61% Underfunded Illinois Teachers Pension Fund Goes For Broke, Becomes Next AIG-In-Waiting By Selling Billions In CDS!

Zero Hedge

61% Underfunded Illinois Teachers Pension Fund Goes For Broke, Becomes Next AIG-In-Waiting By Selling Billions In CDS - credit default swaps!!!

written by Tyler Durden

June 14, 2010

"If you were to have faxed me this balance sheet and asked me to guess who it belonged to, I would have guessed, Citadel, Magnetar or even a proprietary trading desk at a bank.” So begins a story by Alexandra Harris of the Medill Journalism school at Northwestern, which, however, does not focus on some exotic product-specialized hedge fund, or some discount window (taxpayer capital) backed prop desk (hedge fund) at a TBTF bank, but instead at the 61% underfunded, $33.7 billion Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS), which just happened to lose $4.4 billion in 2009 (a year when, courtesy of America's conversion from capitalism to socialism, the market rose 60%), and 5% in 2008.

Yet underperformance can be explained. What can not, is that the TRS has now become a shadow AIG. As Harris notes "TRS is largely on the risky side of the contracts, selling and writing OTC derivatives, including credit default swaps, insurance-like contracts that guarantee payment in the event of a default, that were blamed in part for the 2008 collapse of Lehman Bros. and bailout of insurance giant American International Group Inc., or AIG." Demonstrating just how far the fund is willing to go in the "for broke" category, knowing full well that if it repeats AIG's implosion, the government will likely bail it out, is the disclosure that a stunning 81.5% of the fund's investments are considered risky - this means it is the fourth-riskiest investment portfolio for a pension fund in the U.S!

All it will take is another Flash Crash-like event, or a liquidity crunch, and the 355,000 "full-time, part-time and substitute public school teachers and administrators working outside the city of Chicago" will likely end up with a big, fat donut in their retirement portfolios courtesy of some deranged lunatic, portfolio manager, situated externally at a bank like Goldman Sachs, who in taking a page straight out of Obama's bailout nation, has decided there is no such thing as risk. And to those naive enough to think the TRS is the only such fund which has now gone all-in on "no risk and infinite return", wait until such stories start emerging about every single massively underfunded pension and fully insolvent fund in the US.

From Harris' report:

Frank Partnoy, a law and finance professor at the University of San Diego who worked on Wall Street as a derivatives structurer in the mid-1990s, said TRS’s portfolio is an indication that investing is not about what is smart but what will generate the highest returns.

“It’s an epic illustration of how we’ve really gotten lost in financial complexities,” he said, after studying the Illinois Auditor General's 2009 audit of TRS and the fund's March 31 derivatives positions.

TRS said it uses over-the-counter, or privately negotiated, derivatives to maximize the performance of its portfolio and only allows money managers to invest in derivatives if they “have the appropriate expertise and knowledge and employ sophisticated risk management systems,” said David Urbanek, public information officer, in an e-mail.

The fact that TRS trustees and investment advisors approved the use of OTC derivatives isn’t, in itself, alarming. The financial instruments are not explicitly prohibited in the Illinois pension code, and many derivatives contracts provide protection against losses on other investments.

In the balance sheet provided to Medill News Service, TRS’s OTC derivatives portfolio showed that in addition to writing CDSs, the pension fund was selling swaptions and shorting international-based interest rate swaps. For each contract written or sold, TRS received a premium.

And as always happens when one collects pennies before a rollercoaster, the spectacular blow up always eventually catches up with you:

Unfortunately for TRS, its OTC positions soured in late April when Greece’s debt woes worsened, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain’s debt to AA and the euro dropped to its lowest levels since the currency’s inception. The International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank orchestrated a $1 trillion bailout to ensure that Greece and the other PIIGS—Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain—would not default on their debts.

“As the European debt crisis worsens, TRS’ positions are going to bleed money,” the trader said.

Where it gets even scarier, is that TRS may be fraudulently misrepresenting its massively underwater portfolio:

But the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System said if it unwound the OTC trades held in its pension fund today, the positions would have a market value of $5 million and a notional value of $1.1 billion. Notional value is the total value of a leveraged financial instrument’s assets.

It isn’t clear how TRS is valuing its OTC derivatives and market experts, among them Rosenthal, who estimated a loss of $515 million as of March 31, were skeptical the OTC positions could have been showing a net positive notional value.

TRS projects it will have logged a $158 million gain from its derivatives portfolio by the June 30 end of fiscal 2010— with $5 million derived from its swaptions, CDS and interest rate swaps positions—and just a fraction of its projected $627 million total return.

A significant portion of TRS’s OTC derivatives are linked to interest rate swaps and those are tied to either the London Interbank Offering Rate or Euro Interbank Offering Rate. Interest rate swaps stipulate for every basis point tick upward in the LIBOR or EURIBOR, the fund is forced to pay out an interest rate that is two basis points higher. This is why the notional value of TRS’s U.S. dollar- and international-based interest rate swaps were in the red by $361.4 million at the end of March.

TRS’ portfolio also includes a large number of swaptions—or the right at a future time to enter into a swap position—which showed a loss of $14 million as of March 31. In addition, the fund sold approximately $154 million worth of CDSs guaranteeing the debt of dozens of companies, countries and states, among them American International Group Inc., GMAC, Panama, Mexico and California. (See graphic).

A large part of TRS’s international-based interest rate swaps positions are linked to the Brazilian Interbank Deposit Rate and Euribor in a bet that inflation would stay low in Europe but rise in emerging markets.

Rosenthal, who said TRS appears to be betting that long-term Treasury yields will greatly increase, is incredulous that the fund even has this view. “Their job is not to play the [Treasury] yield curve,” Rosenthal said. “It’s not their job to have that view.”

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