robin blackburn

THE SUBPRIME CRISIS

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n the summer of 2007 many leading banks in the us and Europe were hit by a collapse in the value of mortgage-backed securities which they had themselves been responsible for packaging.* To the surprise of many, the poisonous securities turned out to constitute a major portion of their ultimate asset base. The defaults fostered a credit crunch as all financial institutions hoarded cash and required ever widening premiums before lending to one another. The Wall Street investment banks and brokerages haemorrhaged $175 billion of capital in the period July 2007 to March 2008, and Bear Stearns, the fifth largest, was ‘rescued’ in March, at a fire-sale price, by JP Morgan Chase with the help of $29 billion of guarantees from the Federal Reserve. Many of the rest only survived by selling huge chunks of preferred stock, with guaranteed premium rates of return, to a string of ‘sovereign funds’, owned by the governments of Abu Dhabi, Singapore, South Korea and China, among others. By the end of January 2008, $75 billion of new capital had been injected into the banks, but it was not enough. In the uk the sharply rising cost of liquidity destroyed the business model of a large mortgage house, leading to the first bank run in the uk for 150 years and obliging the British Chancellor first to extend nearly £60 billion in loans and guarantees to its depositors and then to take the concern, Northern Rock, into public ownership. In late January Société Générale, famous for its skill at financial engineering—indeed the winner that month of the coveted ‘Derivatives Bank of the Year Award’ from Risk magazine—reported that a 31-year-old rogue trader had lost the bank over $7 billion. The SocGen management began unwinding the terrible positions taken by this trader on 21 January, contributing to a share rout on the exchanges and, it seems, to an