Wall Street welfarism has consequences

May 2 (Bloomberg) — A month after the Federal Reserve rescued Bear Stearns Cos. from bankruptcy, Chairman Ben S. Bernanke got an S.O.S. from Congress.

There is “a potential crisis in the student-loan market” requiring “similar bold action,” Chairman Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and six other Democrats wrote Bernanke. They want the Fed to swap Treasury notes for bonds backed by student loans. In a separate letter, Pennsylvania Democratic Representative Paul Kanjorski and 31 House members said they want Bernanke to channel money directly to education-finance firms.

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The Fed’s loans to Bear Stearns were “a rogue operation,” said Anna Schwartz, who co-wrote “A Monetary History of the United States” with the late Nobel laureate Milton Friedman.

`No Business’

“To me, it is an open and shut case,” she said in an interview from her office in New York. “The Fed had no business intervening there.”

There are already indications that investors perceive the safety net to be widening as a result of the actions by Bernanke, 54, and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner. The Bear Stearns bailout and an emergency facility to loan directly to government bond dealers triggered a decline in measures of credit risk for investment banks and for Fannie Mae, the Washington-based, government-chartered company that is the nation’s largest source of funds for home mortgages.

Yield differences between Fannie Mae’s five-year debt and five-year U.S. Treasuries have fallen to 0.55 percentage point, from 1.15 percentage points on March 14, the day the Fed’s Board of Governors invoked an emergency rule to lend $13 billion to Bear Stearns.

“The market understood that this is the method by which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be bailed out if necessary,” Poole said.

Wall Street Impact

The cost of default protection on Merrill Lynch & Co. debt fell to 1.4 percentage point by April 30 from 3.3 percentage points on March 14, CMA Datavision’s credit-default swaps prices show. The cost of protection on Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. securities has fallen to 1.5 percentage points from 4.5 percentage points over the same period.

Fed Board spokeswoman Michelle Smith declined to comment, as did New York Fed spokesman Calvin Mitchell.

On March 16, two days after the Fed provided its Bear loan, it agreed to finance $30 billion of the firm’s illiquid assets to secure its takeover by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Financials Index had lost 12 percent in the three weeks prior to March 14; Geithner defended the loans before the Senate Banking Committee on April 3, saying that the Fed needed to offset risks posed to the entire financial system.

A systemic collapse on Wall Street would also mean “higher borrowing costs for housing, education, and the expenses of everyday life,” Geithner, 46, said.

While the Fed must by law withdraw its financing backstop for investment banks once the credit crisis passes, investors will probably still bet on its readiness to intervene. …

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The Fed also influenced market incentives last month when it introduced the so-called Term Securities Lending Facility. The program is designed to lend up to $200 billion of Treasury securities from the Fed’s holdings to Wall Street bond dealers in return for commercial and residential mortgage bonds among other collateral. Congress has noticed the program favors mortgage credits, and Dodd has asked the Fed to swap some of its $548 billion in Treasury holdings for bonds backed by student loans.

Back to Congress

Bernanke rejected Dodd’s request in an April 25 letter, saying it’s up to Congress and the Bush administration to address diminishing profits on the loans. He didn’t explain why the Fed is reluctant to swap Treasuries for bonds backed by student loans.

“If there is a public purpose in lending to investment banks, and taking dodgy mortgage securities as collateral, then it is a question of degree about other potential lending,” Vincent Reinhart, former director of the Fed board’s Division of Monetary Affairs, said in an interview. “That’s the consequence of crossing a line that had been well established for three- quarters of a century.”

Having extended welfare to Wall Street Republicans, the Fed cannot now refuse Democratic client industries, such as government-sponsored enterprises, education financiers, etc.

Additionally, the Fed will be on the hook for the “containment” bailouts it arranged in the first stage of the credit crunch. The Bank of America acquisition of Countrywide, for example, was widely seen as a Fed “containment” move. CFC owed at least $51 billion of debt to the FHLBs, and $38 billion is the latest figure Bloomberg is bandying around. Bank of America appears poised to take every BofA asset it can and shovel the debts to the government into a bogus holding company, which will go bankrupt. It will be entertaining to watch the FHLBs make good on a $38 billion hole in their balance sheet. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard said that at one point, Citigroup owed $98 billion to the FHLBs. Assume that has been cut 25 percent by a combination of a slight credit recovery and the Fed taking a lot of what can’t be sold; that still leaves $75bn. The FHLBs are going to have to start calling in loans. There will be another deleveraging frenzy. What’s the Fed going to do then, since it’s already forked over $400 billion of its $950bn in Treasury “bullets” to the banks? Putting bad debt in different buckets doesn’t change the fact that it’s bad debt, especially when the new bucket is owned by the government.

S&P estimated a couple of weeks ago that Fannie and Freddie alone would require a bailout of between $420 billion and $1.1 trillion - enough to jeopardize the United States’ AAA bond rating. Presumably that didn’t include Sallie Mae, the student loan originator.

At any rate, the renewed sense of optimism on equities among “the big boys” ™ has been palpable for at least a week. Wall Street is once again cranking up the leverage. Hence the shift out of commodities and into equities effected by the tacticals (hedge funds) at the expense of the dinosaur pension funds and endowments, which piled into commodities very late.

The data junkies tell me that broad money (MZM) strongly leads narrow money (BASE). The deflation-will-be-the-end-of-us-all crowd (eg, Mish Shedlock, John Mauldin, coming from somewhat different angles) has generally pointed to BASE as at least a quasi-justification of what Bernanke is doing. Bond vigilantes have pointed to MZM as a portent of severe future inflation. Obviously, I think the bond vigilantes are correct.

For now, the “inflationary bull market” classes (leveraged equities and base raw materials) have won the argument against the stagflation asset classes (eg precious metals). As long as the Fed dilutes Treasuries by swapping them for MBS, precious metals will still woefully underperform. Gold has been hammered for the past few weeks and although I am still quite bullish about it in the 6-24 month time horizon, the past four weeks have obviously been very unkind to that thesis.

Short Treasuries; long equities and precious metals.