Lehman: The Debt Shuffle

What actually happened to Lehman’s balance sheet in the first quarter? Assets rose. Leverage rose. Write-downs were suspiciously minuscule. And the company fiddled with the way it defines a key measure of the firm’s net worth.

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Because investors thought Lehman was more likely to default, its liabilties fell in value and Lehman garnered earnings from this. How much did Lehman win through losing? $600 million in the quarter. How much was its net income? $489 million. Lehman and all the other investment banks are following the accounting rules on this, but that $600 million is hardly the stuff of quality earnings. Indeed, Bernstein’s Hintz called the bank’s earnings quality “weak.”

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Lehman remains exposed to lots of dodgy mortgages, including a group labeled: “Prime and Alt-A.” Prime mortgages represent loans to good quality borrowers; Alt-A loans go to borrowers a mere step up from subprime, and represent an area with almost as many problem loans as subprime. The total amount of such mortgages on Lehman’s balance sheet was $14.6 billion in the first quarter and it actually rose from $12.7 billion in the previous quarter. Is this the time to be increasing exposure to questionable mortgages? More ominously, only $1 billion of that figure is prime and the rest is Alt-A, according to Hintz’s estimate.