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39. Wall Money A (Crumbling) Wall of Money THE Financial Bricolage, CORNER Derivatives and Power HOUSE n 2004, I and other non-governmental organisation (NGO) col- leagues went to a meeting with UK government officials. The pur- Ipose was to discuss the UK’s presidency of the upcoming July 2005 Summit of G8 leaders – the heads of government of the eight leading industrialised countries. One item on the Summit agenda was export credit agency (ECA) reform.1 I was familiar with the UK’s agency, the Export Credits Guarantee Department, from our solidar- ity work with communities around the world affected by the dams, pipelines, power plants and other infrastructure projects that this De- partment had funded.2 NGOs at the time were pressing for ECAs to adopt mandatory environmental, human rights and development stand- ards.3 The UK government officials had other proposals in mind, how- Acknowledgements ever. In particular, they seemed keen to expose the extent to which This paper is the outcome of ECAs were subsidised by the taxpayer. This was (to say the least) numerous discussions with surprising. That’s been the NGO line more than the government’s. In many colleagues, whose fact, the ECGD and other ECAs have consistently and vehemently comments were all critical to denied any element of subsidy in their operations. But the officials its evolution and outcome. The seemed to think that, once the subsidies had been exposed, the ra- author, Nicholas Hildyard, would like to thank them all, and tionale for continued government backing for export credit agencies in particular Larry Lohmann, would be removed. “New instruments”, they said (they were not more Sarah Sexton, Roger Moody, specific), would enable the private sector to provide cheaper export Antonio Tricarico, Wiert insurance cover than official agencies could. The days of publicly sup- Wiertsema, Kavaljit Singh, ported ECAs would soon be over: they would, as one official put it, Judith Neyer, Stephanie Fried “wither on the vine”. The UK’s ECA proposals for the G8 were not and Alex Wilks. accepted: other countries were not so keen to admit that ECAs re- ceive and dispense subsidies. THE CORNER HOUSE But the talk of “new instruments” did not go away. What exactly STATION ROAD STURMINSTER NEWTON were they? How did they work? Were they already impinging on the DORSET DT10 1YJ activities – and influence – of ECAs? Would they make any difference UK to our work supporting people affected by infrastructure development TEL: 0845 330 7928 that had been backed by ECAs? +44 (0)1258 473795 FAX: +44 (0)1258 473748 Fast-forward a couple of years to November 2006. I was in Rome EMAIL <enquiries AT with Antonio Tricarico of the Italian group, Campagna per Riforma gn.apc.org> della Banca Mondiale,4 a long-time colleague in the international WEBSITE http:// ECAWatch coalition, attending a conference on export finance. This www.thecornerhouse.org.uk time, there were no other NGOs – only bankers, export credit agency October 2008 The Corner House Briefing 39: Financial Bricolage, Derivatives and Power 1 officials, insurers and hedge fund managers. Some ECA officials, whom we knew from elsewhere, were none too pleased to see us: “This isn’t an NGO meeting. You shouldn’t be here.” This time, the “new instruments” made it into every presentation. The problem was that the talk was utterly incomprehensible: a jumble of acronyms (IOs, POs, WACs, WAMs, TACs, SLABS and TTEs) and bizarre “in-crowd” phrases (“haircuts”, “black boxes”, “bullets”, “hard bullets” and “dead cat bounces”). What was clear, however, was that those who had drunk this acronym-laced Kool-Aid had little time for official ECAs. “We don’t need you any more”, said one banker candidly. Exporters had a new best friend: the Special Purpose Vehicle or SPV (also known as a Structured Investment Vehicle [SIV] or Spe- cial Purpose Entity [SPE]). Acronymed-out during the conference, Antonio began to sift through The credit crisis and the piles of reports picked up from exhibition stands. “Look at this”, he financial meltdown said, pointing to an article about SPVs and ILSs (decoded: “Insurance Linked Securities”). The article discussed how insurers were using has been caused by these instruments to spread the risks throughout the world’s financial securitisation and markets of claims after severe climatic events such as Hurricane Katrina that flooded New Orleans in August 2005. One paragraph in particular derivatives . stood out: “The typical structure would include the creation of a special purpose vehicle (SPV), usually a Cayman Islands or Bermuda exempt company whose common shares are held by a charita- ble trust in order to shelter it from potential bankruptcy . The ILS will be issued by the SPV and sold to investors, the pro- ceeds from which will be invested in high quality securities and . two things that held in a collateral trust.” I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a double blind date: my first have been difficult encounter with securitisation (the process of placing assets in an SPV) for regulators, and with derivatives (the asset-backed bonds sold by the SPV) – the rating agencies, process and instruments that have caused the “credit crisis”, financial meltdown, and social and economic hardship for millions of people for bankers, lawyers years to come. and investors to At first, what caught my attention was the use of a charitable trust to avoid bankruptcy. Great! That’s what charity and trust had descended understand. to. Slowly, however, some of the broader implications began to dawn on me. What would “spreading risk” through SPVs mean for efforts to persuade insurers to increase their insurance premiums against global- warming related damage? If the tab for paying out claims was now being spread among hundreds of thousands of investors around the world, rather than concentrated in a few companies, would potential pressure points for change be similarly diffused and thus rendered inef- fective? Besides insurers, how many other businesses were using SPVs? Flipping through all the conference reports, we came across dams, toll roads, bridges and oil pipelines that had all been funded through SPV- like arrangements. How did it all work? If alphabetised acronyms were confusing, the spaghetti-like diagrams that filled the various reports created yet fur- ther bewilderment. We were not alone: a partner at accountants PricewaterhouseCoopers has candidly admitted: “Insurance securitisations remain difficult to understand not only for investors, but also for regulators, rating agencies, bankers and lawyers – few of whom even begin with background knowl- edge of the insurance industry.”5 October 2008 The Corner House 2 Briefing 39: A (Crumbling) Wall of Money Given that securitisation and derivatives have been touted as the “most important innovations in modern finance”, such lack of understanding was (and remains) scary. Even officials at the Bank of England are reported to have had trouble grasping the many different derivatives and their combinations. John Moulton, a prominent UK private equity investor, recalls having a breakfast meeting with senior Bank of Eng- land officials in the wake of the September 2007 bankruptcy of the UK’s fifth largest bank, Northern Rock, at which he had to explain Since commercial how derivatives worked.6 What we learned (and what we didn’t) at this export finance meet- credit dried up, ing in Rome prompted ECAWatch and other coalitions to dig deeper exporters have into the world of securitisation and derivatives. Some key questions emerged: How were these new instruments affecting communities on turned increasingly the ground? Were they helping or hindering companies’ ability to fund to government- potentially destructive projects? Were ECAs themselves using these new instruments? backed insurance. From asking and talking around, we discovered that other colleagues had had their own “brief encounters” with this alphabet spaghetti and were just as puzzled and alarmed. Roger Moody of Partizans, a group that has long monitored mining companies, had noticed the wave of mergers and acquisitions in the mining sector. He discovered that many of the new, sometimes major, shareholders in mining companies were hedge funds that were betting on share prices falling (“short selling”) to generate profits from risky new mining ventures, or were speculat- ing on the outcomes of the mergers and acquisitions themselves.7 Other colleagues, such as Kavaljit Singh with Public Interest Research Cen- tre in India, were puzzled by the huge mergers and acquisitions taking place among big and small companies alike. He went on to research the extent to which these new financial instruments were enabling pri- vate equity companies to buy out their target companies.8 Wiert Wiertsema of the Dutch group, BothENDS, uncovered the use of de- . But public rivatives by Atradius, the Dutch ECA.9 money should not be All our collective further research yielded more information about the mechanics and history of securitisation and derivatives, and an- given to exporters swers gradually began to emerge to some (but by no means all) of the without conditions many questions that the Rome meeting had raised about SPVs, deriva- tives and the “spreading of risk” (see Box: “Questions and Answers”, set through pp.8-9). public debate and There were some questions that we didn’t know how to answer in 2007. What happens when the gambling stops? When a derivative decision-making. doesn’t pay up? When the bet goes very wrong? We made some guesses, based on what had happened after Barings Bank collapsed in 1995 when the bets of its trader Nick Leeson went wrong, or when Enron’s gambling finally brought the oil company down (and its employees’ pensions with it). The events of the past 12-18 months have answered some of those questions, but further responses are still unfolding daily.
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