Financial History of the United States from the Subprime Crisis to the Great Recession (2006-2009)
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A FINANCIAL HISTORY of the UNITED STATES From the Subprime Crisis to the Great Recession (2006-2009) (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. A FINANCIAL HISTORY of the UNITED STATES From the Subprime Crisis to the Great Recession (2006-2009) JERRY W. MARKHAM M.E.Sharpe Armonk, New York London, England (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © 2011 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 80 Business Park Drive, Armonk, New York 10504. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Markham, Jerry W. A financial history of the United States : from Enron-era scandals to the subprime crisis (2004–2006) : from the subprime crisis to the Great Recession (2006–2009) / Jerry W. Markham. v. ; cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Contents: Enron and its aftermath—Other Enron era scandals—Corporate governance reforms— Securities, banking, and insurance—Commodity markets—The rise of the hedge funds and private equity—The mortgage market—A critical look at the reformers. ISBN 978-0-7656-2431-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Financial crises—United States—History—21st century. 2. Corporations—Corrupt practices—United States—History—21st century. 3. Enron Corp—Corrupt practices—History. 4. Investment banking—United States—21st century. 5. United States—Economic policy—21st century. I. Title. HB3722.M375 2010 332.0973’090511—dc22 201000775 Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1984. ~ EB (c) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. The thing that differentiates animals and man is money. Gertrude Stein (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Preface This is the sixth volume of a financial history of the United States. The first three volumes trace the development of finance in America from the colonial period to the beginning of this century. They are entitled A Financial His- tory of the United States: From Christopher Columbus to the Robber Barons (1492–1900); A Financial History of the United States: From J.P. Morgan to the Institutional Investor (1900–1970); A Financial History of the United States: From the Age of Derivatives into the New Millennium (1970–2001). The fourth volume describes the Enron-era financial scandals and other developments in finance during the period 2001 to 2005 and is entitledA Financial History of Modern U.S. Corporate Scandals: From Enron to Reform. The fifth volume covers the aftermath of the Enron-era reforms and the developments in the securities, derivative and mortgage markets that promoted subprime lending and is entitled A Financial History of the United States: From Enron-Era Scandals to the Subprime Crisis (2004–2006). This volume describes the worldwide subprime crisis that occurred between 2007 and 2009. As a prelude to that crisis, this history examines the develop- ment of the securitized mortgage products that came to be known as collater- alized debt obligations (CDOs) and their attendant credit support in the form of credit-default swaps (CDS) and monoline insurance. It next turns to the factors that led up to the subprime crisis and then describes events during that worldwide crisis as they unfolded, including the Great Panic that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The massive government bailout programs for financial services firms and automakers are addressed, and the regulatory reforms enacted by President Barack Obama’s administration to prevent such systemic failures in the future are considered. xvii (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgments The author thanks Beth Peiffer for her research assistance, her reading and correcting the manuscript, and her diligence in preparing the bibliography and index. George Sullivan and Rigers Giyshi, my research associates, provided invaluable assistance in responding, always promptly, to my numerous and persistent research requests. I am also, once again, grateful for the support of the Florida International University College of Law. xix (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Introduction Even while the government was in the midst of prosecuting executives in- volved in the Enron-era scandals, another disaster was in the making in the form of a residential real estate bubble. As housing prices soared, the practice of “flipping” houses and condos for a quick profit became a popular Ameri- can pastime. The real estate bubble was fueled, sometimes irresponsibly, by liberal credit extensions at quite low “teaser” interest rates to “subprime” borrowers. These borrowers had credit problems that disqualified them from obtaining a conventional mortgage. Nevertheless, subprime loans were made to individuals with poor or no credit histories on terms that assured they would eventually default. Fueling this subprime lending boom were mortgage brokers promoting “no-doc” or “low-doc” loans that did not require the normal documentation of the borrower’s creditworthiness. Credit quality was of no concern to the mortgage brokers and lenders making those loans because the loans were immediately resold by securitizing them in a pool, which was then sold to investors as collateralized debt obligations (CDO). The CDOs often had complex payment streams, and they were frequently insured against default by “monoline” insurance companies with little capital or hedged by a new financial instrument in the form of credit-default swaps. Those protections allowed the “super-senior” tranches in subprime securitizations to obtain a triple-A credit ratings from the leading rating agencies, making them highly marketable in the United States and Europe. However, there was a major hidden flaw in the ratings process. The rating agencies used risk models for awarding the triple-A rating that did not take into account the possibility of a major downturn in the real estate market. Subprime mortgages were sometimes pooled to fund off-balance-sheet commercial paper borrowings called “structured investment vehicles” (SIVs) or “asset-backed commercial paper” (ABCP). Banks, such as Citigroup, used short-term commercial paper borrowings to purchase mortgages held in their SIVs. Those commercial paper borrowings funded the mortgages and provided a profit through the spread between the higher rates paid by mortgages and the lower rates then existing in the commercial paper market. These carry-trade xxi (c) 2011 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved. xxii INTroducTION programs had a flaw. In the event that commercial paper borrowers refused to roll over their loans, SIVs would have to liquidate their mortgages. That rollover might not be possible in a credit crunch or major market downturn. Another danger was that short-term rates could rise faster than long-term rates, erasing the spread or even inverting the payment stream. The Fed funds rate (the interest rate for overnight funds among banks) was 6.50 percent in 2000 and fell to 1 percent in June 2003. This triggered a housing mania in the United States. In order to burst the real estate bubble inflated by those low rates, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve (the Fed), set the first of a series of what eventually were seventeen consecutive interest rate increases, beginning on June 30, 2004. Ben Bernanke, who succeeded him in that post on February 1, 2006, put in place still more interest rate increases. The effects of those actions were already becoming evident as Bernanke as- sumed office. Indeed, the housing market experienced the largest decline in new home sales in nine years in the month after Bernanke took office. Undeterred by that rather ominous news, Bernanke imposed another rate increase on March 28, 2006, pushing short-term rates to 4.75 percent, the fifteenth straight interest rate increase. Bernanke suggested that more rate increases would be forthcoming. The sixteenth straight rate increase followed on May 10, 2006, pushing short-term rates to 5 percent, and the seventeenth consecutive increase came on June 29, 2006, increasing short-term rates to 5.25 percent. The effect of this onslaught on the real estate market turned into a financial crisis in 2007. Home sales and new residential construction slowed dramatically, and the market became glutted with unsold homes. Construction firms, such as Toll Brothers, cut back their building programs, and the housing construction industry experienced its worst slump in forty years. Speculators who had been earning unprecedented profits by buying and quickly reselling properties, often after only a cosmetic touchup, found that they could no longer flip their properties for a quick profit, so they were left holding highly depreciated properties. “Short” sales, in which foreclosed homes were sold for less than their outstanding mortgage, became common as speculators defaulted, and as homeowners who did not have fixed-rate mortgages could no longer meet their payments due to the rising interest rates. Subprime homeowners, in many instances, simply walked away from their homes and mortgages when the value of their home dropped below the amount of the mortgage, a condition known as being “underwater.” The growing crisis in the real estate market caused banks to tighten credit requirements and to cut back on credit, creating a credit crunch in the summer of 2007. In response to that concern, on August 17, 2007, the Fed issued a statement encouraging banks to access its discount window more freely, but the crisis only deepened. The Fed then cut interest rates by a surprisingly large fifty basis points on September 18, 2007. That was the first rate cut in four years. The size of it was surprising, nevertheless it had little effect in restoring liquidity in the credit markets.