The Slide Continues

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Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "The U.S. economy is likely to keep deteriorating in early 2009 after shrinking last quarter by the most since 1982, as consumers and businesses retrench.

The 3.8 percent annual pace of contraction in the fourth quarter was less than forecast, with a buildup of unsold goods cushioning the blow. Excluding inventories, the decline was 5.1 percent, the Commerce Department said yesterday in Washington.

Job cuts announced this month by companies from Starbucks Corp. and Pep Boys - Manny, Moe & Jack to Eastman Kodak Co. mean there’ll be little respite in the first half of this year, economists said. The Obama administration used the figures to reinforce its call for Congress to pass a stimulus package in excess of $800 billion to arrest the economy’s decline.

“The recession is going to last through most of 2009, and we’ll be lucky to have growth back at zero by the end of the year,” Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard University economics professor, said in a Bloomberg Television interview from Davos, Switzerland, yesterday. Economic growth “will be pretty tepid for a long time.”"

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B of A to defer some bonuses over three years

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Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "Bank of America Corp. is deferring payment of 2008 bonuses of $50,000 or more at its capital markets and investment banking units over three years, according to people familiar with the matter.

Employees who had expected a bonus this month based on their 2008 work will instead get most of it in three annual installments, starting in February 2010, said the people, who declined to be identified because the plan isn’t public."

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How to not let this happen again

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Allowing Lehman Brothers to collapse had such severe systemic effects that the global financial system went into cardiac arrest and is still dealing with the aftermath.

How do we set up a sytem to eliminate the risk of (another) global financial meltdown? In their FT.com article 'A proposal to prevent wholesale financial failure', NYU Stern students Lasse Pedersen and Nouriel Roubini have devised a way to avoid the "worst financial crisis since the Great Depression."

Bail-outs of major financial institutions are based on a fear that their collapse would cause havoc, with collateral damage to the real economy. Examples include the Bear Stearns, Fannie, Freddie, AIG, and Citi­group.

The current system is "vulnerable to financial contagion when big banks (or many small ones) go bust. This is the systemic risk. The root of this problem is that "banks have little incentive to take into account the costs they impose on the wider economy" if their failure prompts a liquidity crisis.

"This is akin to when a company pollutes as part of its production without incurring the full costs of this pollution. To prevent this, pollution is regulated and taxed."

How do we reduce both the moral hazard and the cost of bail-outs in the event of a liquidity crisis? Impose a new systemic capital requirement and systemic insurance program. Once systemic risk can be measured, it can be managed.

Banks already use standard risk-management techniques internally to weigh how much each trading desk or division contributes to the overall risk of a bank. But the authors suggest that these same ideas should be used to evaluate the banks themselves. They set out their ideas in an NYU Stern project on restoring financial stability.

"First, the regulator would assess each bank’s systemic risk. The higher it is, the more capital the bank should hold. This would seek to ensure that the banking system as a whole had sufficient capital relative to the system-wide risk. This is just like the headquarters of a bank charging each trading desk or division for use of economic capital measured by its contribution to overall firm risk.

Second, each institution would be required to buy insurance against its systemic risk – that is, against its own losses in a scenario in which the whole financial sector is doing poorly. In the event of a pay-off on the insurance, the payment should not go to the company, but to the regulator in charge of stabilising the financial sector."

What happens then? A market-based estimate of the risk the develops (the amount of theinsurance premiums). Second, each bank would have an incentive to limit systemic risk (via lower insurance premiums). Finally, it would reduce the fiscal costs and the moral hazard of government bail-outs (because the company does not get the insurance pay-off).

Since the private sector may not be able to put aside enough capital for all the systemic risk insurance, government could provide part of it. Government already provides such partnership on insurance with the private sector in terrorism insurance.

"Unfortunately bank regulation, such as the Basel accord, ignores systemic risk since it analyses the risk of failure of each bank in isolation. It seeks to limit the probability of failure by each bank, treating isolated failures and systemic ones in the same way (and also ignoring how much a bank loses if it fails). However the move by many large banks to lever their balance sheets with similar mortgage-backed securities is more dangerous than if they had made loans to diverse borrowers."

More broadly, a systemic crisis that feeds on itself is more dangerous than the isolated failure of smaller banks. A small bank will probably be taken over with a smooth transition of operations – it does not bring down the economy.

"We believe our proposal offers several advantages by explicitly addressing systemic risk based on tools already in use by private companies to manage internal risks. Our proposal is a better way to deal with the trade-off between letting a large institution go bust (Lehman, for example) and causing a global cardiac arrest of the financial system or being forced to spend trillions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to bail out such systemically critical institutions."

The writers are professors at NYU Stern School of Business and the proposed regulation of systemic risk is part of the NYU Stern project Restoring Financial Stability: How to Repair a Failed System (John Wiley & Sons, 2009)

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Japan Heads for Worst Postwar Slump

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Bloomberg.com: Worldwide: "Jan. 30 (Bloomberg) -- Japan headed for its worst postwar recession as factory output slumped an unprecedented 9.6 percent in December, unemployment surged and households cut spending.

The drop in production eclipsed the previous record of 8.5 percent set only a month earlier, the Trade Ministry said today in Tokyo. The jobless rate soared to 4.4 percent from 3.9 percent, the biggest jump in 41 years.

Recessions in the U.S. and Europe and a slowdown in China have smothered demand for Japanese cars and electronics. Toshiba Corp., which is firing 4,500 workers, yesterday forecast a record annual loss and said it will delay building a chip factory. Honda Motor Co. this week widened production cuts.

“Japan’s economy is falling off a cliff,” said Junko Nishioka, an economist at RBS Securities Japan Ltd. in Tokyo. “There’s really nothing out there to drive growth.”

The Nikkei 225 Stock Average sank 3.4 percent at the morning close in Tokyo, led by Toshiba and Nintendo Co., which cut its profit forecast by a third yesterday. The Nikkei has fallen 10.1 percent this year, extending last year’s record 42 percent drop."

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Fed Warns of Global Deflation

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“The Fed statement yesterday said its prediction of a “gradual recovery” in the U.S. economy later this year has “significant” risks of failing to materialize. At their meeting, central bank officials gave updated forecasts for gross domestic product, inflation and unemployment that will be released with meeting minutes on Feb. 18.

It sounds like the worry is not so much recession as it is depression,” said Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York. “We can only hope that the famous long and variable lags of monetary policy will eventually kick in.”

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FT.com European companies

FT.com / Companies / European companies - Fiat to take 35% stake in Chrysler: "Fiat is to take a 35 per cent stake in Chrysler as part of a deal between the Italian and US automakers as they seek to weather the severe downturn in the automotive industry.

The two groups confirmed on Tuesday that they had signed a “non-binding term sheet to establish a global strategic alliance” that would see Turin-based Fiat acquire the stake in Chrysler in exchange for production and distribution assets."

FT.com / Companies - Newspapers turn into rich mens’ toys

FT.com / Companies - Newspapers turn into rich mens’ toys: "When Gannett, the owner of USA Today, told its employees last week that they would each have to take a week’s unpaid leave, it was “the crowning blow in making us look like the auto industry”, one former editor told Alan Mutter, the newspaper veteran and blogger.

Unlike Detroit, however, the newspaper industry is looking to wealthy individuals rather than government to bail it out."

FT.com / Companies - Google fails to export ad success to print

FT.com / Companies - Google fails to export ad success to print: "Google’s efforts to export its advertising success to the newspaper industry have ended in failure with the closure of its Google Print Ads service.

The Silicon Valley company said on Tuesday it had hoped to create a new revenue stream for the embattled newspaper industry and produce more relevant advertising for consumers, but admitted: “The product has not created the impact that we – or our partners – wanted.”"

Bloomberg.com: U.S.

Bloomberg.com: U.S.: "“The tragic history of financial crises is a history of failures by governments to act with the speed and force commensurate with the severity of the crisis,” Geithner said.

“If our policy response is tentative and incrementalist, if we do not demonstrate by our actions a clear and consistent commitment to do what is necessary to solve the problem, then we risk greater damage to living standards, to the economy's productive potential, and to the fabric of our financial system,” he said."

FT.com / World - Poll shows EU voters resistant on Afghan war

FT.com / World - Poll shows EU voters resistant on Afghan war: "Any attempt by Barack Obama to get European Union members of Nato to send more troops to Afghanistan will be strongly rebuffed by EU voters, according to a new opinion poll for the Financial Times.

As Mr Obama prepares to be sworn in as US president on Tuesday, a Harris poll for the FT shows that clear majorities of people in the UK, France, Italy and Germany believe that their governments must not send more forces to Afghanistan, irrespective of demands that the new American head of state might make."

Prepare to bury the fatally wounded big banks

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Prepare to bury the fatally wounded big banks: "Friday’s bad news from Citigroup and Bank of America confirmed what many experts have long suspected: the subprime losses of 2007 were a bullet that fatally wounded the banks. Many lost so much money on toxic subprime mortgage-related derivatives that they have been essentially insolvent for more than a year. It has taken so long for these banks to fall only because of government support and some investors’ bottomless capacity for denial.

Consider Friday’s eye-popping figures. Bank of America recorded a $15.3bn (£10.4bn, €11.5bn) loss at Merrill Lynch, which it owns. Citigroup announced a total 2008 loss of $18.7bn, nearly half of which came from the fourth quarter. Even in the context of this crisis, these losses are epic."

FT.com / Europe - Spain loses triple A rating

FT.com / Europe - Spain loses triple A rating: "Spain lost its triple A credit rating from Standard & Poor’s on Monday when the ratings agency downgraded the country’s long-term sovereign debt because of its deteriorating public finances.

S&P lowered its rating by one notch to double A plus, arguing that the global economic crisis had highlighted “structural weaknesses” in the Spanish economy that were inconsistent with triple A, the highest rating."

Brown accuses RBS of ‘irresponsible risks’

FT.com / UK - Brown accuses RBS of ‘irresponsible risks’: "Gordon Brown on Monday unveiled a second bank rescue package including powers for the Bank of England to lend up to £50bn directly to businesses, as he accused the Royal Bank of Scotland of taking ”irresponsible risks” as the bank’s shares collapsed.

His comments came as RBS on Monday warned it could report an annual loss of up to £28bn, following the mis-timed acquisition of ABN Amro, the Dutch lender it acquired as part of a €71bn (£63bn) hostile break-up bid in 2007."

Why are the banks in crisis again?

FT.com / Columnists / Tony Jackson - Why are the banks in crisis again?: "The ugly downward lurch of US and European banks in the past 10 days is unsettling, if not wholly unexpected. What is behind it? And where do we go from here?

One likely answer to the first question is that with year-end window dressing out of the way, the banks are starting to confront reality. Citigroup has switched abruptly from defending its conglomerate structure to breaking it up. Barclays has stopped talking about hiring investment bankers and is firing 2,100 instead.

And so forth. In essence, the banks are staring down the twin barrels of a shotgun. The old problems of rancid assets remain, and the new ones of recession are kicking in.

As a result, the system looks like it will stay glued up for a while. The recent fall in interbank rates might suggest otherwise but as Richard Portes of the London Business School points out, they are not the whole story.

In Europe, he puts the amount parked by the banks with the European Central Bank at well over €300bn. They are losing money on those deposits. But that is evidently preferable to risking the cash by putting it to work."

Why are the banks in crisis again?

FT.com / Columnists / Tony Jackson - Why are the banks in crisis again?: "Karen Olney, European strategist with Merrill Lynch, sees the threat differently. Investors, she says, already assume government is the only answer. Their worry is that, as lending risk increasingly becomes sovereign risk, the burden will act as a brake on the whole economy.

The scale of that threat is indicated by a chilling little exercise from Merrill’s bank analysts. This involved measuring European bank assets as a proportion of Europe’s gross domestic product over the years.

The analysts then made the arbitrary but not unreasonable assumption that the ratio should revert to the pre-credit bubble levels of 2002-03. That would apparently mean European banks shrinking their assets – in effect, their loans – by €5,500bn. The reduction so far has been €800bn, leaving €4,700bn to go.

If nothing else, this seems further proof that banking will emerge at the other end of all this changed beyond recognition. I have floated before now the notion that the industry might have been caught up in a 25-year supercycle. That now looks less fanciful by the day."

Key report on financial reform

Image via WikipediaImage via WikipediaImage via WikipediaFrom The Economist - An important new report on regulating the financial industry released Thursday (Jan 15) should play a crucial role in shaping the financial reform agenda.


The Group of Thirty’s “Financial Reform: A Framework for Financial Stability” is important both because of the concreteness of its 18 recommendations and because of who was involved. The authors were led by Paul Volcker, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Jean-Claude Trichet, (president of the European Central Bank).

Banks:

• banks deemed systemically important would face restrictions—in the form of “strict” capital requirements—on high-risk proprietary activities, that is bets made using their own money
• strongly encourage investment banking arms of banks to focus on client businesses, such as merger advice, rather than trading
• separating these needed because they seem “unmanageable in financial conglomerates"
• also require raising the level at which banks are well-capitalised
  

Non-bank financial institutions:

• pools of private capital that live on borrowed money should have to register with a regulator and produce regular reports, disclosing things such as leverage and performance.
  
• biggest of them would even be subject to capital and liquidity standards.
  
• bank-like regulation for money-market funds
  
• legislation in America to set up a mechanism for dealing with non-bank failures

Other key issues:

• Central banks should be more involved in supervising banks—but to safeguard integrity the role of chief firefighter should be played by others once trouble ignites. Central bankers “need to be more concerned about financial stability, but less involved in crises,”
• formal system of regulation for over-the-counter derivatives, such as the type of credit swaps that sank American International Group
• urges regulators to force banks to hold on to a significant portion of credit risk when they package loans into securities and sell them on, in order to curb reckless underwriting of mortgages and other debt.
  
• calls for a rethink of certain accounting principles that may exacerbate downturns through pro-cyclicality, including the practice of marking assets to the current market value;
  

The other important message is that a global crisis requires a global fix. Mr Volcker was typically modest, insisting it was more an agenda for discussion than a hard-and-fast blueprint. But, given his closeness to Mr Obama, it is hardly far-fetched to imagine much of it becoming official policy. All that talk of the biggest overhaul of financial regulation since the 1930s just took a step towards reality.
"

The Darkest Hour

Image by artemuestra via FlickrFrom economy.com, Marc Zandi gives his upbeat look ahead to the national economy in 2008. Among the highlights:

• The coming year will be the worst in decades for the U.S. economy as millions of jobs are lost across nearly all industries, occupations and regions.

• Although the crisis began with excesses in the financial system, it was exacerbated by policy missteps that led to financial panic.

• Despite their past errors, only concerted action by policymakers can end the panic and prevent the forecast from turning darker.

• Even if the recession ends this year, recovery will be slow, with GDP not reaching its pre-recession peak until late 2010.

• The current episode, while painful, could lead to needed reform of the financial and regulatory system.

This will likely be the worst year for the U.S. economy since the end of the 1930s. The recession that began 13 months ago will plague much of 2009, particularly during the first half of the year.

Real GDP is expected to fall 3% peak to trough, and close to 5 million jobs will be lost. The unemployment rate will surge to 9%. The drop in manufacturing will be especially severe, but the hallmark of this downturn will be its breadth across industries, occupations and regions. More than 300 of the nation's 381 metropolitan areas will be in recession; unlike in past recessions, which were regionally concentrated, there is no obvious place to move for better prospects in this downturn.

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