Thanks bourbon, those are two great articles, and every American should read them.
Latest Video of James Galbraith about the bank deals.
http://wallstreetpit.com/4463-james-...an-hardly-lose
The Great American Bubble Machine: From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they're about to do it again, by Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, July 9, 2009.
Taibbi's March article The Big Takeover was killer, and he does not disappoint with this one. He rightly nails Goldman for last years massive run up in oil prices and offers warning of an emerging racket under cap-and-trade.If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.
And here's the real punch line. After playing an intimate role in four historic bubble catastrophes, after helping $5 trillion in wealth disappear from the NASDAQ, after pawning off thousands of toxic mortgages on pensioners and cities, after helping to drive the price of gas up to $4 a gallon and to push 100 million people around the world into hunger, after securing tens of billions of taxpayer dollars through a series of bailouts overseen by its former CEO, what did Goldman Sachs give back to the people of the United States in 2008?
Fourteen million dollars.
That is what the firm paid in taxes in 2008, an effective tax rate of exactly one, read it, one percent. The bank paid out $10 billion in compensation and benefits that same year and made a profit of more than $2 billion - yet it paid the Treasury less than a third of what it forked over to CEO Lloyd Blankfein, who made $42.9 million last year.
How is this possible? According to Goldman's annual report, the low taxes are due in large part to changes in the bank's "geographic earnings mix." In other words, the bank moved its money around so that most of its earnings took place in foreign countries with low tax rates. Thanks to our completely hosed corporate tax system, companies like Goldman can ship their revenues offshore and defer taxes on those revenues indefinitely, even while they claim deductions upfront on that same untaxed income. This is why any corporation with an at least occasionally sober accountant can usually find a way to zero out its taxes. A GAO report, in fact, found that between 1998 and 2005, roughly two-thirds of all corporations operating in the U.S. paid no taxes at all.Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.
"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil-futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."
Thanks bourbon, those are two great articles, and every American should read them.
Latest Video of James Galbraith about the bank deals.
http://wallstreetpit.com/4463-james-...an-hardly-lose
From Harvard Business Review by Niall Ferguson, The Descent of Finance
What if the current recession turns out to be like the Great Depression of 1929–1933? Four years from now, the United States might find itself with a still-shrinking economy, half as many banks as in 2009, a third as many hedge funds, and retail banking resembling a public utility. The federal debt could be at $20 trillion, the top income tax rate at 45%, and the S&P 500 at 418. Ferguson, a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School, imagines that to be the worst-case scenario. The Breakdown, as Ferguson calls it, would alter the international economic order, too, with China’s GDP rising to half that of the U.S. by 2013 and the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights replacing the dollar as the international reserve currency.
Ferguson analyzes the roots of the crisis as well as the measures taken by the Obama administration to tackle it. He goes on to describe the impact on the global economy and points out that the slowdown is hurting other nations more than the U.S., thereby building a powerful case for a somewhat more sanguine view of America’s future. In a better-case 2013, he posits, the Federal Reserve’s policies have produced neither inflation nor deflation. A remarkable number of new banks have appeared, the top income tax rate is 35%, and the S&P 500 stands at 976. Because the world has become more dangerous as well as poorer, everyone looks to the United States to continue acting as a global policeman—and the greenback is still the world’s currency of choice.
Sapere Aude
Can't wait for the next bailout ...
Risk appetite has returned. The securitization mafia is still around, and that's not always a bad thing, but that early construction of an "assembly line" ready to turn these out in industrial fashion mentioned in the article can only bring back bad memories.After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated ...
From the Economist: Wall Street's new shape, Rearranging the towers of gold
Wall Street has staged a surprisingly strong recovery from its meltdown a year ago. But it will not return to business as usualThe most dramatic is likely to be a toughening of capital-adequacy standards, endorsed recently by G20 finance ministers and a group of central bankers and supervisors that oversees the Basel capital rules (see article). The new rules could be ready for adoption by the end of next year. The Basel Committee has already proposed higher capital charges for complex trading and exotic securitisations.
Capital will also be the method of choice to rein in firms big enough to rock the system. American officials are reluctant to go nuclear and break them up, not least because the task of splitting them into pieces small enough to pose no danger would be horribly messy. Instead banks will probably face a sliding scale, with minimum capital ratios rising as they get bigger or embrace more risk. They will also be expected to prepare “living wills”, setting out how they could be liquidated in the event of failure.
“There’s a real risk we end up so laden with capital that we can’t waddle and fart at the same time,” says a Wall Street grandee. Scrutiny from supervisors, increased after Lehman, will remain heavy. Goldman Sachs has no fewer than 40 Fed staffers breathing down the necks of its traders and risk-modellers.
Sapere Aude
G-20 topics...
From today's WSJ By DAMIAN PALETTA and ALESSANDRA GALLONI Europe, U.S. Spar On Cure for Banks
Leaders from the Group of 20 industrial and developing nations, who will discuss the issue this week in Pittsburgh, all agree that banks should hold more capital as a cushion against future losses. But fault lines are quickly emerging about the details, with the Europeans complaining that the U.S.'s proposals will put their banks at a disadvantage.Many bankers and regulators say the financial crisis has exposed big holes in the most recent international deal on capital, known as Basel II, after the Swiss city where many negotiations were held. These rules were supposed to bring U.S. and European banks closer together by measuring capital against assets weighted according to how risky they are.
Basel II relied on assessments by credit-rating firms, many of which were discredited by the crisis. It also allowed banks to judge their own assets, which led to many misjudgments of the value of mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, and exotic financial products.
In the years it took to negotiate the accords, U.S. and foreign dignitaries struggled to reach a consensus, with German officials at one point threatening to walk out, and U.S. regulators unable to agree on their own unified stance.
The U.S. now wants to increase capital requirements for the largest banks in a way that makes the overall measure of capital less sensitive to risk. European officials say that's not fair -- in part because of differences in accounting standards. Some bank balance sheets appear up to twice the size under European accounting rules than they would under U.S. standards.
European banks are also structured differently. Many are cooperatives or have shareholders such as municipalities that can't raise funds in the same way as institutional shareholders in the U.S.
One possible compromise, according to two European officials familiar with the matter, is an FSB proposal that would have European banks report U.S.-style capital levels to their local regulators. But that wouldn't be binding. Another possible compromise would create higher capital requirements for banks that are big or particularly intertwined with other financial institutions around the world, the officials said.
Last edited by Surferbeetle; 09-23-2009 at 02:23 AM.
Sapere Aude
Wall Street's Naked Swindle: A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits, by Matt Taibbi. Rolling Stone, Oct 14, 2009.
The SEC's halfhearted oversight didn't go unnoticed by the market. Six months after Bear was eaten by predators, virtually the same scenario repeated itself in the case of Lehman Brothers — another top-five investment bank that in September 2008 was vaporized in an obvious case of market manipulation. From there, the financial crisis was on, and the global economy went into full-blown crater mode.
Like all the great merchants of the bubble economy, Bear and Lehman were leveraged to the hilt and vulnerable to collapse. Many of the methods that outsiders used to knock them over were mostly legal: Credit markers were pulled, rumors were spread through the media, and legitimate short-sellers pressured the stock price down. But when Bear and Lehman made their final leap off the cliff of history, both undeniably got a push — especially in the form of a flat-out counterfeiting scheme called naked short-selling.
Plan for UK economic revival
An odd place to find such a reformist agenda, the UK's Daily Telegraph has an article on the changes the UK eceonomy needs: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/c...=editorial2810
Maybe some of the ten point plan will resonate across the Atlantic?
davidbfpo
That's legal (or mostly legal)? I thought people had gone to jail for that - usually related to sending out junk emails that hype up a stock and then immediately selling it after the hype results in the stock price being inflated.Originally Posted by bourbon
Schmed, some of that stuff is probably legal, enforcement is also a joke.
I have been told the hedge funds and other miscreants doing these manipulations have a dedicated fax line to their people at the cable financial new channels to spread these rumors. Email records can be subpoenaed but there is no record of the content of a fax.
You are right; a lot of this stuff is from the pump-and-dump schemes of the 1990’s. In a pump and dump manipulation however the company is usually BS and the owners are in on it. In a naked short selling manipulation the owners do not have to be in on it, and the company can be promising and in good health. The company can be destroyed for profit, or the stock manipulated for hostile a take over.
Naked short selling reared its ugly head in microcap markets in the 90’s. The penny stock shenanigans of the 1990’s evolved into the tactics that would ultimately take down Bear Sterns and Lehman brothers.
You can't destroy a company by naked short selling. This has been going on a long time, it's nothing new and it's not nearly as huge a deal as the rather breathless article cited makes it out to be. Short selling is a gamble; if the company loses value you make money, if it doesn't you have to cover your short and you can get whacked. Manipulating a company's value though rumour works with small illiquid companies with small floats; it's very hard to generate enough buy/sell action to move the price of a large company, especially one with major institutional ownership. The 1.7 mil short referred to is not a major deal by Wall Street standards and nowhere nearly enough to have an impact on Companies this size. The short sellers made money because the Companies were in trouble, but the Companies weren't in trouble because of the short sellers. They were in trouble because of their own bad decisions.
If you see a Company that's in major trouble hit with a barrage of short selling, it can mean there's an insider trade involved: maybe inside the Company, or its accounting firm, or in the industry... these secrets don't stay secret. It can also just mean that someone saw it coming a little before the rest.
I don't personally think much of Tabibi's stuff; he's an axe-grinding ideologue and his articles are so full of holes that I couldn't even begin (and wouldn't even bother) to start pointing them out. Rolling Stone can be entertaining but I wouldn't call it a terribly enlightening source for financial commentary.
One thing that fascinates me about this entire economic cycle (and alas, I do know something about it) is the ease with which the whole "greedy Wall Street sank the economy" narrative has been sold to the public. Not that Wall Street had no responsibility, but the political class has used that narrative to very effectively sidestep any kind of accountability for the enormous role that administrations of both parties played in the evolution of the crisis... and the main street investment community should be taking a fair bit of responsibility as well.
Scapegoats are as useful as ever...
Last edited by Dayuhan; 10-29-2009 at 12:33 PM.
You are confusing naked short selling with regular short selling, which is like confusing sexual harassment with sex. Naked short sales are not covered, that’s the point – they are thus ‘naked’. Because they are not covered and thus "fail to deliver", it creates counterfeit or ‘phantom’ shares that are injected into the system increasing supply and depressing share price.
The fact that it was $1.7 million in options is not suspicious. Its that it was such an absurd bet - that Bear Stearns would lose half its value in 9 days.
Bringing Down Bear Began as $1.7 Million of Options, by Gary Matsumoto. Bloomberg.com, August 11, 2008.
I think you may be falling a bit for the old naked short hype routine. It's become a bit standard in times of economic stress; there was a veritable Grecian chorus of it during the tech crash in 2000-2001. CEOs of failed companies always want to blame the failure on short sellers, and there are always a bunch of investors and financial journalists (the ones who were supposed to see it coming and didn't) who want to buy in to the story.
At the end of the day, though, it's a scapegoat: short sellers are not lions bringing down big game, they are jackals prowling for the sick and dying. They don't "bring down" healthy companies, and their presence is a sign, not a cause. The "phantom shares" do appear, but only for the duration of the failure to deliver, generally brief, and the quantity is rarely sufficient to have any significant impact on the share price. The buyer has to either borrow the shares or close the position fairly quickly. If the company is fundamentally healthy any depression in the share price is likely to bring in buyers and the result will be no more than a momentary blip.
In this case it does look like an insider trade is a real possibility: it's illegal but it happens. It might look like an absurd bet from the outside, but if you knew the company had been papering over the cracks for a long time, the glue was coming loose, and the weakness was about to become clear it was a very sensible bet. It looks like somebody knew, but that somebody was not the cause of the collapse, they just saw it coming and made money out of it. Bear Stearns and Lehman didn't collapse because of short selling, they collapsed because of a long series of bad decisions and excessively risky investments. Of course the people who made those decisions would rather point the finger at someone else, much like every day trader who ever lost his shirt playing penny stocks claims to be the victim of the evil market makers.
Trying to blame the recent recession on manipulations by some conspiratorial cabal only distracts attention from where it is desperately needed: on the long series of bad decisions - by Government, by the financial industry, and by large numbers of ordinary investors - that drove the pattern that produced the recession. It didn't happen overnight - this recession was firmly rooted in the collective psychosis of the late 90s equity bubble - and conspiracy theories will not aid in understanding it or in preventing similar upheavals in the future.
One thing that gets far too little attention, for example, is Government's consistent refusal to engage in countercyclic intervention during upward cycles and consistent over-intervention during downward cycles.
The mother of all carry trade faces an inevitable bust - Nouriel Roubini, FT.
Since March there has been a massive rally in all sorts of risky assets – equities, oil, energy and commodity prices – a narrowing of high-yield and high-grade credit spreads, and an even bigger rally in emerging market asset classes (their stocks, bonds and currencies). At the same time, the dollar has weakened sharply , while government bond yields have gently increased but stayed low and stable.
...
Let us sum up: traders are borrowing at negative 20 per cent rates to invest on a highly leveraged basis on a mass of risky global assets that are rising in price due to excess liquidity and a massive carry trade. Every investor who plays this risky game looks like a genius – even if they are just riding a huge bubble financed by a large negative cost of borrowing – as the total returns have been in the 50-70 per cent range since March.
People’s sense of the value at risk (VAR) of their aggregate portfolios ought, instead, to have been increasing due to a rising correlation of the risks between different asset classes, all of which are driven by this common monetary policy and the carry trade. In effect, it has become one big common trade – you short the dollar to buy any global risky assets.
Yet, at the same time, the perceived riskiness of individual asset classes is declining as volatility is diminished due to the Fed’s policy of buying everything in sight – witness its proposed $1,800bn (£1,000bn, €1,200bn) purchase of Treasuries, mortgage-backed securities (bonds guaranteed by a government-sponsored enterprise such as Fannie Mae) and agency debt. By effectively reducing the volatility of individual asset classes, making them behave the same way, there is now little diversification across markets – the VAR again looks low.
So the combined effect of the Fed policy of a zero Fed funds rate, quantitative easing and massive purchase of long-term debt instruments is seemingly making the world safe – for now – for the mother of all carry trades and mother of all highly leveraged global asset bubbles ...
It's quite amazing that with all the "we can't let this happen again" talk, we keep walking down the same road. Government responded to the 2000/2001 recession by dropping interest rates too low and keeping them there for too long, fueling a new wave of speculation. Now we're doing the same thing. The problem is that Government focuses on regulation aimed at the last crisis, which does nothing to avert the next, and ignores the need for incentive management on the macro level. Trying to use regulations to suppress risk-taking in a cheap money environment is a waste of time, you can't regulate against an overwhelming incentive. It's like keeping gas cheap and then trying to force people not to use it. Cheap gas gets burned, cheap (or free) money gets risked.
Again, over-intervention during down cycles, under-intervention during up cycles...
I was listening to the BBC News last evening when I heard quite a remarkable claim.
The newsreader claimed that the recession in America is over with!
U-3 unemployment is up to 10.2%, and it's going to as high as 13% before it levels out. U-6 unemployment, which is a much better indicator of true unemployment, is up to 17.5%.
Just because the stock market is over 10,000 again does not mean the recession is over. The stock market is a global system for one thing, not a national system.
The delusion continues.
"Speak English! said the Eaglet. "I don't know the meaning of half those long words, and what's more, I don't believe you do either!"
The Eaglet from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland
Agree, the whole Stock market is delusional, it is about making money with paper as opposed to making products and services for an economy.
Wise banker
An article on an emerging European bank giant, Banco Santander of Spain and within the chairman explains their success:See:http://www.spectator.co.uk/business/...t-crunch.thtml‘If you don’t fully understand an instrument, don’t buy it,’ he told an awards ceremony last year, parodying Rudyard Kipling. ‘If you would not buy a specific product for yourself, don’t try to sell it. If you do not know your customers very well, don’t lend them any money. If you do these three things, you will be a better banker, my son.
davidbfpo
They are using a conventional definition of recession: two or more consecutive quarters of declining GDP. By this definition a recession is held to have ended when positive GDP growth resumes. It's not based on the stock market, it's based on GDP growth.
Of course resumption of GDP growthe doesn't necessarily mean all is well with the economy. Unemployment will lag well behind, and really addressing employment issues will require some significant changes. We desperately need to resolve the huge and growing disconnection between the output of American education and the needs of the American economy. It would also be useful to finally accept that Americans, individually and collectively, need to compete to prevail in the global economy.
Not to mention the American body politic...
Even politicians with some common sense and basic honesty would help.That too...It would also be useful to finally accept that Americans, individually and collectively, need to compete to prevail in the global economy.
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