Dirt Diggers Digest

It is a sign of how topsy-turvy capitalism has become that stock markets skyrocketed today on the news that some governments are taking complete or partial control of their major banks. Nationalization, traditionally the anathema of private enterprise, is now welcomed as its savior “amid fears,” as the Financial Times states in today’s edition, “that the global financial system is on the brink of collapse.”

These latest moves in Europe and possibly the United States follow a series of stock market plunges that are now being routinely described as a “slow-motion crash.” By turning to direct government investment or full takeover of financial institutions, the latest rescue efforts are starting to look like slow-motion socialism.

The $700 billion U.S. bailout, which until now was supposed to be the solution to the crisis, was criticized by many on the right as a dangerous move toward socialism, while leftists denounced it as socialism for the rich. That was mostly rhetorical. Public ownership of banks is closer to the real thing.

But what kind of quasi-socialism will this be? Left to their own devices, mainstream policymakers like ex-Wall Streeter Henry Paulson will see to it that public investment in banks does not seriously threaten vested private interests. There’s already discussion in today’s Wall Street Journal of how government investment would be done in a way that protects the banks’ existing shareholders. Protecting pension fund and 401(k) holdings in the financial sector is a good idea, but this does not mean that the federal government needs to be a completely passive investor.

On the contrary, now that the crisis has broken down the taboo against direct federal investment in corporations, we need to be sure this extraordinary intervention does more than help banks get through the immediate credit crunch. Unless there are fundamental changes in the way these institutions operate, we’ll be facing another crisis very soon.

While some of these changes need to come through re-regulation, the federal government should use its position as a major shareholder to bring about changes from the inside as well. This should begin, of course, with ousting the top executives who helped to create the current situation. The next step would be to shake up corporate boards and see to it that all stakeholders, which now include taxpayers, are fully represented. The Federal Reserve is already taking a step in this direction by announcing it will appoint three trustees to oversee the government’s stake in AIG.

The new boards could reconfigure executive compensation formulas and overall bank policies to discourage reckless lending and investing practices. Restructuring subprime mortgages to help homeowners avoid foreclosure and lending to prudent renewable energy projects should be their new priorities.

Government investment in banks may not solve all the ills of capitalism, but if done right it could mean that something good comes out of the current mess.

While the stock market was swooning on Monday, Henry Paulson’s Treasury Department issued a series of press releases detailing how it will choose asset managers to carry out the $700 billion purchase of “troubled” securities. Any thought that this process would be open to a wide range of participants was shattered by Treasury’s requirement that any applicant already be involved in managing at least $100 billion in dollar-denominated fixed-income assets.

This means that the bailout will be handled exclusively by a small number of firms that are already major players in the money management business. It also means that it is almost inevitable that these firms will have conflicts of interest while working for the feds.

We can identify the tiny universe of these players by looking at a list compiled by Institutional Investor magazine. It shows that as of the end of 2007, there were two dozen firms that managed $100 billion or more in the domestic fixed-income segment. Here are the top ten:

– Allianz Global Investors of America (parent of Pimco) – $424.5 billion
– BlackRock – $423.2 billion
– Legg Mason – $328.2 billion
– Prudential Financial – $245.7 billion
– Vanguard Group – $239.4 billion
– Fidelity Investments – $183.1 billion
– Goldman Sachs Group – $180.0 billion
– Franklin Resources – $158.4 billion
– MetLife – $158.1 billion
– Bank of New York Mellon Corp. – $155.0

The buzz in the financial world is that Pimco and BlackRock have already submitted applications (the deadline was yesterday) and are likely to be chosen. They are among the firms on the list with the biggest potential conflicts of interest.

Pimco has been an aggressive investor in mortgage-backed securities (MBS) over the past year. In September 2007 it announced the creation of a whole fund devoted to distressed debt. In May 2008 it bought a $2.55 billion MBS portfolio from Israel’s Bank Hapoalim. In August 2008 Pimco was reported to be increasing its distressed-debt portfolio by $5 billion. BlackRock purchased a $15 billion portfolio of subprime mortgage securities from UBS last May.

Pimco and BlackRock are not the only fixed-income money managers heavily exposed to MBS and subprime investments. Legg Mason, for example, posted its first quarterly loss ($255 million) in 25 years earlier this year. The deficit came about after it was forced to pump nearly $2 billion into its money market funds to cover MBS-related losses. Legg Mason’s Western Asset Management (WAMCO) unit made some bad MBS bets, prompting several pension funds to terminate its services.

Whether they’ve done well or poorly in their MBS investments for private clients, these money managers should not have the federal bailout put in their hands. They could use their position either to try to make up for their losses or maximize returns from the distressed debt they purchased at bargain-basement prices.

Treasury has announced interim conflict-of-interest guidelines that would not exclude firms such as these from participating in the bailout. More likely is that they would simply disclose their conflicts and then be given a green light to proceed. Whether they end up doing more to benefit their public client or their private ones is an open question.

There is a lot of talk these days, at least from John McCain, about the need for a “cool hand at the tiller” of government. Presumably, that would apply not only to the White House but also to the $700 billion bank bailout that is under way. Yet the man just chosen by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to oversee the massive purchase of toxic securities once wrote an anti-Japanese tirade that was published as a letter to the editor in an automotive trade journal.

Neel Kashkari (photo) has received lavish praise for his intelligence and his character since Paulson announced his selection earlier this week. While some observers are surprised that so much responsibility is being given to someone who is only 35 years old and only six years out of business school, that seems to be outweighed by the gee-whiz descriptions of a career that has included stints as an engineer for a NASA contractor and a vice president under Paulson at Goldman Sachs as well as his current position as Assistant Treasury Secretary for International Economics and Development. His immediate boss at Treasury told the Associated Press that Kashkari, who describes himself as a “free-market Republican,” is “very analytic…very fact-based…very unemotional.”

Perhaps now, but the December 26, 1988 issue of AutoWeek published a letter from Kashkari (available in the Nexis archive of that publication) that read as follows:

I’m sick of it! Japanese corporations are always taking credit, or in some way relating their pathetic attempts at quality or success, to that of some American or European accomplishment. For years, the Japanese have been stealing computer secrets from IBM and other American computer firms and have tried to build computers with that stolen technology. Now they’re copying others’ cars. Nissan built that car which looks like an out-of-proportion Ferrari Testarossa. The real Testarossa is a fabulous display of Italian craftsmanship. But no, Nissan had to build a copy cat. As far as I’m concerned, the so called “great” Mazda 929 is an out-of-proportion Lincoln Continental. And now this new Lexus is said to be so great. But the Japanese cannot be original at anything. Their cars fail, but someone else’s car is a winner. Then they decide to make a body style change — and suddenly they have a winner, which looks exactly like the other person’s car! I am really sick of it.

Now, with their new Honda CRX ad they are, in some odd way, comparing the CRX to the world’s most advanced nuclear bomber, which is an example of American technology, not Japanese. I can stand no more!

The editor of the magazine felt compelled to insert the following note after the letter: “We do not concur with Mr. Kashkari’s views nor the racial animosity that is apparent in his letter.”

It is true that Kashkari, whose parents are from Kashmir, was only 15 years old when he wrote the letter, but if the Senate gets around to holding a confirmation hearing on his new post, it might be worth asking him how much his views have changed.

Meanwhile, the Treasury Department is moving ahead with the process of hiring outside asset managers to carry out the Troubled Asset Relief Program. The close of business of Wednesday was the deadline for asset managers to submit applications to participate in the Treasury’s big buy-up. That was only two days after the solicitation was announced.

The impression that the managers will be chosen from a small group of players was reinforced by the requirement that an applicant already be involved in managing “at least $100 billion in dollar-denominated fixed-income assets.” According to a ranking published last May in Pensions & Investments, there may be only a handful of firms, mainly Legg Mason and Pimco, that would meet the requirement. The winners are supposed to be announced next week.

Paulson’s solicitation also addresses the question of conflict of interest, which he had been ignoring before being pressured by Congress. The interim guidelines require that applicants disclose potential conflicts, but there is no indication that firms will necessarily be disqualified because of them. In fact, the guidelines come right out and say that conflicts may be waived. The bailout is open for business.

CORRECTION: I belatedly realized that the Pensions & Investment ranking cited above refers only to assets managed for pension funds. A fuller list that appeared in Institutional Investor magazine shows that there were 24 firms managing $100 billion or more in domestic fixed-income assets as of the end of 2007. More than a handful but still not a very large group. Goldman Sachs, the alma mater of both Paulson and Kashkari, is number seven on the list.

Buried inside the Big Bailout bill that the Senate just approved and the House will vote on tomorrow is a section that has received insufficient attention. Titled “Preventing Unjust Enrichment,” Section 101(e) states that the Treasury Secretary, when spending his $700 billion bank roll, “shall take such steps as may be necessary to prevent unjust enrichment of financial institutions.”

This is one of the numerous safeguards added to the original bare-bones proposal submitted to Congress by Secretary Paulson. But what exactly does it mean? One might argue that the whole bailout is a way of unjustly enriching Wall Street and the big banks.

The language of the bill provides a very narrow definition: The Treasury is not supposed to pay more for an asset than the financial institution paid for it in the first place.

Isn’t this superfluous? The point of the bailout is to allow banks and others to unload “troubled” assets – in other words, ones that have been sinking in value. Unless Paulson intends to spend like a drunken sailor, there would no reason to pay more than the original price. The real issue is whether the feds will pay the depressed market price for those assets or something a bit higher.

It’s not unusual for legislation to have redundant safeguards, but if you keep on reading in the bill you will see that there is a big exception to the seemingly unnecessary provision: It “does not apply to troubled assets acquired in a merger or acquisition, or a purchase of assets from a financial institution in conservatorship or receivership, or that has initiated bankruptcy proceedings.”

As E. Scott Reckard pointed out in the Los Angeles Times earlier this week, this seems to open the door for banks that have bought weaker competitors during the crisis – such as JPMorgan Chase, which swallowed Washington Mutual last week – to sell the toxic assets they inherited in those deals to the federal government at a big profit. Is the sky the limit in how much Paulson can pay for their junk?

Much was made of the fact that the shotgun marriage meant that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation did not have to pay out anything to WaMu depositors, but JPMorgan may make out like a bandit when it comes time to play “let’s make a deal” with Treasury’s asset managers.

The financial sector has contributed more than $300 million to federal candidates in this election cycle – split evenly between Democrats and Republicans – but it apparently was not enough. Today a motley coalition of free-market-loving right-wingers, fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats and anti-corporate left-wingers came together to deliver a stunning rebuke to the Wall Street bailout plan concocted by the Bush Administration and the leadership of both major parties.

The House’s defeat of the $700 billion plan represents (for now, at least) a breakdown in the tradition of acceding to the wishes of Big Business and Big Finance, especially at times when those monied interests need to be saved from their own excesses. It has taken a financial crisis of monumental proportions to expose as never before the rift between the needs of the corporate elite and those of the rest of us.

It has been fascinating to watch this play out across the political spectrum. Conservatives clinging to the ideology of market supremacy find themselves in a clash with corporate elites who have jettisoned their laissez-faire sentiments in favor of unprecedented government intervention. Joining the die-hard conservatives are progressives who oppose the Paulson plan but see the crisis as an opportunity to push for even more aggressive intervention, on behalf of working families.

In between are corporate-friendly Democrats and Republicans who were forced to lash themselves to the mast of the Bush Administration’s wildly unpopular plan. They were proud to have forced Paulson to abandon his original power-grabbing proposal in favor of a bill that included an abundance of oversight and disclosure as well as some safeguards for taxpayers. Yet by retaining same basic bailout concept, they were seen as doing little more than putting lipstick and various other cosmetics on a giant pig of a plan.

By taking Bush and Paulson at their word on the necessity of the bailout, mainstream Democrats, who made up most of the losing side in today’s House vote, have put themselves in a precarious position. This was captured in a vignette in today’s Washington Post account of the marathon weekend negotiations on the ill-fated bill. After the conclusion of a post-midnight press conference, Secretary Paulson, who had been showing signs of exhaustion during the talks, locked arms with Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York “and leaned heavily on the senator for support as they walked away.”

By trying to act “responsibly” in this tumultuous situation, the Democratic leadership may be literally and figuratively taking on the albatross of the Bush Administration and its Wall Street supplicants. Whether this is a trap that was deliberately set for them is hard to determine at this point, but the result is that Democrats find themselves out of step with the new anti-corporate zeitgeist.

The apparent sea change in attitudes toward Big Business may have repercussions far beyond the current credit crisis. It may also be felt, for example, at the state and local level. Here at the Corporate Research Project and Good Jobs First, we deal all the time with another sort of corporate giveaway – the often huge economic development subsidy packages given to companies ranging from Wal-Mart and Cabela’s to Dell and Toyota.

While we tend to critique those subsidies because they lack job quality standards and take funds away from public schools, there are libertarians who oppose them as an unwarranted intrusion in the market. Perhaps the right-left uprising against the bailout can help us form more effective strange-bedfellows alliances in our work as well. Look out, Corporate America, you may get outflanked from both sides.

This piece is being posted simultaneously on Good Jobs First’s Clawback blog.

If Congress approves the $700 billion bank bailout the Bush Administration is trying to force on the country through the threat of an economic mushroom cloud, the plan would not be carried out by career public servants. As in the war in Iraq, much of the grunt work would be contracted out to private companies. This raises the question: who will be the KBR or the Blackwater of the Big Bailout?

If William H. Gross has his way, the role will be played by his Pacific Investment Management Company, known as Pimco. Gross (photo) has been shamelessly promoting his firm as having the expertise and experience for the challenging job of using public money to buy up securities that in many cases may be nearly worthless.

When Pimco’s name first surfaced earlier this week, it appeared that the firm was trying to cash in on what would presumably be a bonanza of brokerage and asset management fees. Perhaps recognizing that this amounted to crisis profiteering, Gross gave an interview to the New York Times in which he offers Pimco’s services on a pro bono basis: “If the Treasury wanted to use our help, it would come, you know, free and clear.”

Is this one of the most selfless acts ever committed by a profit-making company, an egotistical play for personal glory, or a spectacularly audacious marketing ploy?

Gross can afford to be generous. His firm earns hefty fees each year managing portfolios (focusing on bonds) worth more than $800 billion for its clients, who are mainly “high net worth individuals” and institutional investors such as pension funds, university endowments and foundations. According to the Forbes 400, Gross has a personal net worth of some $2 billion.

The reason Gross’s offer may be taken seriously is that for the past year or more he was warning of the dangers of the subprime mortgage crisis while many in the financial world were trying to cover up the magnitude of the problem.

That’s all well and good. But it is also the case that Pimco is up to its neck in the crisis. Despite Gross’s concerns, the firm loaded some of its bond funds with mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Last May Pimco spent $2.6 billion to purchase the MBS portfolio of the Israel’s Bank Hapoalim. After Gross published a column last year in which he in effect called for the kind of rescue now being considered by Congress, blogger Mike Shedlock noted Pimco’s MBS exposure in a post titled “Bill Gross Wants PIMCO Bailout.”

This is the first of the problems with Pimco’s noble offer: it might not be so noble. PIMCO would in effect be helping to bail itself out. And perhaps also its parent, German financial conglomerate Allianz Group, which earlier this year wrote down the value of some $1.8 billion in asset-backed securities.

And that leads to the second problem: conflict of interest. Could Pimco, or any money manager for that matter, avoid the temptation to structure its purchases on behalf of the Treasury in a way that benefits its own private clients? The temptation might be even greater if the firm were not earning fees.

Even Gross’s friends are worried. Today’s New York Times piece quotes Luis Maizel of LM Capital Group as saying: “If you put this in Bill’s hands, Pimco is going to come out great, and I don’t know that the government will.”

Sounds like something you might say about the performance of Blackwater or KBR in Iraq.

A number of leading Democrats and Republicans expressed strong misgivings on Monday about the autocratic plan for bailing out Wall Street that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson wants to ram through Congress. It remains to be seen whether this is mere posturing or serious opposition.

Critics are focusing on vital issues such as cost and oversight, but a lot less attention is being paid to the mechanics of Paulson’s proposal – specifically, the question of who would carry out the federal government’s purchase of $700 billion in “troubled” securities from banks. As I noted in my post on Sunday, the draft legislation circulated over the weekend includes a provision that seems to allow Treasury to contract out the process. Treasury then put out a fact sheet making it quite clear it intends to use private asset managers to manage and dispose of the assets it acquires, though the document does not specifically allude to the purchasing. Paulson himself referred to the use of “professional asset managers” during an appearance on one of the Sunday morning talk shows.

It amazes me that there is not more outrage over this aspect of the plan. Paulson seems to be leaving open the possibility that the same firms that are being bailed out could be hired to run the bailout. This would mean that institutions receiving a monumental giveaway of taxpayer money could turn around and earn yet more by acting as the government’s brokers. Aside from the unseemliness of this arrangement, this would be an egregious conflict of interest.

The alternative proposal floated by Senator Chris Dodd, which accepts Paulson’s language on contracting out, includes a section on conflict of interest. But rather than stating what the rules should be, the draft leaves it up to the Treasury Secretary to do so. There were reports on Monday night that Treasury would go along with the inclusion of a conflict-of-interest provision.

Paulson’s approach to the Big Bailout, particularly the insistence that there be no punitive measures for the banks, shows he is not the right party to oversee ethical issues. Paulson apparently can’t help himself. He still has the mindset of a man who spent more than 30 years working on Wall Street, at Goldman Sachs. He is a living example of the perils of the reverse revolving door: the appointment of a private-sector figure to a key policymaking position affecting his or her former industry.

The weak conflict-of-interest provisions Paulson is likely to impose would probably not address the inherent contradiction in having for-profit money managers running the bailout program. Even if Treasury chooses managers whose firms are not getting bailed out, there is still the danger that they will use their inside knowledge to benefit their non-governmental clients (and themselves) or will collude with buyers to the detriment of the public.

A Reuters story that ran on Monday reported that a leading contender for a federal money management role is Laurence Fink and his firm BlackRock, which was involved in managing the portfolio of Bear Stearns when that firm was sold to JPMorgan Chase as part of an earlier bailout. Last March, BlackRock, which is 49-percent owned by Merrill Lynch (now part of Bank of America), announced it was forming a venture to “acquire and restructure distressed residential mortgage loans.” Will Paulson see that as a conflict of interest – or more likely as a credential?

Letting financial firms that have profited from the mortgage crisis manage the bailout gives the impression that we are permanently in the grip of Big Money. To Paulson’s way of thinking, that’s not a problem, but it could make a bad plan much worse.