Freddie Mae and Fannie Mae are long term solvent

Hey guys if you invest in preferred shares theres 50% annualized return on Fannie Mae and freddie Macs, so what do you think? green shoots everywhere!



http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2009/08/modelling-fannie-mae-and-freddie-mac_19.html

This is the money post. I put Parts I, II, III, IV and V together to come to the surprising conclusion that both Fannie and Freddie survive. This conclusion is highly-non-consensus and has substantial political and investment implications. Also I would like to thank FTAlphaville for linking to this series – most the rest of the blogosphere has been silent possibly because I disagree with their preconceptions/ideology. The comments on FTAlphaville reflect mainstream finance opinion – that Fannie and Freddie are irredeemably insolvent.

Putting the model together

We now have enough to do some basic modelling of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I will do it for Freddie Mac only – and leave it to the more ambitious readers to do it for Fannie Mae.*

In the second post in this series I demonstrated how the losses that have been booked to date (rather than provisioned to date) have come primarily from outside the traditional guarantee book of business. Those losses are primarily mark-to-market losses on mortgage securities (especially subprime securities), mark to market losses on the hedge book and the write-off of tax assets.

None of those loss categories are going to expand – and indeed some will reverse.

In the fourth post I estimated the losses in the traditional guarantee book of business. I have asserted that the model is fairly robust (and will cover that in the next three posts) however I showed under quite reasonable assumption that there were $37.6 billion in losses to be realised at Freddie Mac at year end 2008. Since then $2.9 billion have been realised so there are $34.7 billion left to come.

Of these losses 25.2 billion have already been provided for. From now until when the problem-years of business loans run off Freddie will only need to take another 12.5 billion in provisions. They may elect to take more than $12.5 billion in provisions – but if they do and my models are reasonable – then in all likelihood the excess provisions will be reversed through the income statement.

Now if you go to the last Freddie Mac results you will see they have a positive net worth of $8.2 billion. However they owe the government $51.7 billion, as the government has injected $51.7 billion in senior preferred securities. They are thus $43.5 billion in the hole.

They will also – over time – take another $12.5 billion in provisions. So now, until all the problem years of business have run off, they will be $56 billion in capital short.

The Government can get its money back on their “investment” in Freddie Mac provided Freddie can earn more than $56 billion over a reasonable time period and meet the government interest charges.

This would be more certain if some of the losses described in Part II reversed. I am pretty sure that they will – but lets ignore them (until a later post). Pre-tax, pre-provision operating profits of Freddie Mac are running at over $15 billion. If the government were not demanding 10 percent on its preference shares the companies would be sufficiently well capitalised to repay their interest in 4 years. With the drag of having to pay the government $5 billion per annum it will take a bit over five years. Either way the operating profits of Freddie Mac are big enough to ensure the government gets its money back. If you do the same analysis for Fannie Mae its is even better. However Fannie has less aggressively marked private label securities to market so it has less chance of recoveries from their current marks. The consensus view that the GSEs are forever toast – and forever a drain on the US Government is very likely wrong.

 

Implications

I have tried modelling this half a dozen ways and the result is fairly robust. If anything the GSEs (especially Freddie) are solvent quicker than the model I have presented suggests. Indeed if the tax losses are allowed to be bought back as capital they will reach solvency a year and a half earlier – and will be in the position to repay substantial government money during 2012.

The losses (even after all losses are booked) come from primarily outside the traditional business of guaranteeing small well-secured and documented mortgages.

Traditional GSE business (guaranteeing lower value mortgages with reasonable terms on full documentation and with a down-payment) was very effective at raising home-ownership rates whereas modern subprime lending, it seems, just caused a blip in home-ownership rates that corrected with much pain. Later in this series I am going to go through the politics of this issue. However for now it suffices to say that by the time Obama is up for re-election the Government will be in a position to ask for and receive considerable repayment from the GSEs. One of the festering sores from this crisis will appear healed.

One more implication for my investor readers (and this after all started as an investment blog). If the GSEs can repay their debt to the government – and I think that they can – then the common stock in both companies has value. That is a non-consensus view. However the real value is in the preferred securities.

The preferred securities are currently trading between 4 and 6 cents on the dollar (and went down whilst I was writing this sequence indicating my readers either do not believe me, do not have money or had no idea where I was going).

The preference shares are all non-cumulative so you are not entitled to back-coupons when they resume paying – but they will resume paying sometime in the next 4-7 years. At 4-6 cents in the dollar that makes them a real bargain – offering 16 to 25 times your money over 4-7 years. That is a better return than you will get in most places. Even the lower end of the range offers a 50 percent annualised return. The return on the preference shares is substantially better than any possible return on the common stock. However – and it should be noted – the conservatorship agreement gives no time period and specifies no criteria for the government to release Fannie and Freddie for conservatorship. This means that even if this model is right – and Fannie and Freddie do recapitalise internally – there is still no guarantee you will get paid on the preferred. Political risk is omnipresent.

 

Bronte’s position

At Bronte we have thought that the pre-tax, pre-provision profits were sufficient to recapitalise the GSEs for a while. We purchased large holdings of these securities below 2 cents in the dollar. Eventually the preferreds started rising leading to some financial-press scepticism that they would ever be worth anything. All I can say – at Bronte our money and our client money is where our mouth is.

There are plenty of risks to this rosy hypothesis. These fall mainly into the political risk camp (there are many people who will fight a resurrection of the GSEs). However there is model and economic risk as well. I will examine the risks (model, economic and political) in later posts. The next three posts are (unfortunately) a little disjointed because all I am trying to do is subject my model to different data-tests and see if it is robust. You will find that I am much more comfortable about the credit loss estimates in the model (Part IV) than I am about the income estimate (Part V).

What makes me most uncomfortable though is the political risks – and those I have very little idea how to analyse. Late in this series I will be very keen to see if I can get a robust discussion at Talking Points Memo – because those readers know far more about politics than me or most the regular commentators on my blog. For the moment though what we have is Republicans (and a much smaller number of Democrats) who are extremely keen to put Fannie and Freddie into liquidation now and hence make all of this modelling entirely redundant.



John

 

Lmao. This bronte guy and I argued last year whether it made sense to short FNM and FRE at $16, he kept saying it was a bad idea. I couldnt see how a company levered 120-1 could possible not suffer a 'margin call' and fail as a result, whether the company was actually insolvent was irrelevant because it was the market perception that mattered(or the regulator perception). Stock went to $0. Same thing happened to WM, he kept claming the company had long-run positive operating value yet I knew their garbage would lead to failure, long-run would be irrelevant, stock went to $0

Now hes back, I dont have time to look at his numbers but the company is majority owned by the government. I wouldn't be so fast to jump in these things, you never know when the government will screw you. Plus he seem to believe in a V shapped recovery and that might be embedded in his loss estimates

 

Paul Miller has a 50c target in FNM and FRE, says shares have almost no value. Says you cant possibly know what will be the business model of fnm and fre when they try to get out of conservatorship, they are on the hook for $100b each
http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1231093207&play=1

At 50c at the common and 2c preferred it might be worth a punt betting in a 'fat tail' that they will get out of this eventually(like buying OTM calls) but at these levels you might as well let the gamblers play in the GSE casino alone