Tag Archives: Rating agencies

NPR’s Robert Siegel Interviews William K. Black on the Investigation of S&P

Listen to William Black explain how investigations into the recent financial crisis differ from inquiries into previous disasters. Also, you’ll find Professor Black’s review of Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance below the fold.

http://www.npr.org/v2/?i=139763198&m=139763179&t=audio

Guaranteed to Loot: The Perverse Incentives of Systemically Dangerous Institutions’ CEOs
A Book Review for Fidedoglake by William K. Black of:
Guaranteed to Fail: Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Debacle of Mortgage Finance
by
Viral V. Acharya
Matthew Richardson
Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh
Lawrence J. White
(Princeton: 2011)
The Authors’ Revolutionary Indictment of Systemically Dangerous Institutions (SDIs)
Overview of the Authors’ Logic

Fannie and Freddie, like all U.S. systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) were privately-owned and their liabilities were not guaranteed by the Treasury. Nevertheless, all SDIs have an implicit Treasury guarantee of their debts because any SDI failure could cause a global systemic crisis. The SDIs obtain the implicit guarantee by implicitly hold our economy hostage. The perverse incentives arising from this guarantee are the authors’ core concept.

The authors are finance professors at NYU’s Stern School. Their logic makes this a revolutionary book. The book is a case study of the perverse behavior of the managers controlling two SDIs, but the authors generalize the perverse incentives as controlling all SDIs.

The authors’ findings support James Galbraith’s thesis in The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too. Our financial leaders are the SDIs’ CEOs who make “free” markets impossible. The authors found that SDIs cause “a highly distorted market with two types of institutions – LCFI King Kongs and GSE Godzillas – both implicitly backed by the government….” (p. 55). (LCFI: “large complex financial institutions” – the authors’ polite euphemism for SDIs.) Their conclusion that “there was nothing free about these [housing finance] markets” applies to all the SDIs (p. 21).

“[T]he failure of the LCFIs and the GSEs is quite similar – a highly leveraged bet on the mortgage markets by firms that were implicitly backed by the government with artificially low funding rates only to differing degrees” (p. 49).

They adopt the CBO’s simile: living with Fannie and Freddie is like sharing a canoe with a bear.
“Because the GSEs are currently under the conservatorship of the government, it would be crazy not to kill off the “bear” and move forward with a model that did not again create a too-big-to-fail – and, more likely, a too-big-to-reform – monster” (p. 74).

The authors’ revolutionary logic is that it would “be crazy not to kill off the bear[s]” – the SDIs are inherently “monster[s]” that hold our economy hostage and block real markets and real democracy.
The authors argue that it is impossible even for massive SDIs to compete with the largest SDIs. Their simile is that the largest SDIs’ advantages are so great that it is “like bringing a gun to a knife fight” (p. 22).

In 1993, George Akerlof and Paul Romer authored Looting: the Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit. Akerlof & Romer explained how financial CEOs used accounting fraud to make record reported profits a “sure thing” (p. 5). The record, albeit fictional, reported profits were certain to make the CEO wealthy, while the bank was guaranteed to fail.

The authors confirmed Akerlof & Romer’s thesis. The CEOs’ perverse incentive creates three concurrent guarantees: the bank will report high (albeit fictional) short-term profits, the controlling officers will extract large increases in wealth, and the bank will suffer large losses. The bank fails, but the controlling officers walks away rich. “Control frauds” represent the ultimate form of “rent-seeking.” The SEC charged Fannie’s controlling officers with accounting and securities fraud to inflate its reported income so that they could extract greater bonuses.

The Authors Related Tenets: “Tail Risk” and the “Race to the Bottom”

The authors do not explain their concept of an extreme tail gamble, but they say that Fannie and Freddie’s tail gamble was purchasing nonprime loans. Those purchases were not honest “bets” and they were not subject to loss only in “rare” circumstances. Pervasively fraudulent “liar’s” loans sank the SDIs, hyper-inflated the bubble, and caused the great recession. Liar’s loans were certain to default catastrophically as soon as the housing bubble stalled. The housing bubble was certain to stall.

I believe that the authors’ logic chain is as follows:

1. SDI executives caused “their” banks to make investments that had a negative expected value, but a high nominal yield

2. In violation of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), the SDIs did not provide remotely adequate allowances for those future losses (ALLL)

3. This created a “sure thing” – SDIs were guaranteed to report high (fictional) short-term

4. This guaranteed fictional income led to the guaranteed massive executive bonuses

5. The officers controlling the SDIs used professional compensation (e.g., of auditors, appraisers, and rating agencies) to create a “race to the bottom” that led to widespread “echo” fraud epidemics among appraisers and credit rating agencies

6. The SDIs did the same thing to produce echo epidemics by loan officers and brokers

7. The accounting control frauds created a “race to the bottom” that drove the officers controlling other SDIs to mimic their frauds

8. This hyper-inflated the housing bubble

9. The hyper-inflation of the bubble allowed the SDIs to hide losses The SDIs’ creditors did not provide (expensive) market discipline because of the implicit government guarantee protected them from loss

10. The SDIs’ regulators did not act as the regulatory “cops on the beat” to break this private sector “race to the bottom” because the SDIs’ used their political power and ideological “capture” to create a regulatory “race to the bottom” (p. 191, n. 3)

11. SDIs following this fraud strategy were guaranteed to suffer massive loan losses and fail

12. These fraud epidemics and SDI failures triggered the Great Recession

The Authors’ Proposed Reforms are Criminogenic

Any analysis that ignores control fraud is certain to distract us from the reforms essential to prevent our recurrent, intensifying financial crises. Ignoring fraud led the authors to propose reforms that are criminogenic.

The authors’ suggestion that the Treasury charge the SDIs a fee equivalent to the value of their implicit Treasury subsidy would encourage accounting control fraud. Frauds use deceit to hide the risks the lender or purchaser is taking. The result would be an intensified Gresham’s dynamic because the accounting frauds would have an even greater advantage (due to the grossly inadequate charge for their implicit Treasury subsidy) over their honest competitors. Under the authors’ own logic and simile we must kill all of the bears.

The Case Against the Ratings Agencies

By Michael Hudson
(Cross-posted from Counterpunch.org)

In today’s looming confrontation the ratings agencies are playing the political role of “enforcer” as the gatekeepers to credit, to put pressure on Iceland, Greece and even the United States to pursue creditor-oriented policies that lead inevitably to financial crises. These crises in turn force debtor governments to sell off their assets under distress conditions. In pursuing this guard-dog service to the world’s bankers, the ratings agencies are escalating a political strategy they have long been refined over a generation in the corrupt arena of local U.S. politics.
Why ratings agencies use public selloffs rather than sound tax policy: The Kucinich Case Study
In 1936, as part of the New Deal’s reform of America’s financial markets, regulators forbid banks and institutional money managers to buy securities deemed “speculative” by “recognized rating manuals.” Insurance companies, pension funds and mutual funds subject to public regulation are required to “take into account” the views of the credit ratings agencies, providing them with a government-sanctioned monopoly. These agencies make their money by offering their “opinions” (for which they have never been legally liable) as to the payment prospects of various grades of security, from AAA (as secure government debt, the top rating because governments always can print the money to pay) down to various depths of junk.

Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch focus mainly on stocks and on corporate, state and local bond issues. They make money twice off the same transaction when cities and states balance their budgets by spinning off public enterprises into new corporate entities issuing new bonds and stocks. This business incentive gives the ratings agencies an antipathy to governments that finance themselves on a pay-as-you-go basis (as Adam Smith endorsed) by raising taxes on real estate and other property, income or sales taxes instead of borrowing to cover their spending. The effect of this inherent bias is not to give an opinion about what is economically best for a locality, but rather what makes the most profit for themselves.

Localities are pressured when their rising debt levels lead to a financial stringency. Banks pull back their credit lines, and urge cities and states to pay down their debts by selling off their most viable public enterprises. Offering opinions on this practice has become a big business for the ratings agencies. So it is understandable why their business model opposes policies – and political candidates – that support the idea of basing public financing on taxation rather than by borrowing. This self-interest colors their “opinions.”

If this seems too cynical an explanation for today’s ratings agencies self-serving views, there are sufficient examples going back over thirty years to illustrate their unethical behavior. The first and most notorious case occurred in Cleveland, Ohio, after Dennis Kucinich was elected mayor in 1977. The ratings agencies had been giving the city good marks despite the fact that it had been using bond funds improperly for general operating purposes to cover its budget shortfalls by borrowing, leaving Cleveland with $14.5 million owed to the banks on open short-term credit lines.

Cleveland had a potential cash cow in Municipal Light, which its Progressive Era mayor Tom Johnson had created in 1907 as one of America’s first publicly owned power utilities. It provided the electricity to light Cleveland’s streets and other public uses, as well as providing power to private users. Meanwhile, banks and their leading local clients were heavily invested in Muni Light’s privately owned competitor, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company. Members of the Cleveland Trust sat on CEI’s board and wielded a strong influence on the city council to try and take it over. In a series of moves that city officials, the U.S. Senate and regulatory agencies found to be improper (popular usage would say criminal),[1] CEI caused a series of disruptions in service and worked with the banks and ratings agencies to try and force the city to sell it the utility. Banks for their part had their eye on financing a public buyout – and hoped to pressure the city into selling, threatening to pull the plug on its credit lines if it did not surrender Muni Light.
It was to block this privatization that Mr. Kucinich ran for mayor. To free the city from being liable to financial pressure from its vested interests – above all from the banks and private utilities – he sought to put the city’s finances on a sound footing by raising taxes. This threatened to slow borrowing from the banks (thereby shrinking the business of ratings agencies as well), while freeing Cleveland from the pressures that have risen across the United States for cities to start selling off their public enterprises, especially since the 1980s as tax-cutting politicians have left them deeper in debt.

The banks and ratings agencies told Mayor Kucinich that they would back his political career and even hinted financing a run for the governorship if he played ball with them and agreed to sell the electric utility. When he balked, the banks said that they could not renew credit lines to a city that was so reluctant to balance its books by privatizing its most profitable enterprises. This threat was like a credit-card company suddenly demanding payment of the full balance from a customer, saying that if it were not paid, the sheriff would come in and seize property to sell off (usually on credit extended to customers of the bankers).
The ratings agencies chimed in and threatened to downgrade Cleveland’s credit rating if the city did not privatize its utility. The financial tactic was to offer the carrot of corrupting the mayor politically, while using the threat of forcing the city into financial crisis and raising its interest rates. If the economy did not pay higher utility charges as a result of privatization, it would have to pay higher interest.
But standing on principle, the mayor refused to sell the utility, and voters elected to keep Muni light public by a 2-to-1 margin in a referendum. They proceeded to pay down the city’s debt by raising its income-tax rate in order to avoid paying higher rates for privatized electricity. Their choice was thoroughly in line with Book V of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations provides a perspective on how borrowing ends up with a proliferation of taxes to pay the interest. This makes the private sector pay higher prices for its basic needs that Cleveland Mayor Tom Johnson and other Progressive Era leaders a century ago sought to socialize in order to lower the cost of living and doing business in the United States.

The bankers’ alliance with the Cleveland’s wealthy would-be power monopoly led it to be the first U.S. city to default since the Great Depression as the state of Ohio forced it into fiscal receivership in 1979. The banks used the crisis to make an easy gain in buying up bond anticipation notes that were sold under distress conditions exacerbated by the ratings agencies. The banks helped fund Mayor Kucinich’s opponent in the 1979 mayoral race.

But in saving Muni Light he had saved voters hundreds of millions of dollars that the privatizers would have built into their electric rates to cover higher interest charges and financial fees, dividends to stockholders, and exorbitant salaries and stock options. In due course voters came to recognize Mr. Kucinich’s achievement have sent him to Congress since 1997. As for Mini Light’s privately owned rival, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company, it achieved notoriety for being primarily responsible for the northeastern United States power blackout in 2003 that left 50 million people without electricity.

The moral is that the ratings agencies’ criterion was simply what was best for the banks, not for the debtor economy issuing the bonds. They were eager to upgrade Cleveland’s credit ratings for doing something injurious – first, borrowing from the banks rather than covering their budget by raising property and income taxes; and second, raising the cost of doing business by selling Muni Light. They threatened to downgrade the city for acting to protect its economic interest and trying to keep its cost of living and doing business low.
The tactics by banks and credit rating agencies have been successful most easily in cities and states that have fallen deeply into debt dependency. The aim is to carve up national assets, by doing to Washington what they sought to do in Cleveland and other cities over the past generation. Similar pressure is being exerted on the international level on Greece and other countries. Ratings agencies act as political “enforcers” to knee-cap economies that refrain from privatization sell-offs to solve debt problems recognized by the markets before the ratings agencies acknowledge the bad financial mode that they endorse for self-serving business reasons.
Why ratings agencies oppose public checks against financial fraud

The danger posed by ratings agencies in pressing the global economy to a race into debt and privatization recently became even more blatant in their drive to give more leeway to abusive financial behavior by banks and underwriters. Former Congressional staffer Matt Stoller cites an example provided by Josh Rosner and Gretchen Morgenson in Reckless Endangerment regarding their support of creditor rights to engage in predatory lending and outright fraud.[2] On January 12, 2003, the state of Georgia passed strong anti-fraud laws drafted by consumer advocates. Four days later, Standard & Poor announced that if Georgia passed anti-fraud penalties for corrupt mortgage brokers and lenders, packaging including such debts could not be given AAA ratings.

Because of the state’s new Fair Lending Act, S&P said that it would no longer allow mortgage loans originated in Georgia to be placed in mortgage securities that it rated. Moody’s and Fitch soon followed with similar warnings.

 It was a critical blow. S&P’s move meant Georgia lenders would have no access to the securitization money machine; they would either have to keep the loans they made on their own books, or sell them one by one to other institutions. In turn, they made it clear to the public that there would be fewer mortgages funded, dashing “the dream” of homeownership.
The message was that only bank loans free of legal threat against dishonest behavior were deemed legally risk-free for buyers of securities backed by predatory or fraudulent mortgages. The risk in question was that state agencies would reduce or even nullify payments being extracted by crooked real estate brokers, appraisers and bankers. As Rosner and Morgenson summarize:

Standard & Poor’s said it was taking action because the new law created liability for any institution that participated in a securitization containing a loan that might be considered predatory. If a Wall Street firm purchased loans that ran afoul of the law and placed them in a mortgage pool, the firm could be liable under the law. Ditto for investors who bought into the pools. “Transaction parties in securitizations, including depositors, issuers and servicers, might all be subject to penalties for violations under the Georgia Fair Lending Act,” S&P’s press release explained.
The ratings agencies’ logic is that bondholders will not be able to collect if public entities prosecute financial fraud involved in packaging deceptive mortgage packages and bonds. It is a basic principle of law that receivers or other buyers of stolen property must forfeit it, and the asset returned to the victim. So prosecuting fraud is a threat to the buyer – much as an art collector who bought a stolen painting must give it back, regardless of how much money has been paid to the fence or intermediate art dealer. The ratings agencies do not want this principle to be followed in the financial markets.

We have fallen into quite a muddle when ratings agencies take the position that packaged mortgages can receive AAA ratings only from states that do not protect consumers and debtors against mortgage fraud and predatory finance. The logic is that giving courts the right to prosecute fraud threatens the viability of creditor claims endorses a race to the bottom. If honesty and viable credit were the objective of ratings agencies, they would give AAA ratings only to states whose courts deterred lenders from engaging in the kind of fraud that has ended up destroying the securitized mortgage binge since September 2008. But protecting the interests of savers or bank customers – and hence even the viability of securitized mortgage packages – is not the task with which ratings agencies are charged.

Masquerading as objective think tanks and research organizations, the ratings agencies act as lobbyists for banks and underwriters by endorsing a race to the bottom – into debt, privatization sell-offs and an erosion of consumer rights and control over fraud. “S&P was aggressively killing mortgage servicing regulation and rules to prevent fraudulent or predatory mortgage lending,” Stoller concludes. “Naomi Klein wrote about S&P and Moody’s being used by Canadian bankers in the early 1990s to threaten a downgrade of that country unless unemployment insurance and health care were slashed.”

The basic conundrum is that anything that interferes with the arbitrary creditor power to make money by trickery, exploitation and outright fraud threatens the collectability of claims. The banks and ratings agencies have wielded this power with such intransigence that they have corrupted the financial system into junk mortgage lending, junk bonds to finance corporate raiders, and computerized gambles in “casino capitalism.” What then is the logic in giving these agencies a public monopoly to impose their “opinions” on behalf of their paying clients, blackballing policies that the financial sector opposes – rulings that institutional investors are legally obliged to obey?
Threats to downgrade the U.S. and other national economies to force pro-financial policies

At the point where claims for payment prove self-destructive, creditors move to their fallback position. Plan B is to foreclose, taking possession of the property of debtors. In the case of public debt, governments are told to privatize the public domain – with banks creating the credit for their customers to buy these assets, typically under fire-sale distress conditions that leave room for capital gains and other financial rake-offs. In cases where foreclosure and forced sell-offs are not able to make creditors whole (as when the economy breaks down), Plan C is for governments simply to bail out the banks, taking bad bank debts and other obligations onto the public balance sheet for taxpayers to make good on.

Standard and Poor’s threat to downgrade of U.S. Treasury bonds from AAA to AA+ would exacerbate the problem if it actually discouraged purchasers from buying these bonds. But on the Monday on August 8, following their Friday evening downgrade, Treasury borrowing rates fell, with short-term T-bills actually in negative territory. That meant that investors had to lose a small margin simply to keep their money safe. So S&P’s opinions are as ineffectual as being a useful guide to markets as they are as a guide to promote good economic policy.

But S&P’s intent was not really to affect the marketability of Treasury bonds. It was a political stunt to promote the idea that the solution to today’s budget deficit is to pursue economic austerity. The message is that President Obama should roll back Social Security and Medicare entitlements so as to free more money for more subsidies, bailouts and tax cuts for the top of the steepening wealth pyramid. Neoliberal Harvard economics professor Robert Barro made this point explicitly in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Calling the S&P downgrade a “wake-up call” to deal with the budget deficit, he outlined the financial sector’s preferred solution: a vicious class war against labor to reduce living standards and further polarize the U.S. economy between creditors and debtors by shifting taxes off financial speculation and property onto employees and consumers.

 First, make structural reforms to the main entitlement programs, starting with increases in ages of eligibility and a shift to an economically appropriate indexing formula. Second, lower the structure of marginal tax rates in the individual income tax. Third, in the spirit of Reagan’s 1986 tax reform, pay for the rate cuts by gradually phasing out the main tax-expenditure items, including preferences for home-mortgage interest, state and local income taxes, and employee fringe benefits—not to mention eliminating ethanol subsidies. Fourth, permanently eliminate corporate and estate taxes, levies that are inefficient and raise little money. Fifth, introduce a broad-based expenditure tax, such as a value-added tax (VAT), with a rate around 10%.[3]
Bank lobbyist Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute of International Finance jumped onto the bandwagon by applauding Latvia’s economic disaster (a 20 percent plunge in GDP, 30 percent reduction of public-sector salaries and accelerating emigration as a success story for other European countries to follow. As they say, one can’t make this up.

As the main advocate and ultimate beneficiary of privatization, the financial sector directs debtor economies to sell off their public property and cut social services – while increasing taxes on employees. Populations living in such economies call them hell and seek to emigrate to find work or simply to flee their debts. What else should someone call surging poverty, death rates and alcoholism while a few grow rich? The ratings agencies today are like the IMF in the 1970s and ‘80s. Countries that do not agree sell off their public domain (and give tax deductibility to the interest payments of buyers-on-credit, providing multinationals with income-tax exemption on their takings from the monopolies being privatized) are treated as outlaws and isolated Cuba- or Iran-style.

Such austerity plans are a failed economic model, but the financial sector has managed to gain even as economies are carved up. Their “Plan B” is foreclosure, extending to the national scale. By the 1980s, creditor-planned economies in Third World debtor countries had reached the limit of their credit-worthiness. Under World Bank coordination, a vast market in national infrastructure spending for creditor-nation bank debt, bonds and exports. The projects being financed on credit were mainly to facilitate exports and provide electric power for foreign investments. After Mexico announced its insolvency in 1982 when it no longer could afford to service foreign-currency debt, where were creditors to turn?

Their solution was to use the debt crisis as a lever to start financing these same infrastructure projects all over again, now that most were largely paid for. This time, what was being financed was not new construction, but private-sector buyouts of property that had been financed by the World Bank and its allied consortia of international bankers. There is talk of the U.S. Government selling off its national parks and other real estate, national highways and infrastructure, perhaps the oil reserve, postal service and so forth.

S&P’s “opinion” was treated seriously enough by John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic Presidential nominee, as a warning that America should “get its house in order.” Despite the fact that on page 4 of its 8-page explanation of why it downgraded Treasury bonds, S&P’s stated: “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act,” was one of the three senators appointed to the commission under the debt-ceiling agreement. He chimed in to endorse the S&P action as a helpful nudge for the country to deal with its “entitlements” program – as if Social Security and FICA withholding were a kind of welfare, not actual savings put in by labor, to be wiped out as the government empties its coffers to bail out Wall Street’s high rollers.

No less a financial publication than the Wall Street Journal has come to the conclusion that “in a perfect world, S&P wouldn’t exist. And neither would its rivals Moody’s Investors Service and Fitch Ratings Ltd. At least not in their current roles as global judges and juries of corporate and government bonds.”[4] As its financial editor Francesco Guerrera wrote quite eloquently in the aftermath of S&P’s bold threat to downgrade the U.S. Treasury’s credit rating: “The historic decision taken by S&P on Aug. 5 is the culmination of 75 years of policy mistakes that ended up delegating a key regulatory function to three for-profit entities.”

The behavior of leading banks and ratings agencies Cleveland and other similar cases – of promising to give good ratings to states, counties and cities that agree to pay off short-term bank debt by selling off their crown jewels – is not ostensibly criminal under the law (except when their hit men actually succeed in assassination). But the ratings agencies have made an compact with crooks to endorse only public borrowers that agree to pursue such policies and not to prosecute financial fraud.

To acquiescence in such economically destructive financial behavior is the opposite of fiscal responsibility. Cutting federal taxes and Social Security payments to obtain a more positive S&P “opinion” would give banks an ability to “pull the plug” and force privatization and anti-labor austerity plans by refraining from rolling over the U.S. debt – and cutting taxes Tea-Party style rather than funding spending by taxation on a pay-as-you-go-basis.

The present meltdown of the euro provides an object lesson for why policy-making never should be left to central bankers, because their mentality is pro-creditor. Otherwise they would not have the political reliability demanded by the financial sector that has captured the central bank, Treasury and regulatory agencies to gain veto power over who is appointed. Given their preference for debt deflation of the “real” economy – while trying to inflate asset prices by promoting the banks’ product (debt creation) – central bank and Treasury solutions tend to aggravate economic downturns. This is self-destructive because today’s major problem blocking recovery is over-indebtedness.


[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Public_Power, as well as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Kucinich. The financial ploy included hiring a Mafia hit man to shoot Mr. Kucinich at a parade – which he fortunately did not attend. For Mr. Kucinich’s own narrative of these events, see “Kucinich and Muny Light – Battle with the Banks,” truthdig.com, December 15, 2008, also available at http://www.dailypaul.com/76343/kucinich-and-muny-light-battle-with-the-banks.
[3] Robert Barro, “How to Get That AAA Rating Back,” Wall Street Journal, August 8, 2011.
[4] Francesco Guerrera, “Here’s How to Rejigger the U.S. Credit-Rating System,” Wall Street Journal, August 16, 2011.

Prof. William K. Black on the Financial Crisis in the United States

Our own Prof. William K. Black delivered a presentation at the Corruption Forum 2009-University of Calgary.


See also the videos below.

The Two Documents Everyone Should Read to Better Understand the Crisis

By William K. Black (Via Huffington Post)

As a white-collar criminologist and former financial regulator much of my research studies what causes financial markets to become profoundly dysfunctional. The FBI has been warning of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud since September 2004. It also reports that lenders initiated 80% of these frauds.* When the person that controls a seemingly legitimate business or government agency uses it as a “weapon” to defraud we categorize it as a “control fraud” (“The Organization as ‘Weapon’ in White Collar Crime.” Wheeler & Rothman 1982; The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One. Black 2005). Financial control frauds’ “weapon of choice” is accounting. Control frauds cause greater financial losses than all other forms of property crime — combined. Control fraud epidemics can arise when financial deregulation and desupervision and perverse compensation systems create a “criminogenic environment” (Big Money Crime. Calavita, Pontell & Tillman 1997.)

The FBI correctly identified the epidemic of mortgage control fraud at such an early point that the financial crisis could have been averted had the Bush administration acted with even minimal competence. To understand the crisis we have to focus on how the mortgage fraud epidemic produced widespread accounting fraud.

Don’t ask; don’t tell: book profits, “earn” bonuses and closet your losses
The first document everyone should read is by S&P, the largest of the rating agencies. The context of the document is that a professional credit rater has told his superiors that he needs to examine the mortgage loan files to evaluate the risk of a complex financial derivative whose risk and market value depend on the credit quality of the nonprime mortgages “underlying” the derivative. A senior manager sends a blistering reply with this forceful punctuation:

“Any request for loan level tapes is TOTALLY UNREASONABLE!!! Most investors don’t have it and can’t provide it. [W]e MUST produce a credit estimate. It is your responsibility to provide those credit estimates and your responsibility to devise some method for doing so.”

Fraud is the principal credit risk of nonprime mortgage lending. It is impossible to detect fraud without reviewing a sample of the loan files. Paper loan files are bulky, so they are photographed and the images are stored on computer tapes. Unfortunately, “most investors” (the large commercial and investment banks that purchased nonprime loans and pooled them to create financial derivatives) did not review the loan files before purchasing nonprime loans and did not even require the lender to provide loan tapes.

The rating agencies never reviewed samples of loan files before giving AAA ratings to nonprime mortgage financial derivatives. The “AAA” rating is supposed to indicate that there is virtually no credit risk — the risk is equivalent to U.S. government bonds, which finance refers to as “risk-free.” We know that the rating agencies attained their lucrative profits because they gave AAA ratings to nonprime financial derivatives exposed to staggering default risk. A graph of their profits in this era rises like a stairway to heaven [PDF]. We also know that turning a blind eye to the mortgage fraud epidemic was the only way the rating agencies could hope to attain those profits. If they had reviewed even small samples of nonprime loans they would have had only two choices: (1) rating them as toxic waste, which would have made it impossible to sell the nonprime financial derivatives or (2) documenting that they were committing, and aiding and abetting, accounting control fraud.

Worse, the S&P document demonstrates that the investment and commercial banks that purchased nonprime loans, pooled them to create financial derivatives, and sold them to others engaged in the same willful blindness. They did not review samples of loan files because doing so would have exposed the toxic nature of the assets they were buying and selling. The entire business was premised on a massive lie — that fraudulent, toxic nonprime mortgage loans were virtually risk-free. The lie was so blatant that the banks even pooled loans that were known in the trade as “liar’s loans” and obtained AAA ratings despite FBI warnings that mortgage fraud was “epidemic.” The supposedly most financially sophisticated entities in the world — in the core of their expertise, evaluating credit risk — did not undertake the most basic and essential step to evaluate the most dangerous credit risk. They did not review the loan files. In the short and intermediate-term this optimized their accounting fraud but it was also certain to destroy the corporation if it purchased or retained significant nonprime paper.

Stress this: stress tests are useless against the nonprime problems

What commentators have missed is that the big banks often do not have the vital nonprime loan files now. That means that neither they nor the Treasury know their asset quality. It also means that Geithner’s “stress tests” can’t “test” assets when they don’t have the essential information to “stress.” No files means the vital data are unavailable, which means no meaningful stress tests are possible of the nonprime assets that are causing the greatest losses.

The results were disconcerting

A rating agency (Fitch) first reviewed a small sample of nonprime loan files after the secondary market in nonprime loan paper collapsed and nonprime lending virtually ceased. The second document everyone should read is Fitch’s report on what they found.

Fitch’s analysts conducted an independent analysis of these files with the benefit of the full origination and servicing files. The result of the analysis was disconcerting at best, as there was the appearance of fraud or misrepresentation in almost every file.
[F]raud was not only present, but, in most cases, could have been identified with adequate underwriting, quality control and fraud prevention tools prior to the loan funding. Fitch believes that this targeted sampling of files was sufficient to determine that inadequate underwriting controls and, therefore, fraud is a factor in the defaults and losses on recent vintage pools.

Fitch also explained [PDF] why these forms of mortgage fraud cause severe losses.
For example, for an origination program that relies on owner occupancy to offset other risk factors, a borrower fraudulently stating its intent to occupy will dramatically alter the probability of the loan defaulting. When this scenario happens with a borrower who purchased the property as a short-term investment, based on the anticipation that the value would increase, the layering of risk is greatly multiplied. If the same borrower also misrepresented his income, and cannot afford to pay the loan unless he successfully sells the property, the loan will almost certainly default and result in a loss, as there is no type of loss mitigation, including modification, which can rectify these issues.”
The widespread claim that nonprime loan originators that sold their loans caused the crisis because they “had no skin in the game” ignores the fundamental causes. The ultra sophisticated buyers knew the originators had no skin in the game. Neoclassical economics and finance predicts that because they know that the nonprime originators have perverse incentives to sell them toxic loans they will take particular care in their due diligence to detect and block any such sales. They assuredly would never buy assets that the trade openly labeled as fraudulent, after receiving FBI warnings of a fraud epidemic, without the taking exceptional due diligence precautions. The rating agencies’ concerns for their reputations would make them even more cautious. Real markets, however, became perverse — “due diligence” and “private market discipline” became oxymoronic. These two documents are enough to begin to understand:
  • the FBI accurately described mortgage fraud as “epidemic”
  • nonprime lenders are overwhelmingly responsible for the epidemic
  • the fraud was so endemic that it would have been easy to spot if anyone looked
  • the lenders, the banks that created nonprime derivatives, the rating agencies, and the buyers all operated on a “don’t ask; don’t tell” policy
  • willful blindness was essential to originate, sell, pool and resell the loans
  • willful blindness was the pretext for not posting loss reserves
  • both forms of blindness made high (fictional) profits certain when the bubble was expanding rapidly and massive (real) losses certain when it collapsed
  • the worse the nonprime loan quality the higher the fees and interest rates, and the faster the growth in nonprime lending and pooling the greater the immediate fictional profits and (eventual) real losses
  • the greater the destruction of wealth, the greater the (fictional) profits, bonuses, and stock appreciation
  • many of the big banks are deeply insolvent due to severe credit losses
  • those big banks and Treasury don’t know how insolvent they are because they didn’t even have the loan files
  • a “stress test” can’t remedy the banks’ problem — they do not have the loan files

* “Mortgage Fraud: Strengthening Federal and State Mortgage Fraud Prevention Efforts” (2007). Tenth Periodic Case Report to the Mortgage Bankers Association, produced by MARI.

Mortgage Fraud’s Impact on the U.S. Housing and Financial Markets

Click here to read William K. Black’s presentation at the 18th Annual Hyman P. Minsky Conference.

What Caused the Crisis?

Click here to read James K. Galbraith’s piece on the causes of the crisis.