“We shouldn’t pretend we’re not a big company.”
~ Patrick Pichette, Google CFO.
The Department of Justice trumpeted the guilty plea of Delton de Armas, the former CFO […]
This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.
Not exactly shocking news but one of the mysteries of the financial crisis is how it came to be that banks ended up with r transferred to investors.
Sure, it’s well known that the assets banks removed from their balance sheets did not shift much risk to investors after all, thanks to liquidity guarantees they supplied to investors. But that even took former Citigroup vice chairman and Treasury secretary Robert Rubin by surprise, as Rubin said he didn’t know such guarantees existed until after the bank was forced to increase its capital reserves because it had to make good on them.
Now research that came out a year ago but was revised late last month helps clarify what went awry.
It turns out that a conflict between the Financial Accounting Standards Board and federal bank regulators was even more critical than I thought it was when I reported it in 2004. The conflict arose after FASB voted to require commercial banks to consolidate such vehicles after such financing arrangements caused energy trading firm Enron Corp. to fail.
I was aware that the regulators asked the FASB to delay the new accounting rule and that the board eventually provided an exemption for so-called “qualified” special purpose entities, which provided a loophole from consolidation so long as they vehicles weren’t actively managed.
But the full significance of that escaped me until I saw the research, which shows that securitization along the lines of Enron’s — guarantees that limited or even eliminated investor risk — exploded after bank regulators codified the exemption in their capital requirements. Indeed, the exemption essentially paved the way for banks to use more off-balance-sheet financing vehicles that masked their true risk.
How exactly? In late 2004, the Federal Reserve Board, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of Thrift Supervision decided that asset-backed commercial paper put into special purpose vehicles known as conduits would not have to be consolidated for purposes of calculating capital requirements. And the regulators decided that banks need only reserve against 10 percent of the amounts put into conduits even when they guaranteed that investors would be repaid if there were a run on the conduits. Previously, securitizations typically put investors on the hook for that risk.
The research, originally published in May 2009 but revised in late January and entitled “Securitization without Risk Transfer,” found that the amount of subprime assets securitized through such vehicles soared in the wake of the exemption, even though the liquidity guarantees extended to investors meant that little or no risk had been transferred to them.
“Regulation should either treat off-balance-sheet activities with recourse as on-balance sheet for capital requirement and accounting disclosure purposes, or, require that off-balance sheet activities do not have recourse to bank balance sheets,” the authors, Viral V. Acharya and Philipp Schnabl of New York University and Gustavo Suarez of the Federal Reserve, conclude. “The current treatment appears to be a recipe for disaster, from the standpoint of transparency as well as capital adequacy of the financial intermediation sector as a whole.”
This story is republished from CFOZone, where you’ll find news, analysis and professional networking tools for finance executives.
They already share a first name.
Other than that, they probably don’t have much in common but does anybody else have a problem with the fact that the head of the energy trading unit that Citigroup sold to Occidental last year is setting up a hedge fund?
It would be an entirely different situation if Andrew Hall were leaving Occidental to do this, but he isn’t. Instead, he will wear both hats simultaneously.
That sure sounds like a clear conflict of interest to us. After all, fee structure of a hedge fund clearly incentivizes Hall to favor its investors over Occidental’s, though the oil company has a 20 percent equity stake in the fund.
The FT doesn’t explore this issue for some reason, referring merely to the fact that the two companies will be run “separately” and that the trades will be done “in parallel,” whatever that means.
And the article’s point about this deal having an air of history about it seems woefully misplaced.
Forget the fact that Hall’s hedge fund, Astenbeck, is named after a village near the historic German castle he owns. The more telling historical reference has to do with the conflict of interest. Indeed, the last time we saw a conflict this clear-cut was when Andrew Fastow ran some of Enron’s key off-balance-sheet partnerships while serving simultaneously as its CFO.
It was the disclosure of that particular factoid in a footnote that helped prompt short seller James Chanos to question Enron’s financial results back in early 2001.
And maybe this is just a coincidence, but Enron was an energy trading company as well. Remember Get Shorty?
As a side note, my colleague Matt Quinn wonders if Hall’s hedge fund will attract a lot of Citigroup’s former fund investors, and even draw Citigroup itself as an investor. That would certainly make sense if the bank is forced to get out of proprietary trading, as the Obama administration is proposing. Plus the bank would get to benefit from trading without having to reflect the risk on its balance sheet.
But the big question is, would Citi and its investors be treated better than Occidental’s shareholders?