Bear Stearns Explained: How Financial Values Can Disappear

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Bear Stearns Explained: How Financial Values Can Disappear

By Editorial Staff
Fri, 02 May 2008 16:15:00 ET

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Bear Stearns used to be a mighty investment bank on Wall Street, but it faced bankruptcy this March over its exposure to securities linked to subprime mortgages. This grim situation led to the Federal Reserve stepping in to help JP Morgan purchase Bear's assets at a fire-sale price. Now the Fed is taking heat from economists like Anna Schwartz who says that the Fed's loans to JP Morgan were a "rogue operation," according to Bloomberg. The big question that still remains for those who watch the elephants trample the grass from afar is, how did Bear Stearns mortgage-backed securities lose their value so quickly? It's a question that Bob Prechter has pondered in a more general way for his best-selling business book, Conquer the Crash. In this excerpt, Bob carefully explains exactly how financial values can disappear.

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Excerpted from Chapter 9 of Conquer the Crash, You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression by Robert Prechter, 2002

Financial Values Can Disappear

People seem to take for granted that financial values can be created endlessly seemingly out of nowhere and pile up to the moon. Turn the direction around and mention that financial values can disappear into nowhere, and they insist that it is not possible. “The money has to go somewhere… It just moves from stocks to bonds to money funds... It never goes away… For every buyer, there is a seller, so the money just changes hands.” That is true of the money, just as it was all the way up, but it’s not true of the values, which changed all the way up.

Asset prices rise not because of “buying” per se, because indeed for every buyer, there is a seller. They rise because those transacting agree that their prices should be higher. All that everyone else — including those who own some of that asset and those who do not — need do is nothing. Conversely, for prices of assets to fall, it takes only one seller and one buyer who agree that the former value of an asset was too high. If no other bids are competing with that buyer’s, then the value of the asset falls, and it falls for everyone who owns it. If a million other people own it, then their net worth goes down even though they did nothing. Two investors made it happen by transacting, and the rest of the investors made it happen by choosing not to disagree with their price. Financial values can disappear through a decrease in prices for any type of investment asset, including bonds, stocks and land.

Learn More About How To Protect Yourself from Falling Values

Bob Prechter's business best-seller, Conquer the Crash, You Can Survive and Prosper in a Deflationary Depression, gives you 34 chapters on how to recognize the coming crash and how to prepare yourself, your family and your business for it.

Anyone who watches the stock or commodity markets closely has seen this phenomenon on a small scale many times. Whenever a market “gaps” up or down on an opening, it simply registers a new value on the first trade, which can be conducted by as few as two people. It did not take everyone’s action to make it happen, just most people’s inaction on the other side. In financial market “explosions” and panics, there are prices at which assets do not trade at all as they cascade from one trade to the next in great leaps.

A similar dynamic holds in the creation and destruction of credit. Let’s suppose that a lender starts with a million dollars and the borrower starts with zero. Upon extending the loan, the borrower possesses the million dollars, yet the lender feels that he still owns the million dollars that he lent out. If anyone asks the lender what he is worth, he says, “a million dollars,” and shows the note to prove it. Because of this conviction, there is, in the minds of the debtor and the creditor combined, two million dollars worth of value where before there was only one. When the lender calls in the debt and the borrower pays it, he gets back his million dollars. If the borrower can’t pay it, the value of the note goes to zero. Either way, the extra value disappears. If the original lender sold his note for cash, then someone else down the line loses.

In an actively traded bond market, the result of a sudden default is like a game of “hot potato”: whoever holds it last loses. When the volume of credit is large, investors can perceive vast sums of money and value where in fact there are only repayment contracts, which are financial assets dependent upon consensus valuation and the ability of debtors to pay. IOUs can be issued indefinitely, but they have value only as long as their debtors can live up to them and only to the extent that people believe that they will.

The dynamics of value expansion and contraction explain why a bear market can bankrupt millions of people. At the peak of a credit expansion or a bull market, assets have been valued upward, and all participants are wealthy — both the people who sold the assets and the people who hold the assets. The latter group is far larger than the former, because the total supply of money has been relatively stable while the total value of financial assets has ballooned. When the market turns down, the dynamic goes into reverse. Only a very few owners of a collapsing financial asset trade it for money at 90 percent of peak value. Some others may get out at 80 percent, 50 percent or 30 percent of peak value. In each case, sellers are simply transforming the remaining future value losses to someone else.

In a bear market, the vast, vast majority does nothing and gets stuck holding assets with low or non-existent valuations. The “million dollars” that a wealthy investor might have thought he had in his bond portfolio or at a stock’s peak value can quite rapidly become $50,000 or $5000 or $50. The rest of it just disappears. You see, he never really had a million dollars; all he had was IOUs or stock certificates. The idea that it had a certain financial value was in his head and the heads of others who agreed. When the point of agreement changed, so did the value. Poof! Gone in a flash of aggregated neurons. This is exactly what happens to most investment assets in a period of deflation.

Learn More About How To Protect Yourself from Falling Values

Tags: Bear Stearns, subprime lending, Bear market, conquer the crash

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