Category: Commentary

James Surowiecki and Me

Back when I had time to read The New Yorker, I was a big fan of James Surowiecki. I would always look for his column; if it was there, it was usually the first thing I would read. Unfortunately, he’s no fan of mine.

Surowiecki makes three points about our recent long post on nationalization:

  1. If the government were to take over a large bank like Citigroup, it would not be able to sell it into the private sector quickly, but would most likely own it for several years, which constitutes nationalization.
  2. Recent U.S. history, by which he means the S&L crisis, shows that the right strategy is “exercising regulatory forebearance, cutting interest rates sharply (which raises bank profit margins), and helping the banks deal with their bad assets” – not bank takeovers.
  3. We were misleading in citing the IMF’s $4.1 trillion number instead of the lower $1.1 trillion number for U.S. financial institutions. “I assume they used the $4.1 trillion number because it’s much scarier, and offers a much gloomier picture of the state of the U.S. financial system. Unfortunately, it also offers a much more misleading picture of the system.”

Sigh. I guess it’s impossible to make everyone like me.

I’ll take the points in reverse order.

Continue reading “James Surowiecki and Me” →

“Nationalization” (A Weekend Comment Competition)

Writing in the Financial Times on January 27th, 2009, Peter Boone and I expressed our opposition to bank nationalization in no uncertain terms,

If you want to end up with the economy of Pakistan, the politics of Ukraine, and the inflation rate of Zimbabwe, bank nationalization is the way to go.

Most others who recently advocated a managed bankruptcy process – or FDIC-type intervention – for big banks (with or without the injection of new government capital) were careful, at least initially, to avoid using the word nationalization.  And many took pains to explain in detail why their proposals were quite different from nationalization.

But at some point this became a debate in which informed bystanders perceived the sides as being for or against “nationalization” – a semiotic transition that has obviously helped the big bankers, at least in the short term.

This weekend’s comment competition is in two parts.  Who first made “nationalization” the central word for the U.S. bank discussion?  And who was most influential in establishing that the national debate be defined in these terms?

Stress Tests: What Was the Point Again?

There was been a lot of drama over the last week, which we have certainly contributed to, about the stress tests. It was all very exciting, finally seeing numbers purporting to show how healthy or unhealthy each bank was. But let’s recall what the point of this whole exercise was.

Depending on your perspective, the goal is either to restore confidence in the health of the financial system, or to ensure the health of the financial system, which are obviously closely related. We care about the health of the financial system because the financial system is critical for the health of the economy as a whole: without banks that are willing to lend money for people to buy houses, cars, and consumer goods, or for businesses to invest in real estate, factories, inventory, software, etc., none of these things will happen. So the ultimate goal is to ensure the availability of credit.

There are ways to measure the availability of credit directly. One of them is the Fed’s quarterly survey on bank lending practices, which was released earlier this week (hat tip Calculated Risk, as usual). For a quick overview, I recommend the charts. The charts show you, for each quarter, the change in supply of or demand for credit in that quarter – in other words, they are you showing you the first derivative. 

Continue reading “Stress Tests: What Was the Point Again?” →

The Other Stress Test (For Bankers)

There is nothing you can teach Wall Street titans regarding the timing of news flow.  Stephen Friedman, the former head of Goldman Sachs, resigned last night as chair of the New York Fed’s board, after committing essentially a rookie error.  In December/January, he traded the stock of a company (Goldman) overseen by the NY Fed, while helping to pick a new head of the Fed (formerly from Goldman), and presumably being aware of other potentially nonpublic information regarding bank rescues (benefiting Goldman both directly and indirectly).  The real error, given the Federal Reserve System’s incredibly lax rules on potential conflicts of interest at this level, was failing to disclose this information to the NY Fed – they learned it from WSJ reporters and that cannot have been a good moment. 

If you have to resign, pick your time of day carefully, and Friedman is obviously advised by the best people in the business.  I’m looking at the hard copies of four newspapers.  The news of his departure does not make the front page of the NYT (not even the small stuff at the bottom) or the front page of their Business Day section.  There is nothing on the front page of the FT or Washington Post.  Even the WSJ only manages three paragraphs on the front page, before sending you to look for p.A10.  (It was on cnn.com from 5:55pm last night, together with his resignation letter.)

I haven’t checked who first broke the news, but Friedman’s resignation was of course the major development of yesterday.  The bank stress test results were hard-baked a long time ago, and almost all the icing on that cake had already been leaked.  But the stress test for bankers is still underway. Continue reading “The Other Stress Test (For Bankers)” →

Help

Has anyone figured out how to make the numbers in Table 3 (PDF p. 10) in the stress test results add up? I understand what all the lines mean individually, but the presentation seems incomplete. Looking at Citi for example, I know that they expect 104.7 in losses on existing assets, but they expect Citi to make 49.0, for a net loss of 55.7. Common capital on 12/31/08 was 22.9, and 22.9 – 55.7 = -32.8, so absent recapitalization that would leave Citi at -32.8 on 12/31/10. The “SCAP buffer” (which seems like the opposite of a buffer, but whatever) is 92.6, so with the buffer Citi would have 59.8 on 12/31/10. But 59.8 is well over 4% of Citi’s risk-weighted assets of 996.2.

Maybe the model has Citi’s assets climbing up to $1.5 trillion? Or maybe the losses and “resources to absorb losses” do not have a dollar-for-dollar effect on common capital?

Anyway, it seems like at least one number is missing. If you can explain this, or link to someone who can, I will . . . be grateful.

Update: The most common theory is that 59.8 is 6% of 996.2. But I don’t think that is the explanation, for the reasons I cite in this comment reply and that Nemo also flagged. Also, Erich Riesenberg points out that the fact that this works out to 6% for Citi is a pure coincidence, if you look at the same calculation for other banks.

By James Kwak

GMAC Arithmetic

Calculated Risk has a table listing all of the leaked stress test figures so far. As a percentage of assets, the big banks need between 0% and 1.4% in additional capital. But there is one outlier: GMAC, with $189 billion in assets, needs $11.5 billion in capital.

This implies that GMAC is not just low on capital, it has negative capital. If you were to give GMAC $11.5 billion in new cash, it would have $200 billion in assets. The minimum tangible common equity requirement being used for the stress tests is probably in the 3-4% range. If it’s 4%, then the post-recapitalization GMAC would have $8 billion in tangible common equity – which means that right now it has negative $3.5 billion in tangible common equity. (The situation is slightly worse if you assume that it will be recapitalized through a preferred-to-common conversion, or if the threshold is 3%.)

The thing that confuses me is that, on paper, you can’t recapitalize a company with a negative net worth. No investor would pay $11.5 billion to own 100% of the common shares in a company that is worth $8 billion. (You can recapitalize a company that is under-capitalized: if it has $5 billion in capital and needs another $5 billion, then the new investors get 50% of the company.) This is why it is important (from the government perspective) for the stress tests to show that some banks are low on capital, but not that they have negative capital.

Maybe there’s some clever accounting mechanism or financial wizardry I’m missing.

Update: OK, now that I read the stress test document (I must be the last economics blogger to do so), I see there’s a mistake above. According to the stress test, GMAC is sufficiently capitalized now; the problem is that under the “more adverse” (realistic) scenario, its 2009-10 losses will be greater than its capital. So its expected capital at the end of 2010, absent recapitalization in the interim, would be negative.

It is not arithmetically impossible to recapitalize such a company, because we don’t know that this outcome will occur with certainty. I might pay $11.5 billion to own a company that, in the more adverse scenario, will be worth less than $11.5 billion at the end of two years – if I think that the possibility of a better outcome makes the bet worthwhile. Put another way, even if its end-2010 expected value is negative, its current value is still at least a little positive, because of option value. Still, though, it’s a pretty dodgy investment, so GMAC will probably have a difficult time raising new capital by selling common stock to the private sector.

The comment Nemo made below about the difference between market value and book value is true, but I also think my response is true: if anything, market values are below book values these days.

Finally, Felix Salmon also noticed that GMAC is the outlier on the bad end.

By James Kwak

Stress Tests and The Nationalization We Got

The post was co-authored by Simon Johnson and James Kwak.

When the stress tests were first announced on February 10, bank stocks went into a slide (the S&P 500 Financial Sector Index fell from 133.13 on February 9 to 96.18 two weeks later), in part on fears that the stress tests would be a prelude to “nationalization” of the banks. This week, it has emerged that several large banks will require tens of billions of dollars of new capital, most notably Bank of America. They could obtain that capital by exchanging common shares for the preferred shares that Treasury now holds, an accounting trick that boosts tangible common equity without providing the banks any new cash. Such a conversion would greatly increase the government’s stake in certain banks, perhaps even above the 50% level, yet the markets seem relatively unconcerned this week, with the S&P 500 Financial Sector Index at 168.14 and rising.

What happened?

Back in February, America was mired in a public debate over the word “nationalization” and what it meant for our banking system, with contributions by Nobel Laureates Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, former and current Fed officials Alan Greenspan, Alan Blinder, and Thomas Hoenig, and administration figures Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, and even Barack (“Sweden had like five banks“) Obama, among others. On a substantive level, the debate was over whether large and arguably insolvent banks should be allowed to fail and go into government conservatorship, as happens routinely with small insolvent banks. Opponents of this view who wanted to keep the banks afloat in their current form, including the current administration, beat off this challenge by calling it nationalization (more precisely, by demonizing government control of banks). Perversely, however, what we got instead was increasing co-dependency between the government and the large banks, as well as increasing influence of the government over the banks, and vice-versa. And according to the market, the banks should be quite happy with this outcome.

Continue reading “Stress Tests and The Nationalization We Got” →

Is Everyone Confused Yet? (Bank Stress Tests)

The public relations campaign packaging the bank stress tests is kicking into high gear and our professional information managers are really hitting their stride.  They face, of course, a classic spin problem: you need to get the information out there, but you don’t want to be too definitive on the first day or soon after – if you’re easy on the banks, that looks bad; if you’re tough on the banks, that might be dangerous.

The best way to handle this is by jamming your own signal – which they are starting to do in brilliant fashion.  To the WSJ you leak that BoA needs to raise a great deal of capital ($35bn); they run this story on the front page, next to a great frown on the face of Ken Lewis.  But you tell the FT that Citi will need “to raise less than $10bn” (note that the on-line FT version of this story, as of 8:30am Eastern, seems to have been adjusted downwards relative to the print edition that arrived at my house 4 hours ago.)  The NYT yesterday sounded quite upbeat.

Of course, deliberately or inadvertently confusing people is made much easier by the fact that the experts are in sharp disagreement.  Goldman’s Jan Hatzius says that the worst is now behind us in terms of loss recognition and pre-provision earnings will be much higher in the US than they were in Japan during the 1990s – here he and others are taking on the IMF’s Global Financial Stability Report.  And he has two good points in this regard, Continue reading “Is Everyone Confused Yet? (Bank Stress Tests)” →

All About Optics (Predicting Stress Test Outcomes)

The bank stress tests are beginning to create a perception problem, but not – as you might think – for banks.  Rather the issue is top level Administration officials’ own optics (spin jargon for how we think about our rulers).

At one level, the government’s approach to banks – delay doing anything until the economy stabilizes – is working out nicely.  This is the counterpart of the macroeconomic Summers Strategy and in principle it is brilliant. “Don’t just do something, stand there,” is great advice in any crisis – eventually everything bottoms out and you can take the credit, justified or not (unless an election catches up with you first; check with Herbert Hoover.)

But American bankers apparently just cannot cooperate by lying low, keeping their mouths shut, and refraining from anything that looks like picking other people’s pockets. Continue reading “All About Optics (Predicting Stress Test Outcomes)” →

Ponzi Schemes Of The Caribbean (A Weekend Comment Competition)

The IMF has just released a new working paper, with more detail than you likely ever wanted to know about how Ponzi schemes work – particularly in and around the Caribbean.

Ponzi schemes are everywhere and, at least in some environments, new versions arrive frequently.  But why are they so hard to prevent and shut down once they appear?  The paper contains some strong hints, albeit couched in very diplomatic language.

The comment competition is: what, if anything, does the failure of governments to shut down blatant Ponzi schemes imply about the prospects for a potential “macro-prudential” system/market-stability regulator implementing cycle-proof rules in the United States?  Is there a better way to prevent the kind of behavior that led to our current financial crisis?

Zombie Oligarchs

At this stage in any economic stabilization process, the state-sponsored lifeboat for oligarchs starts to get a little crowded.  Governments don’t have enough resources to save everyone, and not all major borrowers can have their debts rolled over.  In emerging markets, it’s usually the shortage of foreign exchange that sets a limit on government largesse (see the start of our Atlantic article for more detail on this cycle); in the US and other industrial countries, it’s more complicated – mostly about constraints around bailout politics (Lorenzo Bini Smaghi made this point effectively in the fall).

The survival-failure decision is taken at the highest level.  In April 2008, after the failure of Bear Stearns, Dick Fuld had dinner with Hank Paulson and reportedly concluded, “We [Lehman] have a huge brand with Treasury.” As the broader problems within the financial system worsened, this proved worth less than he thought.

Fuld is still in shock, and seething. How could Paulson let Lehman go? “Until the day they put me in the ground, I will wonder [why we weren’t saved],” he told Congress.

This week, Daniel Bouton resigned from running SocGen, in the face of what he called “incessant” verbal attacks – a reference presumably to lack of support from Mr. Sarkozy; it’s not good when the President of France calls your proposed pay package “a scandal”.  And Ken Lewis may take a further battering – due in part to not being the best-connected with top people in Washington. Continue reading “Zombie Oligarchs” →

Bankruptcy Cramdowns Defeated in Senate

President Obama, he of the 68% approval rating, asked Congress to allow bankruptcy judges to reduce the principal amounts of mortgages on primary residences (they can already modify almost all other loans in bankruptcy). The goal was to pressure mortgage lenders, or the investors who now own those mortgages, to modify the mortgages themselves to give homeowners a better option than foreclosure. Because, you know, we have a housing foreclosure crisis going on. But after passing the House, the measure got only 45 votes in the Senate, with zero Republican support and twelve Democrats defecting.

Banks campaigned against the measure by – get this – threatening that it would destabilize financial markets. The New York Times reported:

A letter signed by 12 industry organizations this week to senators warned that the legislation would “have the unintended consequence of further destabilizing the markets.” 

Translation: banks are weak; weak banks are dangerous; therefore Congress should not do things that might be bad for banks.

According to the Washington Post:

[Senator Richard] Durbin negotiated with Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo for weeks, hoping their support would bridge the gap. Even after the proposal was weakened significantly, the financial services industry refused to sign on.

I know the main legitimate argument against bankruptcy cramdowns: it increases the riskiness of mortgages, and therefore mortgage rates would have to go up a little for everyone. (Which sounds fine with me.) But the way this issue played out had nothing to do with what would be best for the country as a whole; it had everything to do with what the banks wanted. 

Instead of bankruptcy cramdowns, the Times reports that the banks got a reduction in the insurance premiums they will pay the FDIC for deposit insurance – which is like a group of car owners voting themselves lower premiums on their auto insurance. But because there is zero chance the government will let insured depositors lose money, any shortfall in the premiums paid by banks to the FDIC will be made up by the taxpayer.  

Not that this should surprise anyone.

By James Kwak

The People v. The Flu

In Plagues and Peoples, published in 1976, William McNeill argued that human history can be thought of as the co-evolution of our societies and the “microparasites” to which we are prone.  The emergence of settled agriculture, major historial movements of people, and industrialization all brought with them new or more intense diseases.  Eventually, most societies figured out how to survive – but of course some didn’t (see Jared Diamond‘s work for details) and many people died young along the way.

You don’t need to buy McNeill’s full view in order to take away the following point.  We have to invest and innovate to stay ahead of disease – there is no sense in which these are likely to be completely “conquered” – because they change as we do.  Investments are needed not just in the relevant science, but also in how it is used to combat potential epidemics – as well as more general endemic disease.

As I argue this morning on the NYT’s Economix, regarding the current swine H1N1 flu outbreak, global public health officials are doing much better than our friends who watch over financial systems.  In terms of reaction speed, communications, and the legitimacy of response agencies, economics has much to learn from the people who fight against epidemics. Continue reading “The People v. The Flu” →