Daily Archives: May 26, 2009 @ 9:11 am (Tuesday)

Obama – “US out of money”

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After a fiscal package that may or may not be sufficient to bring down unemployment, the president is now directly telling us that the next move is to dampen aggregate demand by reducing health care spending (and letting tax rates go higher.)

In a sobering holiday interview with C-SPAN, President Obama boldly told Americans: “We are out of money.”

C-SPAN host Steve Scully broke from a meek Washington press corps with probing questions for the new president.

SCULLY: You know the numbers, $1.7 trillion debt, a national deficit of $11 trillion. At what point do we run out of money?

OBAMA: Well, we are out of money now. We are operating in deep deficits, not caused by any decisions we’ve made on health care so far. This is a consequence of the crisis that we’ve seen and in fact our failure to make some good decisions on health care over the last several decades.

So we’ve got a short-term problem, which is we had to spend a lot of money to salvage our financial system, we had to deal with the auto companies, a huge recession which drains tax revenue at the same time it’s putting more pressure on governments to provide unemployment insurance or make sure that food stamps are available for people who have been laid off.

So we have a short-term problem and we also have a long-term problem. The short-term problem is dwarfed by the long-term problem. And the long-term problem is Medicaid and Medicare. If we don’t reduce long-term health care inflation substantially, we can’t get control of the deficit.


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FDIC undervalued failed banks as suspected

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As suspected at the time, some (not all) of the failed banks were undervalued by the FDIC to facilitate a quick transfer to other institutions to the detriment of the former shareholders.

Worse, the FDIC said some of the banks failed due to liquidity and not capital impairment.
This means they failed because FDIC deposit insurance and Fed lending failed to do their job of supporting the liability side of banking as per the business model of this long standing ‘public/private partnership’ called banking.

JPMorgan $29 Billion WaMu Windfall Turned Bad Loans Into Income

by Ari Levy and Elizabeth Hester

May 26 (Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. stands to reap a $29 billion windfall thanks to an accounting rule that lets the second-biggest U.S. bank transform bad loans it purchased from Washington Mutual Inc. into income.

Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of America Corp. and PNC Financial Services Group Inc. are also poised to benefit from taking over home lenders Wachovia Corp., Countrywide Financial Corp. and National City Corp., regulatory filings show. The deals provide a combined $56 billion in so-called accretable yield, the difference between the value of the loans on the banks’ balance sheets and the cash flow they’re expected to produce.

Faced with the highest U.S. unemployment in 25 years and a surging foreclosure rate, the lenders are seizing on a four- year-old rule aimed at standardizing how they book acquired loans that have deteriorated in credit quality. By applying the measure to mortgages and commercial loans that lost value during the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the banks will wring revenue from the wreckage, said Robert Willens, a former Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. executive who runs a tax and accounting consulting firm in New York.

“It will benefit these guys dramatically,” Willens said. “There’s a great chance they’ll be able to record very substantial gains going forward.”

When JPMorgan bought WaMu out of receivership last September for $1.9 billion, the New York-based bank used purchase accounting, which allows it to record impaired loans at fair value, marking down $118.2 billion of assets by 25 percent. Now, as borrowers pay their debts, the bank says it may gain $29.1 billion over the life of the loans in pretax income before taxes and expenses.

Purchase Accounting

The purchase-accounting rule, known as Statement of Position 03-3, provides banks with an incentive to mark down loans they acquire as aggressively as possible, said Gerard Cassidy, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets in Portland, Maine.

“One of the beauties of purchase accounting is after you mark down your assets, you accrete them back in,” Cassidy said. “Those transactions should be favorable over the long run.”

JPMorgan bought WaMu’s deposits and loans after regulators seized the Seattle-based thrift in the biggest bank failure in U.S. history. JPMorgan took a $29.4 billion writedown on WaMu’s holdings, mostly for option adjustable-rate mortgages and home- equity loans.

“We marked the portfolio based on a number of factors, including housing-price judgment at the time,” said JPMorgan spokesman Thomas Kelly. “The accretion is driven by prevailing interest rates.”

Wachovia ARMS

JPMorgan said first-quarter gains from the WaMu loans resulted in $1.26 billion in interest income and left the bank with an accretable-yield balance that could result in additional income of $29.1 billion.

Wells Fargo arranged the $12.7 billion purchase of Wachovia in October, as the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank was sinking from $122 billion in option ARMs. As of March 31, San Francisco-based Wells Fargo had marked down $93 billion of impaired Wachovia loans by 37 percent. The expected cash flow was $70.3 billion.

The Wachovia loans added $561 million to the bank’s first- quarter interest income, leaving Wells Fargo with a remaining accretable yield of almost $10 billion.

Government efforts to reduce mortgage rates and stabilize the housing market may make it easier for borrowers to repay loans and for banks to realize the accretable yield on their books. With mortgage rates below 5 percent, originations surged 71 percent in the first quarter from the fourth, a pace that may accelerate during 2009, said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance in Bethesda, Maryland.

Recapturing Writedowns

Wells Fargo, the biggest U.S. mortgage originator, doubled home loans in the first quarter from the previous three months, in part through refinancing Wachovia loans.

“To the extent that the customers’ experience is better or we can modify the loans, and the loans become more current, that could help recapture some of the writedown,” Wells Fargo Chief Financial Officer Howard Atkins said in an April 22 interview.

Banks still face the risk that defaults may exceed expectations and lead to further writedowns on their purchased loans. Foreclosure filings in the U.S. rose to a record for the second straight month in April, climbing 32 percent from a year earlier to more than 342,000, data compiled by Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc. show.

Accretable Yield

The companies bought by Wells Fargo, JPMorgan, PNC and Bank of America were among the biggest lenders in states with the highest foreclosure rates, including California, Florida and Ohio. Housing prices tumbled the most on record in the first quarter, leaving an increasing number of borrowers owing more in mortgage payments than their homes are worth, according to Zillow.com, an online property data company.

“We’ve still got a lot of downside to work through this year and probably through at least part of next,” said William Schwartz, a credit analyst at DBRS Inc. in New York. “If I were them, I wouldn’t be claiming any victory yet.”

The difference in accretable yield from bank to bank is due to the amount of impaired loans, the credit quality of the acquired assets and the state of the economy when the deals were completed. Rising and falling interest rates also affect accretable yield for portfolios with adjustable-rate loans.

PNC closed its $3.9 billion acquisition of National City on Dec. 31, after the Cleveland-based bank racked up more than $4 billion in losses tied to subprime loans. PNC, based in Pittsburgh, marked down $19.3 billion of impaired loans by 38 percent, or $7.4 billion, and said it expected to recoup half of the writedown. After gaining $213 million in interest income in the first quarter and making some adjustments, the company has an accretable-yield balance of $2.9 billion.

‘Being Prudent’

“We’re just being prudent,” PNC Chief Financial Officer Richard Johnson said in a May 19 interview.

Johnson said he expects the entire accretable yield to result in earnings. The company has taken into “consideration everything that can go wrong with the economy,” he said.

Bank of America, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, has potential purchase-accounting income of $14.1 billion, including $627 million of gains from Merrill Lynch & Co. and the rest from Countrywide. Bank of America bought subprime lender Countrywide in July, two months before the financial crisis forced Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy and WaMu into receivership.

As market losses deepened, Bank of America had to reduce the returns it expected the impaired loans to produce from an original estimate of $19.6 billion.

Countrywide Marks

“The Countrywide marks in hindsight weren’t nearly as aggressive,” said Jason Goldberg, an analyst at Barclays Capital in New York, who has “equal weight” investment ratings on Bank of America and PNC and “overweight” recommendations for Wells Fargo and JPMorgan.

Bank of America spokesman Jerry Dubrowski declined to comment.

The discounted assets purchased by JPMorgan and Wells Fargo make the stocks more attractive because they will spur an acceleration in profit growth, said Chris Armbruster, an analyst at Al Frank Asset Management Inc. in Laguna Beach, California.

“There’s definitely going to be some marks that were taken that were too extreme,” said Armbruster, whose firm oversees about $375 million. “It gives them a huge cushion or buffer to smooth out earnings.”


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Vice Chair Kohn on fiscal expansion

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Yes, he’s got that part very right!!!

>   On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 11:06 PM, Roger wrote:
>   
>   Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn:
>   
>   Interactions between Monetary and Fiscal Policy in the Current Situation
>   
>   [I]n the current weak economic environment, a fiscal expansion may be much more
>   effective in providing a sustained boost to economic activity.
>   Doesn’t say anything about when. Looks like it’s already too late to forestall a pileup.
>   


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German debts set to blow ‘like a grenade’-Pritchard

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Completely agreed about the possibility of a bank blow up.

And it’s also possible the government plan blows up the government.

The eurozone is the region vulnerable to ratings downgrades- both banks and national governments.

Not the UK and US governments where spending is not revenue constrained.

The ECB can ‘save’ the eurozone but only by extending credit beyond that ‘permitted’ by the treaty which in some ways they have already done.

This warning comes from a financial regulator:

German debts set to blow ‘like a grenade’

by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

May 25 (Telegraph) — German debts set to blow ‘like a grenade’
Germany’s financial regulator BaFin has warned that the toxic debts of the country’s banks will blow up “like a grenade” unless they take advantage of the government’s bad bank plans to prepare for the next phase of the crisis.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s bad bank plan has been heavily criticised Photo: EPA
Jochen Sanio, BaFin’s president, said the danger is a series of “brutal” downgrades of mortgage securities by the rating agencies, which would eat into the depleted capital reserves of the banks and cause broader stress across the credit system. “We must make the banks immune against the changes in ratings,” he said.

The markets will “kill” banks that try to go it alone without state protection, warning that banks have €200bn (£176bn) of bad debts on their books. “We are pretty sure that within a month or two our banks will feel the full force of the sharpest recession ever on their credit portfolios,” he said, speaking after the release of BaFin’s annual report last week.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has called for a stress test for Europe’s banks along the lines to the US Treasury’s health screen, saying the region “urgently needs to weatherproof its institutions”.

The IMF said European institutions have written down less than 20pc of projected losses of $900bn (£566bn) by 2010. Euro area banks will have to raise a further $375bn in fresh capital, compared with $275bn for US banks. The Tier one capital ratio is 7.3pc in Europe, and 10.4pc in the US.

The German bad bank plan has been heavily criticised as an attempt to brush the problems under the carpet until after the elections in September. It allows banks to spread losses over 20 years in an off-balance sheet vehicle – much like the “SIVs” that masked their extreme leverage in the first place – and risks repeating the Japanese error of letting “zombie” banks limp on rather than purging the system.

The recession has hit Europe much harder than expected. German GDP has contracted by 6.9pc over the last year, and the eurozone as a whole has shrunk 4.6pc, although there are signs that the economy may be through the worst.

Germany’s IFO business confidence index rose to 84.2 in May, the highest since December, and German exports have started to rise again after a catastrophic fall of 16pc. But Carsten Brzeski from ING said it is too early to celebrate.


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Commodities speculation

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I’ve also hear reports that pension funds have been adding to passive commodity strategies:

The green shoots will grow slowly

by David Robertson

May 25 (Business 24/7) — By the middle of this month, copper prices were 60 per cent up on the start of the year and platinum was up by a third. The rebound has been driven by a conviction that these metals were oversold and as construction demand (copper) and automotive demand (platinum) pick up, the price of the metals will return to more sensible levels. However, I bring bad news. Industrial demand is not returning nearly as fast as the London Metal Exchange or London Stock Exchange would have us believe – and that means we are still some way off from seeing a return to the sort of growth levels achieved prior to 2008.

Two things are currently distorting metal prices: Chinese stockpiling and speculation. The Chinese have taken advantage of the low price of metals to fill their warehouses and this has been mistaken for a dramatic ramp up in “real” industrial demand. I have no doubt that Chinese demand from factories and construction companies has increased recently but at nothing like a rate that would support a 60 per cent surge in copper prices.

Speculation has also played a significant role in boosting prices as investors have piled into commodities, partly because they have been fooled by Chinese demand and partly because a lot of people are already thinking about where to stash their cash in the event of rampant inflation next year.

Last week Investec, the South African bank, highlighted the impact speculation was having on market-traded metals by focusing on commodities that are not easily traded. For example, ferrochrome, which is used to make stainless steel, actually fell 13 per cent in price between the first and second quarter of this year and it is off 63 per cent from its high at the end of last year. Manganese contract prices are off 70 per cent and the steel makers are pushing for a 45 per cent cut in iron ore contract prices.

There is no “hot money” in these commodities so they give us a better guide to real industrial demand – and clearly there is little to get excited about yet. As a result, I expect to see a repeat of last year’s oil bubble: everyone will shortly wake up and realise that the shoots are not quite as green as had been hoped and prices will fall back by 20 to 30 per cent (again).


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Professor James Sturgeon

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From Jim Sturgeon

I’ll put in my two cents. The crooks should be convicted as a regular part of the legal system and examples set to deter future attempts. However, the acquisitive heart and I expect the felonious one, beats about the same from generation to generation (to paraphrase JKG the elder). It’s the institutions that change. We should have a way of dealing with crooks as a matter of institutional (no pun) policy. That much it seems goes without saying, although it seems to be rather more difficult to do than it should.

The most recent economic crisis, triggered by a rapid run-up in the nominal (money) price of various assets, is a more difficult institutional adjustment. Warren is correct that whatever real assets were created as we ran up the money price of debt and other monetary instruments are still in place. And whatever scientific/technological knowledge was created is still present and available for use. We are not now dumber than we were in 2000 or 2005. What has been lost is the balance sheet value of some (probably many) wealth holders. But of course if this was never a reflection of the real value of the assets then it is not so much a loss as a readjustment. People feel poorer because they once felt richer; buoyed by the fool’s gold in their portfolio. Feeling poorer, they now pull in on the reins of their consumption with all the well known results. Agreed there is a need for new rules and the enforcement of both old and new ones so as to control and regulate the financial sector. I also think we would benefit by reducing the strength of that sectors siren’s song that lures so many able minded to its call.

There is a relationship between the financial crises and the real economy, but it is of our making. By this I mean we have put in place a system of rules and policies by which the pecuniary forces in the economy animate or arrest the real forces. This frequently contributes to an already poorly functioning labor sector (market). What would help is to readjust this relationship with an eye toward lessening the impact on the real sector due to the exuberance (irrational or otherwise) in the financial sector. This is a matter of policy, law and regulatory changes necessary to adjust the institutional controls. The first and most obvious one is the labor market. The Full Employment Act of 2009 should be written and passed with an ELR provision (build a high speed rail system for openers and then I’ll add about 50 other obvious projects that would build real wealth in the US). This would significantly dampen the effect of the financial sector on the labor market and bring some stabilization to aggregate demand. Economists and others ought to give at least as much attention to the labor market and real sector as they have to the financial sector.

I don’t know if the above is what Warren has in mind when he says it is the response wherein the problem lies, but it seems to me the response so far is mostly framed with the same logic and played with most of the same players that have helped us misunderstand the relationship between finance and production.


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