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...Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner is expected to announce the administration's plans for the second half of the $700 billion bank bailout approved by Congress last fall. The centerpiece is likely to be a government-backed aggregator bank (the much-discussed "bad bank"), which will provide financing and loss protection for investors willing to buy the troubled assets sitting on bank balance sheets. Those delinquent loans, or the bonds tied to them, are dragging down the financial firms' value, putting some dangerously close to insolvency...
...Pricing plain-vanilla mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which are based on thousands of home loans, isn't easy. But MBS are only the tip of the troubled bank iceberg. Lurking below are bonds that are more complicated, and much more difficult to value. Among the most confounding are collateralized debt obligations (CDOs...
...these bonds that the government's aggregator bank will have to deal with first. In a November survey officers at the nation's largest banks said CDOs were among the assets they would most like to sell should the government begin buying troubled bonds...
...Here's how Strata worked: The original investment (made by hedge funds or other big investors) was $20 million, plus a fee paid to the underwriter, Bank of America, for structuring the bond. Bank of America then took the $20 million and bought some liquid, safe asset, such as Treasury bonds. Those safe bonds then became Strata's collateral...
...comes the messy part. Bank of America used Strata's collateral as the backing against which it could write credit default swaps (CDS), that is, insurance contracts based on whether some other bonds get paid back. As a writer, or seller, of CDS contracts, Strata investors get a regular fee, much like a annual amount any insurance holder would pay, for guaranteeing the buyer of the insurance against losses on the bonds. All told, Bank of America wrote CDS contracts worth $20 million based on the debts of as many as 75 companies. Add the fees from the insurance contracts...