9 – 1998: The Russia default & LTCM

The Russian financial crisis (also called "Ruble crisis") hit Russia on 17 August 1998.

It was exacerbated by the Asian financial crisis, which started in July 1997. Given the ensuing decline in world commodity prices, countries heavily dependent on the export of raw materials, such as oil, were among those most severely hit. (Petroleum, natural gas, metals, and timber accounted for more than 80% of Russian exports, leaving the country vulnerable to swings in world prices. Oil was also a major source of government tax revenue.[1]) The sharp decline in the price of oil had severe consequences for Russia. However, the primary cause of the Russian Financial Crisis was not the fall of oil prices directly, but the result of non-payment of taxes by the energy and manufacturing industries.

On August 17, 1998, the Russian government and the Central Bank of Russia issued a "Joint Statement" announcing, in substance, that: (i) the ruble/dollar trading band would be widened from 5.3-7.1 RUR/USD to 6.0-9.5 RUR/USD; (ii) Russia's ruble-denominated debt would be restructured in a manner to be announced at a later date; and, to prevent mass Russian bank default, (iii) a temporary 90-day moratorium would be imposed on the payment of some bank obligations, including certain debts and forward currency contracts[6]. At the same time, in addition to widening the currency band, the authorities also announced that they intended to allow the RUR/USD rate to move more freely within the wider band.

At the time, the Moscow Interbank Currency Exchange (or "MICEX") set a daily "official" exchange rate through a series of iterative auctions based on written bids submitted by buyers and sellers. When the buy and sell prices matched this "fixed" or "settled" the official MICEX exchange rate, which would then be published by Reuters. The MICEX rate was (and is) commonly used by banks and currency dealers worldwide as the reference exchange rate for transactions involving the Russian ruble and foreign currencies.
From August 17 to August 25, the ruble steadily depreciated on the MICEX, moving from 6.43 to 7.86 RUR/USD. On August 26, the Central Bank terminated ruble-dollar trading on the MICEX, and the MICEX did not fix a ruble-dollar rate that day.

LTCM:
LTCM was founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, the former vice-chairman and head of bond trading at Salomon Brothers. Board of directors members included Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton, who shared the 1997 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, the Nobel Prize in Economics[2] and it is identified with the Nobel Prizes, although it is not one of the five Nobel Prizes (in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace) officially named The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.
As a Big Swinging Dick hedge fund with the most stellar partners and a huge capital base, LTCM was able to convince banks to lend them money at rates that were not available to lesser mortals (including investment banks like Salomon Brothers). LTCM used this credit to leverage their capital base by a factor of twenty to thirty times.

Initially enormously successful with annualized returns of over 40% (after fees) in its first years, in 1998 just a year after the award, The company experienced a flight-to-liquidity. it lost $4.6 billion in less than four months following the Russian financial crisis and became a prominent example of the risk potential in the hedge fund industry. The fund folded in early 2000.
in May and June 1998 returns from the fund were -6.42% and -10.14% respectively, reducing LTCM's capital by $461 million. This was further aggravated by the exit of Salomon Brothers from the arbitrage business in July 1998. Such losses were accentuated through the Russian financial crises in August and September 1998, when the Russian Government defaulted on their government bonds. Panicked investors sold Japanese and European bonds to buy U.S. treasury bonds. The profits that were supposed to occur as the value of these bonds converged became huge losses as the value of the bonds diverged. By the end of August, the fund had lost $1.85 billion in capital.

the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a bailout of $3.625 billion by the major creditors to avoid a wider collapse in the financial markets. The contributions from the various institutions were as follows:
$300 million: Bankers Trust, Barclays, Chase, Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, J.P.Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Salomon Smith Barney, UBS
$125 million: Société Générale
$100 million: Lehman Brothers, Paribas
Bear Stearns declined to participate.
In return, the participating banks got a 90% share in the fund and a promise that a supervisory board would be established.
The total losses were found to be $4.6 billion. The losses in the major investment categories were (ordered by magnitude):
$1.6 bn in interest swaps
$1.3 bn in equity volatility
$430 mn in Russia and other emerging markets
$371 mn in directional trades in developed countries
$215 mn in yield curve arbitrage
$203 mn in S&P 500 stocks
$100 mn in junk bond arbitrage
no substantial losses in merger arbitrage

This table makes it clear that the last two items, interest swaps and equity volatility bets, account for the majority of the losses. LTCM's losses where large for two reasons:
LTCM used large amounts of leverage. For every dollar of assets in the fund they borrowed twenty to thirty dollars to place their trading bets. In many cases the loans made to LTCM where the equivalent of signature loans. There were not backed by securities and there were no margin calls when the value of LTCM's assets dropped. Leverage greatly magnified LTCM's profits when they bet correctly. It also greatly magnified their losses when the market turned against them. Although LTCM's returns were impressive when they did well, their risk adjusted returns were not nearly as good.
Low liquidity. Or to put it simply, there were few buyers when the market turned against LTCM.
Interest rate swaps are contracts between two parties. They do not trade on an open market the way stocks, bonds or exchange traded options do. The options contracts that LTCM traded in their volatility bets were huge customized option contracts:
The investors that had money in LTCM got ten cents on their invested dollar. The partners were largely wiped out. Once LTCM's market positions were unwound the rescue consortium made money on their investment.after the bailout by the other investors, the panic abated, and the positions formerly held by LTCM were eventually liquidated at a small profit to the bailers.

Ian Kaplan - October, 2000 book review on “when genius failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management” by Roger Lowenstein

When markets are stable and no events like the "Asian melt-down" or the Russian bond default perturb them, the assumptions above tend to be true. In fact, during the first three years of LTCM's history, markets were very placid.

Efficient markets show linear behavior that can be described with calculus and statistics. Academics like this because it leads to elegant results which make good journal articles, with nice equations. There is, in fact, some reason to believe that markets are efficient. But there should always be a caveat: markets are efficient, on average, over a long period of time. Unfortunately for those who actually trade in the market, short term effects can be anything but "efficient" and perfect. Unlike physics, where theory is eventually tested against experimental results, much of economics seems almost willfully ignorant of the way the market behaves.
Those who are active in the market, like George Soros, tend to discount academic theory. Anyone who hears news reports about the stock market will realize that rather than being perfectly efficient, markets are not always placid, but sometimes act like a manic depressive, gripped by wild euphoria one moment and crashes the next. A whole language has grown up to describe market "mood", complete with mascots: the bull and the bear.
Markets exhibit avalanche events: a seemingly small trigger can produce a massive wave of change in the market. In the case of LTCM, the avalanche was triggered by the Russian bond default. LTCM was not the only trading firm to lose large amounts of money. Virtually every investment bank lost money when interest rate spreads widened unexpectedly.

Some industry officials said that Federal Reserve Bank of New York involvement in the rescue, however benign, would encourage large financial institutions to assume more risk, in the belief that the Federal Reserve would intervene on their behalf in the event of trouble. Federal Reserve Bank of New York actions raised concerns among some market observers that it could create moral hazard.

Bailout of Long-Term Capital: A Bad Precedent? TYLER COWEN Dec 26 nytimes.com Long-Term Capital was advised by finance quants, or quantitative analysts, who made a number of unsound, esoteric bets, including investments in interest rate derivatives. When Russia’s inability to pay its debts roiled global markets, the fund, saddled with high-leverage and off-balance-sheet obligations, was near collapse.
Because Long-Term Capital owed large sums to banks and other financial institutions, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York organized a consortium of companies to buy it out and cover the debts. Alan Greenspan, then the Fed chairman, eased monetary policy to restart capital markets, which were starting to freeze up. Long-Term Capital’s shareholders were wiped out, but none of the creditors took losses.

The side effect: At the time, it may have seemed that regulators did the right thing. The bailout did not require upfront money from the government, and the world avoided an even bigger financial crisis. Today, however, that ad hoc intervention by the government no longer looks so wise. With the Long-Term Capital bailout as a precedent, creditors came to believe that their loans to unsound financial institutions would be made good by the Fed — as long as the collapse of those institutions would threaten the global credit system. Bolstered by this sense of security, bad loans mushroomed.