Is The Economy Turning America's Children "Goth"?

Moe Tkacik | April 10, 2009, 4:58PM

The degree to which Americans have stopped shopping is getting almost as scary as our over-consumption used to be. Yesterday we learned that men worldwide had stopped buying underwear, a disturbing development because former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan had famously fixed upon the metric as one of the most consistent, recession-proof sales figures in retail.

But it turns out demand for men's underwear is more elastic than we thought (even if, heh, the elastic itself isn't so much anymore.) Sales are projected to drop 2.3 this year. And elsewhere in the shopping universe, the February retail sales released yesterday portended a veritable bloodbath of red ink for the nation's mall retailers. The worst pain was reserved for Nieman Marcus and Abercrombie & Fitch, whose affluent customers cut back their habits to the tune of 30 and 34%, respectively. And the four chains that managed to keep sales flat or modestly up from February 2008 were off-price or discount stores. With one exception...

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Topics: Hot Topic Inc., economic indicators, retail sales

CNBC

Newly Unemployed CNBC Star Dylan Ratigan Joins Class Struggle

Moe Tkacik | April 10, 2009, 3:01PM

Has former CNBC anchor Dylan Ratigan joined the leftist alliance lobbying the right-leaning business network to send its staff to re-education camp?

It didn't exactly seem that way when he abruptly left the channel two weeks ago over what appeared to be his contention that he deserved more money than network execs wanted to pay. In fact, after a few days off the former Fast Money host seemed downright baffled that strangers would associate his grievances with those of Tom Frank and Jon Stewart. "Ever since this started," he told CBS Marketwatch columnist Jon Friedman, "people think I'm some kind of [swear word ending in -ing] Che Guevara!"

Well, welcome to the insurgency, Dylan! Today he tells Henry Blodget of a consciousness-raising moment he experienced during the crisis...

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Topics: CNBC, Dylan Ratigan

Wall Street

Wells Fargo's Rise From The Dead Redeems Sins Of All Banks, Says TIME Columnist

Moe Tkacik | April 10, 2009, 2:04PM

"More Quickly Than It Began, The Banking Crisis Is Over" declares longtime financial journalist Douglas McIntyre in a column posted this morning on the TIME website. Well miracles of miracles! Noting yesterday's news from Wells Fargo that the bank made more than twice analysts' projections during the first quarter and the positive buzz about the progress of the Treasury Department "stress tests" being run to assess banks' abilities to withstand further economic downturns, he wonders why the heck they're bothering to run "stress tests" at all. Isn't it obvious we're out of the woods?

Oddly absent from the discussion of how well Wells Fargo did is why the government was in the midst of testing bank balance sheets at all. The experts at the Treasury had been thrown off the scent and consequently had missed the fact that there was not need to test what is already working well. The same holds true for the Geithner plan to take toxic assets off bank balance sheets. It is academic now. What banks are earning from the difference between the cost of capital and the income from lending is now great enough for the banking system to be self-sustaining again.

Hallelujah, but: zombie banks don't rise from the dead every day. On CNBC this morning CEO Howard Atkins credited Wachovia, the bank it hastily acquired in the thick of the panic of '08, for bringing the good news. And indeed, an analyst tells Forbes the Wachovia deal has been much more auspicious than experts initially expected, when Wells told analysts it anticipated writing down $10 billion in bad and "non-performing" loans held by Wachovia; thus far, they've only had to write down $77 million.

There's probably a very good reason for that, according to mortgage blogger Ken Watson -- the Financial Accounting Standards Board just relaxed mark-to-market accounting restrictions, meaning Wells can value those loans a bit more creatively than before.

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Topics: Douglas McIntyre, Wall Street, Wells Fargo, stress tests

CDR

The New Mexico Corruption Probe: CDOs, Swaps And "Inappropriate Clothing"

Moe Tkacik | April 10, 2009, 12:27PM

The SEC has stepped into the corruption probe in New Mexico that saved Gov. Bill Richardson the hassle of amending years of tax returns. The new angle involves one of those enticing "toxic derivatives" deals we can't stop reading about, although there's a sexual harassment component, too.

Frank Foy used to manage the state teachers' pension fund, and in 2007 he says he got a call from a guy from a Chicago investment adviser -- and soon-to-be Richardson donor -- named Vanderbilt Capital Advisors. He told the Santa Fe Reporter he was too swamped to meet with him:

"This guy calls me up and says, 'I want to talk to you about a CDO.' I said, 'Call me back in a month. I don't have time to screw with it, dude,'" Foy recalls. "He didn't like that answer."

Soon after, Foy told the Reporter, he got a call from [Foy's Richardson-appointed boss Bruce] Malott. "He said, 'You were very rude to Pat Livney. I think he has a good investment and you ought to talk to him.'...I'd never been called by the chairman before. I thought, 'This stinks.'"

The investment was the lowest-rated slice of a collateralized debt obligation -- called the "equity tranche", presumably because like a stock its value can go all the way to zero. (Which it -- surprise! -- essentially did, after paying out about $4 million in interest payments to the fund, according to State Investment Officer Gary Bland.) Vanderbilt's CDO was the most toxic brand of the sort of "toxic" securities dragging down bank balance sheets right now; most banks, according to this handy primer on CDOs, didn't attempt to sell them to investors. But Livney, a former head trader of asset-backed securities at JP Morgan, nabbed a $90 million investment from the teachers' pension fund, despite what Foy claims were his strenuous objections. Malott, Foy says, told him the investment had been ordered by Bill Richardson's chief of staff. Shortly thereafter, a female employee accused Foy of sexually harassing her, and he was demoted.

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Topics: Bill Richardson, CDR, Rod Blagojevich

Berkshire-Hathaway

Barney Frank Rousts Credit Rating Firm For...Being Too Negative?

Moe Tkacik | April 9, 2009, 5:14PM

Credit rating agencies are coming under fire from Congress again -- but this time it's for being too pessimistic. After Moody's issued an unprecedented across-the-board negative credit outlook on all American cities and towns yesterday, House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank issued his own negative assessment of Moody's, and scheduled a hearing to investigate:

I am troubled by the action of Moody's Investors Service to issue a negative outlook across the board on America's municipalities, which could raise the interest rates on cities and towns making it more expensive to borrow funds for infrastructure improvements.

On the face of it, this seems like a perverse round of messenger shooting. But last March, as cities and towns across the country started getting flooded with demands for huge payouts rooted in arcane details of "swap" contracts they'd inked with banks that managed their bond offerings, Frank discovered something truly perverse: the public sector was being scammed on multiple fronts by the investment banks underwriting their bond offerings -- and the profits directly fed the disastrous trade of risky mortgage-linked credit default swaps that hastened the financial meltdown.

The scheme started at the credit ratings agencies, which keep two sets of standards for grading corporate and municipal bonds -- and municipalities are held to a much higher standard, as Frank explained in a hearing using Moody's own data:

I will be giving out this chart, sectoral breakdown of Moody's rated issuers and defaulters, 1970 to 2000, general obligation bonds, there it is. Number of issuers 14,775. Number of defaults, 0.

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Topics: AIG, AMBAC, Barney Frank, Berkshire-Hathaway, Mel Watt, Moody's Investors Service, Muncipal bonds, Municipal finance

Ken Lewis

Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis: Truly The Worst?

Moe Tkacik | April 8, 2009, 6:45PM

Now that the Obama Administration has started sacking CEOs, MoveOn asking its 3.2 million members to petition Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner to issue Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis's pink slip next, in a move that appears to be related to the union pension fund-led proxy battle to get bank shareholders to vote him out at the annual meeting later this month. Yesterday Stephen Lerner, a division director of the Service Employees International Union, went on Ed Schultz's new MSNBC show to lambaste the $35 million in pay Lewis had taken home over the past two years when the average teller makes $21,000 a year.

But antipathy toward Lewis is bipartisan. Yesterday Jerry Finger, who manages a Houston-based pension fund and contributed more than $35,000 to Republicans last year, added his 1.1 million votes to the cause, along with a flashy red, white and blue website encouraging fellow shareholders to "vote for change."

But is Lewis really the worst? If any unforgivably reckless institution on the "too big to fail" list deserves more pushing around from the feds, it's Citigroup. And today the influential analyst Meredith Whitney, a relentless critic of the banking sector, praised Lewis and said he should keep his job.

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Topics: Ken Lewis

UBS

Rich People Sobbing In Fear As UBS Bars Swiss Bankers From Leaving The Country

Moe Tkacik | April 8, 2009, 2:51PM

Steven Michael Rubinstein, the Art Basel-going yacht builder's accountant from Boca Raton who last week became first American prosecuted in a sweeping probe of tax shelters since the Swiss government ordered the bank to hand over the names of some 300 of its clients to the IRS, was released today on $12 million bail, the latest development in the intensifying probe of tax shelters. But not everyone involved in the investigation of what UBS itself called a "scheme to defraud the American government" is enjoying freedom of movement: also today the Wall Street Journal reports the bank has barred its "client facing" bankers from traveling overseas -- a move "aimed at avoiding further trouble" of the sort UBS bankers like Brad Birkenfeld flirted in the good old days before the crackdown:

Brad Birkenfeld was a frequent trans-Atlantic flier. He lived and worked in Switzerland, dividing his time between an apartment in Geneva and a house in Zermatt, an Alpine village at the base of the Matterhorn. But his biggest client was in California, and however grueling the trip through nine time zones was, it was worth it...He was willing to go the extra mile for his clients, so he didn't blink when one of them asked him to do something that was blatantly illegal by any country's standard: Buy diamonds with secret Swiss funds and bring them into the U.S. undeclared and undetected.To get them into the country, Birkenfeld had only one option. He had to smuggle them in...So Brad Birkenfeld, a banker at one of the most prestigious institutions in global finance, began jamming his clients' loose diamonds into a tube of toothpaste.

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Topics: Igor Olenicoff, Steven Michael Rubinstein, UBS

Morgan Keegan

"What The Hell Are Alabama Residents Doing Trading Swaptions?" Just Ask Tennessee...

Moe Tkacik | April 8, 2009, 12:24PM

A day after the credit rating agency Moody's issued an unprecedented blanket negative outlook report on the debt of all American cities and towns, a fascinating New York Times story today further illuminates the process by which so many small municipalities signed on to risky derivative securities contracts that exploded on them last year, in some cases quadrupling their interest payments.

The story focuses on Tennessee and the Memphis-based investment bank Morgan Keegan, which recently celebrated its rise to top underwriter status in the state and the south central U.S., managing a whopping 39% of Tennessee bond issuances last year.

Tennessee is one of few states with laws requiring public officials charged with approving derivatives deals to attend "swap school" to learn about the risks and complexities of the contracts. The state comptroller says he asked business professors to write the swap school textbooks, but when they declined the task was left to...Morgan Keegan, which had also been retained as an adviser to many of the state's towns.

In many corners of Tennessee, the first anyone heard of interest-rate swaps was from C. L. Overman, a vice president of Morgan Keegan who assured officials that the deals carried little risk, city and county officials said.

"He told us it would be a good thing and there wasn't much downside," said Mayor Duncan of Claiborne County.

Then a few months ago, according to the Times, Overman called to tell county officials they had a few weeks to refinance an $18 million bond or pay a quadrupled quarterly payment of $700,000. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Morgan's swap school curriculum understated such risks, and the Times has the textbook to prove it. The big risk factor they missed? It's a familiar one:

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Topics: CDR, Morgan Keegan, Municipal finance

Sheila Bair

The Strange Campaign Against Sheila Bair And The FDIC

Moe Tkacik | April 7, 2009, 6:12PM

FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair has been under attack recently in various quarters of the crisis blogosphere in a campaign that culminated this morning in a critical New York Times column today by Andrew Ross "Let Those AIG 'Brainiacs' Keep Their Bonuses" Sorkin, who takes issue with her agency's agreement to guarantee all the non-recourse loans Treasury's toxic asset buyout plan is promising private investors to leverage their bets.

So how much does the F.D.I.C. think it might lose?

"We project no losses," Sheila Bair, the chairwoman, told me in an interview. Zero? Really? "Our accountants have signed off on no net losses," she said. (Well, that's one way to stay under the borrowing cap.)

By this logic, though, the F.D.I.C. appears to have determined it can lend an unlimited amount of money to anyone so long as it believes, at least at the moment, that it won't lose any money.

Here's the F.D.I.C.'s explanation: It says it plans to carefully vet every loan that gets made and it will receive fees and collateral in exchange. And then there's the safety net: If it loses money from insuring those investments, it will assess the financial industry a fee to pay the agency back.

So what's the problem here? It's not as if Bair is afraid to project a loss for her agency. The biggest concern about the plan is that it will enrich Wall Street at the expense of real prices -- especially if banks use the funds to bid up each other's bad loans as envisioned by this blogger we read on Felix Salmon's blog:

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Topics: Sheila Bair

Bailout

Congress To Probe Geithner's "Special Purpose" Plan To Skirt Pay Caps On Bankers

Moe Tkacik | April 7, 2009, 2:53PM

Yesterday we puzzled over the mixed messages we were hearing from Obama officials over the veracity of a Washington Post report that it was using Enron-style "special purpose vehicles" to undermine executive pay restrictions on bailed out banks: senior adviser David Axelrod sheepishly defended the strategy on one Sunday talk show, while Tim Geithner denied it altogether on another. But newly-promoted House Oversight Chairman Ed Towns is getting to the bottom of it, reports the Post today, in a story that sheds some much-needed light on the conflicting stories: the strategy began with the Treasury Department's $1 trillion consumer and business lending initiative, which is in part an expansion of the Federal Reserve's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which is open to the American subsidiaries of foreign banks, which Treasury presumably wants to participate in the programs without having to deal with the added diplomatic headache of subjecting foreign bankers to rules designed to satisfy American voters. Unsurprisingly, not everyone in Congress is opposed to that.

A senior House aide said he agreed with the Treasury's policy and that he believed a recent vote by the House on another piece of executive compensation legislation showed that Congress did not intend the restrictions to apply to firms that did not receive direct capital injections. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment.

Oversight sees things differently, however.

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Topics: Bailout, David Axelrod, Edolphus Towns, Oversight Committee, Tim Geithner

PIMCO

PIMCO Manager On Being 'Fourth Branch' Of Government: Who, Us?

Moe Tkacik | April 7, 2009, 2:33PM

A mere fortnight ago Bill Gross, who manages the world's largest bond fund PIMCO, was singing the praises of the Treasury Department's newly-unveiled Public Private Investment Program in the media, which the media in turn credited for the stock market rally that immediately followed. But in any event, Gross's endorsement of the plan hardly a surprise, since 1. PIMCO holds more than $118 billion in mortgage-backed securities 2. including one fund that has lost 34% of its value since its 2007 inception and 3. oh yeah, the plan was in part Bill Gross's idea. By the time the week was out PIMCO was being dubbed the fourth branch of government.

Now PIMCO is not very subtly distancing itself from the PPIP, which has only gotten less popular as its details have emerged. This morning, on the heels of yesterday's stock market selloff that accompanied the Treasury Department announcement that it was extending the deadline for PPIP applications and clarifying that applicants would be considered "holistically" (i.e. that demonstrated ability to raise $500 million requirement is now more like a rule of thumb) PIMCO Chief Investment Officer Mohammed Al-Arian went on Squawk Box to talk markets with celebrated (by CNBC anyway) stock picker Mario Gabelli, who couldn't resist getting in a dig at PIMCO for the plan's self-defeating "competitive restraint." The fun starts about 7:54 in, transcript after the jump.

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Topics: PIMCO

Tim Geithner

Is The White House Helping Bailed Out Banks Skirt Pay Caps? Depends What Channel You're Watching

Moe Tkacik | April 6, 2009, 3:22PM

On Saturday the Washington Post reported that the administration was doling out federal bailout money via "special purpose vehicles" to help banks skirt restrictions on the funds imposed by Congress -- including, naturally, limitations on executive pay. In a move a former Justice Department attorney equated to "money laundering," the story further specified that the White House had concluded that the conditions ought not to apply in "at least three out of five initiatives funded by the rescue package."

The story quoted Treasury spokesman Andrew Williams defending the strategy, and on Sunday senior Obama adviser David Axelrod, despite his reported distaste for Treasury's lenience on the banks, went on Fox News Sunday and towed the Treasury line when Chris Wallace brought up the report.

But a bit later the same morning on Face the Nation the policy seemed to have changed -- if you believed Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's unequivocal denial to CBS's Bob Schieffer that any such plan compensation-restriction avoidance plan existed:

Transcripts after the jump:

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Topics: Bailout, David Axelrod, Tim Geithner

CDR

Blago's Risky Bet On Derivatives

Moe Tkacik | April 6, 2009, 2:51PM

The Rod Blagojevich pay-to-play scandal may seem like an anachronistically simple big city machine politics scandal next to the ever-widening web of inscrutably interrelated financial scams comprising the on-going financial crisis. But in brokering deals with public coffers, at least, Blago liked "exotic" derivatives as much as the next hedge fund guy.

In January 2004, the Illinois pension obligation program was $36 billion in the hole, the most indebted state pension program in the country. So Blago decided to refinance, taking advantage of the era's superlow interest rates to float $10 billion in "exotic" new bonds in the country's biggest pension bond offering on record. Bond Buyer named it the Midwest Deal of the Year at the time -- not just for its "complex" pricing but its use of derivatives, which had just been legalized by the state legislature the year earlier. It was the start of a new trend, the trade publication noted:

Since Gov. Rod Blagojevich took office in January 2003 faced with a nearly $5 billion budget deficit, his finance team - which includes former financial advisory professional John Filan and quantitative analyst and investment banker David Abel - has turned to more sophisticated techniques to manage state finances. Supporters have called them creative, while critics have labeled them dangerous.

The deal alone netted investment banks $35 million in fees, including $8 million for the lead underwriter Bear Stearns, which in turn delivered a $809,000 consulting fee to a firm called Springfield Consultants run by lobbyist Robert Kjellander. The fee caused much furor in the Illinois statehouse when Bear Stearns disclosed it in an SEC filing, especially after initial probes launched by the state Inspector General revealed the firm could not produce any evidence that Kjellander, a prominent GOP lobbyist and friend of Karl Rove, had done anything to earn the fee.

The investigation swung into high gear when a hospital president named Pamela Davis got an unsettling phone call at her house from a Bear Stearns executive:

Back in 2003, Davis was trying to get approval for a new medical office building from the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. A night or two before a hearing was to be held, Davis recalled, something strange happened. A business acquaintance of hers, Nicholas Hurtgen, then a managing director of the Chicago office of Bear Stearns, called her at home and told her that unless she agreed to use a certain contractor she should pull her building request, because it wasn't going to be approved.

She ignored the warning and went off to the board hearing, where she was surprised to find that her request was denied. "I was humiliated," she said. "They were mean. So I walk off, and then a different guy comes up to me and he says, 'We told you to pull your project. Call me.' And right then I decided to call the F.B.I."

The FBI wouldn't confirm or deny Davis' story to the New Yorker, but she says she spent seven months secretly recording conversations with Hurtgen and his cronies, eventually filing a sealed federal whistleblower lawsuit alleging that Hurtgen, a former protege of former Wisconsin governor and Bush cabinet member Tommy Thompson, was part of a massive pay-to-play scheme that somehow linked the bond offering to the hospital.

The details are still unclear, but some of that $809,000 allegedly made its way back to Tony Rezko, who in turn split the bounty with three friends -- one of whom was Blago, according to last week's indictment, which refers to Kjellander as a "lobbyist" according to the Chicago Tribune: