Bond Insurer's House Of Cards Set To Tumble

The house of cards made up of credit derivatives backed by crap that isn't worth the paper it's written on moved a step closer to tumbling yesterday with a revelation from MBIA. From Bloomberg:

MBIA Tumbles on $8.1 Billion of CDOs, Fitch Warning

MBIA Inc. fell the most since 1987 in New York trading after the world's biggest bond insurer disclosed that it guarantees $8.1 billion of collateralized debt obligations that investors say have a greater chance of losses.

"We are shocked management withheld this information for as long as it did,'' Ken Zerbe, an analyst with Morgan Stanley in New York, wrote in a report yesterday. "MBIA simply did not disclose arguably the riskiest parts of its CDO portfolio to investors.''

MBIA, Ambac Financial Group Inc., and other insurers are being reviewed by credit-rating companies on concern they don't have enough capital to cover potential losses stemming from mounting downgrades of the securities they guarantee. Fitch Ratings ratcheted up the pressure on MBIA today, saying it would reassess its AAA insurance rating for a possible downgrade and gave the company four to six weeks to raise at least $1 billion.

More than $2 trillion of insured securities would lose their AAA ratings amid mass downgrades of bond guarantors. MBIA fell $7.07, or 26 percent, to $19.95 at the close of regular New York Stock Exchange trading....

Will it take the company being delisted as happened with ACA Capital last week before the already behind the curve ratings agencies downgrade MBIA?

....In five CDOs-squared MBIA insured, the majority of collateral was CDOs of corporate loans, according to the statement. Between 12 percent and 38 percent of the collateral was CDOs of asset- backed securities including mortgage bonds, the company said.

Yesterday, Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook to negative for the AAA ratings of the bond insurance units of Armonk, New York-based MBIA and Ambac.

The $30 billion of exposure for MBIA Insurance to CDOs linked to residential mortgage-backed securities that S&P listed in its report yesterday includes the CDOs-squared disclosed by MBIA, S&P said today in response to investor inquiries. A Dec. 14 analysis by Moody's also included the exposures, Jack Dorer, an analyst at the New York-based ratings company, said in an e-mail message.

There is no credibility left with these rating agencies. The patient has malignant cancer and the doctor's diagnosis is that they look a little tired.

...Credit-default swaps for MBIA soared as much as 145 basis points to 625 basis points, the widest ever, before narrowing to 568 basis points, according to prices from CMA Datavision in London. That means it costs $568,000 a year for an investor to protect $10 million in MBIA bonds from default for five years.

One-year contracts surged to 1,050 basis points, prices from broker Phoenix Partners Group show. That implies investors are pricing in a 20 percent chance of default by March 2009, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. valuation tool used by Bloomberg.

Contracts on MBIA's bond insurer, MBIA Insurance, climbed 55 basis points to 300 basis points after reaching 340 basis points earlier today, CMA prices show. Contracts tied to Ambac rose 17 basis points to 582 basis points, according to CMA.

"How is confidence expected to return to the capital markets when htese types of surprises continue to pop up?'' said Peter Plaut, an analyst at New York-based hedge fund manager Sanno Point Capital Management...

Good question Peter, the answer is not until everybody owns up to the junk they hold, mark it down to what it's really worth and the rating agencies follow accordingly.