Responding to Goldman Sachs
by ilene - December 31st, 2009 11:24 am
Janet Tavakoli is president of Tavakoli Structured Finance, a Chicago-based firm that provides consulting to financial institutions and institutional investors, and author of Credit Derivatives & Synthetic Structures, Structured Finance & Collateralized Debt Obligations, and Dear Mr. Buffett: What An Investor Learns 1,269 Miles From Wall Street. – Ilene
Responding to Goldman Sachs
Courtesy of Janet Tavakoli (originally published in the Huffington Post)
The New York Times published a Christmas Eve expose of Goldman Sachs’s so-called "Abacus" synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). They were created with credit derivatives instead of cash securities. Goldman used credit derivatives to create short bets that gain in value when CDOs lose value. Goldman did this for both protection and profit and marketed the idea to hedge funds.
Goldman responded to the New York Times saying many of these deals were the result of demand from investing clients seeking long exposure. In an earlier Huffington Post article, I wrote about Goldman’s key role in the AIG crisis; it traded or originated $33 billion of AIG’s $80 billion CDOs. AIG was long the majority of six of Goldman’s Abacus deals. These value-destroying CDOs were stuffed with BBB-rated (the lowest "investment grade" rating) portions of other deals. These BBB-rated portions were overrated from the start. Many of them eventually exploded like firecrackers.
Goldman said it suffered losses due to the deterioration of the housing market and disclosed $1.7 billion in residential mortgage exposure write-downs in 2008. These losses would have been substantially higher had it not hedged. Goldman describes its activities as prudent risk management. Many Wall Street firms wound up taking losses. The question is, however, how did they manage to get through a couple of bonus cycles without taking accounting losses while showing "profits?"
The answer is that they sold a lot of "hot air" disguised as valuable securities. Goldman claims this was prudent risk management. In reality, Goldman created products that it knew or should have known were overrated and overpriced.
If Wall Street had not manufactured value-destroying securities and related credit derivatives, the money supply for bad loans would have been choked off years earlier. Instead, Wall Street was chiefly responsible for the "financial innovation" that did massive damage to the U.S. economy.
Earlier, Goldman denied it could have known this was a problem, yet acknowledged I…