By late 1996, Paulson had just $16 million of assets. He was a small-fry in the hedge-fund world. Then he found Peter Novello, a marketing professional determined to help Paulson get to the big leagues.
“He had a reasonable track record but it wasn’t phenomenal; it was a period when a lot of managers were making 20 percent a year,” Novello recalls.
As Novello tried to lure new investors, they sometimes asked him about Paulson’s activities outside the office. Rumor had it that Paulson partied hard.
“What difference does it make?”
“Well, we just want to see a level of stability,” one investor replied.
“John didn’t fit the profile of the average hedge-fund manger. He was living downtown in SoHo and in the Hamptons. He had a different lifestyle than [what the] institutional investors were used to seeing,” Novello says.
Paulson’s fund was hurt by 1998’s Russian-debt default, the implosion of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, and the resulting market tumult. His patience wore thin with one employee, Dennis Chu, who was left frazzled and unable to make clear recommendations to his boss.
“Just tell me what you think!” Paulson screamed at Chu, who eventually left the firm.
Sometimes Paulson hinted at what might have been aggravating him, noting that competitors and friends seemed to be pulling away. He told one analyst that an old roommate from Harvard, Manuel Asensio, was making a million dollars a year at his hedge fund shorting tiny stocks, “and we’re killing ourselves here.”
The fund lost 4 percent in 1998, enough to spur some clients to rush for the exits, leaving Paulson & Co. with about $50 million at the end of the year—down from more than $100 million at the end of 1997. Some deserted Paulson for larger merger specialists, some of whom managed to make a bit of money during the year.
“I was not a major player,” Paulson acknowledges. “We were a little shell-shocked from the LTCM collapse so we were less aggressive getting back into the market later in the year like others.”
On days the firm made money, Paulson was friendlier, even charming, a change in personality that both relieved and confused his employees. Some of them attributed his mercurial personality to his drive to be a major player. It was also, they realized, the nature of merger investing, which requires split-second decisions based on imperfect information. Others learned to appreciate Paulson’s brutal honesty, such as when he dissected their investment recommendations, looking for holes.
While the market shakeout of 1998 cost Paulson clients, it also left him with ripe investment opportunities, enabling him to score impressive gains over the next few years. Just as important, he made a dramatic decision to alter his lifestyle. Paulson had continued to host blowout bashes at his SoHo loft in his early days of running the fund. But as he approached his mid-forties, almost everyone in his group of friends had married, and he, too, was beginning to tire of the social scene. Paulson took out a pad and pen and wrote down the characteristics he was looking for in a wife. The word “cheerful” topped the list. Paulson sensed he needed a partner who could help him deal with the ups and downs of his life.
“I figured I’d always make money, so that was unimportant to me,” Paulson says.
He quickly realized there was a woman he was attracted to who fit the bill and was sitting nearby: his assistant, Jenny.
“Jenny didn’t drink, smoke, or go out late at night; for me she was a breath of fresh air,” Paulson says. “She was almost always smiling and cheerful.”
Paulson quietly pursued Zaharia, asking her out almost every other week for more than a year, but she wouldn’t agree to go on a date. Zaharia told Paulson that she’d only date him if he fired her and found her a new job. But Paulson couldn’t bear to let Zaharia go and work for someone else. He offered her all kinds of enticements, including trips to Aspen, Miami, and Los Angeles. Zaharia had never been to those cities and was tempted to go with her boss, but ultimately refused, saying she didn’t want to cross the lines of professional behavior.
Zaharia did agree to have lunch with Paulson, however, and the two began getting together at least once a week, though other employees were in the dark about the budding relationship. After more than two hundred meals together, and an occasional Rollerblading outing in Central Park, Paulson realized he was in love and proposed; six months later they wed. When Paulson finally told his employees, they were floored, having completely missed any signs that an office romance had been brewing.
Paulson went out of his way to embrace Jenny and her family. The couple agreed to wed in an Episcopal church in Southampton, and Paulson became friendly with the priest. Light streamed through the seaside church’s Tiffany windows as the sun set and the ceremony began.
By 2001, Paulson was on more solid footing in his personal life. And his fund had grown as well. He managed over $200 million and had refined his investment approach.
Few outside the firm picked up on the change in Paulson, though. Erik Norrgård, who invested in hedge funds for New York firm NorthHouse Advisors, met Paulson around that time and decided his was “just another ham-and-cheese operation in a crowded space” of merger investors. Norrgård passed on him. Others heard rumblings about Paulson’s wild past and steered clear, unaware that he had settled down into a quiet family life.
“If people knew him at all, it was as just another merger arb,” says Paulson’s friend and initial investor Howard Gurvitch. “He wasn’t really on anyone’s radar screen.”
But something remarkable was about to happen to the nation, and to the financial markets, an upheaval that would change the course of financial history and transform John Paulson from a bit player into the biggest star in the game.
2.
THE HOUSING MARKET DIDN’T SEEM LIKE AN OBVIOUS BENEFICIARY OF the age of easy money. As the World Trade Center toppled on September 11, 2001, and Osama bin Laden’s lieutenants boasted of crippling the U.S. economy, the real estate market and the overall economy wobbled—especially around the key New York area. Home prices had enjoyed more than five years of gains, but the economy was already fragile in the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble, and most experts worried about a weakening real estate market, even before the tragic attacks.
But the Federal Reserve Board, which had been lowering interest rates to aid the economy, responded to the shocking September 11 attacks by slashing interest rates much further, making it cheaper to borrow all kinds of debt. The key federal-funds rate, a short-term interest rate that influences terms on everything from auto and student loans to credit-card and home-mortgage loans, would hit 1 percent by the middle of 2003, down from 6.5 percent at the start of 2001, as the Fed, led by Chairman Alan Greenspan, worked furiously to keep the economy afloat. Rates around the globe also fell, giving a green light to those hoping for a cheap loan.
For years, Americans had been pulled by two opposing impulses—an instinctive distaste of debt and a love affair with the notion of owning a home. In 1758, Benjamin Franklin wrote: “The second vice is lying; the first is running in debt.”1 The dangers of borrowing were brought home in the Great Depression when a rash of businesses went bankrupt under the burden of heavy debt, scarring a generation. In the 1950s, more than half of all U.S. households had no mortgage debt and almost half had no debt at all. Home owners sometimes celebrated paying off their loans with mortgage-burning parties, setting loan documents aflame before friends and family. The practice continued into the 1970s; Archie Bunker famously held such a get-together in an episode of All in the Family.
Until the second half of the twentieth century, borrowing for anything other than big-ticket items, such as a home or a car, was unusual. Even then, home buyers generally needed at least a 20 percent down payment, and thus required a degree of financial well-being before owning a home.
But the forces of financial innovation, Madison Avenue marketing, and growing prosperity changed prevailing attitudes about being in hock. Two decades of robust growth jus
tified, and encouraged, the embrace of debt. Catchy television commercials convinced most people that debt was an ally, not an enemy.
“One of the tricks in the credit-card business is that people have an inherent guilt with spending,” said Jonathan Cranin, an executive at the big advertising agency McCann-Erickson Worldwide Advertising, in 1997, explaining the rationale behind MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign. “What you want is to have people feel good about their purchases.”2
By the summer of 2000, household borrowing stood at $6.5 trillion, up almost 60 percent in five years. The average U.S. household sported thirteen credit or charge cards and carried $7,500 in credit-card balances, up from $3,000 a decade earlier.3
Americans borrowed more in part because there was more money to borrow. Thanks to Wall Street’s 1977 invention of “securitization,” or the bundling of loans into debt securities, lenders could sell their loans to investors, take the proceeds, and use them to make even more loans to consumers and companies alike. Thousands of loans ended up in these debt securities. So if a few of them went sour, it might have only a minor effect on investors who bought the securities, so the thinking went.
The shift in attitude toward debt gave life to the real estate market. More than most nations, the United States worked at getting as many people in their own homes as possible. Academic data demonstrated that private-home ownership brought all kinds of positive benefits to neighborhoods, such as reduced crime and rising academic achievements. The government made the interest on mortgage payments tax deductible, and pressure on Congress from vested interests in the real estate business kept it that way; other benefits doled out to home sellers and buyers became equally sacred cows.
Low-income consumers and those with poor credit histories who once had difficulty borrowing money found it easier, even before Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve started slashing interest rates. In 2000, more than $160 billion of mortgage loans were outstanding to “subprime” borrowers, a euphemistic phrase invented by lenders to describe those with credit below the top “prime” grade. That figure represented more than 11 percent of all mortgages, up from just 4 percent in 1993, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Low borrower rates helped send home prices higher after the 2001 attacks. Until 2003, the climb in prices made a good deal of sense, given that the economy was resilient, immigration strong, unemployment low, and tracts of land for development increasingly limited.
Then things went overboard, as America’s raging love affair with the home turned unhealthy. Those on the left and right of the political spectrum have their favorite targets of blame for the mess, as if it was a traditional Whodunit. But like a modern version of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express, guilt for the most painful economic collapse of modern times is shared by a long cast of sometimes unsavory characters. Ample amounts of chicanery, collusion, naiveté, downright stupidity, and old-fashioned greed compounded the damage.
AS HOME PRICES SURGED, banks and mortgage-finance companies, enjoying historic growth and eager for new profits, felt comfortable dropping their standards, lending more money on easier terms to higher-risk borrowers. If they ran into problems, a refinancing could always lower their mortgage rate, lenders figured.
After 2001, lenders competed to introduce an array of aggressive loans, as if they were rolling out an all-you-can-eat buffet to a casino full of hungry gamblers. There were interest-only loans for those who wanted to pay only the interest portion of a loan and push off principal payments. Ever-popular adjustable-rate mortgages featured superslim teaser rates that eventually rose. Piggyback loans provided financing to those who couldn’t come up with a down payment.
Borrowers hungry for riskier fare could find mortgages requiring no down payments at all, or loans that were 25 percent larger than the cost of their home itself, providing extra cash for a deserved vacation at the end of the difficult home-bidding process. “Liar loans” were based on stated income, not stuffy pay stubs or bank statements, while “ninja” loans were for those with no income, no job, and no assets. Feel like skipping a monthly payment? Just use a “payment-option” mortgage.
By 2005, 24 percent of all mortgages were done without any down payments at all, up from 3 percent in 2001. More than 40 percent of loans had limited documentation, up from 27 percent. A full 12 percent of mortgages had no down payments and limited documentation, up from 1 percent in 2001.
For those already in homes, lenders urged them to borrow against their equity, as if their homes were automated-teller machines. Citigroup told its customers to “live richly,” arguing that a home could be “the ticket” to whatever “your heart desires.”
“Calling it a ‘second mortgage,’ that’s like hocking your house,” said Pei-Yuan Chia, a former vice chairman at Citicorp who oversaw the bank’s consumer business in the 1980s and 1990s. “But call it ‘equity access,’ and it sounds more innocent.”4
As lenders began exhausting the pool of blue-chip borrowers, they courted those with more scuffed credit. Ameriquest, which focused on loans to subprime borrowers, ran a suggestive ad in the 2004 Super Bowl showing a woman on a man’s lap after an airplane hit sudden turbulence, saying “Don’t Judge Too Quickly … We Won’t.”
Head-turning growth at Ameriquest, New Century Financial, and other firms focused on these subprime borrowers put pressure on traditional lenders to offer more flexible products of their own. Countrywide Financial Corp.’s chairman, Angelo Mozilo, initially decried the lowered lending standards of other banks—until his company began to embrace the practices of the upstarts.
During the 1980s, Mozilo, a forceful executive and gifted salesman born to a butcher in the Bronx, taught employees how to sell mortgages quickly and efficiently, focusing on plain-vanilla, fixed-rate loans. The banking establishment didn’t give Mozilo and his California operation much of a chance, but by the early 2000s, profits were soaring, and the company was the largest mortgage lender in the country.
Mozilo didn’t so much run Countrywide Financial as rule over it. Rivals called him “The Sun God,” both for how his employees seemed to worship him as well as for his deep, permanent tan. Mozilo drove several Rolls-Royces, often in shades of gold, and paid his executives hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mozilo’s shiny white teeth, pinstriped suits, and bravado helped him both stand out and send a message: He was going to shake up the staid industry.
By 2004, competitors were biting at Mozilo’s heels, and Countrywide began to adjust its conservative stance, pushing adjustable-rate, subprime mortgages, and other “affordability products.” ARMs were 49 percent of its business that year, up from 18 percent in 2003, while subprime loans were 11 percent, up from less than 5 percent.5 Mozilo said down payments should be eliminated so more people could buy homes, “the only way we can have a better society.” He called down payments “nonsense” because “it’s often not their money anyway.”6
Mozilo was merely reacting to executives like Brad Morrice. In the early 1990s, Morrice worked at a mortgage lender in Southern California, watching housing prices in the region swing violently. In 1995, Morrice, along with two partners, pulled together $3 million to form New Century, a lender focused on borrowers with poor credit sometimes ignored by major lenders. They chose a name that seemed to foreshadow big changes on the way for the nation.
The New Century offer: People with bad credit could get loans to buy a home, albeit at much higher rates than those offered to borrowers with pristine credit. To limit their risks, New Century’s executives had the good sense to sell their loans to investors attracted to the hefty interest rates. It was a blueprint followed by rival lenders. Orange County in Southern California quickly became the epicenter of subprime lending.
Morrice and his partners took New Century public in 1997, just as the housing market began to heat up. New Century, which billed itself as “a new shade of blue chip,” reached out to independent mortgage-brokerage firms around the country, often tiny, local o
utfits that found customers, advised them on which types of loans were available, and collected fees for handling the initial processing of the mortgages. Brokers favored lenders like New Century that made loans quickly, and didn’t always insist on the most accurate appraisals.
A revolution in home buying was under way: The same borrowers who once saw banks turn up their noses at them now found it easy to borrow money for a home. With immigrants rushing into Southern California, and those with heavy debt or limited or dented credit history trying to keep up with rising home prices, Morrice and his partners enjoyed a gold rush.
As profits rolled in, New Century’s executives chose a black-glass tower in Irvine, California, as their headquarters, and treated their sales force of two thousand to chartered cruises in the Bahamas. Later, they held a bash in a train station in Barcelona and offered top mortgage producers trips to a Porsche driving school. A “culture of excess” was created, says a former computer specialist at the company.
Lenders like New Century relaxed their lending standards, a sharp break with past norms in the business. Regulators gave New Century and its rivals leeway, and New Century became the nation’s second-largest subprime lender, competing head-to-head with older rivals like Countrywide and HSBC Holdings PLC. Wall Street was impressed; David Einhorn, a hedge-fund investor with a stellar record, became a big shareholder and joined the company’s board of directors.
By 2005, almost 30 percent of New Century’s loans were interest-only, requiring borrowers to initially pay only the interest part of the mortgage, rather than principal plus interest. But such loans exposed borrowers to drastic payment hikes when the principal came due. Moreover, more than 40 percent of New Century’s mortgages were based on the borrowers’ stated income, with no documentation required.
Some employees, like Karen Waheed, began having qualms about whether customers would be able to make their payments. She worried that some colleagues weren’t following the company’s rule that borrowers had to have at least $1,000 in income left over each month, after paying the mortgage and taxes.
The Greatest Trade Ever Page 5