Doubtful.
Cite.
[/QUOTE]
Like I said “doubtul.”
As your cite points out, it’s the securitizer not the originator who hires the rating company to rate the security.
No. It’s still true. Your statement is essentially meaningless without further context. May I see your cite so I can show you what they are measuring and why you are wrong?
An irrelevant difference. The point was that the credit rating agencies had incentives–entirely independent from any government interference–to rate the bundles as not risky when they were, in fact, quite risky. This was one of the key factors that led to the current crisis. A factor that is completely independent from government intervention.
How many times do we have to explain this was not the Democrat’s legislation? If you can’t understand that, I will agree, you are flummoxed.
Yeah- again, I’m seeing a bipartisan lack of support, which I can’t lay at the feet of Reid and Pelosi or Boehner and McConnell.
I don’t recall saying anybody had to like it. I said people hate it. It’s easier to swallow this bailout idea if you comprehend why it’s necessary and have some confidence it’s being handled properly. Clearly that confidence doesn’t exist right now, and if the confidence and support existed somebody could’ve scrounged up 13 more Yea votes. Since it didn’t, I hoep they can do it in a few days with a better bill.
So if you tell a guy he’s drowning, you’re obliged to throw him a life vest even if he’s standing in the kiddie pool? I understand how desperate the financial sector says this situation is. I understand what the potential effects are, at least in general. To me, the issue is that someone should’ve proposed a better deal sooner (and that includes the people who asked for the money and drew up this plan), not that this particular bill was defeated today.
My emphasis there was on the “us.”
A hurricane is a much clearer situation than this.
True, but you’re confusing arithmetic with mathematics.
This isn’t really about any particular program, or any ideological approach to the issues at hand. It isn’t even about saving our Congresscritter’s various ass. Its about averting a panic. Under the circumstances, this requires elephantine breeding procedures: it must take place on a very high level, results are long in arriving, and it must be accompished with a great amount of trumpeting, thrashing, and screaming. It must be impressive!
The dark foundation of our economic machinery is credit. And it is a faith, even as we pretend it isn’t. Hard headed realistic men have faith in Credit and the Free Market, that they don’t have in their wives, their nieghbors, or their Savior. That faith is the oil than keeps this fershlugginer machine chugging.
Absent that drama, absent that assurance of bi-partisan resolve, nothing is accomplished. Far flung people must look at this thing and think “Damn, they really mean it! Look, Greenspan commiting* seppuku *in the Rose Garden, they ain’t kidding around, this is for real!”
Otherwise, why bother? If it cannot accomplish its emergency end of staunching fear, none of the rest of them are likely to matter. Sure, the Dems could, according to the arithemetic, pass the legislation all by themselves (if they attain a level of unity that has historically eluded them…) But then the legislation would not meet its single most important purpose.
I don’t see how you could intelligently argue that.
No. This is just all wrong. Their product is their reputation for accuracy and impartiality built up over decades, and demonstrated through a consistent transparent process of due diligence. Failures in this regard are far more damaging than any potential short term monies to be gained by intentional misrating. They are incented to be accurate to maintain the value of their product. Indeed the failure of both Moody’s and S&P to accurately reflect the real risk of these securites is a consequence of the attempt to both bring consistency to and to defend the impartiality and accuracy of the rating process. All bonds with equivalent ratings should have equivalent risks in highly defined and defensible ways. Whole sections of trading departments are devoted to trying to find inconsistencies in like-rated bonds and exploit them.
I’m not saying it’s never happened, but the ratings agencies are strongly disincented from misrating securities.
The misrating of CDOs and other mortgage backed securities is indeed a key cause, as I have elaborated on elsewhere. The idea that they were incented to do so is simply false.
I’m not going to get sidetracked here. For a good explanation of the story, read this current article in Business Week.
The Community Reinvestment Act, passed in 1977, requires banks to lend in the low-income neighborhoods where they take deposits. Just the idea that a lending crisis created from 2004 to 2007 was caused by a 1977 law is silly. But it’s even more ridiculous when you consider that most subprime loans were made by firms that aren’t subject to the CRA. University of Michigan law professor Michael Barr testified back in February before the House Committee on Financial Services that 50% of subprime loans were made by mortgage service companies not subject comprehensive federal supervision and another 30% were made by affiliates of banks or thrifts which are not subject to routine supervision or examinations.
This is too conclusory. All you’ve proven is that they have counter-incentives to be seen as credible. No one doubts that. I have actually offered evidence for why they had stronger incentives to rate these particular complex instruments more highly than they should have been.
And, both of these pieces of evidence should be viewed against the background fact that they did, in fact, rate them incorrectly.
Even if you succeed in showing that the mis-rating was accidental, you still concede that one of the main precipitating causes of the crisis was an entirely private mistake–a mistake that was perpetuated by financiers who failed to be properly skeptical. Since Lamar’s point was that the crisis was not the government’s fault, your assertion that he is disconnected from reality is incorrect even by your own terms.
I think you’ve finally got it! Good job.
That’s true. Once a hurricane hits there is nothing you can do until it is past. With this, there is the potential to take it from a Category IV to a Category II with intelligent intervention.
What we’ve done is taken a Category II storm today and turn it into the largest Category V storm ever recorded (in terms of point drop on the Dow.)
But, in terms of percentage drop, it’s only 17th largest. 1987 was 20% in one day. Depression was much worse.
It like saying that a movie last week that had the biggest gross of all time, was great because it grossed so much money. Specious argument.
I was there to watch it; even in light of the last few weeks it was staggering. But the Dow’s at an almost-three year low, and proportionally, as sam says, it’s certainly bad - worst since Sept. 17, 2001, I think - but not the largest storm ever.
Yes, intelligent intervention. Given all the bad legislation foisted on us by this administration by hiding it behind doomsday warnings, I have no trust or confidence in the necessity of this bailout, and neither do many Americans.
If these companies are in such bad financial straits that they need billions of dollars right this instant or else they’ll go bankrupt, then throwing taxpayer money at them is not the answer. They don’t know how to value these bad assets, they don’t know how much it will cost, and they can’t tell us when to expect a turnaround. If everything is so speculative, and the costs so uncertain, why rush into it?
Let’s back up a step. We both agree that the bonds were misrated. You seem to think that this was deliberate, for money provided by the issuer who hired the ratings company, and the perceived conflict of interest.
This is one of those arguments that is founded by a poor understanding of the ratings process on a number of levels.
First off, when an issuer hires a rating company there is a third party involved. That third party is the buyer of the bond. What is actually being sold is not the rating itself, but the buyer’s confidence in the rating. That rating does not apply just for that individual bond, it applies for all bonds that are rated by that company . So, from an incentive standpoint, misrating a single bond is potentially profitable but since it potentially devalues the rating of all other bonds for which the company is being paid to maintain a rating, it is insanely stupid.
What you are suggesting is like saying you could fill your car with water since it’s cheaper than gas and thereby save money. The damage is so immediate and expensive that no reasonable party would consider it.
That’s what you are proposing.
Likely you are assuming something concerning the nature of the misrating. Likely you think that it is something like there is not enough collateral or what have you. Here’s a brief explanation of some of the factors and process Moody’s uses to rate CDOs:
While we both agree that there is a misrating, what I don’t think you understand is the nature of this misrating.
What is it that you think the ratings companies did wrong? In what way are these bonds misrated?
It’s an important question.
I’ll help you out.
These bonds were misrated because of factors outside of those for which Moody’s and S&P were measuring.
Forget about mortgages and default rates and collateral. Some mistakes were made on some issues there but that’s not the actual problem. The key to why they are misrated has to do with factors outside of the bond issues themselves. Instead it has to do with the leverage and liquidity of the markets in which they were held.
Here’s an oversimplified scenario:
If the typical CDO is held in a 30 to 1 leveraged situation than a small error in the PSA assumptions (default and prepayment type risks) to the downside might result in say a 1% drop in present value. That creates a 30% in the portfolio, generating the equivalent of a margin call to the holding institution which now must either sell to meet that call or raise liquidity from another source.
Two things can happen here: 1. If this drop is due to specific risk than what has happened is that selling simply takes the value of the CDO market down by that tiny fraction of a percent of that issue’s share of the market. Still, if enough of this happens the whole market drops. Or: 2. The PSA assumption failure is a systemic one and all holders of all such securities have suffered the same situation.
In the case of the market we are in 1 triggered the fear and then the fact of 2.
At the time that this happened a lot of issuers held these securities in extremely leveraged portfolios. This means that a lot of holders suddenly experienced large percentage drops in the value of their portfolios and were forced to raise capitol.
They all tried to sell at the same time to meet the “margin call.” This caused the market for these things to drop still further which resulted in more “margin calls” and suddenly the heat was being felt by holders who owned them in totally unleveraged portfolios. We did not have a market panic. We had something worse, a total market failure. There were no buyers for these securities at any price.
The problem was not that their price dropped but that there was no price, no market, no buyers. This is not a credit problem (which is what Moody’s and S&P were trying to rate) but a liquidity problem (which they were not.) The lack of liquidity in these issues than began to have a deleterius effect on the underlying PSA assumptions for these securities, and hence, there credit quality.
So, it is not so much that Moodys or S&P misjudged any particular issue. They misjudged the entire market itself the liquidity of which could boomerang back and undermine the underlying credit quality.
They didn’t make a mistake where they misjudged one issue wrong here or there. They misjudged them all. Worse, it only became a misjudgement retroactively. The ratings were good and accurate for a long time. They essentially all became wrong all at once when market saturation crossed a precipice point. Think of a titrated solution where a single drop makes a whole gallon of a red solution suddenly turn blue. Than a very small move could effect the underlying market.
I’ve cheated in my description, most notably with leverage, but that is the essential nut of the ratings failure.
Is there a Cliff Notes version of that post? With a glossary.
The logic is that losing a third of your party vote means something is seriously wrong with the bill. Deal with it (not you, Congress).
Jesus shit on a cracker! If everyone put half as much effort into coming up with a feasible solution to the financial situation we’re in as is being wasted on trying to assign blame for said situation…
Perhaps we need another Great Depression to get our priorities straight. Perhaps we deserve another Great Depression for letting things get so fucked up in the first place.
No, I certainly don’t have any answers, but the sophomoric “They started it”, “No, they started it” shit is really becoming tedious.
The situation in which we find ourselves does not change with the identification of a confirmed scapegoat.
I’ll eat my hat if it isn’t below 9,000 sometime between opening and closing tomorrow.
I think that is exactly what happened. The Republicans made a deal and reneged. I hope that something is done tomorrow to fix this, because the Republican leadership should have been able to command a majority of their caucus. So should have the Dems, but, of course, the Dems did bring it.
Preach it. In addition to your fine analysis, Greenspan was largely responsible for reducing bank reserves to ridiculously low percentages. Not a single bank would have failed had those percentages remained the same as before Greenspan was appointed chair.
Neither party is going to get 100 percent of their vote, and it shows a complete lack of understanding of American politics to suggest that they should. If both parties had simply brought a simple majority of their members, it would have passed. The Democrats did that and then some, but not enough to make up for the Republican defections on a Republican proposal. This does not speak to the merit of the bill, but rather when making a political deal, you don’t back out of it to score a few points, and you don’t promise what you can’t deliver. The failure to deliver was entirely the failure of Republican votes per the deal, and not a single more Democratic vote was needed per the Deal to deliver the caucus, which implies a majority. By not supplying a majority, the Republicans broke their promise of support and killed the bill.
There is nothing hidden about the conservative of the Chicago School of Economics, or of the Hoover Institute at Stanford. If you Google them, you will see that they are quite openly conservative.
Any renewed effort will be more difficult because the Republicans kept announcing that they had a deal, implying enough discipline to get a majority of their caucus. Because the public is opposed “1000 to 1”, any future efforts will lack the trust in the other side and more will try to defect. It’s simple game theory come to life.
I trust Warren Buffet. He is the most successful investor in history, and has given away his personal fortune for charitable purposes. He’s got the brains and the lack of personal interest and the proven track record to gain my trust. He says a package is absolutely necessary. I believe him. I would love to be wrong, but today was the most tragic day in American financial history because we should have known better, and our politicians should have sacrificed their jobs to do the right thing no matter how unpopular and angry the public is.
Ya know, that’s bullshit. It’s as big a steaming pile of bullshit as Republicans blaming Nancy Pelosi for being mean and making them change their vote. We are entitled to defend ourselves from bullshit attacks.