Subject: Roubini - If Lehman collapses

If Lehman collapses expect a run on all of the other broker dealers and
the collapse of the shadow banking system *

Nouriel Roubini | Sep 13, 2008

It is now clear that we are again – as we were in mid- March at the time
of the Bear Stearns collapse – an epsilon away from a generalized run on
most of the shadow banking system, especially the other major
independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley,
Goldman Sachs). If Lehman does not find a buyer over the weekend and the
counterparties of Lehman withdraw their credit lines on Monday (as they
all will in the absence of a deal) you will have not only a collapse of
Lehman but also the beginning of a run on the other independent broker
dealers (Merrill Lynch first but also in sequence Goldman Sachs and
Morgan Stanley and possibly even those broker dealers that are part of a
larger commercial bank, I.e. JP Morgan and Citigroup). Then this run
would lead to a massive systemic meltdown of the financial system. That
is the reason why the Fed has convened in emergency meetings the heads
of all major Wall Street firms on Friday and again today to convince
them not to pull the plug on Lehman and maintain their exposure to this
distressed broker dealer.

Let me elaborate in much detail on these issues…

This bail-in of investors is the opposite of a bailout of investors like
the one that was done in the case of Bear Stearns and Fannie and
Freddie. It is thus akin to the bail-in of investors that was done in
the case of LTCM in the summer of 1998 and the bail-in of the interbank
creditors of Korean banks in the winter of 1997. I wrote in 2004 with
Brad Setser an entire book titled “Bailouts versus Bailins: Responding
to Financial Crises in Emerging Markets” that discusses these policy
tradeoffs in financial crises where you have runs on the liquid
liabilities of either illiquid and/or insolvent countries. Those were
the international equivalent of the banks runs and financial crises that
we are now seeing in the cases of Bear Stearns, Lehman and Fannie and
Freddie.

Since government bailouts put at risk public money and create moral
hazard Treasury and the Fed decided that they need to draw a line
somewhere after the bailouts of Bear Stearns creditors, of Fannie and
Freddie and all the other actions aimed at backstopping the financial
system. These actions have included the creation of the TAF, TSLF, PDCF,
the use of the FHLBs to provide liquidity to distressed mortgage
lenders, the provision of Treasury liquidity to the FHLBs, the outright
purchase of agency MBS by the Treasury, the swapping of two thirds of
the safe Treasuries of the Fed for toxic illiquid securities of banks
and non banks, etc. So after having created the mother of all moral
hazard with their actions (including the biggest bailout of all, i.e.
the rescue of Fannie and Freddie) the Fed and Treasury are playing a
chicken game with the financial system. Tim Geithner told clearly to the
heads of all the major Wall Street firms that if they pull the plug on
Lehman and Lehman collapses they are next in line for a run on their
institutions. So if a buyer for Lehman is not found (or even if it is
found and the counterparty lines are still pulled) not only Lehman will
collapse but the run will extend to all of the other major broker
dealers and banks that are the counterparties of Lehman.

The Fed may delude itself in thinking – as its stress models suggest –
that the systemic risk of a collapse of Lehman are less serious than
those of Bear Stearns: afterall Lehman is less involved into CDSs than
Bear was and now both Lehman and the other major broker dealers have
access to the discount window with the PDCF. A collapse of Lehman
instead will have as much of a systemic effect as the collapse of Bear
for many reasons: Lehman is larger than Bear was; Lehman is a major
player in a variety of key financial markets; all the other major Wall
Street institutions are interconnected with Lehman in dozens of
different types of counterparty activities; the PDCF support of the Fed
is neither unlimited nor unconditional, i.e. investors cannot assume
that Lehman or any other broker dealer can borrow unlimited amounts with
no conditions from the discount window. Thus, a collapse of Lehman would
trigger a panic and a potential run on all sort of other broker dealers
and also on other distressed financial institutions like banks (WaMu)
and insurance companies (AIG) and smaller member of the shadow financial
system (distressed and highly leveraged hedge funds, etc.).

The reason why Lehman is having a hard time to find a buyer is that it
is most likely insolvent. If you had to mark to market the value of it
illiquid and toxic assets (the $40 billion of commercial real estate
assets, its remaining residential MBS and CDOs, its holdings of real
estate private equity funds) Lehman is most likely insolvent (i.e. has
negative net worth with liabilities well above its impaired assets). So
leaving aside the potential and now dubious value of its franchise (an
option to the value of a much slimmed down financial institution) no
financial institution should be paying even a single penny to buy an
insolvent firm. That is why all the potential suitors of Lehman (such as
Bank of America and others) are waiting for the government to provide
another sleazy Bear Stearns deal where the government would buy at
higher than market value the toxic assets of Lehman (the commercial real
estate assets for example) so as to make the net worth of the remaining
institution positive and worth buying. But such action – borderline
illegal in the case of Bear as pointed out by Paul Volcker – would be a
scandal in the case of Lehman and severely exacerbate the moral hazard
problem.

But here lies the conundrum of this Lehman crisis: no one seems to want
to buy for a positive price Lehman unless there is a public subsidy
(taking off their toxic assets off the firms’ balance sheet). The
government cannot afford to provide the subsidy as the moral hazard
problems are becoming severe. But then if on Monday no deal is done
Lehman collapses and goes into Chapter 11 court and you have the
beginning of a systemic financial meltdown as the run on the other
broker dealers will start. Thus, what Fed and Treasury are trying to do
this weekend is another 1998 LTCM bailin or Korea 1997 bailin, i.e.
trying to convince all the major institutions to either support a
purchase of Lehman or maintain their exposure to Lehman if no buyers is
found. Can this bail-in work? It is not clear as there is a major
collective action problem: you can’t only convince half a dozen major
Wall Street firms to maintain their exposure to Lehman. You need also to
convince all the other counterparties of Lehman (including the hedge
funds and the other broker dealers and banks) not to roll off their
claims and credit to Lehman. This is a much more messy collective action
problem and coordination game than in the case of LTCM and Korea where
the number of involved counterparties was more limited (less than 20 in
each case).

Paulson and Bernanke and Geithner (the troika managing this financial
crisis) have all made public statements in the last few month to the
necessity of finding an orderly way to close down – rather than bailout
– a major and systemically important non bank financial institutions:
the embarrassment and losses for the Fed that the bailout of the
creditors of Bear led made it paramount to avoid another Bear like
bailout. That is why they are now playing tough with Lehman and its
creditors. But in this game of chicken the Fed and the Treasury may end
up being the ones to blink. Faced with the risk of a generalized run on
the other broker dealers they may decide that greasing again a deal for
the purchase of Lehman may be less costly and less risky than testing
whether the system can orderly work out a collapse of Lehman (something
that is highly uncertain). Even in the case of the Bank of America
purchase of Countrywide such public subsidy was significant (the FHLB of
Atlanta lent to Countrywide over $50 billion and Bank of America has
most likely received plenty of tacit forbearance from the Fed to support
its takeover of an insolvent Countrywide). So implicitly or explicitly
the Fed and the Treasury may decide – however reckless and moral hazard
laden that choice may be – to provide some explicit or implicit subsidy
to a private purchase of Lehman.

The trouble is that, in spite of all public statements regarding the
need to provide an orderly demise of large broker dealers, the Fed and
the Treasury have done nothing to create such insolvency regime for such
broker dealers. So the only option for Lehman – if a buyer is not found
- will be the one of ending up in Chapter 11 and trigger massive losses
on its counterparties that will in turn trigger a run on such
counterparties.

In February of 2008 I predicted – in my “12 Steps to a Financial
Disaster” – that one or two major broker dealers would go bankrupt. A
month later Bear Stearns went bust and the collapse of the other ones
was avoided for a time by the most radical change in monetary policy
since the Great Depression, i.e. the creation of the PDCF that extended
the lender of last resort (LOLR) role of the Fed to non-bank
systemically important broker dealers (i.e. all of the bank and non bank
primary dealers of the Fed).

I next argued in June that such action would not prevent a run on other
broker dealers such Lehman as to avoid a run you need both deposit
insurance and unlimited and unconditional access to the Fed LOLR
support. I also discussed why Lehman was next in line for a collapse and
why the PDCF would not prevent a run on Lehman.

I also argued in follow-up pieces that, in a matter of two years, no one
of the remaining independent broker dealers (Lehman, Merrill Lynch,
Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs) would survive as: 1. their business
model is now impaired (securitization is semi-dead); 2. they will need
to be regulated like banks given the PDCF support and thus have lower
leverage, higher liquidity and more capital that will erode their
profitability; 3. Their severe maturity mismatch – borrowing very short
term and liquid, leveraging a lot and lending and investing in more long
term and illiquid ways – makes them very fragile – in the absence of
deposit insurance and in the presence of only limited LOLR support by a
central bank – to bank like run that are destructive even of illiquid
but otherwise solvent institutions. Thus all such broker dealers need to
merge with larger financial institutions that have a commercial banking
arm and thus access to stable and insured deposits and to true LOLR Fed
support. That process of unraveling of independent broker dealers
started with Bear Stearns; now it is moved to Lehman; tomorrow Merrill
Lynch will be on line; and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will be
next. No one of them can and will survive as independent entities. So,
the Fed and Treasury should advise them all to start finding a large
international partner (international as almost no domestic partner is
now sound to take them over) and merge with such partner before we get
another Bear or Lehman disaster.

The step by step, ad hoc and non-holistic approach of Fed and Treasury
to crisis management has been a failure so far as plugging and filling
one hole at the time is useless when the entire system of levies is
collapsing in the perfect financial storm of the century. A much more
radical, holistic and systemic approach to crisis management is now
necessary.

What we are facing now if the beginning of the unraveling and collapse
of the entire shadow financial system, a system of institutions (broker
dealers, hedge funds, private equity funds, SIVs, conduits, etc.) that
look like banks (as they borrow short, are highly leveraged and lend and
invest long and in illiquid ways) and thus are highly vulnerable to bank
like runs; but unlike banks they are not properly regulated and
supervised, they don’t have access to deposit insurance and don’t have
access to the lender of last resort support of the central bank (with
now only a small group of them having access to the limited and
conditional and thus fragile support of the Fed). So no wonder that this
shadow banking system is now collapsing. The entire conduits/SIV system
has already collapsed with the roll-off of their ABCP financing; next is
the collapse of the broker dealers (Bear, Lehman and soon enough the
other ones) that rely mostly on unstable overnight repos and other very
short term funding for their financing; next will be hundreds of poorly
managed hedge funds that will face a tsunami of redemptions; and finally
runs on money market funds that are not supported by a large financial
institutions or other smaller member of the shadow banking system as
well as highly leveraged and distressed private equity funds cannot be
ruled out either.

This is indeed the most severe financial crisis since the Great
Depression and occurring at a time when the US is falling in a now
severe consumer led recession. The vicious interaction between a
systemic financial and banking crisis and a severe economic contraction
will get much worse before there is any bottom to it. We are only in the
third inning of a nine innings economic and financial crisis. And the
only light at the end of the tunnel is the one of the incoming train wreck.