Subprime Tsunami: Spreads Kill You, Not Defaults April 10, 2007
Subprime Tsunami: Spreads Kill You, Not Defaults
"The unwinding of the US housing bubble is like a train wreck in slow motion. As the first wagons crumple, a picture of serenity depicts the trailing cars. However, their fate is sealed. The same is occurring in the US housing market. As the sub-prime market implodes, the situation is calm in the higher-quality segments�with prices still rising in some up-scale markets. Yet, it is only a matter of time until the damage spreads."
Walter Molano
BCP Securities
Last week,
one long-time reader of The IRA, a
senior equity derivatives maven with one of the bulge bracket Sell Side shops, scolded us for spending
too much time pondering the affect on bank safety and soundness of
rising loan default rates:
"Everyone focuses on 'defaults', but the risk, in my
opinion, is in the 'spreads'. People have levered up on the super-senior
tranches as a safe way of chasing yield. Sure the distance to default for this
paper may be large, and the principal safe for many who can hold to maturity,
but that doesn't mean that the paper wont be repriced at a (substantial?)
discount between now and maturity. And everyone I talk to, unfortunately, is
using fairly modest assumptions of spread-widening. Therein lies the real
problem, short-term memory."
We did not remind our colleague, who
spends the day on a trading floor taking incoming fire, that we obsess
about spreads all the time. Indeed, the magnitude to which cash and derivative
spreads remain extremely narrow vs. the underlying risks is one of the key
ingredients of our ongoing angst. But we appreciate the comment and
the insights.
While spreads on subprime paper have indeed widened in the
past couple months, spreads in other sectors remain very tight, this even with
happy predictions of generalized deflation from all sorts of
observers. At the wide, premiums on credit default swaps ("CDS") for collateralized debt obligations ("CDOs"), the vast
majority of which contain subprime paper, traded at perhaps half the
underlying default rate on that collateral, raising questions about the rationality of market
participants as well as about their short-term memory.
Part of the explanation, of course, is that the flow of
funds into just about any sort of asset class is so strong that cautionary
statements and pessimistic data go almost unremarked. When you see
private equity funds going public, you know it is time to start hitting the
bid.
Last week, we read that
hedge funds and other non-bank investors now account for three quarters of all loans made to junk-rated companies. No wonder
defaults are so low. According to Standard and Poor's, there is "a new marketplace of borrowers," including private-equity groups, which prefers loans to bonds. These same funds are also buying subprime bonds, partly in the hope of scoring a bonanza on somebody else's mistake, often in competition with CDOs, which were the main buyers of such collateral last year.
The entry of all manner of funds into the
junk and subprime loan universe has driven spreads down to silly levels, thus the
rant from our equity derivative maven. And of course the warning
is well-considered, but spreads have been so tight for so long that most
people simply don't care. The reality of tight spreads, far below the true economic
risk character of a given asset, is now part of the financial landscape, meaning
that spread risk is entirely pervasive.
Consider a sample from the banking
world, taking a bank-only rollup of Bank of America (NYSE:BAC)
and its peers as a surrogate for the price of spreads
in the financial markets generally. In the early 1990s, BAC earned a gross
lending yield over 1,100 basis points, nearly 50% above current levels. Did this
mean, as it would today, that BAC was a subprime lender?
No, but it does suggest that this key indicator of bank profitability was considerably fatter in the early 1990s than it is today.
GROSS LOAN YIELD (BPs) -- IRA BANK
MONITOR
2006
2001
1997
1991
1990
Bank of America
709
841
806
983
1,040
Peer Avg
661
758
824
994
1,097
Source: FDIC/IRA Bank
Monitor
A decade ago, a subprime asset
would have been trading in the 2,500bp or 25% yield range, what in those
days was seen as the minimum return for a group of assets rated in the B/CCC
categories. Today assets with similar credit default probability profiles
trade at half that spread or less. Indeed, before the big media grabbed onto
the subprime phenomenon, some subprime deals and derivatives were trading at just
a tenth of where similar assets would have traded a decade ago. This
raises a couple of issues in our minds:
First, does the apparent fact
of pervasive spread risk among and within US market participants mean that financial
institutions and investors are headed for a macro event, a one-time outward shift in spread pricing
that exceeds the mean assumptions employed today in most risk models?
Second, does the possibility of such a "spread tsunami"
imply that the market for banks, broker-dealers and hedge funds is going to see
a wave of forced mergers and consolidations, this when smaller boats are swamped by
the flood of red ink? Will the already tight profitability of US banks, funds and
BDs be squeezed further when credit and market spreads revert to the mean?
So
long as the deal flow remained strong and the hedge funds remained numerous, all
was well. But if one morning Mr. Hedge Fund wakes up
to the fact that his CDS of CDO portfolio, which covers
collateral that conservatively will throw
off 20-30% defaults over a three year time horizon, is trading at well less
than a 10% spread, then look out.
Or as the equity
derivatives maven told The IRA:
"Spreads kill you. By the time the paper
actually defaults, you'll be long gone and, hopefully, working at
another shop."
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