Earnings Labs

Assured Guaranty Ltd. (AGO)

Q1 2013 Earnings Call· Fri, May 10, 2013

$82.36

-1.36%

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Transcript

Robert S. Tucker

Management

Good morning. I'm Robert Tucker. I'd like to thank all of you for joining us here today. I'd also like to thank JPMorgan for inviting us to speak. Further, I'd like to remind you that all our comments made today are covered under the Safe Harbor provision of the U.S. SEC. Please note that if you're listening to a replay of this presentation or if you are reading the transcript of the presentation, our statements made today have been updated since this presentation. Please refer to the Investor Information section of our website for our recent presentations, SEC filings and the most current information on our Risk Factors. With that, I'd like to turn the presentation over to Dominic Frederico, President and Chief Executive Officer of Assured Guaranty.

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

Thank you, Robert, and good morning. I'm going to basically review the company, some of its critical strategies that we've been employing over these past few years, and then go a little bit into what we see for the future. So -- slides is backwards from here. I guess I won't rely on reading that. Okay, that's challenging. So anyway, as you can see from the slides, the company is in strong financial position after having come through what I think most of us will realize would probably be, in our experience, the toughest financial marketplace that we've ever been into. Thank you. I can see that one the better. Thank you. Total investment portfolio and cash of $11.2 billion. That actually equates to $57.85 a share for those of you keeping score at home, which obviously is a pretty strong number. And as you know, half of that's equity roughly and half of that's on our premium reserve, which is our money as we just earned out over the life of the insured obligation. Shareholders' equity is approximately $5 billion and claims-paying resources at $12.3 billion, which has held kind of steady throughout the entire period of what is the worst experience from a monoline point of view and obviously from the RMBS or residential mortgage marketplace. As we look at the company and start to break out some further numbers, as you can see, in spite of the economy, we managed to put up on average $0.5 billion of operating income over the last 3 years. And you might point out while it's a decreasing level. That's obviously as our insured portfolios is running off and not replaced by new business. As we look at the business environment today, 0 interest rates, very tight spreads, still some uncertainty…

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

We get that question a lot, so hopefully I've got a pretty good answer for it. Because as we talked, it really still doesn't meet our risk model. So I agree with everything you said. No legacy, good marketplace, good pricing, a lot of weak participants, the sad part is though in difference to our industry the weak participants were still allowed to participate. So even in light of bad things happening, everybody or most people still traded through. In our business, if you really took the kind of losses that they were taking, you wouldn't be able to trade through. So there wasn't a real detriment to your bad behavior. So you never want to be left in an industry where your worst competitor is your toughest competitor type of thing. And that could exist, but that's not the major reason. As we look at the risk, we still say it violates the one big premise in that it's got too much correlation. It's 100% correlated. And we had a great discussion. I mean we have a good, strong senior management team. Trust me, we go through everything pretty religiously. And the MI thing probably got the most debate we've seen over the last couple of years, and we all walked away with the same feeling. We said it's a good business today if you are able to say I've got a sell-by date or an exit date that is certain. So I can exit this business cleanly in 2019, for the sake of argument, because cycles exist in every industry and every business. That might make sense. Or Rob and I used to do the old MI reinsurance back when we were younger men. And you say, "Well, if we could do them on an underwriting year basis,…

Unknown Analyst

Management

Dominic, could you talk a little bit about capital management priorities because it seems to me, at least, that even on an operating book value basis, you're trading at the highest level, 2/3 of booked and on an unadjusted basis, 50% or below. So the IRR in buying back stock is very good. And so talk to me about how you can -- you look at the different priorities because it seems like right now, that seems like a really great opportunity and why $200 million is the right number. It seems to me it should be much, much higher.

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

Well, good question. So first thing I'll tell you, it is priority #1. It's priority #1, it's priority #2, it's priority #3, it's priority #4. And if I was smart enough, I would have wore a t-shirt. I could rip it open and say, "Buy back stock," would be on it. And you could get the joke, right? Why $200 million? Because remember, we have this little interesting part of Assured Guaranty that we're a Bermuda-based holding company. And therefore, you can only buyback as much free cash and capital you have sitting in the holding company. And although we have strategies that will continue to increase that amount that we still have to execute, and there are some things that we have to go through to get there. We've got to give it out as it becomes available. So the one thing we will be very honest with you is we'll tell you what kind of amount that we've had in the buyback, so you'll see exactly what the execution period is. And then number two, as we clear these hurdles and, therefore, free up that available cash, we'll tell you that. And the hurdles revolve around our structure, revolve around our tax position, revolve around the reinsurance agreements that the operating companies have with the Bermuda entity, regard around funds withheld and how they're constituted for statutory purposes. So you think in those broad terms that we've got kind of a strategy to address each of those to free up that cash that we think we need. We will continue to announce that. But we agree 100% with you that it is priority one. Arun N. Kumar - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Other questions?

Unknown Analyst

Management

Dominic, you talked about the unemployment level reaching 15% on a potential MI portfolio. Can you reference that to your FG portfolio?

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

Very interesting question. So we looked at the FG, and we said, "Okay." Other than the RMBS, the residential mortgage-backed book, where we got to, and you could argue what was the real number of unemployment over these past 3 years, created virtually no loss in the company. And even on our structured side, so our pooled corporates did fine marvelously. Our basic asset you can kick. The subprime auto, leasing, all that stuff did absolutely fine, no losses. Obviously, we had some issues with our trust preferreds, but even those have improved substantially, right? And we paid out very little money. So once again, less than anything you would actually notice in a quarter beyond normal quarterly provision. So we felt -- and then we stressed it ourselves, because the one thing we did do when all this was going on, we said, "Okay, we got to build a company that no matter what happens, we're not going to have to go to the market for capital." So how do we do that. So we took a hard look at the composition of the portfolio and broke it down by segments. And in the old days, we were like 70% public financed, less than that, 66%, and 34% structured. But the 34% was too highly weighted to pooled corporate and RMBS. So I said, "Okay." As we then -- and our stressing was 6 notch downgrades. So I said, "Okay, let's run our portfolio and take everything down 6 notches. What it does to the capital, and what do we need is a mix to survive with, say, a $300 million to $500 million cushion of capital we wouldn't have to worry about ratings, needing capital, et cetera." What happened was we came to a number that said 80%…

Unknown Analyst

Management

Looking forward to capital at the various entities throughout the enterprise, how does the introduction of MAC affect capital AGM and AGC? Do you expect capital to be higher given that it's the owner of MAC? Or should it be lower? How are you thinking about that? And then separately, same with portfolio leverage of both those, should that be improved, or how should we think about that?

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

Okay. So the interesting thing in the way we engineered MAC was that it's taking a very substantial portfolio session from AGM and AGC. So if you look at leverage in the firm, it basically is equal among 3 operating companies. So in the theory of excess capital, kind of excess capital now gets divided proportionally. It really doesn't because the MAC deals are a little bit higher quality than the rest. So there is a rub of capital that we're going to guesstimate, and this is a pure guesstimate. It's maybe a couple of hundred million dollars. But the rest of it is as leveraged as everything else in the portfolio because we did it to specifically make sure that we did save our excess capital position. Number two, as you look at 2013 and I showed you where the leveraging of the portfolio goes, we will create excess capital every day of the week, every month in the year. If we did nothing just through the amortization of the portfolio, and of course, the structure is what's running off the fastest. And I would refer you to our supplement where we show you the structured runoff. It's substantial over the next 3 years, and then that doesn't include any further capital benefit we'll get through rep and warranty settlements. When we negotiate these things typically, we get paid back for some of our past losses. Well, that's revamped capital. And two, the counterparty takes responsibility for said big segment of future losses. Once again, that frees up capital. So we think the capital rub that we lose are putting a good -- a different portfolio in MAC of all muni versus the other guy still have structure. That rub of capital that kind of gets lost in that shuffle, we try to make it up by making sure leverage is the same. But then the second thing is, we will create excess capital every quarter and therefore we will still be in a great excess capital position to allow us to execute stock buybacks.

Unknown Analyst

Management

[indiscernible] for 90% -- I mean 10% structured given what happened the last 5 years and all this excess debt that's out there and uncertainties?

Dominic J. Frederico

Management

Good question. And as I said, we try to do it clinically, formulaic and come up with a number. If you really look at what happened these last few years, once again, if you take back the rep and warranty and net it against your losses, I would tell you structured business did absolutely marvelously through the entire cycle. And we -- if everybody had paid their bills on time and if the rest of the monolines didn't do CDOs of ABS, we wouldn't even be having the conversation. We would have just absorbed those losses in the normal context of quarterly earnings without much of a beep, and maybe ROEs would have went from 12% to 8.5% or 7%, but everybody would have been fine. So that's -- and we've looked at that number and rounded it a number of times. We're very confident that's what exists. So we're quite happy with that business anyway. Arun N. Kumar - JP Morgan Chase & Co, Research Division: Folks, we're out of time now. Dominic, thank you so much for your time.