Global Investing

The Austrian government debt agency’s two-year old foray into subprime investments has turned into a political hot potato and sparked an increasingly heated debate between the Social Democrats and conservatives, caught in an uneasy but coalition government without viable alternative.

Austria’s audit court last week revealed that the agency, which in its staid day job issues government bonds and makes sure state coffers are full when they need to be, started to moonlight on money markets in 2002 to earn a little extra money on the side.

Its cash position ballooned from an average 4.5 billion euros in 2002 to a peak of 26.8 billion euros in October 2007. This level “was not only determined by economic necessities, but was also meant to generate additional revenues,” the audit court said in its report.

Sure enough, as much as 10.8 billion euros went into asset-backed commercial paper (ABCP), a class of structured investments that became disreputable when the subprime crisis broke out in 2007. Luckily, the debt agency got away only slightly bruised, with up to 380 million euros in possible losses from those investments.

Even though the loss looks manageable (it equals 0.13 percent of Austria’s GDP), and no rules seem to have broken, two former and the current finance minister – all conservatives – as well as the agency itself find itself at the centre of a debate seeking someone to blame.

It's fashionable now for leading economists and financial wizards to claim that they saw the credit crunch coming and the kind of dislocation it would create. But how many have predicted where the next implosion will occur?

Dr Andrew Lo, founder of hedge fund firm AlphaSimplex, and director of the MIT laboratory for financial engineering, has spent his career studying market behaviour, publishing papers examining why quant funds imploded in August 2007, and trying to reconcile behavioural economics with efficient market theory.

He sees the next big meltdown in commercial mortgages, but this time it's pensions funds that will bear the brunt of the losses rather than banks. Lo points out that commercial mortgages have been packed and sold in the same way as residential mortgages - different levels of risk exposure sliced and diced and wrapped up together in one package with a triple A rating slapped on top.