An Unsavory Rehash of the Ethical Failures

Painful as it is, let's take a look at some of the moral and ethical failures of the financial industry, focusing on those that led directly to the current financial crisis.

Ethical Failures in Subprime Lending

Back in the day, people obtained their mortgages from their local banker, whom they likely knew personally. The banker held the mortgage paper on his balance sheet, and hence cared very much whether the paper was good. That was inefficient, of course, so matters began to evolve rapidly. By the twenty-first century the system worked like this:

• Mortgage brokers developed to find borrowers. Because these brokers were paid on quantity (“How many mortgages did you bring me today?”), not quality (“How many good mortgages did you bring me today?”), and because they weren't carrying the paper on their own balance sheets, far too many of the brokers cared not at all whether the borrowers were engaging in thoughtful transactions or were being set up for heartbreak and penury. Once a mortgage was approved, the broker got paid and would never see the borrower again. To say that very large numbers of mortgage brokers behaved abominably is merely to state the obvious.
• Banks approved the mortgages after (maybe) reviewing the applications, but the banks had no intention of holding on to the paper. Instead, they needed to build leverage into their balance sheets, which meant getting this paper off the balance sheet as quickly as possible. (The paper was sold into mortgage pools that were in turn sold to unsuspecting investors.) Underwriting standards declined and eventually disappeared altogether. Did the banks care whether their shoddy practices resulted in lending money to people who couldn't possibly pay it back? Did the banks care what was likely to happen to the ultimate investors in this paper? Not likely. In fact, commercial banks scrambled to acquire subprime lending banks so they could get ever more deeply into this seedy game.
• Because banks wanted to leverage their balance sheets (reusing their lending capacity over and over again), a market developed for pooled mortgages. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the various megabanks and investment banks put these pools together and then sold them on to investors. Did the financial firms care about the quality of the paper they were selling, or the possible harm to investors who bought it? No, this was a volume operation: The more pooled vehicles the firms could form and the more they could reduce their costs (i.e., no actual checking on the quality of the paper), the higher the profits. What about the consequences for the end investors, many of whom were loyal, long-term clients of the financial firms?
• And what about the rating agencies, the last line of defense between a scamming industry and the ultimate investors? Turns out that conflicts of interest were so rife in the industry that at least one state attorney general is investigating the “symbiotic relationship” between the agencies and the banks and investment banks whose securities they were supposedly rating objectively. Were the rating agencies in the pockets of the financial firms, essentially selling their ratings to the highest bidder?

After a few years of this, is it any wonder that the subprime business blew up, destroying investor capital, wreaking havoc in the lives of overleveraged borrowers, and destroying confidence in the institutions, individuals, and regulatory agencies that not only allowed all this to happen, but in many cases actively cheered it on?

Ethical Failures among the Subprime Lending Banks

I think it likely that there is a special circle in hell reserved for subprime lending banks like Countrywide Financial, which were at the epicenter of the subprime collapse and at the epicenter of the ethical collapse. Looking back, it's clear that the main raison d'être of the subprime banks was to sell mortgage loans to people who couldn't afford them. Screaming ads were created to dupe people into applying for these mortgages, and new, highly misleading mortgage products were developed (teaser rates, Alt-A, etc.) to ramp up volume. Mortgage brokers were paid big fees to lure a steady stream of suckers into the scheme. There was a time when this would have been seen for what it was: predatory lending.

Strangely enough, prior to Countrywide and the rest, there had been a long and reasonably distinguished history of subprime lending in the United States. But here is the interesting point: Prior to Countrywide, lenders to less-than-prime borrowers employed more intensive underwriting, not less intensive underwriting, before making their loans. Loans to less creditworthy borrowers require more careful background checks, more complex structuring, different legal, collateral, and repayment conditions, and so on. Countrywide and others substituted volume for hard work, giving the entire subprime lending industry a bad name.

I single out Countrywide both because of the scale of its subprime lending activities and, especially, because of the egregious conduct of its CEO, Angelo Mozilo. Mozilo didn't build his huge personal fortune because he was smarter or harder working or more creative than other financial executives, nor even because he was luckier than others. He built it on predatory lending and by buying influence in high places. I described the predatory lending activities of Countrywide above, so let's turn to the sordid business of currying favor.

It is now clear that Countrywide attempted to suborn the support of key politicians, regulators, and other influential figures via a secret internal program (headed by loan officer Robert Feinburg, who became a whistleblower) that offered below-market terms on mortgages to individuals Countrywide wanted to curry favor with. This VIP-loan underwriting unit handled mortgage applications from what was known inside Countrywide as “Friends of Angelo;” that is, important figures Mozilo wanted to have in his pocket. The known list of “bribees” includes U.S. Senators, former Cabinet officers, Fannie Mae CEOs, judges, and many others.

Ethical Failures in Auction Rate Securities

To understand just how egregious the ethical failures were among the (many) financial institutions that sold Auction Rates Securities (ARS) to their clients, let's back up and look at the nature of ARS. The idea behind these securities was to create an instrument that would have a long-dated maturity but an interest rate similar to very short-term paper. This was attractive to municipalities and large nonprofit institutions that issued bonds, and it would also be attractive to individuals and institutions who wanted a cashlike risk level but a higher yield than cash. The way it worked was that a long-dated tax-exempt bond would be issued that would pay an interest rate determined by Dutch auctions held (usually) weekly or monthly.

Banks and investment banks eagerly structured such bonds on behalf of municipal clients, and even more eagerly hawked them to investors. Typically, an investor would receive a cold call from his broker, who would tout the exceptional benefits of ARS: “Safe as cash but with a higher yield!” The trouble was that ARS were “safe as cash” only so long as the periodic auctions were successful. If an auction failed, the issuer would pay a much higher penalty rate and the investor in the security would find that his funds were frozen. Some cash!

To ensure that the auctions wouldn't fail, the banks and investment banks agreed to support the auctions by stepping in if there weren't enough bids. In other words, regardless of what the fine print in the underwriting agreement said, the municipalities issuing ARS and the investors buying them clearly expected the banks to stand behind the paper. If there was no expectation that the banks would do so, then there could be no claim that the paper was safe. Thus, the ethical issue was clear from the outset: Either the banks had no obligation to support the auctions and hence the paper was very risky, or the banks did have such an obligation and the paper was safe.

I'm not suggesting that the financial firms intended to rip their clients off from the beginning, but I am suggesting that when the going got slightly tough (and after making big profits on ARS for years), the banks bailed, leaving their clients in the lurch. Specifically, the banks wanted to have their cake and eat it, too: Make money structuring the bonds and auctions and make more money selling ARS to investors, then abandon their clients when trouble first reared its head. The financial firms stood by and allowed ARS auctions to fail, causing issuers to pay egregious penalty interest rates and causing investors' funds to freeze up. Both the issuers and the investors were long-term clients of the banks.

Ethical Failures among the GSEs

GSEs are government-sponsored entities like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They were²—let's face it—bizarre combinations of private corporations and federal bureaucracies. They were shareholder-owned corporations whose shares trade in the public market, but they were formed by the Federal government and their credit is backed by the government. The GSEs have been political footballs for many years, with (I simplify) Democrats defending them for their role in making housing affordable and Republicans vilifying them for usurping what should be the job of the private markets.

But let's sidestep the political heat and simply note that the role of the GSEs is simplicity itself: Using their government backing to borrow cheaply in the markets, the GSEs buy mortgage loans from banks, securitize these loans, and sell them to investors. Once the loans are off the banks' balance sheets, the banks can make more loans (thereby making mortgage loans more widely available). What a great racket! The investors who buy the mortgage-backed securities bear the interest rate risk and the taxpayers bear the default risk. What is it, exactly, that the GSEs bear? That's right—nothing! A 10-year-old could run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and not make a hash of it, to say nothing of, say, a GS-13 government bureaucrat. So how was it, exactly, that the CEOs of the GSEs screwed them up so badly?

The specific problem was that the GSEs tried to increase their profitability by not just buying loans, bundling them, and selling them, but also by holding billions of dollars worth of these mortgages on their own balance sheets. Anticipating how credit-challenged borrowers will behave, how housing prices will behave, and how these factors will affect the value of complex mortgage paper isn't a game for 10-year-olds or for government bureaucrats, and, as it turned out, it certainly wasn't a game for the ethically challenged CEOs of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (who leveraged these institutions' balance sheets 75-to-1). When the loans went bad, both the revenues and the balance sheets of the GSEs collapsed, and that was the end of them.

In any event, the more fundamental problem lay in the queer nature of these entities, half publicly held corporations and half federal bureaucracies, and in the ability of the senior executives to manipulate this hybrid nature to their own advantage. Thus, in their role as publicly held corporations the GSEs mainly behaved like government bureaucracies, and in their role as government bureaucracies they mainly behaved like publicly held corporations. The subprime debacle was a perfect example of this. When private firms began to make large numbers of loans to subprime borrowers, that should have been welcome news to a government bureaucracy—the private sector was stepping up to the plate, making housing more widely available, so there was no need to put taxpayer money at risk.

But the CEOs of the GSEs didn't see it that way. In their government bureaucrat role (making housing available) they behaved instead like private corporations, insisting that they couldn't lose market share. (“There goes the value of my stock options!”) But in their publicly held corporation role, once subprime came unglued, the CEOs behaved like government bureaucrats, running to Congress for protection from the heat coming their way.

Indeed, because the mission of the GSEs was so simple, it's much more instructive to think of them not as players in the mortgage markets, but simply as get-rich-quick schemes for their senior executives. Thus greed-fueled executives like Franklin Raines, Leland Brendsel, Daniel Mudd, and Richard F. Syron made huge fortunes managing a completely risk-free operation. They hobnobbed with politicos in Washington to protect their sinecures and shamelessly pandered to public opinion with pious claims about their roles in keeping housing affordable. In fact, the GSEs under these executives so badly mismanaged themselves that the housing market has collapsed, thousands of homeowners have been thrown into the streets, and the taxpayers are about to be on the hook for billions of dollars to bail these blockheads out. Meanwhile, as noted, the executives got vastly rich.

The Contemptible Public Disclosures of Financial Firms

Publicly held firms in the United States have very strict obligations when it comes to making public disclosures. Among the more important obligations is to report material events in a timely and accurate way and to avoid making overly rosy claims about their business and financial condition. Failure exposes a firm and its executives to shareholder lawsuits and to SEC fines and penalties.

But was anyone listening to the public disclosures made by financial firms over the past year? Over and over again we were treated to impossibly optimistic statements from CEOs of financial firms, statements that were clearly designed to lure shareholders and customers into a false sense of security. Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase told investors at the Investment Company Institute in May 2008 that the worst of the credit crisis “was 75 percent to 80 percent over.” Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman told his shareholders at their annual meeting in April 2008 that “[W]e're at the end of the third quarter, beginning of the fourth quarter” of the crisis. At his own shareholder meeting, John Mack, then CEO of Morgan Stanley, said “You look at the subprime problem in the U.S., you would say we're in the eighth inning or maybe the top of the ninth.” Even as the crisis was deepening toward the middle of 2008, Josef Ackermann, then CEO of Deutsche Bank, assured investors that the credit crisis was at the “the beginning of the end.”³

Perhaps the best example of all occurred between December 2007 and September 2008 at Lehman Brothers. Late in 2007, Lehman's CFO assured the public that the firm was in fine shape and certainly wouldn't need to raise additional capital. The echoes of this breathtaking claim had barely died away when Lehman raised $6 billion (!) of additional capital, profoundly diluting the existing shareholders, who had just been assured that all was well. Despite frequent and ongoing assurances from Lehman's CFO and CEO that all was well, the firm continued to spiral downward, failing completely in September 2008. Were the Lehman executives, and those quoted above, simply delusional? Or were they engaged in something more disreputable; that is, lying to the public, to their customers, to their investors, and even to their own employees? Yet the regulators sat on their hands.

Shorting the Securities You Are Selling to Your Clients

Quite possibly the single most egregious example of unethical conduct in the financial industry was the practice of aggressively selling subprime debt-loaded mortgage paper to clients of a firm, while simultaneously and secretly shorting that paper for your own proprietary capital. The prime blackguard appears to have been Goldman Sachs, which noted in its 3Q07 quarterly report that, “Significant losses on nonprime loans and securities were more than offset by gains on short mortgage positions.” It's possible—bizarre as it sounds—that this practice isn't illegal if you are an investment bank, but it is certainly disgraceful. If Goldman were, say, a registered investment advisor, and was selling subprime paper to its clients while secretly selling that paper short for its own account, the firm would be shut down by the regulators and its executives banned from the industry. But Goldman not only got away with this practice, but actively bragged about how smart it was.

Paulson Bernanke & Co. and the Conspiracy of Silence

The question naturally arises: While all this (and more) was going on, where was the U.S. government and its appointed regulators? Don't they exist to advocate the interests of consumers and investors against the combined might of the financial industry? And isn't it an important part of their responsibilities to head off trouble before it happens, rather than trying to clean up the mess afterward? And yet, from the beginning of the crisis in mid-2007 (and even long before), these folks have either been active cheerleaders for a financial industry whose actions should have been repulsive to them, or they have kept quiet and averted their gaze as one scurrilous activity after another paraded across the front pages.

Let's be clear—I'm not complaining about the actions PB&Co. took once the industry's unethical conduct began causing meltdowns of important companies. History will be the judge of that. But long before the companies collapsed, the Feds kept quiet and kept invisible. Where were they during the ARS scandal? It was the state attorneys general who knew a fraud when they saw it, while the Feds sat idly by. Where were the Feds when Goldman Sachs was secretly shorting mortgage debt it was aggressively selling to its customers? Where were the Feds when the GSEs were abusing their birthrights and mismanaging themselves into oblivion? Where were the Feds when financial firm CEOs and CFOs were lying to investors?

And where, most prominently, were the Feds while the financial firms were leveraging themselves into almost certain oblivion? PB&Co. claim to have been blindsided by the collapse of the entire investment banking industry, but if so it was an intentional refusal to see what was happening before their eyes. I have four words for them: Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). Ten years ago LTCM overleveraged itself and so terrified the New York Fed that it organized a hasty rescue—not of LTCM and its investors, who were wiped out, but of the many other financial firms who had eagerly traded with LTCM on the way up and now didn't want to take their medicine.

We've had 10 long years to figure out what went wrong at LTCM and how to ensure that it wouldn't happen again. What were PB&Co. (and their predecessors) doing during those 10 years? They are like modern-day Rip Van Winkles, suddenly awakening in 2008, looking around and saying, “How could this have happened?”

A poor taxpayer might be inclined to think that the Feds cared far more about Wall Street than about Main Street as we were treated to the following spectacles:

• The bailout of Bear Stearns (taxpayers on the hook for at least $29 billion).
• The bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (taxpayers on the hook for God-knows-what, but many billions).
• The banning of so-called “naked shorting”⁴ just for a handful of favored financial firms, and eventually the banning of short selling for all financial firms in the United States (but not, of course, for nonfinancial firms).
• The opening of the Federal discount window for “dealers” (investment banks) for the first time since the Depression.
• The bailout of insurance giant AIG, by guaranteeing $85 billion of obligations. (This was later raised by another $38 billion—pretty soon we will be talking about serious money.)
• The $50 billion bailout of money market funds.
• The (so far) $700 billion bailout of every financial firm that has toxic paper on its balance sheet.

However important the TARP legislation might be, is it any wonder that public opinion was so solidly opposed to it that the House of Representatives at first voted it down?