The Bailout and the Bonuses, Part 3

Thursday, October 30, 2008

As of today, Congressman Waxman’s office has not had a response to the letter he sent to the first nine major banks to receive the $150 billion capital injection from the government, seeking information on their compensation and bonus plans for 2008 and other years, stating: "I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry's worst years on record."

Think about this: The people who ran these investment banks, who kept only a small amount of money in reserve, but risked a vast amount more than the reserved amount, at a leverage ratio of 40:1, were able to bonus themselves on that 40:1 that was put at risk, and now on the backside have come to the American taxpayer to, in effect, cover that risk.
How is it rational to allow people to incur hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses for this year (and even future bonuses), when they have proven that their business model did not work; they have proven that they took too much risk and they collapsed their businesses, either it had to be sold (Merrill Lynch), or was bankrupted (Lehman Brothers), etc? They engineered and maintained a compensation model that was proven to be flawed.

The Bonus Pools: The report that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (and others) have assembled bonus pools that approach, in terms of billions, the amount of money that has recently been invested by the United States government, is astonishing. It shows the same kind of bad judgment that got us into this mess. It is time for the Boards of Directors of these companies to understand that they are alienating the public. These are the same people who told us the Wall Street bailout was necessary who are now stuffing it into their pockets as “bonuses.” If we are willing o kick out of his house the person who overreached to buy a house he should not have bought, how is it we allow somebody who nakedly went long the housing market with tax-payers’ money to keep their bonuses? Completely unbalanced.

Once you go to the taxpayer for a bailout, does not that private compensation contract become null and void, predicated upon the fact that the business has changed and the economic model has changed? The companies are busted and in need of money, had to be bailed out by the government that had to come out today and say stop hoarding the public money and lend it. Although “Companies participating in the bailout must adopt the Treasury’s standards for executive compensation,” ooops, the rescue legislation has no enforcement mechanism!

To the participating banks we say: Isn’t it obvious that the reason that we are investing in you, why we are giving you this money, is so that you can lend the money, not necessarily use it for bonus pools? It is absurd to have to state the obvious. When the government agreed to put the TARP bailout in place, to make these liquidity injections, it put limits on CEO & executive compensation, albeit weak ones---the government rescue plan merely limits the compensation of the top 5 executives at participating firms, but it does not affirmatively condition the receipt of government funds on required bank conduct. When the TARP plan was drafted and passed by Congress, who was looking out for us?

The lone survivors, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, are no longer investment banks, they ran for dear life into the regulatory embrace of bank holding companies, so their structure and charter has changed, and they are going to have to understand that they will be paid as bankers, not as the river-boat gamblers they have been for the last few years.

The Damage Done: As a consequence, the American people are going to have to forego student loans. The American people are going to have to pay more for their mortgages. The American people are going to lose jobs. The children of this country will be forced to incur a trillion dollars in debts that were accumulated without our consent by investment bankers who created out of unfathomable greed a model of risk in housing such that they were able to bonus themselves hundreds of millions of dollars. On a fundamental human and moral level, is it appropriate to keep those hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation knowing that the system that you created has bankrupted the American taxpayer, or at least has added trillions to the American taxpayers’ bill?

The bonus money is discretionary with the Boards of Directors of these companies, who can choose for their company to forgo the granting of bonuses under these circumstances where the public was told that the bailout was needed to stop the economic contagion.

Without the bailout, Morgan Stanley would have gone under. Those people wouldn’t even have jobs if it were not for the bailout, let alone bonuses.

The law protects those who benefited from this over-leveraged reckless mortgage scheme. Unfortunately, the law is set up to take the home away from the person who overreached for the home mortgage he should not have taken, but the financial engineers were able to alter securities laws and regulations such that they are able to keep the bonuses for taking risks they should not have taken. Shame on the American politicians for saying to them: “You can keep your ½ billion dollars because we screwed up the law, even though obviously you were completely incapable of handling that risk, which brought the world financial system to the brink of collapse.

Congress said there was a CEO & executive compensation limitation in the bailout bill, but at the end of the day there is neither strong nor binding protection against abuse, more of the same abuse by the same abusers who brought us to this point. The deeper you get into the bailout bill the more troubling it becomes. The politicians were just selling it to us, and the banks just had their hands out again, played one more confidence game. The audacity of the investment banks’ endemic, unrepentant avarice, and in plain sight for all to see, is withering.

Credit, which is seized up around the world now, is a word from the Latin, meaning money. It also means faith and confidence. What is really at stake today is the faith which citizens of the free countries have in their societies. Our trust and security in the world as is seems, and our ability to control the circumstances of our lives predicated upon following the rules, have been stolen by the moneysharks and replaced with anxiety.

*******

Partial Excerpt from Lou Dobbs Tonight, October 30, 2008, discussion with BRUCE BARTLETT, FORMER U.S. TREASURY DEPARTMENT ECONOMIST, PROF. PETER MORICI, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND, & DAVID SMICK, AUTHOR, "THE WORLD IS CURVED”:

DOBBS: David Smick, you recently wrote that -- let's go to this, your editorial published in the "Washington Post" Sunday. You compared the global financial markets to a, "rich, generous, but occasionally paranoid great uncle."

You said, "Normally this benevolent great uncle sprinkles money calmly and wisely throughout the family, taking a careful reading of risk and potential investment reward. But every so often, a deep paranoia overtakes him." Do you see any sign that that paranoia is subsiding, the panic is weakening?

SMICK: Well, I think the fact that, you know, that Bernanke has got 12 fire hoses shooting liquidity into the system, I think we've talked about this before, Takes depression off of the table. We're talking about recession.

I think the paranoia still exists about credit card debt and auto debt next year, about this crisis moving from the banks to personal -- the personal balance sheets of the average American. But I think the greatest paranoia is international. When you look at what's happening internationally, the model has been for the last several decades, the U.S. is the consumer of last resort. And the world sets up export platforms to send their exports to the U.S. and build up excess savings.

And now with the global economy collapsing, that model is just crumbling. And we're going to see emerging markets. Now they're weakening very, very quickly. And the surprise has been that the European financial exposure to emerging markets is six times the U.S. bank exposure to the subprime. So you know the paranoid great uncle is paranoid right now because of global reasons.

DOBBS: And globalization itself right now, so-called, you know, you just laid out the model. The model is that United States has been financing these other economies. And doing so while, frankly, jeopardizing -- not jeopardizing, I mean we have literally squandered this nation's wealth in so doing.

[L]et's listen to, what Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, had to say today about the nine financial institutions receiving taxpayer money in the Wall Street bailout: "I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the worst financial -- one of the financial industry's worst years on record."

We have talked with Congressman Waxman's office. They haven't received a response from anybody.…[I]n addition to this, half of the money spent so far on these banks will go over the next three years to dividends to their shareholders, as things stand right now. That is unconscionable, is it not, Professor Morici?

MORICI: Absolutely. We haven't seen hubris on the part of aristocrats like those in New York since just before the French Revolution. It's absolutely absurd that Vikram Pandit [Citigroup CEO], who himself was paid $155 million to sell a bogus hedge fund to Citigroup shareholders and put the money in his pocket, is now prepared to dole out millions and millions more in bonuses to his executives for the privilege of running that bank into the ground, and then borrowing tens of millions of dollars from the American taxpayers.

It's not just Pandit, it's Stan [O’Neill] over at Merrill Lynch and all the others. This is what destroyed Lehman Brothers. They took half the profits of Lehman Brothers, put it into the pockets of the executives, and essentially declared the place bankrupt. It's obscene, it's beyond reproach.

SMICK: Lou, I talked to a number of Japanese officials and bankers in the last week or two. And I've said, you know, you -- went through this experience in the '90s of a financial crisis. What did you learn? And I was surprised that quite a few said, we made the mistakes of giving the banks the money and not requiring anything.

And in fact, I said, what would you have done? He said, we would have basically -- we would have -- not privatized it. We would have taken the banks over, had a workout team essentially... temporarily nationalizing....

DOBBS: As a matter of fact, we heard from the treasury secretary, we've heard from the Democratic leadership of this Congress, that they were dealing with the issue of CEO compensation. They're going to constrain it….There will be no golden parachutes. Now we find out that they're lying through their teeth….Democrat or Republican….both of them.

DOBBS: Can we talk about $200 billion in taxpayer money, floating into the pockets of shareholders, who should be bearing the brunt and the responsibility of the failures of these institutions and the executives who are taking down billions of dollars---when they drove these institutions into the ground?

MORICI: These executives have quite simply purchased the United States Senate. Folks like Dodd and Schumer from New York. They've collected enormous campaign contributions from these guys. So now they're willing to turn a blind eye.

All the bailout bill did was keep them from giving golden parachutes to the five top executives and limit tax deductions on their pay. But the vast majority of executives at these institutions [will walk away with] millions of dollars in bonuses.

DOBBS: Bruce, [y]our thoughts on what in the world happened to -- I thought the Republicans were supposed to have some compunction about prudence, responsibility, moral hazard. I thought the Democrats were going to actually be serious about constraining excess compensation to CEOs and executives. Both of these parties are frauds, are they not?

BARTLETT: Yes, absolutely. What we're doing to the entire financial sector is turning it into Fannie Mae. We're making -- we're going to have a kind of public-private kind of partnership deal, where the risks are all borne by the government and all the profits go to private executives, as was the case with Fannie Mae.

And I think that that is fraught with risk. I think we need to sell off the government's share of these enterprises as soon as we possibly can and privatize them and have a true free market. But I don't think it's going to happen any time soon.

SMICK: But, the deal was -- when the Congress said, we'll give you the money, to the banks, if you lend. They're not lending. That's the tragedy.

DOBBS: …I don't know who -- you know I suppose both of these parties, the House, the Senate, the White House -- they all think that they fooled someone. The only people they did fool certainly were those who they bought off with $150 billion. And of course, they took care of their contributors, both of these parties, on Wall Street.

Read More...

The Bailout and the Bonuses, Part 2

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

The Outrage: With $125 billion of taxpayer funds disbursed to nine major banks (Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and Wells Fargo), $108 billion of it is being held for employee compensation and bonuses by those same banks. That is why banks are not lending the money as intended by the TARP plan, and credit is still frozen.

No Oversight: $125 billion of public funds goes out and no one is overseeing it on behalf of the taxpayers and public. Though the Wall Street bailout package includes modest restrictions on CEO pay, it hardly prevents participating financial firms from paying bonuses to top executives and others.

And it seems many on Wall Street are expecting some big money. Rich Layne of eFinancialCareers tells Fast Money, "I thought you'd be interested in the results of a post-bailout survey of Wall Street professionals on their bonuses expectations. 2/3 are expecting a 2008 bonus; 36% are expecting that bonus to be higher than their 2007 bonuses. There's even a minority - 10% - that expect this year's bonus to the 33% higher."

The Bonuses: Every year those extravagant Wall Street bonuses become the talk of the town, but this year it could be for a whole new reason.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is demanding information about executive compensation and bonuses at nine banks that have received federal funds under TARP, the U.S. Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program.

In a letter to each institution's Board of Directors, Cuomo warns the bonuses could violate New York's state fraudulent conveyance law.

"Obviously," he writes, "we will have grave concerns if your expected bonus pool has increased in any way as a result of your receipt or expected receipt of taxpayer funds from TARP." In the letter, Cuomo demands information on how this year's bonus pools were calculated, as well as details on each bank's 2006 and 2007 bonus payments.

There are also rumblings on Capitol Hill that lawmakers might look to limit or even do away with bonuses this year.

The first salvos were fired late Tuesday when Rep. Henry Waxman, who chairs the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said he sent letters to the first nine major banks set to receive a capital injection from the government, seeking information on their compensation and bonus plans for 2008 and other years.

He wrote, "I question the appropriateness of depleting the capital that taxpayers just injected into the banks through the payment of billions of dollars in bonuses, especially after one of the financial industry's worst years on record."

Although the Wall Street bailout package includes modest restrictions on CEO pay, unfortunately it does not prevent participating financial firms from paying bonuses to top executives and others. No one is looking out for the taxpayer, certainly not the Congress who is dropping our money from helicopters. Who is assuring that there is not self-dealing, a former Goldman Sachs CEO who is directing it all, Treasury Secretary Paulsen?
CNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, like many others, is outraged by the news in general. He can't believe that financial services sector could take on so much risk that they need a $750 billion taxpayer-funded bailout and then turn around and still provide their upper echelon with bonuses. Managers who ran their companies into the ditch and had to take a federal bailout should be penalized. When businesses fail, executives should be paid no bonuses, especially if they take taxpayer money. Why don’t they know that, it is only common sense: no bonuses were earned because there was no value added to the businesses. Where are the Boards of Directors of these companies, and why do they exercise no restraint?
The Boost: The system is set up such that if you buy a house you cannot afford because you were dumb enough to do it or whatever your reasoning was, through foreclosure the system will throw you out of that house. However, if you manage to alter legislation and financially engineer tottering derivatives and you take 40:1 risk (and the Treasury Secretary was one of the people who advocated the SEC to boost that leverage) and go nakedly long the housing market taking through those derivatives more risk than you could bear, then bonus yourself all this money, and then want to stick it to the taxpayer on the way out, that apparently is okay. It is an insane system.
The Coming Change: The fact is that compensation is going to come down on Wall Street and really smart people who worked on Wall Street now will have to do things that are not financial engineering, they will have to go into fields like alternative energy, medicine, healthcare or teaching, or civil or chemical engineering, and those who are good at allocating capital and managing risk will remain on Wall Street and make vast sums of money for doing it a la Warren Buffett and Carl Icahn, etc., and we will get rid of the financial engineers who put the entire financial system, and global economy, on the verge of collapse.

Read More...

The Bailout and the Bonuses, Part 1

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

If you thought that the bailout bill prohibited taxpayer money from being used to pay huge 2008 executive salaries and bonuses at the rescued investment banks, you had best read this post from cnbc.com. Or perhaps you had assumed that proper decorum, sense of fairness or gratitude, or moral compass would guide these human beings to forbear their 2008 bonuses at taxpayer expense, since they wouldn't even have jobs if the the government hadn't rescued their companies from imminent collapse:

CNBC.com: Congress Wants Details On Bailout Firms' Bonus Plans

Read More...

The Credit Rating Agencies Scandal

Thursday, October 23, 2008

October 21, 2008

The business practice in credit ratings is not new, but it is now getting the attention it deserves. The ratings agencies are the individuals who allowed the distribution of the subprime mortgage bonds around the world that would not have been purchased, certainly not at the price they were purchased and with the limited collateral, without the triple-A rating that they received. We are now on the other side of a derivatives experiment gone haywire, and finding out that the ratings agencies, Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch, who are the arbiters of credit, abetted the crime by taking money to falsify the credit-worthiness of debt instruments sold to the public. Moreover, the politicians allowed all kinds of rules and regulations to go unenforced.

Congress and the SEC required that the riskiness of debt instruments be rated by those ratings agencies, but then did no oversight or regulation. There is more regulation of slot machines in Vegas than of debt instruments, so the ratings agencies set up a model for marking prices to market that made the sales of the instruments highly profitable for themselves, but ratings were unsupported by the underlying collateral. Since the ratings agencies were paid by the issuers of the debt as well as by the financial engineers of derivatives, they were motivated to chase more business by faking ratings. The agencies not only failed to flag problems, but they gave triple-A ratings to securities which were anything but triple A.

Lawmakers spent much of today trying to sort through the aftermath of the Wall Street crisis. They’re trying to better understand how credit agencies contributed to the mess. Today’s testimony before Congress shows that the ratings agencies knew they were knowingly running a scam, and the SEC did nothing to protect the public from the falsification. Nobody looked at the models the ratings agencies use to mark the debt to market.

In today's hearing before the House Oversight Committee, the credit rating agencies looked more like profit-hungry institutions that would give any deal their blessing for the right price, reports CNBC’s Scott Cohn. Here's an example from the testimony. This is an instant message exchange between two unidentified Standard & Poor’s officials about a mortgage backed security deal on 4/5/2007:

“Official #1: Btw that deal is ridiculous.
Official #2: I know right...model def does not capture half the risk.
Official #1: We should not be rating it.
Official #2: We rate every deal. It could be structured by cows and we would rate it [as long as they pay us].”

It is clear from this testimony that the people inside the ratings agencies knew that the underlying securities were fraudulent, but when they asked about the illegitimacy of the ratings, they were told to rate it anyway. Also from the testimony, here's a note from an S&P employee who says: "Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters." This is beyond conflict of interest, it is fraud, not to mention that Lehman Brothers and the Bear Stearns, who concocted these things and paid Moody’s and Standard and Poor to rate them, were able to bonus themselves hundreds of millions of dollars while there are no student loans---and retirement accounts loaded with Wamu and Lehman have been obliterated.

So while Main Street believed that the ratings were on the level, no one inside the ratings agencies ever believed the paper was triple-A. People have always trusted the ratings agencies because we have been told we could trust them; with the government’s imprimatur, they were the gatekeepers of the financial industry whom everyone trusted to rate truthfully, but they betrayed the trust.

It is the end of the financial world. The big fear is that once we unwind all of this we will see that people have sold essentially the same worthless financial assets repeatedly until the point at which we have seized the entire credit markets and frozen the entire retail macro-economic world----isn’t that the end of the game? “The ratings agencies are bringing down the entire globe,” exclaimed an irate Jeff Macke. “Today’s testimony before Congress raises the suggestion that nothing out there is what it seems. And if you think this is just a Wall Street problem, you’re wrong.”

It is going to be a long period of time until one bank will willingly lend money to another bank, a long period of time before a bank lends money to a prospective buyer. Dennis Gartman said today: A cat who sits upon a hot stove will not again sit upon a hot stove e again, nor upon a cold one either, because they all look hot to him.

This isn’t going away for a long time, every one will be reluctant for a long time. It annihilates fundamental confidence in the entire retail investment community, which has been decimated & it is going to be years before any sense of confidence returns to a new generation. This financial meltdown has done real damage to the investment psyche of America and the world, and to real economies.

The stuff they rated permeates the entire system; it is everywhere, no one can escape it. The United States is, in dollar terms, bankrupt. There are $800 trillion dollars in these derivatives floating around in the markets, they are in balance sheets everywhere, in pension funds, hedge funds, bond funds, government agency paper, IRAs, etc. That is 10 times the gross national product of the world. These dollar-denominated paper assets are likely worthless or close to it, which means that the dollar is already effectively worthless. This country is in serious trouble (that no one will tell you about). It is stupefying how a once-mighty and wealthy nation has been brought down by a slick, Wall Street con. In dismantling our industrial base and shipping jobs overseas, we unwittingly allowed the financial industry to fill the economic void, to mushroom to uncontrollable size and overweaning power and, without regulation, gave financial engineers unlimited opportunities for self-dealing. It is in the nature of homo sapiens to do that, so we should have been on the vigilant lookout. A few ruin it for all. I am sure that this is what the other species on earth would say about us, if they could speak.

In putting their profits first, the gatekeepers of the securities industry have infected the worldwide financial system. This is different from Enron because these ratings agencies were playing with the whole economy, but the nature of the corruption is qualitatively the same. Corporate debt markets around the world are a mess, a horrible world gone wrong, a global systemic infection wrought from edacious human avarice. I cannot stop thinking that this is not what we are supposed to be doing with the world, with our one sojourn on the earth.

*****
Testifying before the House Oversight Committee tomorrow, Wednesday, October 22, 2008, will be SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who approved 40:1 leverage at the request of now Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly CEO of Goldman Sachs, and Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who, after 9/11, kept interest rates too low for too long.

Read More...

The Ravages and True Costs of Over-consumption

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

2008 Global Crisis of Credit: Collapse of Confidence

The seismic rupture and transformative collapse of the financial system appears to be global, but there is no overarching, multi-national, global architecture of governance to deal with it, so we see various attempts to coordinate actions among nations. Financial globalization has lurched way ahead of any effective global regulatory structure. Crashed markets and confidence have spread around the world like a virus, and humans everywhere seem shocked, confused ab out how this happened and what to do about it. Trillions of dollars of worldwide wealth have been wiped out as if an atomic bomb had been detonated. I think of the words from Hindu scripture that J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered on July 16. 1945, as he witnessed the test explosion of the 19-kiloton plutonium bomb at Trinity, New Mexico: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The shadow banking system of unregulated private equity, hedge funds, money markets and investment banks, which traded in the currency of hyper-leveraged, off-balance-sheet accounting, is collapsing.

Credit Default Swaps Scheme—Is it Theft?

The credit default swaps are insurance policies sold to protect debt against the risk of the debt not being paid off, vehicles through which financial engineers innovated nothing more than jacking billions of dollars out of the taxpayers. Is it fraud when the swappers kept insuring debts with the same risk money over and over and there were never enough funds in reserve to pay off the risks? The swappers sold ”insurance” that they knew they could never pay up because they held insufficient reserves for the leverage, while giving $500 million bonuses to traders at the swap desks.

The Boards of the investment banks and trading floors, whose job it is to oversee risk and soundness, see billions of dollars more than they ever made before but do not ask what is being risked. Their job and fiduciary duty is to look at/moderate risk to be sure that the firm is sound to survive for the long term and is not taking on too much risk. Is it stealing to sell insurance on something you could never afford to pay for if defaulted? When financial wizardry creates chimera in place of the wealth that institutions count and are built upon, and it threatens the whole financial system, is it theft and conspiracy to defraud? The American people know there is a scam and that is why they opposed the bailout. They know that the hoodwinking financial engineers of Wall Street manipulated hundreds of billions of dollars of risk off of their balance sheets and onto the taxpayers’ balance sheets while disappearing the hundreds of billions of dollars of bonuses into their own pockets, leaving behind with deft sleight of hand mere illusions of wealth in the form of worthless IOUs.

Remember that great scene in Casablanca when Claude Raines as Captain Renault is forced to close down Rick’s Café Americain? When Rick asks him why, he declares, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here!" Without missing a beat, a waiter walks up to Raines, hands him a bunch of chits, and says, "Your winnings, sir," to which Raines graciously replies, "Oh, thank you."

The Social Engineering

Mortgage brokers didn’t care if borrowers were strong enough to repay, because they sold off the mortgages to Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, the government supported enterprises (GSEs), who sold them to Wall Street, who repackaged and sold the toxic paper around the world. The ratings companies who rated the bonds were paid by the Wall Street bond insurers. Then the bad loans were bundled as collateral to borrow even more money----leverage on leverage.

The subprime mortgage debacle is really a scandal of Washington & New York. Going back to Clinton’s policy in the 1990s that everyone should own a home, and continuing through Bush’s “ownership society,” Congress has pursued the reckless and corrupted policy of affordable housing that got people into mortgages they cannot afford to keep. With the refusal of Congress to exercise oversight, many others (including McCain) issued alarmist warnings concerning the risky sub-prime mortgages and over-leveraged balance sheets of the GSEs. By then, though, long before they were taken under conservatorship, the question had become, did Fannie & Freddie control Congress, or did Congress control them? The ardent supporters of “affordable housing” for “poor people,” such as Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Charles Schumer, and later Barack Obama, were bathed in campaign contributions by the GSEs. When the accounting scandals broke in 2004 everyone saw that Fannie & Freddie were cooking the books, and their CEOs pocketing huge multi-billion dollar bonuses, it was obvious that Fannie & Freddie were skeetering into insolvency, but Frank, Schumer, and other Congressional members resisted reform, and their political support protected Fannie & Freddie while they spread around political contribution to buy off our elected representatives. The ultimate collapse of the sub- prime housing market engineered by Congress and the GSEs triggered the cascading credit crisis and ultimate global loss of confidence in the credit markets---by then, the bad mortgages had been bundled, sliced, diced, re-aggregated, then sold to a world hungry for yield, served up garnished with a dollop of fake credit swap insurance against default! How can the world not be furious with the United States? Who could ever trust us again as leader of the world, financial or otherwise? Too smart by half.

Credit Markets in Distress—Geoeconomics

(The following in part incorporating comments by Jeffrey Sachs, Sebastian Mallaby, Fred Bergsten & George Soros):

America, as the center of the globalized financial market, had gotten into the habit of consuming 6 to 7 percent more than we are producing. We were sucking up the savings of the world--China and other nations buying Ame rican bonds. That game is finished, and it means a serious process of financial readjustment for America, a painful deleveraging of our balance sheets. Now, we will have to save more, and live within our means. The housing bubble has detonated the entire financial system built of super leverage & financial engineering, where credit was substituted for actual wealth. That Ponzi-scheme construct works only as long as everyone believes in it and has trust, and when confidence collapses, when everyone sees that the emperor has no clothes---the false construct vaporizes. The credit markets are in distress, a financial crisis with wide geopolitical or geoeconomic effects. We are witnessing the de-Americanization of the global financial system and loss of America as the center of finance.

In many ways, this brings home the decline in America's position in the world, because we have over-consumed. The Chinese have produced a lot more than they consume, so they built up reserves. We built up debts; they built up assets. We have exported our wealth abroad, to the oil-producing countries, and exported our jobs and industrial base as well. So, there has been a tremendous power shift. The flow of wealth that had kept this country strong is now a river of debt. The irony is not lost that we outsourced in order to squeeze more corporate profits, yet it left us poorer.

We've gone beyond simply a problem that reflects a busted property market, the fact that banks have holes on their books. We've even gone beyond the effects of deleveraging, which were bound to be inescapable. We've gotten into a complete, blind panic of confidence, where no one will lend to anybody.

The Closure of Lehman Brothers

The Fed made a bad mistake in how it handled the Lehman Brothers closure, by not protecting the short term paper. By allowing it to go worthless, it broke the money market, which broke the confidence in the system. Now banks won’t lend to each other because confidence has dried up. This is the big tactical blunder the Fed made in this crisis. Even if they had let Lehman go under, they could have protected the short-term money market paper, which they didn't do. The shareholders could have lost; the owners of longer term debt to Lehman could have lost. But by let ting the short-term paper go bad, that broke the money markets, and that in turn created the panic. And that was a tactical blunder of tremendous significance.

Since then, they've been scrambling with everything they can think of, lending in every which way. The bailout plan emerged two days after the Lehman mistake. And so, they're trying still to calm what is now an outright panic.

The Coming Recession

Even if the Fed succeeds in calming the markets, that won't stop a recession. It won't solve the bank recapitalization problem. It won't solve the problem of households that are at the limit of debt and can't repay their mortgages. The structural imbalances are real, and will mean that the U.S. economy goes through a significant recession and a lot of pain as it restructures. Many businesses will fail and jobs will be lost. But what is most important right now is to stop the panic, because that's seizing up day-to-day economic operations.

The era of big tax cuts, whether for stimulus or other things, are over. We're going to have to grow up and understand that we need taxes to pay for basic government services. We've been neglecting that for a long time. We've been in fiscal unreality even before the crisis. Now the crisis is going to make all of this more dramatic. We'll have large budget deficits. We're not going to let our roads, bridges, infrastructure collapse. We're not going to let our energy grid collapse. We're not going to let our schools and health care completely collapse. We're going to have to pay for those things. That's the difference. And the way you pay for it, basically, is higher taxes.

We've been trying to run a government on about 17 percent of national income in taxation ever since the Reagan era came in. It's been a myth all the way along. We've been borrowing heavy amounts all through the period. You can't squeeze government when you take into account Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, military, the interest on the debt. When you see all the other things that we care about, the quality of our lives, all squeezed into a tiny little amount, which is what has happened for almost 30 years now, we've run out of that game.

So, this is not only a financial crisis, it's the end of the Reagan era. It' s time to grow up again and understand that we're going to have to pay taxes and that from there, we're going to have to use those revenues for the things that count: health, education, infrastructure, energy. This is not an invitation to ignore our future, it's an invitation to start thinking seriously about it again.

External Finances

The other element to add to the unsustainability of our current situation is that the foreigners have actually been paying, at the margin, most of the increase in our national borrowing. We've been borrowing half-a-trillion dollars or more per year from the rest of the world for the last five to 10 years. That means the United States is now the world's largest debtor country.

Part of the pressure on the government here and the Federal Reserve to deal with our financial crisis has been the fear that our foreign creditors would bail out of the dollar, start dumping dollars. Fortunately, they have not done that. But we have to retain their confidence even more than we have to retain confidence at home, because we put ourselves in the position of being in hock to the world. That can't go on. We can't increase that further. We can't put ourselves more in debt to the rest of the world and lose control over our own destiny. So, for that reason, as well, we've got to get real, get our fiscal house in order.

The United States government goes out to the market and externally finances-- asks foreigners to buy--about $4 billion of IOUs every day. If foreigners buying these assets. don't have faith in the credibility of American Treasury bonds or other financial assets (private debt issued by Wall Street on behalf of companies, including a lot of securitised mortgage assets) they will stop buying U.S. debt. In the past, foreigners have bought this debt because they believed in the institutions on Wall Street. They believed in the credibility and transparency of American financial regulation. Now that that credibility has been exploded, will the foreigners continue to finance American borrowing needs? We are vulnerable when we rely on governments, who have made a political decision to lend America money, that those same governments could make a new political decision to stop lending America money. We have risked putting ourselves into a position where we have a foreign policy liability. If China, which holds a lot of American debt, decided to sell it or to switch the debt into some other dollar instrument - for example, the equity market -- it could disrupt our capital market, inflict a lot of pain on us.

Even if the Fed succeeds in calming the markets, that won't stop a recession. It won't solve the bank recapitalization problem. It won't solve the problem of households that are at the limit of debt and can't repay their mortgages. The structural imbalances are real, and will mean that the U.S. economy goes through a significant recession and a lot of pain as it restructures. But what is most important right now is to stop the panic, because that's seizing up day-to-day economic operations.

The End of Reaganomics

McCain is going to lose the presidential election because he stands for a philosophy that is broken and that has brought this country down to its economic knees. I have admired McCain for his years of principled and tough courage, and feel sorry for him because he does not get that his era has crashed with the financial system; he fights on instead of packing it in. He will lose because the age of Reaganomics is over; it is exhausted. The no-regulation, low-taxes practice has broken the back of our economy. Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the apocryphal idea of the magic of the marketplace; when they came to power in 1980, this belief became the dominant creed, and then led to the globalization of markets, the deregulation of markets and the increased use of leverage and all the financial engineering. Around the world, unfettered markets upheaved, devoured & monetized a huge amount of the Earth’s resources, produced an overwhelming quantity of unneeded products and trash, and did not promote the greater good. Way too much junk wasted diminishing and precious fossil fuels. In the United States, we produced nothing, but put our trust in the reprobate money changers of Wall Street who manipulated balance sheets and hollowed out the economy, bankrupting the financial system while pocketing huge profits, free-market style. A low point in shameful human behaviour for sure.

Now, we have to again get serious about reconstructing normal government that pays its way and a normal financial sector that is properly regulated. The threat we face right now is in the world of geoeconomics, not geopolitics ---how to get through this financial meltdown, how to handle the multiple economic challenges before us, how to steer America in a world where other countries are gaining economic power and resources and confidence.

Our blunders with excessive leverage causing a meltdown in global financial markets will have transformative consequences for United States: The loss of Untied States as the preeminent financial center of the world (the U.S. investment banks vaporized in a nanosecond), and in the final verdict, the dollar will no longer be the reserve currency of the world

The End of Credit Expansion & Ever-Increasing Leverage

It is not just the federal government. Every household, every city, every county, every state in America has wanted things it was unwilling to pay for. And it made up the difference by borrowing in an era of cheap credit. We wanted larger houses than we could afford, more TVs, more laptops --- more of everything. And we did it all by racking up debt.

It's not just America. Around the world. Britain, Spain, Ireland, other over-leveraged societies have all faced the same problem. We've run our companies, countries, households on principles that just didn't make sense. In all venues, leverage was miscounted for wealth, and the nation, and households, are broke. Now, a reordering of our attitude about debt will ask us, just how much stuff do we need and how large do we need to live? How much wealth do we need, how much do we need to spend, and at what cost to the sustainability of the planet upon which all species depend?

We'll have to change, and it will mean deep and wrenching pain, probably a tough recession. But in the end, it will make for a more robust American economy and a stronger global system. The house of cards is collapsing. But there is an opportunity here to build a house of bricks instead. In the reconstruction, we will need fewer financial engineers and more electrical, chemical, and civil engineers.

A Chance for Other Kinds to Survive?

As we reduce consumerism relative to the growth of the economy so as to not be dependant on foreign capital, there is also an opportunity to take honest stock of what our rampaging consumerism has wrought upon the planet Earth, and to choose to shrink our impact, retreat our assault. As we detox from our four-decades long binge of obscene consumerism, positive consequences could be released. If we shrink consumption to what we really need to live, and make those things last the lifespan, we could significantly conserve the precious and finite natural resources and materials gobbled up in the manufacture and transportation of unnecessary goods. Living modestly with less should arrest the relentless incursion to seize more of the earth’s surface to reconfigure for our purpose, and to destroy more & more of the natural and wild habitats of other species whom we have pushed to the edge of extinction by ravaging their homes, raiding their land, and deforesting the earth. We can choose this way as the human way on Earth, trying to make the smallest footprint instead of the largest.

Maybe we humans could even disappear off the face of the earth without a trace, so that they, the innocent and truly magnificent creatures could survive, as more than handbags rugs, and fur coats.

Recommended:
Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power
Kevin Phillips, Bad Money
Bill Bonner, Empire of Debt
Pete Petersen, Running on Empty
I.O.U.S.A
Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth
Jared Diamond, Collapse
Mathew Scully, Dominion
Paul Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal
Fareed Zakaria GPS, CNN October 12, 2008

Read More...

2008 Global Crisis of Credit: Collapse of Confidence

Monday, October 13, 2008

The seismic rupture and transformative collapse of the financial system appears to be global, but there is no overarching, multi-national, global architecture of governance to deal with it, so we see various attemp ts to coordinate actions among nations. Financial globalization has lurched way ahead of any effective global regulatory structure. Crashed markets and confidence has spread around the world like a virus, and humans everywhere seem shocked, confused about how this happened and what to do about it. Trillions of dollars of worldwide wealth have been wiped out as if an atomic bomb had been detonated. I think of the words from Hindu scripture that J. Robert Oppenheimer uttered on July 16. 1945, as he witnessed the test explosion of the 19-kiloton plutonium bomb at Trinity, New Mexico: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The shadow banking system of unregulated private equity, hedge funds, money markets and investment banks, which traded in the currency of hyper-leveraged balance sheets, is collapsing.

Credit Default Swaps Scheme—Is it Theft?
The credit default swaps are insurance policies sold to protect debt against the risk of the debt not being paid off, vehicles through which financial engineers innovated nothing more than jacking billions of dollars out of the taxpayers. Is it fraud when the swappers kept insuring debts with the same risk money over and over and there were never enough funds in reserve to pay off the risks? The swappers sold ”insurance” that they knew they could never pay up because they held insufficient reserves for the leverage, while giving $500 million bonuses to traders at the swap desks.

The Boards of the investment banks and trading floors, whose job it is to oversee risk and soundness, see billions of dollars more than they ever made before but do not ask what is being risked. Their job and fiduciary duty is to look at/moderate risk to be sure that the firm is sound to survive for the long term and is not taking on too much risk. Is it stealing to sell insurance on something you could never afford to pay for if defaulted? When financial wizardry creates chimera in place of the wealth that institutions count and are built upon, and it threatens the whole financial system, is it theft and conspiracy to defraud? The American people know there is a scam and that is why they opposed the bailout. They know that the hoodwinking financial engineers of Wall Street manipulated hundreds of billions of dollars of risk off of their balance sheets and onto the taxpayers’ balance sheets while disappearing the hundreds of billions of dollars of bonuses into their own pockets, leaving behind with deft sleight of hand mere illusions of wealth in the form of worthless IOUs.
Remember that great scene in Casablanca when Claude Raines as Captain Renault is forced to close down Rick’s Café Americain? When Rick asks him why, he declares, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling going on here!" Without missing a beat, a waiter walks up to Raines, hands him a bunch of chits, and says, "Your winnings, sir," to which Raines graciously replies, "Oh, thank you."

The Social Engineering
Mortgage brokers didn’t care if borrowers were strong enough to repay, because they sold off mortgages to Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac, the government supported enterprises (GSEs), who sold them to Wall Street, who repackaged and sold the toxic paper around the world. The ratings companies who rated the bonds were paid by the Wall Street bond insurers. Then the bad loans were bundled as=2 0collateral to borrow even more money----leverage on leverage.

The subprime mortgage debacle is really a scandal of Washington & New York. Going back to Clinton’s policy in the 1990s that everyone should own a home, and continuing through Bush’s “ownership society,” Congress has pursued the reckless and corrupted policy of affordable housing that got people into mortgages they cannot afford to keep. With the refusal of Congress to exercise oversight, many others (including McCain) issued alarmist warnings concerning the risky sub-prime mortgages and over-leveraged balance sheets of the GSEs. By then, though, long before they were taken under conservatorship, the question had become, did Fannie & Freddie control Congress, or did Congress control them? The ardent supporters of “affordable housing” for “poor people,” such as Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Charles Schumer, and later Barack Obama, were bathed in campaign contributions by the GSEs. When the accounting scandals broke in 2004 everyone saw that Fannie & Freddie were cooking the books, and their CEOs pocketing huge multi-billion dollar bonuses, it was obvious that Fannie & Freddie were skeetering into insolve ncy, but Frank, Schumer, and other Congressional members resisted reform, and their political support protected Fannie & Freddie while they spread around political contribution to buy off our elected representatives. The ultimate collapse of the sub-prime housing market engineered by Congress and the GSEs triggered the cascading credit crisis and ultimate global loss of confidence in the credit markets---by then, the bad mortgages had been bundled, sliced, diced, re-aggregated, then sold to a world hungry for yield, served up garnished with a dollop of fake credit swap insurance against default! How can the world not be furious with the United States? Who could ever trust us again as leader of the world, financial or otherwise? Too smart by half.

Credit Markets in Distress—Geoeconomics
(The following in part incorporating comments by Jeffrey Sachs, Sebastian Mallaby, Fred Bergsten & George Soros):

America, as the center of the globalized financial market, had gotten into the habit of consuming 6 to 7 percent more than we are producing. We were sucking up the savings of the world--China and other nations buying American bonds. That game is finished, and it means a serious process of financial readjustment for America, a painful deleveraging of our balance sheets. Now, we will have to save more, and live within our means. The housing bubble has detonated the entire financial system built of super leverage & financial engineering, where credit was substituted for actual wealth. That Ponzi-scheme construct works only as long as everyone believes in it and has trust, and when confidence collapses, when everyone sees that the emperor has no clothes---the false construct vaporizes. The credit markets are in distress, a financial crisis with wide geopolitical or geoeconomic effects. We are witnessing the de-Americanization of the global financial system and loss of America as the center of finance.

In many ways, this brings home the decline in America's position in the world, because we have over-consumed. The Chinese have produced a lot more than they20consume, so they built up reserves. We built up debts; they built up assets. We have exported our wealth abroad, to the oil-producing countries, and exported our jobs and industrial base as well. So, there's been a tremendous power shift. The flow of wealth that had kept this country strong is now a river of debt. The irony is not lost that we outsourced in order to squeeze more corporate profits, yet it left us poorer.

We've gone beyond simply a problem that reflects a busted property market, the fact that banks have holes on their books. We've even gone beyond the effects of deleveraging, which were bound to be inescapable. We've gotten into a complete, blind panic of confidence, where no one will lend to anybody.

The Closure of Lehman Brothers
The Fed made a bad mistake in how it handled the Lehman Brothers closure, by not protecting the short term paper. By allowing it to go worthless, it broke the money market, which broke the confidence in the system. Now banks won’t lend to each other because confidence in has dried up. This is the big tactical blunder the Fed made in this crisis. Even if they had let Lehman go under, they could have protected the short-term money market paper, which they didn't do. The shareholders could have lost; the owners of longer term debt to Lehman could have lost. But by letting the short-term paper go bad, that broke the money markets, and that in turn created the panic. And that was a tactical blunder of tremendous significance.

Since then, they've been scrambling with everything they can think of, lending in every which way. The bailout plan emerged two days after the Lehman mistake. And so, they're trying still to calm what is now an outright panic.

The Coming Recession
Even if the Fed succeeds in calming the markets, that won't stop a recession. It won't solve the bank recapitalization problem. It won't solve the problem of households that are at the limit of debt and can't repay their mortgages. The structural imbalances are real, and will mean that the U.S. economy goes through a significant recession and a lot of pain as it restructures. Many businesses will fail and jobs will be lost. B ut what is most important right now is to stop the panic, because that's seizing up day-to-day economic operations.

The era of big tax cuts, whether for stimulus or other things, are over. We're going to have to grow up and understand that we need taxes to pay for basic government services. We've been neglecting that for a long time. We've been in fiscal unreality even before the crisis. Now the crisis is going to make all of this more dramatic. We'll have large budget deficits. We're not going to let our roads, bridges, infrastructure collapse. We're not going to let our energy grid collapse. We're not going to let our schools and health care completely collapse. We're going to have to pay for those things. That's the difference. And the way you pay for it, basically, is higher taxes.

We've been trying to run a government on about 17 percent of national income in taxation ever since the Reagan era came in. It's been a myth all the way along. We've been borrowing heavy amounts all through the period. You can't squeeze government when you take into account Social Security and Medicare, Medicaid, military, the interest on the debt. When you see all the other things that we care about, the quality of our lives, all squeezed in to a tiny little amount, which is what has happened for almost 30 years now, we've run out of that game.

So, this is not only a financial crisis, it's the end of the Reagan era. It's time to grow up again and understand that we're going to have to pay taxes and that from there, we're going to have to use those revenues for the things that count: health, education, infrastructure, energy. This is not an invitation to ignore our future, it's an invitation to start thinking seriously about it again.

External Finances
The other element to add to the unsustainability of our current situation is that the foreigners have actually been paying, at the margin, most of the increase in our national borrowing. We've been borrowing half-a-trillion dollars or more per year from the rest of the world for the last five to 10 years. That means the United States is now the world's largest debtor country.

Part of the pressure on the government here and the Federal Reserve to deal with our financial crisis has been the fear that our foreign creditors would bail out of the dollar, start dumping dollars. Fortunately, they have not done that. But we have to retain their confidence even more than we have to retain confidence at home, because we put ourselves in the position of being in hock to the world. That can't go on. We can't increase that further. We can't put ourselves more in debt to the rest of the world and lose control over our own destiny. So, for that reason, as well, we've got to get real, get our house in order.

The United States government goes out to the market and externally finances-- asks foreigners to buy--about $4 billion of IOUs every day. If foreigners buying these assets. don't have faith in the credibility of American Treasury bonds or other financial assets (private debt issued by Wall Street on behalf of companies, including a lot of securitized mortgage assets) they will stop buying U.S. debt. .In the past, foreigners have bought this debt because they believed in the institutions on Wall Street. They believed in the credibility of American financial regulation. Now that that credibility has been exploded, will the foreigners continue to finance American borrowing needs? We are vulnerable when we rely on government s, who have made a political decision to lend America money, that those same governments could make a new political decision to stop lending America money. We have risked putting ourselves into a position where we have a foreign policy liability. If China, which holds a lot of American debt, decided to sell it or to switch the debt into some other dollar instrument - for example, the equity market -- it could disrupt our capital market, inflict a lot of pain on us.

.Even if the Fed succeeds in calming the markets, that won't stop a recession. It won't solve the bank recapitalization problem. It won't solve the problem of households that are at the limit of debt and can't repay their mortgages. The structural imbalances are real, and will mean that the U.S. economy goes through a significant recession and a lot of pain as it restructures. But what is most important right now is to stop the panic, because that's seizing up day-to-day economic operations.

The End of Reaganomics
McCain is going to lose the presidenti al election because he stands for a philosophy that is broken and that has brought this country down to its economic knees. I have admired McCain for his years of principled and tough courage, and feel sorry for him because he does not get that his era has crashed; he fights on instead of packing it in. He will lose because the age of Reaganomics is over; it is exhausted. The no-regulation, low-taxes practice has broken the back of our economy. Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, the apocryphal idea of the magic of the marketplace; when they came to power in 1980, this belief became the dominant creed, and then led to the globalization of markets, the deregulation of markets and the increased use of leverage and all the financial engineering. Around the world, unfettered markets upheaved, devoured & monetized a huge amount of the Earth’s resources, produced an overwhelming quantity of unneeded products and trash, and did not promote the greater good. Way too much junk wasted diminishing and precious fossil fuels. In the United States, we produced nothing, but put our trust in the reprobate money changers of Wall Street who manipulated balance sheets and hollowed out the economy, bankrupting the financial system while pocketing huge profits, free-market style. A low point in shameful human behaviour for sure.

Now, we have to again get serious about reconstructing normal government that pays its way and a normal financial sector that is properly regulated. The threat we face right now is in the world of geoeconomics, not geopolitics ---how to get through this financial meltdown, how to handle the multiple economic challenges before us, how to steer America in a world where other countries are gaining economic power and resources and confidence.
Our blunders with excessive leverage causing a meltdown in global financial markets will have transformative consequences for United States: The loss of Untied States as the preeminent financial center of the world (the U.S. investment banks vaporized in a nanosecond), and in the final verdict, the dollar will no longer be the reserve currency of the world.

The End of Credit Expansion & Ever-Increasing Leverage
It is not just the federal government. Every household, every city, every county, every state in America has wanted things it was unwilling to pay for. And it made up the difference by borrowing in an era of cheap credit. We wanted larger houses than we could afford, more TVs, more laptops --- more of everything. And we did it all by racking up debt.

It's not just America. Around the world. Britain, Spain, Ireland, other over-leveraged societies have all faced the same problem. We've run our companies, countries, households on principles that just didn't make sense. In all venues, leverage was miscounted for wealth, and the nation, and households, are broke. Now, a reordering of our attitude about debt will ask us, just how much stuff do we need and how large do we need to live? How much wealth do we need, how much do we need to spend, and at what cost to the sustainability of the planet upon which all species depend?

We'll have to change, and it will mean deep and wrenching pain, probably a tough recession. But in the end, it will make for a more robust American economy and a stronger global system. The house of cards is collapsing. But there is an opportunity here to build a house of bricks instead. In the reconstruction, we will need fewer financial engineers and more electrical, chemical, and civil engineers.

A Chance for Other Kinds to Survive?
As we reduce consumerism relative to the growth of the economy so as to not be dependant on foreign capital, there is also an opportunity to take honest stock of what our rampaging consumerism has wrought upon the planet Earth, and to choose to shrink our impact, retreat our assault. As we detox from our four-decades long binge of obscene consumerism, positive consequences could be released. If we shrink consumption to what we really need to live, and make those things last the lifespan, we could significantly conserve the precious and finite natural resources and materials gobbled up in the manufacture and transportation of unnecessary goods. Living modestly with less should arrest the relentless incursion to seize more of the earth’s surface to reconfigure for our purpose, and to destroy more & more of the natural and wild habitats of other species whom we have pushed to the edge of extinction by ravaging their homes, raiding their land, and deforesting the earth. =0 AWe can choose this way as the human way on Earth, trying to make the smallest footprint instead of the largest.

Maybe we humans could even disappear off the face of the earth without a trace, so that they, the innocent and truly magnificent creatures could survive, as more than handbags rugs, and fur coats.

Recommended:
Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power
Kevin Phillips, Bad Money
Bill Bonner, Empire of Debt
Pete Petersen, Running on Empty, I.O.U.S.A
Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth
Jared Diamond, Collapse
Mathew Scully, Dominion
Paul Ehrlich, The Dominant Animal

Read More...

 
Civilization's Last Call