Why successful bank rescue is far away?

I am becoming ever more worried. I never expected much from the Europeans or the Japanese. But I did expect the US, under a popular new president, to be more decisive than it has been. Instead, the Congress is indulging in a populist frenzy; and the administration is hoping for the best.

If anybody doubts the dangers, they need only read the latest analysis from the International Monetary Fund.* It expects world output to shrink by between 0.5 per cent and 1 per cent this year and the economies of the advanced countries to shrink by between 3 and 3.5 per cent. This is unquestionably the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.

One must judge plans for stimulating demand and rescuing banking systems against this grim background. Inevitably, the focus is on the US, epicentre of the crisis and the world’s largest economy. But here explosive hostility to the financial sector has emerged. Congress is discussing penal retrospective taxation of bonuses not just for the sinking insurance giant, AIG, but for all recipients of government money under the troubled assets relief programme (Tarp) and Andrew Cuomo, New York State attorney-general, seeks to name recipients of bonuses at assisted companies. This, of course, is an invitation to a lynching.

Yet it is clear why this is happening: the crisis has broken the American social contract: people were free to succeed and to fail, unassisted. Now, in the name of systemic risk, bail-outs have poured staggering sums into the failed institutions that brought the economy down. The congressional response is a disaster. If enacted these ideas would lead to an exodus of qualified employees from US banks, undermine willingness to expand credit, destroy confidence in deals struck with the government and threaten the rule of law. I presume legislators expect the president to save them from their folly. That such ideas can even be entertained is a clear sign of the rage that exists.

This is also the background for the “public/private partnership investment programme” announced on Monday by the US Treasury secretary, Tim Geithner. In the Treasury’s words, “using $75bn to $100bn in Tarp capital and capital from private investors, the public/private investment programme will generate $500bn in purchasing power to buy legacy assets – with the potential to expand to $1 trillion over time”. Under the scheme, the government provides virtually all the finance and bears almost all the risk, but it uses the private sector to price the assets. In return, private investors obtain rewards – perhaps generous rewards – based on their performance, via equity participation, alongside the Treasury.

I think of this as the “vulture fund relief scheme”. But will it work? That depends on what one means by “work”. This is not a true market mechanism, because the government is subsidising the risk-bearing. Prices may not prove low enough to entice buyers or high enough to satisfy sellers. Yet the scheme may improve the dire state of banks’ trading books. This cannot be a bad thing, can it? Well, yes, it can, if it gets in the way of more fundamental solutions, because almost nobody – certainly not the Treasury – thinks this scheme will end the chronic under-capitalisation of US finance. Indeed, it might make clearer how much further the assets held on longer-term banking books need to be written down.

Why might this scheme get in the way of the necessary recapitalisation? There are two reasons: first, Congress may decide this scheme makes recapitalisation less important; second and more important, this scheme is likely to make recapitalisation by government even more unpopular.

If this scheme works, a number of the fund managers are going to make vast returns. I fear this is going to convince ordinary Americans that their government is a racket run for the benefit of Wall Street. Now imagine what happens if, after “stress tests” of the country’s biggest banks are completed, the government concludes – surprise, surprise! – that it needs to provide more capital. How will it persuade Congress to pay up?

The danger is that this scheme will, at best, achieve something not particularly important – making past loans more liquid – at the cost of making harder something that is essential – recapitalising banks.

This matters because the government has ruled out the only way of restructuring the banks’ finances that would not cost any extra government money: debt for equity swaps, or a true bankruptcy. Economists I respect – Willem Buiter, for example – condemn this reluctance out of hand. There is no doubt that the decision to make whole the creditors of all systemically significant financial institutions creates concerns for the future: something will have to be done about the “too important to fail” problem this creates. Against this, the Treasury insists that a wave of bankruptcies now would undermine trust in past government promises and generate huge new uncertainties. Alas, this view is not crazy.

I fear, however, that the alternative – adequate public sector recapitalisation – is also going to prove impossible. Provision of public money to banks is unacceptable to an increasingly enraged public, while government ownership of recapitalised banks is unacceptable to the still influential bankers. This seems to be an impasse. The one way out, on which the success of Monday’s plan might be judged, is if the greater transparency offered by the new funds allowed the big banks to raise enough capital from private markets. If that were achieved on the requisite scale – and we are talking many hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions – the new scheme would be a huge success. But I do not believe that pricing legacy assets and loans, even if achieved, is going to be enough to secure this aim. In the context of a global slump, will investors be willing to put up the vast sums required by huge and complex financial institutions, with a proven record of mismanagement? Trust, once destroyed, cannot so swiftly return.

The conclusion, alas, is depressing. Nobody can be confident that the US yet has a workable solution to its banking disaster. On the contrary, with the public enraged, Congress on the war-path, the president timid and a policy that depends on the government’s ability to pour public money into undercapitalised institutions, the US is at an impasse.

It is up to Barack Obama to find a way through. When he meets his group of 20 counterparts in London next week, he will be unable to state he has already done so. If this is not frightening, I do not know what is.

The root cause of the financial crisis: a demand-side view- Photis Lysandrou

The financial sector is widely blamed for the financial crisis, with banks and their investment vehicles considered responsible for the products at its epicentre.

By contrast, investors who bought these products are seen as having played a largely passive role. In fact, demand-side pressures were the main driving force behind the growth of these products. As a result, governments will be unable to prevent crises if they restrict themselves to changing the global financial architecture.

The scale of demand for securities (see appendix, table1) helps to explain the fall in treasury yields and the tightening of yield spreads after 2001. Psychological factors are typically invoked to account for these developments: infected by the atmosphere of optimism and confidence in the real economy, investors also became over-confident and hence overly willing to accept lower risk premiums. However, it is more likely that yields fell after 2001 mainly because governments and large corporations were unable to supply securities with a sufficient wealth storage capacity to accommodate the surplus capital pools.

Without any one of the main components of the global demand for securities, yields would not have fallen as far as they did; nor would the ‘search for yield’ phenomenon have become as pronounced as it did.

The question is: which demand component can we subtract? That exercised by the institutional investors? Or by the banks? Or by governments? In each case, there is justification or plausible explanation for the size of the demand for securities that was exercised.

However, this hardly applies to the high net worth individuals, of whom there were 9.5m in 2006. HNWIs may have had little or no direct involvement in the collateralised debt obligations market, but their indirect involvement was substantial in that they were the leading providers of finance to hedge funds (see appendix, figure 1). These hedge funds were in turn the leading buyers of CDOs (see appendix, figure 2).

This last fact is easily explained. The basic task of hedge funds is to generate above average returns for their clients, for which these clients pay above average fees. This task became increasingly difficult in the low-yield environment of the early to mid- 2000s. The problem was that no matter how sophisticated were the investment strategies used to generate yield, there were limits to how much could be squeezed out of the securities and other available asset classes. So the hedge funds found themselves in a dilemma: on the one hand, more and more assets were placed under their management because other investors were finding it difficult to generate yield; on the other hand, the hedge funds were themselves finding it difficult to generate yield.

It was hedge funds’ need to resolve this dilemma that led them to the search for alternative financial products that could give higher yields, and, when finding that the CDOs fitted this description, led the demand for them. Hedge funds pressured suppliers into providing these products at an ever-increasing rate. As Gerald Corrigan, a managing director of Goldman Sachs, told British MPs recently: “To a significant degree it has been the reach for yield on the part of institutional investors in particular that goes a considerable distance in explaining this very rapid growth of structured credit products”.

Financial crises will not be avoided merely by reforming the financial system. Regulators can make the system as transparent and accountable as they like, but as long as there remain external pressures on it to create products or to indulge in harmful practices, such products and practices will continue to be introduced and financial crises will continue.

Only a significant re-distribution of wealth will remove these external pressures. This requires globally coordinated action in three areas of tax policy:

(1) Tax havens: these need to be closed to prevent trillions of dollars from disappearing off governments’ radar screens;

(2) Tax structures: these need to be harmonised to prevent mobile sections of global capital from encouraging a tax competition ‘race to the bottom’ with the result that domestic tax burdens fall on those who cannot operate across borders;

(3) Tax rates: these need to be re-aligned so that the tax burden is again distributed on a progressive rather than regressive basis.

A globalised version of Keynesianism is needed to help to prevent future crises and to help finance the resolution to the present one. As governments pile more claims on their future revenues through bond issuance, the lower will be their credit ratings and the higher will be the risk-adjusted returns that investors will demand.

From where will these returns come? Since there are limits to how much can be raised from average income households, small businesses and other immobile taxable units, there will have to be, in the absence of serious tax reforms, deep cuts in many areas of government expenditure.

It will be difficult for governments to institute the necessary tax reforms, and thus prevent them from making those cuts, given the pressure exercised by the very wealthy.

However, it can be done providing strong countervailing pressure is brought to bear on governments. If ever there was occasion and opportunity to exercise that countervailing pressure, it is now.

Photis Lysandrou is professor of global political economy, London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan University

Appendix: Table 1

Major Holders of Securities, 2006 (US $Trillions)	Total Assets	Securities	Alternative Investments (inc. Hedge funds)	Other Assets (cash, real estate, etc.)
1. Institutional Investors
(a) PFs	21.6	17.3	1.3	3
(b) MFsÂ	19.3	17.4	0.8	1.1
(c) IC's	18.5	14.8	1.1	2.6
2. Banks	74.4	37.2
3. Governments
(a) Reserves	5.4	4.9	0	0.5
(b) SWFs	1.9	1.5	0.2	0.2
4. HNWIs	37.2	19.3	3.7	14.1

References

Bank of England (2008), Financial Stability Report, October
Capgemini (2007), 11th World Wealth Report, June
Conference Board (2008), Institutional Investment Report, September
House of Commons (2008), Treasury Committee, Report on Financial Stability and Transparency, 26th February, 2008,
International Monetary Fund (2008), Global Financial Stability Report, April
McKinsey Global Institute (2008), Mapping Global Capital Markets: Fourth Annual Report, January
Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (2008), Asset Comparison -Investor Classes and Asset Classifications, August

What is LIBOR?

I recently thought that i had an in-depth idea of LIBOR. But then, all of a sudden i was put into the fray and I learnt that it was only 0.1% of the entire concept I knew. For this, I thank my faculty of International Finance of my college( Mr. Chandrashekhar – amazingly brilliant ) who gave me a better perspective of the topic and now after going through various documents, articles, books and sites I have compiled it to a simple article.

In this article I'll explain a little understood yet extremely relevant financial tool used across the globe: the London Interbank Offered Rate(LIBOR).

Then what Is LIBOR?
LIBOR is equivalent to the federal funds rate, or the interest rate one bank charges another for a loan. The advent of LIBOR can be traced to 1984, when the British Bankers Association (BBA) sought to add proper trading terms to actively traded markets, such as foreign currency,forward rate agreements and interest rate swaps. LIBOR rates were first used in financial markets in 1986 after test runs were conducted in the previous two years. Today, LIBOR has reached such stature that the rate is published daily by the BBA at about 11:45am GMT.
LIBOR's reach is felt thousands of miles away from the Thames; it is used as the key point of reference for financial instruments, such as futures contracts, the U.S. dollar, interest rate swaps and variable rate mortgages. LIBOR takes on added significance in times of tight credit as foreign banks yearn for U.S. dollars. This scenario usually sends LIBOR for dollars soaring, which is generally a sign of imminent economic peril.

The Reach of LIBOR
LIBOR is set by 16 international member banks and, by some estimates, places rates on a staggering $360 trillion of financial products across the globe. Included in those products are adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs). In periods of stable interest rates, LIBOR ARMs can be attractive options for homebuyers. These mortgages have no negative amortization and, in many cases, offer fair rates for prepayment. The typical ARM is indexed to the six-month LIBOR rate plus 2-3%.

LIBOR's reach doesn't end with the homeowner. The rate is also used to calculate rates for small business loans, student loans and credit cards. More often than not, LIBOR's heavy hand isn't felt directly by homeowners or others in need of a loan. When the U.S. interest rate environment is stable and the economy flourishes, all is usually well with LIBOR. Unfortunately, there is another side to that coin. During times of economic uncertainty, especially in developed countries, LIBOR rates show signs of excessive volatility, making it harder for banks to make and receive loans among each other. That problem is passed down to people seeking loans from the bank. If cash is scarce or at a premium for your local bank, the bank simply charges you, the borrower, a higher interest rate, or worse, doesn't loan you the money at all.

If Times Are Bad, Watch LIBOR
Another prominent trait of LIBOR is that it can dilute the effects of Fed rate cuts. Most investors think it's great when the Fed cuts rates, or at least they welcome the news. If LIBOR rates are high, the Fed cuts look a lot like taking a vacation to Hawaii and getting rain every day. High LIBOR rates restrict people from getting loans, making a lower Fed discount rate a nonevent for the average person. If you have a subprime mortgage, you need to watch LIBOR rates with a close eye as almost $1 trillion in subprime ARMs are indexed to LIBOR.

While LIBOR action in relation to the foreign exchange markets pertains more to currencies, such as the euro, the British pound, the Japanese yen, and others, its daily impact on the value of the dollars spent in the United States is negligible, though it is worth noting that LIBOR is very relevant to rates on the euro, or U.S. dollars held by foreign banks. The euro accounts for roughly 20% of total dollar reserves.

Bottom Line
LIBOR isn't sexy, and it's doubtful anyone is looking forward to the next release of LIBOR data with the same anticipation of seeing the next James Bond movie. That said, anyone with a credit card or a desire to own a home needs to be of aware of LIBOR. LIBOR is the true British monarchy, at least for the global financial markets - and your personal bottom line.

Spanish doldrums – Paul Krugman

This is an article written by Paul Krugman which i felt is necessary to share. So read through this and leave your comments.

“I’m in Yurp for a week, spending some time on other peoples’ problems (although in a way it’s all part of the same problem.) And one has to say that Europe has gotten itself into one heck of a mess, worse even than ours — because they have intractable adjustment problems on top of the general crisis.

The poster child for these adjustment problems is Spain, where I’m currently sitting.

For much of the past decade, Spain had a huge construction boom, financed by vast inflows of capital:

Now that boom is over. But it left as its legacy a sharp rise in Spanish costs and prices relative to the rest of the euro zone (the chart below is Spanish unit labor costs in manufacturing relative to the EZ average, but it doesn’t much matter which measure you use):

How does Spain get out of this? No devaluation is possible — and no, I don’t think exiting the euro is feasible. So it has to do it with relative deflation, hard enough in normal times, when at least costs and prices elsewhere are rising a few percent a year. In the face of a depressed and possibly deflationary European economy … this is going to be ugly.”

Why i say we are in the Depression Zone? And Thanks to the Bank it's a crisis; in the eurozone it's a total catastrophe

The Bank of England may have averted a catastrophe. If ever there was a time when England needed its own monetary authorities – acting with wartime urgency – this is the moment.

Those nations with fossilised or timid central banks clinging to outdated ideologies are not so lucky. Even less lucky are those such as Spain and Ireland that have surrendered policy to a body that is deaf to their pleas and constitutionally obliged to ignore the welfare of their particular societies. They face crucifixion.

Spain's agony is already well advanced. Industrial output has fallen 24pc. Some 352,000 people have lost their jobs in two months. BBVA expects unemployment to reach 20pc next year, touching 4.5m. Premier Jose Luis Zapatero can do nothing as long as Spain remains in monetary union.

He cannot devalue to claw back 30pc in lost labour competitiveness against EMU's German bloc, or take emergency steps to slow the property crash. In an odd lapse last week – perhaps a slip – he advised Spaniards that the best thing to do in these dark times was to ****.

Yes, it is dangerous for the Bank of England to buy up a third of all long-dated gilts. But it would be even more dangerous to allow deflation to run its course in an economy where debt levels have reached such extremes. Debt and deflation are a deadly mix.

The errors that led to our current predicament are well-known. A small army of economists – Austrians, Monetarists, and Keynesians – warned that central banks were playing with fire by fixing the price of credit too low and ignoring asset bubbles. The $6.7 trillion in reserve accumulation by China, Japan, and the petro-powers drove bond yields too low for safety.

Credit signals were gravely distorted. In Britain, Gordon Brown poured petrol on the fire by pushing the fiscal deficit to 3pc of GDP at the top of the cycle. Wretched man. However much we rage at Sir Fred or Citi-wrecker Chuck Prince, let us not forget that this crisis was confected by governments. To blame the free market is to miss the bigger point.

But I digress. We are now faced with the post-debt wreckage. The task at hand is to hold our societies together as best we can. One dreads to think what would have happened if the Hoover-Brüning nostalgics had succeeded in blocking every remedy.

As it is we have seen industrial production collapse in every region. The drops in January were: Japan (-31pc), Korea (-26pc), Russia (-16pc), Brazil (-15pc), Italy (-14pc), Germany (-12pc). Falls that took two years from late 1929 have been compressed into five months.

Those who say this is nothing like the Great Depression are complacent. Household debt is higher today, and UK banks are in worse shape. (No bank of size failed in the British Empire during the slump). Britain's economy contracted by 5.6pc from peak to trough in the early 1930s (Eichengreen). Some put the figure at nearer 8pc. We may surpass that this time.

America suffered worse. Real GDP fell 28pc. But the worst occurred in the second leg, after the heinous policy blunders of late 1931. Reading contemporary accounts, it is clear that hardly anybody – not even Keynes or Fisher – realised that the world was slipping into a depression during the first 18 months.

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman says the Fed has been as far behind the curve today as it was then, given the faster pace of collapse. It is bizarre that Ben Bernanke has not started to buy US Treasuries a full three months after he floated the idea, despite a yield rise of 80 basis points.

He has been stymied by the hawks. Kansas chief Thomas Hoenig said last week that the top priority is to drain liquidity before recovery later this year sets off inflation. Well, Mr Hoenig said last May that inflation psychology was gaining a hold "not seen since the 1970s and early 1980s" with a risk that inflation would become "embedded in the economy." The price spike broke within weeks. If his model was wrong then, why is it right now?

As for the ECB, it has not reached the starting line. Jean-Claude Trichet insists that there is no danger of deflation in Europe. What is the weather like on his planet, asked Mr Krugman.

The ECB has cut rates to 1.5pc, but since they need to be minus 1pc on the Taylor Rule, this leaves the breach as wide as ever. The Bundesbank is blocking any serious move towards quantitative easing.

Given that Germany's economy is imploding (Deutsche Bank sees 5pc contraction this year) one wonders if the Bundesbank would be less hawkish if the D-mark still existed. Even their hard-money brothers at Switzerland's SNB are cash printers these days.

So has monetary policy in euroland been paralysed by squabbles at a calamitous moment, blighting every member state? Almost certainly.

I'll take the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street any day, warts and all

 

please  feel free to leave your comments, your views and suggestions.

Do Changes in Stock Prices Causes Recession? And Why Stock Market do not Directly Affect the Economy?

The economy and the stock market are closely related. Many people examine the stock market to find out how the economy is doing. It's long been known that if the stock market is in a period of decline, the economy is sure to follow. However there is little evidence that the stock market causes the economy to rise or fall. The stock market does not directly affect the economy. “It is simply a mirror of people's generally correct beliefs about what is about to happen in the economy”. The best way to understand this is to realize that a stock market index the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) is simply a price. Because the value of index is a price, it only has two determinants: supply and demand.

Supply

Any first year college textbook in Economics states that for most goods if the supply increases in the short run then the price of the good should decline. For example, if the car companies suddenly doubled their supply of cars then we would expect the price of cars to fall.

If we thought that changes in the supply of stocks are the main cause of stock market rises and declines then, according to this rule, when a company issues new stock we would expect the price of stock to decline. If stock prices are largely determined by the supply of stocks and the market declines prior to an economic decline, we should see a flood of new stock issues before a recession. This does not happen in practice, as new stock issues tend to occur as the economy enters a growth period. This is because the money made from a stock issue is used to increase the output of the company, which causes economic growth to rise.

Demand

It appears that if we want to understand why the economy tends to move in the same direction as the stock market, we'll have to consider the demand for stocks. To do this, we'll need to understand what motivates an investors decision to buy or sell shares. Many investors such as Warren Buffett evaluate their stock portfolios on their inherent value. The inherent value is the total expected earnings of the company over a time period, discounted by the fact that a dollar today is not worth as much as a dollar tomorrow. If investors believe that a recession is coming, then they will believe that company earnings will be less in the future (since that typically takes place in a recession) which will decrease the inherent value of the stock. When the inherent value of the stock is far below its current price, investors will sell the stock, driving the price of the stock down. If investors believe a boom is coming, they will increase their estimates of the inherent value because future earnings should be higher than they previously expected. Often this will lead to the inherent value being far higher than the current price of the stock, so investors buy the stock. This leads the price of the stock to rise.

The belief that the stock market drives the economy is due to an error in logic. Generally we think that if A came before B that A caused B. Philosophers refer to this as the post hoc, propter hoc fallacy. In this case, the expectation of a decline in the economy causes the stock market to decline today. Or in logical terms, A came before B, because the expectation of B caused A. It's also important to realize that it's not the expectation of future economic changes that is causing changes in stock prices. It's the fact that people are acting on these expectations. If investors bought and sold stocks based on astrological factors or Barry Bonds'(baseball player) current homerun total then these would be causing the price of stocks to change. In a situation like that, it would seem that the stars are causing the price of stocks to change; the economy would have nothing to do with it.

It is because a large number of investors act on this inherent value principle that the economy tends to follow the stock market. Investors are constantly watching macroeconomic variables to try and determine when the next downturn in the economy will happen. Investors are often right when they predict the future growth rate of the economy. As a result, they often sell off their shares before the economy goes into a decline making it look like the stock market is causing a recession. In reality the causality runs the other way because the two things that causes price to change are changes in supply or changes in demand.

A sharp Decline in US imports & Exports

U.S. Imports and Exports Through December

The first graph shows the monthly U.S. exports and imports in dollars through December 2008. The recent rapid decline in foreign trade continued in December. Note that a large portion of the decline in imports is related to the fall in oil prices - but not all.

The graph includes both goods and services. The import and export of services has held up pretty well; most of the collapse in trade has been in goods. Imports of goods has declined by one third from the peak of last July!

 

The second graph shows the U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through January.

The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products. 
Import oil prices fell to $39.81 in January, and import quantities decreased too - so the petroleum deficit declined by $4 billion. 
The trade deficit is now mostly China ($20.6 billion NSA in January) and oil.

A Sharp decline In U.S Import & Export

U.S. Imports and Exports Through December

The first graph shows the monthly U.S. exports and imports in dollars through December 2008. The recent rapid decline in foreign trade continued in December. Note that a large portion of the decline in imports is related to the fall in oil prices - but not all.

The graph includes both goods and services. The import and export of services has held up pretty well; most of the collapse in trade has been in goods. Imports of goods has declined by one third from the peak of last July!

The second graph shows the U.S. trade deficit, with and without petroleum, through January.

 

The blue line is the total deficit, and the black line is the petroleum deficit, and the red line is the trade deficit ex-petroleum products. 

Import oil prices fell to $39.81 in January, and import quantities decreased too - so the petroleum deficit declined by $4 billion. 

The trade deficit is now mostly China ($20.6 billion NSA in January) and oil.