CDO Market – Rife With Collusion and Manipulation?

[Joanne98]

By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive, and Yves Smith

Despite extensive credit crisis post mortems, many of the widely accepted explanations of what happened are at odds with facts on the ground. These superficial explanations are hard to dislodge because they tally with widely held beliefs about how the real estate and securitization market operate. The waters have been muddied even more by self-serving PR from various market participants.

The consensus reality of the credit crisis appears to be: it was the result of a complex combination of factors, no one can be blamed all that much (save maybe greedy borrowers and complicit rating agencies) and almost no one saw it coming.

We’ve argued that many of the arguments that support that view are myths. In particular, the more we have dug into the CDO market, the more we are convinced that it was central to the crisis. Furthermore, we believe that this market did not operate on an arm’s length basis, that many of the practices that were widespread in the industry amounted to collusion.

Collusion and resulting price distortions serve as the most likely explanations for behaviors that are consistently glossed over in the consensus accounts of the crisis. By early 2006, many mortgage market participants felt that the housing market was overheated and unsustainable. Many felt that mortgage rates should be higher, but despite interest rate tightening by the Fed, mortgage rates were not increasing. Even more distressing, credit spreads remained narrow despite widespread concerns that mortgage risk was increasing and deals were weakening.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2010/04/cdo-market-%e2%80%93-rife-with-collusion-and-manipulation.html