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Chapter 1
J. Kyle Bass
Timing Is Everything
Out of all the legendary men in this book, perhaps the least known is J. Kyle Bass. A hedge fund manager from Dallas, Texas, Kyle is a young, energetic and brilliant man who is not exactly of the Harvard Business School pedigree. Educated at Texas Christian University, the elusive Bass is one to be reckoned with. He is famous for shorting the subprime mortgage crisis that enveloped our country late in the first decade of the 2000s.
But don't be fooled. The man is as shrewd as hedge funders come. Bass saw the crisis coming back in early 2006, when the stock market was peaking and everything was still fine and dandy. Only 36 years old at the time, Bass was one of the youngest managers in the business to spot the crisis coming and to actually place a large bet on it.
THE BACK STORY
Bass started his career as a retail securities broker at Prudential Securities before moving on to Bear Stearns & Co., Inc. and later to Legg Mason, Inc., where he stayed until January 1, 2006. While Bass had plenty of success working for Wall Street firms, in December 2005 he decided it was time to strike out on his own.
Starting your own hedge fund is a daunting task that requires intense preparation. And then there is the capitalâwho is going to give you capital if no one's heard of you? You are just another face in the crowd.
Bass, not just any regular face in the crowd, was able to raise an adequate amount of money for his new fund, Hayman Capital. The fund would be sufficient, but not overburdened, and Bass got to work researching investments.
It is extremely important to be familiar with the tale of derivatives and subprime, second-lien mortgages that unfolded after Bass set up Hayman Capital, and, to truly understand and appreciate the financial alchemy that is in Bass's story, you need to be well educated. First and foremost in the story of Kyle Bass are subprime mortgages.
A FEW DEFINITIONS
Most people understand what a mortgage is, but what about a subprime mortgage? An easy way to think of it is to break down the word subprime. What do you think of when the word prime comes to mind? For some, it's steak. So you've got a prime cut of steak, like a filet mignon, or perhaps a not-so-good cut that is under prime quality. Devalue it further in the case of subprime, and you get the drift; sub, of course, means âunderâ in Latin. Thus, one takeaway is that a subprime mortgage is a mortgage that leaves much to be desired for an investor. And that raises the question, âIf you're an astute investor, why not just toss out the crappy mortgages and buy up the good ones?â The answer is easy: the process of turning something into a security known as securitization. Stocks, bonds, and Treasuries are all securities, so why not securitize mortgages? It even makes sense on paper. Mortgages provide a steady flow of monthly payments to the originating lender or bank that can then be used to service debt.
A mortgage-backed security (MBS) is created when a firm (usually an investment bank) packages a pool of mortgages together and creates debt instruments that are backed by the cashflows and collateral of the underlying mortgages. For years it was viewed as a fool-proof investment because it seemed like everybody would win. Mortgage originators would sell a group of mortgages to a securitization firm (usually an investment bank) or, in the case of larger financial institutions that originated mortgages, they would handle the securitization process themselves. This process allowed originators to clear the loan portfolios off their balance sheets and free up capacity to originate more loans and make more fees. A genius idea, really. But why stop there when having a stroke of genius?
Initially, people securitized mostly prime mortgages. As the demand for MBS increased, the market soon realized it could securitize and sell lower-credit quality mortgages. It accomplished this by offering multiple classes of debt backed by the loans. The classes or âtranchesâ would vary in interest rate and payment terms, with more senior tranches generally being repaid first and as a result yielding a lower interest rate. To best explain the idea of tranches, think of an Olympic medal ceremony. There are three winners (who we'll compare to the investors in our mortgage scenario), and they are delineated into gold, silver, and bronze medalists. The gold medalist is at the top of the podium and a safe bet due to his consistent performance. The gold medalist represents the top tranche, and as you could imagine, it doesn't provide a staggering rate of return. The top tranche is the first to receive cash from the mortgage pool (and importantly the last to absorb losses). In our example, an investor may get close to a 4 percent return by investing in the top (gold) trancheâlittle return for little risk.
Then there is the silver medalist, who may have had a few bad runs in the course of an Olympic career, but generally is a decent and respectable contestant to put a wager on. The silver medalist is like the second tranche of MBSs. They have a little more risk, but also a little more return for the risk. The second tranche will return close to, say, 6 percent. This tranche is slightly more risky because it will experience losses from the mortgage pool before the gold does.
And finally, we have the bronze medalist. Bronze is the bottom tier. While few people bet on bronze, if bronze pulls out a win the payout would be significant. The bronze medalist represents the riskiest portion of the securitization because its tranche is the first to absorb any losses from the underlying mortgages and the last to be repaid from the cashflows. However, if a sufficient number of homeowners pay off their mortgage or do not default until the later stages of the payments, the bronze tranche would be repaid. In this example, the bronze tranche would earn 8 percent because of the additional risk.
In summary, the first tranche is nearly risk-free and thus has a very small rate of return. The second tranche is a little more risky but pays out a little more than the first. And bronze is the riskiest tranche of them all but, should it work out, pays out very nicely.
BASS ASKS WHY
With that brief MBS 101 lesson behind us, we head back to 2006, when J. Kyle Bass started Hayman Capital. At the time, home ownership in the United States was near an all-time high and home prices were continuing to climb. Bass noticed, however, that average income in the United States was not keeping pace. He sat there wondering how exactly this was happening. If home prices were climbing but average income was not increasing at the same rate, how were home buyers able to obtain mortgages to purchase homes and continue to drive prices up? He decided to investigate the mortgage originators (the lenders) who were getting people with no credit or bad creditâand in some cases no jobsâinto homes.
A lot of politicians in the United States have always pushed the belief that home ownership is a good thing and that everyone should have access to the ability to own a home. It's part of the American dream, for sure. But it doesn't always work out that way or, at least, it shouldnât. Should a 20-year-old making $2,470 a month with three jobs be allowed to get a $183,000 mortgage backed by the Federal Housing Administration with just 3.5 percent down? History has already been the judge on this one, and the answer is a resounding âno.â For those of you without a house, 3.5 percent of a $183,000 mortgage equates to about $6500âa ridiculously small amount for a down payment.
And this is just one example, mind you. In simple terms, all over America, predatory lenders were out searching for people sign up for mortgagesâin some cases by any means necessaryâso they could collect the fees while passing on the actual risk to a bank or investment firm. In addition, once secured, the mortgages would then be sold to securitization firms that had little incentive to scrutinize the original borrowers. So, what started out as a genius idea turned out to be a no-holds-barred game of deceit because of a number of complicated factors.
And what deceit it was! Some lenders would approve potential homeowners with just a name, Social Security number, and any kind of identification. A typical conversation could be imagined to have gone along these lines:
Lender: âAll right, Mr. Johnson, so we're going to give you a $250,000 adjustable-rate 30-year mortgage. How's that sound to you?â
Borrower: âFantastic! I've always wanted to live in my own home and stop renting. But there is a problem . . .â
Lender: âAnd what's that?â
Borrower: âWell, I don't have a job right now and I also have six credit cards. Oh, and I work two jobs and have a car loan that's outstanding, too.â
Lender: âNo problem! Let's just make it up as we go along. Sound good to you? I really want to get you into this house. Think about how much easier your life will be when you're a homeowner!â
Borrower: âYeah! Okay. Sure! Let's do it!â
Lender: âGreat! I'm going to take 20 minutes and go grab some lunch. When I get back I want to see some details on a job, your annual income, and your list of debts on this paper, if you get my drift.â
Sounds unimaginable, right? But if you think I'm being a bit too absurd, think again. As part of his investment research, Bass hired private detectives, who uncovered interactions similar to the conversation just described. In an interview I conducted in March 2010, Bass told me that the loan originators he found in 2005 and 2006 were the absolute lowest of the low. They, and the organizations they worked for, preyed upon the public interest in home ownership and tried to exonerate themselves from the ethical challenges of such work by employing the underbelly of the earth: drug dealers, convicted felons, and any other similar type of creature that came along. Not just the âregular Joesâ but the âreally bad guys.â
For a number of reasons, almost no one could see this web of lies, money, and mortgages destroying the country one loan at a time, but one of the few exceptions was Kyle Bass. He simply looked at the data from his research and said to himself: âSomething doesn't make sense here.â Of course, this behavior was atypical at the time, but Bass is a man with a voice and mind-set different from the status quo. He once convinced JP Morgan to help him finance a portion of his house in Japanese yen on the bet that it would ultimately be cheaper than the U.S. dollar.
Kyle Bass has always made the case that companies, no matter how big or small, should be subject to the concept of fiscal Darwinism: The weak perish while the strong survive. Should American International Group, better known as AIG, have been allowed to fail and the taxpayer spared billions? In his mind, the answer was âabsolutely.â
Politicians were oblivious to what was going on. Anyone with a basic understanding of economic theory knows that a country cannot continue to print money as it wishes while racking up gigantic deficits. Throughout the period of subprime lending, home prices continued to soar to new highs as Americansâ incomes faile...
