CDO Insiders: "We Knew We Were Buying Time Bombs"

If you want to know how this subprime mess spread and how financial institutions, hedge funds, pension funds were so stupid to not know that there was a problem with CDO's you have to read this gem article from The Big Picture. This e-mail was sent to Barry Ritholz to highlight how CDO's proliferated, despite the obvious risk. In the end, it's always about greed folks. Greed is the main motivator and it doesn't matter who get's hurt when the music stops.

1. XXXXXX and I were talking in 2003 about how shaky these low FICO, high LTV, 2/28 ARM's that were being created were. People in the know knew then those loan products were going to be a problem in the future. Way back in 2003, it didn't make sense.

2. In early '05, XXXXXX tried to hook me up with a HF he knew that wanted to play the CDO issuer game. I talked to the guy and told him that at the risk of talking them out of hiring me, I wouldn't do it. I thought that game was topped-out even back then. A bit early, but perhaps the right call.

3. I was talking to CDO managers in mid-'05 that were saying how rich sub-prime MBS was and how wrong everyone was for buying that stuff at the spreads they were. To a man, they all agreed they were paying too much for the risk, they all believed that HPA [ED: home price appreciation] was going negative soon. But, sadly, they had to buy the stuff because they needed to accumulate collateral for their CDO issuance. F**k, we all knew we were overpaying, even back in 2005. We knew it was essentially a bet that home price appreciation was going to continue at levels that couldn't be sustained. No way that could keep going on.

Everyone was saying the same thing: Home pricing cannot continue appreciating at the same rate, and the second this thing turns, we are F***ED.

Is it really any surprise to anyone that the mortgage business got too far ahead of itself? To me, the only surprise has been it took so long for all of this to happen."

So what was the prime motivating factor?:

"The answer is quite simple: DEAL FEES. I gotta keep buying collateral, in order to keep issuing these transactions as a CDO manager. Its my job: I gotta keep accumulating collateral, and I gotta issue the liability against that collateral.

In 2005, we all said "I hate the real estate market, I hate the credit spread, but my job is to keep doing this: Buying Collateral and issuing CDOs. Everyone was the buying this shit to do any deal. The greed went thru the whole chain, from the home owner buying a property they couldn't afford right up to the CDO manager buying subprime paper."

Why did these managers keep buying this bad junk?:

"Well, nothing is "bad junk" -- it's just priced wrong. No one believed the under-performance of these MBS loan pools would ever be so severe. Everyone knew in the back of their minds that the possibility existed, as did the possibility that residential real estate prices would move LOWER someday.

But no one wanted to be the first to acknowledge it fearing that they'd miss the opportunity to participate in big fees, big alpha, etc. . . ."