Neat

I am quoting the Mises blog as is-

“Who is Andrew Beal?”

If you don’t know then be sure to read Forbes fantastic overview of the maverick banker who saw and timed the current banking implosion.

Too many nuggets to quote, read the whole thing.

Scaling new heights

The Times of India has set a new standard as far as pragmatism goes. Just when you think they have extinguished all possible avenues, they manage to invent new ones. This is today’s edit-

Switzerland has long been a secret treasure chest for much of the world’s offshore wealth. Its banks including financial giants UBS and Credit Suisse offer clients privacy and personalised service. But the discretion it treats as brand value is also associated with suspicious opacity. Swiss banks have a point in saying their contracts with clients are based on the promise of privacy. So, disclosures-on-demand are a breach of trust, so important in their trade. But client confidentiality is valid only so far as account-holders’ assets accrue from legitimate activity. That indulgence can hardly be extended to law-breakers seeking tax havens or places to park illegal assets.

Nor should confidentiality mean stonewalling of regulatory scrutiny into tax fraud, diversion of embezzled funds, money laundering and other illicit activity.

[...]

By fetishising banking secrecy, Switzerland runs the risk of appearing to side with the bad guys. Banks should maintain secrecy as required by professional norms but also consent to providing client data to regulatory authorities or criminal investigators. That may be the way out of this impasse.

When principles becomes fetishes, anything goes.

Throughout history, governments have been the biggest murderers, rapists and law breakers, ever, and have killed, raped and plundered more people than all the criminals in the world put together. And, therefore, any case of “regulation” should be taken with more than a pinch of salt. Should banks like UBS provide information only to countries like the US and India, or should they also “comply” with the regulations of countries like Zimbabwe. If Mugabe imposes 100% wealth and income taxes on all “rich” people (don’t know if he has) and they rush to keep their money in Swiss banks, should a UBS then be accused of “fetishising” secrecy?

Philosophically, taxation as practiced in the world today is similar to highway robbery; in both cases a gun is held to your head and you are asked to pay up or face the “consequences.” Indira Gandhi once had a 97.5% marginal income tax rate – if you earned more than (middle class) subsistence level incomes, you essentially had to hand the entire amount over to the government. The stupidity ended years later, and it was during Chidambaram’s dream budget and the grudging acknowledgment of the “Laffer curve” phenomenon that the present day 30% marginal rate (excluding various surcharges and cesses) came into being. Governments have no moral right to impose any kind of taxes, or demand that citizens report all their activities – financial or otherwise – to them. The “transparency” they seek is because such “tax havens” prevent them from engaging in egalitarian wealth “redistribution.” No wonder people make heavy use of every loophole available in tax laws as also destinations like Switzerland and the Cayman Islands. Why do you think accountants and tax lawyers exist and earn handsome fees? Further, as far as I am concerned, terrorism is a bogey that governments are using to eliminate the few liberties that individuals have left. If banking secrecy “enables” terrorism, so does the internet, telephones, letters, homing pigeons, government bureaucrats, and politicians. Why not reverse the presumption of innocence principle on all of them?

The Times probably knows its audience – most people will simply drink in everything it writes, and the politicians will politely acknowledge its presence, but a lot of people do exist who have memories that last beyond today’s edition. And that is why today’s edit comes as a surprise. If you remember, the Times Group was once a victim of the dreaded Enforcement Directorate (they picked up the name from the KGB it seems) that falls under the Ministry of Finance. The case dates back to 1997, the finance minister was – Chidambaram – and the victim was Ashok Jain, the father of the present owners of the group; swiss banks and foreign exchange regulation violations were involved. Read this article for a summary of what happened, and try this google search if you want to know more. The poor man died after the ED hounded him for more than a year. The bureaucrats who did the hounding were later arrested on charges of extortion and blackmail-

In his three-year stint at the ED, Aggarwal allegedly intimidated a swathe of bigwigs. Some of his cases in which harassment charges have surfaced include Ashok Jain. The late chairman of Bennett, Coleman and Co. Ltd, publishers of The Times of India Group of newspapers, Jain fell victim to Aggarwal’s ploy after an ed raid on his house in January 1997 in which some visiting cards of Swiss bankers were found. Using it as the trump card, Aggarwal hounded Jain, a heart patient, for two years, with summons and threats, until the press baron had a fatal cardiac failure.

For anyone who is familiar with the workings of the normal face of the MoF, the Income Tax department – if you are just a salaried person filing your tax returns, you don’t know how it works – this is not a surprise. They can slaughter you – make you pay though the nose even if you are not at fault. And the same is true in the US.

Did the Times suffer from amnesia when it wrote this edit? It probably did. But then, these are dangerous times when dissent is equated with crime. So, maybe, amnesia is a good idea.

He said, she said

In response to Jacob Weisberg’s column in Slate magazine (one which I have already commented on), Peter Klein of Organizations and Markets refers to a WSJ article by Charles Calomiris; Calomiris writes that Basel norms, and not deregulation, should be blamed for the credit crisis-

It’s grind-your-favorite-axe day on the network news shows. The financial crisis is all the fault of dreaded “deregulation,” shout some pundits; others blame the “small government” mentality of the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress.
[...]
[S]ubprime lending, securitization and dealing in swaps were all activities that banks and other financial institutions have had the ability to engage in all along. There is no connection between any of these and deregulation. On the contrary, it was the ever-growing Basel Committee rules for measuring bank risk and allocating capital to absorb that risk (just try reading the Basel standards if you don’t believe me) that failed miserably. The Basel rules outsourced the measurement of risk to ratings agencies or to the modelers within the banks themselves. Incentives were not properly aligned, as those that measured risk profited from underestimating it and earned large fees for doing so.

That ineffectual, Rube Goldberg apparatus was, of course, the direct result of the politicization of prudential regulation by the Basel Committee, which was itself the direct consequence of pursuing “international coordination” among countries, which produced rules that work politically but not economically. International cooperation, in case you haven’t heard, is exactly what the French and the Germans now say was missing in the past few years.

So why blame deregulation and small government? The social psychologist Gustav Jahoda says that unreasonable beliefs often arise in circumstances where people lack control and need to believe in something to get them through a highly stressful situation. And a fellow named Machiavelli might help us to understand a different reason for simplistic explanations.

So, Greenspan ran a loose monetary policy. Banks and mortgage companies slush with cheap funds lent it out to people who couldn’t afford to repay them; they packaged the mortgages, securitized them and sold them as MBS (mortgage backed securities); most sold the mortgages off to Mae and Mac who issued their own MBS. People who bought them used CDS (credit default swaps) to insure against the risk of default; AIG underwrote many CDS contracts; so did many other financial institutions. The housing loan defaults triggered a fall in the value of MBS, a corresponding re-rating of various financial institutions and a panic in the CDS market on whether the contracts would be met; Mae and Mac had to be nationalized because their securities were “implicitly” guaranteed by the US government. Banks no longer knew whom to trust and whom not to; the fall in the value of MBS cleaned out most balance sheets; and the credit market came to a grinding halt. This is what I can make out of everything I have read until now.

So who are to blame here?

1. The Fed under Greenspan for its “bad” monetary policy (no one seemed to mind it when the going was good though).
2. Mortgage companies who loaned out money cheaply knowing they could palm the loans off to Mae and Mac (“housing for all”).
3. The government for having created Mae and Mac and thus granting incentives for bad practices.
4. Financial institutions that played around with derivatives without understanding the risk involved.
5. Credit rating agencies that granted AAA ratings without measuring the risk.
6. Politicians who touted Basel and its risk measurement models as some kind of panacea and who forced it on to banks.

Should deregulation or lack of regulation be blamed? In the socialist universe, yes; because their ideology allows for massive government failure and abdication of responsibility, but not “market failure”. Monetary policy ills are acceptable to them (1); socialism in housing is acceptable (3), but profiteering is not (2); financial institutions endangering the economy – not acceptable (4); (5) and (6) – don’t ask.

This is why they blame a deregulated derivatives market and profiteering, and want controls placed on them. And no argument to the contrary will move them. Donkeys will learn Latin before pragmatists learn economics. Libertarians are “intellectually immature”. Indeed.

Crisis

There are two sides to the current crisis that has enveloped the financial world – a crisis of liquidity and a crisis of credit. The liquidity crisis resulted from lack of immediate access to funds to meet liabilities that were due yesterday; the credit crisis resulted from large scale defaults on low quality home loans.

Liquidity
There is one cardinal rule when it comes to finance – never use short term funds to fund long term assets. And businesses that have their feet on the ground understand this – the manufacturer, the retailer, the service provider (their primary assets are people, but still). Everyone in fact, except most of the banking and financial sector. Why is the rule so important (although the names are self explanatory, an explanation will do no harm)?

Short term funds – loans – need to be paid back within a short period of time (the normal classification is anything that is payable within one year is “short term” and everything else – “long term”). So you should only use it to create assets that can be liquidized on demand or within a short period of time. Long term funds, on the other hand – whether your own money or money that is borrowed – is repayable or available to you over a significantly longer time frame. So, if an investment has to go into construction of a building, or buying machinery, or doing similar stuff, care needs to be taken that you are not obliged to return the entire money whenever the lender demands it. This requires that you either embark on the project on the strength of your own equity, or on the basis of a long term loan where the lender cannot demand that you pay up the entire money at once – something that cannot be done because all your funds are locked in a long term venture. The asset classification may vary depending on the business, but the classification still exists. And when someone fails to follow the rule, they end up with a “liquidity crisis”.

Every business more-or-less understands and follows this rule – that is why they differentiate between fixed assets and current assets; equity and long term funds, and current liabilities. And that is why they have a concept of working capital – the difference between current assets and current liabilities, a difference that is generally positive and which is therefore funded either through equity or through special funding in the form of cash credit facilities from banks. Every finance professional worth his salt knows about it, and the bankers even more so (but only when it comes to their debtors) – they will have a fit if you tell them you have a negative working capital – that you are funding your fixed assets from money payable to creditors or from your cash credit facility.

The problem in such a case does not result from the quality of assets – the business is still solvent, but from a mismatch in the time taken to liquidate an asset and the time when a liability needs to be repaid. It is a kind of asset-liability mismatch – a time-based one.

Banks, however, believe that they are exempt from this rule – that they can use demand deposits and lend the money for 10-20-30-year periods. Consider how your average bank operates. They accept “deposits payable on demand” – whether in the form of balances in a current account, or savings account, or a “fixed deposit” – the interest rate offered decided by the rules that govern each account; and they lend the money to businesses and individuals for long term uses. This is a serious mismatch and a disaster waiting to happen – a consequence of the “fractional reserve system” that banks follow, and the only reason banks can get away with this is because of an implicit government guarantee in the form of support from the Central Bank. If, for example, the Federal Reserve and similar central banks across the world were to be dissolved, modern banking will be history by next weekend. But the Central Bank and so called Deposit Insurance Corporations mask the perpetual liquidity crisis by guaranteeing enough funds in case of a bank run one one hand, and if a bank fails because it has to engage in a fire sale of its assets, guaranteeing a minimum amount that would be paid to every deposit holder. If you want to compare this with something you can relate to, think about the overbooking that hotels and airlines indulge in. The only difference is they don’t go bust when the chickens come home to roost – their business model does not depend on a balancing act.

Hence, fractional reserve banking, central banks and deposit insurance corporations are “solutions in search of a problem”, and these solutions fail when the problem raises its ugly head. The answer to this is full reserve banking and stripping government of its “monetary policy” making authority. Banks have to keep at hand a sum equivalent to all demand deposits they are liable for. The only money they can lend is that which they receive specifically for such a purpose. This system will raise the cost of banking, but will eliminate the need for central institutions controlling banks. A beneficial effect of this will be the elimination of inflation – a pernicious side-effect of government control on money supply.

Credit
Credit is a much simpler concept. When a prospective borrower meets a lender, in a free market, the lender will lend only if he is reasonably sure that he will get his money back. If the borrower defaults, the lender loses his money. And interest is the reward that the lender gets in return for taking this risk. So the whole system will work as long as people keep paying up the loans that they borrowed, and the scale of operations of banks and companies help them absorb the few losses that are inevitable when lending is done on a large scale.

The problem appears when lenders don’t pay attention to the risk profile of their borrower, either because of their increased risk appetite, or because they are forced by government to grant loans so that people can buy homes. Even in this case, when multiple defaults occur in a particular category of borrowers, as long as the loans are present on the books of the original lender, it is the one who would take the hit, and in a worst case scenario, it would go bankrupt.

The Current Crisis
In the present “credit crisis”, banks and other financial institutions threw caution to the winds, put their loans in a single basket and sold the basket in pieces to other companies who piled up even more complex financial instruments on top of them and sold them to another series of buyers. A pyramid was built on a fragile foundation, and the foundation collapsed when people who were granted loans way above their repayment abilities started defaulting. The shock wave was felt throughout the system and most banks and credit rating agencies realized that they had no idea of what they were holding and how to measure its risk or value-

ONE of the fastest-growing and most lucrative businesses on Wall Street in the past decade has been in derivatives — a sector that boomed after the near collapse of Long-Term Capital.

It is a stealth market that relies on trades conducted by phone between Wall Street dealer desks, away from open securities exchanges. How much changes hands or who holds what is ultimately unknown to analysts, investors and regulators.

Credit rating agencies, which banks paid to grade some of the new products, slapped high ratings on many of them, despite having only a loose familiarity with the quality of the assets behind these instruments.

Even the people running Wall Street firms didn’t really understand what they were buying and selling, says Byron Wien, a 40-year veteran of the stock market who is now the chief investment strategist of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund.

“These are ordinary folks who know a spreadsheet, but they are not steeped in the sophistication of these kind of models,” Mr. Wien says. “You put a lot of equations in front of them with little Greek letters on their sides, and they won’t know what they’re looking at.”

Mr. Blinder, the former Fed vice chairman, holds a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. but says he has only a “modest understanding” of complex derivatives. “I know the basic understanding of how they work,” he said, “but if you presented me with one and asked me to put a market value on it, I’d be guessing.”

Such uncertainty led some to single out derivatives for greater scrutiny and caution. Most famous, perhaps, was Warren E. Buffett, the legendary investor and chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, who in 2003 said derivatives were potential “weapons of mass destruction.”

And the market for these financial instruments vanished overnight leaving financial jargon like “mark-to-market” meaningless. As a reader of The Telegraph points out – “You can’t mark to a market that doesn’t exist.”

Most companies would have suffered losses but could still make it through if they did not suffer from a “liquidity crisis”, like AIG found out – even while being solvent – just – it had no money available to pay off creditors who demanded additional collateral. When Bear Stearns was being rescued in March 2008, this is what I said-

If the subprime mortgage crisis, and the Federal Reserve coming in with a huge bailout package for affected banks was bad idea, the Bear Stearns distress sale, underwritten by the Federal Reserve is worse. Conventional wisdom, and most pink papers, favors bailouts so that the overall banking system remains unscathed by such crises. But the fact of the matter is, bailouts fix the symptoms, not the cause. The main problem hardcore capitalists and libertarians (at least I do) have with bailouts is that those responsible for the mess don’t pay a financial price. If the tax payer has to pay for the financial jugglery done by employees of investment and commercial banks, and if the only thing that prevents people from losing their trust in banks is the backing of the government in the guise of the infallible Federal Reserve with an infinite credit rating, then a private banking sector makes no sense. In that case, nationalizing all banks should be the way to go.

There is a hint of sarcasm if you read a bit further, but my position is clear, and I stand by it. The crisis is a result of persistent government interference in the market, and the market failing to understand risk. And hence shareholders, bond holders, everyone who has invested in companies that took bad decisions should pay the penalty and take a hit. If they are not willing to do that, then the answer is not a bailout but a 100 % nationalization of the entire US banking and insurance sector. If companies don’t appreciate the free market but seek handouts on every available opportunity, socialism is what they deserve. And Bush can learn valuable lessons from Indira Gandhi on this one.