stories I love to write. The creators of the first structured investment vehicle (SIV), a type of shadow bank that eventually went on to wreak havoc during the financial crisis, are staging a comeback with a plain old vanilla bank.

I’m sad to say though, that First Global Trust Bank does not have the same mythological ring to it as Gordion Knot.

Per the Bloomberg story:

Nicholas Sossidis and Stephen Partridge-Hicks, the bankers who created the model for structured investment vehicles that later collapsed during the global financial crisis, are back.

Sossidis and Partridge-Hicks own First Global Trust Bank Plc, a London-based firm that was authorized to provide banking services a month ago after a three-year approval process, U.K. Companies House and Financial Conduct Authority records show. The new lender is funded by Gordian Knot Ltd., their firm that once managed billions of dollars through a SIV until that vehicle’s 2008 collapse, the documents show.

“FGTB is a simple, narrow wholesale bank,” the lender’s website says. “We will only accept deposits or investments from professional, wholesale investors. Our business model doesn’t cater for retail deposits or current accounts….”

Read the whole thing here.