Oct 242009
A Wide Open Race for Industry Leadership
Warren Buffett has invested in China’s BYD, but columnists Anil Gupta and Haiyan Wang caution against putting too much faith in its early-mover advantage.
Goldman’s Pre-emptive Influence
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Oct 032009
An Inside Look at How Goldman Sachs Lobbies the Senate, by Matt Taibbi: …Later on this week I have a story coming out in Rolling Stone that looks at the history of the Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapses. The story ends up being more about naked short-selling and the role it played in those incidents than I had originally planned…, but it turns out that there’s no way to talk about Bear and Lehman without going into the weeds of naked short-selling…
It’s the conspicuousness … that is the issue here, and the degree to which the SEC and the other financial regulators have proven themselves completely incapable of addressing the issue seriously, constantly giving in to the demands of the major banks to pare back (or shelf altogether) planned regulatory actions. There probably isn’t a better example of “regulatory capture” … than this issue.
In that vein, starting tomorrow, the SEC is holding a public “round table” on the naked short-selling issue. What’s interesting about this round table is that virtually none of the invited speakers represent shareholders or companies that might be targets of naked short-selling, or indeed any activists of any kind in favor of tougher rules against the practice. Instead, all of the invitees are either banks, financial firms, or companies that sell stuff to the first two groups.
In particular, there are very few panelists — in fact only one, from what I understand — who are in favor of a simple reform called “pre-borrowing.” Pre-borrowing is what it sounds like; it forces short-sellers to actually possess shares before they sell them.
It’s been proven to work, as last summer the SEC, concerned about predatory naked short-selling of big companies in the wake of the Bear Stearns wipeout, instituted a temporary pre-borrow requirement…
The lack of pre-borrow voices invited to this panel is analogous to the Max Baucus health care round table last spring, when no single-payer advocates were invited. So who will get to speak? Two guys from Goldman Sachs, plus reps from Citigroup, Citadel (a hedge fund that has done the occasional short sale, to put it gently), Credit Suisse, NYSE Euronext, and so on.
In advance of this panel and in advance of proposed changes to the financial regulatory system, these players have been stepping up their lobbying efforts… Goldman Sachs in particular has been making its presence felt.
Last Friday I got a call from a Senate staffer who said that Goldman had just been in his boss’s office, lobbying against restrictions on naked short-selling. The aide said Goldman had passed out a fact sheet about the issue that was so ridiculous that one of the other staffers immediately thought to send it to me. When I went to actually get the document, though, the aide had had a change of heart.
Which was weird, and I thought the matter had ended there. But the exact same situation then repeated itself with another congressional staffer, who then actually passed me Goldman’s fact sheet.
Now, the mere fact that two different congressional aides were so disgusted by Goldman’s performance that they both called me on the same day — and I don’t have a relationship with either of these people — tells you how nauseated they were.
I would later hear that Senate aides between themselves had discussed Goldman’s lobbying efforts and concluded that it was one of the most shameless performances they’d ever seen from any group of lobbyists, and that the “fact sheet” … was, to quote one person familiar with the situation, “disgraceful” and “hilarious.” …
Prof. Jim Hamilton at Econbrowser (thanks Mark Thoma for the link) addresses one of the Fed’s standard methods of draining liquidity from the banking system: reverse repurchase agreements. Basically, the Fed will transfer some of its assets to the banking system via short-term loans taken out with its Primary Dealers, presumably offering standard (Treasuries) and less standard (MBS or agency bonds) assets as collateral.
Reverse repurchase agreements simply slosh around the assets (MBS, agencies, and Treasuries) between the Fed and the Primary Dealers, rather than removing the assets from the Fed’s balance sheet permanently. Eventually, though, the Fed must sell the securities outright onto the open market – we are far, far from that!
This is all hot air for now. How can the Fed soak up the expansionary liquidity, let alone unwind $1 trillion in assets, when the banking system is still shedding pounds?
The Fed is considering another route, too: conducting the same repurchase agreements with the money-market mutual fund industry in tandem. An excerpt from the FT:
The Federal Reserve is looking to team up with the money-market mutual fund industry as part of its strategy to ensure that its unconventional policies to stimulate the economy do not produce a bout of post-crisis inflation.
The central bank envisages eventually draining liquidity from the financial system by engaging in trades called “reverse repos” with the deep-pocketed money-market funds. In these, the Fed would pledge mortgage-backed securities and Treasuries acquired during the crisis as collateral for short-term loans from the funds.
The obvious counterparties for reverse repo deals are the Wall Street primary dealers. However, the Fed thinks they would only have balance sheet capacity to refinance about $100bn of assets. By contrast, the money-market funds have $2,500bn in assets, which means they could plausibly refinance as much as $500bn in Fed assets. Officials think there would be appetite on the part of the funds, which are under pressure from regulators and investors to stick to low-risk liquid investments.
The Fed is solely attempting to assuage inflation angst at this time; it’s still very premature to talk about an exit of expansionary policies when credit markets still crimp the stimulus that the Fed so desperately wants to get into the open market (much of the base, roughly $855 billion on September 23, 2009 and up from $2 billion in August 2008, remains on balance with the Fed in the form of “excess reserves). Just look at the crunch in the consumer credit space (chart to left).
As Prof. Hamilton suggests, the mechanisms of the reverse repos should successfully sterilize the base before it starts to become inflationary (with either the Primary Dealers and/or the Mutual Funds industry). However, one of the programs through which the Fed utilized previously to sterilize its liquidity, and to which Prof. Hamilton refers, – the Supplementary Financing Program – is unlikely to be an avenue for removing liquidity.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite. The Treasury already announced its imminent plan to liquidate the bulk of its $200 billion account with the Fed. There’s another $200 billion in excess reserves with which the Fed must contend (see my previous post here).
It’s easy to get the liquidity into the financial system. But getting it out without collapsing the economy or allowing inflation pressures to build? Well, that’s a different story.
Aug 042009
In light of the recent allegations of trade secrets theft at Goldman Sachs, Ethan S. Burger and Kenneth Gray look at whether corporate security and policy are prepared to handle a “new generation of economic disruption”. Read Goldman Sachs’ Code and the Elephant in the Room.
Sic Transit Gloria America
A Growing List Of One Term Presidents, China and the Treasuries - A Dependency Relationship, Death of the Dollar, Dollar Musings, Even the Terminator Can't Help California, Global Trade, Insolvency, Our phony middle class, The China Dilemma, The Democrats Blew It Again, The End of American Capitalism As We Know It? - Discuss, The Global Economy, The Importance of Strategic Planning, The Sorry State Of American Manufacturing, US Trade Imbalance, Watch The China Market, We Are All Cooked, We Have Become Beggars To The World
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Aug 022009
As U.S. deficits increased, global investors edged away from the dollar into the German mark, the Japanese yen, the Swiss franc, the Euro, and more recently baskets of Asian currencies.
Which brings us to today. Only goodwill (defined both as an accounting term and as political deference to military might) now supports the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, which is what allows the United States to issue dollar-denominated bonds in world money markets.
It is this borrowing capacity that allows the Obama administration to bailout the banking industry, offer to pay for universal health care, fight colonial wars in the Middle East, stimulate the economy, send billions to Egypt and Israel, buy out General Motors, and subsidize every windmill start-up company in Nancy Pelosi’s home district. (Madoff’s problem was that he failed to set himself up as a country. He otherwise understood deficit spending.) But the shell game requires full faith in the dollar.
For those riding out financial storms by “sitting on cash,” here is what’s under your seat: in recent months U.S. federal debt has grown to $11.3 trillion, almost equivalent to gross domestic production. About one quarter of this indebtedness, or $2.8 trillion, is held abroad, and China and Japan hold just under half of those assets (liabilities to Uncle Sam).
Elsewhere on the American balance sheet is another $11.4 trillion in household debt, an annual trade deficit of about $725 billion, and a federal budget deficit that is estimated in 2009 to be approaching $1.8 trillion. That’s if the economy grows at 3 percent.
Off-balance sheet risks, what accountants call contingent liabilities, include about $10 trillion in new bailout guarantees (Fannie Mae, Bear Stearns, Countrywide, and whatever the administration launches as its New Deal of the Day). None of the above includes the unfunded liabilities of Social Security ($41 trillion), which, by comparison, make the shares of Lehman Brothers and AIG look like Scottish bonds held for widows and orphans.
The geese laying the golden eggs of U.S. financial stability are the printing presses of the U.S. Treasury, and, for now, those collecting them in their Easter baskets include a number of countries and regions perhaps tiring of American arrogance, if not of the drop in the dollar’s value. Who would blame such popular targets of moral abuse as China, Russia, Switzerland, Arabia, or Latin America for dumping their dollar-denominated assets?
All that lies between the U.S. dollar and a financial Armageddon is the Faustian house of credit cards under which Asian economies invest their trade surpluses in U.S. Treasury instruments — to keep the dollar strong, their own currencies weak, and purchases brisk between the likes of Wal-Mart and the Asian Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Sooner than we think, China and Japan, like all nervous creditors, may send the United States a letter, suggesting that, henceforward, if Washington needs to borrow money, the bonds be issued in renmimbi, yen, or a basket of Asian currencies (a Pacific Euro).
Wall Street bankers did the same to the farm interests in the late nineteenth century, when they insisted that debt be based on a gold standard, as opposed to “free silver.” President Obama may be as eloquent as William Jennings Bryan. But at that point he will need to use all his oratory for the business of selling junk bonds.
The Dollar: Running On Reserve – Matthew Stevenson, newgeography
The Big Government Boss isn’t going away
“Hindsight is a wonderful thing,” said Timothy W. Long, the chief bank
examiner for the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “At the height of
the economic boom, to take an aggressive supervisory approach and tell people to
stop lending is hard to do.” Post Mortems Reveal Obvious Risks at Banks, NY Times