The book “The Big Short” is a documentary. The movie is based reasonably closely on the book. The movie is a fictional re-telling, but the people are real and their motivations and actions are accurate.
The Jenga scene to describe CBOs is quite cringe to me.
If a BBB tranche goes under, the investors in the BBB tranche get nothing to protect the AAA tranche (and above). In effect: BBB tranche can fail safely, that's the entire point of them.
That's why they only shorted the BBB tranche (with exception of Brownfield Capital, who did go all the way to the AA tranche). AA was safer and more reliable: so for a short its a riskier move to short.
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The scene does in fact lay the ground basis of tranches and CDOs, which is better than most Hollywood movies. But its still filled with misconceptions, and the Jenga tower (though dramatic) isn't helping at all.
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Synthetic CDOs was very poorly described. The "rating agency" scenes were pretty much purely fiction and just designed to enrage the audience and IMO unhelpful to the general discussion. Etc. etc.
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CDOs of CDOs were accurately described IMO. Hammed up by explaining the "yesterday's fish in today's soup), but that at least is somewhat of an accurate analog.
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I mean, it was a solid movie. But look, I know how reality works. I've actually taken the time to look at (some) of the Congressional Hearings and read some of the papers for how that whole thing worked back in 2008. And there are also some good Frontline Documentaries on the whole 2008 crisis in general.
AIG insured many of the AAA tranches. Once those started becoming at risk, AIG had to respond to a collateral call--which they couldn't (as the AAA tranches were so huge).
They were further hurt by the fact they kept a huge amount of their assets in AAA MBS. Which had now become illiquid and (temporarily) lost value.
AIG's bailout by the government was a critical inflection point; if they hadn't, the entire insurance/financial services industry was at risk.
That's beside the point...the movie is only two hours and can't include everything...the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true, and your comment is not very accurate.
A lot of banks saw what was going on in the market, and decided to "cover their ass" just in case the mortgage industry collapsed. They didn't quite go short like Burry (and everyone else in the movie), they just "hedged", to protect themselves just in case of a collapse.
Any bank that was worried about what was going on would have bought a few credit-default swaps from AIG (not that everyone knew that AIG was the main CDO counterparty: they bought CDS from the market and AIG happened to be one of those sellers).
If AIG went bankrupt, a huge number of shorts (well, "protection buyers") on the mortgage market would have gone bankrupt with them.
AIG isn't covered in the movie because it runs entirely counter to the narritive the movie is trying to build. A huge number of banks did in fact see the mortgage crisis and take moves to protect themselves.
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That's the thing about CDS and going short on the mortgage market: even if you were right about it, you had to also be right about the so called "counterparty risk". The bank who took up the long-side of the bet against you still needed to be around to make the payout.
That's why AIG was bailed out. Also: because the collapse of Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual and other financial companies was wreaking havoc on the economy.
The movie wanted to focus on the narrative that "Bailouts are bad". Well, sure. But its pretty easy to build that narrative by ignoring the AIG situation, as well as Lehman Brothers / Washington Mutual.
If you go back and look at the actual history and debate of the bailout, the question is way more ambiguous.
>> the upshot that the AAA's were in a position to be unstable and possibly cause an economic collapse was in fact very true
You know what a number of my friends took from that scene?
"Wow, the banks are so stupid. Why would AAAs rely upon the B-tranche?"
Yeah, cause that scene is misinformed. The Jenga Tower is upside-down. America's Mortgage market wouldn't really collapse until the AAAs were being threatened (which eventually, they were, but because of CDO-squared and Synthetic CDO leverage).
But yeah, its a long story. You'd expect that the core of the story would be covered by a reasonable documentary. But "The Big Short" isn't one, its an entertainment movie.
Hmmm... that's a good question. Its been a while since I studied the 2008 collapse.
What I can say is that a CDS wasn't purchased directly in most cases. It was indirect.
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So for example: if you're a bank looking at a bunch of CDOs (and therefore: CDO-squared, which people didn't realize was a problem yet). You're seeing default rates creep up in 2006 and you're worried that things might collapse.
You then see a CDO that's insurance-protected. It has a lower %yield, but that's because some of the % is going towards CDS / insurance to protect your basket of mortgages. You check with the ratings agencies and they rate the bond at AAA (because even if the underlying mortgage fails, you have a big-bank providing the CDS protecting the mortgage).
You purchase the CDO (aka: buy a bunch of mortgages on the market), WITH CDS insurance. The CDS portion is sold to the highest-bidder at a separate time. The CDO-buyer didn't care "who" insured the CDO, they just wanted some kind of insurance.
That turned out to be a problem when AIG was revealed to be the owner of $500+ Billion in CDS. As such, the "insurance payout" protecting those CDOs ended up being vaporware.
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So now you're the US Government, looking at this problem. Do you let AIG collapse? If you do, all $500 Billion worth of AIG's CDSes fail (and therefore the CDOs fail). But if you let that happen, other banks also fail (and these other banks made the CORRECT decision: buying insurance to cover their ass).
This is the "Toxic Debt" problem. The toxic debt was passed from company-to-company: everyone "related" to AIG was going to be affected, and no one really had an idea of who AIG was related to.
Note: Bush let the first few banks (ex: Lehman Brothers) fail. They saw in realtime as the "toxic debt" of Lehman Brothers brought down the rest of the market.
By the time AIG was at risk, George Bush had seen enough. When one bank collapses, it causes many other banks to collapse in ways that cannot be foreseen.
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I admit that one could make the argument that it was the smaller-bank's fault for forgetting about counterparty risk (not caring who took up the other side of the CDS).
But by the time banks were falling and collapsing like dominoes in 2008, I think Bush didn't care about the morals of this particular case. It was about stopping the domino effect in general.
Its like the Options market. You can be the seller of a call option without knowing who your counterparty is. Similarly: you don't necessarily know who the counterparty to your CDS is.
The CDS was not a standard instrument like the options market. The details of each-and-every CDS changes with each prospectus. This is very common in the bond market: bonds change (callable vs non-callable vs puttable, vs tax free vs taxed, in a CDO or CDO-squared or Synthetic CDO, or a SLAB or an MBS or... etc. etc. Lots of differing details).
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So when you buy a CDO-squared in 2006, you didn't necessarily know that AIG was providing the CDS-insurance associated with that CDO. (Hypothetically. I'm assuming that such a product existed back then...)
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If it helps, consider a $600 call option on TSLA that expires a month from now. Lets say you want to be the seller of this call option (which is a kinda-sorta insurance-like product on the price of TSLA).
You can sell this Tesla-insurance on the options market. But you will NEVER figure out who is on the buyer-side of your deal.
And vice versa: the buyer of the TSLA insurance (call option) will never know that you were the one selling that insurance. A middleman handles all the details. Neither side really cares "who" is the counterparty is, they just expect that the other side can pay up.
(In the case of options: the clearing house / middleman is a very large bank who guarantees the payment. It turns out that the middlemen of the CDS deals in 2008 were less reliable)
Thanks, I had assumed that the banks organising CDSs were setting things up but the actual final transaction was directly between the two parties. So were they really in the middle selling the CDS and offloading the risk onto the likes of AIG - who was presumably thought to have zero counterparty risk?).
> who was presumably thought to have zero counterparty risk?
By my understanding: people just forgot about counterparty risk in 2008.
You have to remember: banks like Lehman Brothers have been around for over 100 years. The idea that a big bank would collapse was a completely alien thought in 2007.
It was one of those "don't care" situations. Oh, they're a big bank. They wouldn't choose to take on more insurance than they can handle (or whatever). I don't care which bank is the CDS insurance, I just want some insurance from somebody. Besides, mortgages have been reliable for decades, getting CDSes to cover my ass on an already safe mortgage is the height of paranoia. Etc. etc.
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You also have to remember that various banks work pretty hard to "hide their hands". If you hear that a big bank is selling CDOs, the all the smaller banks will similarly sell CDOs (trying to get a "piece of the action").
If you're a big bank deciding to make a $500 Billion bet, you really want to make sure that the details of your bet remains a secret. Otherwise, the smaller banks (who are more agile than you) will make those deals before you finish your deal.
Yes, it's a Hollywood movie, about a very technical subject. I would not expect someone to come away with a strong working knowledge of how credit default swaps work, any more than I would expect someone to come away from watching the miniseries "Chernobyl" and understand what caused the reactor explosion.
The Jenga tower should really be inverted. The BBB tranche gets knocked off the tower to protect the AAA tranche at the base.
The ratings agency scenes are fictional in the sense that no conversation actually happened, to our knowledge, but it's 100% true that the ratings agencies played right along with the industry, and were incentivized to give higher ratings, just like the FAA was incentivized not to ground Boeing after the first 737 Max crash.
