2002 annual report of Berkshire Hathaway , Warren buffet has given lot of meaningful inputs on lot of financial things especially derivatives....
Following are edited excerpts from the Berkshire Hathaway annual report for 2002.
I view derivatives as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.Basically these instruments call for money to change hands at some future date, with the amount to bedetermined by one or more reference items, such as interest rates, stock prices, or currency values. Forexample, if you are either long or short an S&P 500 futures contract, you are a party to a very simplederivatives transaction, with your gain or loss derived from movements in the index. Derivatives contractsare of varying duration, running sometimes to 20 or more years, and their value is often tied to severalvariables.Unless derivatives contracts are collateralized or guaranteed, their ultimate value also depends on thecreditworthiness of the counter-parties to them. But before a contract is settled, the counter-parties recordprofits and losses – often huge in amount – in their current earnings statements without so much as apenny changing hands. Reported earnings on derivatives are often wildly overstated. That’s becausetoday’s earnings are in a significant way based on estimates whose inaccuracy may not be exposed formany years.The errors usually reflect the human tendency to take an optimistic view of one’s commitments. But theparties to derivatives also have enormous incentives to cheat in accounting for them. Those who tradederivatives are usually paid, in whole or part, on “earnings” calculated by mark-to-market accounting. Butoften there is no real market, and “mark-to-model” is utilized. This substitution can bring on large-scalemischief. As a general rule, contracts involving multiple reference items and distant settlement datesincrease the opportunities for counter-parties to use fanciful assumptions. The two parties to the contractmight well use differing models allowing both to show substantial profits for many years. In extremecases, mark-to-model degenerates into what I would call mark-to-myth.I can assure you that the marking errors in the derivatives business have not been symmetrical. Almostinvariably, they have favored either the trader who was eyeing a multi-million dollar bonus or the CEOwho wanted to report impressive “earnings” (or both). The bonuses were paid, and the CEO profited fromhis options. Only much later did shareholders learn that the reported earnings were a sham.Another problem about derivatives is that they can exacerbate trouble that a corporation has run into forcompletely unrelated reasons. This pile-on effect occurs because many derivatives contracts require thata company suffering a credit downgrade immediately supply collateral to counter-parties. Imagine thenthat a company is downgraded because of general adversity and that its derivatives instantly kick in withtheir requirement, imposing an unexpected and enormous demand for cash collateral on the company.The need to meet this demand can then throw the company into a liquidity crisis that may, in some cases,trigger still more downgrades. It all becomes a spiral that can lead to a corporate meltdown.Derivatives also create a daisy-chain risk that is akin to the risk run by insurers or reinsurers that lay offmuch of their business with others. In both cases, huge receivables from many counter-parties tend tobuild up over time. A participant may see himself as prudent, believing his large credit exposures to bediversified and therefore not dangerous. However under certain circumstances, an exogenous event thatcauses the receivable from Company A to go bad will also affect those from Companies B through Z.In banking, the recognition of a “linkage” problem was one of the reasons for the formation of the FederalReserve System. Before the Fed was established, the failure of weak banks would sometimes put suddenand unanticipated liquidity demands on previously-strong banks, causing them to fail in turn. The Fed nowinsulates the strong from the troubles of the weak. But there is no central bank assigned to the job ofpreventing the dominoes toppling in insurance or derivatives. In these industries, firms that arefundamentally solid can become troubled simply because of the travails of other firms further down thechain.Many people argue that derivatives reduce systemic problems, in that participants who can’t bear certainrisks are able to transfer them to stronger hands. These people believe that derivatives act to stabilize theeconomy, facilitate trade, and eliminate bumps for individual participants.On a micro level, what they say is often true. I believe, however, that the macro picture is dangerous andgetting more so. Large amounts of risk, particularly credit risk, have become concentrated in the hands ofrelatively few derivatives dealers, who in addition trade extensively with one other. The troubles of onecould quickly infect the others.On top of that, these dealers are owed huge amounts by non-dealer counter-parties. Some of thesecounter-parties, are linked in ways that could cause them to run into a problem because of a single event,such as the implosion of the telecom industry. Linkage, when it suddenly surfaces, can trigger serioussystemic problems.Indeed, in 1998, the leveraged and derivatives-heavy activities of a single hedge fund, Long-Term CapitalManagement, caused the Federal Reserve anxieties so severe that it hastily orchestrated a rescue effort.In later Congressional testimony, Fed officials acknowledged that, had they not intervened, theoutstanding trades of LTCM – a firm unknown to the general public and employing only a few hundredpeople – could well have posed a serious threat to the stability of American markets. In other words, theFed acted because its leaders were fearful of what might have happened to other financial institutionshad the LTCM domino toppled. And this affair, though it paralyzed many parts of the fixed-income marketfor weeks, was far from a worst-case scenario.One of the derivatives instruments that LTCM used was total-return swaps, contracts that facilitate 100%leverage in various markets, including stocks. For example, Party A to a contract, usually a bank, puts upall of the money for the purchase of a stock while Party B, without putting up any capital, agrees that at afuture date it will receive any gain or pay any loss that the bank realizes.Total-return swaps of this type make a joke of margin requirements. Beyond that, other types ofderivatives severely curtail the ability of regulators to curb leverage and generally get their arms aroundthe risk profiles of banks, insurers and other financial institutions. Similarly, even experienced investorsand analysts encounter major problems in analyzing the financial condition of firms that are heavilyinvolved with derivatives contracts.The derivatives genie is now well out of the bottle, and these instruments will almost certainly multiply invariety and number until some event makes their toxicity clear. Central banks and governments have sofar found no effective way to control, or even monitor, the risks posed by these contracts. In my view,derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, arepotentially lethal.
It is so interesting to note that he is writing letters to his shareholders from past 20 years....
