The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon describes how a person, upon being introduced to a new concept, immediately sees it everywhere. Wall Street is very much hoping that emerging examples of lending fraud are a “frequency illusion” and not something darker.
On Thursday, two regional banks — Zions and Western Alliance — claimed that they were exposed to alleged fraud by borrowers. Those moves came after the likes of JPMorgan and Jefferies had announced exposure to the respective bankruptcies of Tricolor, a subprime auto lender and First Brands, an auto parts maker. In the latter two, allegations of “double pledging”, where a company borrows twice against the same collateral, are now a central issue of investigation for creditors and even law enforcement.
Amid the turmoil in traditional banking, an obscure but adjacent alleged fraud scandal also came to a head on Thursday. Josh Wander, the insurance and investment whizz kid who co-founded 777 Capital, was indicted by federal prosecutors, formally accused of criminal double-pledging. According to prosecutors, he obtained cash from his private capital lenders by pledging assets he simply did not possess, and used the monies to acquire football clubs, among other things. Wander has denied wrongdoing, but the blow-up of 777 Capital casts a shadow over the nascent model of private equity-owned life insurance.