We have no longer just a crisis in the financial system. We have gone even beyond the stage where there is a crisis of the financial system. The western (north-Atlantic) financial system we knew has collapsed. If I may paraphrase that great ensemble of Nobel-prize winning financial wizards, Monty Python’s Flying Circus:
“This financial system is no more! It has ceased to be! ‘It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! ‘It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed ‘it to the tax payer’s perch it’d be pushing up the daisies! ‘Its metabolic processes are now ‘istory! ‘It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FINANCIAL SYSTEM!!”
FT
30 November 2008
London Banker Repost ~ What We Value Is What We Save In a Crisis
“When a woman thinks that her house is on fire, her instinct is at once to rush to the thing which she values most. It is a perfectly overpowering impulse, and I have more than once taken advantage of it. . . . A married woman grabs at her baby; an unmarried one reaches for her jewel-box.”
-- Sherlock Holmes from A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle
When a central bank thinks its house is on fire, it too will rush to save the thing valued most. In the United States, the central bank has rushed to save the bonuses and dividends of its Wall Street clientele by hiding away the bad assets that can no longer be foisted on gullible investors. In Europe too the response of central banks has been to save the wholesale banking and securities industry rather than the consumers and businesses underlying the real economy’s longer term productive strength.
For a comparative of what is valued elsewhere, it is worthwhile to look at what is being saved. I received in my inbox yesterday documents outlining the efforts being taken by the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to address the liquidity crisis in their respective jurisdictions. They are available online here (Hong Kong) and here (PRC). The contrasts with the West are striking, and humbling.
Hong Kong is swiftly introducing a scheme to guarantee credit to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and exporters. China is introducing controls to limit bank credit to over-extended speculative sectors, accelerate rebuilding in the regions affected by the earthquake earlier this year, and promote improvements in local infrastructure, education and economic adjustment.
Holmes would have been disgusted by a married woman who grabbed her jewel-box in preference to her baby. In the same way, I am disgusted by the central banks preserving the privileges of the financial elite in preference to the jobs, incomes and businesses powering the real economy. The US and UK authorities may criticise the banks for their inaction in freeing up lending to commercial businesses constrained by the credit crunch. The Hong Kong and Chinese authorities are implementing guarantee schemes and innovating initiatives to rapidly address the problem.
As Holmes would have considered a child’s life worth more than jewels, I consider the workers and businesses in the real economy as meriting greater protection than the financial elite. It is not merely that I think the financial elite little better than criminals for their irresponsible excesses of recent years, but that I fear long term harm and political instability will come from neglecting the needs of the real economy.
Shortsightedness is a peculiar affliction of the Western economies. We cannot seem to project the consequences of our actions beyond the next quarterly report, fiscal year or - at most - election cycle. Eastern policy makers have a capacity for longer vision – and longer memory – which makes them appreciate sooner the potential consequences of bad policy. Perhaps this is a consequence of the longer term dedication required to gain political ascendancy in their less cyclical heirarchy.
That China's leadership is concerned with the implications for the real economy – and political stability – was confirmed this morning in an unusually blunt public statement by the chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission. From the Financial Times:
The downturn in the Chinese economy accelerated over the past month and could lead to high unemployment and social unrest, the country’s top economic planner warned on Thursday.
Zhang Ping, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the government needed to take “forceful” measures to limit the slowdown in the economy, which included Wednesday’s large cut in interest rates and a sharp increase in fiscal spending. The rate cut was the fourth since September.
“The global financial crisis has not bottomed out yet. The impact is spreading globally and deepening in China. Some domestic economic indicators point to an accelerated slowdown in November,” Mr Zhang said on Thursday at a rare news conference.
Mr Zhang’s warning about the potential for social unrest as a result of factory closures underlined the mounting concern in Beijing about the fallout from the global financial crisis.
“Excessive production cuts and closures of businesses will cause massive unemployment, which will lead to instability,” Mr Zhang said.
As Jim Rohm observed, “Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”
The crisis in debt markets has been rolling since the sub-prime collapse of August 2007. The increasing illiquidity of commercial paper, trade credit, municipal finance and other debt markets was foreseeable and inevitable. And yet the central banks and treasury authorities of the Western nations have done nothing to shield these essential sectors from the ill effects of the financial sector implosion while giving virtually unlimited funds to the banks authoring the collapse.
Any discussion of China always invites criticism of its anti-democratic governance. It is worth remembering that the philisophical defense of democracy lies in the proposition that it is more likely over time to serve the interests of the electorate than a system which disenfranchises the people from the determination of their leadership. If the democratically elected governments - through their appointed executives and central bankers - are free over an extended timespan to ignore the interests of the people, then how is a Western democracy superior to a Chinese bureaucracy? From looking at the policies and practices of the past year, the merits of Western democracy are not immediately apparent in ensuring that policy responses to the financial crisis are aligned with the interests of the people. Even over the past decade, it is not clear that the policies of the democratic Western governments have aimed to strengthen and broaden the economy to benefit of the electorate rather than a narrow, self-serving elite.
According to Brad Setser, the World Bank is projecting increases to China’s trade surplus in 2009 as falling commodity prices lower production costs. Those unelected bureaucrats are doing something right.
If China and Hong Kong recover sooner, prosper more, and gain global political and economic authority in consequence, it will be because they made fewer mistakes and made them less persistently than their Western counterparts. If the promoters of democracy want to strengthen their case, they might best do so by ensuring that their leadership adheres to policies which promote the longer term health and well being of the economy as a whole rather than the short term enrichment of an undemocratic elite.
Posted by London Banker at 04:32
link
-- Sherlock Holmes from A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arthur Conan Doyle
When a central bank thinks its house is on fire, it too will rush to save the thing valued most. In the United States, the central bank has rushed to save the bonuses and dividends of its Wall Street clientele by hiding away the bad assets that can no longer be foisted on gullible investors. In Europe too the response of central banks has been to save the wholesale banking and securities industry rather than the consumers and businesses underlying the real economy’s longer term productive strength.
For a comparative of what is valued elsewhere, it is worthwhile to look at what is being saved. I received in my inbox yesterday documents outlining the efforts being taken by the Hong Kong and Chinese authorities to address the liquidity crisis in their respective jurisdictions. They are available online here (Hong Kong) and here (PRC). The contrasts with the West are striking, and humbling.
Hong Kong is swiftly introducing a scheme to guarantee credit to SMEs (small and medium enterprises) and exporters. China is introducing controls to limit bank credit to over-extended speculative sectors, accelerate rebuilding in the regions affected by the earthquake earlier this year, and promote improvements in local infrastructure, education and economic adjustment.
Holmes would have been disgusted by a married woman who grabbed her jewel-box in preference to her baby. In the same way, I am disgusted by the central banks preserving the privileges of the financial elite in preference to the jobs, incomes and businesses powering the real economy. The US and UK authorities may criticise the banks for their inaction in freeing up lending to commercial businesses constrained by the credit crunch. The Hong Kong and Chinese authorities are implementing guarantee schemes and innovating initiatives to rapidly address the problem.
As Holmes would have considered a child’s life worth more than jewels, I consider the workers and businesses in the real economy as meriting greater protection than the financial elite. It is not merely that I think the financial elite little better than criminals for their irresponsible excesses of recent years, but that I fear long term harm and political instability will come from neglecting the needs of the real economy.
Shortsightedness is a peculiar affliction of the Western economies. We cannot seem to project the consequences of our actions beyond the next quarterly report, fiscal year or - at most - election cycle. Eastern policy makers have a capacity for longer vision – and longer memory – which makes them appreciate sooner the potential consequences of bad policy. Perhaps this is a consequence of the longer term dedication required to gain political ascendancy in their less cyclical heirarchy.
That China's leadership is concerned with the implications for the real economy – and political stability – was confirmed this morning in an unusually blunt public statement by the chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission. From the Financial Times:
The downturn in the Chinese economy accelerated over the past month and could lead to high unemployment and social unrest, the country’s top economic planner warned on Thursday.
Zhang Ping, chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, said the government needed to take “forceful” measures to limit the slowdown in the economy, which included Wednesday’s large cut in interest rates and a sharp increase in fiscal spending. The rate cut was the fourth since September.
“The global financial crisis has not bottomed out yet. The impact is spreading globally and deepening in China. Some domestic economic indicators point to an accelerated slowdown in November,” Mr Zhang said on Thursday at a rare news conference.
Mr Zhang’s warning about the potential for social unrest as a result of factory closures underlined the mounting concern in Beijing about the fallout from the global financial crisis.
“Excessive production cuts and closures of businesses will cause massive unemployment, which will lead to instability,” Mr Zhang said.
As Jim Rohm observed, “Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgement, repeated every day.”
The crisis in debt markets has been rolling since the sub-prime collapse of August 2007. The increasing illiquidity of commercial paper, trade credit, municipal finance and other debt markets was foreseeable and inevitable. And yet the central banks and treasury authorities of the Western nations have done nothing to shield these essential sectors from the ill effects of the financial sector implosion while giving virtually unlimited funds to the banks authoring the collapse.
Any discussion of China always invites criticism of its anti-democratic governance. It is worth remembering that the philisophical defense of democracy lies in the proposition that it is more likely over time to serve the interests of the electorate than a system which disenfranchises the people from the determination of their leadership. If the democratically elected governments - through their appointed executives and central bankers - are free over an extended timespan to ignore the interests of the people, then how is a Western democracy superior to a Chinese bureaucracy? From looking at the policies and practices of the past year, the merits of Western democracy are not immediately apparent in ensuring that policy responses to the financial crisis are aligned with the interests of the people. Even over the past decade, it is not clear that the policies of the democratic Western governments have aimed to strengthen and broaden the economy to benefit of the electorate rather than a narrow, self-serving elite.
According to Brad Setser, the World Bank is projecting increases to China’s trade surplus in 2009 as falling commodity prices lower production costs. Those unelected bureaucrats are doing something right.
If China and Hong Kong recover sooner, prosper more, and gain global political and economic authority in consequence, it will be because they made fewer mistakes and made them less persistently than their Western counterparts. If the promoters of democracy want to strengthen their case, they might best do so by ensuring that their leadership adheres to policies which promote the longer term health and well being of the economy as a whole rather than the short term enrichment of an undemocratic elite.
Posted by London Banker at 04:32
link
29 November 2008
Thanksgiving Menu 2008
Collectively and individually, we all learn through crises. But only after a crisis is over do we recognize the lessons learned and become thankful for the fundamental and needed changes such crises bring. When this crisis is over, we too will be thankful for its gifts. But this crisis is not yet over. It has only just begun.
Thanksgiving Menu 2008
appetizers
Mélange Of Frozen Markets
Tossed Assets With Government Guarantees
Frisée Of Foreclosures And Defaults
main dishes
Évaporation de Credit à la Cold Turkey
House Signature Dish
Seared Investors In Bottomless Pit With Caramelized Investments
Overheated Markets Without Oversight à la SEC
Braised Bankers Rump With Bailout Coulis
desserts
Sorbet Trio Of Shock, Disbelief And Insolvency
Off Balance Sheet flambé
Featured wine
Great Depression Grand Siècle1933 méthode creditoise
THE LAST HAPPY CHRISTMAS
Last fall when the crisis caused by the August 2007 credit contraction began to gain momentum, its effects were initially confined to the financial sector. The lives of most individuals were still not affected by the spreading contagion of defaults emanating from investment banks in New York, London, Tokyo, Europe and elsewhere.
In America, Thanksgiving Day occurs in November and begins the autumn holiday season which ends with Christmas and the New Years festivities. At this time last year, the financial crisis had not yet affected America’s holiday celebrations although I knew it would soon do so.
Last fall, I predicted that Christmas 2007 would be remembered as “the last happy Christmas”. Today, the financial crisis has now reached the lives of those far removed from global financial centers and this holiday season will be unlike those previous. Next year, it will be worse.
schoon
Thanksgiving Menu 2008
appetizers
Mélange Of Frozen Markets
Tossed Assets With Government Guarantees
Frisée Of Foreclosures And Defaults
main dishes
Évaporation de Credit à la Cold Turkey
House Signature Dish
Seared Investors In Bottomless Pit With Caramelized Investments
Overheated Markets Without Oversight à la SEC
Braised Bankers Rump With Bailout Coulis
desserts
Sorbet Trio Of Shock, Disbelief And Insolvency
Off Balance Sheet flambé
Featured wine
Great Depression Grand Siècle1933 méthode creditoise
THE LAST HAPPY CHRISTMAS
Last fall when the crisis caused by the August 2007 credit contraction began to gain momentum, its effects were initially confined to the financial sector. The lives of most individuals were still not affected by the spreading contagion of defaults emanating from investment banks in New York, London, Tokyo, Europe and elsewhere.
In America, Thanksgiving Day occurs in November and begins the autumn holiday season which ends with Christmas and the New Years festivities. At this time last year, the financial crisis had not yet affected America’s holiday celebrations although I knew it would soon do so.
Last fall, I predicted that Christmas 2007 would be remembered as “the last happy Christmas”. Today, the financial crisis has now reached the lives of those far removed from global financial centers and this holiday season will be unlike those previous. Next year, it will be worse.
schoon
Be Right and Sit Tight ~ with real money
You have to laugh, I began reading 'fringe' financial websites, the gold bugs, market timers, the loonytunes back in 2001. I became familar with the timing shonks who offer zero value, Martin Weiss,(a sad scammer and a shonk, always the last to the party, Martin does not take any responsibility for his crap services but touts forever his success), Robert Prechter (serial top caller and general know it all) and the cream of the crop, the flipside, the guys who made you money. Some of the Agora services delivered, in spite of their eternal yankee hype; the endless comeon's to newbie greed, fear and hope and the way they split, slice and dice their offerings like Merril did mortgages. Not that they are terrible, btw, some services really worked and they have educated the masses, but they do tend to overleverage their insight in my view.
James Dines delivered, Marc Faber delivered. Zeal delivered. Jim Willie delivered. Buying gold and silver and doing nothing delivered. Many other niche dude's delivered.
Jim Puplava delivered in the funds management area, but he can't manage my money, he's a yank, he didn't lose anyones bundle investing in crap and his commitment to investor education is massive, valid and worthy of enormous respect, despite the ideological baggage and the ocassional strange takes.
Some great aussie services as well.....
See Hulbert for the US facts, he tracks all these guys, not Jim, the timers that is, but that's my take there and more on this later.
No investor ever made money being really nimble and no trader ever made money being right, two different skill sets...but this is also a topic for another time, its also hard to take advice, however good.
All the while the Industry was talking stocks for the long run, you can't time the market, Haw Haw, history means nothing, we know everything, look at our shiny models and nice computers and ignore the "fringe" they have nothing to offer.
The fringe was far wiser than the mainstream, it turned out. the Industry was, in the main, complacent, greedy and self interested.
What's this all about. Jim Willie makes sense also, so don't confuse his hyperbole with ratbaggery, he makes sense.
A word of warning.
Making money takes more than good advice; the biggest hurdle will always be the personality of the seeker, not the chosen method. To become a successfull trader in all markets will require a self mastery that when acquired may leave the seeker devoid of an interest in money.
Money won't solve your problems unless you are starving, it will only give a bigger canvas on which to make your style of mistake.
So the best advice for the average Joe, at this point in the cycle, is that he worry about the return of his money, not the return on it. My general advice at this point in time: Buy Gold, be right and sit tight. You will do well.
take it away willie...
The OMEN for a powerful shift in the gold market in my playful mind was the very real earthquake on November 18 here in Costa Rica, a clear signal from the financial gods, no minor tremor, measured at 6.0 on the Richter scale. The tremor confirmed the tectonic shifts to come to the gold market without question. This was the biggest earthquake in my life, no damage at all though, roof and toys intact. Numerous stories testify in aggregate to a severe tightening of the physical market, certain to put pressure on the corrupt paper market managed by the COMEX and its parent NYMEX.
Be sure not to miss the spectacular conjunction of planets and the moon in the southwest sky, over the next few days. The opportunity is for those in the Northern Hemisphere, sorry Australians and New Zealanders. Venus will converge with Jupiter, seen in nearly equal magnitude of brightness. When they are close in a few more days, the moon will enter the picture as a crescent in a spectacular display. For the description of the highly unusual event, check the NASA website (CLICK HERE). One could regard this event as another omen for a COMEX gold default, a stretch, but a legitimate one.
THE GLOBAL SHAME OF CENTRAL BANKS
On October 29, the US Federal Reserve cut by 50 basis points the official Fed Funds rate down to 1.0% flat. Do not expect the USFed to be done cutting rates. One week later, the entire globe of beleaguered central banks also cut their official interest rates in a parade of ignominy. They coordinated rate cuts on October 8, and again followed the USFed in early November. The important Euro CB cut by 50 basis points to the 3.25% level, surely in reluctant fashion given their firm defiant stance. The most desperate CBs are clearly England and Switzerland among the majors, and Australia and New Zealand in the second tier. The Bank of England (BOE) cut by 150 basis points unexpectedly, now at a 3.0% low level. The Swiss National Bank cut by 50 bpts with the pack, but on November 20 surprised all by cutting another full 100 bpts down to the ultra-low 0.5% level. The Reserve Bank of Australia cut by 100 bpts in October and plans to cut again this month. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand cut by 100 bpts in October and also plans further cuts. The Bank of Canada cut by 25 bpts in October and plans another 25 bpt cut in December. The Riksbank of Sweden cut by 50 bpts to 3.75% in October and plans another 25 bpt cut in December or soon afterwards. With global monetary inflation raging, and official interest rates converging to zero, the global central bankers must hang their heads in shame. THIS IS THE MOST VISIBLE, OBVIOUS, PREVALENT SIGNAL OF THEIR FAILURE.
The contained messages are four-fold:
ABSOLUTE CONTAGION: the global economy is suffering from broadly felt toxic shock due to US bonds, a process that has a few more quarters of severe crisis pathogenesis
POLICY EXTORTION: the major and secondary CB heads want to cut so that the US$ does not fall, coerced with a monetary gun at their heads
INFLATION EXPLOSION: global monetary growth has gone ballistic, no longer a priority to control, with all talk about limiting price inflation relegated to mumbling in the corner
ENDLESS RESCUES & BAILOUTS: the government sponsored bailouts are nowhere near finished, sure to be an endless parade of patchwork and stimulus with eventual climax of mortgage aid.
Just think of it. The USGovt, after a coup d’etat pulled off by Wall Street and fraudulent climax diversion of TARP funds, has yet to address the mortgage problem at all. Mortgage aid in meaningful and necessary terms is actively avoided, since it must come with a price tag up to $2000 billion in the United States alone. The nationalization of the US banking, if not financial system, is highly likely to be followed by an eventual virtual nationalization of the entire mortgage system. Such a decision and desperate socialist action will be the death knell for the USDollar, if it survives to the point when such a program is enacted.
The unbridled monetary inflation is a powerful bull market signal for gold, once asset prices stabilize. Monetary explosion always pushes gold upward in price, but this time much money is directed into a multi-channeled black hole. Today, yet another program was announced, finally to enable more lending capital to banks. They have been starved to date, drained in order to supply the corrupt Wall Street conmen in charge. The coordinated interest rate cuts reveal the strong impact of Competing Currency Devaluation. Foreigners wish to avoid further aggravation to their economies from even lower domestic currency exchange rates. They inflict higher prices upon their economies. Later, foreign governments will order their reserves and sovereign wealth funds to dump USTBonds in order to bolster their domestic currencies, the great counter-attack. The USEconomy has a worse problem to fix by an order of magnitude. My view is that the powerful US ailments are not fixable, since the financial engineering is too deeply rooted and the manufacturing industrial base has been removed in several stages over a 25-year period. Besides, the credit derivatives loom like a series of hidden bombs whose fuses intersect in the dark.
THE FRANCHISE OF CENTRAL BANKING HAS FAILED, AND GRAND RATE CUTS CONFIRM THIS NOTION EMPHATICALLY!!! THE COLLECTION OF CONCLUSIONS ADDS UP TO ONE POWERFUL FORECAST: GOLD & SILVER PRICES WILL RISE 10-FOLD IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS. SOON THE CLUTCH WILL BE RELEASED AND THE 10000 RPMS ENGAGE THE ECONOMIC TRANSMISSION TO PRODUCE PRICE SKIDMARKS. Ignore for now the paper price heavy-handed influence, which in my view will suddenly disappear in a volcano of controversy and tumult! The US paper system has falsified the entire global pricing structure. Instead of price discovery, we have been subjected to price controls and tyranny. Next comes the counter-attack.
Lost faith in USFed has finally come. Chairman Bernanke has learned the hard way that usage of the printing press is not the boasted solution. He is sending good money after bad, redeeming criminal fraud, endorsing checks for a broken system, and creating numerous delivery channels into a vast black hole. The US Federal Reserve has accomplished a bizarre feat. They have made short-term lending virtually free, but offer a yield over 3% on long-term bonds. So US banks are deeply engaged in a queer carry trade. US banks borrow short and lend to the USGovt long, and thus exploit the steep USTreasury yield curve. The US banks are trying to liquefy from this perverse mechanism, using incredibly large volumes of money. In the process, the USFed balance sheet is testing whether it can grow a tree to the sky. The USGovt has contributed to the ugly mountain of rancid paper with bad precedent after bad precedent, from poorly written deals. No private investor in right mind would step forward to help an ailing industrial or financial firm on the absurd blockheaded terms established by the USGovt. A record setting 25% of high-powered money, as in bank assets, that the USFed has provided, actually sit idle as excess reserves. Hence, money velocity has sharply dropped, typical of a recession. Failure has many symptoms. The USEconomy aggregates are falling off a cliff in unison.
Europe has entered a recession, but the US has entered disintegration, while England is close behind with a galloping leap off the Dover Cliffs. Kenneth Clark is a highly respected former conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) from 1993 to 1997 in England. He delivered an urgent warning for a “catastrophic crisis [that will be] far worse than anything that has occurred in my lifetime” for Great Britain. Clarke even slammed Gordon Brown as having received undue credit for his role in attempting to shore up the global economy. He warned policymakers should beware of a “full-blown depression will have on public finances” for its effect. A major error has been committed by both the US & UK. Neither nation has succeeded in passing on lower interest rates to home loans, and repayment plans are not happening in volume. The elite in both the US & UK are protecting their bankers, but killing the system in the process. Housing prices are careening downward, while job losses mount in large numbers, in both nations. The death of the AngloSphere is nigh, as status of debtor nations comes soon with all its penalties. A simple move to cut rates does nothing to address insolvency of both banks and households. This basic truism is totally lost on clownish inept US & UK economists and bankers. They both built an economy atop a housing bubble, blessed it, and encouraged the debt orgy process, only to see the entire system melt down. This was fully forecasted during the last two years by the Hat Trick Letter.
A VERY QUEER ANOMALY
We are working toward a nasty climax of historic proportions. Notice that the USTreasury Bill has an artificially high price, with staggering huge volume, which is backwards. This condition defies Mother Economic Nature. Notice that gold has an artificially low price on the paper contracts, with staggering huge demand for physical metal, which is also backwards. This condition defies Mother Economic Nature.
The USTreasurys, given the staggering high volume, should be valued lower. The gold bullion, with its staggering high demand, should be valued higher. Something must break, and break soon. Regard these two anomalies as temporary distress symptoms of ass-backward price mechanisms. The natural tendencies of man, full of human emotions like vengeance and retribution, will soon be unleashed to correct the PHONY HIGH USTBILL PRICE AND PHONY LOW GOLD PRICE. All kinds of key evidence points to a COMEX default in December, discussed in the November Gold & Currency Report. The keys are in the Open Interest, which for gold is collapsing. But the December OI is holding up at relatively high levels. The interpretation from Mr Market, who is a distant cousin of Mother Economic Nature, is “The paper gold market is flawed, and people want no part of it. What physical gold becomes available is being grabbed immediately.”
Further hints are offered by the Chinese, who announced a stimulus plan worth over $500 billion. They will use their USTBonds before they are trashed. The next phase is feeding off the USTreasury much like a dead elephant. However, the signature event must come first. THE COMEX GOLD MUST BE VANQUISHED. This is the Achilles Heel to the USDollar.
ATTACK OF COMEX GOLD & SILVER
Powerful foreign entities are preparing a massive major assault on the US financial corruption, at key spots. All signs seem to point to the gold futures contracts traded at the COMEX and NYMEX, whose prices are routinely suppressed by a high volume of uneconomic short contracts by two to four banks. The COMEX is a division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. A highly leveraged sequence is soon to be unleashed, one that should bring back thoughts of asymmetric attack. Think small cost of a weapon, heavy damage to costly equipment. Something big comes to the gold market, with big angry players! If successful, severe damage will be done to the USDollar. Their goal is to kill the COMEX gold market, the key location for gold price suppression. Major Russian, Chinese, Arab, and European bankers and billionaires are angry beyond words. The giant portion of gold vaulted resides in Central Europe. A plan is in place. The key here and now is COMEX gold futures contracts, where many big players are demanding delivery for their December contracts. North American investment houses have also targeting them for delivery demands. With newly energized Russia & China building their gold treasures, with Arabs turning from distrusted Western paper and more toward gold & silver, look for the new players to offer support to the primary thrust attacks. If successful, it will be a defining moment in US financial history. The first delivery notice for the December gold contract is given on November 28.
Recall that Russians and Arabs each have severe damage done to the crude oil price and petro revenues. The futures contract games conducted by US price systems and Wall Street tactics used against hedge funds are largely responsible. Russians and Arabs are angry. Their financial markets are in turmoil, their economies are disrupted, their property markets are in disarray. Furthermore, Russians and Arabs own a large amount of acquired gold, whose value is also pushed down by corrupt US paper mechanisms. The Persian Gulf lusts to put in place a gold trading center of world repute. A brutal powerful trap has been set, to be executed upon the paper engineers without mercy. If you have noticed the facial expression on some Wall Street heads, like Paulson, change in the last few weeks, this is one reason why. They have no shame in confiscation of Congressional funds. But they dread presiding over a failed pricing system for gold, and dread the prospect of being unmasked, not to mention bankrupted. Keep the focus on the JPMorgan garbage can, where the illegal futures contracts are stored, the very same contracts that are never marked to market on their balance sheet. A COMEX blowup reveals their grotesque distortion of market forces, underpinned by gold and USTreasurys. More details are provided in the November Hat Trick Letter report, like the movement by the Chinese and Iranians to vastly increase their gold reserves.
Veteran warhorse Max Keiser, has a video worth watching. See his video (CLICK HERE). He discusses the upcoming COMEX default for the December gold futures contract. He believes that in its wake, the gold price will rise suddenly to $2000 per ounce, perhaps in a single day. The main impetus in his view for the breakdown is pressure exerted by Russia, in his view. He describes their motive. Russia is very angry over the oil price, down 60% from its peak, driven largely by liquidations from Wall Street targeting of hedge funds. Russia regards the paper game to be out of control. Russia has suffered from both reduced energy revenues from export sales, and notable currency decline in their ruble exchange rate. Financial markets, banks, and corporations have suffered in Russia as a result, prompting a severe reaction by Putin and Medvedev. These are not guys known to take ambushes and sucker punches well without a response.
AWAKENED GOLD PRICE
The USDollar DX index has topped. Conversely, the gold price has bottomed. Each has experienced a clear vivid pronounced reversal off the extreme. Signs point to December as being a battleground month. The moving averages have begun to reverse, a more stable signal. A MACD crossover is near, which would give a billboard notice to technical traders. Beware that this is the phony paper gold price. Actual large physical gold transactions are conducted at prices in excess of $1000 per ounce. The undue influence of paper price discovery is soon to end. As the Gladiator said in the 1999 movie by the same name, to the phony emperor who usurped power, “The time will soon come to an end for you to honor yourself.” Expect severe discontinuity in the gold price in the next few months, maybe sooner. If Keiser and others are correct, and the assault on the COMEX gold succeeds to liberate its price, a gap up is assured, a big gap up, like a few hundred dollars per ounce. Now is the time to hold firm your gold and silver metal. Sell the children, but do not sell the precious metal.
link
James Dines delivered, Marc Faber delivered. Zeal delivered. Jim Willie delivered. Buying gold and silver and doing nothing delivered. Many other niche dude's delivered.
Jim Puplava delivered in the funds management area, but he can't manage my money, he's a yank, he didn't lose anyones bundle investing in crap and his commitment to investor education is massive, valid and worthy of enormous respect, despite the ideological baggage and the ocassional strange takes.
Some great aussie services as well.....
See Hulbert for the US facts, he tracks all these guys, not Jim, the timers that is, but that's my take there and more on this later.
No investor ever made money being really nimble and no trader ever made money being right, two different skill sets...but this is also a topic for another time, its also hard to take advice, however good.
All the while the Industry was talking stocks for the long run, you can't time the market, Haw Haw, history means nothing, we know everything, look at our shiny models and nice computers and ignore the "fringe" they have nothing to offer.
The fringe was far wiser than the mainstream, it turned out. the Industry was, in the main, complacent, greedy and self interested.
What's this all about. Jim Willie makes sense also, so don't confuse his hyperbole with ratbaggery, he makes sense.
A word of warning.
Making money takes more than good advice; the biggest hurdle will always be the personality of the seeker, not the chosen method. To become a successfull trader in all markets will require a self mastery that when acquired may leave the seeker devoid of an interest in money.
Money won't solve your problems unless you are starving, it will only give a bigger canvas on which to make your style of mistake.
So the best advice for the average Joe, at this point in the cycle, is that he worry about the return of his money, not the return on it. My general advice at this point in time: Buy Gold, be right and sit tight. You will do well.
take it away willie...
The OMEN for a powerful shift in the gold market in my playful mind was the very real earthquake on November 18 here in Costa Rica, a clear signal from the financial gods, no minor tremor, measured at 6.0 on the Richter scale. The tremor confirmed the tectonic shifts to come to the gold market without question. This was the biggest earthquake in my life, no damage at all though, roof and toys intact. Numerous stories testify in aggregate to a severe tightening of the physical market, certain to put pressure on the corrupt paper market managed by the COMEX and its parent NYMEX.
Be sure not to miss the spectacular conjunction of planets and the moon in the southwest sky, over the next few days. The opportunity is for those in the Northern Hemisphere, sorry Australians and New Zealanders. Venus will converge with Jupiter, seen in nearly equal magnitude of brightness. When they are close in a few more days, the moon will enter the picture as a crescent in a spectacular display. For the description of the highly unusual event, check the NASA website (CLICK HERE). One could regard this event as another omen for a COMEX gold default, a stretch, but a legitimate one.
THE GLOBAL SHAME OF CENTRAL BANKS
On October 29, the US Federal Reserve cut by 50 basis points the official Fed Funds rate down to 1.0% flat. Do not expect the USFed to be done cutting rates. One week later, the entire globe of beleaguered central banks also cut their official interest rates in a parade of ignominy. They coordinated rate cuts on October 8, and again followed the USFed in early November. The important Euro CB cut by 50 basis points to the 3.25% level, surely in reluctant fashion given their firm defiant stance. The most desperate CBs are clearly England and Switzerland among the majors, and Australia and New Zealand in the second tier. The Bank of England (BOE) cut by 150 basis points unexpectedly, now at a 3.0% low level. The Swiss National Bank cut by 50 bpts with the pack, but on November 20 surprised all by cutting another full 100 bpts down to the ultra-low 0.5% level. The Reserve Bank of Australia cut by 100 bpts in October and plans to cut again this month. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand cut by 100 bpts in October and also plans further cuts. The Bank of Canada cut by 25 bpts in October and plans another 25 bpt cut in December. The Riksbank of Sweden cut by 50 bpts to 3.75% in October and plans another 25 bpt cut in December or soon afterwards. With global monetary inflation raging, and official interest rates converging to zero, the global central bankers must hang their heads in shame. THIS IS THE MOST VISIBLE, OBVIOUS, PREVALENT SIGNAL OF THEIR FAILURE.
The contained messages are four-fold:
ABSOLUTE CONTAGION: the global economy is suffering from broadly felt toxic shock due to US bonds, a process that has a few more quarters of severe crisis pathogenesis
POLICY EXTORTION: the major and secondary CB heads want to cut so that the US$ does not fall, coerced with a monetary gun at their heads
INFLATION EXPLOSION: global monetary growth has gone ballistic, no longer a priority to control, with all talk about limiting price inflation relegated to mumbling in the corner
ENDLESS RESCUES & BAILOUTS: the government sponsored bailouts are nowhere near finished, sure to be an endless parade of patchwork and stimulus with eventual climax of mortgage aid.
Just think of it. The USGovt, after a coup d’etat pulled off by Wall Street and fraudulent climax diversion of TARP funds, has yet to address the mortgage problem at all. Mortgage aid in meaningful and necessary terms is actively avoided, since it must come with a price tag up to $2000 billion in the United States alone. The nationalization of the US banking, if not financial system, is highly likely to be followed by an eventual virtual nationalization of the entire mortgage system. Such a decision and desperate socialist action will be the death knell for the USDollar, if it survives to the point when such a program is enacted.
The unbridled monetary inflation is a powerful bull market signal for gold, once asset prices stabilize. Monetary explosion always pushes gold upward in price, but this time much money is directed into a multi-channeled black hole. Today, yet another program was announced, finally to enable more lending capital to banks. They have been starved to date, drained in order to supply the corrupt Wall Street conmen in charge. The coordinated interest rate cuts reveal the strong impact of Competing Currency Devaluation. Foreigners wish to avoid further aggravation to their economies from even lower domestic currency exchange rates. They inflict higher prices upon their economies. Later, foreign governments will order their reserves and sovereign wealth funds to dump USTBonds in order to bolster their domestic currencies, the great counter-attack. The USEconomy has a worse problem to fix by an order of magnitude. My view is that the powerful US ailments are not fixable, since the financial engineering is too deeply rooted and the manufacturing industrial base has been removed in several stages over a 25-year period. Besides, the credit derivatives loom like a series of hidden bombs whose fuses intersect in the dark.
THE FRANCHISE OF CENTRAL BANKING HAS FAILED, AND GRAND RATE CUTS CONFIRM THIS NOTION EMPHATICALLY!!! THE COLLECTION OF CONCLUSIONS ADDS UP TO ONE POWERFUL FORECAST: GOLD & SILVER PRICES WILL RISE 10-FOLD IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS. SOON THE CLUTCH WILL BE RELEASED AND THE 10000 RPMS ENGAGE THE ECONOMIC TRANSMISSION TO PRODUCE PRICE SKIDMARKS. Ignore for now the paper price heavy-handed influence, which in my view will suddenly disappear in a volcano of controversy and tumult! The US paper system has falsified the entire global pricing structure. Instead of price discovery, we have been subjected to price controls and tyranny. Next comes the counter-attack.
Lost faith in USFed has finally come. Chairman Bernanke has learned the hard way that usage of the printing press is not the boasted solution. He is sending good money after bad, redeeming criminal fraud, endorsing checks for a broken system, and creating numerous delivery channels into a vast black hole. The US Federal Reserve has accomplished a bizarre feat. They have made short-term lending virtually free, but offer a yield over 3% on long-term bonds. So US banks are deeply engaged in a queer carry trade. US banks borrow short and lend to the USGovt long, and thus exploit the steep USTreasury yield curve. The US banks are trying to liquefy from this perverse mechanism, using incredibly large volumes of money. In the process, the USFed balance sheet is testing whether it can grow a tree to the sky. The USGovt has contributed to the ugly mountain of rancid paper with bad precedent after bad precedent, from poorly written deals. No private investor in right mind would step forward to help an ailing industrial or financial firm on the absurd blockheaded terms established by the USGovt. A record setting 25% of high-powered money, as in bank assets, that the USFed has provided, actually sit idle as excess reserves. Hence, money velocity has sharply dropped, typical of a recession. Failure has many symptoms. The USEconomy aggregates are falling off a cliff in unison.
Europe has entered a recession, but the US has entered disintegration, while England is close behind with a galloping leap off the Dover Cliffs. Kenneth Clark is a highly respected former conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer (finance minister) from 1993 to 1997 in England. He delivered an urgent warning for a “catastrophic crisis [that will be] far worse than anything that has occurred in my lifetime” for Great Britain. Clarke even slammed Gordon Brown as having received undue credit for his role in attempting to shore up the global economy. He warned policymakers should beware of a “full-blown depression will have on public finances” for its effect. A major error has been committed by both the US & UK. Neither nation has succeeded in passing on lower interest rates to home loans, and repayment plans are not happening in volume. The elite in both the US & UK are protecting their bankers, but killing the system in the process. Housing prices are careening downward, while job losses mount in large numbers, in both nations. The death of the AngloSphere is nigh, as status of debtor nations comes soon with all its penalties. A simple move to cut rates does nothing to address insolvency of both banks and households. This basic truism is totally lost on clownish inept US & UK economists and bankers. They both built an economy atop a housing bubble, blessed it, and encouraged the debt orgy process, only to see the entire system melt down. This was fully forecasted during the last two years by the Hat Trick Letter.
A VERY QUEER ANOMALY
We are working toward a nasty climax of historic proportions. Notice that the USTreasury Bill has an artificially high price, with staggering huge volume, which is backwards. This condition defies Mother Economic Nature. Notice that gold has an artificially low price on the paper contracts, with staggering huge demand for physical metal, which is also backwards. This condition defies Mother Economic Nature.
The USTreasurys, given the staggering high volume, should be valued lower. The gold bullion, with its staggering high demand, should be valued higher. Something must break, and break soon. Regard these two anomalies as temporary distress symptoms of ass-backward price mechanisms. The natural tendencies of man, full of human emotions like vengeance and retribution, will soon be unleashed to correct the PHONY HIGH USTBILL PRICE AND PHONY LOW GOLD PRICE. All kinds of key evidence points to a COMEX default in December, discussed in the November Gold & Currency Report. The keys are in the Open Interest, which for gold is collapsing. But the December OI is holding up at relatively high levels. The interpretation from Mr Market, who is a distant cousin of Mother Economic Nature, is “The paper gold market is flawed, and people want no part of it. What physical gold becomes available is being grabbed immediately.”
Further hints are offered by the Chinese, who announced a stimulus plan worth over $500 billion. They will use their USTBonds before they are trashed. The next phase is feeding off the USTreasury much like a dead elephant. However, the signature event must come first. THE COMEX GOLD MUST BE VANQUISHED. This is the Achilles Heel to the USDollar.
ATTACK OF COMEX GOLD & SILVER
Powerful foreign entities are preparing a massive major assault on the US financial corruption, at key spots. All signs seem to point to the gold futures contracts traded at the COMEX and NYMEX, whose prices are routinely suppressed by a high volume of uneconomic short contracts by two to four banks. The COMEX is a division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. A highly leveraged sequence is soon to be unleashed, one that should bring back thoughts of asymmetric attack. Think small cost of a weapon, heavy damage to costly equipment. Something big comes to the gold market, with big angry players! If successful, severe damage will be done to the USDollar. Their goal is to kill the COMEX gold market, the key location for gold price suppression. Major Russian, Chinese, Arab, and European bankers and billionaires are angry beyond words. The giant portion of gold vaulted resides in Central Europe. A plan is in place. The key here and now is COMEX gold futures contracts, where many big players are demanding delivery for their December contracts. North American investment houses have also targeting them for delivery demands. With newly energized Russia & China building their gold treasures, with Arabs turning from distrusted Western paper and more toward gold & silver, look for the new players to offer support to the primary thrust attacks. If successful, it will be a defining moment in US financial history. The first delivery notice for the December gold contract is given on November 28.
Recall that Russians and Arabs each have severe damage done to the crude oil price and petro revenues. The futures contract games conducted by US price systems and Wall Street tactics used against hedge funds are largely responsible. Russians and Arabs are angry. Their financial markets are in turmoil, their economies are disrupted, their property markets are in disarray. Furthermore, Russians and Arabs own a large amount of acquired gold, whose value is also pushed down by corrupt US paper mechanisms. The Persian Gulf lusts to put in place a gold trading center of world repute. A brutal powerful trap has been set, to be executed upon the paper engineers without mercy. If you have noticed the facial expression on some Wall Street heads, like Paulson, change in the last few weeks, this is one reason why. They have no shame in confiscation of Congressional funds. But they dread presiding over a failed pricing system for gold, and dread the prospect of being unmasked, not to mention bankrupted. Keep the focus on the JPMorgan garbage can, where the illegal futures contracts are stored, the very same contracts that are never marked to market on their balance sheet. A COMEX blowup reveals their grotesque distortion of market forces, underpinned by gold and USTreasurys. More details are provided in the November Hat Trick Letter report, like the movement by the Chinese and Iranians to vastly increase their gold reserves.
Veteran warhorse Max Keiser, has a video worth watching. See his video (CLICK HERE). He discusses the upcoming COMEX default for the December gold futures contract. He believes that in its wake, the gold price will rise suddenly to $2000 per ounce, perhaps in a single day. The main impetus in his view for the breakdown is pressure exerted by Russia, in his view. He describes their motive. Russia is very angry over the oil price, down 60% from its peak, driven largely by liquidations from Wall Street targeting of hedge funds. Russia regards the paper game to be out of control. Russia has suffered from both reduced energy revenues from export sales, and notable currency decline in their ruble exchange rate. Financial markets, banks, and corporations have suffered in Russia as a result, prompting a severe reaction by Putin and Medvedev. These are not guys known to take ambushes and sucker punches well without a response.
AWAKENED GOLD PRICE
The USDollar DX index has topped. Conversely, the gold price has bottomed. Each has experienced a clear vivid pronounced reversal off the extreme. Signs point to December as being a battleground month. The moving averages have begun to reverse, a more stable signal. A MACD crossover is near, which would give a billboard notice to technical traders. Beware that this is the phony paper gold price. Actual large physical gold transactions are conducted at prices in excess of $1000 per ounce. The undue influence of paper price discovery is soon to end. As the Gladiator said in the 1999 movie by the same name, to the phony emperor who usurped power, “The time will soon come to an end for you to honor yourself.” Expect severe discontinuity in the gold price in the next few months, maybe sooner. If Keiser and others are correct, and the assault on the COMEX gold succeeds to liberate its price, a gap up is assured, a big gap up, like a few hundred dollars per ounce. Now is the time to hold firm your gold and silver metal. Sell the children, but do not sell the precious metal.
link
28 November 2008
A familiar swap again; deal risk for systemic risk
The down side of the high life on Planet Finance; the subprime loan, the home equity extraction, bond insurance, the credit default swap was hidden for years and the central weakness was perceived as a strength; it was the elimination of deal risk via insurance. But the dynamic of healthy capitalism is creative distruction; those who pick the wrong side of the risk/reward tradeoff lose and that process of liquidation frees resources that can be employed by the sucessfull.
But risk cannot be eliminated and what was happening was deal risk was being exchanged for systemic risk, the guarantees froze the weightings, the dynamic network hardened and became stiff and unresponsive and was driven to fracture, the rewards paid to the finance sector players was nothing less than the monitisation of the systems capacity for dynamic change.
The final rock of the current order is the dollar system itself and this bailout and stimulus mentality is, I'm afraid, more of the same, the risk of failure of these entities, even though they have been revealed as parasites is being transferred, not eliminated. as this Bloomberg item below reveals, the risks implicit in the bailout are being transferred and at stake is the current geopolitical order and dollar hegemony itself.
That's my take, anyway.
Kevin
Treasury Credit Swaps Soar to Record on New $800 Billion Pledge
By Michael Shanahan and Abigail Moses
Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The cost of hedging against losses on U.S. Treasuries surged to an all-time high after the Federal Reserve’s new $800 billion effort to combat the financial crisis raised concern about how the ballooning debt will be funded.
Benchmark 10-year credit-default swaps on U.S. government bonds jumped six basis points to 56, according to CMA Datavision prices at 12:20 p.m. in London. The contracts have risen from below two basis points at the start of the credit crisis in July 2007.
“There is a lot more money to be spent and it is not clear how it is going to be financed,” said Tim Brunne, a Munich-based credit strategist at UniCredit SpA. “Credit spreads don’t reflect expectation of default, just the uncertainty over the enormous cost to the government.”
The Fed’s new plan to kick-start markets for loans to students, car buyers, credit-card borrowers and small businesses means it will be taking on credit risk by buying debt. The central bank pledged to purchase as much as $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities as well as up to $100 billion in direct debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the world’s two largest mortgage buyers, and Federal Home Loan Banks.
“They are loading their balance sheet with credit risk,” Brunne said in a phone interview. “Where does all the money come from?”
Five-Year Contracts
The cost of five-year contracts on Treasuries rose 3 basis points to 50.5, after earlier trading as high as 52, CMA prices show. That’s higher than the debt of Finland, Germany and Norway, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Credit-default swaps, contracts conceived to protect bondholders against default, pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent should a country or company fail to adhere to its debt agreements. A rise indicates deterioration in the perception of credit quality; a decline, the opposite.
Contracts on Treasuries are quoted in euros. A basis point on a credit-default swap protecting 10 million euros ($13 million) of debt from default for five years is equivalent to 1,000 euros a year.
The cost of default protection in corporate credit markets was little changed in Europe today. The Markit iTraxx Europe index of 125 companies with investment-grade ratings was unchanged at 168 basis points, JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices show. The Markit iTraxx Crossover Index of 50 companies with mostly high-risk, high-yield credit ratings was rose 2 basis points to 877.
Contracts on the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index of 125 companies in the U.S. and Canada declined 12 basis points to 241 at the close of trading in New York, according to Barclays Capital.
But risk cannot be eliminated and what was happening was deal risk was being exchanged for systemic risk, the guarantees froze the weightings, the dynamic network hardened and became stiff and unresponsive and was driven to fracture, the rewards paid to the finance sector players was nothing less than the monitisation of the systems capacity for dynamic change.
The final rock of the current order is the dollar system itself and this bailout and stimulus mentality is, I'm afraid, more of the same, the risk of failure of these entities, even though they have been revealed as parasites is being transferred, not eliminated. as this Bloomberg item below reveals, the risks implicit in the bailout are being transferred and at stake is the current geopolitical order and dollar hegemony itself.
That's my take, anyway.
Kevin
Treasury Credit Swaps Soar to Record on New $800 Billion Pledge
By Michael Shanahan and Abigail Moses
Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) -- The cost of hedging against losses on U.S. Treasuries surged to an all-time high after the Federal Reserve’s new $800 billion effort to combat the financial crisis raised concern about how the ballooning debt will be funded.
Benchmark 10-year credit-default swaps on U.S. government bonds jumped six basis points to 56, according to CMA Datavision prices at 12:20 p.m. in London. The contracts have risen from below two basis points at the start of the credit crisis in July 2007.
“There is a lot more money to be spent and it is not clear how it is going to be financed,” said Tim Brunne, a Munich-based credit strategist at UniCredit SpA. “Credit spreads don’t reflect expectation of default, just the uncertainty over the enormous cost to the government.”
The Fed’s new plan to kick-start markets for loans to students, car buyers, credit-card borrowers and small businesses means it will be taking on credit risk by buying debt. The central bank pledged to purchase as much as $500 billion in mortgage-backed securities as well as up to $100 billion in direct debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the world’s two largest mortgage buyers, and Federal Home Loan Banks.
“They are loading their balance sheet with credit risk,” Brunne said in a phone interview. “Where does all the money come from?”
Five-Year Contracts
The cost of five-year contracts on Treasuries rose 3 basis points to 50.5, after earlier trading as high as 52, CMA prices show. That’s higher than the debt of Finland, Germany and Norway, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Credit-default swaps, contracts conceived to protect bondholders against default, pay the buyer face value in exchange for the underlying securities or the cash equivalent should a country or company fail to adhere to its debt agreements. A rise indicates deterioration in the perception of credit quality; a decline, the opposite.
Contracts on Treasuries are quoted in euros. A basis point on a credit-default swap protecting 10 million euros ($13 million) of debt from default for five years is equivalent to 1,000 euros a year.
The cost of default protection in corporate credit markets was little changed in Europe today. The Markit iTraxx Europe index of 125 companies with investment-grade ratings was unchanged at 168 basis points, JPMorgan Chase & Co. prices show. The Markit iTraxx Crossover Index of 50 companies with mostly high-risk, high-yield credit ratings was rose 2 basis points to 877.
Contracts on the Markit CDX North America Investment Grade Index of 125 companies in the U.S. and Canada declined 12 basis points to 241 at the close of trading in New York, according to Barclays Capital.
27 November 2008
Mass extinction on Planet Finance
(After the post bubble revulsion, asset holders are awakening from the the dream that the moneyness of credit is 100%. The current turmoil is nothing less than the market in search for the security of reliable money, that search will end when savers discover the one special attribute of "real money" is precisely what distinguishes it from the dross that passes for money today and is the very thing they seek.
What the market seeks is a divisable asset with no counterparty risk that is impossible to counterfeit, by that definition, money is what it has always been: gold and silver and nothing else.
Why was I dogged with a terrible dread for the last four years and completely obsessed with the absolute certanity that the current economic order was about to collapse. My iconoclasm and alienation from the mainstream and my understanding of the history of human economic folly.
Based on the aggregates, this downturn, from a technical perspective may be a turn of supercycle degree correcting the rise of the west from 1712 and therefore a bust much more significant than the Great Depression.
We don't make social transformations from a carbon based energy addiction where social rank is defined by the nicest granite countertops to a sustainable hitech world with a completely distributed energy system, a healthy communal life and the classic human virtues seemlessly. The old must die before the new emerges.
As the article below demonstrates; if you want to know the future consult the historian and philosopher, not those most at ease in the current order.
Thats my take anyway.
Kevin McKern
Wall Street Lays Another Egg
Not so long ago, the dollar stood for a sum of gold, and bankers knew the people they lent to. The author charts the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world—call it Planet Finance—where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning.
by
Niall Ferguson
December 2008
The bigger they come: Uncle Sam and Wall Street take the hardest fall since the Depression.
This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.
Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. And all the time new financial life-forms were evolving. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including fancy new “collateralized debt obligations” (C.D.O.’s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of “derivatives”—contracts such as options and swaps—grew even faster, so that by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. In the space of a few years their populations exploded. On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships.
Read Niall Ferguson’s prescient article on today’s financial woes, Empire Falls (November 2006).
New institutions also proliferated. In 1990 there were just 610 hedge funds, with $38.9 billion under management. At the end of 2006 there were 9,462, with $1.5 trillion under management. Private-equity partnerships also went forth and multiplied. Banks, meanwhile, set up a host of “conduits” and “structured investment vehicles” (sivs—surely the most apt acronym in financial history) to keep potentially risky assets off their balance sheets. It was as if an entire shadow banking system had come into being.
Then, beginning in the summer of 2007, Planet Finance began to self-destruct in what the International Monetary Fund soon acknowledged to be “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” Did the crisis of 2007–8 happen because American companies had gotten worse at designing new products? Had the pace of technological innovation or productivity growth suddenly slackened? No. The proximate cause of the economic uncertainty of 2008 was financial: to be precise, a crunch in the credit markets triggered by mounting defaults on a hitherto obscure species of housing loan known euphemistically as “subprime mortgages.”
Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest-rate cuts and offers of funds through special “term auction facilities.” Yet the market rates at which banks could borrow money, whether by issuing commercial paper, selling bonds, or borrowing from one another, failed to follow the lead of the official federal-funds rate. The banks had to turn not only to Western central banks for short-term assistance to rebuild their reserves but also to Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds for equity injections. When these sources proved insufficient, investors—and speculative short-sellers—began to lose faith.
B
eginning with Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s investment banks entered a death spiral that ended with their being either taken over by a commercial bank (as Bear was, followed by Merrill Lynch) or driven into bankruptcy (as Lehman Brothers was). In September the two survivors—Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—formally ceased to be investment banks, signaling the death of a business model that dated back to the Depression. Other institutions deemed “too big to fail” by the U.S. Treasury were effectively taken over by the government, including the mortgage lenders and guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the insurance giant American International Group (A.I.G.).
By September 18 the U.S. financial system was gripped by such panic that the Treasury had to abandon this ad hoc policy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson hastily devised a plan whereby the government would be authorized to buy “troubled” securities with up to $700 billion of taxpayers’ money—a figure apparently plucked from the air. When a modified version of the measure was rejected by Congress 11 days later, there was panic. When it was passed four days after that, there was more panic. Now it wasn’t just bank stocks that were tanking. The entire stock market seemed to be in free fall as fears mounted that the credit crunch was going to trigger a recession. Moreover, the crisis was now clearly global in scale. European banks were in much the same trouble as their American counterparts, while emerging-market stock markets were crashing. A week of frenetic improvisation by national governments culminated on the weekend of October 11–12, when the United States reluctantly followed the British government’s lead, buying equity stakes in banks rather than just their dodgy assets and offering unprecedented guarantees of banks’ debt and deposits.
Since these events coincided with the final phase of a U.S. presidential-election campaign, it was not surprising that some rather simplistic lessons were soon being touted by candidates and commentators. The crisis, some said, was the result of excessive deregulation of financial markets. Others sought to lay the blame on unscrupulous speculators: short-sellers, who borrowed the stocks of vulnerable banks and sold them in the expectation of further price declines. Still other suspects in the frame were negligent regulators and corrupt congressmen.
This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part in this latest sorry example of what the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay described in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Nothing New
As long as there have been banks, bond markets, and stock markets, there have been financial crises. Banks went bust in the days of the Medici. There were bond-market panics in the Venice of Shylock’s day. And the world’s first stock-market crash happened in 1720, when the Mississippi Company—the Enron of its day—blew up. According to economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the financial history of the past 800 years is a litany of debt defaults, banking crises, currency crises, and inflationary spikes. Moreover, financial crises seldom happen without inflicting pain on the wider economy. Another recent paper, co-authored by Rogoff’s Harvard colleague Robert Barro, has identified 148 crises since 1870 in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in gross domestic product (G.D.P.) of at least 10 percent, implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6 percent per year.
If stock-market movements followed the normal-distribution, or bell, curve, like human heights, an annual drop of 10 percent or more would happen only once every 500 years, whereas in the case of the Dow Jones Industrial Average it has happened in 20 of the last 100 years. And stock-market plunges of 20 percent or more would be unheard of—rather like people a foot and a half tall—whereas in fact there have been eight such crashes in the past century.
The most famous financial crisis—the Wall Street Crash—is conventionally said to have begun on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929, when the Dow declined by 2 percent, though in fact the market had been slipping since early September and had suffered a sharp, 6 percent drop on October 23. On “Black Monday,” October 28, it plunged by 13 percent, and the next day by a further 12 percent. In the course of the next three years the U.S. stock market declined by a staggering 89 percent, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954.
That helps put our current troubles into perspective. From its peak of 14,164, on October 9, 2007, to a dismal level of 8,579, exactly a year later, the Dow declined by 39 percent. By contrast, on a single day just over two decades ago—October 19, 1987—the index fell by 23 percent, one of only four days in history when the index has fallen by more than 10 percent in a single trading session.
This crisis, however, is about much more than just the stock market. It needs to be understood as a fundamental breakdown of the entire financial system, extending from the monetary-and-banking system through the bond market, the stock market, the insurance market, and the real-estate market. It affects not only established financial institutions such as investment banks but also relatively novel ones such as hedge funds. It is global in scope and unfathomable in scale.
Had it not been for the frantic efforts of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, to say nothing of their counterparts in almost equally afflicted Europe, there would by now have been a repeat of that “great contraction” of credit and economic activity that was the prime mover of the Depression. Back then, the Fed and the Treasury did next to nothing to prevent bank failures from translating into a drastic contraction of credit and hence of business activity and employment. If the more openhanded monetary and fiscal authorities of today are ultimately successful in preventing a comparable slump of output, future historians may end up calling this “the Great Repression.” This is the Depression they are hoping to bottle up—a Depression in denial.
To understand why we have come so close to a rerun of the 1930s, we need to begin at the beginning, with banks and the money they make. From the Middle Ages until the mid-20th century, most banks made their money by maximizing the difference between the costs of their liabilities (payments to depositors) and the earnings on their assets (interest and commissions on loans). Some banks also made money by financing trade, discounting the commercial bills issued by merchants. Others issued and traded bonds and stocks, or dealt in commodities (especially precious metals). But the core business of banking was simple. It consisted, as the third Lord Rothschild pithily put it, “essentially of facilitating the movement of money from Point A, where it is, to Point B, where it is needed.”
The system evolved gradually. First came the invention of cashless intra-bank and inter-bank transactions, which allowed debts to be settled between account holders without having money physically change hands. Then came the idea of fractional-reserve banking, whereby banks kept only a small proportion of their existing deposits on hand to satisfy the needs of depositors (who seldom wanted all their money simultaneously), allowing the rest to be lent out profitably. That was followed by the rise of special public banks with monopolies on the issuing of banknotes and other powers and privileges: the first central banks.
With these innovations, money ceased to be understood as precious metal minted into coins. Now it was the sum total of specific liabilities (deposits and reserves) incurred by banks. Credit was the other side of banks’ balance sheets: the total of their assets; in other words, the loans they made. Some of this money might still consist of precious metal, though a rising proportion of that would be held in the central bank’s vault. Most would be made up of banknotes and coins recognized as “legal tender,” along with money that was visible only in current- and deposit-account statements.
Until the late 20th century, the system of bank money retained an anchor in the pre-modern conception of money in the form of the gold standard: fixed ratios between units of account and quantities of precious metal. As early as 1924, the English economist John Maynard Keynes dismissed the gold standard as a “barbarous relic,” but the last vestige of the system did not disappear until August 15, 1971—the day President Richard Nixon closed the so-called gold window, through which foreign central banks could still exchange dollars for gold. With that, the centuries-old link between money and precious metal was broken.
Though we tend to think of money today as being made of paper, in reality most of it now consists of bank deposits. If we measure the ratio of actual money to output in developed economies, it becomes clear that the trend since the 1970s has been for that ratio to rise from around 70 percent, before the closing of the gold window, to more than 100 percent by 2005. The corollary has been a parallel growth of credit on the other side of bank balance sheets. A significant component of that credit growth has been a surge of lending to consumers. Back in 1952, the ratio of household debt to disposable income was less than 40 percent in the United States. At its peak in 2007, it reached 133 percent, up from 90 percent a decade before. Today Americans carry a total of $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up by more than a fifth since 2000.
Even more spectacular, however, has been the rising indebtedness of banks themselves. In 1980, bank indebtedness was equivalent to 21 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. In 2007 the figure was 116 percent. Another measure of this was the declining capital adequacy of banks. On the eve of “the Great Repression,” average bank capital in Europe was equivalent to less than 10 percent of assets; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was around 25 percent. It was not unusual for investment banks’ balance sheets to be as much as 20 or 30 times larger than their capital, thanks in large part to a 2004 rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission that exempted the five largest of those banks from the regulation that had capped their debt-to-capital ratio at 12 to 1. The Age of Leverage had truly arrived for Planet Finance.
Credit and money, in other words, have for decades been growing more rapidly than underlying economic activity. Is it any wonder, then, that money has ceased to hold its value the way it did in the era of the gold standard? The motto “In God we trust” was added to the dollar bill in 1957. Since then its purchasing power, relative to the consumer price index, has declined by a staggering 87 percent. Average annual inflation during that period has been more than 4 percent. A man who decided to put his savings into gold in 1970 could have bought just over 27.8 ounces of the precious metal for $1,000. At the time of writing, with gold trading at $900 an ounce, he could have sold it for around $25,000.
Those few goldbugs who always doubted the soundness of fiat money—paper currency without a metal anchor—have in large measure been vindicated. But why were the rest of us so blinded by money illusion?
Blowing Bubbles
In the immediate aftermath of the death of gold as the anchor of the monetary system, the problem of inflation affected mainly retail prices and wages. Today, only around one out of seven countries has an inflation rate above 10 percent, and only one, Zimbabwe, is afflicted with hyperinflation. But back in 1979 at least 7 countries had an annual inflation rate above 50 percent, and more than 60 countries—including Britain and the United States—had inflation in double digits.
Inflation has come down since then, partly because many of the items we buy—from clothes to computers—have gotten cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. It has also been reduced because of a worldwide transformation in monetary policy, which began with the monetarist-inspired increases in short-term rates implemented by the Federal Reserve in 1979. Just as important, some of the structural drivers of inflation, such as powerful trade unions, have also been weakened.
By the 1980s, in any case, more and more people had grasped how to protect their wealth from inflation: by investing it in assets they expected to appreciate in line with, or ahead of, the cost of living. These assets could take multiple forms, from modern art to vintage wine, but the most popular proved to be stocks and real estate. Once it became clear that this formula worked, the Age of Leverage could begin. For it clearly made sense to borrow to the hilt to maximize your holdings of stocks and real estate if these promised to generate higher rates of return than the interest payments on your borrowings. Between 1990 and 2004, most American households did not see an appreciable improvement in their incomes. Adjusted for inflation, the median household income rose by about 6 percent. But people could raise their living standards by borrowing and investing in stocks and housing.
Nearly all of us did it. And the bankers were there to help. Not only could they borrow more cheaply from one another than we could borrow from them; increasingly they devised all kinds of new mortgages that looked more attractive to us (and promised to be more lucrative to them) than boring old 30-year fixed-rate deals. Moreover, the banks were just as ready to play the asset markets as we were. Proprietary trading soon became the most profitable arm of investment banking: buying and selling assets on the bank’s own account.
Losing our shirt? The problem is that our banks are also losing theirs. Illustration by Barry Blitt.
There was, however, a catch. The Age of Leverage was also an age of bubbles, beginning with the dot-com bubble of the irrationally exuberant 1990s and ending with the real-estate mania of the exuberantly irrational 2000s. Why was this?
The future is in large measure uncertain, so our assessments of future asset prices are bound to vary. If we were all calculating machines, we would simultaneously process all the available information and come to the same conclusion. But we are human beings, and as such are prone to myopia and mood swings. When asset prices surge upward in sync, it is as if investors are gripped by a kind of collective euphoria. Conversely, when their “animal spirits” flip from greed to fear, the bubble that their earlier euphoria inflated can burst with amazing suddenness. Zoological imagery is an integral part of the culture of Planet Finance. Optimistic buyers are “bulls,” pessimistic sellers are “bears.” The real point, however, is that stock markets are mirrors of the human psyche. Like Homo sapiens, they can become depressed. They can even suffer complete breakdowns.
This is no new insight. In the 400 years since the first shares were bought and sold on the Amsterdam Beurs, there has been a long succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, asset prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downward again. So familiar is this pattern—described by the economic historian Charles Kindleberger—that it is possible to distill it into five stages:
(1) Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities. (2) Euphoria, or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby expectation of rising profits leads to rapid growth in asset prices. (3) Mania, or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to mulct them of their money. (4) Distress: The insiders discern that profits cannot possibly justify the now exorbitant price of the assets and begin to take profits by selling. (5) Revulsion, or discredit: As asset prices fall, the outsiders stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst.
The key point is that without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission and commission of central banks.
The bubbles of our time had their origins in the aftermath of the 1987 stock-market crash, when then novice Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan boldly affirmed the Fed’s “readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.” This sent a signal to the markets, particularly the New York banks: if things got really bad, he stood ready to bail them out. Thus was born the “Greenspan put”—the implicit option the Fed gave traders to be able to sell their stocks at today’s prices even in the event of a meltdown tomorrow.
Having contained a panic once, Greenspan thereafter had a dilemma lurking in the back of his mind: whether or not to act pre-emptively the next time—to prevent a panic altogether. This dilemma came to the fore as a classic stock-market bubble took shape in the mid-90s. The displacement in this case was the explosion of innovation by the technology and software industry as personal computers met the Internet. But, as in all of history’s bubbles, an accommodative monetary policy also played a role. From a peak of 6 percent in February 1995, the federal-funds target rate had been reduced to 5.25 percent by January 1996. It was then cut in steps, in the fall of 1998, down to 4.75 percent, and it remained at that level until June 1999, by which time the Dow had passed the 10,000 mark.
Why did the Fed allow euphoria to run loose in the 1990s? Partly because Greenspan and his colleagues underestimated the momentum of the technology bubble; as early as December 1995, with the Dow just past the 5,000 mark, members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee speculated that the market might be approaching its peak. Partly, also, because Greenspan came to the conclusion that it was not the Fed’s responsibility to worry about asset-price inflation, only consumer-price inflation, and this, he believed, was being reduced by a major improvement in productivity due precisely to the tech boom.
Greenspan could not postpone a stock-exchange crash indefinitely. After Silicon Valley’s dot-com bubble peaked, in March 2000, the U.S. stock market fell by almost half over the next two and a half years. It was not until May 2007 that investors in the Standard & Poor’s 500 had recouped their losses. But the Fed’s response to the sell-off—and the massive shot of liquidity it injected into the financial markets after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—prevented the “correction” from precipitating a depression. Not only were the 1930s averted; so too, it seemed, was a repeat of the Japanese experience after 1989, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble had ended up triggering an 80 percent stock-market sell-off, a real-estate collapse, and a decade of economic stagnation.
What was not immediately obvious was that Greenspan’s easy-money policy was already generating another bubble—this time in the financial market that a majority of Americans have been encouraged for generations to play: the real-estate market.
The American Dream
Real estate is the English-speaking world’s favorite economic game. No other facet of financial life has such a hold on the popular imagination. The real-estate market is unique. Every adult, no matter how economically illiterate, has a view on its future prospects. Through the evergreen board game Monopoly, even children are taught how to climb the property ladder.
Once upon a time, people saved a portion of their earnings for the proverbial rainy day, stowing the cash in a mattress or a bank safe. The Age of Leverage, as we have seen, brought a growing reliance on borrowing to buy assets in the expectation of their future appreciation in value. For a majority of families, this meant a leveraged investment in a house. That strategy had one very obvious flaw. It represented a one-way, totally unhedged bet on a single asset.
To be sure, investing in housing paid off handsomely for more than half a century, up until 2006. Suppose you had put $100,000 into the U.S. property market back in the first quarter of 1987. According to the Case-Shiller national home-price index, you would have nearly tripled your money by the first quarter of 2007, to $299,000. On the other hand, if you had put the same money into the S&P 500, and had continued to re-invest the dividend income in that index, you would have ended up with $772,000 to play with—more than double what you would have made on bricks and mortar.
There is, obviously, an important difference between a house and a stock-market index. You cannot live in a stock-market index. For the sake of a fair comparison, allowance must therefore be made for the rent you save by owning your house (or the rent you can collect if you own a second property). A simple way to proceed is just to leave out both dividends and rents. In that case the difference is somewhat reduced. In the two decades after 1987, the S&P 500, excluding dividends, rose by a factor of just over six, meaning that an investment of $100,000 would be worth some $600,000. But that still comfortably beat housing.
There are three other considerations to bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of assets. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, houses are a great deal more expensive to convert into cash than stocks. The third is volatility. Housing markets since World War II have been far less volatile than stock markets. Yet that is not to say that house prices have never deviated from a steady upward path. In Britain between 1989 and 1995, for example, the average house price fell by 18 percent, or, in inflation-adjusted terms, by more than a third—37 percent. In London, the real decline was closer to 47 percent. In Japan between 1990 and 2000, property prices fell by more than 60 percent.
The recent decline of property prices in the United States should therefore have come as less of a shock than it did. Between July 2006 and June 2008, the Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 big American cities declined on average by 19 percent. In some of these cities—Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Miami—the total decline was as much as a third. Seen in international perspective, those are not unprecedented figures. Seen in the context of the post-2000 bubble, prices have yet to return to their starting point. On average, house prices are still 50 percent higher than they were at the beginning of this process.
So why were we oblivious to the likely bursting of the real-estate bubble? The answer is that for generations we have been brainwashed into thinking that borrowing to buy a house is the only rational financial strategy to pursue. Think of Frank Capra’s classic 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, which tells the story of the family-owned Bailey Building & Loan, a small-town mortgage firm that George Bailey (played by James Stewart) struggles to keep afloat in the teeth of the Depression. “You know, George,” his father tells him, “I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. It’s satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.” George gets the message, as he passionately explains to the villainous slumlord Potter after Bailey Sr.’s death: “[My father] never once thought of himself.… But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what’s wrong with that? … Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers?”
There, in a nutshell, is one of the key concepts of the 20th century: the notion that property ownership enhances citizenship, and that therefore a property-owning democracy is more socially and politically stable than a democracy divided into an elite of landlords and a majority of property-less tenants. So deeply rooted is this idea in our political culture that it comes as a surprise to learn that it was invented just 70 years ago.
Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddie
Prior to the 1930s, only a minority of Americans owned their homes. During the Depression, however, the Roosevelt administration created a whole complex of institutions to change that. A Federal Home Loan Bank Board was set up in 1932 to encourage and oversee local mortgage lenders known as savings-and-loans (S&Ls)—mutual associations that took in deposits and lent to homebuyers. Under the New Deal, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation stepped in to refinance mortgages on longer terms, up to 15 years. To reassure depositors, who had been traumatized by the thousands of bank failures of the previous three years, Roosevelt introduced federal deposit insurance. And by providing federally backed insurance for mortgage lenders, the Federal Housing Administration (F.H.A.) sought to encourage large (up to 80 percent of the purchase price), long (20- to 25-year), fully amortized, low-interest loans.
By standardizing the long-term mortgage and creating a national system of official inspection and valuation, the F.H.A. laid the foundation for a secondary market in mortgages. This market came to life in 1938, when a new Federal National Mortgage Association—nicknamed Fannie Mae—was authorized to issue bonds and use the proceeds to buy mortgages from the local S&Ls, which were restricted by regulation both in terms of geography (they could not lend to borrowers more than 50 miles from their offices) and in terms of the rates they could offer (the so-called Regulation Q, which imposed a low ceiling on interest paid on deposits). Because these changes tended to reduce the average monthly payment on a mortgage, the F.H.A. made home ownership viable for many more Americans than ever before. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the modern United States, with its seductively samey suburbs, was born with Fannie Mae. Between 1940 and 1960, the home-ownership rate soared from 43 to 62 percent.
These were not the only ways in which the federal government sought to encourage Americans to own their own homes. Mortgage-interest payments were always tax-deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913. As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage-interest relief was “part of the American dream.”
In 1968, to broaden the secondary-mortgage market still further, Fannie Mae was split in two—the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government-sponsored enterprise (G.S.E.). Two years later, to provide competition for Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. In addition, Fannie Mae was permitted to buy conventional as well as government-guaranteed mortgages. Later, with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, American banks found themselves under pressure for the first time to lend to poor, minority communities.
These changes presaged a more radical modification to the New Deal system. In the late 1970s, the savings-and-loan industry was hit first by double-digit inflation and then by sharply rising interest rates. This double punch was potentially lethal. The S&Ls were simultaneously losing money on long-term, fixed-rate mortgages, due to inflation, and hemorrhaging deposits to higher-interest money-market funds. The response in Washington from both the Carter and Reagan administrations was to try to salvage the S&Ls with tax breaks and deregulation. When the new legislation was passed, President Reagan declared, “All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” Some people certainly did.
On the one hand, S&Ls could now invest in whatever they liked, not just local long-term mortgages. Commercial property, stocks, junk bonds—anything was allowed. They could even issue credit cards. On the other, they could now pay whatever interest rate they liked to depositors. Yet all their deposits were still effectively insured, with the maximum covered amount raised from $40,000 to $100,000, thanks to a government regulation two years earlier. And if ordinary deposits did not suffice, the S&Ls could raise money in the form of brokered deposits from middlemen. What happened next perfectly illustrated the great financial precept first enunciated by William Crawford, the commissioner of the California Department of Savings and Loan: “The best way to rob a bank is to own one.” Some S&Ls bet their depositors’ money on highly dubious real-estate developments. Many simply stole the money, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them at all.
When the ensuing bubble burst, nearly 300 S&Ls collapsed, while another 747 were closed or reorganized under the auspices of the Resolution Trust Corporation, established by Congress in 1989 to clear up the mess. The final cost of the crisis was $153 billion (around 3 percent of the 1989 G.D.P.), of which taxpayers had to pay $124 billion.
But even as the S&Ls were going belly-up, they offered another, very different group of American financial institutions a fast track to megabucks. To the bond traders at Salomon Brothers, the New York investment bank, the breakdown of the New Deal mortgage system was not a crisis but a wonderful opportunity. As profit-hungry as their language was profane, the self-styled “Big Swinging Dicks” at Salomon saw a way of exploiting the gyrating interest rates of the early 1980s.
The idea was to re-invent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds—in short, to convert mortgages into bonds. Once lumped together, the interest payments due on the mortgages could be subdivided into strips with different maturities and credit risks. The first issue of this new kind of mortgage-backed security (known as a “collateralized mortgage obligation”) occurred in June 1983. The dawn of securitization was a necessary prelude to the Age of Leverage.
Once again, however, it was the federal government that stood ready to pick up the tab in a crisis. For the majority of mortgages continued to enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government-sponsored trio of Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie, meaning that bonds which used those mortgages as collateral could be represented as virtual government bonds and considered “investment grade.” Between 1980 and 2007, the volume of such G.S.E.-backed mortgage-backed securities grew from less than $200 billion to more than $4 trillion. In 1980 only 10 percent of the home-mortgage market was securitized; by 2007, 56 percent of it was.
These changes swept away the last vestiges of the business model depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life. Once there had been meaningful social ties between mortgage lenders and borrowers. James Stewart’s character knew both the depositors and the debtors. By contrast, in a securitized market the interest you paid on your mortgage ultimately went to someone who had no idea you existed. The full implications of this transition for ordinary homeowners would become apparent only 25 years later.
The Lessons of Detroit
In July 2007, I paid a visit to Detroit, because I had the feeling that what was happening there was the shape of things to come in the United States as a whole. In the space of 10 years, house prices in Detroit, which probably possesses the worst housing stock of any American city other than New Orleans, had risen by more than a third—not much compared with the nationwide bubble, but still hard to explain, given the city’s chronically depressed economic state. As I discovered, the explanation lay in fundamental changes in the rules of the housing game.
I arrived at the end of a borrowing spree. For several years agents and brokers selling subprime mortgages had been flooding Detroit with radio, television, and direct-mail advertisements, offering what sounded like attractive deals. In 2006, for example, subprime lenders pumped more than a billion dollars into 22 Detroit Zip Codes.
These were not the old 30-year fixed-rate mortgages invented in the New Deal. On the contrary, a high proportion were adjustable-rate mortgages—in other words, the interest rate could vary according to changes in short-term lending rates. Many were also interest-only mortgages, without amortization (repayment of principal), even when the principal represented 100 percent of the assessed value of the mortgaged property. And most had introductory “teaser” periods, whereby the initial interest payments—usually for the first two years—were kept artificially low, with the cost of the loan backloaded. All of these devices were intended to allow an immediate reduction in the debt-servicing costs of the borrower.
In Detroit only a minority of these loans were going to first-time buyers. They were nearly all refinancing deals, which allowed borrowers to treat their homes as cash machines, converting their existing equity into cash and using the proceeds to pay off credit-card debts, carry out renovations, or buy new consumer durables. However, the combination of declining long-term interest rates and ever more alluring mortgage deals did attract new buyers into the housing market. By 2005, 69 percent of all U.S. householders were homeowners; 10 years earlier it had been 64 percent. About half of that increase could be attributed to the subprime-lending boom.
Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.
Here, surely, was the zenith of the property-owning democracy. It was an achievement that the Bush administration was proud of. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” President George W. Bush had said in October 2002. Having challenged lenders to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade, Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003, a measure designed to subsidize first-time house purchases in low-income groups. Between 2000 and 2006, the share of undocumented subprime contracts rose from 17 to 44 percent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also came under pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to support the subprime market. As Bush put it in December 2003, “It is in our national interest that more people own their own home.” Few people dissented.
As a business model, subprime lending worked beautifully—as long, that is, as interest rates stayed low, people kept their jobs, and real-estate prices continued to rise. Such conditions could not be relied upon to last, however, least of all in a city like Detroit. But that did not worry the subprime lenders. They simply followed the trail blazed by mainstream mortgage lenders in the 1980s. Having pocketed fat commissions on the signing of the original loan contracts, they hastily resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more of return on their capital. Repackaged as C.D.O.’s, these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A-rated investment-grade securities. All that was required was certification from one of the rating agencies that at least the top tier of these securities was unlikely to go into default.
The risk was spread across the globe, from American state pension funds to public-hospital networks in Australia, to town councils near the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, eight municipalities, including Rana and Hemnes, invested some $120 million of their taxpayers’ money in C.D.O.’s secured on American subprime mortgages.
In Detroit the rise of subprime mortgages had in fact coincided with a new slump in the inexorably declining automobile industry. That anticipated a wider American slowdown, an almost inevitable consequence of a tightening of monetary policy as the Federal Reserve belatedly raised short-term interest rates from 1 percent to 5.25 percent. As soon as the teaser rates expired and mortgages were reset at new and much higher interest rates, hundreds of Detroit households swiftly fell behind in their mortgage payments. The effect was to burst the real-estate bubble, causing house prices to start falling significantly for the first time since the early 1990s. And the further house prices fell, the more homeowners found themselves with “negative equity”—in other words, owing more money than their homes were worth.
The rest—the chain reaction as defaults in Detroit and elsewhere unleashed huge losses on C.D.O.’s in financial institutions all around the world—you know.
Drunk on Derivatives
Do you, however, know about the second-order effects of this crisis in the markets for derivatives? Do you in fact know what a derivative is? Once excoriated by Warren Buffett as “financial weapons of mass destruction,” derivatives are what make this crisis both unique and unfathomable in its ramifications. To understand what they are, you need, literally, to go back to the future.
For a farmer planting a crop, nothing is more crucial than the future price it will fetch after it has been harvested and taken to market. A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a merchant to buy his crop when it comes to market at a price agreed upon when the seeds are being planted. If the market price on the day of delivery is lower than expected, the farmer is protected.
The earliest forms of protection for farmers were known as forward contracts, which were simply bilateral agreements between seller and buyer. A true futures contract, however, is a standardized instrument issued by a futures exchange and hence tradable. With the development of a standard “to arrive” futures contract, along with a set of rules to enforce settlement and, finally, an effective clearinghouse, the first true futures market was born.
Because they are derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts are forms of derivatives. Closely related, though distinct from futures, are the contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a “call” option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed-upon quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller (“writer”) of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the “strike price”). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed-upon strike price, the option is “in the money”—and so is the smart guy who bought it. A “put” option is just the opposite: the buyer has the right but not the obligation to sell an agreed-upon quantity of something to the seller of the option at an agreed-upon price.
A third kind of derivative is the interest-rate “swap,” which is effectively a bet between two parties on the future path of interest rates. A pure interest-rate swap allows two parties already receiving interest payments literally to swap them, allowing someone receiving a variable rate of interest to exchange it for a fixed rate, in case interest rates decline. A credit-default swap (C.D.S.), meanwhile, offers protection against a company’s defaulting on its bonds.
Bringing down the bull: The pain of America’s financial crisis is felt all over the world. Illustration by Brad Holland.
There was a time when derivatives were standardized instruments traded on exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade. Now, however, the vast proportion are custom-made and sold “over the counter” (O.T.C.), often by banks, which charge attractive commissions for their services, but also by insurance companies (notably A.I.G.). According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total notional amounts outstanding of O.T.C. derivative contracts—arranged on an ad hoc basis between two parties—reached a staggering $596 trillion in December 2007, with a gross market value of just over $14.5 trillion.
But how exactly do you price a derivative? What precisely is an option worth? The answers to those questions required a revolution in financial theory. From an academic point of view, what this revolution achieved was highly impressive. But the events of the 1990s, as the rise of quantitative finance replaced preppies with quants (quantitative analysts) all along Wall Street, revealed a new truth: those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.
Working closely with Fischer Black, of the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, M.I.T.’s Myron Scholes invented a groundbreaking new theory of pricing options, to which his colleague Robert Merton also contributed. (Scholes and Merton would share the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics.) They reasoned that a call option’s value depended on six variables: the current market price of the stock (S), the agreed future price at which the stock could be bought (L), the time until the expiration date of the option (t), the risk-free rate of return in the economy as a whole (r), the probability that the option will be exercised (N), and—the crucial variable—the expected volatility of the stock, i.e., the likely fluctuations of its price between the time of purchase and the expiration date (s). With wonderful mathematical wizardry, the quants reduced the price of a call option to this formula (the Black-Scholes formula):
Feeling a bit baffled? Can’t follow the algebra? That was just fine by the quants. To make money from this magic formula, they needed markets to be full of people who didn’t have a clue about how to price options but relied instead on their (seldom accurate) gut instincts. They also needed a great deal of computing power, a force which had been transforming the financial markets since the early 1980s. Their final requirement was a partner with some market savvy in order to make the leap from the faculty club to the trading floor. Black, who would soon be struck down by cancer, could not be that partner. But John Meriwether could. The former head of the bond-arbitrage group at Salomon Brothers, Meriwether had made his first fortune in the wake of the S&L meltdown of the late 1980s. The hedge fund he created with Scholes and Merton in 1994 was called Long-Term Capital Management.
In its brief, four-year life, Long-Term was the brightest star in the hedge-fund firmament, generating mind-blowing returns for its elite club of investors and even more money for its founders. Needless to say, the firm did more than just trade options, though selling puts on the stock market became such a big part of its business that it was nicknamed “the central bank of volatility” by banks buying insurance against a big stock-market sell-off. In fact, the partners were simultaneously pursuing multiple trading strategies, about 100 of them, with a total of 7,600 positions. This conformed to a second key rule of the new mathematical finance: the virtue of diversification, a principle that had been formalized by Harry M. Markowitz, of the Rand Corporation. Diversification was all about having a multitude of uncorrelated positions. One might go wrong, or even two. But thousands just could not go wrong simultaneously.
The mathematics were reassuring. According to the firm’s “Value at Risk” models, it would take a 10-s (in other words, 10-standard-deviation) event to cause the firm to lose all its capital in a single year. But the probability of such an event, according to the quants, was 1 in 10,24—or effectively zero. Indeed, the models said the most Long-Term was likely to lose in a single day was $45 million. For that reason, the partners felt no compunction about leveraging their trades. At the end of August 1997, the fund’s capital was $6.7 billion, but the debt-financed assets on its balance sheet amounted to $126 billion, a ratio of assets to capital of 19 to 1.
There is no need to rehearse here the story of Long-Term’s downfall, which was precipitated by a Russian debt default. Suffice it to say that on Friday, August 21, 1998, the firm lost $550 million—15 percent of its entire capital, and vastly more than its mathematical models had said was possible. The key point is to appreciate why the quants were so wrong.
The problem lay with the assumptions that underlie so much of mathematical finance. In order to construct their models, the quants had to postulate a planet where the inhabitants were omniscient and perfectly rational; where they instantly absorbed all new information and used it to maximize profits; where they never stopped trading; where markets were continuous, frictionless, and completely liquid. Financial markets on this planet followed a “random walk,” meaning that each day’s prices were quite unrelated to the previous day’s, but reflected no more and no less than all the relevant information currently available. The returns on this planet’s stock market were normally distributed along the bell curve, with most years clustered closely around the mean, and two-thirds of them within one standard deviation of the mean. On such a planet, a “six standard deviation” sell-off would be about as common as a person shorter than one foot in our world. It would happen only once in four million years of trading.
But Long-Term was not located on Planet Finance. It was based in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Planet Earth, a place inhabited by emotional human beings, always capable of flipping suddenly and en masse from greed to fear. In the case of Long-Term, the herding problem was acute, because many other firms had begun trying to copy Long-Term’s strategies in the hope of replicating its stellar performance. When things began to go wrong, there was a truly bovine stampede for the exits. The result was a massive, synchronized downturn in virtually all asset markets. Diversification was no defense in such a crisis. As one leading London hedge-fund manager later put it to Meriwether, “John, you were the correlation.”
There was, however, another reason why Long-Term failed. The quants’ Value at Risk models had implied that the loss the firm suffered in August 1998 was so unlikely that it ought never to have happened in the entire life of the universe. But that was because the models were working with just five years of data. If they had gone back even 11 years, they would have captured the 1987 stock-market crash. If they had gone back 80 years they would have captured the last great Russian default, after the 1917 revolution. Meriwether himself, born in 1947, ruefully observed, “If I had lived through the Depression, I would have been in a better position to understand events.” To put it bluntly, the Nobel Prize winners knew plenty of mathematics but not enough history.
One might assume that, after the catastrophic failure of L.T.C.M., quantitative hedge funds would have vanished from the financial scene, and derivatives such as options would be sold a good deal more circumspectly. Yet the very reverse happened. Far from declining, in the past 10 years hedge funds of every type have exploded in number and in the volume of assets they manage, with quantitative hedge funds such as Renaissance, Citadel, and D. E. Shaw emerging as leading players. The growth of derivatives has also been spectacular—and it has continued despite the onset of the credit crunch. Between December 2005 and December 2007, the notional amounts outstanding for all derivatives increased from $298 trillion to $596 trillion. Credit-default swaps quadrupled, from $14 trillion to $58 trillion.
An intimation of the problems likely to arise came in September, when the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie cast doubt on the status of derivative contracts protecting the holders of more than $1.4 trillion of their bonds against default. The consequences of the failure of Lehman Brothers were substantially greater, because the firm was the counter-party in so many derivative contracts.
The big question is whether those active in the market waited too long to set up some kind of clearing mechanism. If, as seems inevitable, there is an upsurge in corporate defaults as the U.S. slides into recession, the whole system could completely seize up.
Just 10 years ago, during the Asian crisis of 1997–98, it was conventional wisdom that financial crises were more likely to happen on the periphery of the world economy—in the so-called emerging markets of East Asia and Latin America. Yet the biggest threats to the global financial system in this new century have come not from the periphery but from the core. The explanation for this strange role reversal may in fact lie in the way emerging markets changed their behavior after 1998.
For many decades it was assumed that poor countries could become rich only by borrowing capital from wealthy countries. Recurrent debt crises and currency crises associated with sudden withdrawals of Western money led to a rethinking, inspired largely by the Chinese example.
When the Chinese wanted to attract foreign capital, they insisted that it take the form of direct investment. That meant that instead of borrowing from Western banks to finance its industrial development, as many emerging markets did, China got foreigners to build factories in Chinese enterprise zones—large, lumpy assets that could not easily be withdrawn in a crisis.
The crucial point, though, is that the bulk of Chinese investment has been financed from China’s own savings. Cautious after years of instability and unused to the panoply of credit facilities we have in the West, Chinese households save a high proportion of their rising incomes, in marked contrast to Americans, who in recent years have saved almost none at all. Chinese corporations save an even larger proportion of their soaring profits. The remarkable thing is that a growing share of that savings surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America.
The Chinese have not been acting out of altruism. Until very recently, the best way for China to employ its vast population was by exporting manufactured goods to the spendthrift U.S. consumer. To ensure that those exports were irresistibly cheap, China had to fight the tendency for its currency to strengthen against the dollar by buying literally billions of dollars on world markets. In 2006, Chinese holdings of dollars reached 700 billion. Other Asian and Middle Eastern economies adopted much the same strategy.
The benefits for the United States were manifold. Asian imports kept down U.S. inflation. Asian labor kept down U.S. wage costs. Above all, Asian savings kept down U.S. interest rates. But there was a catch. The more Asia was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. The Asian savings glut was thus the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance, and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge-fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private-equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right, and center to finance leveraged buyouts. And it was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash by 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job, and no assets.
Whether or not China is now sufficiently “decoupled” from the United States that it can insulate itself from our credit crunch remains to be seen. At the time of writing, however, it looks very doubtful.
Back to Reality
The modern financial system is the product of centuries of economic evolution. Banks transformed money from metal coins into accounts, allowing ever larger aggregations of borrowing and lending. From the Renaissance on, government bonds introduced the securitization of streams of interest payments. From the 17th century on, equity in corporations could be bought and sold in public stock markets. From the 18th century on, central banks slowly learned how to moderate or exacerbate the business cycle. From the 19th century on, insurance was supplemented by futures, the first derivatives. And from the 20th century on, households were encouraged by government to skew their portfolios in favor of real estate.
Read Niall Ferguson’s prescient article on today’s financial woes, Empire Falls (November 2006).
Economies that combined all these institutional innovations performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources than, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, then in the guise of globalization.
Yet money’s ascent has not been, and can never be, a smooth one. On the contrary, financial history is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes. The excesses of the Age of Leverage—the deluge of paper money, the asset-price inflation, the explosion of consumer and bank debt, and the hypertrophic growth of derivatives—were bound sooner or later to produce a really big crisis.
It remains unclear whether this crisis will have economic and social effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression, or whether the monetary and fiscal authorities will succeed in achieving a Great Repression, averting a 1930s-style “great contraction” of credit and output by transferring the as yet unquantifiable losses from banks to taxpayers.
Either way, Planet Finance has now returned to Planet Earth with a bang. The key figures of the Age of Leverage—the lax central bankers, the reckless investment bankers, the hubristic quants—are now feeling the full force of this planet’s gravity.
But what about the rest of us, the rank-and-file members of the deluded crowd? Well, we shall now have to question some of our most deeply rooted assumptions—not only about the benefits of paper money but also about the rationale of the property-owning democracy itself.
On Planet Finance it may have made sense to borrow billions of dollars to finance a massive speculation on the future prices of American houses, and then to erect on the back of this trade a vast inverted pyramid of incomprehensible securities and derivatives.
But back here on Planet Earth it suddenly seems like an extraordinary popular delusion.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.
What the market seeks is a divisable asset with no counterparty risk that is impossible to counterfeit, by that definition, money is what it has always been: gold and silver and nothing else.
Why was I dogged with a terrible dread for the last four years and completely obsessed with the absolute certanity that the current economic order was about to collapse. My iconoclasm and alienation from the mainstream and my understanding of the history of human economic folly.
Based on the aggregates, this downturn, from a technical perspective may be a turn of supercycle degree correcting the rise of the west from 1712 and therefore a bust much more significant than the Great Depression.
We don't make social transformations from a carbon based energy addiction where social rank is defined by the nicest granite countertops to a sustainable hitech world with a completely distributed energy system, a healthy communal life and the classic human virtues seemlessly. The old must die before the new emerges.
As the article below demonstrates; if you want to know the future consult the historian and philosopher, not those most at ease in the current order.
Thats my take anyway.
Kevin McKern
Wall Street Lays Another Egg
Not so long ago, the dollar stood for a sum of gold, and bankers knew the people they lent to. The author charts the emergence of an abstract, even absurd world—call it Planet Finance—where mathematical models ignored both history and human nature, and value had no meaning.
by
Niall Ferguson
December 2008
The bigger they come: Uncle Sam and Wall Street take the hardest fall since the Depression.
This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth.
Planet Finance seemed to spin faster, too. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange markets. Every month $5.8 trillion changed hands on global stock markets. And all the time new financial life-forms were evolving. The total annual issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including fancy new “collateralized debt obligations” (C.D.O.’s), rose to more than $1 trillion. The volume of “derivatives”—contracts such as options and swaps—grew even faster, so that by the end of 2006 their notional value was just over $400 trillion. Before the 1980s, such things were virtually unknown. In the space of a few years their populations exploded. On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships.
Read Niall Ferguson’s prescient article on today’s financial woes, Empire Falls (November 2006).
New institutions also proliferated. In 1990 there were just 610 hedge funds, with $38.9 billion under management. At the end of 2006 there were 9,462, with $1.5 trillion under management. Private-equity partnerships also went forth and multiplied. Banks, meanwhile, set up a host of “conduits” and “structured investment vehicles” (sivs—surely the most apt acronym in financial history) to keep potentially risky assets off their balance sheets. It was as if an entire shadow banking system had come into being.
Then, beginning in the summer of 2007, Planet Finance began to self-destruct in what the International Monetary Fund soon acknowledged to be “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” Did the crisis of 2007–8 happen because American companies had gotten worse at designing new products? Had the pace of technological innovation or productivity growth suddenly slackened? No. The proximate cause of the economic uncertainty of 2008 was financial: to be precise, a crunch in the credit markets triggered by mounting defaults on a hitherto obscure species of housing loan known euphemistically as “subprime mortgages.”
Central banks in the United States and Europe sought to alleviate the pressure on the banks with interest-rate cuts and offers of funds through special “term auction facilities.” Yet the market rates at which banks could borrow money, whether by issuing commercial paper, selling bonds, or borrowing from one another, failed to follow the lead of the official federal-funds rate. The banks had to turn not only to Western central banks for short-term assistance to rebuild their reserves but also to Asian and Middle Eastern sovereign-wealth funds for equity injections. When these sources proved insufficient, investors—and speculative short-sellers—began to lose faith.
B
eginning with Bear Stearns, Wall Street’s investment banks entered a death spiral that ended with their being either taken over by a commercial bank (as Bear was, followed by Merrill Lynch) or driven into bankruptcy (as Lehman Brothers was). In September the two survivors—Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—formally ceased to be investment banks, signaling the death of a business model that dated back to the Depression. Other institutions deemed “too big to fail” by the U.S. Treasury were effectively taken over by the government, including the mortgage lenders and guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the insurance giant American International Group (A.I.G.).
By September 18 the U.S. financial system was gripped by such panic that the Treasury had to abandon this ad hoc policy. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson hastily devised a plan whereby the government would be authorized to buy “troubled” securities with up to $700 billion of taxpayers’ money—a figure apparently plucked from the air. When a modified version of the measure was rejected by Congress 11 days later, there was panic. When it was passed four days after that, there was more panic. Now it wasn’t just bank stocks that were tanking. The entire stock market seemed to be in free fall as fears mounted that the credit crunch was going to trigger a recession. Moreover, the crisis was now clearly global in scale. European banks were in much the same trouble as their American counterparts, while emerging-market stock markets were crashing. A week of frenetic improvisation by national governments culminated on the weekend of October 11–12, when the United States reluctantly followed the British government’s lead, buying equity stakes in banks rather than just their dodgy assets and offering unprecedented guarantees of banks’ debt and deposits.
Since these events coincided with the final phase of a U.S. presidential-election campaign, it was not surprising that some rather simplistic lessons were soon being touted by candidates and commentators. The crisis, some said, was the result of excessive deregulation of financial markets. Others sought to lay the blame on unscrupulous speculators: short-sellers, who borrowed the stocks of vulnerable banks and sold them in the expectation of further price declines. Still other suspects in the frame were negligent regulators and corrupt congressmen.
This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part in this latest sorry example of what the Victorian journalist Charles Mackay described in his 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Nothing New
As long as there have been banks, bond markets, and stock markets, there have been financial crises. Banks went bust in the days of the Medici. There were bond-market panics in the Venice of Shylock’s day. And the world’s first stock-market crash happened in 1720, when the Mississippi Company—the Enron of its day—blew up. According to economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the financial history of the past 800 years is a litany of debt defaults, banking crises, currency crises, and inflationary spikes. Moreover, financial crises seldom happen without inflicting pain on the wider economy. Another recent paper, co-authored by Rogoff’s Harvard colleague Robert Barro, has identified 148 crises since 1870 in which a country experienced a cumulative decline in gross domestic product (G.D.P.) of at least 10 percent, implying a probability of financial disaster of around 3.6 percent per year.
If stock-market movements followed the normal-distribution, or bell, curve, like human heights, an annual drop of 10 percent or more would happen only once every 500 years, whereas in the case of the Dow Jones Industrial Average it has happened in 20 of the last 100 years. And stock-market plunges of 20 percent or more would be unheard of—rather like people a foot and a half tall—whereas in fact there have been eight such crashes in the past century.
The most famous financial crisis—the Wall Street Crash—is conventionally said to have begun on “Black Thursday,” October 24, 1929, when the Dow declined by 2 percent, though in fact the market had been slipping since early September and had suffered a sharp, 6 percent drop on October 23. On “Black Monday,” October 28, it plunged by 13 percent, and the next day by a further 12 percent. In the course of the next three years the U.S. stock market declined by a staggering 89 percent, reaching its nadir in July 1932. The index did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954.
That helps put our current troubles into perspective. From its peak of 14,164, on October 9, 2007, to a dismal level of 8,579, exactly a year later, the Dow declined by 39 percent. By contrast, on a single day just over two decades ago—October 19, 1987—the index fell by 23 percent, one of only four days in history when the index has fallen by more than 10 percent in a single trading session.
This crisis, however, is about much more than just the stock market. It needs to be understood as a fundamental breakdown of the entire financial system, extending from the monetary-and-banking system through the bond market, the stock market, the insurance market, and the real-estate market. It affects not only established financial institutions such as investment banks but also relatively novel ones such as hedge funds. It is global in scope and unfathomable in scale.
Had it not been for the frantic efforts of the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, to say nothing of their counterparts in almost equally afflicted Europe, there would by now have been a repeat of that “great contraction” of credit and economic activity that was the prime mover of the Depression. Back then, the Fed and the Treasury did next to nothing to prevent bank failures from translating into a drastic contraction of credit and hence of business activity and employment. If the more openhanded monetary and fiscal authorities of today are ultimately successful in preventing a comparable slump of output, future historians may end up calling this “the Great Repression.” This is the Depression they are hoping to bottle up—a Depression in denial.
To understand why we have come so close to a rerun of the 1930s, we need to begin at the beginning, with banks and the money they make. From the Middle Ages until the mid-20th century, most banks made their money by maximizing the difference between the costs of their liabilities (payments to depositors) and the earnings on their assets (interest and commissions on loans). Some banks also made money by financing trade, discounting the commercial bills issued by merchants. Others issued and traded bonds and stocks, or dealt in commodities (especially precious metals). But the core business of banking was simple. It consisted, as the third Lord Rothschild pithily put it, “essentially of facilitating the movement of money from Point A, where it is, to Point B, where it is needed.”
The system evolved gradually. First came the invention of cashless intra-bank and inter-bank transactions, which allowed debts to be settled between account holders without having money physically change hands. Then came the idea of fractional-reserve banking, whereby banks kept only a small proportion of their existing deposits on hand to satisfy the needs of depositors (who seldom wanted all their money simultaneously), allowing the rest to be lent out profitably. That was followed by the rise of special public banks with monopolies on the issuing of banknotes and other powers and privileges: the first central banks.
With these innovations, money ceased to be understood as precious metal minted into coins. Now it was the sum total of specific liabilities (deposits and reserves) incurred by banks. Credit was the other side of banks’ balance sheets: the total of their assets; in other words, the loans they made. Some of this money might still consist of precious metal, though a rising proportion of that would be held in the central bank’s vault. Most would be made up of banknotes and coins recognized as “legal tender,” along with money that was visible only in current- and deposit-account statements.
Until the late 20th century, the system of bank money retained an anchor in the pre-modern conception of money in the form of the gold standard: fixed ratios between units of account and quantities of precious metal. As early as 1924, the English economist John Maynard Keynes dismissed the gold standard as a “barbarous relic,” but the last vestige of the system did not disappear until August 15, 1971—the day President Richard Nixon closed the so-called gold window, through which foreign central banks could still exchange dollars for gold. With that, the centuries-old link between money and precious metal was broken.
Though we tend to think of money today as being made of paper, in reality most of it now consists of bank deposits. If we measure the ratio of actual money to output in developed economies, it becomes clear that the trend since the 1970s has been for that ratio to rise from around 70 percent, before the closing of the gold window, to more than 100 percent by 2005. The corollary has been a parallel growth of credit on the other side of bank balance sheets. A significant component of that credit growth has been a surge of lending to consumers. Back in 1952, the ratio of household debt to disposable income was less than 40 percent in the United States. At its peak in 2007, it reached 133 percent, up from 90 percent a decade before. Today Americans carry a total of $2.56 trillion in consumer debt, up by more than a fifth since 2000.
Even more spectacular, however, has been the rising indebtedness of banks themselves. In 1980, bank indebtedness was equivalent to 21 percent of U.S. gross domestic product. In 2007 the figure was 116 percent. Another measure of this was the declining capital adequacy of banks. On the eve of “the Great Repression,” average bank capital in Europe was equivalent to less than 10 percent of assets; at the beginning of the 20th century, it was around 25 percent. It was not unusual for investment banks’ balance sheets to be as much as 20 or 30 times larger than their capital, thanks in large part to a 2004 rule change by the Securities and Exchange Commission that exempted the five largest of those banks from the regulation that had capped their debt-to-capital ratio at 12 to 1. The Age of Leverage had truly arrived for Planet Finance.
Credit and money, in other words, have for decades been growing more rapidly than underlying economic activity. Is it any wonder, then, that money has ceased to hold its value the way it did in the era of the gold standard? The motto “In God we trust” was added to the dollar bill in 1957. Since then its purchasing power, relative to the consumer price index, has declined by a staggering 87 percent. Average annual inflation during that period has been more than 4 percent. A man who decided to put his savings into gold in 1970 could have bought just over 27.8 ounces of the precious metal for $1,000. At the time of writing, with gold trading at $900 an ounce, he could have sold it for around $25,000.
Those few goldbugs who always doubted the soundness of fiat money—paper currency without a metal anchor—have in large measure been vindicated. But why were the rest of us so blinded by money illusion?
Blowing Bubbles
In the immediate aftermath of the death of gold as the anchor of the monetary system, the problem of inflation affected mainly retail prices and wages. Today, only around one out of seven countries has an inflation rate above 10 percent, and only one, Zimbabwe, is afflicted with hyperinflation. But back in 1979 at least 7 countries had an annual inflation rate above 50 percent, and more than 60 countries—including Britain and the United States—had inflation in double digits.
Inflation has come down since then, partly because many of the items we buy—from clothes to computers—have gotten cheaper as a result of technological innovation and the relocation of production to low-wage economies in Asia. It has also been reduced because of a worldwide transformation in monetary policy, which began with the monetarist-inspired increases in short-term rates implemented by the Federal Reserve in 1979. Just as important, some of the structural drivers of inflation, such as powerful trade unions, have also been weakened.
By the 1980s, in any case, more and more people had grasped how to protect their wealth from inflation: by investing it in assets they expected to appreciate in line with, or ahead of, the cost of living. These assets could take multiple forms, from modern art to vintage wine, but the most popular proved to be stocks and real estate. Once it became clear that this formula worked, the Age of Leverage could begin. For it clearly made sense to borrow to the hilt to maximize your holdings of stocks and real estate if these promised to generate higher rates of return than the interest payments on your borrowings. Between 1990 and 2004, most American households did not see an appreciable improvement in their incomes. Adjusted for inflation, the median household income rose by about 6 percent. But people could raise their living standards by borrowing and investing in stocks and housing.
Nearly all of us did it. And the bankers were there to help. Not only could they borrow more cheaply from one another than we could borrow from them; increasingly they devised all kinds of new mortgages that looked more attractive to us (and promised to be more lucrative to them) than boring old 30-year fixed-rate deals. Moreover, the banks were just as ready to play the asset markets as we were. Proprietary trading soon became the most profitable arm of investment banking: buying and selling assets on the bank’s own account.
Losing our shirt? The problem is that our banks are also losing theirs. Illustration by Barry Blitt.
There was, however, a catch. The Age of Leverage was also an age of bubbles, beginning with the dot-com bubble of the irrationally exuberant 1990s and ending with the real-estate mania of the exuberantly irrational 2000s. Why was this?
The future is in large measure uncertain, so our assessments of future asset prices are bound to vary. If we were all calculating machines, we would simultaneously process all the available information and come to the same conclusion. But we are human beings, and as such are prone to myopia and mood swings. When asset prices surge upward in sync, it is as if investors are gripped by a kind of collective euphoria. Conversely, when their “animal spirits” flip from greed to fear, the bubble that their earlier euphoria inflated can burst with amazing suddenness. Zoological imagery is an integral part of the culture of Planet Finance. Optimistic buyers are “bulls,” pessimistic sellers are “bears.” The real point, however, is that stock markets are mirrors of the human psyche. Like Homo sapiens, they can become depressed. They can even suffer complete breakdowns.
This is no new insight. In the 400 years since the first shares were bought and sold on the Amsterdam Beurs, there has been a long succession of financial bubbles. Time and again, asset prices have soared to unsustainable heights only to crash downward again. So familiar is this pattern—described by the economic historian Charles Kindleberger—that it is possible to distill it into five stages:
(1) Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities. (2) Euphoria, or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby expectation of rising profits leads to rapid growth in asset prices. (3) Mania, or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to mulct them of their money. (4) Distress: The insiders discern that profits cannot possibly justify the now exorbitant price of the assets and begin to take profits by selling. (5) Revulsion, or discredit: As asset prices fall, the outsiders stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst.
The key point is that without easy credit creation a true bubble cannot occur. That is why so many bubbles have their origins in the sins of omission and commission of central banks.
The bubbles of our time had their origins in the aftermath of the 1987 stock-market crash, when then novice Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan boldly affirmed the Fed’s “readiness to serve as a source of liquidity to support the economic and financial system.” This sent a signal to the markets, particularly the New York banks: if things got really bad, he stood ready to bail them out. Thus was born the “Greenspan put”—the implicit option the Fed gave traders to be able to sell their stocks at today’s prices even in the event of a meltdown tomorrow.
Having contained a panic once, Greenspan thereafter had a dilemma lurking in the back of his mind: whether or not to act pre-emptively the next time—to prevent a panic altogether. This dilemma came to the fore as a classic stock-market bubble took shape in the mid-90s. The displacement in this case was the explosion of innovation by the technology and software industry as personal computers met the Internet. But, as in all of history’s bubbles, an accommodative monetary policy also played a role. From a peak of 6 percent in February 1995, the federal-funds target rate had been reduced to 5.25 percent by January 1996. It was then cut in steps, in the fall of 1998, down to 4.75 percent, and it remained at that level until June 1999, by which time the Dow had passed the 10,000 mark.
Why did the Fed allow euphoria to run loose in the 1990s? Partly because Greenspan and his colleagues underestimated the momentum of the technology bubble; as early as December 1995, with the Dow just past the 5,000 mark, members of the Fed’s Open Market Committee speculated that the market might be approaching its peak. Partly, also, because Greenspan came to the conclusion that it was not the Fed’s responsibility to worry about asset-price inflation, only consumer-price inflation, and this, he believed, was being reduced by a major improvement in productivity due precisely to the tech boom.
Greenspan could not postpone a stock-exchange crash indefinitely. After Silicon Valley’s dot-com bubble peaked, in March 2000, the U.S. stock market fell by almost half over the next two and a half years. It was not until May 2007 that investors in the Standard & Poor’s 500 had recouped their losses. But the Fed’s response to the sell-off—and the massive shot of liquidity it injected into the financial markets after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—prevented the “correction” from precipitating a depression. Not only were the 1930s averted; so too, it seemed, was a repeat of the Japanese experience after 1989, when a conscious effort by the central bank to prick an asset bubble had ended up triggering an 80 percent stock-market sell-off, a real-estate collapse, and a decade of economic stagnation.
What was not immediately obvious was that Greenspan’s easy-money policy was already generating another bubble—this time in the financial market that a majority of Americans have been encouraged for generations to play: the real-estate market.
The American Dream
Real estate is the English-speaking world’s favorite economic game. No other facet of financial life has such a hold on the popular imagination. The real-estate market is unique. Every adult, no matter how economically illiterate, has a view on its future prospects. Through the evergreen board game Monopoly, even children are taught how to climb the property ladder.
Once upon a time, people saved a portion of their earnings for the proverbial rainy day, stowing the cash in a mattress or a bank safe. The Age of Leverage, as we have seen, brought a growing reliance on borrowing to buy assets in the expectation of their future appreciation in value. For a majority of families, this meant a leveraged investment in a house. That strategy had one very obvious flaw. It represented a one-way, totally unhedged bet on a single asset.
To be sure, investing in housing paid off handsomely for more than half a century, up until 2006. Suppose you had put $100,000 into the U.S. property market back in the first quarter of 1987. According to the Case-Shiller national home-price index, you would have nearly tripled your money by the first quarter of 2007, to $299,000. On the other hand, if you had put the same money into the S&P 500, and had continued to re-invest the dividend income in that index, you would have ended up with $772,000 to play with—more than double what you would have made on bricks and mortar.
There is, obviously, an important difference between a house and a stock-market index. You cannot live in a stock-market index. For the sake of a fair comparison, allowance must therefore be made for the rent you save by owning your house (or the rent you can collect if you own a second property). A simple way to proceed is just to leave out both dividends and rents. In that case the difference is somewhat reduced. In the two decades after 1987, the S&P 500, excluding dividends, rose by a factor of just over six, meaning that an investment of $100,000 would be worth some $600,000. But that still comfortably beat housing.
There are three other considerations to bear in mind when trying to compare housing with other forms of assets. The first is depreciation. Stocks do not wear out and require new roofs; houses do. The second is liquidity. As assets, houses are a great deal more expensive to convert into cash than stocks. The third is volatility. Housing markets since World War II have been far less volatile than stock markets. Yet that is not to say that house prices have never deviated from a steady upward path. In Britain between 1989 and 1995, for example, the average house price fell by 18 percent, or, in inflation-adjusted terms, by more than a third—37 percent. In London, the real decline was closer to 47 percent. In Japan between 1990 and 2000, property prices fell by more than 60 percent.
The recent decline of property prices in the United States should therefore have come as less of a shock than it did. Between July 2006 and June 2008, the Case-Shiller index of home prices in 20 big American cities declined on average by 19 percent. In some of these cities—Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Miami—the total decline was as much as a third. Seen in international perspective, those are not unprecedented figures. Seen in the context of the post-2000 bubble, prices have yet to return to their starting point. On average, house prices are still 50 percent higher than they were at the beginning of this process.
So why were we oblivious to the likely bursting of the real-estate bubble? The answer is that for generations we have been brainwashed into thinking that borrowing to buy a house is the only rational financial strategy to pursue. Think of Frank Capra’s classic 1946 movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, which tells the story of the family-owned Bailey Building & Loan, a small-town mortgage firm that George Bailey (played by James Stewart) struggles to keep afloat in the teeth of the Depression. “You know, George,” his father tells him, “I feel that in a small way we are doing something important. It’s satisfying a fundamental urge. It’s deep in the race for a man to want his own roof and walls and fireplace, and we’re helping him get those things in our shabby little office.” George gets the message, as he passionately explains to the villainous slumlord Potter after Bailey Sr.’s death: “[My father] never once thought of himself.… But he did help a few people get out of your slums, Mr. Potter. And what’s wrong with that? … Doesn’t it make them better citizens? Doesn’t it make them better customers?”
There, in a nutshell, is one of the key concepts of the 20th century: the notion that property ownership enhances citizenship, and that therefore a property-owning democracy is more socially and politically stable than a democracy divided into an elite of landlords and a majority of property-less tenants. So deeply rooted is this idea in our political culture that it comes as a surprise to learn that it was invented just 70 years ago.
Fannie, Ginnie, and Freddie
Prior to the 1930s, only a minority of Americans owned their homes. During the Depression, however, the Roosevelt administration created a whole complex of institutions to change that. A Federal Home Loan Bank Board was set up in 1932 to encourage and oversee local mortgage lenders known as savings-and-loans (S&Ls)—mutual associations that took in deposits and lent to homebuyers. Under the New Deal, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation stepped in to refinance mortgages on longer terms, up to 15 years. To reassure depositors, who had been traumatized by the thousands of bank failures of the previous three years, Roosevelt introduced federal deposit insurance. And by providing federally backed insurance for mortgage lenders, the Federal Housing Administration (F.H.A.) sought to encourage large (up to 80 percent of the purchase price), long (20- to 25-year), fully amortized, low-interest loans.
By standardizing the long-term mortgage and creating a national system of official inspection and valuation, the F.H.A. laid the foundation for a secondary market in mortgages. This market came to life in 1938, when a new Federal National Mortgage Association—nicknamed Fannie Mae—was authorized to issue bonds and use the proceeds to buy mortgages from the local S&Ls, which were restricted by regulation both in terms of geography (they could not lend to borrowers more than 50 miles from their offices) and in terms of the rates they could offer (the so-called Regulation Q, which imposed a low ceiling on interest paid on deposits). Because these changes tended to reduce the average monthly payment on a mortgage, the F.H.A. made home ownership viable for many more Americans than ever before. Indeed, it is not too much to say that the modern United States, with its seductively samey suburbs, was born with Fannie Mae. Between 1940 and 1960, the home-ownership rate soared from 43 to 62 percent.
These were not the only ways in which the federal government sought to encourage Americans to own their own homes. Mortgage-interest payments were always tax-deductible, from the inception of the federal income tax in 1913. As Ronald Reagan said when the rationality of this tax break was challenged, mortgage-interest relief was “part of the American dream.”
In 1968, to broaden the secondary-mortgage market still further, Fannie Mae was split in two—the Government National Mortgage Association (Ginnie Mae), which was to cater to poor borrowers, and a rechartered Fannie Mae, now a privately owned government-sponsored enterprise (G.S.E.). Two years later, to provide competition for Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) was set up. In addition, Fannie Mae was permitted to buy conventional as well as government-guaranteed mortgages. Later, with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, American banks found themselves under pressure for the first time to lend to poor, minority communities.
These changes presaged a more radical modification to the New Deal system. In the late 1970s, the savings-and-loan industry was hit first by double-digit inflation and then by sharply rising interest rates. This double punch was potentially lethal. The S&Ls were simultaneously losing money on long-term, fixed-rate mortgages, due to inflation, and hemorrhaging deposits to higher-interest money-market funds. The response in Washington from both the Carter and Reagan administrations was to try to salvage the S&Ls with tax breaks and deregulation. When the new legislation was passed, President Reagan declared, “All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” Some people certainly did.
On the one hand, S&Ls could now invest in whatever they liked, not just local long-term mortgages. Commercial property, stocks, junk bonds—anything was allowed. They could even issue credit cards. On the other, they could now pay whatever interest rate they liked to depositors. Yet all their deposits were still effectively insured, with the maximum covered amount raised from $40,000 to $100,000, thanks to a government regulation two years earlier. And if ordinary deposits did not suffice, the S&Ls could raise money in the form of brokered deposits from middlemen. What happened next perfectly illustrated the great financial precept first enunciated by William Crawford, the commissioner of the California Department of Savings and Loan: “The best way to rob a bank is to own one.” Some S&Ls bet their depositors’ money on highly dubious real-estate developments. Many simply stole the money, as if deregulation meant that the law no longer applied to them at all.
When the ensuing bubble burst, nearly 300 S&Ls collapsed, while another 747 were closed or reorganized under the auspices of the Resolution Trust Corporation, established by Congress in 1989 to clear up the mess. The final cost of the crisis was $153 billion (around 3 percent of the 1989 G.D.P.), of which taxpayers had to pay $124 billion.
But even as the S&Ls were going belly-up, they offered another, very different group of American financial institutions a fast track to megabucks. To the bond traders at Salomon Brothers, the New York investment bank, the breakdown of the New Deal mortgage system was not a crisis but a wonderful opportunity. As profit-hungry as their language was profane, the self-styled “Big Swinging Dicks” at Salomon saw a way of exploiting the gyrating interest rates of the early 1980s.
The idea was to re-invent mortgages by bundling thousands of them together as the backing for new and alluring securities that could be sold as alternatives to traditional government and corporate bonds—in short, to convert mortgages into bonds. Once lumped together, the interest payments due on the mortgages could be subdivided into strips with different maturities and credit risks. The first issue of this new kind of mortgage-backed security (known as a “collateralized mortgage obligation”) occurred in June 1983. The dawn of securitization was a necessary prelude to the Age of Leverage.
Once again, however, it was the federal government that stood ready to pick up the tab in a crisis. For the majority of mortgages continued to enjoy an implicit guarantee from the government-sponsored trio of Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie, meaning that bonds which used those mortgages as collateral could be represented as virtual government bonds and considered “investment grade.” Between 1980 and 2007, the volume of such G.S.E.-backed mortgage-backed securities grew from less than $200 billion to more than $4 trillion. In 1980 only 10 percent of the home-mortgage market was securitized; by 2007, 56 percent of it was.
These changes swept away the last vestiges of the business model depicted in It’s a Wonderful Life. Once there had been meaningful social ties between mortgage lenders and borrowers. James Stewart’s character knew both the depositors and the debtors. By contrast, in a securitized market the interest you paid on your mortgage ultimately went to someone who had no idea you existed. The full implications of this transition for ordinary homeowners would become apparent only 25 years later.
The Lessons of Detroit
In July 2007, I paid a visit to Detroit, because I had the feeling that what was happening there was the shape of things to come in the United States as a whole. In the space of 10 years, house prices in Detroit, which probably possesses the worst housing stock of any American city other than New Orleans, had risen by more than a third—not much compared with the nationwide bubble, but still hard to explain, given the city’s chronically depressed economic state. As I discovered, the explanation lay in fundamental changes in the rules of the housing game.
I arrived at the end of a borrowing spree. For several years agents and brokers selling subprime mortgages had been flooding Detroit with radio, television, and direct-mail advertisements, offering what sounded like attractive deals. In 2006, for example, subprime lenders pumped more than a billion dollars into 22 Detroit Zip Codes.
These were not the old 30-year fixed-rate mortgages invented in the New Deal. On the contrary, a high proportion were adjustable-rate mortgages—in other words, the interest rate could vary according to changes in short-term lending rates. Many were also interest-only mortgages, without amortization (repayment of principal), even when the principal represented 100 percent of the assessed value of the mortgaged property. And most had introductory “teaser” periods, whereby the initial interest payments—usually for the first two years—were kept artificially low, with the cost of the loan backloaded. All of these devices were intended to allow an immediate reduction in the debt-servicing costs of the borrower.
In Detroit only a minority of these loans were going to first-time buyers. They were nearly all refinancing deals, which allowed borrowers to treat their homes as cash machines, converting their existing equity into cash and using the proceeds to pay off credit-card debts, carry out renovations, or buy new consumer durables. However, the combination of declining long-term interest rates and ever more alluring mortgage deals did attract new buyers into the housing market. By 2005, 69 percent of all U.S. householders were homeowners; 10 years earlier it had been 64 percent. About half of that increase could be attributed to the subprime-lending boom.
Significantly, a disproportionate number of subprime borrowers belonged to ethnic minorities. Indeed, I found myself wondering, as I drove around Detroit, if “subprime” was in fact a new financial euphemism for “black.” This was no idle supposition. According to a joint study by, among others, the Massachusetts Affordable Housing Alliance, 55 percent of black and Latino borrowers in Boston who had obtained loans for single-family homes in 2005 had been given subprime mortgages; the figure for white borrowers was just 13 percent. More than three-quarters of black and Latino borrowers from Washington Mutual were classed as subprime, whereas only 17 percent of white borrowers were. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, minority ownership increased by 3.1 million between 2002 and 2007.
Here, surely, was the zenith of the property-owning democracy. It was an achievement that the Bush administration was proud of. “We want everybody in America to own their own home,” President George W. Bush had said in October 2002. Having challenged lenders to create 5.5 million new minority homeowners by the end of the decade, Bush signed the American Dream Downpayment Act in 2003, a measure designed to subsidize first-time house purchases in low-income groups. Between 2000 and 2006, the share of undocumented subprime contracts rose from 17 to 44 percent. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac also came under pressure from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to support the subprime market. As Bush put it in December 2003, “It is in our national interest that more people own their own home.” Few people dissented.
As a business model, subprime lending worked beautifully—as long, that is, as interest rates stayed low, people kept their jobs, and real-estate prices continued to rise. Such conditions could not be relied upon to last, however, least of all in a city like Detroit. But that did not worry the subprime lenders. They simply followed the trail blazed by mainstream mortgage lenders in the 1980s. Having pocketed fat commissions on the signing of the original loan contracts, they hastily resold their loans in bulk to Wall Street banks. The banks, in turn, bundled the loans into high-yielding mortgage-backed securities and sold them to investors around the world, all eager for a few hundredths of a percentage point more of return on their capital. Repackaged as C.D.O.’s, these subprime securities could be transformed from risky loans to flaky borrowers into triple-A-rated investment-grade securities. All that was required was certification from one of the rating agencies that at least the top tier of these securities was unlikely to go into default.
The risk was spread across the globe, from American state pension funds to public-hospital networks in Australia, to town councils near the Arctic Circle. In Norway, for example, eight municipalities, including Rana and Hemnes, invested some $120 million of their taxpayers’ money in C.D.O.’s secured on American subprime mortgages.
In Detroit the rise of subprime mortgages had in fact coincided with a new slump in the inexorably declining automobile industry. That anticipated a wider American slowdown, an almost inevitable consequence of a tightening of monetary policy as the Federal Reserve belatedly raised short-term interest rates from 1 percent to 5.25 percent. As soon as the teaser rates expired and mortgages were reset at new and much higher interest rates, hundreds of Detroit households swiftly fell behind in their mortgage payments. The effect was to burst the real-estate bubble, causing house prices to start falling significantly for the first time since the early 1990s. And the further house prices fell, the more homeowners found themselves with “negative equity”—in other words, owing more money than their homes were worth.
The rest—the chain reaction as defaults in Detroit and elsewhere unleashed huge losses on C.D.O.’s in financial institutions all around the world—you know.
Drunk on Derivatives
Do you, however, know about the second-order effects of this crisis in the markets for derivatives? Do you in fact know what a derivative is? Once excoriated by Warren Buffett as “financial weapons of mass destruction,” derivatives are what make this crisis both unique and unfathomable in its ramifications. To understand what they are, you need, literally, to go back to the future.
For a farmer planting a crop, nothing is more crucial than the future price it will fetch after it has been harvested and taken to market. A futures contract allows him to protect himself by committing a merchant to buy his crop when it comes to market at a price agreed upon when the seeds are being planted. If the market price on the day of delivery is lower than expected, the farmer is protected.
The earliest forms of protection for farmers were known as forward contracts, which were simply bilateral agreements between seller and buyer. A true futures contract, however, is a standardized instrument issued by a futures exchange and hence tradable. With the development of a standard “to arrive” futures contract, along with a set of rules to enforce settlement and, finally, an effective clearinghouse, the first true futures market was born.
Because they are derived from the value of underlying assets, all futures contracts are forms of derivatives. Closely related, though distinct from futures, are the contracts known as options. In essence, the buyer of a “call” option has the right, but not the obligation, to buy an agreed-upon quantity of a particular commodity or financial asset from the seller (“writer”) of the option at a certain time (the expiration date) for a certain price (known as the “strike price”). Clearly, the buyer of a call option expects the price of the underlying instrument to rise in the future. When the price passes the agreed-upon strike price, the option is “in the money”—and so is the smart guy who bought it. A “put” option is just the opposite: the buyer has the right but not the obligation to sell an agreed-upon quantity of something to the seller of the option at an agreed-upon price.
A third kind of derivative is the interest-rate “swap,” which is effectively a bet between two parties on the future path of interest rates. A pure interest-rate swap allows two parties already receiving interest payments literally to swap them, allowing someone receiving a variable rate of interest to exchange it for a fixed rate, in case interest rates decline. A credit-default swap (C.D.S.), meanwhile, offers protection against a company’s defaulting on its bonds.
Bringing down the bull: The pain of America’s financial crisis is felt all over the world. Illustration by Brad Holland.
There was a time when derivatives were standardized instruments traded on exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade. Now, however, the vast proportion are custom-made and sold “over the counter” (O.T.C.), often by banks, which charge attractive commissions for their services, but also by insurance companies (notably A.I.G.). According to the Bank for International Settlements, the total notional amounts outstanding of O.T.C. derivative contracts—arranged on an ad hoc basis between two parties—reached a staggering $596 trillion in December 2007, with a gross market value of just over $14.5 trillion.
But how exactly do you price a derivative? What precisely is an option worth? The answers to those questions required a revolution in financial theory. From an academic point of view, what this revolution achieved was highly impressive. But the events of the 1990s, as the rise of quantitative finance replaced preppies with quants (quantitative analysts) all along Wall Street, revealed a new truth: those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.
Working closely with Fischer Black, of the consulting firm Arthur D. Little, M.I.T.’s Myron Scholes invented a groundbreaking new theory of pricing options, to which his colleague Robert Merton also contributed. (Scholes and Merton would share the 1997 Nobel Prize in economics.) They reasoned that a call option’s value depended on six variables: the current market price of the stock (S), the agreed future price at which the stock could be bought (L), the time until the expiration date of the option (t), the risk-free rate of return in the economy as a whole (r), the probability that the option will be exercised (N), and—the crucial variable—the expected volatility of the stock, i.e., the likely fluctuations of its price between the time of purchase and the expiration date (s). With wonderful mathematical wizardry, the quants reduced the price of a call option to this formula (the Black-Scholes formula):
Feeling a bit baffled? Can’t follow the algebra? That was just fine by the quants. To make money from this magic formula, they needed markets to be full of people who didn’t have a clue about how to price options but relied instead on their (seldom accurate) gut instincts. They also needed a great deal of computing power, a force which had been transforming the financial markets since the early 1980s. Their final requirement was a partner with some market savvy in order to make the leap from the faculty club to the trading floor. Black, who would soon be struck down by cancer, could not be that partner. But John Meriwether could. The former head of the bond-arbitrage group at Salomon Brothers, Meriwether had made his first fortune in the wake of the S&L meltdown of the late 1980s. The hedge fund he created with Scholes and Merton in 1994 was called Long-Term Capital Management.
In its brief, four-year life, Long-Term was the brightest star in the hedge-fund firmament, generating mind-blowing returns for its elite club of investors and even more money for its founders. Needless to say, the firm did more than just trade options, though selling puts on the stock market became such a big part of its business that it was nicknamed “the central bank of volatility” by banks buying insurance against a big stock-market sell-off. In fact, the partners were simultaneously pursuing multiple trading strategies, about 100 of them, with a total of 7,600 positions. This conformed to a second key rule of the new mathematical finance: the virtue of diversification, a principle that had been formalized by Harry M. Markowitz, of the Rand Corporation. Diversification was all about having a multitude of uncorrelated positions. One might go wrong, or even two. But thousands just could not go wrong simultaneously.
The mathematics were reassuring. According to the firm’s “Value at Risk” models, it would take a 10-s (in other words, 10-standard-deviation) event to cause the firm to lose all its capital in a single year. But the probability of such an event, according to the quants, was 1 in 10,24—or effectively zero. Indeed, the models said the most Long-Term was likely to lose in a single day was $45 million. For that reason, the partners felt no compunction about leveraging their trades. At the end of August 1997, the fund’s capital was $6.7 billion, but the debt-financed assets on its balance sheet amounted to $126 billion, a ratio of assets to capital of 19 to 1.
There is no need to rehearse here the story of Long-Term’s downfall, which was precipitated by a Russian debt default. Suffice it to say that on Friday, August 21, 1998, the firm lost $550 million—15 percent of its entire capital, and vastly more than its mathematical models had said was possible. The key point is to appreciate why the quants were so wrong.
The problem lay with the assumptions that underlie so much of mathematical finance. In order to construct their models, the quants had to postulate a planet where the inhabitants were omniscient and perfectly rational; where they instantly absorbed all new information and used it to maximize profits; where they never stopped trading; where markets were continuous, frictionless, and completely liquid. Financial markets on this planet followed a “random walk,” meaning that each day’s prices were quite unrelated to the previous day’s, but reflected no more and no less than all the relevant information currently available. The returns on this planet’s stock market were normally distributed along the bell curve, with most years clustered closely around the mean, and two-thirds of them within one standard deviation of the mean. On such a planet, a “six standard deviation” sell-off would be about as common as a person shorter than one foot in our world. It would happen only once in four million years of trading.
But Long-Term was not located on Planet Finance. It was based in Greenwich, Connecticut, on Planet Earth, a place inhabited by emotional human beings, always capable of flipping suddenly and en masse from greed to fear. In the case of Long-Term, the herding problem was acute, because many other firms had begun trying to copy Long-Term’s strategies in the hope of replicating its stellar performance. When things began to go wrong, there was a truly bovine stampede for the exits. The result was a massive, synchronized downturn in virtually all asset markets. Diversification was no defense in such a crisis. As one leading London hedge-fund manager later put it to Meriwether, “John, you were the correlation.”
There was, however, another reason why Long-Term failed. The quants’ Value at Risk models had implied that the loss the firm suffered in August 1998 was so unlikely that it ought never to have happened in the entire life of the universe. But that was because the models were working with just five years of data. If they had gone back even 11 years, they would have captured the 1987 stock-market crash. If they had gone back 80 years they would have captured the last great Russian default, after the 1917 revolution. Meriwether himself, born in 1947, ruefully observed, “If I had lived through the Depression, I would have been in a better position to understand events.” To put it bluntly, the Nobel Prize winners knew plenty of mathematics but not enough history.
One might assume that, after the catastrophic failure of L.T.C.M., quantitative hedge funds would have vanished from the financial scene, and derivatives such as options would be sold a good deal more circumspectly. Yet the very reverse happened. Far from declining, in the past 10 years hedge funds of every type have exploded in number and in the volume of assets they manage, with quantitative hedge funds such as Renaissance, Citadel, and D. E. Shaw emerging as leading players. The growth of derivatives has also been spectacular—and it has continued despite the onset of the credit crunch. Between December 2005 and December 2007, the notional amounts outstanding for all derivatives increased from $298 trillion to $596 trillion. Credit-default swaps quadrupled, from $14 trillion to $58 trillion.
An intimation of the problems likely to arise came in September, when the government takeover of Fannie and Freddie cast doubt on the status of derivative contracts protecting the holders of more than $1.4 trillion of their bonds against default. The consequences of the failure of Lehman Brothers were substantially greater, because the firm was the counter-party in so many derivative contracts.
The big question is whether those active in the market waited too long to set up some kind of clearing mechanism. If, as seems inevitable, there is an upsurge in corporate defaults as the U.S. slides into recession, the whole system could completely seize up.
Just 10 years ago, during the Asian crisis of 1997–98, it was conventional wisdom that financial crises were more likely to happen on the periphery of the world economy—in the so-called emerging markets of East Asia and Latin America. Yet the biggest threats to the global financial system in this new century have come not from the periphery but from the core. The explanation for this strange role reversal may in fact lie in the way emerging markets changed their behavior after 1998.
For many decades it was assumed that poor countries could become rich only by borrowing capital from wealthy countries. Recurrent debt crises and currency crises associated with sudden withdrawals of Western money led to a rethinking, inspired largely by the Chinese example.
When the Chinese wanted to attract foreign capital, they insisted that it take the form of direct investment. That meant that instead of borrowing from Western banks to finance its industrial development, as many emerging markets did, China got foreigners to build factories in Chinese enterprise zones—large, lumpy assets that could not easily be withdrawn in a crisis.
The crucial point, though, is that the bulk of Chinese investment has been financed from China’s own savings. Cautious after years of instability and unused to the panoply of credit facilities we have in the West, Chinese households save a high proportion of their rising incomes, in marked contrast to Americans, who in recent years have saved almost none at all. Chinese corporations save an even larger proportion of their soaring profits. The remarkable thing is that a growing share of that savings surplus has ended up being lent to the United States. In effect, the People’s Republic of China has become banker to the United States of America.
The Chinese have not been acting out of altruism. Until very recently, the best way for China to employ its vast population was by exporting manufactured goods to the spendthrift U.S. consumer. To ensure that those exports were irresistibly cheap, China had to fight the tendency for its currency to strengthen against the dollar by buying literally billions of dollars on world markets. In 2006, Chinese holdings of dollars reached 700 billion. Other Asian and Middle Eastern economies adopted much the same strategy.
The benefits for the United States were manifold. Asian imports kept down U.S. inflation. Asian labor kept down U.S. wage costs. Above all, Asian savings kept down U.S. interest rates. But there was a catch. The more Asia was willing to lend to the United States, the more Americans were willing to borrow. The Asian savings glut was thus the underlying cause of the surge in bank lending, bond issuance, and new derivative contracts that Planet Finance witnessed after 2000. It was the underlying cause of the hedge-fund population explosion. It was the underlying reason why private-equity partnerships were able to borrow money left, right, and center to finance leveraged buyouts. And it was the underlying reason why the U.S. mortgage market was so awash with cash by 2006 that you could get a 100 percent mortgage with no income, no job, and no assets.
Whether or not China is now sufficiently “decoupled” from the United States that it can insulate itself from our credit crunch remains to be seen. At the time of writing, however, it looks very doubtful.
Back to Reality
The modern financial system is the product of centuries of economic evolution. Banks transformed money from metal coins into accounts, allowing ever larger aggregations of borrowing and lending. From the Renaissance on, government bonds introduced the securitization of streams of interest payments. From the 17th century on, equity in corporations could be bought and sold in public stock markets. From the 18th century on, central banks slowly learned how to moderate or exacerbate the business cycle. From the 19th century on, insurance was supplemented by futures, the first derivatives. And from the 20th century on, households were encouraged by government to skew their portfolios in favor of real estate.
Read Niall Ferguson’s prescient article on today’s financial woes, Empire Falls (November 2006).
Economies that combined all these institutional innovations performed better over the long run than those that did not, because financial intermediation generally permits a more efficient allocation of resources than, say, feudalism or central planning. For this reason, it is not wholly surprising that the Western financial model tended to spread around the world, first in the guise of imperialism, then in the guise of globalization.
Yet money’s ascent has not been, and can never be, a smooth one. On the contrary, financial history is a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, bubbles and busts, manias and panics, shocks and crashes. The excesses of the Age of Leverage—the deluge of paper money, the asset-price inflation, the explosion of consumer and bank debt, and the hypertrophic growth of derivatives—were bound sooner or later to produce a really big crisis.
It remains unclear whether this crisis will have economic and social effects as disastrous as those of the Great Depression, or whether the monetary and fiscal authorities will succeed in achieving a Great Repression, averting a 1930s-style “great contraction” of credit and output by transferring the as yet unquantifiable losses from banks to taxpayers.
Either way, Planet Finance has now returned to Planet Earth with a bang. The key figures of the Age of Leverage—the lax central bankers, the reckless investment bankers, the hubristic quants—are now feeling the full force of this planet’s gravity.
But what about the rest of us, the rank-and-file members of the deluded crowd? Well, we shall now have to question some of our most deeply rooted assumptions—not only about the benefits of paper money but also about the rationale of the property-owning democracy itself.
On Planet Finance it may have made sense to borrow billions of dollars to finance a massive speculation on the future prices of American houses, and then to erect on the back of this trade a vast inverted pyramid of incomprehensible securities and derivatives.
But back here on Planet Earth it suddenly seems like an extraordinary popular delusion.
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.
26 November 2008
Gold - The Traditional Safe Haven in Troubled Times
The thing about gold is it has no counterparty risk and can't default, when you connect money to it in whatever way you at least put a break of the process of credit creation. You still see a business cycle, but you don't have these 25 years booms followed by collapse. ~ Kevin
On November 19, Market Watch.com reported that "Retail investors sharply increased their demand for gold bars and coins in the past few months as they struggled to find a safe place for their money amid the financial crisis...."
On the same date, a World Gold Council press release stated:
"Dollar demand for gold reached an all-time quarterly record of US $32 billion in the third quarter of 2008 as investors around the world sought refuge from the global financial meltdown, and jewelry buyers returned to the market in droves on a lower gold price. This figure was 45% higher than the previous record in Q 2 2008. Tonnage demand was also 18% higher than a year earlier."
Record demand is showing up at retail and in exchange traded fund (ETF) inflows. They were also offset by "inferred investment" outflows by hedge fund liquidations to raise cash for redemptions.
James Burton, World Gold Council's chief executive officer stated:
"Gold's universal role as a store of value has shone through during this quarter helping (to) attract investors and consumers to all forms of gold ownership. Looking forward, given the uncertainty that surrounds the global economy, gold's safe haven appeal should continue," but so will the speculative side of the gold market.
Earlier in the year, spot gold reached $1000 an ounce. The price then briefly fell below $700, remained in the low to mid-$700 range (until on November 21 it spiked to $800), and reasons cited are that institutional investors are selling desired assets to meet margin calls on weaker ones. Perhaps so, but much more is going on as well.
Markets are heavily manipulated, and gold among others are targeted. For the precious metal, it's to hold down its price to make dollars more attractive at a time it should be soaring and likely will looking ahead with some forecasts of it reaching extremely high valuations.
Noted analyst Richard Russell of Dow Theory Letters has his view on gold and its price action. He believes "one way or another, gold is being manipulated by certain sources. What group would least want to see (it) heading higher? My answer is the Fed. (It's) exploding the money supply. This would ordinarily foment inflation. Surging gold is a red flag that the public understands. The Fed is doing everything it can to hide the fact that it is devaluing the dollar via its" explosion of the money supply.
Russell believes that gold is in a primary bull market. The longer its price is artificially depressed, the "greater the bull forces within gold will struggle to express themselves."
Even now, the New York Post reported (on November 18) that "Governments Can't Handle (the) Global Run on Gold Coins....as people around the world are demanding so many of the valuable coins that government mints are having difficulty filling orders."
The US mint is allocating them to restrict supply. It increased its dealer price for a 10-ounce coin by 10% and one-ounce coins by 3%, and one dealer says that customers wanting 200 gold coins have to wait up to two weeks to get them. Six months ago they were available immediately. In addition, some dealers turn customers away, and those selling them demand a 10 - 15% premium over the Comex quoted price.
It hasn't curtailed demand and why not. Gold is a global thermometer that reflects monetary, political and economic stability as well as marketplace demand - for investment, jewelry, or as the ultimate hedge against uncertainty. When prices rise, it usually warns of trouble - geopolitical, inflation, deflation, the loss of confidence in fiat currency, or a possible looming depression so far not reflected in the metal's price, but watch out.
Gold's price may be resting for a time and is being artificially held down, but for how long. If conditions keep deteriorating and money creation remains too expansive, sooner or later gold may explode on the upside.
Petrodollar states may think so and are making large gold purchases. In November, Saudi investors bought $3.5 billion worth, reportedly as a safe haven at a time of crisis and falling oil prices. Reuters said that Iran is converting some of its $120 billion in foreign currency reserves to gold. Dubai dealers are running low on the metal as demand is high.
In China it hit 38.4 metric tons through September compared to 24 tons for all of 2007. Gold jewelry demand in China reached 241.6 tons through September compared to 302 tons in 2007 when jewelry demand grew by 26%. China is the world's second largest gold consumer.
On November 14, The Standard (based in Hong Kong) reported that "The mainland is seriously considering a plan to diversify more of its massive foreign-exchange reserves into gold (because of) fears about the long-term viability of parking most of (them) in US government bonds" at a time America's budget deficit and national debt are soaring.
Demand in India (the largest gold consuming market) is also growing (up 31% from Q 3 2007) at a time global gold mining production was 1133 tons in the first half of 2008 or 6% below the same 2007 period. Gold supply was down 9.7% over year-earlier levels due largely to significantly lower central bank sales. Those made under the Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) totaled 357 tons in the year ending September 26 - the lowest annual figure since the first 1999 Agreement. Prices are falling, but Saudis and other Middle East investors are buying and for good reason.
World economic viability is sinking, and it's affecting oil prices. They've fallen around two-thirds from their all-time high, and producer states are worried. The Energy Information Agency projects that OPEC may earn $595 billion in 2009 - way down from its earlier $979 billion net 2008 revenues and lower that $671 in 2007.
So today's gold weakness and dollar strength may turn out to be a shorter-term phenomenon than many observers believe. The 10-year credit default swap (CDS) spread on US Treasuries provides a clue. The cost of insuring against a US government default is soaring, and it's happening to Britain and Germany as well. It's now many fold higher than in late summer, a cause for worry, and likely because markets are pricing in massive bailouts that may far exceed the current levels. In the US, it already hit $4.2 trillion, it's rising, and hinting at a possible future default or huge devaluation that's the same thing.
In this environment, gold may be the safest of all asset classes at a time none are safe, and no one can predict how bad things may get before they improve. What's likely, however, is that the road ahead will be painful, protracted, and unlike anything experienced before so all the old rules don't apply, and no one knows what, if anything, may work. This saga has a long way to run, and the path ahead is down.
On November 19, Market Watch.com reported that "Retail investors sharply increased their demand for gold bars and coins in the past few months as they struggled to find a safe place for their money amid the financial crisis...."
On the same date, a World Gold Council press release stated:
"Dollar demand for gold reached an all-time quarterly record of US $32 billion in the third quarter of 2008 as investors around the world sought refuge from the global financial meltdown, and jewelry buyers returned to the market in droves on a lower gold price. This figure was 45% higher than the previous record in Q 2 2008. Tonnage demand was also 18% higher than a year earlier."
Record demand is showing up at retail and in exchange traded fund (ETF) inflows. They were also offset by "inferred investment" outflows by hedge fund liquidations to raise cash for redemptions.
James Burton, World Gold Council's chief executive officer stated:
"Gold's universal role as a store of value has shone through during this quarter helping (to) attract investors and consumers to all forms of gold ownership. Looking forward, given the uncertainty that surrounds the global economy, gold's safe haven appeal should continue," but so will the speculative side of the gold market.
Earlier in the year, spot gold reached $1000 an ounce. The price then briefly fell below $700, remained in the low to mid-$700 range (until on November 21 it spiked to $800), and reasons cited are that institutional investors are selling desired assets to meet margin calls on weaker ones. Perhaps so, but much more is going on as well.
Markets are heavily manipulated, and gold among others are targeted. For the precious metal, it's to hold down its price to make dollars more attractive at a time it should be soaring and likely will looking ahead with some forecasts of it reaching extremely high valuations.
Noted analyst Richard Russell of Dow Theory Letters has his view on gold and its price action. He believes "one way or another, gold is being manipulated by certain sources. What group would least want to see (it) heading higher? My answer is the Fed. (It's) exploding the money supply. This would ordinarily foment inflation. Surging gold is a red flag that the public understands. The Fed is doing everything it can to hide the fact that it is devaluing the dollar via its" explosion of the money supply.
Russell believes that gold is in a primary bull market. The longer its price is artificially depressed, the "greater the bull forces within gold will struggle to express themselves."
Even now, the New York Post reported (on November 18) that "Governments Can't Handle (the) Global Run on Gold Coins....as people around the world are demanding so many of the valuable coins that government mints are having difficulty filling orders."
The US mint is allocating them to restrict supply. It increased its dealer price for a 10-ounce coin by 10% and one-ounce coins by 3%, and one dealer says that customers wanting 200 gold coins have to wait up to two weeks to get them. Six months ago they were available immediately. In addition, some dealers turn customers away, and those selling them demand a 10 - 15% premium over the Comex quoted price.
It hasn't curtailed demand and why not. Gold is a global thermometer that reflects monetary, political and economic stability as well as marketplace demand - for investment, jewelry, or as the ultimate hedge against uncertainty. When prices rise, it usually warns of trouble - geopolitical, inflation, deflation, the loss of confidence in fiat currency, or a possible looming depression so far not reflected in the metal's price, but watch out.
Gold's price may be resting for a time and is being artificially held down, but for how long. If conditions keep deteriorating and money creation remains too expansive, sooner or later gold may explode on the upside.
Petrodollar states may think so and are making large gold purchases. In November, Saudi investors bought $3.5 billion worth, reportedly as a safe haven at a time of crisis and falling oil prices. Reuters said that Iran is converting some of its $120 billion in foreign currency reserves to gold. Dubai dealers are running low on the metal as demand is high.
In China it hit 38.4 metric tons through September compared to 24 tons for all of 2007. Gold jewelry demand in China reached 241.6 tons through September compared to 302 tons in 2007 when jewelry demand grew by 26%. China is the world's second largest gold consumer.
On November 14, The Standard (based in Hong Kong) reported that "The mainland is seriously considering a plan to diversify more of its massive foreign-exchange reserves into gold (because of) fears about the long-term viability of parking most of (them) in US government bonds" at a time America's budget deficit and national debt are soaring.
Demand in India (the largest gold consuming market) is also growing (up 31% from Q 3 2007) at a time global gold mining production was 1133 tons in the first half of 2008 or 6% below the same 2007 period. Gold supply was down 9.7% over year-earlier levels due largely to significantly lower central bank sales. Those made under the Central Bank Gold Agreement (CBGA) totaled 357 tons in the year ending September 26 - the lowest annual figure since the first 1999 Agreement. Prices are falling, but Saudis and other Middle East investors are buying and for good reason.
World economic viability is sinking, and it's affecting oil prices. They've fallen around two-thirds from their all-time high, and producer states are worried. The Energy Information Agency projects that OPEC may earn $595 billion in 2009 - way down from its earlier $979 billion net 2008 revenues and lower that $671 in 2007.
So today's gold weakness and dollar strength may turn out to be a shorter-term phenomenon than many observers believe. The 10-year credit default swap (CDS) spread on US Treasuries provides a clue. The cost of insuring against a US government default is soaring, and it's happening to Britain and Germany as well. It's now many fold higher than in late summer, a cause for worry, and likely because markets are pricing in massive bailouts that may far exceed the current levels. In the US, it already hit $4.2 trillion, it's rising, and hinting at a possible future default or huge devaluation that's the same thing.
In this environment, gold may be the safest of all asset classes at a time none are safe, and no one can predict how bad things may get before they improve. What's likely, however, is that the road ahead will be painful, protracted, and unlike anything experienced before so all the old rules don't apply, and no one knows what, if anything, may work. This saga has a long way to run, and the path ahead is down.
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