Panic on Wall Street

You've heard about the home-loan bust, but do you know your derivatives from your tranches? Read Salon's easy guide to understanding the current market freakout.

By Andrew Leonard

Read more: Technology & Business, Andrew Leonard

AP Photo/Richard Drew

Gerard Petti, right, directs trading from his post at the New York Stock Exchange, Aug. 16. Stocks fell sharply Thursday after a move by Countrywide Financial Corp. confirmed fears of widening problems with some mortgages.

Aug. 17, 2007 | From New York to Hong Kong and everywhere in between, alarm bells are ringing. Central bankers are on 24/7 alert, ready to perform life support on catatonic markets. Stock traders are panicking -- the Dow's wild ride on Wednesday, down 350 points and then almost all the way back, is just the latest declaration of confusion and fear.

If you had been paying only casual attention to the financial markets as summer rolled along, you could be excused for glancing at the headlines and wondering, what the hell is going on? By many measures the global economy is growing faster than it has for decades. But in our globalized world, anxiety is everywhere. Soon after the markets close in New York, Asia's traders start running for cover. By the time they're exhausted, Europe is picking up the relay. And then back to the United States it comes.

People who devote their entire lives to studying the intricacies of high finance are confused right now. But the basic story line isn't that complicated once you break it down into simple building blocks. And that's what Salon is going to do. Here are some simple questions and, we hope, some simple answers.

How did this happen? How did we get here? What does it all mean?

There is a standard explanation included as a paragraph in almost every story attempting to explain the current turmoil. It goes like this: Anxious to goose the U.S. economy out of its dot-com-bust doldrums, Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve Bank lowered interest rates to rock bottom in 2001. The resulting flood of cheap money encouraged an orgy of borrowing at every level of the U.S. and world economies. Whether you wanted to buy a house or a multibillion-dollar conglomerate, lenders were your best friends, falling over themselves to offer you whatever amount of capital you desired -- and charging low, low rates of interest. Cheap money led to a growing complacency about risk. If you ran into trouble, you could just refinance your house, or borrow a few billion more dollars today to pay off the billions you might owe tomorrow.

Greenspan's policies are being blamed for inciting the greatest housing bubble in U.S. history. The collapse of that bubble set off a wave of defaults by homeowners no longer able to make the payments on their mortgages. Mortgage lenders were the next link of the chain to break, followed by the investors who were trading in bonds and securities whose value was tied to these loans. Suddenly, risk was back!

So that's that? It's Greenspan's fault?

Partially, but interest rate tinkering is not the whole story. It may not even be the most important part of the story. There's another reason so many homeowners are in trouble and stock markets are imploding: Wall Street rigged the system so something like this was inevitable.

One could make a case that the biggest economic story of the last 10 years -- bigger than the dot-com or housing booms, bigger than their busts, perhaps even bigger than the extraordinary growth of the Chinese and Indian economies -- has been the astonishing growth of what is obscurely referred to as "structured finance," a crazy quilt of arcane derivatives and other "financial instruments" that have become the lifeblood of markets everywhere.

Whoa. Stop right there. What is a derivative?

Strictly speaking, a derivative is a financial doohickey whose value derives from some underlying asset. A mortgage loan is an asset. A pool of mortgage loans grouped together into a security that can be traded on markets is a derivative.

We often hear about the "real economy," that place where real people buy and sell real things, or go to work at real jobs where they make real stuff or deliver real services. Derivatives belong to what should be called -- but never is -- the unreal economy, a place where speculators make bets about what will happen in the real economy. Derivatives are vehicles for making such bets. If you think the borrowers whose loans are pooled together are going to make their payments, then buying a share in a group of such investments might be a good idea. That would be your bet.

A metaphor might be useful here. The real economy is like the Super Bowl. Real men on a real field push each other around and play with a real ball for a set period of time, and the team with the most points at the end wins. But while all this is going on, millions of outsiders who are not physically involved in the game bet on its outcome. Only they don't bet just on the outcome. They also bet on the spread -- how badly one team might beat the other. Or they can get more creative and bet on what the combined score of the teams might be, or which team's quarterback will be the first to be injured. There's absolutely no limit to the things that you can bet on, as long as you can find someone to take your bet.

The betting economy is the unreal economy. All those sports bets, no matter how kooky, are financial exercises whose value and meaning are derived from what happens on the field. Theoretically speaking, the betting economy exists in a separate dimension from the actual game, but we all know that's not true. There's so much money involved in gambling that the temptation to fix the results becomes irresistible. Players and referees, for instance, can be bribed.

We can call a bribed NBA official an example of "spillover" from the betting economy into the sports economy. The very same thing happens in the real and unreal economies. So much money is riding on all the derivative bets connected to the housing sector that Wall Street speculators essentially rigged the housing sector to make their bets pay off.

To understand exactly what happened, we must take a closer look at a particular kind of derivative: the infamous "collateralized debt obligation," or CDO.

Say what? Collateralized who which how?

Don't worry about the name. Call it an extra-special funky doohickey if you like. It's not important. What is important is its function, which is to make things that should be considered risky take on the appearance of less riskiness.

Next page: So Wall Street wanted mortgage lenders to make bad loans?