``We've created an absolute disaster,'': Is that like, "It's alive!"

Excellent post in Bloomberg which I might well comment on more than once:

"Evil Wall Street Exports Boomed With `Fools' Born to Buy Debt

By Mark Pittman"

"While the collapse was most visible in the stock markets, the cause was the loss of confidence in the world's biggest bond market, structured finance. So far, it has led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the disappearance or takeover of more than a dozen banks, including three storied Wall Street firms, and almost $3 trillion in government expenditures and guarantees to contain the contagion"

What is structured finance?

"The bundling of consumer loans and home mortgages into packages of securities -- a process known as securitization -- was the biggest U.S. export business of the 21st century. More than $27 trillion of these securities have been sold since 2001, according to the Securities Industry Financial Markets Association, an industry trade group. That's almost twice last year's U.S. gross domestic product of $13.8 trillion.

The growth over the past decade was made possible by overseas banks, which saw the profits U.S. financial institutions were making and coveted the made-in-America technology, much as consumers around the world craved other emblems of American ingenuity from Coca-Cola to Hollywood movies. Wall Street obliged, with disastrous results: two-thirds of a trillion dollars in bank losses, about 40 percent of them outside the U.S."

How does securitazation work?

"Securitization is a shadow banking system that funds most of the world's credit cards, car purchases, leveraged buyouts and, for a while, subprime mortgages. The system, which pools loans and slices up the risk of default, made borrowing cheaper for everyone, creating a debt culture that put credit cards in wallets from Seoul to Sao Paolo and enabled people to buy luxury cars and homes. It also pumped out record profits for banks, accounting for as much as one-fifth of their revenue over the last decade.

Beginning about three years ago, investment banks revved the system's engine to boost earnings. They raised revenue by funding more subprime mortgages and cut costs by relying increasingly on the $4.2 trillion sitting in U.S. money-market funds. As it turned out, those decisions would prove fatal."

We went from where to where?

"Before the invention of securitization, banks loaned money, received payments and profited from the difference between what the borrower paid and the bank's funding cost.

During the mid-1980s, mortgage-bond traders at Salomon Brothers devised a method of lending without using capital, a technique at the heart of securitization. It works by taking anything that has regular payments -- mortgages, car loans, aircraft leases, music royalties -- and channeling the money to a trust that pays bondholders principal and interest."

Understand this: Anything.

"The word ``securitization'' implies safety. Investors with less appetite for risk buy higher-rated securities and get paid first at lower interest rates. Those with a bigger appetite get paid later and receive more interest."

Just like hedge funds suggest hedging your bets.

"Securitization's biggest innovation was off-balance-sheet accounting. If a bank couldn't sell a bond or didn't want to, the asset could be sold to a trust within a so-called special- purpose entity, incorporated in a place such as the Cayman Islands or Dublin, and shifted off the books. Lending expanded, and banks still booked profits.

With this new technology, a bank could originate $100 million in loans, sell off some to investors, transfer the rest to a special-purpose entity and not have to hold any capital. The profit could be as much as 1.25 percentage points of the amount loaned, or $1.25 million for every $100 million issued.

``The banks could turn a low return-on-equity business into one that doesn't use any equity, which was the motivation for this,'' said Brad Hintz, a Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst and former chief financial officer at Lehman. ``It becomes almost like a fee business because it requires no capital.''

Let's see, off-balance-sheet-accounting, no capital. Sounds great.

"Exporting Debt

As securitization caught on, borrowing increased. U.S. consumer debt tripled in the two decades after 1988 to $2.6 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve. Foreign banks used the new technology to expand lending, seeking borrowers on their home turf.

``One of the things the United States exported overseas was a debt culture,'' Haley said."

And people worry about our exports. Go figure.

"Starting around 2005, securitization began to rely more on short-term money-market funds for financing. This was especially true for securities made by pooling other bonds, known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. Investors were loath to buy long-term debt of issuers that didn't have a track record, so new issuers sold asset-backed commercial paper that matured in less than a year. While money markets are the cheapest way to finance, they can also be the most dangerous for borrowers because they can mature as soon as the next day.

``What happened in 2005 was that because of subprime and some other changes, commercial paper and asset-backed securities offered a bigger spread than anything that had ever been in the market before,'' said Deborah Cunningham, chief investment officer of Federated Investors in Pittsburgh, who oversees $235 billion in commercial paper. ``It was hundreds of basis points, as opposed to 10 or 20 basis points before.''

SIVs, banks and CDOs sold trillions of dollars of asset- backed commercial paper between 2005 and 2007 in maturities ranging from nine months to overnight. In the U.S., the amount outstanding marched higher almost every week beginning in April 2005, peaking at $1.2 trillion for the week ending Aug. 8, 2007".

Oh dear.

"Once money-market funds began to be tapped for financing, Ocampo said, ``it created a huge appetite for high-yield assets, far more than could be originated on a sound basis.''

To accommodate the demand, banks funded more subprime mortgages, with an average life of seven years, replacing car loans with an average life of three years and credit-card bonds paid off within 18 months.

Among conservative lenders, that rang an alarm: Bankers are taught to avoid such mismatched funding, in which a lender has to pay back money before the borrower has to pay the principal.

``Most of the terrible things happening now are because of the presence of money-market assets, taking what used to be long-term funding and making it short-term,'' Bruce Bent, 71, who started the first money-market fund in 1970, said in an interview in July"

But we must always satisfy demand, even if it leads to penury.

"Yet asset-backed securities weren't Bent's undoing. His fund also owned $785 million in Lehman debt, bought before the firm filed for bankruptcy Sept. 15. In the two days following the bankruptcy, Reserve clients asked to pull about $40 billion from the $62.5 billion fund, and its net asset value fell to 97 cents. It was the first time that a money fund ``broke the buck,'' or fell below $1, in 14 years. The fund is now being liquidated, and Bent hasn't given an interview since.

Reserve Primary Fund's implosion, and the subsequent seizing up of two Commonfund portfolios used by universities and endowments to hold cash, triggered a panic in U.S. money markets, cutting off this form of credit to industrial companies and banks. No one could be sure whether the banks held securitizations that had dropped in value, making them insolvent. That set off a series of bank takeovers and bailouts around the world, including a $64 billion capital injection by the U.K. government into that nation's financial institutions and 400 billion euros in loan guarantees pledged by Germany"

Let's keep hearing those wonderful arguments about Lehman causing the run of reserve clients being a good moral hazard cleanser.

"Also tarnished, if not blackened, is the securitization business itself. Sales of European asset-backed securities, including bonds for car loans and credit cards, fell by 40 percent to 12.7 billion euros in the second quarter, and CDO sales fell by two-thirds to 10 billion euros. In the U.S., mortgage bonds issued by entities not affiliated with the government plummeted to $10.8 billion in the first half of the year, one-twentieth of the $241 billion sold in the same period in 2007".

How unjust.

A tale told by...well, you get the point.

What an interesting narrative. I can't wait for the movie.