SEEKING ALPHA: Breaking Down the Geithner Plan by Geoff Gannon - Feb 12, 2009 http://seekingalpha.com/article/119900-breaking-down-the-geithner-plan Yesterday, the stock market tanked as Treasury Secretary Geithner outlined his financial stability plan. Blogger Felix Salmon (http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/market-movers/2009/02/10/geithners-vague-plan ) noticed the mirror image: âI like the symmetry here. On November 21, when Barack Obama announced that he was nominating Tim Geithner to be his Treasury secretary, the Dow rose 494 points and broke through the 8,000 barrier. On February 10, when Geithner gave his first major speech as Treasury secretary, the Dow fell 273 points and broke through the 8,000 barrier.â I once wrote that âthe market is a lot like a fun house mirror.â New data affects prices indirectly. And sometimes the reflection comes out warped. Ben Graham said it best: â...the influence of... analytical factors over the market price is both partial and indirect â partial, because it frequently competes with purely speculative factors which influence the price in the opposite direction; and indirect, because it acts through the intermediary of peopleâs sentiments and decisions.â Iâm not sure if the market decline had more to do with the substance of Geithnerâs speech or the sentiments of traders. I certainly didn't think it justified marking American businesses down a couple percentage points. Personally, I didnât find the plan especially bad. I thought it would have a lot more detail. Iâm glad it didnât. How could anyone come up with a detailed plan at this point? Some banks â some very big banks â are going to have to be recapitalized. The only way to start that process is to look at the economic reality under the accounting fictions that are bank balance sheets. It doesnât matter if you use mark-to-market or mark-to-model, youâre still going to end up with some very inaccurate balance sheet numbers in times like these. Markets â be they liquid or illiquid â value assets oddly from time to time. And models are as flawed as their makers. At least Geithner is talking about a stress test. That sounds like the first step toward recapitalizations. Unfortunately, heâs also talking about private money coming in to buy toxic assets. Unless there are ironclad government guarantees involved, Iâm not sure that will fly. Some of these assets werenât just overpriced the way houses were â they were inherently flawed. Toxic Assets Accountants record. They donât analyze. There isnât a right number and a wrong number. There are just useful numbers and useless numbers. For example, it makes not one iota of difference to me â as an investor â what dollar value public Company A assigns its 23% stake in public Company B, because public Company B files with the SEC. All I need to know is the number Company A put on its books and where I can read all about Company B. The rest is up to me. Unfortunately, you canât do this with âtoxic assetsâ. In her book Dear Mr. Buffett, Janet Tavakoli quotes an email from Warren Buffett: âIâve looked at the prospectuses, and they are not easy to read. If you want to understand the deal youâd have to read around 750,000 pages of documents.â If you want to understand how CDOs and other toxic assets are built, read Janet's book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/04...mp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=047040678X A lot of people make the argument that these assets are not toxic at some prices. Theoretically, thatâs true. If thereâs value in an asset â at some deep discount to par â a high-risk asset can become a low-risk investment. But, as I wrote in my review of Janetâs book http://www.gannononinvesting.com/2009/02/on_buffett_and_derivatives.html , these toxic assets are âmeta-betsâ. A low price is little help if there is inadequate cash flow or collateral built into the asset. A low price canât fix an inherent flaw in an asset. If the cash flow generating potential of the asset is almost non-existent, the asset is essentially worthless. Warren Buffett gave a great example of this kind of inherently worthless asset in his 1990 letter to shareholders :http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1990.html âAt the height of the debt mania, capital structures were concocted that guaranteed failure: In some cases, so much debt was issued that even highly favorable business results could not produce the funds to service it. One particularly egregious "kill- 'em-at-birth" case a few years back involved the purchase of a mature television station in Tampa, bought with so much debt that the interest on it exceeded the station's gross revenues. Even if you assume that all labor, programs and services were donated rather than purchased, this capital structure required revenues to explode - or else the station was doomed to go broke.â A lot of these toxic assets were similarly structured. They were built to fail. A bad house is a good value at some price. A risky mortgage is a good value at some price. But âmeta-betsâ are trickier. They can suffer from the same sort of problem Buffett described with the very worst junk bonds â you can actually take a good asset, with good cash flows and then put so much debt on top of it that the only way you can fix the problem is by restructuring the debt. In such cases, a low price is no longer enough. The terms are the problem. Nationalization Nationalizing the biggest banks â a surprisingly popular view among bloggers if not investors â doesnât address the underlying issue of payment obligations that canât be met. Recapitalizations would help banks lend, but problems would still linger. And unless nationalized much smaller banks â and some clearly donât need it â Iâm not sure you could ever get the kind of clean purge investors and lenders so desperately want. Restructuring John Hussman has written about a different approach http://www.hussmanfunds.com/wmc/wmc090209.htm : âThe heart of this problem continues to be the need to restructure the payment obligations of borrowers. For the better part of a year now, I have repeatedly (and increasingly urgently) advocated the restructuring of mortgage obligations by a variety of methods (collecting the pieces of securitized mortgages through âall or nothingâ auctions, writing down principal in return for âproperty appreciation rightsâ, etc).â I agree. We could use a little innovation here. Economists, politicians, and pundits seem to be drawn to the same stale ideas. We need to fix the balance sheets of both banks and homeowners. The way to do that is to admit that mortgage debt is improperly structured. We need to apply some bankruptcy court like thinking to our approach to insolvent banks and borrowers. Their current capital is as unsustainable as the TV station Buffett wrote about in 1990. Just as you canât keep corporations â even good corporations â under a mountain of high-yield debt greater than their cash flows, you canât keep homeowners in a state of insolvency. We wouldnât allow it in individual cases. And yet weâre basically encouraging borrowers to keep trying to meet terms that are unsustainable. In both cases, we need to admit the insolvency and then move to remedy it through debt restructuring. That wonât eliminate the need to recapitalize some of Americaâs biggest banks. But without debt restructuring, Iâm not sure recapitalizing those banks that are too big to fail will be sufficient to avoid a long-term credit freeze. Just think how long it would take borrowers to get out from under their current debt burden. Weâre talking about a process of balance sheet rebuilding that would go on for years and years â long after the official end to this recession. Iâm not sure you could resume anything like normal economic growth under those conditions.
Excellent article. It makes clear that this is no crisis of confidence or psychological problem with consumers or investors. The accumulated (and still-accumulating) debt of households, companies, and governments cannot be sustained. The residential and commercial real estate that backs much of the debt simply isn't worth the principle remaining on the loan in many situations. That debt must be restructured (aka a controlled default on debt). Yet the problem is deeper than the unserviceable level of debt because too much of the economy was based on spending created by easy money. Until the US (EU and Asia) restructures their productive assets to produce goods that don't require ever-increasing amounts of debt, these economies won't recover. That restructuring of both debt and assets will take time. And until the economy is properly restructured, earnings will be much lower than "normal" (especially given that at least the last 5 years of "normal" earnings were based on unsustainable spending pumped by unsustainable debt creation).
If you cannot play well, play faster? http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aL7CTGCYZBOc Geithner Pressed By G-7 to Move Faster on Bank Bailout Bloomberg News - Feb 16, 2009 Stung by domestic criticism for failing to provide details last week on just how he plans to clean up banksâ toxic assets and revive lending, Geithner was told by foreign policy makers at weekend talks in Rome that speed was of the essence.
Say what you like about his ideas, but Geithner is right about the need for speed. Every day that this crisis continues, the values of bank assets decline toward or past the insolvency line. Currently, a number of banks would probably be bankrupt if it weren't for various accounting games with how they value their assets. But at some point, something will snap and those banks will have to admit that they owe more than they own. That's when all the toxic toothpaste will come out of the tube and the Fed/Treasury/G7 will be powerless to fix the situation. The time to prop-up an unstable building is before it collapses, not after.
Geithner has been involved since day one, so I expected a better plan and less confusion such as that mentioned in today's WaPo: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/16/AR2009021601180.html?hpid=topnews But as always, Traden4Alpha, you make an excellent point.