Investment Banking and California's Municipal Bonds

California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer is a man with a lot of questions. On March 29, 2010 his office sent letters to Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley asking about their Credit Default Swap practices. In his letter, he expressed worries that these firms - who are hired to market California's General Obligation (GO) bonds and also sell many other municipal debt issuances across the United States -- also participate in the credit default swap (CDS) business of betting against these bonds.

Mr. Lockyer notes that the State of California has never defaulted on its' obligations, he asked each bank to explain why they both sell for the State on one hand and bet against the State with the other. Responses were due back by April 12, 2010 and the State of California posted all of the responses on the Treasurer's website at this URL http://www.treasurer.ca.gov/cds/index.asp.

Why is there a market in California defaults? Basically an opportunity for arbitrage - what I like to call a mathematical gap between reality and financial modeling - exists. In an article published by Bloomberg News on April 19 on L.A. Unified's latest bond issuance, they note that California has "the lowest-rated U.S. state, is ranked Baa1 by Moody's, three steps above non-investment grade, and A- by S&P, four levels above." Bookies call this the "spread" and so does Wall Street.

The language of the banks responses to California are steeped in the murky language of finance but translated into English the banks say the answer is because there's money to be made playing both sides of the street. In the finance business it's acceptable for institutions to happily take fees and commissions both on the "sell side" as they market California's debt to primary buyers and on the "buy side" making markets - that means promoting business - for people betting against that debt using, among other things, CDS. Of the banks asked, the response by Goldman Sachs was the most direct.

They explained that working both sides is fine and dandy because a "Chinese Wall" separates the two sides of their activities. The message is that California - or any municipality - is a client only of the sell-side. California is not a client of the buy-side on the other side of the "Chinese Wall. That's some other "client" in need of insurance because the rating agencies say your State isn't a risk free investment. In effect, they take the business position that the job of a Wall Street middleman is to make as much for the house from both business channels. The other banks admit they do this too though the demeanor of their letters seem somewhat less ebullient probably remembering that there's money to be made on the sell side.

The letters tell California State Treasurer Lockyer that CDS is actually a good thing because someone buying insurance on the predicted mathematical default probability somehow means they are creating a bigger market to buy more of it. Huh? That's what the letters say. The common theme says because someone buying California GO bonds can also buys CDS protection they can lever up and buy more GO bonds. They've hedged their position against California defaulting on its' debts even though it never has. Remembering that their sell-side services business is also lucrative, they also say that California's bonds are among the most desirable on the planet. This brings up two questions. One, are you sure that Chinese Wall is sound proof? And two, why do you need default insurance on bonds that don't default again?

Citigroup, one of California's staunchest sellers of tax-exempt municipal issuances, did note with what I felt was a hint of sympathetic frustration in their response that they thought the buy-side hype about California's so called modeled default spreads has been overblown and at times out of control. Insurance is about selling perceived risk even if that perception is purely mathematical. So maybe we need to ask if, just as people wonder if some ratings were pushed up to help sell certain types of now toxic securities, might there also be a need to see if we need to weed out systemic pressures to push risk spreads on CDS arbitrage?

If your head isn't hurting too badly yet read on. It gets weirder.

On February 17, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment (ARR) Act. Part of this stimulus package created something called the Build America Bonds program known in finance circles as BAB's. Most municipal bonds are tax-exempt financial instruments. BAB's aren't. They are federally subsidized taxable bonds sharing some of the characteristics of corporate bonds.

BAB's opened a door for taxable bond investors, who had previously not been as active in this area, to become active speculating on municipals. In case you haven't figured it out by now the finance universe consists of micro-communities that get along about as well as the bi-polar opposites of the U.S. middle-class, Progressives and Tea Partiers. Taxable bond investors are used to working with corporate bonds. Unlike sovereign debt, corporations carry tangible default risks and corporate bond investors live by the motto that it's prudent to take on insurance to hedge their positions. So what happens when these people come to play in the municipal bonds sector?

Their deeply ingrained habits about the "investment tripod" of position, hedge and financing will begin to alter the market for municipal bonds. Corporate bond CDS spreads are based on the perceived problems of the company. Anything and everything imaginable is fair game for arguing what the spread should be. And these folks can be a mite jittery. Can Municipal BAB's be any less risky than a heavily government subsidized entity like General Motors? And so California's legendary polar politics, budget woes and legislative gridlock become the shrapnel far outweighing the payment history tapes.

Reading their letters, all of the respondents noted that they weren't quite sure what this means. Alignments of unsteadiness like that are significant in finance. BAB's are new, a very recent invention on the Obama Administration's watch. All of them were careful to assure California that this won't affect demand for the State's General Obligation bonds. But the letters also said the CDS desks of these institutions fully intend to continue to make markets from this new source of transaction clients interested in purchasing CDS insurance on things like BAB's. They also indicated the possibility that the CDS' written on these BAB's may result in an uptick in both rational and irrational analysis of municipal issuer default quality. That could make all municipal bonds harder to sell. Given that the credo of charge what the market will bear is almost irresistible to Wall Street, one needs to ask if the law of unintended consequences just manufactured another future systemic challenge to deal with.

One additional note, the statutory issuance window for BAB's ends in January, 2011. However, other federally subsidized taxable bond programs such as the Qualified School Construction Bond (QSCB) program authorized under the very recent Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act also exist. So it's not like these things are going to disappear. Per the Bloomberg article mentioned earlier, QSCB's trade more thinly than BAB's so the pressure to help them liquefy is even stronger.

My point is that finance is never quite as simple as calling for solutions one can make with a machete. Bill Lockyer's stack of letters deserves a broader reading. They are a canvas to learn a little more about the perturbations we make to the very complex system that is the U.S. economy.

Thanks to Tom Petruno from the L.A. Times for pointing me at the letters.