Tag Archives: bond insurers

By James Kwak

MBIA, the big bond insurer, is actually headquartered in Armonk, New York, about forty miles from Wall Street, and it’s not quite one of the swaggering elite. But it plays its own crucial role in the financial system, insuring municipal bonds as part of a tight oligopoly. Then it recently expanded into writing credit default swaps on mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations, raking in profits during the boom while loading up on exposures that would almost kill it during the financial crisis.

But when it comes to attitude, MBIA wanted to be every bit the financial oligarch. Bloomberg has an excerpt from Christine Richard’s upcoming Confidence Game, which tells the story of hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s short position on MBIA. (Here’s a previous Bloomberg story on the topic.) There isn’t much in the excerpt, but there is this choice quote from MBIA CEO Jay Brown, as recalled by Ackman:

“You’re a young guy, early in your career. You should think long and hard before issuing the report. We are the largest guarantor of New York state and New York city bonds. In fact, we’re the largest guarantor of municipal debt in the country. Let’s put it this way: We have friends in high places.”

(The next year, New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer began investigating Ackman for market manipulation, but Ackman was never charged with anything.) It doesn’t get much more clear than that.

(Disclosure: I knew Bill Ackman a long, long time ago. We took calculus together in high school; I was a sophomore and he was a senior. And I vaguely recall helping him with it. Nice guy. Yes, he had gray hair in high school.)