Finance – Page 4 – Donald Marron

I Bid $28,000 for Mars

Over at Boing Boing, Lee Billings interviews astrophysicist Greg Laughlin about his formula for valuing planets. Or, more precisely, measuring how much it appears we value those planets based on (a) how much we spend to search for them and (b) planet characteristics like stellar age, stellar mass, light, heat, brightness, etc.

According to the formula, Earth is worth about $5 quadrillion. Which seems about right if you believe my only-partly-joking estimate that the United States alone is worth $1.4 quadrillion.

Mars, however, rings in at a measly $14,000. That seems low to me, so let me make an offer.

Dear Marvin: I would gladly pay you $28,000 for your home, Mars. That’s a 100% mark-up on today’s value. And you and your goons could continue to live there. Thanks, –Donald P.S. Please send Spirit back.

And then there’s Venus. Laughlin ran his equation two ways for the brightest planet in our sky:

Venus is a great example. It does pretty well in the equation, and actually gets a value of about one and a half quadrillion dollars if you tweak its reflectivity a bit to factor in its bright clouds. This echoes what unfolded for Venus in the first half of the 20th century, when astronomers saw these bright clouds and thought they were water clouds, and that it was really humid and warm on the surface. It gave rise to this idea in the 1930s that Venus was a jungle planet. So you put this in the formula, and it has an explosive valuation. Then you’d show up and face the reality of lead melting on the surface beneath sulfuric-acid clouds, and everyone would want their money back!

If Venus is valued using its actual surface temperature, it’s like 10^-12 of a single cent. @home.com was valued on the order of a billion dollars for its market cap, and the stock is now literally worth zero. Venus is unfortunately the @home.com of planets.

In short, Venus might be worth as much as the United States or nothing. If the astrophysicist thing doesn’t work out, Laughlin could clearly find work as an economist.

Treasury Takes Step 1 in Avoiding the Debt Ceiling

As expected, Treasury has announced that it will allow the $200 billion Supplemental Financing Program to run down to only $5 billion; that will save $195 billion of borrowing authority under the current debt ceiling:

Treasury Issues Debt Management Guidance on the Supplementary Financing Program
1/27/2011
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Financial Markets, Mary Miller, today issued the following statement on the Supplementary Financing Program:
“Beginning on February 3, 2011, the balance in the Treasury’s Supplementary Financing Account will gradually decrease to $5 billion, as outstanding Supplementary Financing Program bills mature and are not rolled over. This action is being taken to preserve flexibility in the conduct of debt management policy.”

Treasury created the SFP in order to help the Fed expand its balance sheet without “printing money” (or, more accurately, “printing reserves”). Under the program, Treasury issues bonds, as usual, but it deposits the proceeds in an account at the Federal Reserve, rather than using them to pay the nation’s bills. The Fed then uses those deposits to purchase assets. Since the money ultimately comes from investors who own the new Treasury bonds, the SFP allows the Fed to expand its balance sheet without creating reserves out of thin air.

With the program winding down — at least until the debt ceiling gets raised — the Fed will have to ask its electronic printing press for another $195 billion if it wants to maintain its targeted portfolio.

Europe and the Financial Crisis

Over the New York Times Magazine, Paul Krugman has today’s must-read economics article on the fate of Europe. (Today’s in the physical world; it’s been up electronically for several days.)

Krugman walks through various ways that struggling Eurozone members might adjust to their ongoing financial crisis.

Along the way, he emphasizes a key point: American housing and mortgage markets were not the only cause of the global crisis:

You still hear people talking about the global economic crisis of 2008 as if it were something made in America. But Europe deserves equal billing. This was, if you like, a North Atlantic crisis, with not much to choose between the messes of the Old World and the New. We had our subprime borrowers, who either chose to take on or were misled into taking on mortgages too big for their incomes; they had their peripheral economies, which similarly borrowed much more than they could really afford to pay back. In both cases, real estate bubbles temporarily masked the underlying unsustainability of the borrowing: as long as housing prices kept rising, borrowers could always pay back previous loans with more money borrowed against their properties. Sooner or later, however, the music would stop. Both sides of the Atlantic were accidents waiting to happen.

Federal Reserve Earned $81 Billion in 2010

The Federal Reserve system is doing its part to cut the budget deficit. The central bank earned $81 billion in fiscal 2010, of which a bit more than $78 billion will be remitted to the Treasury. That’s $31 billion more than last year.

According to the Fed’s news release yesterday, the following items drove profits:

$76.2 billion in income on securities acquired through open market operations (federal agency and government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage-backed securities, U.S. Treasury securities, and GSE debt securities) [In short, the Fed is making money on its “quantitative easing” / “credit easing” activities. At least for now.];

$7.1 billion in net income from consolidated limited liability companies (LLCs), which were created in response to the financial crisis [Profits on the Maiden Lane partnerships, etc.];

$2.1 billion in interest income from credit extended to American International Group, Inc.;

$1.3 billion of dividends on preferred interests in AIA Aurora LLC and ALICO Holdings LLC [also related to AIG]; and

$0.8 billion in interest income on loans extended under the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility (TALF) and loans to depository institutions.

Additional earnings were derived primarily from revenue of $0.6 billion from the provision of priced services to depository institutions.

Those $88 billion in gross earnings were slightly offset by the following expenses:

$2.7 billion [of interest expense] on depository institutions’ reserve balances and term deposits;

[$4.3 billion] of operating expenses of the Reserve Banks, including $1.0 billion for Board expenditures and the cost of new currency.

The resulting $81 billion in net profits were then distributed as follows: $78.4 billion to the Treasury, $1.6 billion as dividends to member banks, and $0.6 billion retained to “equate surplus with paid-in capital.”

CBO Weighs in on Fannie and Freddie

Yesterday, the Congressional Budget Office released its long-awaited report on the future of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Role in the Secondary Mortgage Market (written by Deborah Lucas and David Torregrosa, with input from a cast of dozens — including, full disclosure, me as an outside reviewer) provides an outstanding overview of Fannie and Freddie’s history, the arguments for and against a government role in the secondary mortgage market, the flaws of the precrisis structure of Fannie and Freddie, and the pros and cons of possible reform models.

Readers may recall that last spring Phill Swagel and I proposed a reform in which Fannie and Freddie would be privatized, the government would sell guarantees on mortgage-backed securities composed of conforming loans, and that this guarantee would be available not only to Fannie and Freddie but also to qualified new entrants. (Here’s the blog version; here’s the full paper.)

CBO provides a thoughtful overview of such hybrid models:

A Hybrid Public/Private Model

Many proposals for the secondary mortgage market involve a hybrid approach with a combination of private for-profit or nonprofit entities and federal guarantees on qualifying MBSs. At its core, the hybrid public/private approach would preserve many features of the way in which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have operated, with federal guarantees (combined with private capital and private mortgage insurance) protecting investors against credit risk on qualifying mortgages. However, most hybrid proposals would differ from the precrisis operations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in several important ways: A possibly different set of private intermediaries would participate in securitizing mortgages backed by federal credit guarantees, the guarantees would be explicit rather than implicit, and their subsidy cost would be recorded in the federal budget.14 As the public-utility and competitive market-maker models illustrate, a hybrid approach could be implemented in a way that involved more or less federal regulation of participants in the secondary market and a smaller or larger number of competitors in that market.

Advantages of a Hybrid Approach

Regardless of its exact design, a hybrid model with explicit federal backing for qualifying privately issued MBSs would have several advantages over the precrisis model, as well as over either a fully federal agency or complete privatization (approaches that are discussed below). An explicit federal guarantee would help maintain liquidity in the secondary mortgage market, in normal times and particularly in times of stress, and could retain the standardization of products offered to investors that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bring to that market. Compared with the precrisis model, imposing guarantee fees would ensure that taxpayers received some compensation for the risks they were assuming.

Compared with a fully federal agency, a hybrid approach would lessen the problem of putting a large portion of the capital market under government control, encourage the inflow of private capital to the secondary market, and limit the costs and risks to taxpayers by having private capital absorb some or most losses. Putting private capital at risk would also provide incentives for prudent management and pricing of risk.

Compared with a fully private market, hybrid proposals would give the government more ongoing influence over the secondary market and an explicit liability in the case of large mortgage losses that would be reflected in the budget. That arrangement might have the advantage of leading to a more orderly handling of crisis situations.

Disadvantages of a Hybrid Approach

Relative to other approaches, a public/private model has a number of potential drawbacks, the importance of which differs depending in part on the specific design chosen. Experience with other federal insurance and credit programs suggests that the government would have trouble setting risk-sensitive prices for guarantees and probably would shift some risks to taxpayers. A hybrid approach also might not eliminate the tensions that exist—with regard to risk management and pursuit of affordable housing goals—between serving private shareholders and carrying out public missions.

Another concern is that over time, the secondary-market entities might push for broader guarantees of their product lines and attempt to reestablish themselves as too-big-to-fail institutions backed by implicit federal guarantees. Consequently, regulators would need to be vigilant to control risks to the financial system and avoid regulatory capture, while also being open to market innovations.

A Second Thought on the Cost of TARP

Two commenters (Jack B. and John L.) raise an important point about the $25 billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office recently placed on the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Their concern is that the $25 billion figure includes some impacts that should rightfully be attributed to other government actions, not to TARP itself.

To illustrate, suppose that Treasury used TARP to buy $10 of preferred stock in Bank X in 2008 and that a year later Treasury sold its position for $12, including accrued dividends. This investment would be recorded as achieving a $2 profit in TARP (subject to one technical caveat, see below).

That’s the normal way of calculating profit on an investment, and is what CBO was instructed to do for its part of TARP oversight. But as Jack and John point out, there’s an important complication here. During the year, the federal government undertook many other policy actions which may have boosted the value of Bank X (remember all the new acronyms?). From the perspective of policy evaluation, some or all of the $2 gain should be attributed to those other policies, not TARP.

It could be, for example, that absent further action, Bank X would have struggled, leaving Treasury with stock worth only $6. Other government actions, however, breathed enough life into the company (or, at least, boosted the value of its assets) that the stock ultimately became worth $12.

In that case, you could argue that TARP, by itself, resulted in a $4 loss, while the other government actions created a $6 gain. That puts the budgetary impacts of TARP in a different light: a 40% loss versus a 20% gain in this example.

Of course, you could also argue that the $6 gain was only possible because of the TARP ownership stake. There’s certainly an element of truth to that. But the basic concern still applies: the $2 gain in this example reflects both TARP and subsequent government actions, not just TARP alone. That’s an essential point when trying to evaluate these policies after the fact, and we commenters should keep that in mind when interpreting CBO’s findings.

And that’s not all. The other government actions may also have imposed additional direct or indirect costs on the federal budget. As a result, the $2 gain in this example may be offset (or more) by other costs that aren’t included in the calculation.

Bottom line: One reason that TARP appears much less expensive than originally predicted is that many of its investments benefitted from other government actions whose costs show up elsewhere in the budget.

Caveat: CBO’s methodology actually judges the profitability of investments relative to benchmark rates of return. The details are surprisingly complex, but just for purposes of illustration, suppose that the appropriate benchmark rate of return for investing in Bank X was 10%. If Treasury sold the stock for $11 after one year, CBO would deem that as breaking even. If it sold it for $12, that would be a $1 profit.

How Much Did TARP Cost? $25 Billion

The much-maligned TARP program will cost taxpayers only $25 billion according to the latest estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s substantially less than the $66 billion CBO estimated back in August or the $113 billion that the Office of Management and Budget estimated in October.

The good news, budget-wise, is that the government is on track to make about $22 billion on its assistance to banks.

However, CBO estimates that TARP’s other activities will cost $47 billion. This reflects aid to AIG ($14 billion), the auto industry ($19 billion), mortgage programs ($12), and a few smaller programs ($2 billion).

Positive Feedback and the Flash Crash

The CFTC and SEC staffs are out with their analysis of the May 6 “flash crash.”

Short version: A large trader (identified by the media as Waddell & Reed) initiated a large sell order to be executed based on volume, not time or price. The initial selling boosted trading volumes which prompted the algorithm to sell even faster. That positive feedback then spawned the short-lived crash.

The whole report is worth a skim for the details about market functioning, but if you are pressed for time here’s the key part of the Executive Summary (with my emphasis added and footnotes deleted):

At 2:32 p.m., against this backdrop of unusually high volatility and thinning liquidity, a large fundamental trader (a mutual fund complex]) initiated a sell program to sell a total of 75,000 E-Mini contracts (valued at approximately $4.1 billion) as a hedge to an existing equity position.

…

This large fundamental trader chose to execute this sell program via an automated execution algorithm (“Sell Algorithm”) that was programmed to feed orders into the June 2010 E-Mini market to target an execution rate set to 9% of the trading volume calculated over the previous minute, but without regard to price or time.

The execution of this sell program resulted in the largest net change in daily position of any trader in the E-Mini since the beginning of the year (from January 1, 2010 through May 6, 2010). Only two single-day sell programs of equal or larger size – one of which was by the same large fundamental trader – were executed in the E-Mini in the 12 months prior to May 6. When executing the previous sell program, this large fundamental trader utilized a combination of manual trading entered over the course of a day and several automated execution algorithms which took into account price, time, and volume. On that occasion it took more than 5 hours for this large trader to execute the first 75,000 contracts of a large sell program.

However, on May 6, when markets were already under stress, the Sell Algorithm chosen by the large trader to only target trading volume, and neither price nor time, executed the sell program extremely rapidly in just 20 minutes.

This sell pressure was initially absorbed by:

• high frequency traders (“HFTs”) and other intermediaries in the futures market;

• fundamental buyers in the futures market; and

• cross-market arbitrageurs who transferred this sell pressure to the equities markets by opportunistically buying E-Mini contracts and simultaneously selling products like SPY, or selling individual equities in the S&P 500 Index.

HFTs and intermediaries were the likely buyers of the initial batch of orders submitted by the Sell Algorithm, and, as a result, these buyers built up temporary long positions. Specifically, HFTs accumulated a net long position of about 3,300 contracts. However, between 2:41 p.m. and 2:44 p.m., HFTs aggressively sold about 2,000 E-Mini contracts in order to reduce their temporary long positions. At the same time, HFTs traded nearly 140,000 E-Mini contracts or over 33% of the total trading volume. This is consistent with the HFTs’ typical practice of trading a very large number of contracts, but not accumulating an aggregate inventory beyond three to four thousand contracts in either direction.

The Sell Algorithm used by the large trader responded to the increased volume by increasing the rate at which it was feeding the orders into the market, even though orders that it already sent to the market were arguably not yet fully absorbed by fundamental buyers or cross-market arbitrageurs. In fact, especially in times of significant volatility, high trading volume is not necessarily a reliable indicator of market liquidity.

What happened next is best described in terms of two liquidity crises – one at the broad index level in the E-Mini, the other with respect to individual stocks.

For more, click on over to the report.

Another Observation on the Yield Curve

As a follow-up to my recent post about recessions and the yield curve, reader Joan F. points us to a piece by the FT’s James Mackintosh. The money quote:

[T]hose keeping faith in recovery also point to the fact that the yield curve has not inverted – 10-year bonds still yield 2 percentage points more than two-year bonds. Given that the 10-year yield has dropped below the two-year (and the three-month) before every recession since the second world war, perhaps a double dip is not looming.

Unfortunately, a quick glance at Japan suggests that once short-term rates hit the floor, the yield curve may no longer be a valuable indicator. While it warned of the recession that followed the bursting of Japan’s bubble, it missed the three recessions since.

The Yield Spread and the Odds of Recession

Worries about a double-dip recession have spawned much economic commentary … and a humorous country and western song. So how likely is a return to recession?

Researchers at the San Francisco Fed took a crack at this question a few weeks ago. Their answer? It depends.

When they used a traditional model based on the leading economic indicators, the probability of a second dip turned out to be about 25% over the next two years (the blue line). When they dropped one indicator from their model, that probability doubled to about 50% (the red line).

That important indicator is the yield spread–the difference between the 10-year Treasury interest rate and federal funds rate. In recent decades, the yield spread has done a terrific job at anticipating recessions. When the federal funds rate has risen above the 10-year rate, the economy has invariably fallen into recession.

As I noted briefly the other day, the relative steepness of today’s yield curve (10-year rate about 2.5 percentage points above the fed funds rate) thus suggests, by itself, that renewed recession is unlikely, despite recent weak economic data. On the other hand, there are reasons to believe that this time things are different (usually a scary phrase). After all, fed funds rate has been pushed down almost to zero and yet the economy no longer appears to be responding. That’s exactly the logic that inspired the SF Fed researchers to try their model without the yield spread.