In 1987 I used the title of this post to describe the brand new Basel Capital Accords. I was a young and novice central banker, but as soon as I looked at the proposed accords, I knew they were sowing the seeds of a great misallocation of capital. The principal flaw was the uniform weighting of assets:
- zero weight for OECD government debt and all other government debt with less than one year maturity;
- 20 percent weight for debt of OECD banks;
- 50 percent weight for mortgage debt.
Young as I was, I had the confidence to express to my elders and betters that they were making a mistake treating a French bank - with unlimited state support - exactly the same as a Italian bank - where state support would be subject to greater political and currency risk. Given the massive differences in yield and liquidity, how could an Italian government bond be just as good as a US Treasury held as bank capital?
The enthusiasm of my colleagues did not convince me. I knew that by drawing these clumsy rules we were telling banks that they no longer had individual, direct responsibility for assessment of the creditworthiness of their assets or their bank counterparties. The banks could use the uniform weightings of Basel to justify bad judgement and lend to Italian banks just as if they were French. Worse, the zero weighting of all OECD government debt would make Italian bonds just as good as Gilts or Treasuries as capital assets, despite more volatile liquidity and the obvious credit risks. [Italian governments changed almost weekly back then.] If the bank regulators slapped a label of capital adequacy on a bank, they would keep on lending unto disaster.
"But no!", my colleagues declaimed, "We are making the world safe for capitalism. With level playing fields from here to West Germany, American and British banks can grow internationally in every market because competition will favour more efficient international banks." [At the time the Soviet Union was still a bar to capitalist extremism in Eastern Europe and we were all devoted to Chicago School free markets elsewhere.]
Basel Capital Accords did promote global competition, and so the concentration of global banking into a very few global banks by punishing smaller banks with higher capital requirements. And to that extent, the plan worked to favour Wall Street and the City. The plan also worked in favour of the Italians, who could issue copious government debt to capitalise their banks at the zero risk weighting and flog that debt to American, British and German banks who carried it at zero risk too.
But as the American, British and German banks were relieved of the onerous responsibility for due diligence, they took sillier and sillier risks. For example, they bought lots of Italian government bonds. They spread the emergent model of securitisation far past any productive reinvestment of capital to the point of wasting each nation's decades of accumulated wealth to finance excess consumption. They bought ratings from willing rating agencies to justify more and more leverage with less and less capital. They used derivatives to make their balance sheets and accounting impenetrable and misleading, and then got governments to adopt the same techniques in the public sector to support increasing government debt. And all the time the bias of Basel made them more and more powerful.
Basel II cemented big banks' control of both regulators and markets. They could use ratings to justify investments in structured products that seemed to have no economic rationale for either investors or intermediaries, but were magically profitable for everyone in theory. They could use internal models to book profits now and defer losses indefinitely, so ensuring wonderful bonus growth. Ah, glory days!
It is all starting to unravel now. Despite a commitment to Basel III - to be implemented far in the future - I doubt Basel II will last much longer. This week saw Portugese and Irish government bonds downrated to junk. Even the mighty US Treasury is on creditwatch for downrating given the rising risk of default.
Junk rating means risk. Recognition of an asset as capital implies that it can be priced in a liquid market when cash is required. When sovereign debt is junk rated and only good for collateral at the ECB or Fed, then it should not be eligible for bank capital. And so, zero weighting of these bonds as bank capital assets is no longer defensible. The banks holding Irish and Portugese debt as zero weighted for regulatory capital will have to supplement their capital at a time when bond markets are already dysfunctional and becoming downright illiquid for new issues. Huge maturity mismatch and refinancing overhangs were already threatening banks over the next few years, and now it will be much, much worse.
The ECB has ripped up its liquidity facilities rulebook this week to permit Portugese government debt to remain eligible as collateral despite the downgrades. That just tells the banks that there is no longer any rulebook that will not be ripped up as the occasion requires. And that inevitably includes Basel II and Basel III. The ECB has doubled down on moral hazard.
Watch the banks use the next crisis to ensure that no rules apply to them at all. Basel II will be suspended as regulators come under pressure to agree to continue to zero weight even junk bonds, despite high risks of sovereign defaults. You won't hear the Portugese, Irish, Italians or Spanish - or likely even the Germans - object to that when the time comes and the alternative is recognition of widespread capital deficits and bank failures.
But if the Basel II rulebook gets ripped up, that will also destroy the means by which the banks suborned regulators, central banks and governments to their service, chasing ever higher yields and ever bigger marketshare. I'm not sure what will come after that, but it probably won't have zero weight and certainly not zero risk.
Related posts:
More on the lunacy of the Basel Accords
Basel Faulty: Sovereign defaults and bank capital
Wednesday, 13 July 2011
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Protect the Bondholders?
The latest twists and turns in the Greek bailout fiasco have combined with a disturbing insight into FSA attitudes here in the UK to make me concerned that the system may now be distorted beyond peaceful reform. In fact, the danger of harmful destabilisation may be much worse because supervisor actions reinforce poor outcomes.
I am told that the primary objective of the ECB in Greece and the FSA in the UK is the same: Protect the bondholders.
Perhaps I am naive, but I did not realise that the FSA saw this as its primary mission until someone at the FSA bluntly told me so and someone in the markets confirmed it independently as only just and proper that this should be so.
If protecting bondholders from bad debt really is the primary objective of the supervisors, then the supervisors have become the problem. Capitalism does not work when capitalists are shielded from the economic risks that they freely undertake for profit when they enter into private contracts for debt finance. If bondholders know that they can get the ECB and the FSA to tilt the field in their direction, they have no incentive to balance yield against risk. They should just go for yield wherever they find it, and trust the ECB and FSA to ensure that they get their money whatever happens to the company, the depositor, the employee or the taxpayer who foots the ultimate bill for their yield.
If the objective of current official interaction with the markets is to prevent market determined outcomes, then we are in for a very ugly period of instability. The market is going to force a market outcome. The officials standing in the way can influence who profits from the market clearing, but the market is going to clear. If the officials have decided that the bondholders always win, then the rest of us will always lose. And once the rest of us - the companies, depositors, employees and taxpayers - remember that we have political power, then we will change the system.
This is what we are seeing in Greece on the streets. The Greek people have realised that the government works for the bondholders; the ECB works for the bondholders; the IMF works for the bondholders. They now understand what was not clear before: No one works for the people.
Strangely, this is also the realisation taking hold in Germany too. People are waking up to the fact that their national economic self-interest is subordinate to the claims of the bondholders. The German government's priority is to protect the bondholders. Germans should know better than most that stuffing the bondholders is sometimes the best policy - having defaulted three times in the last century to lay the ground in each case for economic resurgence.
What scares me is that I naively believed the UK was different. I believed that the FSA was a market regulator that understood market operations. I am now under no such illusion. They have told me their job is to protect the bondholders. If that is true, then the UK is no different than Greece, just slightly behind Greece on the arc of history.
It used to be that the role of the state in financial market regulation was to ensure efficient market operations, promote transparency of prices and liquidity, protect consumers from abusive practices, and to resolve failed companies according to principles of equitable distribution of assets among like classes of creditors. If the role of the state now is to shield HFT, dark pool and OTC markets from transparency, provide liquidity where the market fails, oversee the orderly fleecing of consumers, and to ensure that some creditors of failing firms always win while others always lose, then we no longer have a market economy. And as virtually all these regulatory policies have evolved in the absence of public debate and legislative scrutiny, we also no longer have democratic governance of markets.
Perhaps this is what tiny Iceland realised when it determined that it would default rather than protect the bondholders. Perhaps in a small country in a big ocean it is easier to perceive a common interest in economic and political adaptation to protect the future of your children and your neighbours, rejecting the claims of the faceless, pitiless and stateless bondholders.
I suddenly have a lot more sympathy for the Greek people than I did a fortnight ago. Come the revolution here, I may be in the streets too.
Some will say that the Greeks are hard line communists pining for generous state benefits and pensions they haven't earned. Maybe so. But there is more economic justice in such a system with such objectives determined in a democratic process than in any system with a secret primary imperative to Protect the Bondholders.
The FSA is being broken up as institutional punishment for its many failings in the run up to the financial crisis. I was skeptical of breaking the FSA along prudential supervision and consumer protection lines, but now think that may be a good thing. It may draw a sharp distinction between maintaining resilient banks and tilting the playing field toward institutional players like bondholders. A consumer protection authority will have a more direct interest in countering the Protect the Bondholders mindset where it robs the consumers or risks the taxpayers to achieve its ends.
As many long time readers know, I try to remain optimistic. There is hard work to be done, but the ground is fertile for those who will make the effort to seed and nurture the reforms required. The Vickers/Indepdendent Commission on Banking review and various efforts by HM Treasury and the Bank of England are all moving in the right direction: toward getting the state out of private financial transactions except as regards the setting and enforcing of reasonable rules. Hopefully they will succeed and the bondholder bias will be curbed with the break up of the FSA and long before we Britons hit the streets under the weight of an unsustainable debt.
I am told that the primary objective of the ECB in Greece and the FSA in the UK is the same: Protect the bondholders.
Perhaps I am naive, but I did not realise that the FSA saw this as its primary mission until someone at the FSA bluntly told me so and someone in the markets confirmed it independently as only just and proper that this should be so.
If protecting bondholders from bad debt really is the primary objective of the supervisors, then the supervisors have become the problem. Capitalism does not work when capitalists are shielded from the economic risks that they freely undertake for profit when they enter into private contracts for debt finance. If bondholders know that they can get the ECB and the FSA to tilt the field in their direction, they have no incentive to balance yield against risk. They should just go for yield wherever they find it, and trust the ECB and FSA to ensure that they get their money whatever happens to the company, the depositor, the employee or the taxpayer who foots the ultimate bill for their yield.
If the objective of current official interaction with the markets is to prevent market determined outcomes, then we are in for a very ugly period of instability. The market is going to force a market outcome. The officials standing in the way can influence who profits from the market clearing, but the market is going to clear. If the officials have decided that the bondholders always win, then the rest of us will always lose. And once the rest of us - the companies, depositors, employees and taxpayers - remember that we have political power, then we will change the system.
This is what we are seeing in Greece on the streets. The Greek people have realised that the government works for the bondholders; the ECB works for the bondholders; the IMF works for the bondholders. They now understand what was not clear before: No one works for the people.
Strangely, this is also the realisation taking hold in Germany too. People are waking up to the fact that their national economic self-interest is subordinate to the claims of the bondholders. The German government's priority is to protect the bondholders. Germans should know better than most that stuffing the bondholders is sometimes the best policy - having defaulted three times in the last century to lay the ground in each case for economic resurgence.
What scares me is that I naively believed the UK was different. I believed that the FSA was a market regulator that understood market operations. I am now under no such illusion. They have told me their job is to protect the bondholders. If that is true, then the UK is no different than Greece, just slightly behind Greece on the arc of history.
It used to be that the role of the state in financial market regulation was to ensure efficient market operations, promote transparency of prices and liquidity, protect consumers from abusive practices, and to resolve failed companies according to principles of equitable distribution of assets among like classes of creditors. If the role of the state now is to shield HFT, dark pool and OTC markets from transparency, provide liquidity where the market fails, oversee the orderly fleecing of consumers, and to ensure that some creditors of failing firms always win while others always lose, then we no longer have a market economy. And as virtually all these regulatory policies have evolved in the absence of public debate and legislative scrutiny, we also no longer have democratic governance of markets.
Perhaps this is what tiny Iceland realised when it determined that it would default rather than protect the bondholders. Perhaps in a small country in a big ocean it is easier to perceive a common interest in economic and political adaptation to protect the future of your children and your neighbours, rejecting the claims of the faceless, pitiless and stateless bondholders.
I suddenly have a lot more sympathy for the Greek people than I did a fortnight ago. Come the revolution here, I may be in the streets too.
Some will say that the Greeks are hard line communists pining for generous state benefits and pensions they haven't earned. Maybe so. But there is more economic justice in such a system with such objectives determined in a democratic process than in any system with a secret primary imperative to Protect the Bondholders.
The FSA is being broken up as institutional punishment for its many failings in the run up to the financial crisis. I was skeptical of breaking the FSA along prudential supervision and consumer protection lines, but now think that may be a good thing. It may draw a sharp distinction between maintaining resilient banks and tilting the playing field toward institutional players like bondholders. A consumer protection authority will have a more direct interest in countering the Protect the Bondholders mindset where it robs the consumers or risks the taxpayers to achieve its ends.
As many long time readers know, I try to remain optimistic. There is hard work to be done, but the ground is fertile for those who will make the effort to seed and nurture the reforms required. The Vickers/Indepdendent Commission on Banking review and various efforts by HM Treasury and the Bank of England are all moving in the right direction: toward getting the state out of private financial transactions except as regards the setting and enforcing of reasonable rules. Hopefully they will succeed and the bondholder bias will be curbed with the break up of the FSA and long before we Britons hit the streets under the weight of an unsustainable debt.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Anomie
I came across a new word today playing Scrabble:
Now that is one very useful word! It could usefully describe the slow motion collapse of the financial markets as investors and consumers realise that their interests are no longer protected by fiduciary, exchange, monetary and regulatory structures that once engendered confidence. Or maybe it captures the loss of patriotism and social cohesion in a globalised economy dominated by stateless corporations, their executive elites and their political puppets who are all determined to loot the public treasury while paying no taxes.
One word. So much potential. I will be finding all kinds of appropriate contexts to use it, I expect.
Anomie: a collapse of the social structures governing a given society.
Now that is one very useful word! It could usefully describe the slow motion collapse of the financial markets as investors and consumers realise that their interests are no longer protected by fiduciary, exchange, monetary and regulatory structures that once engendered confidence. Or maybe it captures the loss of patriotism and social cohesion in a globalised economy dominated by stateless corporations, their executive elites and their political puppets who are all determined to loot the public treasury while paying no taxes.
One word. So much potential. I will be finding all kinds of appropriate contexts to use it, I expect.
Thursday, 26 May 2011
Concentration, Manipulation and Margin Calls
Over the past 25 years the financial markets of the world have become highly concentrated in the intermediation of a handful of firms, and regulation has been harmonised in the interests of these few firms. As Adam Smith - that great proponent of free markets - cogently observed:
Sadly, these few global firms have been for some time in "a conspiracy against the public", and have subverted the organs of public governance and the infrastructure of the financial markets to their purposes. Regulators and legislatures have done what they were asked to do in rubber stamping the policies that promoted further concentration, assured the whole time that it would result in "efficient markets", when the reality has been entirely otherwise. Exchanges were demutualised, and their new owners installed electronic trading systems to a common design, with provision for co-located HFT servers right next to the exchange's boxes to better front run their client orders. Clearinghouses were demutualised, and their new owners installed common margin algorithms and collateral rules that created a liquidity bias in their favour, reinforcing their control of global liquidity. Regulators liberalised over-the-counter markets, off-exchange trading and shadow banking so that the real trade flows that drive global markets occur well out of sight or supervision.
Four global banks are intermediaries in 85 percent of OTC derivatives transactions. The same banks dominate prime brokerage. The same banks own large equity interests in the now demutualised exchanges, clearinghouses and even warehouses of the global markets. Naturally, the same banks dominated underwriting of securitised assets. The implications have scarcely been grasped of what this portends in terms of the information asymmetries and the opportunity to manipulate markets without risk.
Each of these roles gives these few banks a view into the positions of market investors. They know who owns what, using what leverage, under what terms, and trading in which markets. Knowing that, the manipulation of prices to impoverish investors and enrich the ruling banks is child's play with a bit of ill-transparent HFT through proprietary dealing desks and connected hedge funds aligned with the firms.
These banks will protest that there are Chinese walls between their trading desks and the market infrastructure they own. The problem with Chinese walls is that they have chinks in them. (Apologies to PC crowd, but it is an old Wall Street joke I'm quoting.) We have seen from what is now reported about securitisations, that these banks structured products to trade against their clients, often colluding with hedge funds to share the profits. Is it likely that when they balance the public interest in market integrity against next year's bonus they become much more altruistic?
In October 2008 the global financial markets crashed. The story in the media is that it was a panic caused by the insolvency of Lehman Brothers. This is not the truth - or at least not all of it. The crash actually followed a $2 trillion margin call by these four global banks on their prime brokerage clients and OTC counterparties - effectively a 30 per cent increase in required margin. It was the margin call that forced liquidation of global portfolios of all asset classes - and particularly the high quality, most liquid asset classes.
Eligible margin is defined by bilateral agreement for both prime brokerage and OTC derivatives. According to the ISDA Margin Survey for 2009, the eligible collateral at the time of the crash was predominantly US dollar cash, euro cash and US Treasury securities.
Bilateral agreements are not made public, and neither are the margin calls. This is why the $2 trillion dollar margin call did not make the news. Each prime brokerge client and each OTC counterparty dealt with their margin call as a bilateral obligation, despite it being systemically the most important event in the history of financial markets.
As the markets crashed, the US Congress was threatened with chaos and martial law if it did not pass the Paulson Plan to grant $700 billion to Wall Street banks without any formal process or review. The Federal Reserve in parallel innovated a series of secret, extra-legal measures to give money to the same banks in exchange for assets which would never be disclosed, publicly valued or audited. The need to raise dollar liquidity globally to meet margin calls in US dollar led to the innovation of central bank dollar swaps - to preferred central banks only, of course.
After all the global liquidity had been sucked into the hands of these few global banks, and the dollar surged to strength along with US Treasuries, the game of increasing leverage started all over. The firms sitting on all the margin cash and global liquidity bought up all the quality assets lying about the crashed global markets at deep discount, then they started lending again. They have been reporting huge profits consistently ever since as their clients and counterparties take the assets and exposures in this "recovery" on terms very profitable to those running the markets and liqudity business.
And remember, these few firms see all your positions and know all your clearing balances better than you can. And they chair all the margin committees at all your clearinghouses and exchanges too. And they even own the warehouses where you believe your gold, silver and other hedges against financial chaos are supposed to be stored.
We are now nearing the same global levels of leverage as prevailed in summer 2008. The political situations in the US and in Europe are unstable, and China is slowing. There is money to be made in instability.
It isn't the leverage that causes a crisis, but the margin call.
In the past few months we have seen a pattern of increased margin calls in exchange traded derivatives. It makes me wonder what is happening unseen in the OTC markets. The dollar is strengthening from its lows, indicating flows back to US counterparties. Perhaps another round in the game of liquidity manipulation has begun.
Leaving that aside, how would Adam Smith recommend that we protect ourselves from the well-entrenched tyranny of a global elite of manipulators? The only resilient solution is local, transparent markets with disintermediation of the controlling banks. Eliminating the information asymetries which allow them to see everyone's positions, leverage and trading activity - and trade and ration liquidity accordingly - would go a long way to preventing further concentration.
How to do this? Would the co-opted regulators allow markets that disintermediated reliable paymasters? Those are the questions we will grapple with after the next crash I suppose.
UPDATE: A timely example of the public spirit of exchange executives:
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”
Sadly, these few global firms have been for some time in "a conspiracy against the public", and have subverted the organs of public governance and the infrastructure of the financial markets to their purposes. Regulators and legislatures have done what they were asked to do in rubber stamping the policies that promoted further concentration, assured the whole time that it would result in "efficient markets", when the reality has been entirely otherwise. Exchanges were demutualised, and their new owners installed electronic trading systems to a common design, with provision for co-located HFT servers right next to the exchange's boxes to better front run their client orders. Clearinghouses were demutualised, and their new owners installed common margin algorithms and collateral rules that created a liquidity bias in their favour, reinforcing their control of global liquidity. Regulators liberalised over-the-counter markets, off-exchange trading and shadow banking so that the real trade flows that drive global markets occur well out of sight or supervision.
Four global banks are intermediaries in 85 percent of OTC derivatives transactions. The same banks dominate prime brokerage. The same banks own large equity interests in the now demutualised exchanges, clearinghouses and even warehouses of the global markets. Naturally, the same banks dominated underwriting of securitised assets. The implications have scarcely been grasped of what this portends in terms of the information asymmetries and the opportunity to manipulate markets without risk.
Each of these roles gives these few banks a view into the positions of market investors. They know who owns what, using what leverage, under what terms, and trading in which markets. Knowing that, the manipulation of prices to impoverish investors and enrich the ruling banks is child's play with a bit of ill-transparent HFT through proprietary dealing desks and connected hedge funds aligned with the firms.
These banks will protest that there are Chinese walls between their trading desks and the market infrastructure they own. The problem with Chinese walls is that they have chinks in them. (Apologies to PC crowd, but it is an old Wall Street joke I'm quoting.) We have seen from what is now reported about securitisations, that these banks structured products to trade against their clients, often colluding with hedge funds to share the profits. Is it likely that when they balance the public interest in market integrity against next year's bonus they become much more altruistic?
In October 2008 the global financial markets crashed. The story in the media is that it was a panic caused by the insolvency of Lehman Brothers. This is not the truth - or at least not all of it. The crash actually followed a $2 trillion margin call by these four global banks on their prime brokerage clients and OTC counterparties - effectively a 30 per cent increase in required margin. It was the margin call that forced liquidation of global portfolios of all asset classes - and particularly the high quality, most liquid asset classes.
Eligible margin is defined by bilateral agreement for both prime brokerage and OTC derivatives. According to the ISDA Margin Survey for 2009, the eligible collateral at the time of the crash was predominantly US dollar cash, euro cash and US Treasury securities.
Bilateral agreements are not made public, and neither are the margin calls. This is why the $2 trillion dollar margin call did not make the news. Each prime brokerge client and each OTC counterparty dealt with their margin call as a bilateral obligation, despite it being systemically the most important event in the history of financial markets.
As the markets crashed, the US Congress was threatened with chaos and martial law if it did not pass the Paulson Plan to grant $700 billion to Wall Street banks without any formal process or review. The Federal Reserve in parallel innovated a series of secret, extra-legal measures to give money to the same banks in exchange for assets which would never be disclosed, publicly valued or audited. The need to raise dollar liquidity globally to meet margin calls in US dollar led to the innovation of central bank dollar swaps - to preferred central banks only, of course.
After all the global liquidity had been sucked into the hands of these few global banks, and the dollar surged to strength along with US Treasuries, the game of increasing leverage started all over. The firms sitting on all the margin cash and global liquidity bought up all the quality assets lying about the crashed global markets at deep discount, then they started lending again. They have been reporting huge profits consistently ever since as their clients and counterparties take the assets and exposures in this "recovery" on terms very profitable to those running the markets and liqudity business.
And remember, these few firms see all your positions and know all your clearing balances better than you can. And they chair all the margin committees at all your clearinghouses and exchanges too. And they even own the warehouses where you believe your gold, silver and other hedges against financial chaos are supposed to be stored.
We are now nearing the same global levels of leverage as prevailed in summer 2008. The political situations in the US and in Europe are unstable, and China is slowing. There is money to be made in instability.
It isn't the leverage that causes a crisis, but the margin call.
In the past few months we have seen a pattern of increased margin calls in exchange traded derivatives. It makes me wonder what is happening unseen in the OTC markets. The dollar is strengthening from its lows, indicating flows back to US counterparties. Perhaps another round in the game of liquidity manipulation has begun.
Leaving that aside, how would Adam Smith recommend that we protect ourselves from the well-entrenched tyranny of a global elite of manipulators? The only resilient solution is local, transparent markets with disintermediation of the controlling banks. Eliminating the information asymetries which allow them to see everyone's positions, leverage and trading activity - and trade and ration liquidity accordingly - would go a long way to preventing further concentration.
How to do this? Would the co-opted regulators allow markets that disintermediated reliable paymasters? Those are the questions we will grapple with after the next crash I suppose.
UPDATE: A timely example of the public spirit of exchange executives:
SEC -- Antonia Chion, Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, added, “Johnson brazenly stole nonpublic information from NASDAQ and its listed companies in breach of his duties of confidentiality to his employer and clients. Johnson assured at least one corporate official that she could share material nonpublic information with him because he was obligated as a NASDAQ employee to hold such information in confidence, and then he illegally traded on it.”
Monday, 21 March 2011
Quote of the Day: Greenspan's reputation dead as a parrot
“Greenspan is an ex-Maestro; his reputation is pushing up the daisies, it’s gone to meet its maker, it’s joined the choir invisible.
He’s no longer the Man Who Knows; he’s the man who presided over an economy careening to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — and who saw no evil, heard no evil, refused to do anything about subprime, insisted that derivatives made the financial system more stable, denied not only that there was a national housing bubble but that such a bubble was even possible.”
- Paul Krugman
Hat tip: Barry Ritholtz
"You can't build a car with 97% of the parts"
The title statement summarises the challenge for the global manufacturing sector with Japan's industry and logistics disrupted for an unknown span of time.
Damage to ports, railroads, and factories in northern Japan has yet to be fully assessed - not least because engineers, corporate management and insurance claims adjusters have been kept at bay by radiation leaks from the Fukushima crisis-hit nuclear complex. Fuel shortages, power blackouts and disrupted land and mobile communications further stymie any effort to document damage or predict reopening schedules for stalled manufacturing plants. Rolling blackouts occasioned by damage to power generation and electricity grids mean even undamaged industries across the nation are producing less than expected. The scale of human tragedy - with half a million displaced refugees and 21,000 lives lost - mean many workers will be unable to report to work, or too concerned with rebuilding their homes and comforting their families to work more than regular shifts.
We have a highly interdependent, global manufacturing sector for modern goods, particularly high end electronics and automobiles. Japan may only account for 3 percent of the modern product, but it is usually the high value components that will be very difficult to source elsewhere. And as the title suggests, a failure to supply the 3 percent might result in halting production for the rest of the supply chain.
As this week rolls on, and the scale of disruption becomes better understood, I expect a lot of companies worldwide will start evaluating the implications for their operations of a disrupted supply chain. Without more precise information from Japanese suppliers on the expected scale of the disruption, few businesses elsewhere have been able to issue statements on the implications. As the information begins to flow, we can expect more than a few negative shocks about Q2 and Q3 earnings as inventories of parts run down globally.
So far as the media has noticed the issue, concern has been limited to supplies of the iPad 2. We may find that the implications are more serious for our economies than delayed gratification of Apple fans.
Intererestingly, the Japanese companies most directly affected are the only ones likely to be able to claim insurance for business interruption. Companies elsewhere reliant on Japanese-sourced components might have comparable losses, or even greater losses, but have no recourse except their reserves and such corporate finance as might be available in already tight markets.
Adding to the uncertainty of losses and disruption is the likelihood that insurers may contest coverage for some damage or disruption. After Katrina, many hurricane insurers asserted that their policies did not cover flood damage to properties. Similar disputes may arise in Japan where a trifecta of catastrophe has complicated claims assessment. The longer companies are kept from rebuilding and restarting production, the longer and deeper will be the losses for the industries dependent on them for their own operations, production lines and profits.
Power shortages threaten global supply chain
Ford Motor Co., Samsung and The Boeing Co. are waiting for suppliers in quake-stricken Japan to increase one key export: information.
A top supplier of high-end components for the global technology and auto industries, Japan may need weeks to recover output lost as a result of the country's strongest earthquake on record, according to a forecast by Barclays Capital. . . .
“Our production won't be affected this week, but then we'll see,” Volvo spokesman Per-Ake Froberg said.
Supply of batteries, Blu-ray compact discs and magnetic heads used in hard drives also may be affected by the quake and power shortages, according to a report by Taipei research company TrendForce Corp.
“The reality is, the companies don't know the full extent of what's happened,” said economist Kim Hill at the Center for Automotive Research. “You can't build a car with 97% of the parts.”
Damage to ports, railroads, and factories in northern Japan has yet to be fully assessed - not least because engineers, corporate management and insurance claims adjusters have been kept at bay by radiation leaks from the Fukushima crisis-hit nuclear complex. Fuel shortages, power blackouts and disrupted land and mobile communications further stymie any effort to document damage or predict reopening schedules for stalled manufacturing plants. Rolling blackouts occasioned by damage to power generation and electricity grids mean even undamaged industries across the nation are producing less than expected. The scale of human tragedy - with half a million displaced refugees and 21,000 lives lost - mean many workers will be unable to report to work, or too concerned with rebuilding their homes and comforting their families to work more than regular shifts.
We have a highly interdependent, global manufacturing sector for modern goods, particularly high end electronics and automobiles. Japan may only account for 3 percent of the modern product, but it is usually the high value components that will be very difficult to source elsewhere. And as the title suggests, a failure to supply the 3 percent might result in halting production for the rest of the supply chain.
As this week rolls on, and the scale of disruption becomes better understood, I expect a lot of companies worldwide will start evaluating the implications for their operations of a disrupted supply chain. Without more precise information from Japanese suppliers on the expected scale of the disruption, few businesses elsewhere have been able to issue statements on the implications. As the information begins to flow, we can expect more than a few negative shocks about Q2 and Q3 earnings as inventories of parts run down globally.
So far as the media has noticed the issue, concern has been limited to supplies of the iPad 2. We may find that the implications are more serious for our economies than delayed gratification of Apple fans.
Intererestingly, the Japanese companies most directly affected are the only ones likely to be able to claim insurance for business interruption. Companies elsewhere reliant on Japanese-sourced components might have comparable losses, or even greater losses, but have no recourse except their reserves and such corporate finance as might be available in already tight markets.
Magnitude of insurance claims still almost impossible to measure
While analysts and risk modellers are daily raising their estimates of the economic damage, with the latest Barclays Capital estimate coming in at $US185 billion, many insurance experts believe it will be well over $US200 billion.
In terms of insured losses, risk modeller AIR Worldwide estimates it at $US15 billion to $US35 billion.
But some big-name brokers are quietly suggesting it could be $US70 billion, making it one of the biggest losses to the insurance and reinsurance industry.
Claims adjusters have poured into Japan in the past few days trying to grapple with the size of the damages and their clients' exposure, but cannot get near the radiation-affected area. Japanese insurance companies are also being hampered by power cuts in Tokyo that make it virtually impossible for them to appraise the damage.
A growing concern is how the tsunami is covered by general insurance policies. For example, AIR's estimates for insured losses do not factor in tsunami-related damage, business interruption costs or potential losses from nuclear damage.
Adding to the uncertainty of losses and disruption is the likelihood that insurers may contest coverage for some damage or disruption. After Katrina, many hurricane insurers asserted that their policies did not cover flood damage to properties. Similar disputes may arise in Japan where a trifecta of catastrophe has complicated claims assessment. The longer companies are kept from rebuilding and restarting production, the longer and deeper will be the losses for the industries dependent on them for their own operations, production lines and profits.
Friday, 18 March 2011
Inflation and Deflation revisited
In December 2008 I came off the fence and plumped for deflation as inevitable. Mostly I reasoned that debasement of accounting practice, mismanagement of financial intermediaries, captured regulators that collaborated in perpetuating failure, and extremely poor market pricing of risks and fundamentals meant that there was litte incentive to save and no place safe to invest. I predicted that when the last great bubble in sovereign debt popped, deflation would work its cleansing power to restore fundamentals.
The Fed permitting dividend hikes at bailed out banks only deepens my cynicism about the poor quality of regulation and the inadequacy of management controls.
Obviously, I was premature about deflation as events in 2009 and 2010 proved, but I am not convinced I was wrong in the longer term. Events this week in Japan, and political upheavals this year elsewhere, have me thinking that we are at a turning point in many ways. When the numbness that follows such a mammoth series of tragedies wears off, the public in Japan is going to be very angry. They have suffered three great catastrophes in one week: the 8.9 earthquake, the tsunami that swiftly followed, and the failure of safety controls at six nuclear reactors. We still don't know the scale of the final disaster, or what it will mean for the country or the world.
The Japanese state is to be congratulated that strict building codes preserved much of the physical infrastructure from the earthquake, and regular tsunami drills doubtless saved tens of thousands of lives during the tsunami. The most serious failure was in management, risk assessment and regulation of the nuclear industry. The anger will be that an industry critical to the economy, with powerful lobbyists close to government, was able to capture its regulators and erode safety standards until a crisis revealed the tragic short-termism. The anger will increase when the Japanese come to appreciate that the serial depredations of the banking industry have left them over-exposed with few fiscal policy options to meet the financial challenge of rebuilding and resettlement of refugees.
If the government and institutions of Japan are forced to liquidate and repatriate foreign assets, then fears of rising Yen and destabilisation of G7 economies are well founded. I believe it was the collective self-interest in preserving stability that motivated today's central bank interventions. The Yen appreciated 20 percent in the three months following the Kobi earthquake, and the scale of the current disaster - particularly with the risk of nuclear contamination of some part of the country - is likely to dwarf the Kobi effect.
As radiation reaches California from Fukushima today, we might all consider that regulatory capture places us all at some degree of risk. The crisis in California sub-prime real estate was borne by the currents of international finance to the pension funds of Norway and the savings banks of Germany. Both the nuclear energy industry and the banking industry had parallel patterns of political influence leading to regulatory capture and debasement of best practice, and ultimately ruination for a suffering public. It will be interesting to see how much accountability is demanded of management and regulators in the nuclear industry in Japan, and compare this with the lack of accountabiity for serial financial failures and bailouts.
Japan has 20 years more experience of financial sector accounting abuse and bailouts than the rest of us. And the result has been almost continuous deflation - even in the face of mounting deficits, ZIRP and quantitative easing.
Another factor that leads me to fear deflation over inflation is the risk of popping of the great China bubble. My view is that the Chinese economy slowed markedly in Q4 2010 as monetary tightening and administrative regulation of bank lending began to bite, and that the slowing has accelerated in 2011. This view has been confirmed by Gavyn Davies on his FT blog. With another rate rise today by the PBOC, and the supply chain shock of Japan's industrial disruption and power shortages, we could be in for a sharp, deflationary global contraction in the next few months.
UPDATE 20/03/11: Days before quake, plant operator admitted oversight
It is now clear to me that policy makers in the West are determined to apply every available resource to underpinning failure, misallocation and executive excess. As this discourages the honest saver from parting with cash, policy makers are ensuring that deflation will wreak its havoc on the financial and real economies of the world. Only when that deflation has played out and rational policies that reward market-based management and returns are restored will it be worthwhile to invest again.
The Fed permitting dividend hikes at bailed out banks only deepens my cynicism about the poor quality of regulation and the inadequacy of management controls.
Obviously, I was premature about deflation as events in 2009 and 2010 proved, but I am not convinced I was wrong in the longer term. Events this week in Japan, and political upheavals this year elsewhere, have me thinking that we are at a turning point in many ways. When the numbness that follows such a mammoth series of tragedies wears off, the public in Japan is going to be very angry. They have suffered three great catastrophes in one week: the 8.9 earthquake, the tsunami that swiftly followed, and the failure of safety controls at six nuclear reactors. We still don't know the scale of the final disaster, or what it will mean for the country or the world.
The Japanese state is to be congratulated that strict building codes preserved much of the physical infrastructure from the earthquake, and regular tsunami drills doubtless saved tens of thousands of lives during the tsunami. The most serious failure was in management, risk assessment and regulation of the nuclear industry. The anger will be that an industry critical to the economy, with powerful lobbyists close to government, was able to capture its regulators and erode safety standards until a crisis revealed the tragic short-termism. The anger will increase when the Japanese come to appreciate that the serial depredations of the banking industry have left them over-exposed with few fiscal policy options to meet the financial challenge of rebuilding and resettlement of refugees.
If the government and institutions of Japan are forced to liquidate and repatriate foreign assets, then fears of rising Yen and destabilisation of G7 economies are well founded. I believe it was the collective self-interest in preserving stability that motivated today's central bank interventions. The Yen appreciated 20 percent in the three months following the Kobi earthquake, and the scale of the current disaster - particularly with the risk of nuclear contamination of some part of the country - is likely to dwarf the Kobi effect.
As radiation reaches California from Fukushima today, we might all consider that regulatory capture places us all at some degree of risk. The crisis in California sub-prime real estate was borne by the currents of international finance to the pension funds of Norway and the savings banks of Germany. Both the nuclear energy industry and the banking industry had parallel patterns of political influence leading to regulatory capture and debasement of best practice, and ultimately ruination for a suffering public. It will be interesting to see how much accountability is demanded of management and regulators in the nuclear industry in Japan, and compare this with the lack of accountabiity for serial financial failures and bailouts.
Japan has 20 years more experience of financial sector accounting abuse and bailouts than the rest of us. And the result has been almost continuous deflation - even in the face of mounting deficits, ZIRP and quantitative easing.
Another factor that leads me to fear deflation over inflation is the risk of popping of the great China bubble. My view is that the Chinese economy slowed markedly in Q4 2010 as monetary tightening and administrative regulation of bank lending began to bite, and that the slowing has accelerated in 2011. This view has been confirmed by Gavyn Davies on his FT blog. With another rate rise today by the PBOC, and the supply chain shock of Japan's industrial disruption and power shortages, we could be in for a sharp, deflationary global contraction in the next few months.
UPDATE 20/03/11: Days before quake, plant operator admitted oversight
Days before Japan plunged into an atomic crisis after a giant earthquake and tsunami knocked out power at the ageing Fukushima nuclear plant, its operator had admitted faking repair records.
The revelation raises fresh questions about both Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO)'s scandal-tainted past and the government's perceived soft regulation of a key industry.
The operator of the Fukushima No. 1 plant submitted a report to the country's nuclear watchdog ten days before the quake hit on March 11, admitting it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment in its six reactors there.
A power board distributing electricity to a reactor's temperature control valves was not examined for 11 years, and inspectors faked records, pretending to make thorough inspections when in fact they were only cursory, TEPCO said.
It also said that inspections, which are voluntary, did not cover other devices related to cooling systems including water pump motors and diesel generators.
The report was submitted after the regulator ordered operators to examine whether inspections were suitably thorough.
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