On the Edge of Efficient Markets

The Epicurean Dealmaker is on a roll. The anonymous banker (you can tell he's a banker, because he copyrights his blog entries), had a great piece up yesterday on Bob Merton, derivatives, and risk.

All the wonderful risk transfer instruments that have been developed over the past several years—credit derivatives, total return swaps, collateralized debt and loan obligations, etc., etc.—have not eliminated one iota of risk in the global financial system. They have merely spread it around, presumably more efficiently, to the investors who want to hold it.
Some people argue that this broad-based, system-wide transfer of risk has indeed made the world's financial markets safer and better able to withstand shocks...
But can we say that systemwide risk has indeed been reduced? To say that convincingly, you would have to argue that the hedge funds and others buying credit risk are somehow "better owners" of such risks; that in fact traditional balance sheet lenders were inefficient holders of credit risk, and hedge funds know how to price credit risk better than commercial banks. But is this true? I for one find it hard to believe that a collection of ex-Wall Street bond traders and fixed income quants—who are the guys buying this stuff for hedge funds nowadays—actually have superior credit skills than the green eyeshaded legions at JP Morgan, Citibank, and Bank of America who used to originate and hold corporate debt.

This is especially germane in light of a rather scary article by David Wigan of Reuters on the correlation trade. The riskiest parts of the CDO and CDS markets are trading at ridiculous levels, it would seem:

Much of the focus is on so-called equity risk, in which investors offer to insure the first 3 percent of defaults on a portfolio of 100 to 150 companies.
Such is the level of demand that the upfront cost of five-year equity RISK on the iTraxx index of credit default swaps has fallen in 18 months from around 26 percent of the value of the insurance to 8.6 percent.

The market is basically making two bets, here: firstly, that if most companies stay out of trouble, then any given individual company is going to stay out of trouble. That's the "correlation trade". And secondly, there's the bet that most companies are going to stay out of trouble.

The problem is the private equity boom, where buyouts invariably come with massive new leverage. One or two of those buyouts are bound to go sour -- and when that happens, in the best case scenario, the people making these correlation trades are going to lose a lot of money. In the worst-case scenario, a couple of big defaults trigger a credit crunch which leads to a lot of defaults, and everybody loses a lot of money.

The Epicurean Dealmaker has also managed to unearth a gem of an SEC filing today, from Houston-based air freight forwarder EGL, Inc. The founder, Jim Crane, tried to take the company public at $36 per share, but was outbid by a rival private-equity shop willing to pay $47.50, and is now blaming one of his lieutenants, accusing him of, essentially, being a spy for the opposition. Rather than celebrate the fact that he's getting a much better deal for his shareholders, he's threatening all manner of "legal action for damages and other relief" instead. Concludes our blogger:

The EGL take private is a nifty example of how private equity can indeed do the right thing by existing public shareholders in a situation where entrenched management can potentially deter competing bids.

But what if doing the right thing involves hiring a mole in the target company?