It’s an excellent question, one that Bill Saporito takes on in the current issue of our magazine. You can read his story, “Is General Motors Worth Saving?” online here. You can also watch Bill talk about his story on MSNBC tomorrow morning at 10:30.
My question, considering the way things have been shaking out in the mortgage market, is whether investors in auto loan securitizations should care. For example, if GM goes bankrupt and the residual value of its cars falls, does that affect the worth of car-loan CDOs? I’m curious because, as we’ve come to learn, as go CDOs, so goes the country.
I called up Carlos Mendez, senior managing director at ICP Capital, an investment management firm that specializes in structured finance, and asked him that question. He explained that the value of auto-loan securitizations depends on car payments, not so much on residual value. Good news.
What might be a problem, though, is the fact that GM services a lot of its own securitizations. It takes a while to move assets between servicers, so if GM were to implode, there’d likely be a spike in defaults during that window where there’s no one calling up borrowers behind on their payments. This is what happened when the mortgage originator New Century Financial went down in a ball of flames.
Now, I’m guessing GM would use bankruptcy to restructure, not to liquidate, but even in that scenario, there could be trouble. The trusts that are responsible for securitizations probably wouldn’t be too hot on a bankrupt company managing its cash flows, and there’s a good chance they’d petition a bankruptcy court judge to switch servicers anyway.
But maybe I’m too far in the weeds.
Before I sign off, though, I do have to tell you one more thing Mendez said. We got to talking about consumer loans in general, and Hank Paulson’s efforts to juice lending, and then he mentioned having spoken to a small bank this morning that had just gotten its TARP funds. “You know what they bought with it?” he said. “Treasuries.”
Barbara!