UK News

from Felix Salmon:

Europe’s insoluble problems

Mohamed El-Erian is calling for massive recapitalization of the banking system:

The global financial system is being refined "day in and day out," El-Erian said, and as a result the balance between public and private is shifting and regulation is altering. "This is not being done according to some master plan," but in reaction to a series of crisis management interventions.

None of these piecemeal policy moves restored confidence in the markets, he said. What is needed is a coordinated and simultaneous set of policy actions globally in four areas: restoration of credit markets, elimination of deteriorating assets from balance sheets, injecting capital quickly into the banking system, and regulatory forbearance.

Oh, wait, that was El-Erian back in October 2008. But he's saying something very similar now:

In addition to specifying higher prudential capital ratios, governments must now bully banks to act immediately. Where private funding is not forthcoming, which should now be the presumption for a growing number of banks, recapitalization must be imposed, in return for fundamental changes in the way financial institutions operate and burdens are shared.

The main difference, here, is the move from "regulatory forbearance" the first time around, to governments forcing "fundamental changes in the way financial institutions operate" today. But either way, this is basically, the bank-nationalization debate all over again.

In the U.S., we didn't nationalize in 2009. We ended up taking only modest stakes in banks, and getting through the crisis through the massive application of liquidity by the Fed. If the central bank, as lender of last resort, ensures that banks will always be funded, then you don't need nationalization. It's a bailout by monetary rather than fiscal means, and it's a lot friendlier to bank shareholders than nationalization is.

But the problem in Europe is that the ECB is displaying neither the willingness nor the ability to act as a lender of last resort -- and in that situation, the only policy action left is for governments to step in and try to backstop the banking system directly. This is a very dangerous road to travel down: it's basically what Ireland did when it guaranteed the liabilities of the entire Irish banking system, thereby consigning itself to a national fiscal nightmare for the foreseeable future.

from James Saft:

Britain eats (leverages) its young

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

Four years, several failed banks and at least one global recession later, Britain has finally discovered what its young people need: 19-1 leverage.

Britain has announced a new housing initiative, the centerpiece of which is a plan to entice first-time buyers into buying newly-built properties with as little as 5 percent down.

Under the plan both builders and the government would contribute funds to partially indemnify lenders against what I am betting are the inevitable losses. Borrowers, who are almost by definition younger and less well off, will still bear all losses, but will be rewarded with the chance to take out the kind of loan which has proven time and again to be a bad idea.

This is utterly wrongheaded -- the best possible thing that can happen for first-time buyers, and arguably for most Britons, is for housing prices to fall to a level commensurate with earnings.

Why are houses in Britain so difficult to afford? Partly because of problems with supply, issues that the housing plan takes some steps, almost certainly insufficient ones, to address. And also because Britons, first out of necessity and then in the fever of greed, borrowed so much money in order to wedge themselves into what little housing was available that they drove prices up to unaffordable levels.

Again, as in Europe and the U.S., we have governments which, when confronted with problems that are fundamentally about debt, decide that piling yet more debt on top is the answer. Like the European Financial Stability Facility, which has proved utterly ineffective in supporting Italian debt, this plan too will fail, but not before many people will be tempted into taking on houses and debts they ought not to risk.

from Felix Salmon:

When investment banks hire risk-takers

Matt Taibbi is quite right about the $2 billion of rogue-trading losses at UBS. Basically, investment banks hire for risk-takers; they shouldn't be surprised when this kind of thing happens.

The brains of investment bankers by nature are not wired for "client-based" thinking. This is the reason why the Glass-Steagall Act, which kept investment banks and commercial banks separate, was originally passed back in 1933: it just defies common sense to have professional gamblers in charge of stewarding commercial bank accounts.

Investment bankers do not see it as their jobs to tend to the dreary business of making sure Ma and Pa Main Street get their $8.03 in savings account interest every month. Nothing about traditional commercial banking – historically, the dullest of businesses, taking customer deposits and making conservative investments with them in search of a percentage point of profit here and there – turns them on.

In fact, investment bankers by nature have huge appetites for risk, and most of them take pride in being able to sleep at night even when their bets are going the wrong way.

Taibbi is receiving some blogospheric pushback, because the term "investment banker" means two very different things depending on the context. On the one hand, there's investment banking as in M&A advice and old-fashioned merchant banking. A typical sentence would be "traders have replaced bankers in the executive suite at Goldman Sachs". And then there's Taibbi's meaning: investment bankers as opposed to commercial bankers, or people who work at investment banks rather than at commercial banks. These are the people that the Vickers report is scared of.

The fact is that old-fashioned advisory bankers are pretty irrelevant here: the big money in finance has always been where the balance sheet is. And balance sheet is used on the trading floor and in commercial banking. So let's put the fee-based bankers to one side: it's absolutely true that investment bankers tend to love risk, even as commercial bankers have historically shunned it.

I'm reading The Devil's Derivatives right now, Nick Dunbar's fantastic book about credit derivatives traders. (I'll have much more on the book when I'm done with it.) In the introduction, he makes this distinction really well, introducing the hotshot traders he dubs "the men who love to win":

This rare, often admirable, but ultimately dangerous breed of financier isn’t wired like the rest of us. Normal people are constitutionally, genetically, down-to-their-bones risk averse: they hate to lose money. The pain of dropping $10 at the casino craps table far outweighs the pleasure of winning $10 on a throw of the dice. Give these people responsibility for decisions at small banks or insurance companies, and their risk-averse nature carries over quite naturally to their professional judgment. For most of its history, our financial system was built on the stolid, cautious decisions of bankers, the men who hate to lose. This cautious investment mind-set drove the creation of socially useful financial institutions over the last few hundred years. The anger of losing dominated their thinking. Such people are attached to the idea of certainty and stability. It took some convincing to persuade them to give that up in favor of an uncertain bet. People like that did not drive the kind of astronomical growth seen in the last two decades.

Now imagine somebody who, when confronted with uncertainty, sees not danger but opportunity. This sort of person cannot be chained to predictable, safe outcomes. This sort of person cannot be a traditional banker. For them, any uncertain bet is a chance to become unbelievably happy, and the misery of losing barely merits a moment’s consid- eration. Such people have a very high tolerance for risk. To be more precise, they crave it. Most of us accept that risk-seeking people have an economic role to play. We need entrepreneurs and inventors. But what we don’t need is for that mentality to infect the once boring and cautious job of lending and investing money.

from Felix Salmon:

Dimon vs Vickers

It's beyond ironic -- closer to moronic, really -- that Jamie Dimon would give an interview to London's very own Financial Times, complaining that international bank-regulation standards are “anti-American,” on the very day that the Vickers Report -- Robert Peston calls it "the most radical reform of British banks in a generation, and possibly ever" -- is released.

It's literally unthinkable that the US Treasury would ever dream of doing to JP Morgan what the UK Treasury, here, seems to want to do to the likes of Barclays and RBS. This is a Volcker Rule on steroids -- all retail banking will be ring-fenced and forced to operate with enormous amounts of capital, much more than Dimon is complaining about. It's essentially a break-up, in all but name, of the big banks with both retail arms and investment-banking operations. And it's designed, quite explicitly, to strengthen the UK's banking system by reducing the amount of risk and bolstering financial stability.

But Dimon doesn't care about what's going on in the UK. He's just looking at Basel, which -- incredibly -- he wants the US to withdraw from.

“I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel any more. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American,” he said. “Our regulators should go there and say: ‘If it’s not in the interests of the United States, we’re not doing it’.”

I have no idea what Dimon thinks is anti-American about the Basel standards, which are certainly in the interests of the United States. In fact, by all accounts it was the US which was pushing for stricter rules, and had to compromise with the laxer Europeans, whose banks are much less well capitalized right now.

US banks, including JP Morgan with its "fortress balance sheet", are very well placed to navigate through the Basel rules and come out strong and dominant on the other side. European banks, by contrast, will have to raise a lot of very expensive equity. And UK banks, if the Vickers proposals are adopted, will be much less formidable in the international arena than they are right now, with most of their assets ring-fenced and unavailable for merchant-banking misadventures.

And in any case, as we learned during the financial crisis, the world is so interconnected that whatever is good for the global banking system is good for the US banking system. Which point seems to be lost on Dimon:

from Felix Salmon:

How the UK wants to deal with its biggest banks

In the Republican presidential debate last night, there was unanimity on most issues, including the new orthodoxy on the right that bank regulation -- like any other regulation, for that matter -- is a Bad Thing, and a sign of the government overreaching. It's important to remember that this is not the way that right-wing parties behave elsewhere in the world. Consider for instance the UK, which seems to be cracking down on banks in a manner which would make even Barney Frank blush:

Britain's biggest banks will be forced to put a firewall around their retail operations, the chancellor will announce on Wednesday at the Mansion House...

This was the central proposal made by the Independent Commission on Banking (ICB) in its April interim report...

By putting retail banking into a separate legal subsidiary, ring-fenced from the trading and investment banking activities of a big bank, the vital parts of our giant banks will be less exposed to danger in a crisis.

The idea is that the retail banking bits of Barclays, HSBC and Royal Bank of Scotland will have more capital to absorb possible losses...

The ICB's interim report suggested a minimum capital ratio for retail banks of 10%, which Mr Osborne is understood to support, although he won't quote any precise number for the new minimum capital ratio.

A source close to the chancellor said there was "nothing sinister" in Mr Osborne's reluctance to quote a particular number for how much capital above the international floor should be held by British retail banks. "Ten per cent is certainly the right ballpark", he said.

This is bold and welcome thinking. From a regulatory perspective, banks have good profits and bad profits. Bad profits are the ones coming from risky structured products and leveraged trading desks; good profits are the ones which come from the lending investment capital to individuals, small businesses, and large companies. State-insured deposits should be use to fund good businesses, not risky and speculative businesses -- as should any access to central bank liquidity windows.

So if you're not going to break the big banks up, then the next best thing is to force their riskier arms to operate outside the protective walls of their too-big-to-fail retail operations. And the retail operations should be as bankruptcy-remote as possible, with extremely stringent capital requirements on the order of 10% of total assets.

Now the 10% figure, although it sounds tough, might not be quite as harsh as it seems at first glance: I'm sure that it's based on risk-weighted assets, for one thing, and so the details of the risk weighting will be very important. And I suspect that banks might be able to put all manner of capital into that 10% bucket, beyond tangible core equity: the UK is likely to allow them to use their beloved CoCos, for starters.

All the same, Britain's politicians are thinking constructively about how to rein in the more dangerous tendencies of its biggest banks. The same can't be said, sadly, of their U.S. counterparts. There are bank regulators at the Federal Reserve and elsewhere who are trying to put in place higher capital requirements for systemically important financial institutions -- but those will be negotiated on the international stage, in Basel, and will phase in very slowly. The UK policy, by contrast, could simply be implemented unilaterally, and would make that country significantly less prone to systemically-dangerous bank crises. Just don't think for a minute that it's likely to be replicated here.

from Felix Salmon:

Dealing with Britain’s overpaid bankers

Bagehot has a very odd column about Britain's overpaid bankers. Part of it is spot on:

One shorthand description for the New Labour boom years is: Gordon Brown let a deregulated City rip, then used the tax revenues to fund a dramatic expansion of the state.

He's quite right about this. If a government starts seeing tax revenues from banks rise sharply, it should worry: that's a sign of a dangerous financial bubble. The exception to that rule, of course, is when a government deliberately tries to cut the financial sector down to a more sensible and sustainable size by taxing it more.

But that's not the way that Bagehot sees it. For him, the question of whether bankers are paid too much is exactly the same as the question of whether, if they were paid less, they would move to some other country.

That's silly. An overpaid banker in Hong Kong or Sao Paulo is still an overpaid banker. And the UK must make its own determination as to whether or not it wants to be home to a large contingent of overpaid bankers.

Bagehot might be right that if London's contingent of overpaid bankers were to shrink, then its financial-sector tax revenues would probably shrink as well. But if you're addicted to the fiscal crack cocaine that is City taxes, that's a reason to give up those taxes -- it's not a reason to keep on going back for an extra fix, even after bitter experience has taught you how damaging your addiction will prove to be in the long run.

Bagehot writes:

from Felix Salmon:

Immoral bankers

The UK's Institutional Investor Council has issued a blistering report on the excessive fees that investment banks charge companies to issue new shares -- fees which one issuer are "usually immoral". It certainly seems that way, looking at this chart: fees have been steadily increasing over time, even as the discount at which the new shares are issued has got larger and larger. The bigger the discount, of course, the less risk taken on by the underwriter, since the more that the share price would have to plunge overnight in order for the underwriter to risk losing money on the deal.

Yes, this chart includes the financial crisis, and it stands to reason that fees for rights issues would rise during a crisis. But we're not in a crisis any more, and the fees aren't coming down to their historical levels, even though the discounts are still enormous. And it's notable that fees hit these highs on a percentage basis just as the amount of underwriting was surging:

What we're seeing here is a textbook example of banks squeezing every last dollar they can out of their clients just when those clients are most desperate for money. And it stands in stark contrast to legal fees, which were considered fair by issuers and which have not risen visibly at all over the past few years.

None of this is illegal, of course, but it's fair to call it unethical, if ethics are fundamentally based on the principle of "treat others as you would like to be treated".

Christina Rexrode had a long article on banking and ethics in Sunday's Charlotte Observer, and she concentrated on the kind of behavior which steps close to or even over the line into outright illegality. Maybe it's just so blindingly obvious that banks behave in a fundamentally immoral manner most of the time that her editors considered that not to be news -- charging $35 for a $2 cup of coffee, slapping enormous overdraft fees onto those who can least afford them, pushing high-interest credit cards on desperate customers, locating credit-card operations in South Dakota where usury laws are at their laxest, encouraging people to use the bonkers anachronism that is signature debit, steering customers into the financial products which pay the highest commissions, etc etc. All of this is legal, and all of it is designed to funnel as much money as possible from the customers' pocket to the bank's bottom line, and none of it is in the customer's best interest, which means that none of it can really be considered moral.

from The Great Debate UK:

EU stress tests: for banks or governments?

- Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff Business School. The opinions expressed are his own.-

Worries about Europe’s banking system go back at least to 2007, but whereas the U.S. (and UK) banks appear to have weathered the storm, there are fears that for European banks the worst may lie ahead.  Concerns centre on four areas.

First, there are obvious worries about Greece and the other small countries facing debt problems, notably Portugal and Ireland, where the local banks have lent heavily to their governments and in addition may need to make provision for a substantial build-up in the level of bad debts in their respective corporate sectors as their economies struggle through the recession.

Second, there are worries about the small-to-medium banking sector in Germany, where some of the first signs of the oncoming crisis appeared early in 2007. It is hard to tell how seriously we should treat these concerns, because the Landesbanken are closely linked to their regional (“Land”) governments, so the question is unusually sensitive. Third, there are worries about the European giants, especially the big French and German banks.

Not only is it still unclear (to me, at least) how badly hit they were by Lehman and its aftermath, it is still a matter of conjecture how much sovereign debt they are holding.

Fourth, there is the enigma of Spain, worth a blog on its own. The bald facts about Spain are frightening – 20 percent unemployment (and nearly as much even before the credit crunch), the economy most dependent on construction of any in Europe, a large budget deficit, tourism suffering from the strong Euro.

from Felix Salmon:

BP: Now more evil than Goldman Sachs

There will be rejoicing in the corridors of Goldman Sachs tonight: BP has finally overtaken it in the most-loathed company stakes! Yes, Goldman is still plumbing depths rarely seen in the modern era. But BP, even after putting aside $20 billion and grovelling to the president, continues to implode: it's now hit a level of -47.6 in the latest BrandIndex poll. That's not far from Toyota's low point, which was -52.7 at the end of March, but it's going to be a much harder fight back for BP than it was for Toyota.

It's amusing to remember that earlier this year BrandZ put out a piece of glossy research saying that the BP brand was the 34th most valuable brand in the world, worth $17.283 billion. (Love the specificity there.) Is it possible for a brand to have negative value? If so, BP has probably achieved that distinction at this point.

Meanwhile, for those of you keeping count, BrandZ put the value of the Toyota brand at $21.769 billion, post-recall, while the Goldman Sachs brand was worth $9.283 billion, up a whopping 25% from 2009. How quickly these things can change.

from The Great Debate UK:

Roger Bootle on the Future of Banking Commission

-Roger Bootle is the managing director of Capital Economics. The opinions expressed are his own.-

I was invited to join the Future of Banking Commission by John (now Lord) McFall, then Chairman of the House of Commons Treasury Select Committee, to which I have been a specialist adviser for 13 years.

John is a dedicated public servant and a very persuasive man, as all those who appeared in front of the Treasury Committee can testify. I found it very difficult to refuse his invitation.

As it happens, I had been thinking deeply about many of the questions that the Commission had been asked to examine in connection with my book, The Trouble with Markets, which was published last year. So in many ways, what I experienced with the Commission was rather like seeing the live performance of a play that you had previously only read.

This was the first such Commission that I had sat on. It proved to be a revelation. It was particularly fruitful to be surrounded by people of very different backgrounds – first of all, distinguished members of the three main political parties - David Davis, Vince Cable and John McFall.

We also had highly experienced financial practitioners on board, including David Pitt-Watson of Hermes and the distinguished author Philip Augar, formerly with Schroders. Clare Spottiswoode also had enormously valuable experience as a regulator and Peter Vicary-Smith of Which? brought tremendous experience as a consumer champion.