Tag Archives: SEC

the SEC, Citigroup and moral hazard

December 1, 2011 By in Banks, Derivative instruments, Industry Analysis, Investment firms, moral hazard, securities markets, Securities regulation, short selling, Where are the customers' yachts? Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

This is an update and elaboration on my November 11th post about Judge Jed S. Rakoff, the SEC and Citigroup.

moral hazard

Moral hazard in finance is the situation where the existence of an agreement to share risks causes one of the parties to act in an extra-risky manner, to the detriment of the other.   In a sense, the willingness of the party who ultimately gets injured to enter into the agreement causes, or at least allows, the bad behavior by the other to occur.  He inadvertently sets up a situation where the bad behavior is rewarded, not punished.

examples

–Systematically important banks have been able to take very big proprietary trading risks, knowing that they are “too big to fail” and will ultimately be bailed out by the government if their risky bets don’t pan out.  The rewards of such risk-taking go as bonuses to the bankers; the cost of bets gone bad is borne by the general public.

–One of the reasons Germany is so hesitant to bail out Greece is that doing so rewards the latter country’s reckless borrowing behavior over the past decadeand shifts the costs of cleaning up the resulting economic mess onto the citizens of the rest of the EU.

the Rakoff case and moral hazard

Judge Rakoff has just rejected a proposed settlement of a case involving Citigroup and the SEC, on what appear to me to be similar moral hazard grounds.

The settlement involves Citi’s creation and sale of $1 billion in securities ultimately tied to a pool of sub-prime mortgages selected by the bank.  Citi neglected to tell the buyers of the securities that it wasn’t simply an agent.  It was making a $500 million bet that the securities would decline in value sharply–which they subsequently did.  Investors who bought the securities from Citi lost $700 million.

I don’t know precisely how much money Citi made on this transaction.  But I think I can make a good guess.  To make up rough numbers, collecting a 2% fee for creating and selling the issue would bring in $20 million or so.  A 70% gain on its negative bet on the issue would yield $350 million.  If so, the much more compelling reason for creating the issue would be to design it to fail and then short it.  In any event, let’s say Citi cleared $370 million before paying its employees who thought up and executed the total deal.

The proposed settlement?

–fines and penalties totaling $285 million

–Citi doesn’t admit or deny guilt, which means

——the settlement doesn’t create any evidence to support a lawsuit by the investors who lost money, and

——the settlement doesn’t trigger the sanctions against future illegal conduct that are contained in prior settlements with the SEC.

–only low-level Citi employees are reprimanded.

Assume the SEC allegations are all true.

If so, what a deal for Citi!  The SEC “punishment” is that the bank keeps $85 million in profits and gets a slap on the wrist.  Who wouldn’t agree?

What would make this moral hazard is that this is is the worst case outcome for Citi.

And, if you figure that the SEC looks at one suspicious deal out of ten, the situation is even less favorable for investors.  The decision whether to create another issue like this one is a layup.

Would it be so easy if Citi stood a chance of losing money?  …or of triggering clauses in prior settlements prohibiting illegal behavior?

What about the legal team that decided what he minimum disclosure in sales materials should be?  Would they have insisted that Citi must reveal its proprietary trading position in those materials if fines were larger, or if they could be held professionally liable for the information’s exclusion?

What if the Citi executives that okayed everything risked being barred from the securities business for a period of time–would they have acted in the way they did?

grandstanding?

I don’t think critics are correct that Judge Rakoff is trying to raise his public profile by insisting that the SEC either obtain a better settlement or go to trial with its case.  Others are saying that the SEC takes settlements like this because it doesn’t have the legal skill to get anything better.  But these are ad hominem arguments  –like saying the parties are wearing ill-fitting clothes, they’re distracting, but irrelevant.

But it is true that this case comes at a time of growing public anger that bank executives are showing few ill effects from the devastating economic damage they helped cause.

It will be interesting to see what new settlement the SEC and Citi come up with.

Stay tuned.

Citigroup, Jed Rakoff, MF Global and the SEC

November 11, 2011 By in Banks, Derivative instruments, Industry Analysis, Investment firms, Securities regulation, Where are the customers' yachts? Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

There’s an odd asymmetry to the way the SEC works.

For example, it put Martha Stewart in jail but ignored Bernie Madoff.   It pursued Michael Milken vigorously after the junk bond market collapsed.   But it has, so far, left the heads of the major commercial and investment banks untouched, despite the fact that the toxic derivative securities they created were much more widespread and–as we continue to see–have damaged the world financial system much more severely than anything Milken did.

Raj Rajaratnam’s insider trading recently drew an 11-year prison sentence and a $93 million fine.

But the other side of the SEC has come to light again recently in the court of gadfly judge Jed Rakoff.  Judge Rakoff is being asked to approve a settlement of a case in which buyers of a Citigroup mortgage product lost $700 million.

The deal the SEC is offering?

–pay back $160 million, plus $30 million in interest and a $95 million fine;

–Citi doesn’t admit it did anything wrong;

–only low-level Citi employees are sanctioned.

–oh  …and the SEC wants to include an admonition to Citi not to do stuff like this again.  But, as Judge Rakoff points out, Citi appears to have violated such orders issued in prior settlements at least twice in the past decade and the SEC has done nothing.

You’d take a deal like that all day long.

A cynic might say that this behavior is related to the fact the current head of the SEC used to be in charge of the brokerage industry trade association.  On the other hand, I believe much of the toxic derivative activity was deliberately organized by the banks out of London because that put them out of the reach of US prosecutors.  So there’s not much the SEC can do.

…which brings me to MF Global.

There’s certainly a danger to generalizing from a small number of instances.  But, to me, what connects Martha Stewart, Michael Milken and Raj Rajaratnam is tha: t the issues are easy to understand, the names are high-profile, none were deeply plugged into the financial industry establishment and, although wealthy, none had the near-infinite resources of the large investment and commercial banks.

One of the issues that the Occupy Wall Street movement gives voice to is that after nearly destroying the world economy and forcing a high-cost financial rescue that all of us will be paying for for many years, no high-level financial commercial bank or brokerage executive has been prosecuted for anything.

What this adds up to, I think, is that the SEC will be scrutinizing the role Jon Corzine played in the demise of MF Global very carefully.  He’s a former head of Goldman Sachs but no longer an industry insider;  he’s an ex-senator and ex-governor; he’s wealthy–but not Bill Gates.   And, the question of whether the firm illegally took money out of customer accounts and used it to stave off margin calls is pretty clear-cut.  It may also be hard to say you didn’t notice an extra $600 million plopping into a portfolio you manage–especially so if you really needed it.

It will be interesting to see what happens–both whether the SEC finds a reason to prosecute and whether that will satisfy OWS.  My guess on the second count is that it won’t.

insider trading and ETF stripping

February 14, 2011 By in ETF stripping, Securities regulation, Trading Tags: , , , , 2 Comments

insider trading

Over the past couple of months there has been a constant drip, drip, drip of news conferences by the SEC on the topic of its ongoing investigation of insider trading.   Most have been to announce arrests of hedge fund-related professionals accused of this white-collar crime.  The “timed release” nature of the news flow has several objectives that I can see:

–it unsettles as yet uncaught lawbreakers, perhaps causing them to make foolish mistakes that will make their apprehension easier,

–it discourages anyone tempted to trade on confidential company information,

–it burnishes the reputation of the SEC as guardian of the securities markets, and, of course,

–it keeps unflattering stories, such as the one that the agency’s own financial statements have chronically failed to meet minimum government standards, off the front page.

ETF stripping

One the of the latest SEC announcements involves something new to me–ETF stripping. What is it?

The securities exchanges and their regulators maintain continual computer surveillance of public market trading, both of securities and derivatives.  They look for unusual patterns in volume or price movement that may indicate insider trading.   For example, three days before a merger announcement, trading in near-term call options of the target firm spikes to 5x normal volume; or the day before a surprisingly bad earnings report, puts for the stock of the company in question do the same thing.  Such deviations from the norm ring alarm bells and prompt the regulators to investigate who was trading and why.

According to the SEC, one way traders on inside information have been able to outwit this surveillance has been by buying shares in a sector ETF that contains their target stock, and shorting all the other names the ETF contains.  They end up owning only the name they want to.  But they don’t show up on the regulators’ screens as owning the target stock at all.  Instead, they’re seen as holding an index security (the ETF) and a bunch of short positions.

my thoughts

I have several thoughts:

–Most traditional investors can’t short stocks.  For those who can, there’s a very good chance that clients would notice and question the synthetic construction of a long position through ETF stripping.  So the SEC is talking about hedge funds here.

–Hedge funds would presumably piece the trading out to several brokers so that no one counterparty sees the entire picture.

–ETF stripping would be particularly hard to find if it were done by the trading desks of brokers, particularly those who act as intermediaries for ETFs and are constantly buying and selling both ETFs and their component securities.  Trading costs would be the lowest for such brokers, as well.

–There’s no reason to go to the trouble of ETF stripping other than to try to evade regulatory scrutiny.  So the practice seems to me to be a two-edged sword.  On the one hand, the chances of being detected are lessened.  On the other hand, the ETF stripper is like the burglar caught in the bank after hours with safe-cracking tools.  If caught, he can’t claim he’s there by accident.

–I can’t imagine the SEC figured this out by itself.  Instead, I presume the agency learned about ETF stripping through an arrested inside trader who offered information in exchange for a lesser sentence.

It will be interesting as this story develops to see how widespread the practice has been.

 

the SEC inspector general is investigating the agency’s office leasing practices–again

February 2, 2011 By in securities markets, Securities regulation Tags: , , Leave a comment

a new lease

The point at issue:  the SEC, which has been leasing office space for itself for the past twenty years, inked a ten-year contract last July for 900,000 square feet of prime office space in downtown Washington.  According to the Financial Times, rent for the new space in Constitution Center amounts to $51.8 million annually.

unusual or not?

What’s unusual about the signing?  For the SEC, a critic might say it’s just business as usual.  Anyway:

1.  It comes at a time when the agency is cutting back on investigations for lack of resources

2.  The SEC bypassed government competitive bidding requirements for leasing office space, by declaring this situation was an emergency

3.  Normally, government agencies wait for Congress to appropriate the money before spending it.   The SEC didn’t in this case.  And it now appears the extra funds will not be coming any time soon,

4.  The SEC doesn’t need the space.  It’s moving a bunch of people from the suburbs, where rents are presumably much cheaper, to fill some of it up.  And it’s trying to get out of its obligation for two-thirds of the space it just signed up for.  My guess is that it will end up subletting the space at a loss to some other arm of the Federal government.

the lease expense is huge

Two other factors make this deal stand out:

1.  If you take the $51.8 million and add to it the $83 million the SEC already spends each year on real estate, the SEC was committing a whopping 15% of its budget to real estate.

2.  According to the Wall Street Journal, the SEC’s offices are 2.5x the size that’s the norm for the federal government.

What’s also noteworthy is that this isn’t the SEC’s first office snafu–though arguably the largest.  Of the incidents we know about, in 2005-06 it had to cut back on investigations to fund a $48 million cost overrun on office construction expenses.  The agency is reported to have paid for years for office space in New York that it wasn’t occupying.  Recently, its leasing practices in San Francisco have also come in for criticism.

Where do they get these people?

more on insider trading

November 28, 2010 By in Current Market Thoughts, hedge funds, Industry Analysis, insider trading, Investment firms, securities markets, stock market, Trading Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

A number of new ( to me, anyway) pieces of information about the current FBI/SEC insider trading investigation have emerged over the past few days.  They are:

1.  Many commentators have noted that the investigation resembles much more closely an FBI operation against organized crime than the “usual” kind of SEC action.  The latter case typically has involved followup from red flags that emerge from SEC monitoring of trading patterns in individual stocks.

In this case, in contrast, the investigation has apparently been going on for three years, involves the FBI, includes wiretapping, and seeks criminal penalties.

No one I’m aware of has publicly drawn an obvious inference from this behavior, though.  If the focus of this probe is organized criminal enterprises, it seems to me that the government will be seeking, or at least threatening to seek, penalties under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970.

Under RICO, which requires that prosecutors establish a pattern (meaning at least two acts) of illegal activity, those found guilty can be sentenced to twenty years in prison for each racketeering act and fined $25,000.  They can also be sued in civil court by those they have wronged for triple damages.  Defendants’ assets can be frozen prior to trial (making it hard to pay your lawyer).  The government’s reach is also extended to include all a person’s assets, not just those connected with the legal entity where a crime has occurred.  In other words, if you’ve traded in insider information as an agent of a corporation or partnership, your house, your bank accounts, your art collection, your cars…are all at risk, not just corporate or partnership interests.

RICO has a history of being used in combatting financial markets crimes.  Corrupt junk bond king Michael Milken was indicted under RICO in 1989.  Drexel Burnham Lambert, the firm Milken worked for, was threatened with a RICO indictment as well.  Both pled guilty to lesser charges.

I think RICO is the next shoe to drop.

2.  Former SEC head, Harvey Pitt, has been making the rounds of financial TV shows giving his opinion about what the FBI/SEC are doing.  The most interesting point he makes, I think, is on CNBC, where he points out that this investigation can’t involve a gray area that may, or may, not be insider trading.  For the resources involved in this case, and given all the publicity the agencies have generated, it must concern clearly illegal activity.  (Mr. Pitt says this around minute 3:10 of the CNBC interview.)

Points Mr. Pitt makes in other interviews:  this action is focussed on hedge funds and comes as a result of authority explicitly granted to the SEC by the Dodd-Frank Act.

3.  Don Ching Trang Chu, an employee at  a California-based “expert network”

firm, Primary Global Research, was arrested by the FBI on November

24th and charged with conspiring to distribute inside information.  The way Mr.

Chu’s business is described in the US Attorney’s press release and by

Bloomberg among others, it seems to have consisted in large part in finding

compliant middle-level employees in technology companies.  These

employees would disclose company operating results, sometimes in great detail, to

hedge funds some hours in advance of their being made public in return for money.


In a narrow sense, for a long-term investor the question of whether a company’s

short-term results are 1% higher or lower than the Wall Street

consensus is of little consequence.  The larger issue, however, is that the

perception that monied interests can rig the game in even one aspect can

undermine the public’s confidence in the markets–thereby delivering lower price

earnings multiples for everyone.


And of course, a sheriff must fear that if everyone believes he’s asleep on the job

he’ll be thrown out office and replaced.

This story will likely get more interesting as it unfolds.