By far the most amazing point in his exposition is how he describes how CDS was used to create leverage. Seriously, you won't believe this.
Here Lewis is describing Steve Eisman (who was shorting subprime BBB tranches using CDS):
Whatever rising anger Eisman felt was offset by the man’s genial disposition. Not only did he not mind that Eisman took a dim view of his C.D.O.’s; he saw it as a basis for friendship. “Then he said something that blew my mind,” Eisman tells me. “He says, ‘I love guys like you who short my market. Without you, I don’t have anything to buy.’ ”
That’s when Eisman finally got it. Here he’d been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman’s bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn’t create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league’s stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. “They weren’t satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn’t afford,” Eisman says. “They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That’s why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that’s when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?”
I keep reading that again and again.
This is how bad it got.
They actually "cloned" bad loans (by some estimates 10:1) because the "returns" were so great and people wanted to buy.
Monstrous.
Something to think about:
ReplyDeleteBernanke was on a tv show where he was questioned about the millions of Dollards he spend to save the banks. The host asked him the following question: Mr. Bernanke where is al the money comming from ? You spend millions to save the banks. Again: how did you get the money to the banks ? Bernanke looked at the host like he was looking at an alien and replied with disbelief in his voice: Well, thats realy a strange question. You do it the same way as I do it: sitting behind your computer !!! You login, type the account number, choose the amount and press enter......
Two words: Virtual Money