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Wall Street Wizardry Amplified Credit Crisis
A CDO Called Norma Left 'Hairball of Risk'; Tailored by Merrill Lynch
In recent years, as home prices and mortgage lending boomed, bankers found ever-more-clever ways to repackage trillions of dollars in loans, selling them off in slivers to investors around the world. Financiers and regulators figured all the activity would disperse risk, and maybe even make markets safer and stronger.
Then along came Norma.
Norma CDO I Ltd., as its full name goes, is one of a new breed of mortgage investments created in the waning days of the U.S. housing boom. Instead of spreading the risk of a global home-finance boom, the instruments have magnified and concentrated the effects of the subprime-mortgage bust. They are now behind tens of billions of dollars of write-downs at some of the world's largest banks, including the $9.4 billion announced last week by Morgan Stanley.
Norma illustrates how investors and Wall Street, in their efforts to keep a lucrative market going, took a good idea too far. Created at the behest of an Illinois hedge fund looking for a tailor-made bet on subprime mortgages, the vehicle was brought into existence by Merrill Lynch & Co. and a posse of little-known partners.
In its use of newfangled derivatives, Norma contributed to a speculative market that dwarfed the value of the subprime mortgages on which it was based. It was also part of a chain of mortgage-linked investments that took stakes in one another. The practice generated fees for a handful of big banks. But, say critics, it created little value for investors or the broader economy.
"Everyone was passing the risk to the next deal and keeping it within a closed system," says Ann Rutledge, a principal of R&R Consulting, a New York structured-finance consultancy. "If you hold my risk and I hold yours, we can say whatever we think it's worth and generate fees from that. It's like...creating artificial value."
Only nine months after selling $1.5 billion in securities to investors, Norma is worth a fraction of its original value. Credit-rating firms, which once signed off approvingly on the deal, have slashed its ratings to junk.
The concept behind Norma, known as a collateralized debt obligation, has been in use since the 1980s. A CDO, most broadly, is a device that repackages the income from a pool of bonds, derivatives or other investments. A mortgage CDO might own pieces of a hundred or more bonds, each of which contains thousands of individual mortgages. Ideally, this diversification makes investors in the CDO less vulnerable to the problems of a single borrower or security.
The CDO issues a new set of securities, each bearing a different degree of risk. The highest-risk pieces of a CDO pay their investors higher returns. Pieces with lower risk, and higher credit ratings, pay less. Investors in the lower-risk pieces are first in line to receive income from the CDO's investments; investors in the higher-risk pieces are first to take losses.
But Norma and similar CDOs added potentially fatal new twists to the model. Rather than diversifying their investments, they bet heavily on securities that had one thing in common: They were among the most vulnerable to a rise in defaults on so-called subprime mortgage loans, typically made to borrowers with poor or patchy credit histories. While this boosted returns, it also increased the chances that losses would hit investors severely.
Also, these CDOs invested in more than simply subprime-backed securities. The CDOs held chunks of each other, as well as derivative contracts that allowed them to bet on mortgage-backed bonds they didn't own. This magnified risk. Wall Street banks took big pieces of Norma and similar CDOs on their own balance sheets, concentrating the losses rather than spreading them among far-flung investors.
"It is a tangled hairball of risk," Janet Tavakoli, a Chicago consultant who specializes in CDOs, says of Norma. "In March of 2007, any savvy investor would have thrown this...in the trash bin."
Penny Stocks
Norma was nurtured in a small office building on a busy road in Roslyn, on the north shore of New York's Long Island. There, a stocky, 37-year-old money manager named Corey Ribotsky runs a company called N.I.R. Group LLC. Mr. Ribotsky came not from the world of mortgage securities, but from the arena of penny stocks, shares that trade cheaply and often become targets of speculation or manipulation.
N.I.R. and its affiliates have taken stakes in 300 companies, some little-known, including a brewer called Bootie Beer Corp., lighting firm Cyberlux Corp. and water-purification company R.G. Global Lifestyles. Mr. Ribotsky's firms are in litigation in New York federal court with all three companies, which claim N.I.R. manipulated their share prices. Through its lawyer, N.I.R. denies wrongdoing and has accused the companies of failing to repay loans.
Mr. Ribotsky's firm attracted the attention of Merrill Lynch in 2005. The top underwriter of CDOs from 2004 to mid-2007, Merrill had generated hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from assembling and then helping to distribute CDOs backed by mortgage securities. For each CDO Merrill underwrote, the investment bank earned fees of 1% to 1.50% of the deal's total size, or as much as $15 million for a typical $1 billion CDO.
To keep underwriting fees coming, Merrill recruited outside firms, called CDO managers. Merrill helped them raise funds, procure the assets for their CDOs and find investors. The managers, for their part, choose assets and later monitor the CDO's collateral, although many of the structures don't require much active management. It was an attractive proposition for many start-up firms, which could earn lucrative annual management fees.
Mr. Ribotsky's entry into the world of CDO managers began at Engineers Country Club on Long Island. There, in 2005, he met Mitchell Elman, a New York criminal-defense lawyer who specializes in drunk-driving and drug cases. Mr. Elman introduced Mr. Ribotsky to Kenneth Margolis, then a high-profile CDO salesman at Merrill, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Elman declined to comment.
'It Sounded Interesting'
Mr. Margolis, who in February 2006 became co-head of Merrill's CDO banking business, played a key role in seeking out start-up firms to manage CDOs. He put Mr. Ribotsky in contact with a few people who had experience in the mortgage debt market. They included two former Wachovia Corp. bankers, Scott Shannon and Joseph Parish III, who left Wachovia and established their own CDO management firm.
Mr. Ribotsky decided to team up with Messrs. Shannon and Parish. "It sounded interesting and that's how we ventured into it," Mr. Ribotsky says. Messrs. Parish and Shannon declined to discuss specifics of Norma.
Together the trio set up a company called N.I.R. Capital Management, which over the next year or so took on the management of three CDOs underwritten by Merrill.
In 2006, Mr. Ribotsky says Merrill came to N.I.R. with a new proposition: One of the investment bank's clients, a hedge fund, wanted to invest in the riskiest piece of a certain type of CDO. Merrill worked out a general structure for the vehicle. It asked N.I.R. to manage it.
"It was already set up when it was presented to us," Mr. Ribotsky says. "They interviewed a bunch of managers and selected our team."
The CDO would be called Norma, after a small constellation in the southern hemisphere. According to people familiar to the matter, the hedge fund was Evanston, Ill.-based Magnetar, a fund that shared its name with a powerful neutron star. Magnetar declined to comment.
On Dec. 7, 2006, Norma was established as a company domiciled in the Cayman Islands. N.I.R., as its manager, would earn fees of some 0.1%, or about $1.5 million a year.
Norma belonged to a class of instruments known as "mezzanine" CDOs, because they invested in securities with middling credit ratings, averaging triple-B. Despite their risks, mezzanine CDOs boomed in the late stages of the credit cycle as investors reached for the higher returns they offered. In the first half of 2007, issuers put out $68 billion in mortgage CDOs containing securities with an average rating of triple-B or the equivalent -- the lowest investment-grade rating -- or lower, according to research from Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. That was more than double the level for the same period a year earlier.
Buying Protection
For Norma, N.I.R. assembled $1.5 billion in investments. Most were not actual securities, but derivatives linked to triple-B-rated mortgage securities. Called credit default swaps, these derivatives worked like insurance policies on subprime residential mortgage-backed securities or on the CDOs that held them. Norma, acting as the insurer, would receive a regular premium payment, which it would pass on to its investors. The buyer of protection, which was initially Merrill Lynch, would receive payouts from Norma if the insured securities were hurt by losses. It is unclear whether Merrill retained the insurance, or resold it to other investors who were hedging their subprime exposure or betting on a meltdown.
Many investment banks favored CDOs that contained these credit-default swaps, because they didn't require the purchase of securities, a process that typically took months. With credit-default swaps, a billion-dollar CDO could be assembled in weeks.
Multiplying Risk
In principle, credit-default swaps help banks and other investors pass along risks they don't want to keep. But in the case of subprime mortgages, the derivatives have magnified the effect of losses, because they allowed bankers to create an unlimited number of CDOs linked to the same mortgage-backed bonds. UBS Investment Research, a unit of Swiss bank UBS AG, estimates that CDOs sold credit protection on around three times the actual face value of triple-B-rated subprime bonds.
The use of derivatives "multiplied the risk," says Greg Medcraft, chairman of the American Securitization Forum, an industry association. "The subprime-mortgage crisis is far greater in terms of potential losses than anyone expected because it's not just physical loans that are defaulting."
Norma, for its part, bought only about $90 million of mortgage-backed securities, or 6% of its overall holdings. Of that, some were pieces of other CDOs mostly underwritten by Merrill, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. These CDOs included Scorpius CDO Ltd., managed by a unit of Cohen & Co., a company run by former Merrill CDO chief Christopher Ricciardi. Later, Norma itself would be among the holdings of Glacier Funding CDO V Ltd., managed by an arm of New York mortgage firm Winter Group.
A Winter Group official said the company declined to comment, as did Cohen & Co.
Such cross-selling benefited banks, because it helped support the flow of new CDOs and underwriting fees. In fact, the bulk of the middle-rated pieces of CDOs underwritten by Merrill were purchased by other CDOs that the investment bank arranged, according to people familiar with the matter. Each CDO sold some of its riskier slices to the next CDO, which then sold its own slices to the next deal, and so on.
Propping Up Prices
Critics say the cross-selling reached such proportions that it artificially propped up the prices of CDOs. Rather than widely dispersing exposure to these mortgages, the practice circulated the same risk among a relatively small number of players.
By early 2007, Norma was ready to face the ratings firms. Different slices of CDOs get different ratings because some protect the others from losses to defaults. A "junior" slice might take the first $30 million in losses on a $1 billion CDO, while a triple-A "senior" slice would not be affected until losses reached $200 million or more.
But the system works only if the securities in the CDO are uncorrelated -- that is, if they are unlikely to go bad all at once. Corporate bonds, for example, tend to have low correlation because the companies that issue them operate in different industries, which typically don't get into trouble simultaneously.
Mortgage securities, by contrast, have turned out to be very similar to one another. They're all linked to thousands of loans across the U.S. Anything big enough to trigger defaults on a large portion of those loans -- like falling home prices across the country -- is likely to affect the bonds in a CDO as well. That's particularly true for the kinds of securities on which mezzanine CDOs made their bets. Triple-B-rated bonds would typically stand to suffer if losses to defaults on the underlying pools of loans reached about 10%.
Easy Credit
When rating companies analyzed Norma, though, they were looking backward to a time when rising house prices and easy credit had kept defaults on subprime mortgages low. Norma's marketing documents noted plenty of risks for investors but also said that CDO securities had a high degree of ratings stability.
Beyond that, rating firms say they had reason to believe that the securities wouldn't all go bad at once as the housing market soured. For one, each security contained mortgages from a different mix of lenders, so lending standards might differ from security to security. Also, each security had its own unique team of companies collecting the payments. Yuri Yoshizawa, group managing director at Moody's Investors Service, says the firm figured some of these mortgage servicers would be better than others at handling problematic loans.
In March, Moody's, Standard & Poor's and Fitch Ratings gave Norma their seal of approval. In its report, Fitch cited growing concern about the subprime mortgage business and the high number of borrowers who obtained loans without proof of income. Still, all three rating companies gave slices comprising 75% of the CDO's total value their highest, triple-A rating -- implying they had as little risk as Treasury bonds of the U.S. government.
Merrill and N.I.R. took Norma to investors. Together, they produced a 78-page pitchbook that bore Merrill's trademark bull. Inside were nine pages of risk factors that included standard warnings about CDOs. The pitchbook also extolled mortgage securities, which it noted "have historically exhibited lower default rates, higher recovery upon default and better rating stability than comparably rated corporate bonds."
Most importantly, though, Norma offered high returns: On a riskier triple-B slice, Norma said it would pay investors 5.5 percentage points above the interest rate at which banks lend to each other, known as the London interbank offered rate, or Libor. At the time, that translated into a yield of over 10% on the security -- compared with roughly 6% on triple-B corporate bonds.
Network of Contacts
Mr. Ribotsky says the selling required little effort, as Merrill drummed up interest from its network of contacts. "That's what they get their fees for," he says.
Norma sold some $525 million in CDO slices -- largely the lower-rated ones with higher returns -- to investors. Merrill declined to say whether it kept Norma's triple-A rated, $975 million super-senior tranche or sold it to another financial institution.
Many investment banks with CDO businesses -- Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley and UBS -- frequently kept or bought these super-senior pieces, whose lower returns interested few investors. In doing so, they bet that the top CDO slices, which typically comprised as much as 60% of the whole CDO, were insulated from losses.
By September, Norma was in trouble. Amid a steep decline in house prices and rising defaults on mortgage loans, the value of subprime-backed securities went into a free fall. As increasingly worrisome delinquency data rolled in, analysts upped their estimates of total losses on subprime-backed securities issued in 2006 to 20% or more, a level that would wipe out most triple-B-rated securities.
Within weeks, ratings firms began to change their views. In October, Moody's downgraded $33.4 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities, including those which Norma had insured. Those downgrades set the stage for a review of CDOs backed by those securities -- and then further downgrades.
Mezzanine CDOs such as Norma were the hardest hit. On Nov. 2, Moody's slashed the ratings on seven of Norma's nine rated slices, three all the way from investment-grade to junk. Fitch downgraded all nine slices to junk, including two that it had rated triple-A.
Worse Performances
Other mezzanine CDOs, including some underwritten by other investment banks, have had worse performances. Around 30 are now in default, according to S&P. Norma is still paying interest on its securities. It is not known whether it has had to make payouts under the credit default swap agreements.
Ratings companies say their March opinions represented their best read at the time, and called the subprime deterioration unprecedented and unexpectedly rapid. "It's one of the worst performances that we've seen," says Kevin Kendra, a managing director at Fitch. "The world has changed quite drastically -- and our view of the world has changed quite drastically."
By mid-December, $153.5 billion in CDO slices had been downgraded, according to Deutsche Bank. Because banks owned the lion's share of the mezzanine CDOs, they bore the brunt of the losses. In all, banks' write-downs on mortgage investments announced so far add up to more than $70 billion.
For larger banks, holdings of mezzanine CDOs could account for one-third to three-quarters of the total losses. In addition to the $9.4 billion fourth-quarter write-down Morgan Stanley just announced it would take, Citigroup has projected its fourth-quarter write-down could reach $11 billion. UBS said this month it would take a $10 billion write-down after taking a $4.4 billion third-quarter loss.
Merrill, for its part, took a $7.9 billion write-down on mortgage-related holdings in the third quarter. Analysts expect it to write down a similar amount in the current quarter, which would represent the largest losses of any bank. News of the losses have led to the ouster of CEO Stan O'Neal and Osman Semerci, the bank's global head of fixed income. Mr. Margolis left this summer.
Mr. Ribotsky says he doesn't have plans to do any more CDOs at the current time. "Obviously, we're not happy about the occurrences in the marketplace," he says.
Write to Carrick Mollenkamp at carrick.mollenkamp@wsj.com and Serena Ng at serena.ng@wsj.com
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