The Richie Riches of the Housing Mess

Expect some fireworks out of Congress this Thursday as chief executives from Citigroup (C), Merrill Lynch (MER) and Countrywide Financial (CFC) face questions about how they walked away with rich pay, after leaving behind the smoking wreck of companies damaged by the sub prime mess.

At bat: Former Citigroup chairman and chief executive Charles Prince, former Merrill Lynch CEO Stan O’Neal and Angelo Mozilo, founder and CEO of Countrywide Financial, who has become the public face of the mortgage crisis as the CEO of the nation’s largest mortgage company. All will share the same panel before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, with Congressmen Henry Waxman, Carolyn Maloney and Dennis Kucinich.

Watch for whether Congress asks this question: Should rich bankers give back the lucrative compensation they got during the illusory go-go years of a bubble they helped inflate?

Unless Congress now has rhetorical swollen glands from the baseball steroid hearings, watch, too, for whether elected officials rain hellfire and brimstone down on Countrywide Financial, for its tone-deaf behavior in the face of a massive housing meltdown.

Countrywide only just now canceled a high-priced junket that the damaged lender would have paid for, a junket for bankers at a ski resort near Aspen, Colo., where Countrywide would have footed the bill for rooms going for $725 a night, as well as servings of Kobe beef and caviar.

You’ll likely hear from the three bankers a series of aw shucks dissimulations about their roles in the subprime mess, “we didn’t know, who could have known, no one knew,” that sound so gee whizzy, they’ll appear to have leapt out of an Archie comic book.

Shopworn excuses seized upon by these bankers as a flotation device under the media glare, a glare that would leave regular people feeling as withered as a salted snail, but not them.

Why? Because what do these executives care—they can stand the temporary glare of the cameras’ because they are walking away as rich as Croesus.

However, the three have much to answer for, notably the neatly scissored Mozilo, (who does his PR?).

Countrywide has come under fire for willy-nilly handing out dubious loans to people who could offer up no more collateral than their signature on a piece of paper. The lender then sold those loans into the mortgage-backed security market where Citi and Merrill were big players, reaping a bonanza of fat fees. Such fees accounted for 20% to 30% of big investment banks' profits before the crisis, according to CreditSights, a financial-research firm. Merrill’s fees from collateralized debt obligations alone hit $700m in 2006.

Here’s the back story. When the market for mortgage-backed securities seized up this past summer, and Countrywide faced a liquidity crisis, Mozilo seems to have started covering up with a multitude of spins.

He stayed “bullish,” and went so far as to publicly criticize a Merrill Lynch analyst for having the temerity to say Countrywide faced a potential bankruptcy, calling the comment irresponsible, baseless and tantamount to "yelling fire in a very crowded theater."

But behind the scenes, Countrywide was moving quickly to plug life-threatening holes on its leaking balance sheet.

To keep funding loans, it won a $2bn cash infusion from Bank of America (BAC), it drew down an $11.5bn credit line, and it used its mortgages as collateral to borrow $51bn from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta, equal to 37% of the home loan bank's total outstanding advances.

Sums so large that Sen. Chuck Schumer warned they threaten the health of the system’s 12 home loan banks (the amount of loans these home loan banks have made to their 8,125 members has risen some $200bn to $822bn, a whopping 32% jump in just six months.)

When BofA saw its $2bn stake threatened by Countrywide’s near-death experience, BofA agreed to buy Countrywide for $4.1bn, at what analysts now say was a fire-sale price.

To date, Countrywide has foreclosed on 90,000 loans, has laid off more than 11,400 employees since last summer, and it has reported a loss of $704mn for 2007, its first annual loss in more than 30 years.

Meanwhile, Countrywide, along with Bank of America, has been asking the federal government (meaning taxpayers) to buy up bad mortgages and to broaden its bailout of the housing mess.

And despite his bullish comments, Mozilo wasn’t buying into his company's stock, instead, he was unloading through mid-October, selling for an average share price of $35 (the stock has dropped to $7, down 83% over the last 52 weeks).

Mozilo is now under an SEC probe for $414mn in stock sales from 2003 to 2007, sales he attributes to a pre-existing executive plan to unload shares, shares which cost him nothing, and a plan he reportedly widened to unload more stock.

Back to the BofA deal. Mozilo was going to walk away with a severance package worth more than $110mn once his bank was sold to BofA. But Mozilo now says he’s forfeiting $37.5mn of severance pay, fees and benefits in the face of pressure.

However, Mozilo still keeps the balance. That includes two pensions that he’ll get as a lump sum when he leaves, worth some $24mn when last Countrywide reported their value in December 2006.

Mozilo and his spouse also get health benefits for life, three years of financial planning and company payments of what are called “tax gross ups” to cover any potential tax payments on his rich payout. Mozilo also gets free rides on the company jet, and Countrywide will pick up his country club tab until 2011.

Merrill’s O’Neal walked away in October with an estimated $161mn in retirement benefits, stock and options. Prince quit in November with an estimated $68mn in pension, stock and options and another $12.5mn “performance bonus.”

The payouts are effectively based on phantom profits, given the massive write-downs these companies so far have taken. Merrill Lynch has already booked a total of $24.5bn in write-downs; Citigroup, $22.1bn.

What’s most ironic is the fact that once their former companies’ new executives clean up the mess, the stock options held by O’Neal, Prince and Mozilo will be worth much more as the underlying stock prices rise, giving them a lucrative payout down the road.

BIG GRAIN OF SALT: The Emily Litellas are out in force in the market these days. Almost daily the stock market gets choppier on news of predicted bank write downs from the housing crisis and from the bond insurer mess, a total of $470bn last we looked, amounting to more than the gross domestic product of either Belgium, Egypt or Sweden.

The estimates are just that, a farrago of numbers that amount to putting a wet finger up in the wind to arrive at write-downs that may never come to fruition. And if just the $400bn do come to pass, remember we’re in the post-Enron age, where auditors, panicked at constantly being the deep pocket in law suits, are now taking a battle axe to the banks’ books.

The auditors are using though accounting rules that are more art than science, so say sources at the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which sets the bookkeeping rules for the nation’s publicly traded companies.

The rules force banks to price-tag assets based on what the market would say these assets are worth on the day they are unloaded. But in a market that’s frozen solid, you can’t even price-tag a security backed by a 10c popsicle. I warned you about this back on January 22, ("In the Weeds"). Banks are using indices largely based on market sentiment to figure out writedowns that could be exaggerated. Despite the negative readings from the indices, many of the loans or assets backing these frozen securities like CDOs still pay interest on time, which is why banks still keep them on their balance sheets because once the panic passes, they still present value.

And you can be sure that if these mark-to-market accounting rules were in effect during the Asian economic crisis or the Latin American debt crisis, these economies would still be under water, likely until the next millennium.

No one knows how bad the situation is.

For instance, in a neat bit of hindsight, Moody’s estimates some 3.5mn people will lose their homes in the next two and a half years. Three point five million.

That’s equal to every family in either both Dakotas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico or Wyoming losing their homes, according to one estimate. Really? But how many will still have incomes to buy other houses?

I’m always mindful of this saying: A conclusion is where the mind comes to rest. Not in this very fluid situation. No research report, no write down, no prognostication is definitive. Beware of those analysts who write like they are.