mercredi 11 mars 2009

Haircuts for Bond Holders

ENFIN !!!!!!! cette crise ne s'améliorera pas tant que les différentes parties n'auront pas compris que seules des réductions massives de dette peuvent fonctionner. Quant à l'impact sur les détenteurs d'obligations (banques, fonds de pension, FCP)... Les actionnaires ont déjà largement payé (et n'ont probablement pas fini), au tour des investisseurs obligataires.

 
 

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via The Big Picture de Barry Ritholtz le 11/03/09

"The bond market is getting more scared every day. At some time, the government is going to say enough is enough, the only way we will give you more cash is if the bondholders have to be hit."
-Gary Austin, PDR Advisors

>

We have been lambasting the AIG bailout as a backdoor rescue for Goldman and others. It is unconscionable that the taxpayer must make good the speculative, off-exchange bets made by hedge funds.

There is another group that has also been (unfairly) made whole: The Bond Holders.They lent momey to poorly run, insolvent institutions, and somehow expect to see a return of a 100% of their capital.That makes no sense whatsoever.

In bailout deals such as Bear Stearns, Citgroup and Bank of America, they garnered a 100% return of invested capital (i.e., lonas). I suspect that is fast coming to an end. In the event of any pre-packaged receivership workout (aka Nationalization), the bond holders are going to have to take a big hit.

Bloomberg:

"Citigroup Inc. and Bank of America Corp.'s bond prices are sliding on concern that owners of debt issued by U.S. financial firms will be forced to swallow losses if the industry needs another bailout.

U.S. bank debt has lost 7.8 percent and yields have jumped to record levels compared with benchmark rates in the past month, even after taxpayers committed more than $11.6 trillion to prop up financial firms. With shareholders almost wiped out at banks like Citigroup and lawmakers resisting more rescues, holders may be asked to swap bonds for new debt that offers reduced interest rates or lower face values, analysts said.

Debt investors are an attractive target because of the size of their holdings — more than $1 trillion just at the four largest U.S. banks — and because they've emerged almost unscathed so far."

I thought this quote was interesting also:

Since any reduction in debt at a bank helps boost capital ratios, members of Congress including U.S. Representative Brad Sherman, a California Democrat, say it's time for bondholders to share the pain.

"These banks can go into receivership, shed their shareholders, shed or reduce the amount they owe to their bondholders and come back out much stronger institutions," said Sherman, who sits on the House Financial Services Committee, in a statement to Bloomberg News. More U.S. capital might be offered as part of the package, he said.

I appears that Congress is starting to get it . . .

>

Previously:
iBanks Grabbed $50 Billion in AIG Bailout Cash (March 7th, 2009)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/03/ibanks-grabbed-50-billion-in-aig-bailout-cash/

Backdoor Bailouts for Goldman Sachs? (March 5, 2009)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/03/backdoor-bailouts-for-goldman-sachs/

Solvent Insurer / Insolvent Insurer (March 4, 2009)
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2009/03/solvent-insurer-insolvent-insurer/

Source:
 Banks' Bondholders May Be Next in Line to Share Bailout Pain
David Mildenberg and Bryan Keogh
Bloomberg, March 11 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601213&sid=agAXIowc8q3c&


 
 

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mardi 10 mars 2009

Willem Buiter Strikes Again, Calls for Over-Regulation of Banks



 
 

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via naked capitalism de Yves Smith le 10/03/09

In case readers haven't figured it out, I am a big Willem Buiter fan. Even when he is wrong, he is at least forthright and colorful. He does have an appetite for showing off his formidable intellect. Nevertheless, his best qualities are his willingness to take on orthodoxies and authorities, and his vivid, trenchant style. It was Buiter who at the last Jackson Hole conference accused the Fed of "cognitive regulatory capture," eliciting a firestorm of criticism.

Today Buiter takes up one of my favorite causes: the need to leash and collar bankers. He dismisses the canard so often trotted out in the US, that too many restraints might inhibit financial innovation. Paul Volcker deemed the most important financial innovation in the last 30 years to be the ATM machine. Nassim Nicolas Taleb has dismissed the supposed advantages conferred by the development of the Black-Scholes option pricing model.

Given the considerable costs gambling innovation hath wrought, the calls to shackle bankers seem completely warranted. If any other class had done this much damage, they'd almost certainly be in jail.

Note the timing of this post. This is pre the G-20, where the Euro crowd is pushing for more financial regulation, particularly with new international mechanisms, while the US is arguing for more coordinated fiscal stimulus. The US does not want to (and won't as long as the dollar holds as reserve currency) cede control over its institutions. But a good deal more "harmonisation" and coordination is in order.

Buiter provides a long list of reform ideas. I've extracted the ones I found most interesting, and I encourage readers to look at the full roster. Be sure to read his comments on self regulation.

From VoxEU:
Financial regulation is a now-or-never proposition as the sector's lobbying power is greatly diminished. This column argues that we should embrace robust regulation now, risking over-regulation. Correcting mistakes later would be better than risking another era of "self-" or "soft-touch" regulation.

Over-regulate now

It is necessary, for political economy reasons, to rush new comprehensive regulation of the financial sector. While it would be better, holding constant the likelihood of the measures being adopted and implemented, not to act in haste, there is now a unique window of opportunity – a period of extraordinary politics, in the words of Balcerowicz – to actually get the thorough regulatory reform we need. The reason is that the private financial sector is on its uppers – down and out – and will not be able to put together much of a fight, let alone its usual boom-time massive lobbying effort to veto radical measures. It is better to over-regulate now and subsequently correct the mistakes than to risk another era of self-regulation and soft-touch under-regulation of financial markets, instruments and institutions.

Macro-prudential regulation

The objective of macro-prudential regulation is systemic financial stability. This has a number of dimensions:
Preventing or mitigating asset market and credit booms, bubbles and busts
Preventing or mitigating market illiquidity in systemically important markets
Preventing or mitigating funding illiquidity for systemically important financial institutions
Preventing or managing insolvencies of systemically important financial institutions

Other micro-prudential considerations (abuse of monopoly power; consumer protection; micro-manifestations of asymmetric information) should be left to the micro-prudential regulator(s).

Comprehensive regulation
Regulation will have to be comprehensive across instruments, institutions, markets and countries. Specifically, we must:
R
egulate all systemically important highly leveraged financial enterprises, whatever they call themselves: commercial bank, investment bank, universal bank, hedge fund, SIV, CDO, private equity fund or bicycle repair shop.
Regulate all markets for systemically important financial instruments.
Regulate all systemically important financial infrastructure or plumbing: payment, clearing, settlement systems, mechanisms and platforms, and the associated provision of custodial services.
Do it all on a cross-border basis.

Self-regulation

Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance. The notion that markets, including financial markets could be self-regulating, by properly incentivising CEOs and Boards of Directors and through market-discipline, is prima facie suspect. We decide to regulate markets because of market failure. Then we let the market regulate the market. This is an invisible hand too far. The concept of self-regulation is especially ludicrous for financial markets. Finance is trade in promises expressed in units of abstract purchasing power (money). It scales up and down ferociously quickly. If Airbus or Boeing wishes to double the size of its operations, it takes 4 or 5 years to put in place another set of assembly lines. If a bank wishes to scale its balance sheet and operations ten-fold, all it has to do is to add a zero in the right places. Given enough optimism, trust, confidence and self-confidence, financial activity can, through leverage, be scaled up alarmingly quickly. Once optimism, trust, confidence and self-confidence disappear and are replaced by pessimism, mistrust, lack of confidence and fear/panic, the scaling down of bank activities can occur even faster. Such an industry cannot be left to its own devices.

The importance of public information

Regulation can only take place on the basis of independently verifiable (public) information. Regulators cannot rely on information that is private to the regulated entity. This means that the capital adequacy of the first pillar of Basel II has to be overhauled radically, as its risk-weighting of assets relies in part on internal bank models that are private to the banks...

Regulation financial innovation

Financial innovation in products and institutions is potentially beneficial and potentially harmful. There is a need to regulate financial innovation. I propose the model used in the US by the Food and Drug Administration for pharmaceutical and medical products.
First, there is a positive list of financial instruments and institutions. Anything that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden.
To get a new instrument or new institution approved, there will have to be testing, scrutiny by regulators, supervisors, academic specialists and other interested parties, and pilot projects. It is possible that, once a new instrument or institution has been approved, it is only available 'with a prescription'. For instance, only professional counterparties rather than the general public could be permitted.....

Clearly, this approach to financial innovation would slow down financial innovation. It may even kill off certain innovations that would have been socially useful. So be it. The dangers of unbridled financial innovation are too manifest.

Yves here. The FDA has recently come under a lot of criticism (deservedly) but that is due in large measure to a lack of commitment to its mandate from deregulation-minded Administrations, budget cuts, and its conflicted position (40%+ of its budget comes from fees paid by the industry for new drug applications, an arrangement created during the Bush Senior presidency. Too high a turndown rate would deter applications. The problems with the FDA are due to a significant degree to nearly 20 years of efforts to undermine its role. And that is not my just my view; I've heard this sort of thing from FDA lawyers and former FDA commissioners). Back to Buiter:
Narrow banking vs. investment banking

The distinction between public utility banking/narrow banking vs. investment banking; (the rest) has to be re-introduced. I advocate a form of Glass-Steagall on steroids, with a heavily regulated and closely supervised narrow banking sector, engaged in commercial banking (taking deposits and making loans) and benefiting from lender of last resort and market maker of last resort support. The investment bank sector will also be regulated and supervised, but more lightly, and according to the same principles as other systemically important highly leveraged non-narrow bank institutions.

Universal banking has few if any efficiency advantages and many disadvantages. Economies of scale and scope in banking are soon exhausted. They tend to be fat to fail, have a lack of focus, and suffer from span-of-control negative synergies etc. Universal banks or financial supermarkets use their size to exploit market power and try to shelter their risky, non-narrow banking activities under the LLR and MMLR umbrella of the narrow bank that's hiding somewhere inside the universal bank....

Mixed public-private ownership

Given the manifest failure of the efficient market hypothesis, it is not at all obvious that systemically important financial institutions should be allowed to be listed companies. Financial institutions' stock market valuations have been notorious will-o'-the wisps and have, through stock options and other stock-market valuation-related executive remuneration components, contributed to the excessive risk taking during the recent boom. Partnerships, mutual ownership, cooperative ownership, and various forms of public and mixed public-private ownership may be more appropriate for financial institutions. Perhaps we should even consider removing limited liability for investment banks!

 
 

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lundi 9 mars 2009

Some Musings on The Black Swan



 
 

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via naked capitalism de Yves Smith le 07/03/09

I must confess to being very late to read Nassim Nicolas Taleb's The Black Swan, and frankly had considered NOT reading it. First, it has been so widely reviewed and discussed that I had assumed the additional knowledge to be gained by reading the book itself would be marginal. Second, I've read a bit of Benoit Mandelbrot, who is arguably Taleb's most important predecessor. It was Mandelbrot, a mathematician, in the 1960s, who found 100 years of cotton trading data, with daily prices. Mandelbrot cut the information every which way and found that its distribution did not at all correspond with the assumptions underpinning the new and growing school of financial economics. It was Mandelbrot that discovered "fat tails", that very extreme price movements are far more likely than the theories predict. He also found that market have memory, that their price movements do not comport with the "random walk" theory (I have assumed this pattern somehow relates to the cognitive bias of anchoring, but do not know if anyone has been able to connect the dots).

His findings were initially rejected, and continued to be resisted even when they were replicated in other markets (and then proved out in the real world: a daily price move like that of the 1987 crash was so extreme as to verge on being statistically impossible).

Put simply, computational convenience trumped empirical findings.

Even though Taleb's observations have gotten a lot of attention in the popular media, I sincerely doubt they will be internalized. In classic cognitive dissonance fashion, his views may be given more lip service, but it will not be integrated into mental models, even of those who ought to pay heed. The very fact that his construct has been reduced to the soundbite "black swan" when it is more complicated and richer is telling.

What are some of the reasons? Let me speculate.

First, Taleb goes to some length to establish that he is not the first to go down this line of thinking; he has quite a few intellectual ancestors. Yet these observations never took hold.

Of course, one reason is that the implications are pretty uncomfortable for a lot of professions (although Taleb would dispute their clams of professionalism). He contends that predictions are a fraught-to-useless exercise, and cites research that shows that lay forecasts are frequently no worse than those of experts. His book would appeal most to people who are well educated and interested in finance and economics. A fairly large subset of that group has invested in expensive educations and/or developed a lot of career experience to try to anticipate the future better than your average slob. Do you think a book, even a very persuasive book, is going to change how people operate on a day-to-day basis? Unlikely.

But second, and perhaps as important, people do not want to see the world as subject to chance to the degree that Taleb says it is. This is hugely unsettling if you really do come to terms with the implications of his argument. We like to believe we have some measure of control over our lives. And research has shown that people do pretty consistently overestimate their degree of control and influence (for instance, most people will exaggerate their contribution to the success of a project, not as a matter of PR, although that may be true too, but their private assessment). Most people (ironically those deemed psychologically healthy) have an optimistic bias and generally assign too high odds of things working out well (the mildly depressed make more accurate assessments. I have often wondered which way the causality runs: do they make better assessments BECAUSE their unhappy state strips away the rose-colored filter, or are they mildly depressed because they keep giving more realistic assessments, which makes them a drag to be around, and they are depressed because they encounter social rejection?). So if you embrace Taleb, you'd have to accept the disorienting fact that the world really is a pretty untractable place, that success had more to do with luck than application (although Taleb stresses the importance of working at being lucky, that is, accepting the opportunity to meet new people and make the most of chance encounters).

Third, if our mental construct of how the world works is off in some fundamental respects, it also calls into question our ability to make good decisions. And apart from Taleb, there are reasons to question our abilities here. It has been pretty well documented in brain research that humans can only hold so many variables in their consciousness at once. Our decision-making capabilities are more limited than we'd like to believe. And confronting every situation as if it were new would be simply exhausting, That is why we rely heavily on rules of thumb (more fancily called heuristics). Now we also have certain types of analytic processes, what I like to think of as pattern recognition, that can serve us well (this was the topic of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink). The problem is that this quick pattern recognition can work very well, or be absolutely wrong, and we have no easy way of telling which.

Essentially, Taleb paints a picture of the world and human behavior that is unflattering. So as much as his work makes a fundamentally important set of observations, its success may be largely a function of luck. It came out just when the credit markets were starting to unravel and well established practices, both among traders and the broader financial community, were being shown to have serious flaws. Had his book come out at another juncture, it probably would not have been as well received.

 
 

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Wolfgang Munchau: Abandon All Hope.....



 
 

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via naked capitalism de Yves Smith le 08/03/09

While Wolfgang Munchau's latest comment for the Financial Times, "An L of a recession – reform is the way out," fell short of being apocalyptic, it was the gloomiest piece I can recall coming from him. Munchau argues that the world is going into what is politely referred to as an L shaped recession, but he sees it as a full blown, Japan style recession. Why? Because governments lack the will to take the painful steps necessary to forestall even more painful outcomes.

The big items he points to are: reluctance to reform the financial sector, major economies clinging to national strategies that no longer work, and in particular, exporters unwilling to spend short term and reorient longer term to stimulate enough demand internally.

From the Financial Times:
The US is dragging its feet over the financial sector. The European Union is doing the same, as well as failing to adopt policies that could shield it from an increasingly probable speculative attack. And judging by the state of preparations, the forthcoming Group of 20 summit is going to be a disaster.

So it looks like it is going to be an L – not a V or a U. I mean an L-shaped recession, one that starts with a steep decline, followed by very low growth for many years... This looks like Japan all over. Without financial restructuring, the economy is not going to recover. And Japan was lucky. It was surrounded by a booming global economy.

The best way to fight such a disaster is to restructure the banking system and provide short-term economic stimulus through monetary and fiscal policy. ...the current stimulus package is woefully inadequate. In other words: we are looking at an L.

An L-shaped recession will make the adjustment of balance sheets even more painful. Unemployment will continue to rise. House prices will keep on falling. US consumers and banks will spend the next five or more years deleveraging, getting their respective balance sheets back in order. In that period, the US current-account deficit will fall sharply, as will that of the UK, Spain and several central and eastern European countries. This process can take a long time, and in an L-shaped recession it takes longer.

But the effect is also brutal on the rest of the world. The fall in current-account deficits will be partially compensated for by lower surpluses from oil and gas exporters, such as Middle Eastern countries and Russia. But the bulk of the adjustment would be borne by the world's largest exporters: Germany, China and Japan....

If we had a simple U-shaped recession, we would still have a painful recession in Germany and Japan, for example. But under a U-shaped scenario, both countries would be among the first to benefit from the recovery.

In an L-shaped recession, however, recession gives way to depression, despite the fact that both countries thought they had done their "homework". If nobody can afford to run a large deficit for a long time – which is what an L recession effectively implies – the economic models of Germany and Japan will no longer work. Germany had a current-account surplus of more than 7 per cent last year. It is the world's largest exporter. Exports constitute about 41 per cent of national gross domestic product – an extraordinary number, given the size of the country.

So what should these countries do? The right policy response would be to reduce the dependency on exports and undertake structural reforms that facilitate the shift towards non-tradable goods...

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening. Germany is clinging to its export model like a drug addict. An example is the debate about the future of Opel, the European car manufacturing subsidiary of General Motors. Opel is unlikely to survive without help from the government. The proponents of a state bail-out of Opel argue that the company is systemically relevant. This argument is obviously wrong. There can be systemically relevant banks, but there can be no systemically relevant carmakers. But the answer is also revealing. What it means is that Opel is systemically relevant for the country's export-oriented model. The bail-out adherents are clinging to an industrial structure that has no hope of survival in an L-shaped world...

We are nowhere near a solution to the crisis. After committing errors of omission, global leaders are now producing errors of commission. The Americans dream about a return to a world of credit finance consumption while the Germans dream about assembly lines. In an L-shaped world, these are nightmares.

 
 

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lundi 2 mars 2009

"The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics"



 
 

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via Economist's View de Mark Thoma le 01/03/09

Via email:

The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics, by David Colander, Hans Föllmer, Armin Haas, Michael Goldberg, Katarina Juselius, Alan Kirman, and Thomas Lux: [From the conclusion] ..."We believe that economics has been trapped in a sub-optimal equilibrium in which much of its research efforts are not directed towards the most prevalent needs of society. Paradoxically self-reinforcing feedback effects within the profession may have led to the dominance of a paradigm that has no solid methodological basis and whose empirical performance is, to say the least, modest. Defining away the most prevalent economic problems of modern economies and failing to communicate the limitations and assumptions of its popular models, the economics profession bears some responsibility for the current crisis. It has failed in its duty to society to provide as much insight as possible into the workings of the economy and in providing warnings about the tools it created. It has also been reluctant to emphasize the limitations of its analysis. We believe that the failure to even envisage the current problems of the worldwide financial system and the inability of standard macro and finance models to provide any insight into ongoing events make a strong case for a major reorientation in these areas and a reconsideration of their basic premises."


 
 

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"In Praise of More Primitive Finance"



 
 

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via naked capitalism de Yves Smith le 02/03/09

Analysts, regulators, and politicians are beginning to recognize that most if not all of the widely touted benefits of modern finance redounded only to its purveyors. The decidedly retro Canadian banking system, with simple products, high equity requirements, and relatively modest securities operations that focus on domestic customers, is the soundest in the world. As Theresa Tedesco noted in the New York Times:
The five major chartered banks, the few regional banks and handful of large insurance companies are all regulated by the federal government. Canadian banks are relatively constrained in the amounts they can lend. Canadian banks are required to have a bigger cushion to absorb losses than American banks. In addition, Canadian government regulations protect the domestic banks by limiting foreign competition. They also keep banks broadly owned by public shareholders....

Canadian banks are known to be risk-averse, and this has served them well. While their American counterparts were loading up their books with risky mortgages, Canadian banks maintained their lending requirements, largely avoiding subprime mortgages. The buttoned-down banks in Canada also tended to keep these types of securities on their books, rather than packaging them and selling them to investors. This meant that the exposures they did have to weak mortgages were more visible to the marketplace.

The big five Canadian banks — Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Bank of Montreal — survived the recent turmoil relatively unscathed. Their balance sheets remain intact and their capital ratios are comfortably above requirements.

Columbia University professor Amar Bhide, writing at the Berkeley Economic Press, endorses the idea of a reinstitution of simpler banking practices. The first part of his article offers an insightful, in many respects novel, critique of how we got in our mess. Bhide sees it as long in the making:
The financial debacle— the first to implicate the widespread use of complex financial instruments, rather than simple speculation or imprudent lending— isn't just the result of the recent missteps of bankers, rating agencies or mortgage brokers. Rather, finance has been on the wrong trajectory for more than half a century. Its defects derive from the academic theories and regulatory structures that have evolved since the 1930s—dysfunctional foundations that have not drawn the scrutiny they deserve. And without addressing the deep defects, we are likely to lurch from crisis to crisis.

His recommendation is straightforward:
Reversing many age-old dysfunctions isn't likely. We aren't going to retrain business school processors in the art and science of traditional fundamental analysis or due diligence. Nor is repeal of the Securities Acts or the reprivatization of financial firms on the cards.

We could, however, go a long way to limiting future meltdowns by a simpler more primitive regulatory regime that keeps banks from enabling dangerous and opaque schemes.

Let's revive the radical idea of narrow banking and tightly limit what banks (and any other entities that raise short term deposits from the public) can do: nothing besides making loans—after old-fashioned due diligence— and simple hedging transactions. The standard would simply be whether the loan can be monitored by bankers and examiners who do not have PhDs in finance.

Anyone else: investment banks, hedge funds, trusts and the like can innovate and speculate to the utmost, free of any additional oversight. But, they would not be allowed to trade with or secure credit from regulated banks, except through prudent loans whose collateral and terms can be monitored by run-of-the-mill bankers and examiners.5 This simple, "retro" approach—a more stringent Glass-Steagall Act—would protect depositors, limit the risks of financial contagion, allow the FDIC and Fed to focus on their primary responsibilities, and not require new agencies or more regulators. Less, would in fact, be more.

Speculations and bubbles would not be eliminated, but walling off the banking system would limit the extent of collateral damage. When the internet bubble burst, for instance, nearly half a trillion dollars of wealth evaporated. But because very little bank lending was involved the impact on the economy as a whole was modest.

Some would, of course, lose. Money market funds would lose their free ride—the howls of protest emanating from money market funds at proposed rules that they take some responsibility for their investment choices6 are telling. Financial engineers would lose access to cheap credit—alarming those who claim that the "sophistication" of the U.S. financial system is a prime cause of U.S. prosperity. But, although a modern economy does need the effective provision of some financial basics, such as risk capital, credit and insurance, claims that all the bells and whistles that have been developed over the last couple of decades are a net plus are implausible. Can we really believe that a financial sector now receives more than thirty percent of domestic corporate profits—double its share from twenty five years ago7—because it has produced improvements in mobilizing or allocating capital of that magnitude?

More likely, innovators and entrepreneurs in the real economy prospered in spite of the talent and funds that were taken up by the expansion of the financial sector. So if the financial sector shrinks back to the basics, so much the better for long run prosperity.

 
 

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