possible.
Chapter One
The Meeting
In our minds, our franchise is the ultimate money-back guarantee, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
—GARY DUNTON, PRESIDENT OF MBIA, 2001
AS THE TAXI PULLED AWAY from Grand Central Station on a late November afternoon in 2002, Bill Ackman was bracing for a fight. The 36-year-old cofounder of a hedge fund called Gotham Partners had been summoned to a meeting with Jay Brown, the chief executive officer of MBIA Inc. MBIA’s general counsel wouldn’t say what Brown wanted to discuss, but Ackman had a suspicion. Gotham had placed a bet against the company that could make the fund $2 billion if MBIA filed for bankruptcy. The hedge fund planned to issue a critical research report questioning the bond insurer’s triple-A rating.
Ackman had already described the situation in an October 2002 letter to his investors. Our newest and largest [short] investment is on an extremely highly levered, yet triple-A-rated financial institution, which we believe has inadequate reserves, undisclosed credit-quality problems, aggressive accounting, and substantial unconsolidated indebtedness contained in off-balance-sheet special-purpose vehicles,
he wrote. Ackman explained that the position had the potential to generate a return of approximately five times the fund’s total assets if it was successful.
Though little known outside of Wall Street circles in 2002, MBIA ranked as one of the top five financial institutions in the country, as measured by outstanding credit exposure, along with Citigroup, Bank of America, and government-sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Using its triple-A credit rating, MBIA had turned nearly half a trillion dollars of securities into investments that rating companies apparently considered as safe as U.S. Treasuries. Bonds issued by a water and sewer authority in Mississippi, debt backed by loans on used cars to people with a history of not paying their bills, and complex pools of derivatives held by a shell company in the Cayman Islands all became top-rated securities under the Midas touch of an MBIA guarantee.
Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings—the credit-rating oligopoly—all assigned MBIA’s bond-insurance unit a triple-A rating. Using computer models and historical default data, analysts at the rating companies had determined that MBIA could weather another Great Depression and still meet all of its claims.
Ackman was not convinced.
MBIA held just $1 of capital for every $140 of debt it guaranteed. Although the company claimed it underwrote risk to a so-called zeroloss
standard, its past performance hadn’t been free from error. The high leverage meant MBIA had virtually no margin of safety. The company’s underwriting, transparency, accounting, and track record all had to be beyond reproach. Ackman, a money manager known for his intensive research, thought he saw problems with every one of these issues.
Earlier that day, Ackman had met for lunch with Michael Ovitz, the founder of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency and a longtime investor in Ackman’s fund. As they worked their way through six different versions of toro, the Japanese fatty tuna delicacy, Ackman asked Ovitz’s advice about the upcoming meeting with Brown.
It sounds like a very Japanese meeting,
said Ovitz. In other words, he said, Just shut up and listen.
ACKMAN’S TAXI STOPPED on Third Avenue outside the building where MBIA’s attorneys, Debevoise & Plimpton, have their offices. Together with Gotham’s general counsel, David Klafter, and one of the firm’s analysts, Greg Lyss, Ackman headed for the security desk in the lobby. The group was sent upstairs, where Ackman told the receptionist they were there for the meeting with Jay Brown. She pointed Ackman toward a closed conference room door just behind the reception desk. Opening it, he found Brown seated at a conference table with a dozen other men. The conversation in the room came to an abrupt halt. Hi,
he said. I’m Bill Ackman. I’m here to . . .
Wrong meeting,
one of the men said as he jumped up to close the door. Ackman returned to the reception area, convinced he’d just interrupted a tired and frazzled-looking Brown in a meeting with his crisis-management team. The Gotham group was shown to another conference room and told to wait.
ACKMAN COFOUNDED Gotham Partners in 1993 with David Berkowitz, increasing the hedge fund’s assets from $3 million to more than $350 million by 2001. The firm was small, with just nine employees. Ackman and the fund’s analysts sought out companies with securities that were mispriced or misunderstood by the market. In MBIA’s case, the market believed in the permanence of the company’s triple-A rating. If it didn’t, then the bond insurer’s ability to write new business would have disappeared overnight.
Ackman had placed his bet against MBIA principally in the credit-default-swap market. Credit-default swaps, or CDS contracts, are derivatives that allow parties to buy and sell protection against a default on a security. The contracts are essentially life insurance policies on companies. The protection buyer—in Wall Street parlance—makes regular payments over the life of the contract to the protection seller, who promises to make a lump sum payment to the insurance buyer if a security defaults. The cost of the insurance rises and falls minute by minute based on the market’s perception of the company’s credit quality. Default protection on a company with a triple-A rating, which MBIA had in 2002, could be purchased cheaply because the risk of default was perceived to be de minimus.
Blythe Masters, a 26-year-old Trinity College graduate working at JPMorgan in 1995, is often credited with having invented CDS contracts. The contracts were created as a way for commercial banks to reduce their exposure to corporate borrowers. By purchasing protection against a default, the bank took on a position that would offset losses if a borrower defaulted.
The market for CDS contracts, which didn’t exist before the mid-1990s, totaled $2.2 trillion by the end of 2002. Outstanding contracts hit $62 trillion by the end of 2007. Ackman was not seeking protection against MBIA filing for bankruptcy; he was betting that the chance of the company defaulting on its bonds was more likely than the market believed. In addition to shorting tens of millions of dollars of MBIA stock, Ackman bought protection against a default on $2 billion worth of MBIA debt. He had also set up two additional funds, Gotham Credit Partners I and IA, to hold CDS contracts on MBIA. Investors in these funds could earn nearly 40 times their money, or a 4,000 percent return, if MBIA filed for bankruptcy. Of course, investors would lose their entire investment if perceptions about MBIA’s triple-A rating remained unchanged and unchallenged.
Ackman’s bet was spectacularly contrarian. He was wagering on the collapse of a company that the rating companies had awarded their highest triple-A rating and that everyone else was counting on.
Indeed, MBIA’s reason for being was to take the worries out of the debt market. MBIA’s president, Gary Dunton, summed it up in the company’s 2001 annual report: In our minds, our franchise is the ultimate money-back guarantee, the ‘Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.’
The company was started in the early 1970s by a young man named Jack Butler, who had worked on Wall Street for Franklin National Bank, picking municipal bonds for the bank’s portfolio. One winter afternoon in 1967, as Butler was driving back from a ski weekend in Vermont with Jim Lopp, an investment banker, the pair hit on an idea: If you took the time to understand how the municipal bond market really worked, you could find plenty of municipal bonds on which the risk of default was practically zero. Butler bought such bonds all the time. Selling insurance on bonds that would never default sounded like a good business.
Butler and Lopp had worked together on a deal in Omaha, Nebraska, several years earlier that became their blueprint. The mayor of Omaha wanted to raise millions of dollars to build a sewage-incineration plant. The process was experimental, however, and taxpayers didn’t want to foot the bill if the project didn’t work. The sewage-incineration plan was designed to blast the sewage into a solid substance, which could then provide fuel to blast the next batch of sewage into more fuel. To finance the plan, the mayor, Lopp, and Butler came to an agreement. Lopp would underwrite the bonds, Butler would buy them, and the mayor would see to it that the project was bailed out if something went wrong.
In fact, the plant didn’t work. As Butler remembers it, the headline in the local Omaha newspaper read Ten Million Dollar Toilet Doesn’t Flush.
But the mayor made good on his promise, and the taxpayers bailed out the bondholders.
The municipal bond market was less risky than it appeared, Butler realized. The credit ratings on many municipal bonds didn’t take into account the understanding between investors and public officials, such as Omaha’s mayor, that bonds used to fund public projects wouldn’t default.
Then came the spark of inspiration. If a smart investor could find bonds that were safer than they appeared, an even more astute businessperson could create a business guaranteeing these bonds. The bond-insurance business was simple: In exchange for receiving an upfront insurance premium, the bond insurer agreed to cover all interest and principal payments over the life of the bond if the issuer defaulted. As long as the bond insurer maintained its triple-A rating, the bonds remained triple-A. The beauty of bond insurance, Butler saw, was that the bond insurer didn’t need capital to buy the bonds. The bond investor put up the capital. The insurer would collect the insurance premium up front in exchange for guaranteeing the bonds and would invest the premiums over the long term.
That’s not to say bond insurance required no capital. To enter the business, Butler had to prove to regulators that the company had the wherewithal to make good on its guarantees. That meant setting aside some fraction of the amount of each bond it guaranteed. But how much? To determine the amount, Butler hired George Hempel, an economist who had studied municipal bond defaults during the Great Depression. With Hempel’s help, Butler figured out how much capital a municipal bond-insurance company would have needed to weather the Depression. Although a large number of municipalities missed bond payments at the height of the Depression, most paid bondholders back, with interest, after just a few years. That meant a bond insurer didn’t really need to pay claims so much as advance money for brief periods during times of extreme financial distress.
Still, it was a business that required extreme caution. It has to be underwritten to a no-loss standard, otherwise the leverage is deadly,
says Butler.
Butler and Lopp toyed with other business ideas, including manufacturing hollow golf balls. In the end, they went with municipal bond insurance. Bulter founded MBIA. Lopp, who died at age 51 of a heart attack on the tennis court of his vacation home in the south of France, started up Financial Security Assurance, another bond insurer.
FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER Ackman and the others from Gotham were shown to the conference room, Brown appeared with MBIA’s general counsel, Ram Wertheim, whose first question to the Gotham group was whether it planned to record the meeting. Ackman told him no, then asked Wertheim whether he and Brown planned on making a recording. They did not, Wertheim said.
Brown wasted no time getting to the point. He had been in the insurance industry for years, and no one had ever questioned his reputation, Ackman remembers Brown saying, No one has ever gone to my regulators without my permission.
Ackman asked Brown whether he disputed any of the assertions Ackman had made about MBIA. Brown was aware of the issues in Ackman’s report from questions he had received from a Wall Street equity analyst with whom Ackman had shared his findings.
This isn’t about the facts; it’s about process,
Ackman recalls Brown saying. You’re a young guy, early in your career. You should think long and hard before issuing the report. We are the largest guarantor of New York state and New York City bonds. In fact, we’re the largest guarantor of municipal debt in the country. Let’s put it this way: We have friends in high places.
In a follow-up letter to Ackman after the meeting, Wertheim reminded Gotham what was at stake: MBIA is a regulated insurance company that operates in a regulated environment and acts in a fiduciary capacity for the benefit of our many constituencies—principally our policyholders, our customers, including the numerous states and municipalities that rely on bond insurance, and our stockholders but also our employees, our community, and the other people who rely on the vitality of the markets that we support. . . . MBIA’s credibility and reputation in the market, and its triple-A ratings, are critical to our continued ability to service these constituencies.
In the meeting, Brown compared Gotham to Enron, which had been accused of manipulating California’s electricity market. Was Gotham seeking to manipulate perceptions about a regulated insurance company by taking positions in the unregulated CDS market? Brown also asked Ackman how long Gotham planned to hold its CDS position on MBIA.
Ackman explained that for the hedge fund to make money on its CDS position, it was going to have to be correct in its criticism of MBIA. Ackman told Brown that the CDS market was not liquid enough for Gotham to easily trade in and out of such a huge position.
Wertheim asked to see a copy of Gotham’s report before it was published so MBIA could check Gotham’s facts. Ackman countered that it was considered inappropriate for analysts to give advance copies of research reports to companies but again offered to discuss any findings at the meeting.
The meeting ended abruptly. As the men filed out of the room, Ackman reached out to shake Brown’s hand. I don’t think so,
Brown said, refusing to extend his hand.
When Ackman, Klafter, and Lyss stepped back out onto Third Avenue, Ackman’s first call was to Aaron Marcu, a lawyer with Covington & Burling, who had been advising Gotham on its research. We left the meeting thinking we were going to be sued,
Ackman told me years later.
Ackman’s second call was to Paul Hilal, an investor in one of the Gotham Credit Partners funds and Ackman’s friend since the two were undergraduate roommates at Harvard in the late 1980s. Ackman related the high points of the brief meeting: Brown’s refusal to discuss Gotham’s report, the apparent paranoia about whether Gotham was recording the conversation, the warning, the refusal to shake hands. Years later, Brown told the Wall Street Journal that he remembered refusing to shake Ackman’s hand, though he recalled saying nothing that should have been interpreted as a threat.
Hilal had been hearing about MBIA for months. He and his girlfriend had spent a week with Ackman and his wife, Karen, at a beach house the Ackmans rented in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, during the summer of 2002. Bill did what he always does on vacation,
Hilal says. He read financial statements. That week his reading consisted of years of MBIA quarterly filings. Every once in a while, you’d hear Bill exclaim, ‘Oh, my God, this is such bullshit,’
Hilal recalls. What he was reading about was another layer of hidden leverage or messed up accounting at MBIA. The tone was a combination of surprise but also glee: ‘I can’t believe it’s this good.’
Chapter Two
The Short Seller
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
—BILL ACKMAN’S HIGH SCHOOL YEARBOOK EPITHET, 1984
BILL ACKMAN’S INTEREST in MBIA started with an interest in triple-A ratings. Earlier in 2002, he’d made a substantial sum by shorting the stock and purchasing credit-default swaps on a company called the Federal Agricultural Mortgage Corporation, better known as Farmer Mac. The company was chartered by the U.S. government to create a secondary market for farm loans, and this government connection caused investors to view Farmer Mac as a triple-A-rated company. In fact, the company never sought to obtain a credit rating because the market perceived it to be triple-A and its bonds traded like other top-rated agency bonds at very tight spreads to Treasuries.
Ackman had originally gotten the idea of looking into Farmer Mac from Whitney Tilson, who heads up the hedge fund T2 Partners and who had been friends with Ackman since they were undergraduates at Harvard in the 1980s. Tilson suggested Ackman consider buying shares in the company. When Ackman reviewed the company’s financial statements and later met with the company’s chief executive officer (CEO), he decided to short it instead. Before Ackman’s involvement, Farmer Mac was rarely mentioned outside of trade publications such as Progressive Farmer and Pork Magazine. Ackman’s research landed the company on the front page of the New York Times business section after he spoke with reporter Alison Leigh Cowan about his findings. Ackman churned out a series of reports on the company provocatively titled Buying the Farm,
Parts I, II, and III. He didn’t mince words: Gotham believes that the company is in precarious financial condition and could face severe financial stress.
For months, Ackman was a thorn in Farmer Mac’s side. During one of the company’s investor conference calls, Farmer Mac executives explained that their reason for not obtaining a credit rating was that the company did not want to pay the cost. In response, Ackman offered to pay for Farmer Mac’s rating. His offer was rebuffed.
After Ackman issued his first report on the company, Farmer Mac’s shares plummeted and premiums on its credit-default-swap (CDS) contracts jumped. Then the Senate Agricultural Committee asked the U.S. Government Accountability Office to look into the issues raised in the reports. The company responded by accusing Ackman and the Times of orchestrating a negative campaign to drive down its shares and asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate the Times reporter, Alison Leigh Cowan.
In July 2003, after MBIA prompted the New York attorney general’s office to investigate Gotham Partners, Tilson was called to testify about Ackman’s research efforts and, in particular, about his use of the press to spread his message. "Bill spent a number of hours walking [the New York Times reporter] through Farmer Mac’s filings, the 10-K and 10-Q documents going back many years, Tilson said about one marathon meeting with Cowan, which he also attended. Ackman spent hours showing the reporter
problems, things that he believed the company was trying to hide. Investigators asked Tilson how long the meeting lasted.
Eight, maybe twelve hours," he replied.
Ackman’s fund netted about $80 million on its Farmer Mac position. Shortly after his Farmer Mac win in the spring of 2002, Ackman asked Michael Neumann, a salesman on Lehman Brothers’ credit desk who had sold him the contracts on Farmer Mac, if he could think of another triple-A-rated company that might not merit its lofty rating. Neumann told Ackman he was skeptical of the bond insurers. The largest bond insurer was MBIA Inc.
Ackman called MBIA and requested the previous five years of annual reports. Later, when he began to read Jay Brown’s letter to shareholders in MBIA’s 2001 annual report, it didn’t take long for him to spot the first red flag. In the letter, Brown addressed the issue of so-called special-purpose vehicles (SPVs), which are created by companies to finance assets off of their balance sheets. The SPV purchases assets such as mortgages from a sponsor or parent company and sells debt to finance the purchase. The SPV is considered legally separate from the company that created it and is considered bankruptcy remote,
meaning that if the parent company filed for bankruptcy, the SPV would be unlikely to be dragged into the parent company’s bankruptcy. Investors began to raise questions about the use of SPVs after Enron Corporation’s off-balance-sheet debt contributed to its collapse because the risk had not actually been transferred.
During the past several months, there has been a fair amount of public debate on issues such as balance-sheet transparency, special-purpose vehicles, risk management, accounting conflicts, and quality of earnings,
Brown wrote in MBIA’s annual report. As you might expect, we have spent some time staring in the mirror.
The result of this reflection, Brown told shareholders, was that investors would find expanded disclosure on the company’s approximately $8 billion of special-purpose vehicles in that year’s 10-K.
Ackman searched MBIA’s public filings and found no previous mention of the SPVs to which Brown had alluded. The apparent deception caused Ackman to look deeper. He began a research process that involved reading thousands of pages of SEC filings, conference-call transcripts, and rating-company and analysts’ reports.
What Ackman really wanted was a face-to-face meeting with MBIA executives. In August 2002, Ackman got the chance. Robert Gendelman, a friend and at that time an investment adviser at Neuberger Berman, one of the largest holders of MBIA stock, agreed to arrange a meeting.
Several days before his visit to MBIA, Ackman e-mailed a senior insurance executive who had once worked with Brown, seeking his opinion on the executive. He is smart and top notch,
the acquaintance wrote back. And that’s important because business is dangerous, like picking up dimes in front of a steamroller.
Ackman and Gendelman made the short trip by car to MBIA’s headquarters an hour north of Manhattan in the leafy Westchester suburb of Armonk. Gendelman introduced Ackman to MBIA executives as a money manager who had done a lot of research on the company. MBIA welcomed him. The question of whether Ackman had a long or short position on MBIA never came up.
The meetings, which began around 10 in the morning and ran well into the evening, started in Brown’s office. Acquaintances describe Brown as a very private person. He is also a self-made man, who sometimes told colleagues about the years he spent driving a truck before he completed college. A graduate of Northern Illinois University who had majored in statistics, Brown rose through the ranks of Fireman’s Fund Insurance, starting with the company as an actuarial trainee when he was 25, eventually becoming its CEO.
Brown later advised Xerox Corporation on the sale of its insurance unit, including Crum and Forster, a 150-year-old insurer based in Morristown, New Jersey, which had huge exposure to asbestos claims. Asbestos was the miracle building material of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, however, doctors discovered that the mineral, named after the Greek word meaning inextinguishable,
lodged in the lungs of workers, remaining there for years and causing cancer and other fatal respiratory diseases. By the late 1990s, the insurance industry was bracing for asbestos-related workers’ compensation claims of more than $250 billion.
Brown’s ability to dispose of this toxic exposure at a profit to Xerox earned him a reputation as a dealmaker. Brown, who had served on MBIA’s board since the mid-1980s, joined MBIA as its CEO in 1999 after the company’s longtime president and CEO, David Elliott, suddenly stepped down. After assuming the top spot, Brown purchased more than $7 million of MBIA’s shares using his own money. He is a tough, tough man who is deceptively gentle in his demeanor,
James Lebenthal, a longtime MBIA board member, said of Brown.
In his meeting with Brown at the company’s headquarters that August, Ackman took notes, jotting down Brown’s description of MBIA’s two core businesses. Structured finance is analyzable, understandable,
Ackman noted as Brown explained the business of insuring asset-backed securities, bonds backed by everything from credit-card bills to mortgages and even other bonds.
Bankers often use the analogy of a waterfall to explain how asset-backed-securities holders are paid. Each month, payments on mortgages or credit cards flow into a trust that has issued various securities to fund the purchase of the loans. The cash is used to pay the highest-rated asset-backed-securities holders first before the overflow spills down to the next highest-rated level of securities holders and so on. Defaults on the underlying loans reduce the amount of cash available to pay securities holders. As a result, the lower down in the waterfall, the riskier the securities and the higher the yield the trust must pay to get investors to buy these junior, or subordinate, securities.
Brown explained that insuring public finance securities required a completely different approach. It’s illogical and not analytical. It’s a moral commitment.
The federal government wouldn’t let a state go broke, Brown explained. Debt issuers below the state level, such as counties, cities, and towns, always have someone above who can help out,
Ackman’s notes read. When you went that last step, public finance resolves around a moral obligation,
Brown told him.
Ackman met later that day with MBIA’s chief financial officer, Neil Budnick, and the two discussed the company’s so-called zero-loss
underwriting policy. The former Moody’s Investors Service analyst told Ackman that it was crucial that MBIA back only those bonds on which it expected to take no losses. MBIA risked losing its triple-A credit rating on losses of as little as $900 million, Budnick said. In other words, if MBIA was required to make payments on just 0.2 percent of the nearly half a trillion dollars of bonds it had insured, it risked losing its triple-A rating.
By the time Ackman met with Mark Gold, who oversaw MBIA’s structured finance business, it was nearly 7 p.m. The fund manager from Neuberger Berman was long gone, and the building was nearly deserted on that summer evening. Ackman talked with Gold about the company’s business of guaranteeing collateralized-debt obligations (CDOs), a business that Budnick described as booming.
CDOs were Wall Street’s favorite new asset class. The securities are built out of pools of securities rather than pools of loans. Otherwise, CDOs work on the same waterfall principle as simpler asset-backed bonds. MBIA was backing lots of CDOs at what it called super-senior levels,
the most senior or highest levels of a CDO securitization. These super-senior exposures were considered better than triple-A because they had a greater cushion to absorb losses than what the rating companies believed was necessary to achieve triple-A performance.
Gold gave Ackman a history of the CDO business, including a description of a groundbreaking transaction called BISTRO.
The CDO was created by JPMorgan as a way to lay off the credit risk of a pool of loans it held on its balance sheet.
In his notes, Ackman took down the nickname Gold told him people in the industry gave to BISTRO: Bank for International Settlements Total Rip Off.
The Bank for International Settlements is an organization headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, that was created to promote global financial stability. One of its ongoing projects has been to create bank capital guidelines. BISTRO gamed those guidelines by converting long-term lending risk into a series of credit-default contracts that required less capital.
These CDS contracts had become the preferred way for banks to hedge their exposure to CDOs. Most of the CDOs MBIA guaranteed were insured through CDS contracts. In doing his research, Ackman found that insurance companies were prohibited from dealing in derivatives such as credit-default swaps. He asked Gold about this restriction during their meeting.
Financial guarantors can’t write swaps,
Gold agreed. That’s why MBIA had set up LaCrosse Financial Products, which Gold called an orphaned subsidiary.
LaCrosse, a shell company with nominal assets that was owned by an apparently unaffiliated charity, sold credit-default swaps, and MBIA guaranteed LaCrosse’s obligations. The orphaned subsidiary allowed MBIA to indirectly participate in the CDS market apparently without breaking the law. Ackman had asked Neil Budnick about LaCrosse, which was disclosed in a footnote in MBIA’s annual report, during their meeting earlier in the day, and he was surprised when the chief financial officer said he’d never heard of LaCrosse. Ackman found this particularly striking when Gold said later in the day that the company had seen huge growth
and remarkable volume
in its super-senior CDO business through LaCrosse.
Gold told Ackman that the performance of the CDO guarantees had been disappointing. MBIA wasn’t paying claims on its super-senior guarantees, but CDOs weren’t proving as stable as the financial models had predicted. Because the contracts were in derivative form, accounting rules required that the guarantees be marked to market, or valued each quarter based on the current market price. Because the CDOs were considered even safer than the highest-rated securities, the premiums MBIA received to insure the securities were tiny. That made the volatility of super-senior CDOs even more of a concern, Gold explained.
Ackman ended his visit to MBIA with his suspicions confirmed. In the car on the way back to the city, he called his business partner, David Berkowitz. The pair had started Gotham together nearly 10 years earlier after graduating from Harvard Business School. It’s even worse than I thought,
Ackman told him.
AFTER THE MEETING AT MBIA, Ackman wanted to increase his wager on MBIA. He called Lehman Brothers in August 2002, looking to buy huge amounts of CDSs on MBIA, Michael Neumann, the CDS salesman at Lehman, later told the New York attorney general’s office when it investigated Gotham’s activities in 2003. We’re very interested in this trade,
Ackman told him. We’re really interested in buying big size.
But Neumann struggled to find enough parties willing to sell protection on MBIA to meet Ackman’s demand.
In our market, $5 [million] to $10 million is a typical trade, and he was expressing interest in multiple hundreds of millions,
Neumann told the attorneys. It wasn’t unheard of, but it was unusual. It was our first request for MBIA in that size.
As Ackman continued to buy, the price rose. At the beginning of 2002, it cost around $35,000 per annum to buy protection on $10 million of MBIA debt. By late summer, the price topped $200,000 a year.
Then, in August, Neumann tapped into a substantial seller. The mystery seller allowed Gotham to increase its position to hundreds of millions of dollars of contracts. This newfound supply of credit-default protection on MBIA also caused the price of buying CDSs on MBIA to fall to around $100,000 per annum and sent a reassuring message to the market about MBIA’s financial health. Ackman suspected that the counterparty on the other side of many of his trades was MBIA. The company later confirmed that it sold CDS contracts on itself.
Frankly, it’s a very crazy thing to do,
Ackman told attorneys at the Securities and Exchange Commission after the SEC launched an investigation of Gotham several months later.
After all, MBIA was selling protection against its own bankruptcy filing. Who would buy an insurance policy that by definition required the policyholder to collect from a bankrupt company? Wall Street brokers would have agreed to arrange such a transaction only if MBIA put up collateral to make sure that it could pay out in the event of a default.
The real reason MBIA was selling protection on itself, Ackman suggested to regulators, was to drive down the price of its CDS contracts and create an impression of stability. Conversely, the SEC would question whether Gotham was trying to undermine confidence in the company by bidding up the contracts.
Every once in a while, spreads would go out, and we would step out of the market because we didn’t want to pay these high prices,
Ackman explained to the SEC. Those are the times we believe they would step in to sell it, so it would come back down, and then we would start nibbling again.
AMONG THE FIRST PEOPLE Ackman talked to after his meeting with MBIA executives in August was Henny Sender, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Ackman spent several months talking to Sender about MBIA’s expansion beyond municipal finance, its off-balance-sheet debt, and the guarantees on CDOs it was writing by the billions. But when Sender’s article appeared in early November 2002, it was as much about Ackman as it was about MBIA.
The market for credit-default swaps could be extremely thin, sources told the Journal, and an investor taking even a small position in a company could easily push the premiums one way or the other. The Journal estimated that Ackman’s $1 billion position against MBIA might have cost as little as $15 million.
This is a company built on faith,
Ackman told the Journal. [MBIA] depends on the markets believing that it has the resources to back all its claims.
MBIA’s president, Gary Dunton, along with analysts from Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s, said the credit-default-swap market—and, by extension, Gotham—had it wrong. The company was as secure as it had ever been. The shares fell in response to the article but rebounded the next day.
Disappointed in the Wall Street Journal article, Ackman began to write a research report that would lay out all of his concerns about MBIA. In preparing the report, Ackman approached the New York State Insurance Department (NYSID). His first tip that MBIA’s regulators might have been in over their heads came when he called to set up a meeting with the official responsible for overseeing the financial-guarantee companies. Auto,
said the person answering the phone. MBIA, with credit-market exposure nearly the size of Citigroup, was overseen out of the same division that regulates insurers that cover fender benders and stolen cars.
Ackman and David Klafter, Gotham’s general counsel, met with officials at the insurance department on November 6, 2002. They talked to the group about MBIA’s expansion into the CDS business despite a New York state prohibition against insurers engaging in derivative transactions. Officials asked several times during the meeting, Are you sure they’re using insurance company capital to guarantee credit derivatives?
He also told the officials that he didn’t believe the company was marking its derivative contracts to market, another violation of state insurance law.
When Ackman returned to the office that afternoon, he received a call from the NYSID asking him to come back the next day to give his presentation to a wider group of regulators. We believe that our analysis was taken seriously and is being considered at the highest levels of the insurance department,
Ackman wrote in a November 10 e-mail to his hedge fund investors.
Ackman told them that he’d obtained an estimate of where the CDOs MBIA had guaranteed were trading. Late last week, we received bid, offer, and mid-market prices from Deutsche Bank on MBIA’s CDO and synthetic CDO portfolio balances, which were disclosed in detail for the first time,
Ackman wrote. The mid-market prices indicate that MBIA has a mark-to-market loss of $5.4 billion in its portfolio as of August 31, 2002,
Ackman wrote. The company, however, has shown only an extremely modest loss on this portfolio in its filings.
Ackman was also determined to get Morgan Stanley analyst Alice Schroeder on his side. Voted the top insurance analyst two years running by Institutional Investor magazine, Schroeder, author of The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life (Bantam, 2008), was known as Buffett’s favorite analyst. Buffett once described her as the only Wall Street analyst whose work he bothered to read. The dinner she hosted at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meetings was the ticket of the year for fans of Buffett, who made an appearance to speak to Schroeder’s guests.
While ‘turning’ a bullish analyst is going to be difficult, we can be pretty convincing and it’s therefore worth the energy,
Ackman wrote in the November 10 e-mail
