EUCOM Economic Analysis - Part I

[Surferbeetle]

What is a rating agency?, By Rebecca Marston Business reporter, 18 April 2011, BBC News

AAA, Ba3, Ca, CCC... they look like some kind of hyper-active school report.

They are, indeed, a marking system, and one that is designed to inform interested parties.

The letter formations are given to large-scale borrowers, whether companies or governments, and tell the buyers of this debt how likely they are to be able to get it back.

The score card also affects the amount that should be charged by way of return on that borrowing.

These letters have been all over the coverage of the financial impact of the crisis besetting the eurozone.

A change to the score means a change to the amount a borrower must pay its debt-holders, something that can make it more expensive to borrow as investors demand a higher rate of return for taking on more risky debt.

Timeline: The unfolding eurozone crisis, 20 September 2011, BBC News

To join the currency, member states had to qualify by meeting the terms of the treaty in terms of budget deficits, inflation, interest rates and other monetary requirements.

Of EU members at the time, the UK, Sweden and Denmark declined to join the currency.

Since then, there have been many twists and turns for the countries that use the single currency.

Economy enters 'dangerous phase', By Kabir Chibber Business reporter, 20 September 2011, BBC News

Three nations in the eurozone - the 17 nations that use the euro - have been recipients of bailouts as attempts to solve the crisis keep stalling.

Italy became the latest to feel the domino effect of the markets when its debt rating was lowered, the latest in a series of downgrades.

Greece, Spain, the Irish Republic and even Cyprus have also had their ratings cut this year. The future of the euro is being questioned in a way it never has since 1999.

Which countries have fallen, and which are feared to be next?

EU 'faces its greatest challenge' - Jose Manuel Barroso, 28 September 2011, BBC News

The head of the European Commission has told Euro MPs that Greece will stay in the eurozone, but warned that the EU was facing its "greatest challenge".

Appealing for patience over the Greek debt crisis in his annual State of the Union address, Manuel Barroso said: "This is not a sprint but a marathon."

A key obstacle to the payment was removed on Tuesday when the Greek parliament passed a controversial new property tax bill, first announced earlier this month, that aims to boost revenues.

[Surferbeetle]

Greece's debt crisis odyssey, 22 September 2011, BBC News

Binomial tree methods are taught in business school, as an investment tool, for the valuation of options.

Exchange Traded Funds are evolving from simply tracking/replicating a specific index to including leverage.

These tools and others are just like a rifle or pistol in that it's good to keep in mind that they are always loaded, are not toys, and need to be used responsibly.

Financial Engineering TTP's used by 'Quants'

A good, positive, and fun to read, book regarding the world of banking and finance is Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk, by Peter L. Bernstein

There are also plenty of examples to keep in mind of how things can quickly go wrong:

TARP

Long Term Capital Management

Kweku Adoboli

Jerome Kerviel

[slapout9]

Link to the blog naked capitalism which has an interview with Dr. Michael Hudson on the situation in Europe and USA.



http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/...n-america.html

[Surferbeetle]

Although it might be a bit much for those with delicate sensibilities (the writer has a very definite point of view), the blog London Banker is thoughtful, very well written, and provides an interesting window into the world of finance for those so inclined.

[slapout9]

Although it might be a bit much for those with delicate sensibilities (the writer has a very definite point of view), the blog London Banker is thoughtful, very well written, and provides an interesting window into the world of finance for those so inclined.

Beetle, it is a good idea but I don't think it is going to happen.

[Surferbeetle]

Banks to be forced to boost liquid assets, by Brooke Masters, chief regulation correspondent, October 9, 2011 7:08 pm, Financial Times, www.ft.com

Global banking regulators will press ahead with the first worldwide effort to force banks to hold more liquid assets and cut back the industry’s reliance on short-term funding, despite complaints that the rule changes could damage the broader economy, the new chairman of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision has warned.

“It is going to be all about implementation in as uniform a way as possible. Balkanisation of the rules over the long term is not in anyone’s interest,” Mr Ingves said.

The committee plans to publish “heat” maps that show which countries are in compliance. It will also send out teams of experts to look at whether each country’s implementation laws and regulations live up to the letter of the agreement.

Belgium Said to Get Approval to Buy Dexia Unit, By Francois de Beaupuy, Jacqueline Simmons and Fabio Benedetti - Oct 9, 2011 1:03 PM MT, Bloomberg News

Rescuing Dexia -- the first victim of the debt crisis at the core of Europe -- has become critical to preventing contagion in the region’s banking industry. Dexia’s balance sheet, with total assets of about 518 billion euros at the end of June, is about the size of the entire banking system in Greece and larger than the combined assets of financial institutions bailed out in Ireland in the last 2 1/2 years.

Fate of Eurozone bailout rests on Slovak politician Richard Sulik, October 07, 2011, By Henry Chu, Los Angeles Times

The Slovak parliament is scheduled to vote Tuesday on a plan to beef up Europe's bailout fund for financially strapped nations such as Greece. Most experts agree that broadening the fund's powers is a crucial, if limited, step in taming the debt crisis that has had financial markets somersaulting and fed worries about a double-dip recession.

Fifteen of the 17 nations that use the euro currency, including heavyweights Germany and France, have signed on to the plan, with Malta expected to approve it within days. But it requires approval by all the Eurozone countries, and a thumbs up from Slovakia, which will probably be the last to vote on the measure, is in grave doubt.

The torpid response has given ammunition to those in Brussels who yearn for a more federalist setup in which centralized institutions such as the European Parliament could make quick, binding decisions, instead of relying on getting each member state's government to sign off on policies.

Imagine the difficulties in the United States, critics say, if legislation affecting the entire country had to be approved by the government of every state, rather than by Congress.

BNP, Socgen deny reported plan to raise $9.4 billion, PARIS | Sun Oct 9, 2011 5:13pm EDT, Reuters

The Journal du Dimanche report, which did not cite sources, follows one in German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung saying that the top five French banks had agreed to receive 10 to 15 billion euros in fresh capital from the French state as long as Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) agreed to a government capital injection as well.

[Surferbeetle]

Gavyn Davies is a macroeconomist who is now chairman of Fulcrum Asset Management and co-founder of Prisma Capital Partners. He was the head of the global economics department at Goldman Sachs from 1987-2001, and was chairman of the BBC from 2001-2004.

He has also served as an economic policy adviser in No 10 Downing Street, an external adviser to the British Treasury, and as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics.

Schizophrenia about debt, October 9, 2011 4:10 pm by Gavyn Davies, Financial Times, www.ft.com

German Finance Minister Schauble has graphically described his own attitude to the debt crisis. “You cannot”, he says, “cure an alcoholic by giving him more alcohol.” Maybe not, but the alternative of cold turkey does not seem to be working all that well, either. Like it or not, the global economy needs a mixture of policies which write off debt in some cases, pay off debt in others, and extend debt in still others. A one-size-fits-all approach which encourages the simultaneous deleveraging of all sectors at maximum speed could cause a genuine economic calamity.

If the debt is transferred to the government balance sheet, these risks come in the form of higher rates of taxation in the long term. If transferred to the central bank balance sheet, they come in the form of higher inflation. All this is justified on the grounds that the alternative is worse, for everyone.

Not everyone agrees with this. In the 1920s, Friedrich von Hayek wrote that the rapid expunging of debt would rid the economic system of what he called “malinvestments”.

Most recently, these malinvestments have been made in finance and real estate. Allowing them to fail, Hayekians believe, will encourage a fresh start. (Robert Skidelsky, Keynes’ biographer, discusses the Hayekian view in an excellent piece in the New Statesman this week.) Those who believe in Schumpeter’s notion of “creative destruction” may be tempted down the same path.

James Grant’s latest “Interest Rate Observer” contains an interesting account of what happened the last time a policy of outright cold turkey was tried in the US, which was in the depression of 1920-21. In the face of a deep slump, credit growth was stopped in its tracks. The Fed, under Benjamin Strong, raised interest rates and the Treasury, under Democrat Carter Glass, ran budget surpluses. “The Treasury has no money to lend. It is not in the banking business, and should not be”, said Secretary Glass. Deflation was treated as inevitable. “No-one could have stopped it…in our opinion, it was bound to come” said Chairman Strong.

The unemployed, deliberately it seems, were left to fend for themselves, even when the jobless rate increased eight-fold to over 12 per cent in 1920. Policy did not change. The public books were balanced, and the Fed even repelled an influx of gold which might have ended the downturn quicker. So did cold turkey work?

James Grant says it did. The recession was over by 1922, and unemployment was back down to 2.4 per cent by 1923. But in the meantime, real GDP fell by over 8 per cent, industrial production was down by 23 per cent, and consumer prices fell by 22 per cent.

That, says Grant, is better than a policy of endless stagnation. But surely we can find a better way.

Creative destruction, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Creative destruction is a term originally derived from Marxist economic theory which refers to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism. These processes were first described in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 1848)[1] and were expanded in Marx's Grundrisse (1857)[2] and "Volume IV" (1863) of Das Kapital.[3] At its most basic, "creative destruction" (German: schöpferische Zerstörung) describes the way in which capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order, and this is largely the sense implied by the German Marxist sociologist Werner Sombart who has been credited[4] with the first use of these terms in his work Krieg und Kapitalismus ("War and Capitalism", 1913).[5] In the earlier work of Marx, however, the idea of creative destruction or annihilation (German: Vernichtung) implies not only that capitalism destroys and reconfigures previous economic orders, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth (whether through war, dereliction, or regular and periodic economic crises) in order to clear the ground for the creation of new wealth.[1][2][3]

From the 1950s onwards, the term "creative destruction" has become more readily identified with the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter,[4] who adapted and popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and progress. The term, as used by Schumpeter, bears little resemblance with how it was used by Marx. As such, the term gained popularity within neoliberal or free-market economics as a description of processes such as downsizing in order to increase the efficiency and dynamism of a company. The original Marxist usage has, however, been maintained in the work of influential social scientists such as David Harvey,[6] Marshall Berman,[7] and Manuel Castells.[8]