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Kass: Finding the Next Shoe to Drop

Doug Kass

At year-end 2006, Countrywide's subprime delinquencies were approaching 20%. That's nearly twice the rate reported by the subprime industry in November and it suggests that the upward spiral in subprime-industy late payments will rise dramatically in 2007. (New data from First American Loan Performance, a San Francisco-based research firm, confirmed this likely trend, reporting that nearly 14% of packaged subprime loans were delinquent.)

More importantly, these results confirm that credit problems will not be contained to the subprime mortgage market. At Countrywide, prime mortgage-lending delinquencies doubled to nearly 3% year over year, indicating that that sector is experiencing the same contagion that subprime experienced over the last 12 months.

On Tuesday, in response to the subprime carnage, Freddie Mac(FRE Quote) announced tougher subprime lending standards.

Today, the Federal Reserve and other regulators of banks are expected to release new subprime lending guidance, which will incorporate the impact of mortgage interest rate resets.

As a result of new lending standards and self-imposed reductions in mortgage lending, the availability of mortgages is going to be severely crimped -- and with it, personal consumption expenditures will soon take a dive.

It is no wonder that bullish commentators are getting bored with subprime lending problems. Larry Kudlow's hedgehogs, who, like Dante, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Proust, view the world through the lens of a single defining idea ("the greatest story never told"), are about to be outwitted by the foxes who, like Shakespeare, Aristotle, Balzac and Joyce, draw on a variety of experiences in creating their investment mosaic and refuse to believe that the world can be boiled down to a single idea.

The Next Shoe to Drop?

Not only will older, less-protected packaged securitizations and other derivatives decline in price in a readjustment, but the entire credit securitization chain will become less profitable to industrial companies, mortgage lenders, banks and brokerages.

Consider what has occurred and is now occurring in subprime. The prices of mortgages are rising as the originations become less profitable for the financial intermediaries that serve the market. In turn, housing affordability worsens, delinquencies and foreclosures rise, housing inventories build further, and home prices drop in the second leg down for residential real estate.

This is the vicious cycle and contagion in credit markets.

Now I am hearing stories of plunging demand for CDO tranches and sponsors taking large fee-haircuts before deals can be sold. It is in the mixed asset class of CDOs where the contagion of subprime might soon spread as buyers recoil from sharper-than-anticipated losses in the mortgage market.

Credit spreads are flying open and the vicious cycle of credit has begun as the evaluation of risk is reassessed.

Given the sheer size and significance of the unregulated credit derivative markets, this is the kind of stuff that capital market crashes are made of.