Discuss the factors which led to the financial crisis of 2007/8 (20%)Financial crisis of 2007/8 reviewed as the worst crisis after depression, one of the main reason of financial crisis is because of different issues occurred during the period. One of the factor is financial innovation and subprime mortgage markets. The function of financial innovation is creating new financial instruments, technologies, institutions and markets. The outcome of financial innovations are mortgage-backed securities products and collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) in mortgage markets during the financial crisis. Subprime mortgage in US market was estimated at $ 1.3 trillion and over 7.
5 million subprime mortgage is outstanding. Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) did a big effect on the crisis, its special purpose vehicle (SPV) had created to buy assets, create securities from those assets, and then sell those securities to investors. Many subprime mortgage bundle together sold and dependent on US federal government support and guarantees led to a moral hazard to happen when one party intentions to behave inappropriately after the financial transaction has happened while another party need to bears for the costs if moral hazard happened. Banking crisis is another main factor that led to the financial crisis. For instance, bank runs occur is when large number of bank customers withdraw their deposits because they believe the bank might fail and it could affect the banking activity. Besides that, banking crisis include banking panics and systemic banking crisis, which could led many banks and a country happened a large number of defaults. Many of financial institution and the government try to assist during the crisis to prevent the financial system collapse. On September 2008, Lehman Brother filed for bankruptcy, Merrill Lynch had sold to Bank of America at a low sale prices and AIG had faced the liquidity crisis.
In addition, one of the factor contributed to the financial crisis is agency problems and asymmetric information. Agency problems happened when mortgage originators did not hold the actual mortgage but they sold the notes on the secondary market and they gained the commissions from the amount of the loans produced. During the financial crisis, originators had sold number of loans to banks and they got information that many of borrowers from these loans about to default. Asymmetric information mean the parties engage in a transaction do not have same quantity and same standard of the information. In order to measure the accurate of risk, banks need considerable and accurate information to do a rational decision.
Asymmetric information could exist between investors and companies or investors and investment firms. There is a risk for any investor or analyst because when evaluating companies, companies have good or bad information while investors and analyst is lack that information. The risk exist between investment firms and investors is the investment firm may suggest a customer to buy a company’s stock while they knew the stock’s price is going down. Explain how these factors impacted upon Northern Rock and the reasons for the nationalisation (20%)Financial innovation and subprime mortgage markets factor had led to financial crisis while financial innovation is ongoing development on financial products to achieve particular customer objectives and offset particular risk exposure (For example: default of borrower) to assist obtain financing.
The bundling of subprime mortgages through securitization into collateralized debt obligations (CDO) sale to investors. Because take advantage of collateralized debt obligations (CDO), borrowers which less than credit worthy able to purchase house through subprime lending. Northern Rock reckless lending and offer cheap rates to customer had made them became the UK’s fifth-largest mortgage lender.
By the way, housing bubbles had occurred when housing prices peaked in early 2006, and started to decline in 2006 and 2007. After the collapsed of housing bubble had led to mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures increase, which is bank has right to take possession of mortgaged property when the mortgagor fail to make payment and led the housing-related securities price decreased. Besides that, Northern Rock faced financial crisis because of high mortgage approved and underwriting standard fell caused people buying houses that they could not afford and drove up housing prices. Appreciate in value led large number of house owner borrow against their house to earn a lot of profit. But the high delinquency rate led the value of these assets drop at rapid speed. Banks who were invested in these assets started had experienced the liquidity crisis and deteriorating balance sheets.
Deteriorating balance sheets lead financial institutions into insolvency and these lead to a bank panic. Depositors are unsecure which banks are insolvent, causing all depositors to withdraw all funds immediately. Northern Rock started faced problems in raising funds in the money market to replace maturing money market borrowings. The agency problem and asymmetric problems arose when credit rating agencies gave asymmetric information to investors while they consulted with firm on structuring products to achieve the highest rating. Investors have taking on additional risk when they relied on the asymmetric information. Borrowers get easier to qualify for prime loans and make subprime to purchase the house that they not affordable. Banks had reduced the importance on proof of income and assets.
Besides that, they had lower the mortgage underwriting standard, loans moved from full documentation to low documentation and to no documentation. This action had made Northern Rock accumulated a large number of mortgages and when delinquencies rate increase made they faced liquidity crisis. The reason that Northern Rock had nationalisation is when the subprime housing problems rose up, banks stopped lending to each other because fear of exposure to bad debts. Northern Rock became unable to repay loans from the money market because they lack of fund raised after the subprime mortgage crisis began and the global demand from investors for securitised mortgage was declined. Northern Rock’s source of funding is completely dried up led to liquidity problem and forced to ask Bank of England, as lender of last resort for an emergency financial support. When run on the bank occurred, many customers queued outside branches to withdraw their savings and led to liquidity crisis out of control.
The bank was taken into state ownership as result of two unsuccessful bids to take over the bank and announced was to be nationalised. Research the post nationalisation outcome and evaluate whether the net impact has been positive or negative. (20%)Nationalisation is the process of transforming private assets into public assets by bring private assets under the public ownership of a national government or state. The opposite of nationalisation is privatization, which is the process of transferring an enterprise or industry from the public sector to private sector. Another opposite of nationalisation is demutualization, which is the process of a customer-owned mutual organization changes legal form to a joint stock company. On 2008, Northern Rock announced expected losses of £585.4m for the first six months of the year.
In the same time they also managed to repay £9.4bn loan from the Bank of England, reduced amount owed to £17.5bn. On February 2009, Britain passed legislation allowed government to nationalise Northern Rock.
After the government nationalise Northern Rock, Britain decided sold off Northern Rock by the end of 2009 and the bank was split into two parts (assets and banking) to help the bank back to the private sector. Northern Rock Plc, which represents the “good” bank by include new mortgages and savings while the “bad” bank of Northern Rock is to merge with state-owned rival Bradford & Bingley, designed to cut costs and expected to generate greater returns. On 17 November 2011, the government announced had sold Northern Rock to Virgin Money for £747m.
Virgin Money will have to pay government an additional £50m to £80m if they successful sells or lists the combined business on the stock exchange in the next five years. Virgin Money had combined the two businesses together because Virgin Money has credit cards, insurances, and investments but lack of mortgages, savings and current accounts while Northern Rock fulfilled their requirements. Taxpayers had injected £1.
4bn into Northern Rock plc, while the bad bank part of Northern Rock is still owes Treasury £21bn and uncertain about the potential losses contained. The net impact for nationalisation has been positive because through the nationalisation government had saved the bank from bankruptcy and tried to keep reduced the job losses. One of the advantage of nationalisation is if Northern Rock lose more money from mortgage defaults, the taxpayer will take responsibility for the losses. However, the government could benefit from the profits of banks if the bank does well. During nationalisation process, government helped to improve the company’s financial conditions in order to sell the company at a better price after few years later. The reason led to this financial crisis is subprime and poor management of bank, actually nationalisation had helped avoided the collapse of economic or getting worse circumstances. Through this financial crisis, we are aware of the disadvantage of deregulation and how serious the risk of subprime could bring to the market.
Present and analyse the steps which have been take to prevent the repetition of a similar financial crisis (20%)One of the reason occurred financial crisis because particularly of commercial and investment banks had been deregulated started on 1980. In 1999, the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed for separated the powers of commercial and investment banking to ensure that banks would not take rise with depositors’ money. In 1994, a credit default swap (CDS) which is a financial swap agreement was invented by Blythe Masters from JP Morgan. It designed to transfer the credit exposure of fixed income products between two or more parties and it was increased in use in the early 2000s. Before the Great Recession, borrowers were able borrowed mortgage to purchase a home that they may not affordable and led the housing market was moving full steam ahead. Many banks had put these mortgages from housing market together into packages of securities of derivatives, which is credit default swap (CDS) and also known as synthetic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). In 2000, a provision in the legislation, the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which exempt credit default swaps from regulation was passed. Besides that, the U.
S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) largely exempt credit default swaps from regulation. By the end of 2007, the amount of outstanding (CDS) was $62.2 trillion and was $25.5 trillion in early 2012. The lack of transparency in credit defaults swaps market became a concern to regulators. In March 2010, the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), an American post-trade financial services company which provide clearing and settlement services to financial markets announced gave regulators greater access to its credit default swaps database. Credit rating agencies (CRAs) is a firms paid by the banks who employ them to rate debt instruments/securities according to the ability of debtor to make repayment.
These agencies failed to remain committed to its own credit-rating standards led to the financial crisis occurred. The agencies had gave their highest ratings to over three trillion dollars of loans to homebuyers with no income proved by documents and bad credit record. Over half a trillion dollar was losses and hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of triple-A securities were downgraded five levels to a speculative grade. On January 2017, one of the rating agency “Moody’s Investors Service agreed to pay nearly $864m to settle with US federal and state authorities over its ratings of risky mortgage securities during 2008 financial crisis.
In addition, EU regulator fines Moody’s €1.24m for breaching credit rating rules and European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) carried out policy work its role as the single supervisor of credit rating agencies within the European Union. ESMA published its market share calculation for EU registered credit rating agencies (CRAs).
It is designed to increase awareness of the different types of credit ratings offered by each registered CRAs and helped issuers and related third parties to appoint smaller CRAs. In an addition, The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision had published Basel ? (Third Basel Accord) to prevent repetition of the financial crisis. Main purpose of Basel ? is to enhance international regulation, risk management and supervision of banks. It required banks to maintain proper leverage ratios and minimum capital requirements to avoid the liquidity risk of banks may out of control. In conclusion, present an opinion as to whether or not the factor which triggered the 2007/2008 crisis have been addressed and whether you consider the rescue of Northern Rock to be a good or bad thing (20%) My opinion toward the factor which triggered the 2007 / 2008 crisis haven’t been addressed because the mortgage sector forced shut down after the financial crisis in 2007 / 2008, currently more and more lenders willing lend to people who were bankruptcy. After published Basel ? had strengthens the banking supervisor and regulations. But on June 2017, the new retail bank Masthaven became the latest company lend to people who suffered financial problems or who missed their mortgage payments.
The financial innovation led a great increase of number of default posted on credit files by mobile phone companies and more clemency on defaults which have been registered by phone companies. There is an obligation on brokers and lenders to check the borrower before make any borrowing to ensure the borrowing is sensible and appropriate. Another factor which is credit default swaps (CDS), bundle of credit default swaps are tied to the risk of corporate defaults and it has more than doubled in the first seven months of 2017. Traders by over-the-counter market estimated has been issuance of $20bn to $30bn this year, compared to $15bn in the whole year of 2016 and $10bn in year of 2015. Bespoke tranches, type of collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that a dealer creates for a specific group of investors are created by allow investor to pick a bundle of about 100 different “single-name” of credit default swaps.
Bespoke tranches possess large domain of credit hedge funds since the products are not graded by the rating agencies therefore exist a limited investor base but pension funds from the institutional investors at Canada and New Zealand have entered the market and it might led to the risk of a spike in defaults. For my opinion, the rescue of Northern Rock is a good thing because after the rescue Northern Rock had split into “good bank”, containing deposits and quality mortgage assets while “bad bank” containing the rest. The government forms UK Asset Resolution (UKAR) and lends it £48.7bn to take on £68bn of loans from “bad” Northern Rock (NRAM Limited) with purpose to repay the state bailout. On 2011, Virgin Money paid £1bn for “good” Northern Rock, got £14bn of mortgages, and £16.6bn of deposits.
During 2013 to 2016, UKAR had sold NRAM’s unsecured loans and mortgages to One Savings Bank, Marlin Financial Group, JPMorgan, and Cerberus. On 2017, UKAR had sold £9.7bn of NRAM mortgages and repaid £4.6bn of the government loan and 93 percent of its borrowers are up to date with their repayment. The rescued bank has performed well after they get bailout even though the bank had faced financial crisis at beginning because of poor management and subprime mortgage factor. After this lesson, UK banks have raised more than £130bn in additional capital since 2007 and the UK’s largest four banks – HSBC, Lloyds, RBS and Barclays, had launched rights issues to boost their capital base in 2008 to 2009.
