James Saft

"Confidence grows at the rate that a coconut tree grows, but confidence falls at the rate that the coconut falls," Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of India's Planning Commission, told a panel in Davos.

He also indicated that India's decision not to float its currency and to build up massive reserves was correct, noting that this gave it a cushion during the downturn.

"Floating (currencies) would be fine, if that was what was meant, but what they mean by floating is crashing upwards and crashing downwards."

John Lipsky of the IMF said the answer was a better international liquidity facility to give surplus producing nations the confidence that cash would be there if they did float and were hit by volatility.

He's right though it would have to be a very big fund indeed. But if the lesson of the last five years is that everyone should export like heck and build up reserves we are going to have a battle on our hands and a long, deep downturn.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb,  the author of  “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”, has a simple proposal to as he puts it, “save capitalism and free markets from the banks.”

Nationalise the banks, limit the rewards to those who work in what he calls the “utility” part of the system and have a completely uninsured second leg that can take all the risks it wants and lose its shirt, he said in an interview in Davos at the World Economic Forum.

“They rigged the game. We pay them for their profits, there is no clawback so their incentive is to hide the risk they are taking.”

“Which is why eventually as someone who loves free markets,  a total nationalisation of the part of the business that requires insurance and does clearing and payments needs to happen.”

“I am angry with U.S. policy. What we had is exactly the opposite of socialism, they got TARP to pay their bonuses and to take more risk.”

He describes his plan as Capitalism 2.0. It would have a barbell structure, with the insured utility-like part on one end and the free market bit with privatized risk on the other.

He describes banking bonuses as asymmetric because the banker gets the upside but does not share in the liability which ultimately may be funded by taxpayers, as we have seen.

Taleb, who as you may have noticed doesn’t mince words, is no fan of private equity.

“Private equity has absolutely no reason to exist. The private equity holder has all the upside and the banks all the downside.” He’d have no objection to a system where private equity funds itself via hedge funds, so long as neither party had any recourse to government insurance.

And a bit like an Old Testament prophet, Taleb is angry and wants those he thinks are responsible to suffer.

“I want them poor and they deserve to be poor.You can’t have capitalism without punishment.”

Oh, and another thing, he wants Bob Rubin, who trousered millions while chairman of Citigroup, to cough up.

“I want Bob Rubin to return his $110 million dollars to the American taxpayer.”

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

One of the best things about Davos is the conversations you overhear. It's like no place else.

Sitting minding my own business, typing away I became aware of a central banker from a medium sized emerging market sitting nearby. He was joined by a gentleman from a bank in his home country. After a few muffled preliminaries the central banks said:

"So, how much trouble are you in?"

The banker responded in what sounded like soothing tones but I couldn't make out exactly what he was saying. The only other line that came through clearly was that after a long speech the banker said to the central banker, with an air of exasperation.:

"The prices are very low, but there are no buyers!"

That's it, in a nutshell.

Was letting Lehman go down the biggest mistake of the crisis? Many, including George Soros in the Financial Times, have argued that letting Lehman go down sowed panic to markets, consumers and businesses.

Not so fast, says Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, in an interview in Davos:

"My position is this is a typical error of historical understanding in which a single event is blamed for much more than it can possibly have caused. You can say ‘Hank Paulson is to blame for my troubles' and if you can change one thing in the story it would have a happy ending.

It's like saying if only Princip had not shot the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 there wouldn't have been a First World War.

If you go through the events of September of last year you will find it incredibly hard to produce a counterfactual scenario in which it could have been possible to save both Merrill Lynch and Lehman. There is one bank which could be bought by Bank of America but there couldn't have been two.

This is a crisis of too much bank leverage which began in August of 2007 and indeed had it roots far before. A bank leveraged 25-1 only needs a 4 percent decline in their assets to have their equity wiped out. And the notion that saving one investment bank could somehow have prevented or mitigated the crisis is a fantasy. The problem would have happened at some point somewhere else. There is a fundamental problem of bank solvency."

Ferguson argues that without another buyer for one of the two, one would have needed to have been taken into a kind of Treasury conservatorship, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were. But those were already quasi-government and such a move would have required Congressional approval, which given that Congress turned down the first version of the TARP, was not likely.

"Historical arguments need to be based on a credible counterfactual, " Ferguson said. "Nobody has been able to tell me a credible story about how both Lehman and Merrill could have been saved. It wasn't possible."

My view is that the "Oh no, they killed Lehman" meme is just part of the denial phase of grieving. Few in financial circles wanted, or indeed want, to believe that things have changed fundamentally and that the good days won't be coming back any time soon. Blaming mom and dad is the last first refuge of the adolescent.

Jim Saft is a Reuters columnist. Any views expressed are his own.

Good session on the "Frugal American," an as yet undiscovered species that is coming to a global economy near you.

You know the general idea, a decade or so of living beyond their means, borrowing money against their rising house values to finance consumption is coming to a grinding halt. That's called a recession, but how long will this frugal thing last?

Ian Davis, the MD from consultants McKinsey & Co was blunt:

"Americans have no option but to be relatively more frugal over the next 10-20 years." This is irrespective of the crisis and is a structural issue due to overspending in the past and the huge host of baby boomers who are now moving into what they fondly hope will be their retirement years. Old people buy fewer ipods and ski boots apparently, and are less likely to remodel their kitchens and bathrooms. That is a problem for the global economy.

So who is going to pick up the ball on consumption? From the sound of the panel, it looks like some kid took the ball and went home. China was candidate one, but even if consumption increased there, as it will, its not likely to become the next America, nor should it be.

"We have to live with the frugal American. Think about how much wealth has been lost, half of world market cap" said Zhu Min, executive vice president of the Bank of China.

"You don’t have wealth, you don’t have liquidity, how do you come back? After a very deep adjustment ... the whole world will be a frugal world."

The understanding I came away with is that it is 1) unclear what the new model will be, who will produce what and who will consume what, and 2) the frugal countries like Germany, Japan and China face their own very stern tests as their business models were predicated on consumption in the English-speaking world.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Alan Greenspan hasn't been chairman of the Fed for three years, but his policy mistakes keep paying dividends in the form of blame at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos.

Polish Finance Minister Jacek Rostowski yesterday:

"This was the failure of one of the key institutions in the world." During the Greenspan era he said they continually met downturns and distress with easing and "eliminated fear."

Ken Rosen of Berkeley, who was writing about the housing bubble in 2005 or so, is in the same camp:

"Alan Greenspan personally prevented some needed regulations being put in place. The free market fundamentalism we had was a mistake, to go the other way would also be a mistake.

We had excessively loose monetary policy and regulations on these aggressive loans were not put in place. There were Fed board members who wanted to do it, and Greenspan himself said the had too much belief in the market. ...it was a global problem of excess credit led by the central bank in the U.S. but ratified by the central banks around the world."

Maybe history will be kinder to his reputation as a jazz musician.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So do countries which can borrow money more cheaply, Germany for example, have a higher obligation to borrow, spend and make things better for everyone across Europe?

Polish finmin Jacek Rostowski, speaking in a session on the outlook for Europe, seemed to think so:

“Fiscal policy … some countries which are far more able to afford increases in govt expediture and budget deficits than others. We should apply the principle that those with the lowest debt financing costs should consider the most expansive policies.”

He pointed out that Greece is now paying more for financing that Poland, and said further that Poland would not go down the stimulative route, seeing as how credit was still flowing, but instead “leaving space for interest rate reductions.”

He did make clear that this was the province of the central bank.

Rostowski did raise another point I think has legs: financial protectionism. Smaller countries without a big banking sector could see themselves really hurt if governments make lending at home rather than abroad a quid pro quo for bailout money. It is a slippery slope.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Duncan Niederauer, chief exec of NYSE Euronext, told a panel here at Davos that rather than inventing a whole host of new regulations, we’d be better off focusing on existing means of bringing order to markets, specifically taking a page from the exchanges books by having central clearing and more price transparancy for derivatives and off-exchange structured products. I think he’s actually got a great point about clearing and better price information, but I can’t see this as being anywhere near bringing regulation up to scratch.

The response from others on the panel was similar.

Nourial Roubini of NYU – “The ideology of the last decade was self-regulation which means no regulation. Reliance on ratings agencies with massive conflicts of interest.

“If we don’t want a backlash against trade we have to have prudential regulation of the financial system.”

Obama economic advisor Laura Tyson -

“We need regulation, we’ve tried self regulation and it doesn’t work. Psychology tells us that in a highly competitive game the insensitivity to risk grows. It’s like a drug addiction problem. They got so much pleasure that they simply stopped paying attention to the risk.”

At the end of the panel they held a vote on Niederauer’s idea and it won 71 percent to 29. Whether that was a vote for the sensible parts of his idea or for making that the whole of the regulatory effort I leave you to decide.

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The ideas expressed are his own.

So what is Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman’s prescription for solving the banking crisis?

More leverage and less transparency, apparently.

Schwarzman told a panel at Davos that you can’t mandate higher levels of bank capital at the same time losses are mounting and that mark-to-market accounting needed to be changed.

“You need lower capital. Do something with fair value accounting which is exacerbating things . . . We have to add more leverage to the system.” He further took issue with what he described as a “fixation on transparency” and said “We have to use regulators to schedule out losses.” By that I presume he means keep the bank on life support until they can make enough to absorb their losses. It did work in the 1990s with some prominent U.S. banks, but…

Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, didn’t seem to be buying in to the more leverage less disclosure meme.

“Nobody trusts the private system, why should they trust them?” she said. She also mentioned the Swedish solution, which you may remember imposed some pretty tough conditions on bank shareholders. She said that voters would be watching who made money out of bailouts and would be concerned by “compensation and dividends.”

Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley, who pretty much called it at last year’s Davos, when consensus was for no recession in the “real” economy and decoupling of emerging markets, is gloomy again. Speaking with him this morning after he did an interview with Reuters on Davos Today, Roach said that there was a real threat of protectionism as politicians come under pressure from rising unemployment. The U.S. and China relationship will be key, he said.

On U.S. real estate – a continuing issue for banks and the economy:

“The interplay between the property and financial sectors has been ground zero of this crisis.

The problem was the banks played the property bubble just like consumers did and so we are all in this together.”

Not a big fan of equities, it seems:-

“Equities have pretty much discounted a dire outlook for 2009. The problem with equities as an asset class is that they are pretty much based on optimistic earning expectations for 2010 and 2011. We will challenge those expectations this year. I’d be pretty cautious before committing new funds to the equity market in this climate.

So what is Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman’s prescription for solving the banking crisis?

More leverage and less transparency, apparently.

Schwarzman told a panel at Davos that you can’t mandate higher levels of bank capital at the same time losses are mounting and that mark-to-market accounting needed to be changed.

“You need lower capital. Do something with fair value accounting which is exacerbating things . . . We have to add more leverage to the system.” He further took issue with what he described as a “fixation on transparency” and said “We have to use regulators to schedule out losses.” By that I presume he means keep the bank on life support until they can make enough to absorb their losses. It did work in the 1990s with some prominent U.S. banks, but…

Laura Tyson, an economic advisor to the Obama administration, didn’t seem to be buying in to the more leverage less disclosure meme.

“Nobody trusts the private system, why should they trust them?” she said. She also mentioned the Swedish solution, which you may remember imposed some pretty tough conditions on bank shareholders. She said that voters would be watching who made money out of bailouts and would be concerned by “compensation and dividends.”

James Saft is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.