Category Archives: exposure

Backwardation in Gold Prices?

May 2, 2013 – 5:53 am

Izabella Kaminska at FT Alphaville clarifies what’s going on.

By John Parsons | Also posted in commodities, dynamic risks, markets | Comments (0)

Games with Risk Controls

April 10, 2013 – 2:08 pm

FT Alphaville has been running a series of blog posts digging in to items raised in the investigation of the fiasco at JP Morgan’s Chief Investment Office. The series is called The Belly of the Whale.

Today’s entry is a must read for anyone who has tried to “control” traders using quantitative risk measures. It’s all about gaming government capital rules. But shouldn’t any corporate officer who has to manage teams of traders have to worry about similar games being played?

 

By John Parsons | Also posted in accounting, governance, incentives, measuring risk | Comments (0)

Alternatives to Captives & Contagion

February 26, 2013 – 7:18 am

Last week we wrote about the financial contagion from Peugeot’s auto manufacturing business to its captive finance unit, Banque PSA Finance (PFA). The important question this raises for management is whether there are other ways to get the synergies associated with a captive finance unit without at the same time being susceptible to the contagion.

One set of alternatives keeps the unit as a captive, but tries to find financial structures that are not subject to the contagion. This includes separating funding sources and eliminating cross recourse. PFA is now considering offering deposits and making its liabilities separate from the Peugeot.

It is also possible to capture the synergies by some other means such as a strategic alliance with an otherwise independent bank. That’s what Fiat/Chrysler is doing with Banco Santander. The new venture, Chrysler Capital, will provide funds to consumers purchasing and leasing Chrysler’s cars and trucks, as well as loans to dealerships construction, real estate and working capital.

In the new venture with Santander, the automaker Chrysler will not even be listed as a shareholder. Chrysler decided against it because of its low credit rating (B1 by Moody’s and B+ by S&P), arguing that it would have damaged Chrysler Capital’s borrowing costs and ability to raise funds. Chrysler Group vice president of dealer network development and fleet operations, Peter Grady, is quoted in the Bloomberg story saying that “We were looking for a bank with some significant heft” that could “provide the financial backstop that would be needed in a downturn if another capital market disruption occurred.”

 

By John Parsons | Also posted in credit risk, financial policy, packaging risk, regulation | Comments (0)

Hiding Risk by Netting Exposures

February 22, 2013 – 9:16 am

whistling past the graveyard

Which representation of a bank’s derivative portfolio provides a fairer picture of the risk it presents, the net or gross balances? US banks, operating under US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), report the balance after netting out offsetting exposures with the same counterparty together with collateral. European banks, operating under International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), report the balance gross.[1] Consequently, a naïve comparison of banks using total assets as reported under the two different standards gives an erroneous impression that US banks are much smaller relative to their European counterparts. Were the assets reported on a comparable basis, US banks would climb in the rankings. But which comparable basis is the right one? Should the US bank assets be adjusted upward with the netted derivative assets added back, or should the European bank assets be adjusted downward by netting out more of their derivative assets. A number of US banking regulators and experts have recently started calling for putting the gross exposure onto the balance sheet. Not surprisingly, the big US banks and derivative trade associations like the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (ISDA) argue that the net exposure is the right one.

What is at the root of the disagreement?

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By John Parsons | Also posted in accounting, credit risk, dynamic risks, regulation, systemic risk | Comments (2)

Captives and Contagion

February 14, 2013 – 9:10 am

peugeot

The French automaker Peugeot is in trouble. Automobile sales in Europe saw a dramatic 8.6% slump in 2012. For Peugeot it was even worse: a 15% drop. Since the company relies overwhelmingly on sales in Europe, the company was burning through cash at a rate of €200 million per month, according to the Financial Times. Earlier today the company reported a loss of €5.01 billion in 2012. Already last March, Moody’s had downgraded the company’s credit rating to junk. To stabilize its finances, management last year initiated a program of asset sales, an issue of new equity, and the closure of one of its manufacturing plants near Paris.

Like many other manufacturers, Peugeot owns a captive finance arm, Banque PSA Finance (BPF). The bank has a special access to Peugeot-Citroen dealer networks and supports automobile sales by offering loans, leases and insurance to customers.

The bank gets its funds in the wholesale market, as shown in the figure below, taken from the bank’s 2012 annual report.

BPF

BPF’s captive relationship with Peugeot-Citroen exposes it to the risks of the car company. The sales volumes achieved on Peugeot and Citroën cars directly affect the bank’s own business opportunities. The ownership relationship, too, creates exposure. Accordingly, the credit rating agency Moody’s determined that its rating of the bank is constrained by its rating of the parent.

In 2012, the automaker’s financial problems infected the bank. As the parent was downgraded, Moody’s also reviewed the rating of the bank, and it was downgraded. In July, the parent was downgraded to junk, and Moody’s announced that the bank’s credit rating was in review for possible downgrade to junk status.

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By John Parsons & Antonio Mello | Also posted in credit risk, financial policy, packaging risk, regulation | Comments (1)

Was Ina Drew a Hedger or a Speculator?

October 9, 2012 – 4:45 pm

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine included a piece by Susan Dominus about Ina Drew, the former Chief Investment Officer (CIO) at JP Morgan who resigned following the outsized trading loss in her unit. The focus of the piece is on the rough and tumble of a woman trying “to succeed as an interloper in the Wall Street boys’ club. But buried within the piece is a repeated confusion of hedging with proprietary trading. Dominus repeatedly describes Drew as responsible for hedging this or that risk facing the bank, but immediately afterwards Dominus lauds Drew’s uncanny ability to predict where the market was heading and so to be a profit center. Since the question of whether JP Morgan’s CIO was or was not hedging is at the heart of the public policy dispute surrounding JP Morgan and the Volcker Rule (see here and here), it is worthwhile addressing the confusion in Dominus’ piece.

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By John Parsons | Also posted in governance, hedging, speculation | Comments (0)

Alice’s Adventures in Australia

August 20, 2012 – 3:47 pm

Liam Denning at the Wall Street Journal has a nice piece today on why Chevron has chosen not to hedge its apparent exposure to fluctuations in the value of the Australian dollar.

The apparent exposure arises from its Gorgon liquefied-natural-gas project. Sales of natural gas are denominated in US dollars, but a large fraction of Chevron’s costs at Gorgon are denominated in Australian dollars. Let’s look at the project’s value measured in US dollars. How are they exposed to fluctuations in the exchange rate between the Australian dollar and the US dollar? A mechanical sensitivity analysis will show the US dollar costs fluctuating as the exchange rate fluctuates, while the US dollar revenues will be constant. That creates the apparent exposure.

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By John Parsons | Also posted in commodities, measuring risk | Comments (0)

“A lot of weather we’ve been having lately.”

June 18, 2012 – 9:17 am

The winter of 2011-2012 was the fourth warmest on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). One consequence of this has been a sharp drop in demand for natural gas use to heat buildings, and that is a hit to the bottom line of many gas distribution utilities with revenues tied to the quantity of gas consumed. For example, the Delta Natural Gas Company, a Kentucky utility, reported in its second quarter 10Q that:

Heating degree days were 78% and 84% of normal thirty year average temperatures for the three and nine months ended March 31, 2012, respectively, as compared with 102% and 105% of normal temperatures in the 2011 periods. … For the three months ended March 31, 2012, consolidated gross margins decreased $890,000 (7%) due to decreased regulated and non-regulated gross margins of $707,000 (7%) and $183,000 (6%), respectively. Regulated gross margins decreased due to a 26% decline in volumes sold as a result of warmer weather, as compared to the same period in the prior year. … Non-regulated gross margins decreased due to a 26% decline in volumes sold due to a decline in our non-regulated customers’ gas requirement, partially offset by a decline in the cost of gas and the sale of natural gas liquids.

Some of this quantity risk might be hedgeable using weather derivatives. And hedging this risk can decrease the volatility in corporate cash flow, increasing both the company’s debt capacity and its dividend ratio and ultimately raising shareholder value.

A research paper by Francisco Pérez-González of Stanford University and Hayong Yun of the University of Notre Dame, forthcoming in the Journal of Finance, uses this setting to explore the question of whether financial innovation is useful to the real economy. They take the case of the innovation of weather derivatives in 1997 as a kind of natural experiment and explore the cash flow volatility situation for natural gas and electric utilities before and after the introduction of this risk management tool. Altogether, they examine stock market and financial statement data on 203 companies over the years 1960 to 2007. Their data show that the utilities most likely to use weather derivatives are those with the greatest cash flow sensitivity to weather, and that those that do make use of the derivatives significantly decrease the volatility of their cash flows. This increases the debt and dividend ratios of these utilities, and ultimately their share prices, too.

By John Parsons & Antonio Mello | Also posted in commodities, financial innovation, hedging | Comments (0)

Delta’s Refinery Gambit: It’s Not About Volatility

May 1, 2012 – 2:46 pm

Delta Airlines’ deal to buy the Trainer Refinery owned by Phillips66 was formally announced yesterday. The 8K filing is available here and includes the press release and slide show. Until yesterday the deal was being talked about as a way to hedge the fluctuating price of jet fuel oil. But the announcement makes clear that the objective is something different entirely: battling the rising jet fuel crack spread in the Northeast U.S. where Delta has critical hubs at LaGuardia and JFK.

This is one of the key charts from Delta’s slideshow highlighting the rising crack spread Delta has paid over the last three years.

The possibility of further closures of East Coast refineries threatened to drive the local spread even higher, Delta claimed. Delta believes that by investing in the refinery, including $100 million in investments to shift even more of its production to jet fuel, it will be able to source its fuel cheaper and able to bargain better for the balance of its needs.

The title of Delta’s presentation reads “Addressing Rising Jet Fuel Risk”, and it does contain talk about how “jet fuel crack spreads cannot be cost-effectively hedged”, among other language evocative of risk management and hedging. But it would be a mistake to try and understand this as a hedge in the traditional sense. Delta isn’t trying to limit volatility: at least not volatility around a mean. It’s trying to put direct pressure on the mean level of the jet fuel spread. That’s a different thing entirely.

This is an attempt to gain a strategic advantage in the airline industry. Will it payoff? Apparently yes, according to Delta’s projections. Even if the Brent-WTI spread reverses and becomes negative and many East Coast refineries reopen for business, that will likely take longer than one year, as much time as Delta believes is needed to payback the investment. Time will tell.

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Update: Liam Denning at the WSJ provides some useful statistics:

The Justice Department considers a market with a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index score above 2,500 to be “highly concentrated.” In 2010, the East Coast refining market’s score hit 3,255, against a nationwide one of 680, according to the Federal Trade Commission. If Pennsylvania’s Trainer facility had stayed idle rather than be bought by Delta, the score would likely have surpassed 4,000, according to the American Antitrust Institute.

By John Parsons & Antonio Mello | Also posted in commodities, hedging, volatility | Comments (3)

Reading the Term Structure of Futures Prices

April 10, 2012 – 6:02 pm

Over the last few years, natural gas prices in the U.S. have been pounded by a variety of factors. Front and center are the continuing breakthroughs in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing. On top of this, the winter of 2011-2012 was the fourth warmest on record, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and those temperatures slashed demand. From a peak of over $13/mmBtu in July 2008, the price fell to almost $2/mmBtu in March 2012.

How much of the price drop has been due to which factors?

Of course, the answer to that question is anybody’s guess, and no one’s guess can be hazarded with too much certainty. But the term structure of futures prices is a good distillation of the opinions of many market participants. Anyone trying to comment on market movements would be well advised to be informed on how the whole term structure has shifted, and not just on how the spot price has moved.

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By John Parsons & Antonio Mello | Also posted in commodities, dynamic risks, measuring risk, volatility | Comments (2)
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