CMA reports on Thursday that Norway has been overtaken by Germany as the safest country in terms of sovereign CDS. Here’s the data, as it stands now:
All eyes have been on the Fed in the past 24 hours - and all currency gyrations, particularly the dollar’s sharp depreciation - have been attributed to the Fed’s move to spend $300bn on buying long-term Treasuries, among other measures. As some currency analysts observed on Thursday, however, the dollar’s steep decline suggests there may have been some over-reaction to the Fed’s move.
But there are other factors at work behind the dollar’s downward trajectory - not least, growing disenchantment in some parts of the world with US economic policies (or lack thereof), and rumbles about dumping the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and adopting a shared basket of currencies.
In an article about a gathering of top Asian think tanks on Thursday in Tokyo, Reuters reported:
The role of the US dollar as the key global currency will decline after the financial crisis, and its value may also weaken due to America’s current account deficit, officials at some of Asia’s top think tanks said. But Asia, which is heavily invested in US assets, hopes any decline in the dollar will be gradual to avoid further shocks to financial systems, the officials said on Thursday.
The bottom line was summed up by Chalongphob Sussangkarn, a former Thai finance minister and now president of Thailand Development Research Institute, who said:The US deficit is so huge. This is why all countries, particularly East Asia, are concerned because we hold a lot of these assets. What happens if the US dollar falls 40 percent? Many central bankers will be losing huge amounts of money.”
Such fears, now spreading among governments about their relatively large holdings of dollar reserves, have been fuelling moves at the United Nations and there is now growing speculation among analysts and forex markets that the UN is preparing a recommendation to member countries to move away from using the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and instead, adopt a shared basket of currencies. No matter that the UN often appears bureaucratic and ineffectual - it sometimes does make an impact - and almost certainly will if it goes ahead with such a push.
Growing speculation about such an announcement was “as large a reason for the overnight sell-off in the dollar, as was the Fed’s announcement to buy US Treasuries as part of their quantitative easing policy”, noted Richard Grace, CBA’s chief currency strategist in a Thursday note.
While Grace suggests it’s “worth waiting until next week” to see the full intention of the UN’s recommendation to diversify out of dollar, he voices three key reservations about such a move:(1) The UN does not carry as much weight as the G7. If it were a G7 announcement (or even an IMF announcement) then the announcement effect (and the full ramifications) on the USD would be extremely significant (and USD negative). We do not expect such an announcement from the G7 anytime soon.
(2) Most major currency reserve managers already diversify (out of USD) anyway. There is nothing new here. Currency reserve managers will diversify according to liquidity, expected return, and to cover a mix of underlying assets (be it imports or underlying securities). Central bank data from the IMF illustrates that, while there is plenty of room for diversification, a significant amount of reserves are already diversified in non-USD currencies (chart 4).
(3) Most trade contracts and commodity prices are priced in USD. If the UN statement is designed to re-price commodities and trade contracts in an alternative to the USD, and toward a basket of currencies such as Special Drawing Rights (SDR’s), then it is a significant announcement by the UN, and clearly USD negative. But it is worth waiting until next week to see if this is the intention of the UN, and if it has endorsement from the US Treasury. The logistics of such a move are huge and will take some time to implement, but an immediate depreciation of the USD under the above circumstances would certainly occur.
Afterall, notes Grace, the two major foundations which keep the dollar stable as the world’s major reserve currency are first, that the US is the largest economy in the world; and second, that it has the deepest and most sophisticated bond markets in the world (so there is somewhere to park capital reserves). “It takes time for alternative markets to grow and adjust to additional demand”, he noted.
Even so, it’s clear, as the FT reported recently, that countries such as China, which hold massive dollar reserves, are concerned, and that there is some interest in at least radically reducing dollar holdings if not shift out of the dollar as the reserve currency. And as we saw last week, moves by Switzerland to intervene in its currency - and fresh speculation that Japan may go the same route (see Related Links, below) has triggered much discussion within governments about forex holdings and safe-haven currencies.
On top of that is the point made by Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Jen this week, that plans to massively boost the IMF’s funds in order to channel aid to Eastern Europe could ultimately see the euro gaining substantial ground. Still, as Hong Kong-based research and investment house Gavekal remarks in a note on Thursday:
There are numerous reasons to dislike the euro … some valid concerns about sterling and the yen, and, with the Fed clearly indicating its “no holds barred” approach to printing money to spur economic activity, dollar-aversion is no surprise either…
Still, we continue to believe that, warm and fuzzy IMF statements aside, the issues Europe is confronting are very serious and will necessitate a political will and flexibility which we have yet to see on the Old Continent. Thus, of all the three-legged blind mules out there, the euro remains, in our view, the most structurally challenged.
Perhaps, as the FT’s currency correspondent Peter Garnham suggests on Thursday, Norway’s krone may emerge as the big, new safe-haven currency.
The bottom line, as Gavekal concludes, remains that picking a currency has truly become an “ugly contest”. Meanwhile, it says, “away from the spotlight, some currencies either offer tremendous value because they have been oversold concerns about debt exposure (SEK, KRW, IDR…), or because they have sound-enough fundamentals which, in these panicked times, the markets are ignoring (CA$, BRL, MYR…).”
Related links:
Norwegian krone: the new safe haven currency? - FT
Game-changer for the euro, and a coming CHF bloc - FT Alphaville
Getting the IMF to take the heat - FT Alphaville
Ministers agree on need to boost IMF funds - FT
The Swiss franc factor - FT Alphaville
Swiss franc intervention - Short View
Swiss stoke fears of currency wars - FT
On your marks, get set, devalue - FT Alphaville
China’s dollar dilemma - FT
By Sarah O’Connor in Reykjavik
Published: December 23 2008 20:14 | Last updated: December 23 2008 20:14
On the ground floor of one of Reykjavik’s gleaming office buildings, a well-dressed crowd shuffles and waits. Tinny Christmas songs blare from a small hi-fi by the door.
As numbers are called out one by one, people file into the next room where rudimentary shelves are filled with free tins, fish, clothes, books and wrapping paper.
Some 2,500 people have applied for Christmas relief packages from Iceland’s three main charities in recent weeks, a 30 per cent rise on last year, as growing numbers of the middle class lose their jobs in the wake of Iceland’s banking collapse.Jon Omar Gunnarsson, a pastor at Hallgrimskirkja, Reykjavik’s main church, says applications to the Church Aid group have doubled.
“It’s mostly middle class people who have all these obligations, mortgages that are going up, many are losing their jobs ... they just can’t carry the burden alone,” he says.
Iceland is still reverberating after its economy crumpled in October in the face of global financial turmoil.
Inflation and interest rates are both at 18 per cent as the country struggles to shore up its currency, which plunged after its three banks collapsed. It has borrowed $10bn from the International Monetary Fund and others which it needs to repay, meaning taxes are rising even as recession deepens."
So, they have:
1) Interest rates at 18%
2) A Falling currency
3) Borrowed $10 Billion from the IMF
4) Higher taxes
5) A recession
"The charities believe more people need help but are too ashamed to ask.
“We should just forget about Christmas, just cancel it,” says Sigridur, 57, waiting for her number to be called.
“My husband lost his job, I don’t have one either – I am recovering from cancer. We cannot even pay for the house.”
Sigridur and her husband are considering moving to Norway where there are jobs in construction. “We would just post the house key back to the bank.”
Asa, 44, will give her children Christmas presents provided by charity this year. “You have to take off your pride,” she says. “It’s very difficult to do it.
“There will be a lot of people who leave this country, just go away. Think of the future here for the children. When they are 95 they will still be paying for this( YIKES ).”
Although growing, the number of people needing food aid is still small. Many of those who have lost their jobs will continue to get paid until February. The government, which owns the three main banks, has promised mortgage holidays for people who cannot meet repayments. But even those who have not been badly hit are changing their lifestyles. This Christmas, people are giving each other books, home-made trinkets and practical presents such as warm socks.
Last year’s must-haves, flat screen televisions and games consoles, are on the list of things people here call “so 2007”.
For many, Christmas brings a welcome distraction from the crisis. But others find it impossible to get into the seasonal spirit.
Sitting in an old fisherman’s cafe by the port, Orn Svavarsson shakes with rage. He sold his health food business three years ago when he was 54 and, like many of his countrymen, put the money into the stock market. It has been wiped out.
“The Icelandic people are too lazy,” he says. “Why don’t we go to the airport and block it until we get answers?
“For the first time in my life I have sympathy with the Bolsheviks; with the French revolutionaries who put up the guillotine.”
Note well the last sentence. If Icelanders should come to lose confidence in the social system as well as the economic system, then things could actually get ugly.At a time when the headlines are filled with financial crises and violence, it is especially important to recognise the creativity of many governments in fighting poverty, disease and hunger( GOOD IDEA ). The point is not merely to make ourselves feel a little better, but rather to confront one of the world's gravest threats: the widespread pessimism( IT MIGHT BE REALISM, BUT, YOU'RE RIGHT, WE SHOULD TRY, IN ANY CASE ) that today's problems are too big to be solved. Studying the successes gives us the knowledge and confidence to step up our shared efforts to solve today's great global challenges.
Hats off, first, to Mexico for pioneering the idea of "conditional cash transfers" to poor households. These transfers enable and encourage those households to invest in their children's health, nutrition and schooling.
Mexico's opportunities programme, led by the president, Felipe Calder, is now being widely emulated around Latin America. Recently, at the behest of the singers Shakira and Alejandro Sanz, and a social movement called Alas that they lead, all of Latin America's leaders have committed to step up the region's programmes for early childhood development, based on successes that have been proven to date. ( SOUNDS GOOD )
Norway, under the leadership of prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, is maintaining its tradition of creative social and environmental leadership. The government has put together a global alliance to prevent maternal death in childbirth, investing in safe delivery and the survival of newborns. At the same time, Norway launched an innovative $1bn (£0.66bn) programme with Brazil to induce poor communities in the Amazon to end rampant deforestation. Cleverly, Norway pays out the funds to Brazil only upon proven success in avoiding deforestation, compared with an agreed baseline.( GOOD IDEAS )
Spain, under the leadership of the prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez-Zapatero, has given a major stimulus to helping the poorest countries to achieve the UN millennium development goals (MDGs). Spain created a new MDG fund at the United Nations to promote the co-operation needed within the UN to address the various challenges of the MDGs. ( WORTH A SHOT )
The Spanish government rightly proposed that true solutions to poverty required simultaneous investments in health, education, agriculture and infrastructure, and then the Spanish put up the funds to help make that integrated vision a practical reality. Spain will host a meeting in January to launch a new fight against global hunger. Once again, Spain is proposing practical and innovative means to move from talk to action, specifically to help impoverished peasant farmers to get the tools, seeds and fertiliser they need to increase their farm productivity, incomes and food security. ( WE NEED TO SEE IF THEY WORK. IF SO, FINE )
The Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd, has similarly surged to the forefront of global problem solving, putting forward a bold action plan on climate change and proposing new and practical( A KEY CONCEPT ) means to address the MDGs. Australia put real money on the table for increased food production, along the lines that Spain is proposing. It also champions an increased programme of action for the poor and environmentally threatened island economies of the Pacific region.( FINE )
These efforts have been matched by actions in the poorest countries. The landlocked and impoverished country of Malawi, under the leadership of President Bingu wa Mutharika, has doubled its annual food production since 2005 through a pioneering effort to help its poorest farmers. The programme has been so successful that it is being emulated across Africa( GOOD ).
Mali's government, under President Amadou Toumani Touré, has recently put forward a bold challenge to the world community. Mali is eager to scale up investments in agriculture, health, education and infrastructure in its 166 poorest communities. The plans are detailed, thoughtful, credible and based on proven successes that the government has already achieved. The rich world has promised to help Mali, and now Mali has led the way with its creativity( GOOD FOR THEM ).
There are countless more cases that can be mentioned. The European Union has launched a €1bn (£0.93bn) effort to help peasant farmers. The Gates Foundation, Unicef, Rotary International and many governments have succeeded in bringing down polio deaths to one-thousandth of the rate a generation ago, bringing the disease to the verge of eradication. Similar efforts are under way on many other fronts: the control of worm infections and leprosy, and a major global effort to bring malaria deaths nearly to zero by 2015.( VERY GOOD )
All of these successes, and many more, share a similar pattern. They address a well-defined( KEY ) and serious challenge, for example, low food production or a specific disease, and are based on a well-defined( KEY ) set of solutions, such as the supply of agricultural equipment and inputs needed by peasant farmers or immunisations.
Small-scale demonstration projects prove how success can be achieved; the challenge then becomes taking the solutions "to scale" in nationwide or even worldwide programmes ( TRUE ). Leadership is needed within the countries in need as well as among the rich nations that can help to launch and finance the solutions. Finally, modest amounts of money, directed at practical problem solving, can make an historic difference( I'M FOR IT IF IT'S ASSESSED FOR SUCCESS ).
Bad news can crowd out good news, especially in times of serious financial crisis and political unrest. Yet the good news shows that we will lose the battle against poverty and misery only if we give up and fail to heed the intelligence and goodwill that can be mobilised today. And perhaps next year, the US will rejoin the global effort with a new and remarkable force, led by a young president who has rightly told Americans and the world that "Yes, we can"."
No more about Bush. I'm begging you. I'm counting the seconds.
2) The rules for LOLR( from here on down this includes any government guarantee ) intervention should be clear, public, and followed, otherwise Moral Hazard is ineffective. All guarantees must be explicit.
3) The terms must be onerous.
"Who can forget the end of "Planet of the Apes" when Charlton Heston, kneeling before the half-buried remains of the Statue of Liberty, slams his fists into the sand and cries, "You maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you ... damn you all to hell!"
Now imagine the same scene, but with a half-buried Morgan Stanley building standing in for Miss Liberty and a time-traveling Walter Bagehot playing the lead and you've got the perfect Hollywood dramatization of the real-life tragedy that, with luck, is having its denouement on Wall Street.
Bagehot? The great Victorian man of letters, best remembered today as the second and most celebrated editor of the British magazine The Economist, wasn't exactly a hunk. But he certainly could have delivered those futile last lines with real conviction, for he was among the first to recognize the vast destructive potential of that newfangled weapon of Victorian finance: the modern central bank.
Bagehot first alerted readers to this potential and offered his suggestions for containing it in an article that appeared in The Economist after the great panic and credit crisis of 1866. That panic witnessed the spectacular collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co., which had long been Great Britain's premier investment house.
Bagehot understood that, during such panics, the Bank of England alone commanded the confidence needed to serve other financial firms as a "lender of last resort." But as Bagehot put it later in his book "Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market" (1873), the bank's "faltering way" -- its arbitrary and inconsistent use of its unique lending powers -- tended only to make things worse.
"The public," Bagehot wrote, "is never sure what policy will be adopted at the most important moment: it is not sure what amount of advance will be made. ... And until we have on this point a clear understanding with the Bank of England, both our ability to avoid crises and our terror at crises will always be greater than they would otherwise be."
The ultimate source of trouble, Bagehot believed, was the very existence of the Bank of England and the special privileges it enjoyed. But because nothing save a revolution seemed likely to do away with the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street," as it was called, Bagehot's preferred, practical solution was for the bank expressly to commit itself to lending freely during crises, though on good collateral only, and at "penalty" rates.
The restrictive provisions were supposed to limit aid to otherwise solvent firms panic had rendered illiquid.
Bagehot's recommendation has since become a sort of master precept of central banking -- albeit one that's mainly honored in the breach by central bankers.
To be fair to today's central bankers, there's never been much agreement on how to apply Bagehot's rule in practice. Just what do "good collateral" and "penalty rates" mean in times like these?
While no one might precisely be able to define good collateral -- and one can debate whether the rate at which banks offer to lend unsecured funds to other banks, known as the London Interbank Offered Rate, or LIBOR rate, plus 8 percent constitutes a "penalty" rate -- who even pretends that recent central bank lending has been based on good collateral?
But rescuing insolvent firms is the least of it. The real damage comes from the Treasury's utter lack of any consistent last-resort lending rule. The recently enacted financial institutions bailout bill does little to clarify this.
That's just the sort of thing that troubled Bagehot almost a century and a half ago, when central banks were still in their swaddling clothes. Yet central bankers and governments still don't get it, despite the lip service they pay to this great thinker from our past."
Neither Barack Obama nor John McCain had much of value to say about the financial crisis as it raged through the headlines this fall. Rather than shred their campaign strategies, they played it safe, as most politicians would have. But in the name of justice we ought to recall that there was one candidate who did foresee our predicament with considerable accuracy when it still lay far in the future. Ron Paul, in almost every speech he made during the Republican primaries, spoke of bubbles, reckless credit growth, and the "unsustainability" of present policy. So why isn't there more demand for the common-sense solutions he put forward? Because common sense is not much use in a financial panic. This was the great discovery of Walter Bagehot, the prolific 19th-century essayist and journalist, who was editor of the Economist from 1860 to 1877. (His name rhymes with gadget.) Ninety-nine percent of the time, common sense is a synonym for practicality. But in a serious banking crisis, doing the commonsensical thing--hunkering down and counting your pennies--has proved to be not practical at all. Bagehot's Lombard Street is an insider's look at the Bank of England, and at the principles on which political and financial leaders act when advanced economies come under pressure. Those principles are depressing in the extreme for anyone with an uncomplicated idea of how a democracy works. But they are effective. That is why, in the so-called Anglo-Saxon world, Bagehot's book still provides the bedrock of policy thinking during financial emergencies, including our present one. Lombard Street was published in 1873, seven years after the sudden collapse of Overend, Gurney & Co., a bank that lost £11 million, spread panic among investors, sparked a run, and became "the model instance of all evil in business." The crisis made such a deep impression on British finance and government that the country did not have another bank run for 141 years--not until Northern Rock collapsed in the summer of 2007. (English investors must have longer memories than American ones. Most of our own noxious subprime mortgages were contracted, and the securities built on them concocted, after Enron became our own model instance of evil in 2001.) It was the Bank of England that took charge of averting panic, during the Overend, Gurney crisis and thereafter. It did so by injecting credit into the economy, by bailing people out. Bagehot approved of this. Many ordinary retailers could not pay their suppliers until they got the money for the things they sold. Without credit, they would be ruined, and the ruin would spread to those to whom they owed money. This was not a question of moral failing, it was just the way a modern economy worked. But the modern economic system interacts with the modern political system--democracy--in a rather uncomfortable way. Indeed, at more than one juncture in Lombard Street, Bagehot framed the problem of booms and busts as part of the "increasingly democratic structure of English commerce." People in a democracy are most comfortable when their institutions do the same things that they would do as individuals. In a crisis, banks--like everyone else--reflexively hoard their money. But a central bank must do the opposite. It must lend freely. This was the most basic affront to common sense that the Bank of England presented, but it was not the worst. The worst was that the bank could carry out its necessary duties as a lender of last resort only by breaking the law. The basis of the bank's operating procedure--and of its soundness--was the Bank Act of 1844. We would call it a regime of sound money. It included stringent caps on the ratio of notes issued to reserves held. These caps were hewed to when the economy was running smoothly. Yet at the time Bagehot was writing, a quarter century later, the law had already been suspended three times. Not just that. "No similar occasion has ever yet occurred," Bagehot wrote, "in which it has not been suspended." So the law on which the solvency of the British nation rested was ironclad, except when someone felt a need to break it. Stranger still, never did the Bank of England acknowledge its duty as the lender of last resort. Some of its governors even denied that any such duty existed. Bagehot thought the bank should come clean about what it really was:
But there was a reason for the central bankers' dissembling. If the bank ever acknowledged a duty to rescue banks by generous extensions of credit, it would create a form of moral hazard. Thomson Hankey, a Bank of England director whom Bagehot much admired (and to whom the financial writer James Grant devotes an admiring essay in his new book Mr. Market Miscalculates), called Bagehot's lender-of-last-resort views "the most mischievous doctrine ever broached in the monetary or banking world in this country." In practice, Bagehot was right and Hankey was wrong. The bank was beyond question the lender of last resort. In principle, Hankey was right and Bagehot was wrong. Unless there was a real, credible threat that a bank would be allowed to fail, the guarantee of rescue would simply get priced into any financial bubble that developed, making things worse when the bubble popped. The situation required what we would now call "strategic ambiguity"--both Hankey's doctrine and Bagehot's practice, which contradicts it. The situation today requires the same mix. Central banking is thus often a high-stakes game of chicken. And sometimes, when banks enter the game insufficiently scared, it will be played out to the end. It certainly was in September when the U.S. Treasury terrified the financial world by not coming to the rescue of Lehman Brothers. This was a catastrophe in terms of Bagehot's practice, but it will produce benefits in terms of Hankey's principle. It will discourage people from paying more than is reasonable for assets on the belief that they come equipped with an insurance policy (the promise of a central bank rescue) that has been underwritten by taxpayers. The Republicans who nearly derailed the Treasury's Troubled Assets Relief Program in September played a similar role. A final problem is that there are limits to how accountable a central bank can be. Everyone is always hollering for clear rules and transparency. But a dirty secret of regulation is that it frequently influences conduct most effectively when it is capricious and opaque. Any regulatory system will reveal its vulnerabilities over long use. If it addresses economic problems in a predictable way, savvy investors will find a way to "game" that predictability. You can draw an analogy with antidepressant drugs. There is no permanent right match of medication for a depressive. Antidepressants work only until the mind (or is it the brain?) finds a way around them, at which point a new, unfamiliar drug must be substituted. In the same way, no matter how good the content of a regulatory regime, it must change periodically if big market players are to be kept from profiting off it. As Bagehot outlined his system, he was conscious that the practical realities of banking required him to heap paradox upon paradox. There is a hint of both Andrew Jackson and Thomas Aquinas in the way he referred to central banking as an "unnatural" thing in its very conception. "The business of banking ought to be simple," he wrote. "If it is hard it is wrong." If it is hard, the banker is either delegating poorly or has entangled his institution in complex transactions where it has no business. According to Bagehot, "Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution, I had almost said timidity, is the life of banking." Centralizing a society's cash reserves is complicated, reckless, and artificial:
In his ideas of company size, Bagehot harkened back to the 18th century rather than ahead to our own. To modern eyes, Bagehot is, as a factual matter, simply wrong. The natural tendency under free-market conditions is towards consolidation, and even monopoly. If you want small firms, you must protect them through government--whether this means Teddy Roosevelt-ian trust-busting, French-style subsidies to tobacconists, the EU's hounding of Microsoft, or the NIMBY anti-Wal-Mart campaigns aimed at preserving Mom-and-Pop stores. Bagehot sometimes contradicted himself on this point, noting also that "a large bank always tends to become larger, and a small one tends to become smaller," but his application of the word unnatural to a large central bank was frequent and must be taken as his settled view. It is curious that Bagehot, a contemporary of Marx, came to the opposite (and false) conclusion about how firms evolve. Where Bagehot would agree with Marx is in his belief that there is something predictably destabilizing about modern economies. You don't need banks to have a precarious economy, or one liable to speculation--Bagehot noted that there were no banks, as we would understand them, in 1720, at the time of the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Scheme. But modern banking is precarious by design. "In exact proportion to the power of this system is its delicacy," he wrote. "I should hardly say too much if I said its danger." The power, delicacy, and danger all have the same source. In fact they are just different names for the same thing: leverage. At the very opening of the book, Bagehot illustrates with exquisite simplicity how, at least in a boom economy, traders on margin can "harass and press upon, if they do not eradicate, the old capitalist." The old capitalist in question is the poor sap who believes all this stuff about neither-a-borrower-nor-a-lender-be and is foolish enough to be using his own cash:
Later, Bagehot showed that this need for leverage is no different for those selling money than it is for those selling dry goods. The banker can no more choose not to lend than the merchant can choose not to borrow:
In finance, once you can have leverage, you must have leverage. Once you have some leverage, getting more of it than your competitors is a matter of survival. And when governments and central banks debate whether to loosen or tighten up money, they face a constant clamor from the financial world to permit more leverage still. That is why, even in democracies, the instruments of monetary policy tend to be kept far from the influence of voters, and even hidden from view. Otherwise, credit tends to spiral. Bubbles result. Nothing could be more foolish than to assume that this process of spiraling speculation is unleashed by "greed," unless by greed you mean human nature. Credit spirals are a darker aspect of the world Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations and Bernard de Mandeville did in the Fable of the Bees. Just as society can be improved by the uncoordinated action of the selfishly motivated, an economy can collapse for reasons having nothing to do with anybody's cupidity. We should be moral in the way we think about money, but a credit system tends to make a mess of moral accounting. Bagehot described London's financial district as "a sort of standing broker between quiet saving districts of the country and the active employing districts." Decent, puritanical Suffolk farmers want to put their money in a safe place; Lancashire entrepreneurs want money to put to work. Thanks to London bankers, both can follow their wishes and make a profit in the process. We have an idea that the Suffolk dairyman is the "moral" party here (he's saving) and the Lancashire speculator the "immoral" one (he's gambling). But, once a banking system intervenes, they are both gambling and they are both saving. In good times you are welcome to mouth the folkloric cliché that holds farmers to be better people than financiers. When depression looms, you had better realize that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Many Americans who have wound up underwater on their houses and maxed out on their credit cards are greedy, climbing, brand-intoxicated, materialistic shopaholics who thought the world owed them a living. But just as many of them are not. They are trapped, as surely as financial institutions are, in a system based on wild borrowing. Participation in this system is not exactly required, but it is not exactly optional, either. One's quality of life is determined not just by one's purchasing power but also by one's relative economic standing. Chagrin at seeing one's neighbors get richer faster may be a sign of bad character, but do not for a minute assume there is nothing to feel chagrin about! When it comes to the very goods people deem most essential--the proper mate; the schooling of one's children; the size, location, elegance, and comfort of one's house--relative standing is more important than absolute wealth. Those who kept their money in savings banks in the 1990s lost out to those who did things we are supposed to disapprove of, like "spending money they didn't have," borrowing profligately to invest in stocks and even bonds, which appreciated at an average of 15 percent a year over the decade. Among rich people, how one entered the present decade had more to do with how one had done in the stock market than with how one had done in the labor market. Is that just? Of course it's not! It's easy to see now. But while the boom was going on there was all sorts of rationalizing about why it was okay that the social hierarchy should be reordered through stock and housing speculation. One line of argument was that people who did not have a ton of money in stocks, as well as those who rented rather than bought the houses they lived in, were foolish. This line of argument peaked at the turn of the decade, when Americans elected a president who had argued that the public was foolish for not launching its retirement savings onto the open seas of the stock market. Bagehot saw that a speculative mania eventually sweeps up everyone in its path. "Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected," he wrote, "and which commonly indeed had not begun or had not carried very far those speculations, till they were tempted by the daily rise of price and the surrounding fever." Avaricious people get hurt, but it is in the nature of crashes that they are not the ones who get hurt most. A tragic figure present in almost every historic account of speculation and collapse in history is the person who believed, year after year, that the boom was an illusion, and held himself aloof until, at the very last minute, whether out of self-doubt or deference to the opinions of his fellow man, he entered the fray and was (having bought at the top, rather than the bottom, of the market) wiped out. What a wicked irony! His punishment is as much for his long and wise forbearance as for his momentary weakness. So the "cultural contradictions of capitalism" run deeper than we thought. The classic idea, as laid out in their different ways by the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the sociologist Daniel Bell, is that capitalism rewards diligence; diligence produces wealth; wealth begets idleness; and idleness undermines capitalism. But when, as now, push comes to shove, we can ask whether there is really anything particularly capitalist about the virtues of diligence and self-restraint. The real capitalist virtues appear to be optimism and luck. From a central-banking perspective, the cultural contradictions are not results of capitalism but elements of it. The problem with central banking is that it reacts to a system that has been mismanaged by rewarding the managers. That is why objections to central banking, although they can come from the right (Ron Paul, Jim Bunning) or the left (Barney Frank, William Greider), tend to be populist. Bagehot was no populist. He was comfortable with the idea that what some people think should be more important than what other people think:
Although he would surely fault Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson for many things, the criticism most often heard at present--that Paulson is too close to former colleagues on Wall Street, where he worked for years as CEO of Goldman Sachs--would strike Bagehot as misplaced. Because it is on Wall Street, alas, that "the state of credit" is to be determined:
To be blunt, credit is successfully reestablished when financial elites say, "When." Credit is close to a synonym for the mood of the ruling class. To say an economy is based on credit is to say it is based on animal mysteries. Glamour, prestige, élan, sprezzatura, cutting a figure . . . that is what the economy is made of. It is a rather terrifying thought. Viewed as Bagehot viewed it, from the perspective of a central bank in a crisis, an advanced economy looks an awful lot like a primitive economy." |
"Loyal readers, please take a moment to check out Gretchen Morgenson’s column this week. She’s taken a close look at the buyout of Bear Stearns organized by the Federal Reserve, and she has come to an intriguing conclusion: that the Fed not only wanted to prevent financial havoc - it also wanted to deter speculators who were betting on big banks to fail.
Adherents of the Walter Bagehot school of central banking - and I have been among them at times - have cried foul at the sight of big bailouts and the granting of emergency credit at low interest rates. The Bagehot argument is that emergencies that arise from the risks that banks have chosen to take should not be treated with overwhelming sympathy. Emergency credit should be offered, yes, but at rates that will make banks think twice about using the safety net again. That’s not the case this time around (neither in the United States nor in Britain, and probably not in Europe either by the time the folks in Brussels are finished), so the central banks may be telling financial institutions that they can take silly risks without fear of disaster.
But if Morgenson is right, there is a long-term purpose here, too: to reduce the winnings of those who bet on failure, and thus to reduce the incentives to bring that failure to pass. And let’s face it, the speculators aren’t operating in a vacuum; their bets can start to snowball with market sentiment, as they did against Lehman Brothers last week. Still, the Bagehot argument (often called moral hazard) is also a powerful one - which one do you agree with?"
Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, who has read his Bagehot and kept a copy in his Princeton office when he was a professor, responded to recent developments first by pumping money into the markets through the New York Fed’s open-market operations and then last week by easing the terms on loans to banks from the Fed’s discount window.
Bagehot (pictured at right) still makes for good reading at times like this.
“What is wanted and what is necessary to stop a panic is to diffuse the impression, that though money may be dear, still money is to be had. If people could be really convinced that they could have money if they wait a day or two, and that utter ruin is not coming, most likely they would cease to run in such a mad way for money. Either shut the Bank at once, and say it will not lend more than it commonly lends, or lend freely, boldly, and so that the public may feel you mean to go on lending. To lend a great deal, and yet not give the public confidence that you will lend sufficiently and effectually, is the worst of all policies; but it is the policy now pursued.”
Robert Feldman, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist for Japan, writes in a note today that it’s key to distinguish between internal discredit — private domestic lenders retreating — and external discredit, which Bagehot defined as a foreign drain on a bank’s money. (Bagehot’s solution to the problem of external discredit is to still lend freely but “at very high rates.”) That doesn’t apply in today’s floating rate system, Feldman says, and exchange rates don’t provide a good substitute, with the dollar’s drop against the yen suggesting we have external discredit while the strengthening against the euro saying we don’t.
Feldman writes: “My view is that the modern counterpart of ‘external discredit’ is moral hazard. The credit of the U.S. IS a problem, since no one knows how big the subprime and related housing market problems really are. Given how poorly banks know their clients, the ‘high rates’ part should come into play. There is no way to re-establish confidence unless those who have made loans to questionable borrowers pay a price for rash lending. Only then will markets regain confidence that risk is under control.
“The next stage of the credit problem — and whether it affects the real economy seriously — depend on eliminating the moral hazard,” Feldman says. “The faster the moral hazard in eliminated, the less impact on the real economy.”
Fed officials are acutely aware of the moral hazard, having resisted action for weeks to not be seen as bailing out risky investments. But they also don’t want a crisis to feed on itself. The Fed stressed its statement, in lowering the discount rate for banks, that it would accept “a broad range of collateral…including home mortgages and related assets.” The central bank sought to reassure a market that had been roiled by risky investments in subprime mortgages.
That’s how the Bank of England halted a panic in 1825, as Bagehot recounts: “A panic, in a word, is a species of neuralgia, and according to the rules of science you must not starve it. The holders of the cash reserve must be ready not only to keep it for their own liabilities, but to advance it most freely for the liabilities of others. They must lend to merchants, to minor bankers, to ‘this man and that man,’ whenever the security is good. In wild periods of alarm, one failure makes many, and the best way to prevent the derivative failures is to arrest the primary failure which causes them. The way in which the panic of 1825 was stopped by advancing money has been described in so broad and graphic a way that the passage has become classical. ‘We lent it,’ said Mr. Harman, on behalf of the Bank of England, ‘by every possible means and in modes we had never adopted before; we took in stock on security, we purchased Exchequer bills, we made advances on Exchequer bills, we not only discounted outright, but we made advances on the deposit of bills of exchange to an immense amount, in short, by every possible means consistent with the safety of the Bank, and we were not on some occasions over-nice. Seeing the dreadful state in which the public were, we rendered every assistance in our power.’ After a day or two of this treatment, the entire panic subsided, and the ‘City’ was quite calm.”
"Bagehot advocated in 1873 that a Lender of Last Resort in a crisis should lend at a penalty rate to solvent but illiquid banks that have adequate collateral. The doctrine has been criticised as having no place in our modern interbank market, but this is wrong. Bagehot’s prescription aims to eliminate the coordination problem of investors at the base of the crisis. It is still a useful guide for action when the interbank market stalls.1 It makes clear that discount-window lending to entities in need may be necessary in a crisis.
Bagehot's doctrine, however, is easy to state and hard to apply. It requires the central bank to distinguish between institutions that are insolvent and those that are merely illiquid. It also requires them to assess the collateral offered. Central banks, because of information limitations, are bound to make mistakes, losing face and money in the process. This doesn’t mean they should not try.
Poor collateral versus massive liquidity
The collateral should be valued under “normal circumstances”, that is, in a situation where the coordination failure of investors does not occur. This involves a judgment call in which the central bank values the illiquid assets. A central bank that only takes high quality collateral will be safe, but will have to inject much more liquidity and/or set lower interest rates to stabilise the market. This may fuel future speculative behavior. Some of this may have happened in the Greenspan era, in the aftermath of the crisis in Russia and LTCM, and after the crash of the technological bubble. The ECB and the Federal Reserve have accepted now partially illiquid collateral that the market would not. This seems appropriate and releases pressure to lower interest rates to solve the problem, something that should be done only if there are signs of deterioration in the real economy. The problem is that central banks are extending the lender of last resort facility outside the realm of traditional banks to entities, like Bear Stearns, that they do not supervise and, therefore, over which they do not have first hand information. How does the Fed know whether Bear Stearns or other similar institutions are solvent? It seems that the Fed is not following Bagehot’s doctrine here.
Finally, if banks and investors are bailed out now, why should they be careful next time? This is the moral hazard problem: help to the market that is optimal once the crisis starts has perverse effects in the incentives of market players at the investment stage. The issue is that only when the moral hazard problem is moderate does it pay to eliminate completely the coordination failure of investors with central bank help. When the moral hazard problem is severe, a certain degree of coordination failure of investors - that is, allowing some crises - is optimal to maintain discipline when investing and, amending Bagehot, some barely solvent institutions should not be helped."
To repeat Bagehot's Rule: "very large (domestic) loans at very high rates are the best remedy for the worst malady of the money market when a foreign drain is added to a domestic drain." The Fed, and the U.S. government more generally, have so far got it only half right."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_56/ai_55015114/pg_6"In a number of recent blog contributions, we have sketched the role of a modern central bank as ‘market maker of last resort’ (MMLR). This MMLR is the analogue, in a world where intermediation is increasingly through financial markets, to Bagehot’s lender of last resort (LOLR) in a world where most intermediation took place through banks (see e.g. Willem H. Buiter and Anne C. Sibert “The Central Bank as the Market Maker of last Resort: From lender of last resort to market maker of last resort"; Willem H. Buiter “Central banks as market makers of last resort, again”; Willem H. Buiter and Anne C. Sibert “A missed opportunity for the Fed”).
The market maker of last resort function can be fulfilled in two ways. First, the central bank can make outright purchases and sales of a wider range of securities than they currently do. Second, central banks can accept a wider range of securities as collateral in repos, and in collateralised loans and advances at the discount window than they currently do. Following Bagehot’s rule, the MMLR should buy these securities outright or accept them as collateral only on terms that would imply a stiff financial penalty to the owner. The central bank of course already applies a liquidity ‘haircut’ even to liquid instruments offered as collateral in repos or at the discount window. Because the MMLR would have to establish a buying price ‘in the dark’, that is, unaided by recent relevant market prices, and would inevitably take on much more credit risk than central banks have become accustomed to, the ‘haircuts’ should be severe – a financial version of ‘short back and sides’.I doubt a week has gone by since last summer during which I haven't seen some pundit or other trot out Walter Bagehot's dictum that in the event of a credit crunch, the central bank should lend freely at a penalty rate. More often than not, this is contrasted with the actions of the Federal Reserve, which seems to be lending freely at very low interest rates.
Ben Bernanke, in a speech today, addressed this criticism directly:
What are the terms at which the central bank should lend freely? Bagehot argues that "these loans should only be made at a very high rate of interest". Some modern commentators have rationalized Bagehot's dictum to lend at a high or "penalty" rate as a way to mitigate moral hazard--that is, to help maintain incentives for private-sector banks to provide for adequate liquidity in advance of any crisis. I will return to the issue of moral hazard later. But it is worth pointing out briefly that, in fact, the risk of moral hazard did not appear to be Bagehot's principal motivation for recommending a high rate; rather, he saw it as a tool to dissuade unnecessary borrowing and thus to help protect the Bank of England's own finite store of liquid assets. Today, potential limitations on the central bank's lending capacity are not nearly so pressing an issue as in Bagehot's time, when the central bank's ability to provide liquidity was far more tenuous.
I'm no expert on Walter Bagehot, and in fact I admit I've never read Lombard Street. But I'll trust in Bernanke as an economic historian on this one, unless and until someone else makes a persuasive case that Bagehot's penalty rate really was designed to punish the feckless rather than just to preserve the Bank of England's limited liquidity."
"So, we have, what I will call "Grant's Graham For Investing":
1) Decent Size
2) Current Assets Exceed Liabilities By Two Times
3) 10 Continuous Years Of Profit
4) 20 Continuous Years Of Dividends
5) 10 Years Of Earnings Growth Exceeding 33%
6) Price To Earnings Ratio Less Than 15
7 ) Price To Book Ratio Less Than 1.5"The Government will succumb and will lend taxpayers' money to non-financial companies.
In a way, there's no choice, because we'll be hobbled for years as an economy if our few remaining manufacturers and exporters are wiped out."
"Trader's Narrative's Due Diligence":
"The process of investigation undertaken by an party to gather material information on actual or potential risks involved in a financial transaction or relationship."
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Isn't the fact that the Flight to Safety necessitated losses when the economy reversed course understood? Surely they knew that it was a hedge against deflation, but that deflation was the one thing that everyone feared and the fight against it would be substantial. I guess what I'm saying is that they don't want to lose money on treasuries, but they want to US economy to strengthen as well, which seem contradictory goals, unless, again, you see the Flight to Safety as a hedge.
Frankly, the fact that there is a focal point for the Flight to Safety might end up being good, as it acted as a kind of LOLR for the world. I'm not sure yet that countries won't want to keep that burden, if you will, on the US, but time will tell.