Well, it was obvious that this bullet point from the Merlin agreement: implementing and applying European and international rules to create a level playing field in both policy and practice whilst protecting and maintaining the particular strength of UK financial services, and without pre-judging the outcome of the Independent Commission on Banking (IBC). was a […]
Read more...We’ve repeatedly said that offshoring and outsourcing are often not the big cost-savers that the industry promoting them, Wall Street, and the stenographers among the business press would have you believe.
Direct factory labor is typically just north of 10% of the cost of most manufactured goods; for cars, we are told it’s 13%. Even if you can extract meaningful savings there, you have significant offsets: the upfront cost of re-orgainzing production (which in the outsourcing scenario include hiring costly outsourcing “consultants” and paying attorneys to paper up the deals), higher ongoing managerial costs, higher shipping and related inventory financing costs. Yes, there are cases like Apple where outsourcing has been a big success, but there are also others where the benefits have been underwhelming and have come at considerable costs to US workers, communities, and the economy (see a very good long form discussion by Leo Hindery).
Moreover, these cost savings come with higher risk.
Read more...Readers have hopefully had the opportunity to read “The Center for American Progress Objects to Our Critique of Its GSE Reform Plan”, which contained an e-mail by David Min of the Center for American Progress presenting its bones of contention.
While we appreciate that the CAP has gone to the trouble to communicate with us directly, we are not persuaded by its arguments.
We’ll recap the e-mail and then address the issues individually:
1. You need to have some form of government guarantee to have a mortgage product that is fair to middle class consumers (his writing is a bit confused, at one point he uses “no” when he means “yes”, but this is the drift of his gist).
2. We’ve mistated who would eat “catastrophic risk” under the CAP scheme, since the Catastrophic Risk Fund and the new mortgage insurer investors would take losses first
3. Not all “banks” are behind or support the CAP proposal
4. This plan is the best option for the public and less lucrative to the financial services industry than a “privatization” model
Let’s dispatch these arguments in order.
Read more...We received this e-mail from David Min on February 11 about our post titled, “Wall Street Co-Opting Nominally Liberal Think Tanks; Banks Lobbying to Become New GSEs.” That piece took a dim view of a GSE “reform” proposal from the Center for American Progress, which we pointed out is “THE mainstream Democratic think tank for Congress and the administration”.
We must note that this message mischaracterizes some aspects of our post (for instance, we discussed at length in the our post why we thought the catastrophic risk fund would come up short, and this e-mail does not address our argument). Nevertheless, we thought readers would be interested in his message. From Min:
Read more...t’s high time that reporters start lifting the veil to look at exactly who is behind the “research” put out by think tanks. Even drug company research, which many members of the public now know to view with some doubt, at least has an actual investigation of some sort underpinning it (the doubts about them usually involve study design and/or interpretation of results). Think tank end product should be taken with even more salt, since it too often is the intellectual equivalent of a CDO: taking junk ideas and dressing it up in a structure and a brand name so that most people will regard it as AAA-rated thinking.
A piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times is an all-too-rare and badly need hard look at the less than savory process of creating impressive-looking arguments in favor of special-interest serving policies.
Read more...Yves here. This long and informative post on the pending train wreck in the Australian financial system might seem to be too narrow a topic for most Naked Capitalism readers, but it makes for an important object lesson. Australia managed to come out of the global financial crisis largely unscathed because its banks did not swill down toxic assets from the US (chump quasi retail investors were another matter) and it benefitted from the commodities boom.
Nevertheless, one might think its bank regulators might see what happened abroad as a cautionary tale. Mortgage debt took center stage in the crisis, and Australia is in the throes of a serious housing bubble. Yet as this post describes, the regulators seem asleep at the switch as to one of its major drivers.
By Deep T., a senior banking insider who is fed up with his colleague’s reliance on public support. Cross posted from MacroBusiness.
Previously I have posted on how the major banks recycle capital in The Capital Rort. I want to extend that subject by showing how mortgage ‘rehypothecation’ in Australia has led to the massive expansion in liquidity available to Australian banks which is at the root of the mortgage affordability issues in Australia and has put Australia’s banking system on the unstoppable path to collapse or government bailout.
Read more...This document was leaked to Naked Capitalism by a university economics student who has asked to remain anonymous
Background
Mixed reactions have followed the recent brilliant demonstration by a pair of young Harvard economists that bankruptcy cannot occur. While the community of economists has generally affirmed the correctness of the reasoning at issue, various individuals already distinguished for their carping attitudes have willfully misunderstood the theorem; for example, the controversial blogger Yves Smith has publicly labeled the proof ‘yet another demonstration that economics is the ugly stepsister of astrology.’
This sort of obscurantism is hardly surprising – as Ludwig von Mises pointed out in 1956 in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, ‘economics is so different from the natural sciences and technology on the one hand, and history and jurisprudence on the other hand, that it seems strange and repulsive to the beginner.’ Ms. Smith is evidently one of the people who experienced as a student this natural but irrational feeling of aversion, and has since refused to make the effort to think with true economic rigor.
The insight incorporated in the recent theorem is not difficult to explain, although for a full understanding, knowledge of the relevant mathematical techniques is, of course, essential.
Read more...The notion underlying the Volcker rule is that too big to fail institutions have a government backstop and therefore their activities should be restricted to the types of intermediation that support the real economy. The taxpayer has no reason to fund “heads I win, tails you lose” wagers. Various firms, most notably “doing God’s work” Goldman, has tried to play up the social value of its role, whenever possible wrapping its conflict-of-interest ridden trading activities in the mantle of “market making”.
A big problem in taking about market making versus position trading is that, Goldman piety to the contrary, the two are closely linked. Even though all the major dealer banks created proprietary trading operations to allow top traders to speculate with the house’s capital, plenty of positioning also takes place on dealing desks. While dealers are obligated to make a price to customer (well, in theory, it’s amazing how many quit taking calls in turbulent markets), they are shading their prices in light of how they feel about holding more or less exposure at that time. And the dealing desks, just like the prop traders, are seeking to maximize the value of their inventories over time.
A Goldman discussion of risk management presented yesterday (hat tip reader Michael T) gives reason to question that much has changed on Wall Street regarding the role of position taking, now taxpayer supported, in firm profits.
Read more...Oh, I need a new round of black humor as a coping device to deal with the predictable but nevertheless disheartening news that banksters are getting record pay for 2010, after having gotten record pay for 2009…after having wrecked the global economy.
If this isn’t incentivizing destructive behavior, I’d like you to suggest how we could make this picture worse. A newspaper ad for the swaps salesman that tanked the most municipalities? Ticker tape parades for the deal structurer that was best at pulling most fees out of clients in ways they wouldn’t detect? (Oh wait, you’d have to include pretty much every derivative salesman) Honorable mention for the banker with the biggest expense account charges in the industry? (Oh wait, that’s not the right metric, we learned in Inside Job that the drugs and hookers get charged to research budgets. Damn).
My pet joke from the dot bomb era scandals is now looking a bit tired:
Read more...By Satyajit Das, the author of “Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives.” Cross posted from Wilmott
A question of values …
Derivative contracts are valued on a mark-to-market (“MtM”) basis. This requires valuation of the contracts based on the current market price.
OTC derivatives trade privately. Market prices for specific transactions are not directly available. This means current valuations rely on pricing models.
There are significant differences in the complexity of the models and the ability to verify and calibrate inputs. More complex products used sophisticated financial models, often derived from science or statistical methodology. There are frequently differences in choice, exact factorisation and even numerical implementation of the models. Different dealers may use different models.
Some required inputs for the models are available from markets sources. The nature of the OTC market and the limited trading in certain instruments mean that key input parameters must frequently be “estimated” or “bootstrapped” from available data. In certain products, the limited number of active dealers means that “market” prices are sometimes no more than the dealer’s own quote being fed back after being collated and “scrubbed” by an external data provider. This is referred to prosaically as “mark-to-myself”.
Read more...I often enjoy Joe Nocera’s take on Wall Street, but like some other well known financial writers, he has become overly close to his subjects. No where is this more evident than in a stunning little aside in an otherwise not bad piece on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commision’s report, which points out that it is long on potentially helpful detail, short on analysis.
Here is the offending section:
Read more...But I wonder. Had there been a Dutch Tulip Inquiry Commission nearly four centuries ago, it would no doubt have found tulip salesmen who fraudulently persuaded people to borrow money they could never pay back to buy tulips.
Yves here. Although this post deals with a specific aspect of the House of Lords inquiry, note how it focuses on mechanisms that led to bank insolvency, in this case, how dubious accounting produced exaggerated profit reports, and along with it, looting (as in paying out funds to insiders to a degree that put the survival of the firm at risk).
By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance.
The many inquiries into the financial crisis have turned over plenty of stones but have failed to find any smoking guns. But the House of Lords economic affairs committee’s inquiry “Auditors: market concentration and their role” is making strides in identifying and maybe rooting out the accounting shenanigans that lay at the heart of the crisis.
At a recent session of the HoL inquiry, UK-based investors said that IFRS (international financial reporting standards) had encouraged imprudent, reckless and even illegal behavior by UK and Irish banks, enabling them to deceive investors, boost executive bonuses and ultimately destroy their institutions at taxpayers’ expense.
Read more...Once in a while, you’ll see stories pop up about state governments looking into setting up a state bank, Washington being the latest sighting, along the lines of the only state bank in the US, the Bank of North Dakota. And there’s good reason. The Bank of North Dakota has an enviable track record, having remained profitable during the credit crisis. Moreover, in the ten years prior, the bank returned roughly half its profits, or roughly a third of a billion dollars, to the state government. That is a substantial amount in a state with only 600,000 people. The bank was also able to pay a special dividend to the state the last time it was on the verge of having a budget deficit, during the dot-bomb era, thus keeping state finances in the black.
But the good financial performance is simply an important side benefit. The bank’s real raison d’etre is to assist the local economy. And it has done so for a very long time. It was established in 1919 as part of a multi-pronged effort by farmers to wield more power against entrenched interests in the East.
And the most important potential use of this type of bank in our era could again be to level the playing field with powerful interests, in this case, the TBTF banks.
Read more...Our current approach to banking regulation exposes us to recurrent, intensifying financial crises. The good news is that because we reached an all time low in Basel II, Basel III almost has to be an improvement. The bad news is that Basel III has not reexamined the fundamental assumptions underlying the Basel process. As a result, Basel III will be a variant on the common ineffective theme of banking regulation designed by economists and the industry.
The Basel process is built upon three flawed assumptions.
1. Capital requirements are the ideal form of banking regulation.
2. Capital requirements can be set without establishing sound accounting.
3. Accounting control fraud is not a serious concern.
Capital requirements are the ideal form of banking regulation under conventional economic wisdom. The attraction of capital requirements to neoclassical economists is elegance. Their theory is that while private market discipline ensures that normal corporations are inherently safe, private market discipline poses an inherent dilemma for banks.
Read more...By Ian Fraser, a financial journalist who blogs at his web site and at qfinance.
Hitching your wagon to flawed or “dozy” metrics is never a particularly good idea. We saw this in the build up to the global financial crisis. RBS’s obsession with earnings growth, whilst paying no attention to return on capital, is just one idiosyncratic example; spurious “credit ratings” of structured products are another, and pervasive. It was financial institutions’ blind faith in flawed metrics, and their penchant for burying risk, through the use of deceptive risk models such as Value At Risk, that, as much as anything else, encouraged a generation of bank CEOs to lead their institutions over a cliff.
Equally flawed metrics are now driving risky, and indeed sometimes even desperate, behavior in the oil and gas sector.
Read more...