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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29603 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The core of this is a concept called "Mark to Market." The Enron documentary (The Smartest Guys in the Room. 10/10 would recommend) spends some time on it.

It's also the same core mechanism that fucked the whole mortgaged-backed securities market in 2008-2009.

Mark to Market was never really intended for intermediate goods with weird cashflow and long-term appreciation dynamics (like houses). It definitely was never intended for use with Magic Internet Money.

Mark to Market was originally conjured up as a way for oil extraction companies to better value their inventory (oil) as daily markets could fluctuate pretty wildly. The thing there, however, is that that oil was both (a) a thing you had on hand that had a long established market and (b) a commodity that functioned ... like a commodity! There was a spot price and ... that was kind of it. Yeah, there are futures markets, but it's not like a house that has a monthly cashflow (rent or mortgage) but also an asset appreciation profile determined by all sorts of things (mainly location, but also real improvements and hyper local supply/demand profiles). There's just so much more inherent complexity in things like houses that Mark to Market can't really be a stable valuation scheme. [:1]

For a digital currency with zero non-digital assets backing it you're marking-to-a-made-up-market with a formless thought experiment of an asset. Yes ... that's really, really, really obvious dumb as shit.

[:1] To be fair, there are people who will disagree with this and make a (good) point that as long as markets stay liquid enough, they can perform accurate price discovery. I actually think 2008-2009 strongly supports that argument. The crisis point wasn't mortgages going down in value per se, it was in the lack of overnight and short term cash to help firms shift their positions and recapitalize. Firefighting by Bernanke et al. goes into the (quite technical) details of this. To "yes, but," one last time, there are also those who would say that the sheer size of the MBS market and all of the related assets and liabilities made it impossible to "soft land", regardless of any amount of short term credit and liquidity. I can't really refute that because we decided not to test it out back in '09. If we had, and gotten in wrong, we'd be having this conversation in person beneath the rubble of Midgar.

Firefighting by Bernanke et al. goes into the (quite technical) details of this.

One of the points that got bandied around in the aftermath of that crisis was that the US government could have simply made the mortgage repayments on every delinquent mortgage for less money than they actually ended up handing out - but furthermore, that this wouldn't actually be enough to prevent the crash from happening due to the precarious financial structure involved. Given that you seem to know a fair bit about what happened, is there any truth to this?

Three points worth considering.

  1. "Speed of Money" - It's hard to overstate how fast moving the 2008 financial crisis was. It wasn't hour to hour, it was minute to minute. We actually got lucky that some of the critical events took place late in the week so that there was a weekend (markets not open) to stop, think, and re-orient. The government paying back all of the mortgages directly would've taken too long. Remember during COVID how everyone got checks? How long did it take between announcement and the check arriving. IIRC, a couple weeks (at best). Even when Congress faces a crisis and passes a bill, the machinery of government can only go so fast. The best thing to do is what they did - telling the market to help itself out as much as possible while also passing TARP and constantly repeating "the full faith and credit of the USA is behind this."

  2. Because everything was moving so fast and the scale of the collapse was unprecedented, Congress, the Fed, and the Treasury didn't exactly know if what they were planning on doing was legal. This is also in Firefighting. It wasn't just saying, "have general counsel look at this" it was literally unknown constitutional waters with (allegedly) the potential for personal liability. You can have differences of opinion with Bernanke et al., but those guys had to make some Big Time decisions under massive stress that could've (maybe) landed them in jail no matter how noble their intent.

All of this is to say, the government blanket paying mortgages might have some legal traps within it. Even if it did come back "clean" the time taken to review it would've been catastrophic (see point number 1)

  1. Organizations don't have all of the information and sometimes getting it is illegal. Remember AIG? They were an insurance giant who collapsed in 2008. This was (to oversimplify) because they wrote a bunch of insurance policies to other financial entities that went really bad really fast. Well, why didn't AIG just do better diligence? (1) There were layers and layers of counter parties, derivatives, and reinsurance. Impossible to trace through all of it (2) In some cases, getting a complete picture of a counter-party's risk or exposure is illegal as it would involve revealing trade secrets. How do mortgages fit into this? At the time, I'm not sure it was readily apparent that mortgages were the root cause of all of this. The crisis itself was on liquidity and short term financing for big financial instiutions, everyone could see that. What caused that may have been more mysterious, so I don't think the Gov't was in a position to quickly say "let's get these mortgages figured out." And, to beat the dead horse, taking the time to figure it out would've been the wrong move.

2008 is fascinating to me for tons of reasons. People experienced a lot of pain in the years following and it has a non-trivial part in the political situation we have today. But it could've been so, so, much worse, and I think we avoided it just barely.

Thank you for the well thought out reply! Of course I actually think that the guillotines not being rolled out for the people responsible for the crisis was a societal failure, but I appreciate your analysis here.

For a more detailed discussion of how mark-to-market accounting affected the 2008 crisis, see chapter 12 of Peter Wallison's book Hidden in Plain Sight.

At the peak of the panic in 2008, the [mark-to-market] value of available-for-sale non-agency mortgage-backed securities declined by almost 25 percent from the value they would have had under historical cost accounting. Needless to say, if historical cost accounting had been permitted at the time, it might have had a major stabilizing effect on public perceptions of the financial condition of many large financial firms.

 

Companies required to write down the value of their mortgage-backed securities when they had not actually suffered any losses were desperately aware of the absurdity of their situation.

Mark to Market was originally conjured up as a way for oil extraction companies to better value their inventory (oil) as daily markets could fluctuate pretty wildly.

Not really. Mark to Market (in technical accountancy terminology, "fair value accounting") first comes in as a way for financial institutions (banks, trading firms, brokerages etc,) with assets whose price varied based on movements in liquid financial markets to better assess their current solvency than historical cost accounting. It was brought in after the S&L crisis - a big part the reason why the S&L crisis got so bad is that you had institutions that were accounting-solvent (because 30-year fixed rate mortgages with interest rates that were now below-market were on the books at par) but clearly could not meet their obligations over a 30-year time horizon, and so they had an incentive to double down with what was in effect other people's money. (SVB was in the same situation, but had a lot of tightly-networked, financially sophisticated depositors with balances over the FDIC limit, so they got taken out by a run).

The thing that made Enron special was that they applied the mark-to-market accounting that made sense for the energy trading division of the firm to things that would not usually be marked to market like long-term contracts for wholesale gas supply, and that this allowed them to recognise revenue and profit earlier than competitors. It also meant that the business model wasn't sustainable because the contracts didn't produce long-term profits, so Andrew Fastow ended up having to double down repeatedly until he ended up ratting on Jeffery Skilling for a light sentence.

You are correct!

I had an EPIC brain snap and swapped the Mark to Market for Master Limited Partnerships in discussing their original application to Oil and Gas. Wow, yeah, my mistake. Thanks for correction.

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