Shining a Light onto Municipal Bond Issuance Costs

In a recent study of 800 municipal bond issues for UC Berkeley, I found that issuance costs varied widely – from less than 0.2% of face value to over 10%. Issuance costs are to local governments like points are to a consumer taking out a home mortgage. In both cases, the goal should normally be to minimize them. While consumers have many forums to compare against and thus reduce financing costs, local government officials have been less fortunate – but that situation is starting to change.

Aside from publishing the study, I also released a data set showing each bond’s total issuance costs – as shown on Official Statements – and itemized details for a sub-sample of the bonds. My group obtained these details by sending Public Records Act or Freedom of Information Act requests to local government bond issuers. We found that the largest components of issuance costs were underwriting expenses, legal fees, financial adviser expenses, rating agency fees and bond insurance premiums.

While my study provides data for a nationwide sample of bonds, the California State Treasurer’s Office has now posted issuance cost details for all municipal bonds issued in the largest state. This impressive data set can be found here. The data were collected by the California Debt and Investment Advisory Commission (CDIAC), a unit of the State Treasurer’s Office. Under state law, California local governments must report their debt data to CDIAC. The commission had been publishing some of this data, but Treasurer John Chiang, an advocate for transparency, recently decided to publish everything, including details on issuance costs.

Issuance Costs often > 10%

A review of the California data shows numerous issuance cost ratios in excess of 10% of the issued amount - and even some exceeding 20%. Just like a consumer would never pay 20 points on a home mortgage, it is hard to understand why a bond issuer would do the same.

Many of the higher issuance cost levels were associated with small bond issues from rural school districts and special districts. Since some of the issuance costs don’t vary with issuance size, they can hit small issuers relatively hard. Further, small issuers often receive lower bond ratings, creating the necessity to purchase municipal bond insurance.

Monoline insurance was not a factor in a couple of the 20%+ cost of issuance situations I found in the CDIAC data. 

In 2013, San Jacinto special districts (called Community Facilities Districts) issued two special tax bonds totaling $985,000 and $925,000 respectively. In each case, cost of issuance exceed 20%.

Focusing on the $925,000 bond, we find that the district received a mere $532,066 of the bond proceeds (see the Official Statement).   The Estimated Sources and Uses of Funds on page 6 of the document, show $90,428 being deposited into a reserve fund and a total of $295,890 going to the underwriter and other service providers. The remaining $6,616 reflected an original issue discount, arising from the bonds being sold below face value.

The debt service schedule on page 10 of the Official Statement shows that the district will spend $1,240,252 of interest on the $925,000 of bonds through 2043.  Total debt service of $2,165,252 over the life of the bond issue is four times the net proceeds received by the district. All in all, not a great deal for San Jacinto's taxpayers.

In an influential 2011 paper, Andrew Ang and Richard Green found that state and local governments lose billions of dollars due to the opacity and illiquidity of the municipal bond market. They proposed the creation of a municipal bond issuer consortium (they called it CommonMuni) to share information and best practices in order to lower these costs. A cost of issuance data set that allows us to identify disparities across issuers seems like a good opportunity to begin realizing the CommonMuni vision.

The California Ontario Ratings Paradox

Today, the Fraser Institute published a compendium entitled “The State of Ontario’s Indebtedness” which includes my research comparing Canada’s largest province to California, America’s largest state. While media reports often suggests that California is on the verge of bankruptcy, the Golden State appears to be a model of fiscal probity when compared to Ontario. Consider these 2011 statistics from the report:

Indicator	Ontario	California
Total Bonded Debt	$236.6 billion	$143.9 billion
Bonded Debt-to-GDP	38.6%	7.7%
Bonded Debt Per Capita	$17,922	$3,833
Interest Expense	$9.5 billion	$ 5.5 billion
Interest Expense to Revenues	8.9%	2.8%
Deficit (Fiscal 2011)	$14.0 billion	$2.6 billion

Source: Fraser Institute based on California Comprehensive Annual Financial Report and Ontario Public Accounts. For comparability. California debt includes that of separately reporting component units.

Now, guess which of these sub-sovereigns has a lower rating. While reason suggests Ontario, the fact is California is rated below Ontario by the three major rating agencies. Here are the ratings:

Agency	Ontario	California
Moody’s	Aa2	A1
Standard & Poor’s	AA-	A-
Fitch	AA	A-

Rating agencies have admitted to applying a different, harsher, scale to US municipal bond issuers – including states –compared to other types of debt. In testimony to a US Congressional Committee, Moody’s Managing Director Laura Levenstein reported that this dual scale (i.e., one more severe rating system for US municipal bonds and another, less punitive scale for all other long term instruments) originated when John Moody first issued municipal bond ratings over 90 years ago.

In an attachment to written testimony to the same Congressional committee, California State Treasurer Bill Lockyer reported that when the state issued a taxable bond in 2007, Moody’s assigned a rating of A1 on its municipal scale and Aaa on its global scale. The implication is that Moody’s would have assigned California its highest rating – above that of Ontario – if it employed a single rating scale.

After being sued by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (now a US Senator), Moody’s and Fitch rescaled their municipal bond ratings, while S&P claimed that no such adjustment was necessary.

Not only was such a rescaling sorely needed, but it appears that the rescaling that was performed was insufficient. As I’ve discussed on ExpectedLoss previously, the inconsistency between municipal and other ratings is harmful to taxpayers. Monoline insurers arbitraged this discrepancy by selling unneeded insurance to general obligation issuers that have a long-term historic default rate on the order of 0.1%. If corporate and municipal ratings reflected similar default risk, it would have been impossible for an undercapitalized insurance provider to sell a wrapper to the nation’s largest state. As long as municipal and corporate ratings remain inconsistent, the risk of the monoline insurance business returning persists.

Also, besides ensuring that ratings for different asset classes have consistent definitions in default probability (or expected loss) terms, rating agencies should improve their monitoring efforts by using models that can be automatically updated as new fiscal data becomes available.

For example, we recently learned that California’s budget deficits have been closed through a mixture of tax increases and spending cuts. Yet the state’s ratings remain fixed in single A territory. If rating agencies ran new revenue and expenditure figures through a fiscal simulation model - like our Public Sector Credit Framework - they would be able to adjust their ratings more promptly. 

In Part II of this blog post, I will provide some comparative information on California and Ontario education, health and pension costs.

Multiple Rating Scales: When A Isn’t A

Philosophers from Aristotle to Ayn Rand have contended that “A is A.” Apparently none of these thinkers worked at a credit rating agency - in which “A” in one department may actually mean AA or even BBB in another. While the uninitiated might naively assume that various types of bonds carrying the same rating have the same level of credit risk, history shows otherwise.

During the credit crisis, AAA RMBS and ABS CDO tranches experienced far higher default rates than similarly rated corporate and government securities. Less well known is the fact that municipal bonds have for decades experienced substantially lower default rates than identically rated corporate securities – and that the rating agencies never assumed that a single A-rated issuer ought to carry the same credit risk in both sectors. This discrepancy was noted in Fitch’s 1999 municipal bond study and confirmed by Moody’s executive Laura Levenstein in 2008 Congressional testimony on the topic. Later in 2008, the Connecticut attorney general sued the three major rating agencies for under-rating municipal bond issues relative to other asset categories. (The suit was recently settled for $900,000 in credits for future rating services, but without any admission of responsibility). Last year, three economists – Cornaggia, Cornaggia and Hund – reported that government credit ratings were harsher than those assigned to corporates, which, in turn, were more severe than those assigned to structured finance issues.

One might ask why it is important for ratings in different credit classes to carry the same expectation in terms of either default probability or expected loss? Perhaps we should accept the argument that ratings are intended to simply provide a relative measure of risk among bonds within a given asset class.

There are at least two problems with this approach. First, it is unnecessarily confusing to the majority of the population that is unaware of technical distinctions in the ratings world. Second, it creates counterproductive arbitrage opportunities.

If an insurer is rated AAA on a more lenient scale than insurable entities in another asset class, the insurer can profitably "sell" its AAA rating to those entities without creating any real value in the process.

Municipal bond insurance is a great example. Monoline bond insurers like AAA-rated Ambac, FGIC and MBIA insured bonds issued by states, cities, counties and other municipal issuers for three decades prior to the 2008 financial crisis. In some cases, the entities paying for insurance were of a stronger credit quality than the insurers. As it happened, the insurers often failed while the issuers survived, leaving one to wonder why the insurance was necessary.

During this period, general obligation bonds had very low overall default rates. According to Kroll Bond Rating Agency’s Municipal Default Study, estimated annual municipal bond default rates by issuer count have been consistently below 0.4% since 1941. Similar findings for the period 1970-2010 are reported in The Bloomberg Visual Guide to Municipal Bonds by Robert Doty. This 0.4% annual rate applies to all municipal debt issues, including unrated issues and revenue bonds. The annual default rate for rated, general obligation bonds is less than 0.1%.

Given this long period of excellent performance, one might reasonably expect that most states and other large municipal issuers with diversified revenue bases to be rated AAA. No state has defaulted on its general obligation issues since 1933, and most have relatively low debt burdens when compared to their tax base. Despite these facts, the modal rating for states is typically AA/Aa with several in the A range. (This remains the case despite certain rating agencies’ claims that they have recently scaled up their municipal bond ratings to place them on a par with corporate ratings).

The depressed ratings created an opportunity for municipal bond insurers to sell policies to states that did not really need them. For example, the State of California paid $102 million for municipal bond insurance between 2003 and 2007. Negative publicity notwithstanding, the facts are that single A rated California has a Debt to Gross State Product ratio of 5% (in contrast to a 70% Debt/GDP ratio for the federal government) and that interest costs represent less than 5% of the state’s overall expenditures. While pension costs are a concern, they are unlikely to consume more than 12.5% of the state’s budget over the long term – not nearly enough to crowd out debt service.

California provides but one example. The Connecticut lawsuit mentioned above also cited unnecessary bond insurance payments on the part of cities, towns, school districts, and sewer and water districts.

Meanwhile, AAA-rated municipal bond insurers carried substantial risks, evident to many not working at rating agencies. For example, Bill Ackman found in 2002 that MBIA was 139 times leveraged. As reported in Christine Richard’s book Confidence Game, Ackman repeatedly shared his research with rating agencies – to no avail.

This imbalance between the ratings of risky bond insurers and those of relatively safe municipal issuers essentially created the monoline insurance business – a business that largely disappeared with the mass bankruptcy and downgrading of insurers during the 2008 crisis.

Inconsistent ratings across asset classes thus do have real world costs. In the US, taxpayers across the country paid billions of dollars over three decades for unneeded bond insurance. Individual municipal bond investors, often directed by their advisors to focus on AAA securities only, missed opportunities to invest in tens of thousands of bonds that should credibly have carried AAA ratings, but were depressed by the raters’ inopportune choice of scale.

We believe that one reason for the persistent imbalance between municipal, corporate and structured ratings is the dearth of analytics directed at government securities. Rating agencies and analytic firms offer models (and attendant data sets) that estimate default probabilities and expected losses for corporate and structured bonds. Such tools are relatively rare for government bonds. Consequently, the market lacks independent, quantitatively-based analytics that compute credit risks for these instruments. This lack of alternative, rigorously researched opinions allows the incorrect rating of US municipal bonds to continue, without the alleviation of a positive feedback loop.

Next month, PF2 will do its part to address this gap in the marketplace with the release of a free, open source Public Sector Credit Framework, designed to enable users to estimate government default probabilities through the use of a multi-period budget simulation. The framework allows a wide range of parameterizations, so you may find it useful even if you disagree with the characterization of municipal bond risk offered above. If you wish to participate in beta testing or learn more about this technology please contact us at info@pf2se.com, or call +1 212-797-0215.

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Contributed by PF2 consultant Marc Joffe. Marc previously researched and co-authored Kroll Bond Rating Agency’s Municipal Default Study.

Christine Richard, on Confidence

Earlier this week, Expect[ed] Loss sat down with Christine Richard, author of Confidence Game. If you haven’t already read the book well firstly shame on you. The paperback’s due out next week so pick it up. It’s a vital story.

Briefly, the book tells of a hedge fund investor’s campaign to bring attention to what he felt to be material shortcomings within a AAA-rated, systemically important insurance company. He’s short their credit default swap, which means he stands to profit if other market participants, authorities, rating agencies or regulators can be convinced to agree with his take. Of course, he walks the line between good and evil: he provides a material public good in a way in warning of a systemic concern, but in doing so his warnings serve to cloud the viability of a systemically important public company, while creating a profit for him.

We’re not here to spoil the book for those of you who haven’t read it yet. But we’re going to provide you with a couple of snippets from our conversation. Any wisdom coming from the interview belongs to Christine. Any errors are ours.


EL: Christine your book describes activist investor Bill Ackman’s crusade, and really it’s quite a lonely crusade isn’t it, against an insurance company he believed to need reforming and perhaps a whole system he felt was broken. Having seen how reform and regulation has transpired since, how the world has moved on, well has it affected your perception of the value of your work. Was the book fulfilling to you?

CR: I'm pleased with the book and the response I've gotten from people who've read it. I think it succeeds in combining a very human story with the larger story about what went wrong on Wall Street. I do find it discouraging that the FCIC left the role of the bond insurers out of its 500-page-plus report. I think that the loss of confidence in the triple-A ratings of companies like MBIA was the beginning of the unraveling of everything. Most of the companies have crept quietly off the stage but still I think the story of their collapse is worth understanding. They were the first, really, to figure out that the triple-A rating was one of the most powerful brands in the world. Before the crisis, their collapse was unthinkable. Even the idea that they might be downgraded to AA from AAA was unimaginable. It shows you just how fragile and delusional the financial system had become.

EL: Companies can fail for all sorts of things, often trace-able to poor communication between management and the board and shareholders. But here that wasn’t really the problem – Ackman, like Harry Markopolos in a way, was all about communication. He went to regulators, to the attorney generals, to the executives at the ratings agencies. He wrote detailed reports, ran extensive analyses, produced an open source model at a time in which analytics were expensive and the market opaque. What can be taken from all his efforts? All these authorities he went to that were deaf to his comments - did they all just have a distortion field around them at the time?

CR: Some of the reasons people wouldn't listen to Bill were obvious. It wasn't in their interest to be critical of a company that could turn any bond into a top-rated security. For a while, the main business of Wall Street was manufacturing triple-A-rated securities. I also think there were psychological reasons that people didn't want to listen. No one wants to be told how to do their job or that they have it all wrong. Plus, Bill had this huge financial motivation to scare people about the bond insurers so that he could make money on his credit default swap position. It was hard to look beyond the self-interest and really think through the argument. Above all, the triple-A credit rating shielded the company from critics.

EL: When we read interviews of Inside Job director Charles Ferguson, they often ask him about the language barrier of finance. Overcoming the barrier might be quite difficult for some reporters who are not too familiar with finance. Now I know you’ve been covering the debt market for many years at Dow Jones from well before you were at Bloomberg. And you’ve written a page turner, you really have, it’s remarkable. But was there a, how do we say it, complexity barrier for you to overcome?

CR: The financial system became so unbelievably complex. And, bond insurance layered more complexity on top of complexity. I didn't want to shy away from writing about credit default swaps or collateralized debt obligations but I was always conscious that I needed to quickly offset the technical explanations with something a human being could relate to. Bill's willingness to share his personal experiences, to let me look through thousands of emails and to interview his friends and colleagues made it possible to write a story that's as much about human nature as it is about bonds or credit default swaps or collapsing mortgage securities. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Moody's finally puts MBIA under review and Bill is at his grandmother's 90th birthday at the Plaza Hotel. He's trying to piece together how a credit rating downgrade might unravel the whole company and how that is going to trigger payments of billions of dollars on his swaps. Meanwhile, the waiter is holding up a cake and his family is singing Happy Birthday and he's trying to sing and to read Bloomberg headlines and communicate with his trader on a Blackberry under the table.

EL: You mention even at Dow Jones that there wasn’t much patience for your investigative tendencies, your interest in digging deeper. And you’ve mentioned to me before the pressures to keep current – how nobody wants you going back and following up on stories of the past. Is this the new normal?

CR: It's a big part of what business journalism aspires to do -- to give people information to trade on, to move stocks, to make profitable predictions. Maybe it explains why the M&A reporters get so much of the attention. I've always enjoyed telling stories more than making forecasts. In the case of MBIA, I found the company's history of covering up losses so fascinating because it revealed its vulnerability. It had to be infallible or it was finished. That made going back and looking at the past important. The past held all the clues about what was going to happen.

EL: Christine before I let you go I want to ask you one thing – does Bill inspire you?

CR: I spoke with Bill for six years before I started writing the book. What I enjoyed most about our interactions was his enthusiasm for the research. He was fanatical about figuring out what made the company tick, and he seemed to have more fun reading financial statements than anyone I've ever met. He also just has this incredible optimism. He'd come back from a meeting with one of the credit rating agencies (back in the days when he was giving two-hour long presentations about why MBIA should be downgraded and he was being ignored) and an employee at Pershing Square would ask how it went. It was always the same response -- "On a scale of one-to-ten, the meeting was definitely a ten." Eventually, people didn't even bother to ask Bill about meetings, they just looked at each as he came through the door: "Ten out of ten?" "Yep, ten out of ten?" It's a great message about believing in yourself and persevering when the world thinks you're wrong.

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To read more about the Confidence Game, click here.

The Carry Trade from Off-Balance-Sheet Heaven

The Citigroup-structured CDO, Adams Square Funding II, Ltd., closed in March 2007 with the $600mm Class A1 Floating Rate Notes (Due 2047) not being offered by Citi; rather the A1 notes were being insured by a swap counterparty by way of the then-convenient-and-now-infamous negative basis trade.

By insuring this A1 tranche trade (Ambac Assurance was reportedly the ultimate swap counterparty), Citi was able to lock in substantial up-front “profits” on the trade in addition to their significant underwriting fee. FASB’s accounting regime (1) enabled the so-called profits on the trade to be recognized immediately, by way of “sale accounting,” and (2) allowed the trade to disappear into off-balance-sheet oblivion, away from Citigroup shareholder verification.

The negative basis trade was perpetuated by several banks for many reasons, as described more comprehensively here. The forthcoming chart provides what we believe to be a thorough breakdown of the minimum estimated up-front profit -- of approximately $9.8mm -- Citigroup would have been able to achieve in having the A1 wrapped by a monoline guarantor.



Indeed UBS’s shareholder report explains that

[UBS’s] CDO desk viewed retaining the Super Senior tranche of CDOs as an attractive source of profit, with the funded positions yielding a positive carry (i.e. return) above the internal UBS funding rate …

and…

Day1 P&L treatment of many of the transactions meant that employee remuneration (including bonuses) was not directly impacted by the longer term development of positions created…

UBS may have made larger sums on the deals they had wrapped: UBS’s cost of credit default swap (CDS) protection was on average as low as 11 bps, or 0.11%.

The ability to lock in such enormous, fictitious, gains (and potentially distribute some of these gains immediately in the form of bonuses to investment bankers) proved to be a major contributor to the financial crisis. With the under-capitalized monolines – such as ACA, AIG, Ambac, CIFG, FGIC, FSA, MBIA, Radian and XL -- struggling or failing to support the credit protection contracts they had over-sold, several of the TBTF banks were forced to rely on the government’s (and taxpayers’) aid to fund the ultimate return to their balance sheets of what we estimate to be $300 billion of off-balance-sheet negative basis trade securities.

Other resources: a diagram describing the trade more generally, in its context relative to the CDO, can be found here.

Credit Ratings vs. Credit Default Swaps

As an alternative to relying overly on ratings produced by credit rating agencies, several ratings reform proposals offer the usage of bond or credit default swap (CDS) prices or spreads as a more plausible option. Some of these proposals are positively suggestive of the fact that market prices are both more accurate and more predictive than credit ratings.

I’m not convinced.

Firstly, with ratings being so deeply embedded throughout our financial structure, the ratings of the assets themselves become an integral component of the market-implied risk assessment. For example, even when analyzing securitized products Vink and Fabozzi (2009) show credit ratings to be a major factor accounting for the movement of primary market spreads. Thus, for any proposal to be convincing it would have to test the accuracy and reliability of CDS spreads on unrated bonds or companies. Alternatively, a study would need to compare the performance of traded securities whose ratings are not publicly known (also known as shadow ratings) to the performance of those shadow ratings.

Secondly, bond yields (or spreads-to-swaps) and credit default swap premiums are largely incomparable to credit ratings for many reasons. These differences will have to be tackled in a separate piece, but at the very least there’s that non-insignificant concept of liquidity. Both CDS premiums and bond yields include the various risks – not just credit risks – that come with investing in, or buying protection on, a security. Credit ratings speak solely to long-term credit risks.

One may argue that the ratings were far less accurate than CDS spreads during the crisis, and that this (i.e., during a market dislocation) is the only time we depend on accurate default projections and we should therefore abolish rating agencies in general. While I don’t wish to complain of these proposals, I fear that they complain unfairly of the rating agencies.

Yes the CDS spreads may better reflect default probability during a crisis. By definition they’re more adaptive to changing market conditions, versus the ratings which are long-term predictors. But would you want ratings to change in as volatile a fashion as CDS spreads? Would you want ratings to depend on headline news, or on audited (or lightly audited) financial data? Also, one shouldn’t forget that CDS spreads on CDOs and RMBS tranches were just as poor reflections of market-perceived asset quality before the crisis. The crisis could only occur, in part, because the banks were able to buy protection so cheaply from the monolines, by way of being long the CDS -- the infamous negative basis trades.

But even if these proposals made sense and even if their hypotheses were correct, they would be missing at least one crucial point: we need ratings. Meaningful ratings are essential – certainly now. Let me explain why, albeit by way of a long-winded explanation.

For financial reform to be successful it needs ultimately to deal with the flaws in our banks’ risk management procedures – and to deal with them in an environment in which the very serious practice of risk mitigation is left by senior management to risk managers, just as the serious business of growing revenues while attending to shareholder pressure is left by risk managers to upper management.

That these two functions are more adversarial than independent in nature is a concept not to be lost on us. Overly cautious risk management might hinder the implementation of growth opportunities, or the extent thereof. At times, indeed, they may be thought by the skeptic to be mutually exclusive.

Indeed the overpowering pressures that come with business initiatives can influence even the most judicious risk manager’s ability to perform her function in an objective manner, even though her function ought to be both separate from and independent of the business strategies. (See for example “Lehman’s Worst Offense: Risk Management.”)

With both traders and management being compensated for revenue generation, and with prudent risk managers acting only as a hindrance to the initiation and exploitation of growth opportunities, there remains little incentive for senior managers to maintain a healthy risk management environment. Instead of cultivating an environment in which risk managers are educated in monitoring the real risks (which requires expensive resources including personnel, data and systems) they are seen rather as a burden and a cost center, and are therefore starved of the resources necessary to question traders, trades, and trading strategies.

In sum, we remain in the infancy of creating a functioning risk control practice in place at our major banks. We are yet to promote adequate business-peer challenge processes and our price verification processes remain immature. Credit ratings, if created and applied properly, can provide a healthy starting point for internal skepticism; they can provide the independent credit risk assessment that supplements an analysis performed by the front-office or by the back-office.

Conclusion

CDS spreads are untested as a predictor of long-term default probability on unrated securities. Perhaps the reliability of CDS spreads depends on the underlying referenced entity being rated. There’s no doubt that CDS spreads are useful indicators – but I seriously doubt that they’re anywhere near as useful as ratings in predicting long-term default probabilities or losses.

I remain convinced there's an important place in our market for one or more independent agencies to provide their objective opinions in the form of a rating. For ratings reform to be successful, however, requires that the necessary measures be put in place to ensure that rating analysts are unfettered by market share concerns, and are incentivized only by ratings quality and accuracy. If we can achieve these objectives, ratings will return to providing a meaningful utility.

Jack of All Trades?

We are brought up with the mantra that, while substantially limiting the upside, diversification saves us on the downside. Being by nature (partly subconsciously) risk-averse we tend to diversify endlessly, protecting against losing our dinner, even if it means a lesser chance of a royal dinner with the Queen.

Possibly true for the individual - not necessarily for the managed funds. Let's dig deeper...

Our investigations into recent hedge fund performance bring us back to our deliberations on whether diversification really is always such a good thing. (Remember, the monolines, in an attempt to diversify their portfolios, moved away from being purely muni-bond insurers, and were stung by their participation in the structured finance market. See Muni Bond Insurance (for the short term) for more on this.)

This chart (click on it to enlarge) shows us that multi-strategy hedge funds are among the worst performing in the down cycle.


Some thoughts and possible explanations/justifications:
(1) Multi-strategy funds tend to be more highly leveraged on the back of this diversification (just like certain ABS, CDOs)
(2) As you have more strategies under management, you may tend to lose asset-specific expertise
(3) Perhaps better managers like to keep it clean and simple...

Summary opinion: perhaps diversification is truly a good thing if it's not mis-used or mis-applied. If the diversified fund or portfolio is able to be more aggressively managed purely due to the benefits of diversification, the plain vanilla option, often cheaper, may just become more enticing.