"The Big Short" dwells mistakenly on an asset class that represented just 2% of bank assets and whose role in the global crisis has been grossly distorted

See ‘Big Short,’ Big Hooey Forget mortgages. A change of accounting rules could have avoided the crisis by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. of the WSJ. Excerpt:

"Widely lauded for many virtues, especially comedic, the film nevertheless dwells mistakenly on an asset class that represented just 2% of bank assets and whose role in the global crisis has been grossly distorted. These highly rated securities were manufactured out of lower-rated, or subprime, mortgages. They got their triple-A rating because bond insurers and lower-rated security holders agreed to absorb the first losses. And, of course, even so, defaulted mortgages don’t become worthless—they default to the value of the repossessed house.

So how “toxic” were these securities? Well after the worst of the meltdown, Washington’s own Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission noted that “most of the triple-A tranches . . . have avoided actual losses in cash flow through 2010 and may avoid significant realized losses going forward.”

"Or as this column pointed out at the very start of the subprime crisis in 2007, the “fluctuations in the S&P 500 wipe out as much wealth every ho-hum day.”

The “big shorts” paid millions to Goldman Sachs and others to concoct convoluted contracts that let them bet against these securities, and to find banks to take the opposing, or “long,” bet. (The irony being that, in this way, the movie heroes actually supported the manufacture of more subprime housing loans.) If they had really seen what was coming, our heroes would have saved themselves a lot of trouble and expense and simply shorted the big banks and the entire stock market—a bet that any day trader can make from the comfort of his bathrobe.

Far from being the lonely seers their fans imagine, the big shorts benefited from seeing the words “housing bubble” 425 times in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times in the seven years leading to the crash. In 2004, the FBI warned of an “epidemic” of mortgage fraud.

Even John Paulson, the biggest short of all, according to later court testimony by a top deputy, didn’t foresee Armageddon, only that the “housing market had appreciated excessively and that housing prices would stabilize or flatten out or decline.”

The truth is a lot more interesting. The global crisis was a manufactured event—manufactured out of radical uncertainty about how government would treat the biggest banks, 2% of whose assets consisted of suddenly illiquid but not worthless mortgage securities. That may seem a mouthful, but Vince Reinhart, who had just retired as a top Fed official, stated matters plainly when he said the whole game had become “predicting government intentions.” 

What’s more, this colossal snafu was telegraphed a long way off. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in late 2007, had tried to round up private funding for a Super SIV (structured investment vehicle) to relieve banks of these securities and any accounting markdowns. Had he succeeded, or had the government simply waived its own rules to let banks hold these securities on their books at non-firesale values, the crisis would have been avoided.

Understand what we’re saying: The government saw early on how its regulatory machinery had become a trap for itself and the banks but couldn’t act fast enough, coherently enough, and apolitically enough to forestall unintended consequences. Yet at another level, as we’ve pointed out many times, confidence actually held up pretty well. Whatever the uncertain outcome for bank shareholders and wholesale creditors, the public showed strong faith that Washington, having learned from the 1930s, would uphold the solvency of the banking system for depositors."

The Problem With The Movie "The Inside Job"

See A Review of HBO's "Too Big To Fail" by Phillip Swagel. Excerpt:

"In contrast, Inside Job is all about assigning blame. The documentary makes a moralistic case that the crisis was all the fault of Wall Street villains and their helpers. To be sure, mistakes can cross over into villainy - some creators of toxic securities must have known that they were not doing God's work. But Inside Job takes this to a populist extreme, assuming malevolent motivations and spattering blame through ambush interviews of hapless crisis participants who agreed to speak on camera (I took a pass when the filmmakers called me in the spring of 2009). The portrayal of Eliot Spitzer is especially ironic, with the former New York Governor shown as a saint commenting on all the sinners.

In truth, the striking feature of the crisis was how many different people committed mistakes: banks and other firms made bad loans and packaged them into subprime securities; rating agencies rubber stamped them as AAA; pension funds bought the junk assets; government officials missed the mounting problems; and so on. But surely also at fault are the multitude of individual homebuyers who turned into mini-speculators during the housing bubble. These folks are off the hook in Inside Job."

Phillip Swagel is a non-resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Policy, where he teaches courses on international economics and is a faculty associate of the Center for Financial Policy at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. He was Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department from December 2006 to January 2009.