The man who broke AIG

Vanity Fair, fresh off of smoking Sarah Palin, has a much more in-depth piece on Joseph Cassano, the man who led AIG’s financial products unit into the toilet.

Cassano, without using the mathematical models of his predecessor, became willing to take on ever more risk, and to apply corporate risk modeling to consumer financial risk, in a very small nutshell.

And AIG CEO Hank Greenberg and the board apparently either didn’t know, or didn’t want to know, what he was doing. Nor did Greenberg’s successor, as, ironically, AIG was downgraded from AAA to AA the day he retired, even while Cassano was adding more subprime loans to his credit default swap portfolio.

And, losing the AAA rating, per a Cassano agreement, required it to start posting collateral on these CDSs. And that’s when trouble really started.

It’s a complicated story, but well worth a read.

Yet more reason to distrust Larry Summers

At a soiree symposium hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve, he verbally attacked Raghuram Rajan’s presentation that suggested just maybe free market don’t always get it right.

What the bears on the Street won’t mention: banks borrow $50 bil from Fed

That’s $50 billion with a “b” of money banks have borrowed from the Federal Reserve’s Term Auction Facility. Besides the basic fact that borrowing of that much money should underscore the fact that our economy isn’t close to level, many economists say both the opaqueness and indirectness of borrowing from the new TAF should raise concerns.

Maybe hackles, instead.

The collateral requirements are so low as to show this is clearly part of the latest Fed bubble-building effort.

Couldn’t have said it better about financiers in the credit bubble myself

So, I’ll let Bill Fleckenstein say it for me:

One final comment about the financial world: It's populated with rich, hypocritical whiners. Wall Street, the hedge-fund community and their lap dogs in the news media continually brag about how much they love capitalism and free markets.

Yet when the creative-destruction component of capitalism rears its ugly head, they want the central planners to bail them out immediately, before they take any pain. And the ones clamoring the loudest are the very same folks who behaved the most irresponsibly.

Fleckenstein goes on to note that the Financial Standards Accounting Board has allowed much of this bubble to happen right along with the Fed, through it’s officially signing off on counting Level 3 values, based on fair value being measured using “unobservable inputs,” as part of a company’s assets.

See this Bloomberg article for how far Wells Fargo is running with this ball.

Top Swiss banker agog at U.S. lending standards

Credit bubble looks more and more globalized

Roth says story is just beginning:

“We’re certainly not at the end of the story. There are question marks surrounding the development of the American economy,” Jean-Pierre Roth, president of the Swiss National Bank, said. “Something unbelievable happened. People who had neither income nor capital got credit with very attractive conditions. Now reality is striking back,” he said.

Meanwhile, an American financial analyst says not all of the collateralized debt obligations have been priced to market, so we still don’t know exactly how serious things are.

Stockmarket historian David Schwartz warned investors not be fooled by signs of recovery. “The truth is no-one knows how serious the financial problem in the US is, nor how it will unfold. We do know central banks are scared out of their minds,” he said.

The credit bubble Roth says became global because foreign banks either followed the Fed’s lead or inflated their countries’ credit for their own reasons, as with Japan.

In parallel, the Bank of Japan held interest rates at zero for six years until July 2006 to stave off deflation. Even now, rates are still just 0.5pc. It also injected some $12bn liquidity every month by printing money to buy bonds. The net effect has been a massive leakage of money into the global economy. …

Faced with an asset shock coming from Asia, the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank could have taken counter-action. They did not do so. Nor did they tighten much to offset liquidity being "created" by the new-fangled credit instruments. The Fed held rates at 1pc until June 2004, when the economy was growing at 5pc. The ECB kept rates at 2pc until December 2005. It takes 18 months - or so - for monetary policy to exert its full effects. The bubble peaked in early 2007.

The central banks have said their task is to fight inflation, not to police asset prices. Critics retort that the US asset bubble in the 1920s and Japan's bubble in the 1980s both occurred at a time of low inflation. Belatedly the Bank of Japan, the ECB, the Swiss, the Scandies and the Bank of England are questioning the wisdom of ignoring asset prices, deeming it wise to "lean into the wind" to slow excesses. But it is very late in the day. The credit bubble is already with us.

And, that’s why this thing isn’t going to go away overnight.

Also, related to that, if Bernanke seriously cuts the Fed funds rate, other countries’ central banks will look to their own houses. Just like warring tariff hikes exacerbated the Depression, warring rate manipulation may do the same for the credit bubble.