Botched Bailouts

I've been following the government's many recent financial bailouts (Fannie and Freddie, AIG) and interventions (Term Lending and Auction Facilities, short selling rules, RTCII) fairly closely.

There has been much discussion of how deregulation of the financial industry lead to this crisis - especially in the case of the (former) five firms that 'enjoyed' net capital exemptions from the SEC - and how the government's recent actions smack of socialist policies.

Until Friday, I had not read anything about how these actions may have exacerbated the financial crisis. Jim Jubak does a superb job of outlining how these rescues have actually made some things worse. The whole article is worth reading, but the highlights are below.

[I]n the name of creating an orderly liquidation of a company such as Lehman Bros., they create a mad scramble to get paid before the bankruptcy court can act.

By wiping out the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac preferred stock, the Fed and Treasury killed off any possibility that some other financial institution in need of capital could raise cash by selling these dividend-paying shares.

[T]he Treasury and Fed have ensured that no conservative, income-seeking investor in his or her right mind would buy preferred stock from a troubled financial company looking for capital.

After drawing a line in the sand and saying no more bailouts, the Fed and Treasury ponied up $85 billion in taxpayer cash to go into the insurance business. Their excuse for the about-face: Though the Fed had planned for a Lehman bankruptcy, it hadn't modeled a failure at AIG and couldn't predict the consequences of letting the company go into bankruptcy. That's not reassuring.

Source:
Botched rescues are killing markets
Jubak's Journal 9/19/2008 12:01 AM ET

No Longer Seeking Alpha

I will stop frequenting and reading Seeking Alpha because of this:


UPDATE: It appears Seeking Alpha and Barry Ritholtz reached an agreement, as Seeking Alpha has renamed "The Big Picture" as "The Macro View".

Lehman Finds Suitor

Breaking News: Lehman To Be Acquired by Tooth Fairy

The market responded with enthusiasm to reports that the Tooth Fairy has agreed to acquire Lehman. The purchase price has not yet been determined and will be set by Dick Fuld wishing upon a star, clicking his heels three times, and being transported back to that magical place where Lehman still sells for over $70 per share.

In related news, Lehman has agreed to sell all of its level III capital, including CDOs, ABSs, pet rocks, baseball cards, slightly used condoms, and credit default swaps written by MBIA and Ambac. Lehman’s level III capital will be acquired for 150% of its face value by Tinkerbell, who will carry it off to Neverland to be fed to a crocodile. Lehman is financing 90% of the acquisition at an interest rate that has not been announced; Tinkerbell’s up-front payment consists of a handful of pixie dust, three crickets, and a bullfrog. Analyst Dick Bove estimates that the bullfrog could eventually be transformed into three princes and a pumpkin coach. The deal gives Lehman no recourse to any of Tinkerbell’s assets other than the Level III capital. If Tinkerbell defaults, Lehman’s successor entity will stick its hand down the crocodile’s throat and attempt to get it to regurgitate. The firm’s historical value-at-risk analysis shows that sticking your hand down a crocodile’s throat is completely safe.

Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson issued a statement: “I am delighted that SWFs (Sovereign Wealth Fairies) continue to express confidence in the terrific values represented by American financial institutions. As I have been saying since August of 2007, this shows that the crisis is now over.”

Meanwhile, the SEC has announced an investigation of mean, evil, bad short-seller David Einhorn. While out for a beer with a friend, Einhorn reportedly suggested that the Tooth Fairy does not exist and that wishing upon a star is not a wholly reliable price discovery mechanism. Christopher Cox, chairman of the SEC, said, “Vicious rumors attacking the Tooth Fairy will not be tolerated. Our entire financial system and indeed the American way of life depend on the Tooth Fairy and wishing upon a star. How else could one value level III capital appropriately?” The SEC is reportedly planning to set up re-education camps for short-sellers.

Source:
Lehman, the Tooth Fairy and the Revenge of the Short-Sellers
Posted by Heidi N. Moore
Deal Journal, August 25, 2008, 10:56 am

New R-Finance Group on LinkedIn

I've created a new group on the professional networking site, LinkedIn. It is oriented toward finance useRs. The goal of this group is to help members:

• Reach other finance useRs (you decide if group members can contact you directly)
• Accelerate careers/business through referrals from R-Finance group members
• Know more than a name; view other members' rich, professional profiles

Click here to join. Joining will allow you to find and contact other R-Finance members on LinkedIn.

70 61 63 6b

I posted earlier about creating the new opentick package. Since it requires reading/writing binary data to a socket connection, I wrote some utility functions to made the conversion to/from raw data easier.

These functions are tangential to opentick and potentially useful to others, so I created yet another package... called pack. pack attempts to replicate the functionality of PERL's pack and unpack functions.

The functions are probably best illustrated via an example:

> computer <- pack('C A3 v x V a*', 3, 'foo', 21, 50000, 'bar')
> computer
[1] 03 66 6f 6f 15 00 00 50 c3 00 00 62 61 72
> human <- unpack('C/A v x V A3', computer)
> human
[[1]]
[1] "foo"

[[2]]
[1] 21

[[3]]
[1] 50000

[[4]]
[1] "bar"

>

(For those curious, the post title is pack in hexadecimal... sorry, but I find it amusing.)

Make the Right Choice

Lifehack.org has a nice post about how to make quality choices. One way to analyze choices is to ask yourself why, 5 times. I have to share this hilarious excerpt below:

Ask why – five times

The Five Whys are a problem-solving technique invented by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. When something goes wrong, you ask “why?” five times. By asking why something failed, over and over, you eventually get to the root cause.

Why did my car break down? A spark plug failed. Why? It was fouled. Why? I didn’t get a tune-up. Why? I was too busy playing GTA4. Why? Because I’m miserable and lonely and the people in the game are the only ones that really love me.

See? Your car broke down because you’re a sociopath.

The Past Month

I haven't posted much the past month because I have be remodeling my kitchen. We installed a ceramic tile floor, all new cabinets, new counter top, all new appliances. It's been an adventure, since I've never done any of it before.

I've been working on updates to TTR and making small progress on the opentick package, but blog posts have taken a back seat. I will have much more time to program and post when the kitchen is finished in ~2 weeks.