The Evergrande crisis is bringing back memories of 2006-08 and comparisons with Lehman’s collapse. Since I had a front seat to the Great Credit Bubble, I have a few observations.
The Credit Bubble of 2006-08 and the crash that followed were pretty easy to identify and to predict. I did it, and I’m no genius. All it took was some common sense and a bit of research. Not serious scientific research - finance is not quantum physics - just data put together from sources easily accessible to everyone. So, I looked; it was immediately obvious that residential mortgage lending had gone from a boring workaday business to a free-for-all, involving piles of obscure ultra leveraged derivatives.
The immediate culprit, over-leveraged real estate, led to a collapse that was easily understood and affected the wider public. I mean, everyone understood real estate and mortgages, even if they had no clue about MBS. CMO, CDS, CDO and the rest of the derivative alphabet soup.
The collapse immediately spread to the banking/financial system for a very simple reason: everyone trusted that a AAA or AA rated CMO or CDO meant it was gild-edged. In fact, it was an artificial construct that depended on very spurious assumptions. Basically, most of them were little pieces of mortgage bird$#it that were put into a pot, stirred vigorously and…. Voila, they were magically transmuted into foie gras. It was called structured finance and financial engineering; in fact, it was greedy loony alchemy.
Mark Twain said “it ain't what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain’t so”. In 2006-07 everyone knew for sure that they were buying expensive duck liver.
Before the Credit Bubble collapsed, everyone knew for sure that residential mortgages just didn’t default much - right?
But then, defaults soared - see chart below. The assumption upon which
all those alphabet soup securities were based was wrong, so they all
came crashing down like blocks in a Jenga game.
Delinquency Rate Of House Mortgages
Today, despite Evergrande’s troubles it is not really possible to point a finger to a single overpriced and over-leveraged asset class. Yes, there are NFTs and meme stocks that are priced absurdly, but they are not going to produce a systemic shock on their own. A can of “trading sardines” selling for $1 million won’t create a domino effect (see bottom of today’s post for an explanation). I think that while Evergrande may be in big trouble, it is pretty isolated. Crucially, it has not generated hundreds of billions in ultra leveraged credit derivatives which could annihilate bank and insurance company balance sheets all over the world. Evergrande is not Lehman. But something else may be an even bigger problem.
Back to the present: what is the biggest assumption that we make in markets? What is it that we all know for sure?
The US is rated AAA/AA+ and will never default, right?
The US government has never defaulted. Its bonds are considered ultra safe and act as the foundation of our global dollar-based monetary system. We know that they are safe, so we use them everywhere, from banking to pension fund assets. We also use them, one way or another, as benchmarks for just about every other financial product in existence. Treasurys are very, very deeply and widely interconnected with our global economic system. We take them for granted.
So, how safe are Treasurys, really?
Let’s start with the basics. Proper debt service is based on two things:
- The ability to easily cover interest payments.
- The ability to easily refinance.
- Point B: The US federal govt. is very highly indebted versus its income
Federal Debt/Annual Tax Receipts
Another way to look at US debt service is how much money is left over to cover interest payments after basic expenses are paid, eg salaries. For Fiscal Year 2022 the government projects receipts of .$4.12 trillion and outlays of $6.01 trillion. The budget deficit is thus estimated at $1.89 trillion. It was much worse for FY2020 due to COVID, but even so the 2022 deficit will be enormous by historical standards.
Salaries and national defense outlays for 2022 are budgeted at $4.86 trillion. In other words, just paying for those two wipes out all revenue: $4.12-4.86 trillion = - $740 billion. The US is running a huge deficit before interest payments, ie it has a very large primary budget deficit. Outlays for interest for FY22 are estimated at $305 billion and will obviously have to be covered by more debt. Again, if this was a business banks would be very leery to lend.
- Point C: The US cannot cover interest without going deeper into debt, or slashing expenses and/or raising taxes significantly
Finally, are investors taking all of the above into account when lending to the US? Yes, to a limited extend they are getting more cautious. The "purest" way to look at default risk is through Credit Default Swaps (CDS). As of yesterday, the US is ranked #9 as a credit risk, below even Belgium and just a notch above Ireland (higher CDS prices equal higher default risk).
Never mind Evergrande, maybe what we know but just ain't so is that the US cannot default. Or at least, that its debt is priced at a level that does not adequately reflect the risk of default. Given the upcoming debt limit process and the highly polarized political scene in Washington, we should maybe rethink what we know for sure.
————————————————-
The following was posted originally on Nov. 2, 2009
The Trading Sardine
Andy convinces Billy to buy a can of sardines at a high price by telling him how wonderful they taste. Billy, being greedy, decides to resell them to Charlie for a profit at an even higher price by convincing him, too, about how great these sardines are. The process is repeated several times until the last buyer, let’s call him Zebediah, pays a million bucks to Yorick for a can of the “world’s absolute best sardines – EVER”.
Well, Zebediah decides to open the can and eat the sardines, only to discover they are ordinary, plain sardines. Furious at being swindled, he yells at Yorick:
Yorick shrugs and replies…
“Hey Zebediah, you are such a schmuck. Those were not eating sardines – them were trading sardines!"
Hi Hell,
ReplyDeleteI was looking at your CDS table..... Hong Kong is AA+ but has CDS of 32.50... Higher than Portugal; does that mean a high risk of Hong Kong default?
Best Regards,
Chicken
The market is pricing HK debt as a higher credit risk than the US, yes. Not a HIGH risk, but higher in comparison.
Deletecool! thanks for explaining.
DeleteCapitalism, Chinese style...
ReplyDeletehttps://i.redd.it/qkce6n9d7ip71.jpg
fun right?... hope we get to rule the world. =)
Deletebtw,... when you see this kind of news getting wide coverage, it means the party has decided to kill the person.... Such stuff happens all the time; no one, domestically or internationally can talk about it.
Delete