New studies from the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank show that, whatever else, a recovery in the economy is not being supported by a resumption in bank lending, raising concerns about how exactly growth will become self-sustaining when official stimulus ebbs.

The ECB last week released its loan survey showing banks tightened credit yet again for businesses and consumers, though at a less severe rate than in the previous quarter. Much was made of the fact that banks said they expected to ease terms to businesses, but not individuals, slightly in the last three months of the year.

Days later the Fed was out with its own survey, and again the news is getting worse more slowly, which must mean it is time to pop open the tap water. Banks are tightening terms and conditions to large firms, though fewer are doing so than before. Of course we should be thankful for small mercies, but the fact remains that this is a relative rather than an absolute survey, which means that even if fewer are being tougher the vast majority are being just as tight with money as they were three months ago when things were very tight indeed.

But wait, I can almost hear you ask, banks are making money again. If not making loans, what are they doing with it? Funny you should ask, they are lending it to the government. According to Fed data October marked the first time in years that banks held the same amount in Treasuries and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds as they did in commercial and industrial loans. Business loans have plunged 18 percent in a year, while Treasury and agency bonds are up 8 percent.

Banks are choosing to lend to the government and to government-backstopped mortgage firms because they see it as the best way to survive: hunker down, take fewer risks and content yourself with the thin gruel and thin margins of taking deposits and lending to the entity insuring those deposits. It’s a good way to get solvent but it will take a terribly long time.

Falling demand for credit is a factor too. Firms are concentrating on expanding margins by cutting back on costs, rather than positioning themselves for an upswing in demand. That means they want fewer loans to support capital expenditure. It also sadly means that they are not yet hiring.

OF JOB GROWTH AND SMALL FIRMS

The question becomes will the loans be there when companies do decide that it is time to tool up and hire again. There can be no certainty. Banks are still in pretty poor shape, more will fail and few look likely to expand.

If you believed in markets you would believe that this is simply setting the stage for new entrants to come in and make loans that the banks won’t. I’d like to believe this, but here we run into one of the terrible side effects of too-big and too-connected to fail. Who on earth wants to set themselves up in competition with government-backed firms? Some will do extremely well in making loans opportunistically to commercial real estate and industry over the next two years, but fewer than would be the case if there was a truly level playing field.

Two groups are doing reasonably well, but only because they don’t have to rely on bank credit: large credit-worthy borrowers and house buyers. Fannie and Freddie are still cranking out mortgages, and loans backed by the Federal Housing Authority have boomed. Rates are low, and though fees are high and terms tighter it has to be said that the decision to officially support the housing market by tax breaks and subsidized lending is making a difference. It may not be good policy, but it is effective poor policy.

Small firms seem to be getting particularly tough treatment; the Fed survey shows that terms, conditions, pricing and availability were all deteriorating more rapidly for the small than the large and medium-sized companies. Annaly Capital points out that while middle market firms paid only a slight premium in the loans market in 2007 and 2008, the difference between benchmark loans and middle market is now almost 6 full percentage points, meaning they pay nearly double.

A prepackaged bankruptcy for CIT Group and a chastened GE Capital will not improve things.

Two possibilities suggest themselves for how things play out. Banks may get their balance sheets in order and begin to lend again in force next year, meeting a need for investment as economic growth takes root, if indeed it does.

If demand rises and banks can’t meet it, look for more official arm-twisting, more ritual abasement by bankers called before Congress and, ultimately, more official interference in the process, probably in the form of insurance or even mandates.

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

Reuters News has charted the key events and their impact in "Times of Crisis" -- a major new multimedia production on Reuters.com. (See it here.)

We'd like to add the experiences of Reuters readers. So, if you or your family have been affected by the events of the past year then use the comments section below to share your story.

The U.S. faces a lengthening series of request from industries and interests seeking shelter under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, most of which it should dismiss out of hand.

YRC Worldwide, a large trucking company, told the Wall Street Journal it will seek $1 billion in TARP funds to help relive it of its pension obligations.

YRC said that about half of the $2 billion it will owe in pension payments over the next four years covers the costs of retirees who worked not for it but for other companies, now vanished, that are part of a multi-employer pension plan.

That’s certainly an irony but doesn’t seem to be the basis for a claim on the public purse.

YRC is not systemically important and its pension woes, presumably the result of negotiation and free agreement, must be its own responsibility.

Next up: states and municipalities.

California Treasurer Bill Lockyer has asked Tim Geithner to provide assistance under the TARP, warning of a hit to public services and infrastructure if the money is not forthcoming.

Lockyer wants the TARP to provide insurance to banks who themselves provide insurance backstopping California’s short-term borrowings. That insurance would cover the banks in the event of a default by California making the deals a surefire moneymaker for the banks.

Lockyer says that because of the credit crunch the banks are imposing too high fees for their letters of credit. That is true, but only up to a point.

The real issue is that California, because of the recession and its own decisions about taxing and spending, is not a particularly good bet.

While California is most certainly systemically important, and while keeping government spending ticking over in a recession is arguably a good thing, this plan is not the way to do it.

As proposed, it is a subsidy to California and to the banks, or in other words one subsidy too far. Like so many other of the government actions during the crisis, this short-circuits market discipline and encourages risk taking in search of private gain but with public insurance.

If the U.S. wants to bail out California, by all means do it, but take responsibility for the decision and do it directly.

– At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund. –

When foreign strategic investors were invited to take stakes in Chinese banks, the word “strategic” had a clear meaning for their hosts.

The banks were supposed to stay in for the long term, and that’s why they had the chance to buy big stakes at bargain prices. Yet many have behaved like “foreign speculative investors”, as they are now called in China — they took the cheap deal and then flipped the shares for a fast profit.

Chinese banks looked to the West for access to capital, risk management and exposure to fast growing and sexy new products. But now China no longer needs as much foreign investment.

Meanwhile some of the fancy new financial products China once craved have turned out to be toxic, and the risk management skills of the so-called teachers from the West look tarnished in the wake of the credit crunch.

The recent exodus by cash-strapped Western banks such as RBS, BofA, and UBS, all of whom sold out of Chinese banks for fat profits, has left behind a sour taste.

LAST OF THE BIG 5

Beijing should reflect on this as it prepares the last of the big 5 state-owned lenders to go public. Does the Bank of Agriculture really need strategic investors at all?

And if so, should it exclude local strategic investors, as the other Chinese banks did, in the name of attracting foreign capital and expertise?

There are strong arguments for changing tack. If foreign banks haven’t really delivered the goods, there is little point in bending over backwards to secure their involvement, especially when only a handful of Western banks can afford a substantial investment in AgBank.

With assets of 7 trillion yuan ($1 trillion) it is the second largest bank in China. It would therefore make sense to open the door for domestic companies to bid for Agbank’s shares.

There would be no shortage of interest. Chinese financial institutions have some of the strongest balance sheets in the world and are eager to find new investment targets.

Domestic commercial banks are unlikely to get a stake at AgBank for competition reasons, but China Investment Corp. (CIC), the Social Security Fund and China Life could be interested.

CIC already owns half of AgBank through Central Huijin, its wholly-owned subsidiary. While it would not necessarily bring AgBank much in terms of banking technology or risk management, an investment would allow China to use its reserves to fund domestic investment.

China Life, on the other hand, could be an partner as well as an investor. Chinese banks have become a vital distributor of insurance policies. AgBank can help China Life tap into a market of 700 million farmers, equal to twice the U.S. population.

Chinese financial firms all have ambitions to become financial conglomerates, and a strategic investment will help China Life, and probably AgBank too, get closer to that goal.

Of course, just because you stop favoring foreign investors doesn’t mean you should start favoring the locals. The right answer is to favor no-one.

That would allow real price competition for the shares, meaning that the most likely winners would be those institutions that most valued the relationship. Moreover, a proper competition would not leave too much money on the table and would be fair for future common investors.

OLD THINKING

That said, the powers that be still seem to be hung up on old thinking. Despite the credit crunch, Western banks are still regarded as superior by many in China. Xiang Junbo, the chairman of AgBank, said in a recent interview with Asian Banker that he still believed foreign strategic investors would bring “advanced concepts, risk management models and microfinance experiences.”

Yet it is far from clear that sophisticated Western institutions have that much to teach AgBank, which is dealing with a large, relatively poor clientele. For instance, if AgBank really wants to learn about microfinance, it would probably do better to engage microfinance pioneer and Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus as a consultant rather than, say, to bring in the French bank, Credit Agricole, as a shareholder.

To use a Chinese idiom — Chinese banks and their foreign strategic investors have been sleeping in the same bed but dreaming differently. The Chinese hoped to learn from the Westerners but never fully trusted them, while the Westerners planned to use the partnership to build their own franchise in China. The credit crunch has merely laid bare these differences.

TIGHTER SELECTION CRITERIA

Facing the backlash against foreign investors, Xiang said he would tighten the selection criteria applied to foreign investors, probably extending the lock-up period from three to six years. Foreign bidders for a stake in AgBank must be financially strong, and be experienced in agriculture, rural area business and microfinance loan extension, he said.

This has effectively weeded out almost all Western interest, leaving China with limited negotiating power — surely another argument for widening the net to domestic bidders.

AgBank does not need a foreign sugar daddy to get its IPO away. True, it has traditionally been the weakest among the big five state-owned banks for a good reason: AgBank shoulders a social responsibility to lend to the largest disadvantaged group in the world. But as the success of microfinance in Bangladesh has demonstrated, lending to the rural poor can be a lucrative business if it is done well.

AgBank reckons that the profit of lending 1 billion yuan in rural areas is equal to lending 1.6 billion in urban areas, because it can command a higher interest rate.

China is focusing on boosting rural demand, and AgBank can benefit from this process. The land reform will give the rural population more rights over the land.

As this happens they will be able to borrow more money using land as a collateral — something that should boost lending. That is a good story to tell public investors. Gone are the days that Chinese lenders need a foreign label to help sell shares. The AgBank IPO is a chance to drive home this point.

By Margaret Doyle

Barclays has avoided the dead hand of state shareholding and, on Thursday’s evidence, it looks as though it will escape completely.

Barclays Capital has enjoyed a storming first quarter — so good it is hard to see it being sustained — which has allowed the bank to make more big write-downs and still report a 15 percent increase in pre-tax profit.

The key question is whether its provisions against so-called level 3 (hard to value) assets are sufficient.

On the face of it, they do not appear to be, because they have provided for a write-down of 24 percent on an alphabet soup of American junk assets. That compares to a write-down of 75 percent taken on a bunch of similar assets by Societe Generale, which unveiled an unexpected first-quarter loss.

Both bought insurance against a deterioration in the value of these assets, in Barclays’ case, 27 billion pounds-worth, from “monoline” insurers.

Analysts have questioned the value of such insurance, as the survival of the monolines themselves has been called into question. Barclays’ defence is straightforward: it says the likelihood of being hit by both a default on the underlying asset and on the insurer is very low. And it is taking more write-downs with each quarter’s results.

But are these haircuts just big enough to be comfortably covered by Barclays’ profits? Is it simply trying to earn its way out of the credit crunch?

It is, of course, in Barclays interests to play a long game. It gave Middle Eastern state investors great terms on a capital injection last autumn in order to avoid having Her Majesty’s Government on the share register.

I-shares, only recently considered to be a core asset, was also ditched in order to help it pass a British stress test. Had it failed, it would have had to buy insurance on punitive terms from the government.

Shareholders have bought the story. The stock price has risen six-fold from its January low. Whether it will continue to rise depends on whether BarCap can continue to turn in profits faster than its American junk goes bad.

Gamefully opening the discourse is Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and President of the World Economic Forum.

If you’ve got suggestions for Klaus then use the comments section below.

The international system of bank regulation, epitomised by the Basle II process and the light-touch principles-based regulation of Britain’s Financial Services Authority (FSA) has comprehensively failed.

In too many instances, light-touch principles-based regulation with an emphasis on banks’ internal risk controls turned out to be no effective regulation at all.

Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was the most prominent proponent of this approach, which relied on the profit-maximising self interest of financial institutions to limit risk-taking to prudent levels.

In this view, bank leaders themselves could be relied upon to manage their institutions prudently — after all bankruptcy is not in the interest of shareholders. Previous bank failures (such as Barings) were the result of failure to measure risks properly, or failures of internal communication and control.

So the job of regulators was to set out principles and ensure banking institutions had adequate internal systems and controls, then allow senior management to ensure the overall level of risk was prudent.

This reliance on internal risk-management systems has proved to be a huge error. As Greenspan himself noted recently, bank leaders had not acted in the careful manner he had expected when he pushed for them to be freed from the old, more restrictive regime.

As a result, credit control will be much more intrusive in future. As noted in a companion column, there is renewed interest in some form of overall credit policy to limit the quantity of credit (and debt) within the economy and ensure it is consistent with macroeconomic stability.

But intensive contra-cyclical credit controls will only work if they are imposed on a broad range of institutions and on a worldwide basis — otherwise the banking system will arbitrage between regulators, and business will be booked in the jurisdiction with the “lightest touch”.

This is precisely what happened in the last decade, when the FSA, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in the United States, arguably led a race to the bottom among regulators to offer the most generous regime in the hope of creating a competitive advantage for their home jurisdiction and winning more business.

So any new credit control instruments will need to be implemented on a multilateral basis and agreed through the Basle Committee on Banking Supervision, in tandem with the Madrid-based International Organisation of Securities Commissions (IOSCO).

The Basle Committee’s updated Capital Accord (Basle II) has already been rendered moot even before it has been fully implemented. Basle II’s decision to allow banks to rely on their own complex internal risk control systems when judging how much regulatory capital they need to hold now looks quaint. Of the three pillars in Basle II — (1) capital requirements, (2) supervisory review, and (3) market discipline — the third now looks wholly outdated, and elements of the first and second need substantial re-working.

Some form of Basle III will be needed to buttress the contra-cyclical credit instruments which national regulators and central banks will deploy to manage the credit cycle and limit debt to GDP ratios to more safe levels.

Basle III needs to settle on an agreed range of credit instruments and credit-creating institutions that will be subject to regulation, how regulation will be applied on a counter-cyclical basis, the respective roles of supervisors and bank management, and how to ensure against regulatory arbitrage.

BANK REGULATION AND MONETARY POLICY
The failure of Basle II process bank regulation at multilateral level has been matched by failure among national regulators. The events of the last 18 months have demonstrated that a credit-fuelled banking crisis cannot be contained within the financial sector and has potential to destabilise the rest of the economy severely. Credit policy is a matter of macroeconomic strategy, not just financial regulation.

If credit expansion has the potential to destabilise the real economy, and the liabilities of much or all of the financial system are contingent liabilities of the central bank and the finance ministry as lenders of last resort, then the quantitative control of credit is arguably too important to be left to a financial regulator, such as the FSA or the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS).

Quantitative credit control needs to be brought within the remit of the central bank, so that credit expansion can be adjusted in tandem with interest rates (and indirectly in response to changes in government fiscal policy) to ensure internal, external and financial balance simultaneously.

While banking regulators may still have a “tactical” role in supervising prudential management and risk controls within individual institutions, the “strategic” role of limiting credit extension across the financial system as a whole to a safe level is too important, and properly belongs to the macroeconomic managers at the central bank.

Recent regulatory trends have seen institutional responsibility for financial regulation dispersed across multiple institutions, and separated from monetary policy at the central bank. This trend may now have to be reversed.

A more consolidated and intensive approach appears inevitable. Proposals to combine the various US regulators or at least to give the Fed over-arching responsibility as a super-regulator for the financial system have received widespread support, though the details of institutional reform have yet to be agreed.

In the United Kingdom, the wisdom of separating financial regulation from the Bank of England and passing responsibility to the FSA is increasingly questioned. The need for a lender of last resort support to a wide range of institutions, and the macroeconomic consequences of a widespread debt crisis, have pushed the Bank of England back into the heart of financial regulation.

If a new instrument for controlling the quantity of credit is eventually implemented, it will probably have to be managed out of the central bank. The FSA may retain responsibility for the prudential supervision of individual banking institutions, but the overall framework of control will need to be set by the central bank.

EMERGING REFORM AGENDA
If proposals for regulatory reform are to stand any chance of being implemented, they will need to move beyond a sterile debate over market-led discipline and innovation versus stodgy heavy-handed state regulation.

They will have to recognise that collective action problems and moral hazards in the credit creation process make some form of quantitative control essential. The system needs to achieve a financial balance alongside internal balance and external balance, and for that it needs to develop a third instrument, credit policy, alongside the traditional monetary and fiscal policies.

Credit policy will need to act directly on the volume of credit created, and amount of risk, independently of its price, which is the province of interest rates and monetary policy.

It will need to be contra-cyclical and apply to a broad range of institutions to be effective.
It must be dynamic, capable of being modified as the financial system evolves and pioneers new ways to circumvent the existing controls.

It must also be applied on a multilateral basis to prevent the type of regulatory arbitrage which occurred in the late 1990s and 2000s.

The Basle Committee is the most promising forum for reaching agreement. But Basle III will need to be developed much more quickly than Basle II, which took more than a decade, has still not been implemented fully, and risks becoming a stillborn historical curiosity, a monument to an age which has passed.

That suggests Basle III should focus on a much simpler set of credit control instruments, and eschew complexity in favour of a blunter but more effective approach. Crude but effective safeguards may be preferable to interminable arguments and theoretical elegance.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s call today for a new G20 charter of principles on financial regulation  reflects an emerging consensus among policymakers that, once the immediate crisis has passed, the regulatory framework must be fundamentally redesigned.

In particular, policymakers are concerned with how to correct the basic moral hazard problem in which bankers have an incentive to extend too much credit, while private firms and households have an incentive to take on too much debt.

A consensus is emerging that the volume of credit expansion needs to be restrained and managed as a separate policy objective. This marks a sharp break with past practice — in which central banks attempted to control the cost of credit by manipulating short-term interest rates, but have increasingly left its quantity to decisions by individual banks and borrowers.

There is also something of an emerging agreement that if credit control is a separate economic objective alongside “internal balance” (output-inflation) and “external balance” (trade and capital flows) then a new instrument needs to be developed to achieve this target.

With three targets (internal balance, external balance and financial balance) Tinbergen’s Rule says there need to be three independent policy instruments — fiscal policy, monetary policy, and a distinct credit policy.

In his recent speech to the CBI Annual Dinner in the East Midlands last week, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King alluded to the need to develop a new policy instrument to achieve credit-policy objectives. He stated a strong preference it should not be interest rates. King argued rates should continue to be used to target output and inflation.

The clear implication is the “new policy instrument” referred to by King will have to be some form of direct quantitative control, so as not to interfere with interest-rate strategy, and allow the authorities to manipulate the volume of credit for any given level of interest rates.

SECOND GENERATION CONTROLS
In 1945-1975, banking crises were few, but credit was expensive and unavailable to many households and businesses. The banking system was tightly controlled and the quantity of credit was rationed through a variety of direct mechanisms (reserve requirements, intensive bank examinations, margin requirements and a host of other direct lending controls).

Most of these were dismantled during the 1980s and 1990s. They could be resurrected but this would face stiff opposition from within the industry. It would also face hostility from within the economics establishment (broadly in favour of market solutions) and among politicians (worried about the impact of reduced access to credit for many households, and voters, in the lower half of the income distribution).

Fed Vice-Chairman Don Kohn and Prof Lawrence Summers (now head of the Obama administration’s National Economic Council) both poured scorn on what they saw as a rose-tinted view of the heavy regulatory past at the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole symposium in 2005. Both men are presumably chastened by the subsequent meltdown. But their personal opposition to intensive quantitative controls is probably still intact, and shared by many policymakers at the top of the new administration, in Congress, and among the wider regulatory community.

So the search is on for a compromise. The idea is to create a new instrument or instruments that would work with the grain of the market, rather than cut against it, and enable regulators to exercise some control over the quantity of credit being extended while preserving flexibility for banks to innovate.

If the old pre-1980 quantitative controls are seen as “first generation” methods, the hunt is on for more sophisticated market-friendly “second generation” methods that promote stability while protecting growth.

The first design issue for these new quantitative controls is whether to impose them directly or indirectly.

First-generation quantitative controls were formulated within the central bank and consisted of a series of prescriptive lending ratios.

The trend in recent years has been towards a more indirect approach, in which the central bank and other regulators set out general principles and a flexible framework; banks are then free to manage their business and risk-taking within this. One key question is how far second-generation controls will build on the modern principles-based indirect approach, or revert to a more prescriptive command-and-control one.

COUNTER-CYCLICAL INSTRUMENTS
The second design issue is how to make quantitative controls “active” rather than “passive”. First-generation controls were largely specified in passive terms: fixed capital and lending ratios that were invariant over the cycle. But there is an emerging consensus second-generation controls should be more active and capable of varying over the cycle, limiting credit growth during the expansion phase, but also mitigating the collapse of credit during a contraction.

Contra-cyclical bank regulation policies are especially popular at the moment, because the industry is in the contraction phase, and contra-cyclicality implies a loosening of policy. The real challenge is to create a contra-cyclical approach that is sufficiently robust it can compel the banks to increase their capital cushions during an upturn.

One option is to impose reserve requirements or risk-weightings which rise above the long-term mean during expansions and are allowed to fall below it during the contraction phase. But that raises thorny questions of who measures the cycle and how. Dating and measuring business and credit cycles, and identifying turning points are notoriously difficult in real time.

To take a recent example: the start of the most recent expansion is controversial, with many commentators now arguing the Fed missed the beginning of the upturn and failed to raise interest rates in a timely manner. If the Fed, or another regulator, had been responsible for adjusting reserve requirements or risk-weightings, as well as interest rates, would the adjustments have been any more successful?

If relying on regulators’ discretion to identify turning points in the credit cycle is problematic, is there a way to make contra-cyclical controls endogenous to the lending system?

The aim would be to make reserve requirements, risk-weightings or other instruments depend on the volume of credit extended in the immediate past period(s). Credit controls would be progressively tightened the longer and faster credit expands, and progressively loosened the longer and further credit falls.

The problem with endogenous credit control policies (like endogenous interest rate policies) is that they do not work well around cyclical turning points.  In the summer of 2007, an endogenous contra-cyclical policy would probably still be tightening conditions in response to the explosive credit growth in 2004-H12007 rather than loosening them to forestall the calamitous collapse of credit that occurred later in the year.

INSTITUTIONAL REACH
In practice, credit is hard to define, measure and restrict. Conventional bank lending is only one element of an increasingly complex and diverse credit-creating system.

Finance companies, commodity brokers, special investment vehicles, and even hedge funds, all of which are increasingly active in wholesale money markets, may be engaging in credit-creating processes.

The question of what types of credit to control is analogous to the debate during the 1980s about what measure of the money supply to target. Moreover, Goodhart’s Law suggests any statistical or economic relationship between the chosen target measure and the wider economy will tend to break down once pressure is applied for control purposes.

In fact, as soon as the authorities decide on which forms of credit are subject to regulation and control, there is an immediate incentive to create other forms of credit in other institutions that are not subject to control and therefore more profitable. This was precisely the reason for the huge growth in the “shadow banking system” during the 1990s and 2000s.

To have any chance of being effective, the new credit policy will need to cover the whole range of institutions which create credit, not just commercial banks, and need to be applied on a fairly international basis, to prevent this sort of institutional and jurisdictional arbitrage.

Even in the good times, many British consumers were borrowing against their houses just to fund routine consumption, indicating a big hit to come for retail sales and for the banks who hold the loans.

With house prices falling rapidly and mortgage debt tougher to get, it is no surprise that homeowners are less able and inclined to borrow against their houses in order to spend.

That will be hitting the High Street now - analysts are expecting a 0.6 percent fall on the month in retail sales for November when data are released later this week. But a rise in unemployment next year could expose a really serious weakness in household finances, as consumers who counted on being able to extract wealth from their houses to smooth consumption in bad times find that, when bad times come, the wealth isn't there and the banks don't want to lend anyway.

Researchers at Durham University looking at survey data found that 37 percent of homeowners borrowed against their house between 2002 and 2005, typically realising about 6,000 pounds. That's a lot people borrowing a lot of money against very illiquid and now hard to realise assets.

Even more interesting is the pattern of what householders were doing with the money and what was happening to them when they decided to borrow. Over time the proportion of people borrowing to re-invest in their houses through improvements fell, while more was finding its way into day-to-day costs, according to Susan J. Smith, a professor at Durham and one of the authors of the study.

This was borne out by a high percentage of equity borrowers who had lost their jobs, become pregnant or had a child in the year they borrowed.

How exactly a borrower who has lost his job gets a bigger mortgage is a puzzle, but one that evidently banks and borrowers in Britain together have somehow managed to solve. The record in the United States shows that the housing boom brought with it a tremendous amount of mortgage fraud, much of it abetted by people within the lending industry.

In short, it seems that even during boom times in Britain people weren't borrowing against their houses simply to buy BMWs and fund vacations, but often to keep their households ticking over during tough times.

"The rising property market was central to encouraging people to borrow more for non housing expenditure," said Ross Walker, economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in London.  "And with the housing market now in reverse you would expect to see a retrenchment. It reinforces the potential fault line for the UK household sector: there is a big debt exposure and the real test will come next year as unemployment rises."

BORROW NOW, DEFAULT LATER
The housing safety net, such as it was, simply won't be there next year when unemployment vaults higher, which is very likely to exacerbate a spending slowdown which itself will feed unemployment. And remember, these weren't people who were defaulting on their house loans in order to be able to pay their grocery bills, but people who were in part paying their grocery bills because they could borrow against their houses.

I wouldn't want to be the bank that made those loans, or the government that insures that bank. It also goes some way, in my view, towards explaining the very precipitous fall in the pound, which is down more than 30 percent on a trade-weighted basis this year.

According to a survey of households just released by the Bank of England, credit is much harder to get as compared with a year ago. A total of 16 percent of households said they had put off spending because they were concerned about access to credit, up by a quarter from a year ago.

Only six percent of mortgage borrowers said they had taken out an additional secured loan, compared with 10 percent last year and 14 percent in 2006. Nearly 40 percent took out these loans to pay down other debts. That points to higher credit card losses and delinquencies next year, as unemployment interacts with an inability to access fresh secured loans.

So 2009 looks like it will feature higher unemployment, much reduced consumer spending, impaired access to credit and a default cycle that will worsen the already difficult capital problems of the banking sector. There has been a lot of effort and exhortation to try and keep banks lending to consumers in Britain, presumably on the view that it's best to sober up gradually.

That can only work so long, and if it comes at the expense of capital for businesses that make and sell things, especially overseas, it may in prove to be a mistake.

And while big ticket items like automobiles, which are easy to defer, are now suffering, next year may see very tough times on the British high street for more basic items.

(At the time of publication James Saft did not own any direct investments in securities mentioned in this article. He may be an owner indirectly as an investor in a fund.)

It’s time to get Russia back into proportion.

Moscow’s resurgence as a major power, determined to be treated with respect and to stamp its influence on its neighborhood, has been one of the big stories of 2008.

The sight of Russian tanks rolling into Georgia in August, coupled with a Kremlin drive to extend its control over energy supply routes to Europe, sent shivers through former Soviet satellite countries and drew loud condemnation from Washington.

President Dmitry Medvedev’s threat to site short-range missiles in Kaliningrad aimed at Poland if Warsaw deploys part of a planned U.S. missile shield raised the rhetorical stakes.

Yet the global financial crisis, the collapse of oil prices, the aftermath of the Georgia war and U.S. President-elect Barack Obama’s victory have all cast doubt on Russia’s real weight.

The credit crunch has hit Russia harder than other emerging economies, hammering confidence in its stocks, bonds and the rouble and forcing the central bank to spend some of its huge foreign currency reserves to stabilize the financial system.

Foreign portfolio investors have fled and many Russian investors have parked more of their money in foreign currency abroad, at least partly due to heightened political risk since the military action in Georgia.

State gas monopoly Gazprom (GAZP.MM: Quote, Profile, Research, Stock Buzz), feared in many parts of Europe as a predator seeking a stranglehold on the continent’s gas supply, has lost more than two-thirds of its market capitalization since May.

SHRINKING POPULATION

With oil prices down from a peak of $147 a barrel in July to below $50 now, the heavily oil-and-gas-dependent economy looks more vulnerable, especially since Russia needs Western technology to boost its energy extraction.

Alexander Shokhin, president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, says that after a 10-year boom, growth will fall to between 0 and 3 percent next year.

Russia remains a lucrative market for Western consumer goods, but concerns about state meddling in business, widespread corruption and shortcomings in the rule of law have contributed to its failure to diversify away from hydrocarbons and minerals.

Compounding the weakness of its non-energy economy, Russia’s demographics are among the worst in the world, with a life expectancy of just 67 (60 for men) and the combination of a low birth-rate, an aging population and a public health crisis.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) projects the population could shrink by nearly one-third by 2050 to 100 million from 143 million.

Diplomatically, Russia overreached itself after its lightning military victory in Georgia by recognizing the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent.

Only Nicaragua followed suit. Major allies such as China and India, fearing the precedent, pointedly declined.

The European Union, the main customer for Russian gas, has responded by accelerating efforts to reduce its dependency, planning an alternative supply corridor through Turkey and seeking new suppliers in Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.

Other former Soviet republics, including Azerbaijan, Belarus and Turkmenistan, have sought closer ties with the West.

True, the U.S.-led NATO alliance has gone no further toward giving Georgia and Ukraine a roadmap to membership — the issue is off the agenda for now — and it has now resumed some frozen contacts with Russia, as has the EU.

But Moscow’s efforts to reshape the security architecture of Europe, sidelining the role of the United States and of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, loathed by Moscow for its election monitoring, have gained little traction.

STATUS QUO POWER?

Russian analysts insist the Georgia war was a defensive action responding to pro-Western Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s bid to retake control of South Ossetia by force.

“Russia is a status quo power, not a recidivist aggressor on the prowl,” says Dmitry Trenin, head of the Moscow office of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Moscow has taken a number of steps recently to suggest it wants peaceful solutions to other “frozen conflicts” in its neighborhood, brokering the first summit talks between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and seeking a deal between Moldova and its breakaway region of Transdniestria.

In Ukraine, the biggest former Soviet republic where a democratic “Orange Revolution” in 2004 infuriated the Kremlin, Russia has other political and economic levers it can pull to maintain influence without having to use force.

Getting Russia into proportion does not mean ignoring Moscow or its security interests. Its location and the fact it supplies 40 percent of Europe’s gas imports mean it cannot be neglected.

The United States and the EU have an interest in binding Moscow rapidly into rule-based international bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the OECD, although they put both processes on hold in reprisal for the Georgia war.

Some Western analysts believe a weak Russia could be more dangerous, if mishandled, than a strong one.

In NATO circles, some see a risk of the “Weimarisation” of Russia, comparing it to Germany’s economically enfeebled Weimar Republic that was swept away by the rise of Hitler’s Nazi party.

Political humiliation and economic instability could lead to a surge of aggressive nationalism.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, wags branded Boris Yeltsin’s rump Russian Federation “Upper Volta with nukes,” capturing the paradox of a failed state with a ruined economy sitting on a huge arsenal of atomic weapons.

When Vladimir Putin succeeded Yeltsin in 2000, he was determined to restore Russia’s power and pride after a decade in which many Russians felt the West ignored their interests by expanding NATO in ex-communist eastern Europe.

Today, it sometimes seems that Russophiles and Russophobes in Europe and the United States have become objective allies in exaggerating the importance of or the threat from Moscow.

A more self-confident Europe and a less unilateralist America need to find a way of engaging with Russia according to its true weight, without treating it as a giant.