The worse the mortgages packaged, the higher the potential of securitization profits was (is)

Sir, FT’s big read by Mark Vandevelde and Joe Rennison “The story of a house” September 6, leaves out two important facts:

First: Christopher Cruise, who ran popular courses in mortgage origination, is quoted with “You had no incentive whatsoever to be concerned about the quality of the loan or whether it was suitable for the borrower” 

But yes you did, only in a direction quite different than usual. The worse the borrower and the worse the mortgagor, the higher the potential of profits of packaging it in a securitization sausage bound for a high credit rating. All involved in that securitization would profit, immensely, except of course those who were being packaged into that sausage. Imagine, if that sausage obtained an AAA to AA rating, US investment banks and European banks were allowed by the regulators to leverage 62.5 times their capital with these.

Second: “Société Générale, the French bank, was one of those that took out insurance against a collapse in the value of Davis Square, buying exotic derivatives contracts from the insurance group AIG.”

That was not solely for insurance. Because AIG was AAA rated, whatever lower rated securitized mortgages it added its signatures to also gave the banks the possibility of a mindboggling 62.5 times leverage. 

Profit potential: If you convinced risky and broke Joe to take a $300.000 mortgage at 11 percent for 30 years and then, with more than a little help from the credit rating agencies, you could convince risk-adverse Fred that this mortgage, repackaged in a securitized version, and rated AAA, was so safe that a six percent return was quite adequate, then you could sell Fred the mortgage for $510.000. This would allow you and your partners in the set-up, to pocket a tidy profit of $210.000

Sir, credit rating agencies using fallible humans did not stand a chance to get it right! 

@PerKurowski

A regulatory guiding hand poses great systemic risks, and often doubles down on its mistakes, like with Basel III.

Sir, I refer to Mark Vandevelde’s “Beware the paternalist in libertarian garb” where December 8 he reviews Cass Sunstein’s book “Valuing life: Humanizing the Regulatory State”.

Vandevelde finalizes the review championing regulation and writing: “Better to acknowledge out loud that, on life’s dark prairie, the torch of freedom is something less useful than a guiding hand”.

Of course that might be true, in some cases, but at the same time he should acknowledge that a guiding hand has immensely larger possibilities to introduce dangerous systemic risks than any free market.

Just look at bank regulators who, to how banks respond to perceived credit risks by means of interest rates, size of exposure and other terms, added on their basically similar response, to the same perceived credit risks, by means of their credit risk weighted capital requirements for banks. And that of course distorted all the allocation of bank credit to the real economy.

It is ok to use the average risk aversion of nannies, that is what the market usually does, but it is sheer lunacy to add up risk aversions, which is what the Basel Committee did.

And when the market gets it wrong, it feels the pain, and it fast corrects itself; but, when regulators get it wrong, they quite often suffer no consequences, and so double down on their mistakes… like with Basel III following Basel II… and keeping credit risk-weighting as a pillar.