How I caused credit crunch - Goldman CDO man

The writer of a book entitled "How I caused the credit crunch" worked for the unit of Goldman Sachs that sold the financial product at the heart of U.S. fraud allegations against the bank.

Tetsuya Ishikawa's name appears on the preliminary term sheet for the Abacus 2007-AC1 deal, a collateralized debt obligation (CDO) the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accuses the bank of using to commit fraud.

"Tets" Ishikawa, who is Japanese by birth but grew up in London, was educated at the elite British school of Eton and at Oxford University, according to a short biography in his 2009 novel. He left Goldman in 2007 and then worked for Morgan Stanley, structuring, syndicating and selling credit derivatives to investors.

His name and London phone number are on the Abacus term sheet as one of six people in the "Global Syndicate" group, part of a wider contact list that also includes Fabrice Tourre, the 31-year old Frenchman who has been charged with fraud by the SEC.

Goldman is vigorously defending itself against the U.S. accusations, contesting the idea that it was selling the CDO in the knowledge it would collapse so as to allow hedge fund manager John Paulson to bet against it.

Ishikawa's novel, about a fictitious Oxford graduate, "tells how a novice to the mysteries of hedge funds, subprime mortgages and CDOs can fix complex deals worth billions in the exclusive bars, brothels and trading floors of London, New York, Frankfurt and Tokyo," a blurb on the back of the book says.

The idea for the novel was born when Ishikawa was telling his friends "about the cliched high life I had been living while creating and selling billions upon billions of these securitization and credit derivative products, now better known as 'toxic assets'," the preface of his book says.

Ishikawa was made redundant by Morgan Stanley in May 2008. He now works for fixed income house Amias Berman & Co in London. He could not be reached for comment through his current employer. A spokeswoman for his publisher, Icon Book Ltd., said he did not talk to the press.

The book -- which contains a financial glossary -- uses no real names and says "any resemblance to actual firms of persons in this book is entirely and genuinely coincidental."


Based on an article that appeared in http://thewallstreetchallenger.com the use of Synthetic CDOs after 2005 would have been very risky. Since home prices grew at a high rate till almost the end of 2007 and peaking in 2005, CDOs backed by MSS were an ideal high return investment till approximately November 2005.

Using home prices forecast it is hard to believe that the financial institutions and credit rating agencies involved in the CDO business had sophisticated risk analysis simulations, but did not forecast price movements of the underlying collateral.

CDOs played a notable role in the financial markets. Did the CDO cause the financial crisis or was it blindness, greed and the need for riskier assets? The constructors of the CDOs may not bear direct responsibility. Rather their reckless use, misunderstanding and ignorance of key warning signs likely contributed to the magnitude of the financial crisis. You can observe the financial landscape today and recognize from the survivors, walking wounded and the absentees those who knew and those who had not understood the use of these tools.

How One Hedge Fund Helped Keep the Bubble Going

In late 2005, the booming U.S. housing market seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve had begun raising interest rates. Subprime mortgage company shares were falling. Investors began to balk at buying complex mortgage securities. The housing bubble, which had propelled a historic growth in home prices, seemed poised to deflate. And if it had, the great financial crisis of 2008, which produced the Great Recession of 2008-09, might have come sooner and been less severe.

At just that moment, a few savvy financial engineers at a suburban Chicago hedge fund [1] [1] helped revive the Wall Street money machine, spawning billions of dollars of securities ultimately backed by home mortgages.

When the crash came, nearly all of these securities became worthless, a loss of an estimated $40 billion paid by investors, the investment banks who helped bring them into the world, and, eventually, American taxpayers.

Yet the hedge fund, named Magnetar for the super-magnetic field created by the last moments of a dying star, earned outsized returns in the year the financial crisis began.

How Magnetar pulled this off is one of the untold stories of the meltdown. Only a small group of Wall Street insiders was privy to what became known as the Magnetar Trade [2] [2]. Nearly all of those approached by ProPublica declined to talk on the record, fearing their careers would be hurt if they spoke publicly. But interviews with participants, e-mails [3] [3], thousands of pages of documents and details about the securities that until now have not been publicly disclosed shed light on an arcane, secretive corner of Wall Street.

According to bankers and others involved, the Magnetar Trade worked this way: The hedge fund bought the riskiest portion of a kind of securities known as collateralized debt obligations -- CDOs. If housing prices kept rising, this would provide a solid return for many years. But that's not what hedge funds are after. They want outsized gains, the sooner the better, and Magnetar set itself up for a huge win: It placed bets that portions of its own deals would fail.

Along the way, it did something to enhance the chances of that happening, according to several people with direct knowledge of the deals. They say Magnetar pressed to include riskier assets in their CDOs that would make the investments more vulnerable to failure. The hedge fund acknowledges it bet against its own deals but says the majority of its short positions, as they are known on Wall Street, involved similar CDOs that it did not own. Magnetar says it never selected the assets that went into its CDOs.

Magnetar says it was "market neutral," meaning it would make money whether housing rose or fell. (Read their full statement. [4] [4]) Dozens of Wall Street professionals, including many who had direct dealings with Magnetar, are skeptical of that assertion. They understood the Magnetar Trade as a bet against the subprime mortgage securities market. Why else, they ask, would a hedge fund sponsor tens of billions of dollars of new CDOs at a time of rising uncertainty about housing?

Key details of the Magnetar Trade remain shrouded in secrecy and the fund declined to respond to most of our questions. Magnetar invested in 30 CDOs from the spring of 2006 to the summer of 2007, though it declined to name them. ProPublica has identified 26 [5] [5].

An independent analysis [6] [6] commissioned by ProPublica shows that these deals defaulted faster and at a higher rate compared to other similar CDOs. According to the analysis, 96 percent of the Magnetar deals were in default by the end of 2008, compared with 68 percent for comparable CDOs. The study [6] [6] was conducted by PF2 Securities Evaluations, a CDO valuation firm. (Magnetar says defaults don't necessarily indicate the quality of the underlying CDO assets.)

From what we've learned, there was nothing illegal in what Magnetar did; it was playing by the rules in place at the time. And the hedge fund didn't cause the housing bubble or the financial crisis. But the Magnetar Trade does illustrate the perverse incentives and reckless behavior that characterized the last days of the boom.

At least nine banks helped Magnetar hatch deals. Merrill Lynch, Citigroup and UBS all did multiple deals with Magnetar. JPMorgan Chase, often lauded for having avoided the worst of the CDO craze, actually ended up doing one of the riskiest deals with Magnetar, in May 2007, nearly a year after housing prices started to decline. According to marketing material and prospectuses [5] [5], the banks didn't disclose to CDO investors the role Magnetar played.

Many of the bankers who worked on these deals personally benefited, earning millions in annual bonuses. The banks booked profits at the outset. But those gains were fleeting. As it turned out, the banks that assembled and marketed the Magnetar CDOs had trouble selling them. And when the crash came, they were among the biggest losers.

Some bankers involved in the Magnetar Trade now regret what they did. We showed one of the many people fired as a result of the CDO collapse a list of unusually risky mortgage bonds included in a Magnetar deal he had worked on. The deal was a disaster. He shook his head at being reminded of the details and said: "After looking at this, I deserved to lose my job."

Magnetar wasn't the only market player to come up with clever ways to bet against housing. Many articles and books, including a bestseller by Michael Lewis [7] [7], have recounted how a few investors saw trouble coming and bet big. Such short bets can be helpful; they can serve as a counterweight to manias and keep bubbles from expanding.

Magnetar's approach had the opposite effect -- by helping create investments it also bet against, the hedge fund was actually fueling the market. Magnetar wasn't alone in that: A few other hedge funds also created CDOs they bet against. And, as the New York Times has reported, Goldman Sachs did too. But Magnetar industrialized the process, creating more and bigger CDOs.

Several journalists have alluded to the Magnetar Trade in recent years, but until now none has assembled a full narrative. Yves Smith, a prominent financial blogger who has reported on aspects of the Magnetar Trade, writes in her new book, "Econned," [8] [8] that "Magnetar went into the business of creating subprime CDOs on an unheard of scale. If the world had been spared their cunning, the insanity of 2006-2007 would have been less extreme and the unwinding milder."