Stephen Roach doesn’t mince words. He calls monetary policy during the bubble years “reckless and irresponsible” and he thinks politics is thwarting any meaningful regulatory reform, a view I also hold. I think the point of Roach’s attack is that a lot of finger-pointing has been directed at Wall Street and even Main Street. But, policy makers share much of the blame. This is a point I tried to make in a post “Forget about Goldman” from this past summer.
Moreover, as Roach indicates, the concept that a central planner (which a central bank most certainly is) can allow bubbles to form and then clean up after the mess- is on it’s face absurd. But, clearly the Federal Reserve and other central banks are doing their level best to re-create the conditions which led to a near-financial collapse.
The money quote comes just about 4:45 through the eleven minute clip below:
Central bankers say trust us. We know what we’re doing. I don’t trust them one bit. They got us into this mess in the first place.
As for Asia, Roach sees a bright future. However, he warns that it has risen on the back of an unsustainable export-led macro-policy by selling things to people in the West who can’t afford them. With continued private-sector deleveraging in the west likely, this dynamic has ended.
(video embedded below)
As an aside, Roach also correctly adds that the recent protectionist tariff administered by President Obama was not the result of tire manufacturers’ lobbying. Four of five of the Chinese importers are subsidiaries of U.S. firms. Obama did this to gain credibility and support from unions, a key Democratic constituency in the health care debate and in the run-up to the mid-term elections.
I should also point out that much of the U.S. trade deficit comes from such arrangements, where a U.S. company imports goods from its own foreign subsidiary.
Part of the charm of Wall Street, and what scares most reasonable people away, is that it is as close to a meritocracy as exists on this earth. It’s dog eat dog. It’s sink or swim. You do a trade and it makes money, then you’re a hero (for a moment anyway) and deserve a bonus. You bring in a deal, you get paid. You lasso more clients’ assets under your firm’s roof, you’re a hitter. I once discovered some good news on the stocks I followed before the rest of the Street, and mentioned it to the sales force at a morning meeting and moved markets in New York, Tokyo and London. I had the head of global equities pat my head on the elevator ride up the next morning. Pat my head! I was told he never does that.
The flip side, of course, is what makes Wall Street so dangerous. You lose money for the firm and you’re a heel. Do it again and you don’t get paid that year. Do it a third time and you’re out of a job. Just like that. Gone. I’ve seen it happen to friends and acquaintances at just about every firm up and down Wall Street. There is no tenure on Wall Street, no job security, no long-term guarantees. Ten- and 20-year careers end in a flash. Happens all the time, and everybody who works in the business knows this.
That’s one reason why everyone is paid so well. Think of it as combat pay. But the other reason compensation is many, many multiples of the average wage in this country is that trading stocks, doing IPOs, merging companies, managing money is a very lucrative business. Not everyone can do it. It looks easy, football-field-sized trading rooms jammed with adrenalin-rush maniacs sitting in front of huge LCD screens. It might as well be a call center in Mumbai. But it’s hard. Really nasty hard. Wall Street hires in that 99 percentile zone. And then they make your life miserable hoping you’ll quit before they break you. Or hoping they break you before you lose money for the firm. It’s not WalMart or General Motors or even Pfizer or Intel. It’s trial by fire.
You would think that would make the entire workforce afraid to do anything for fear of being tossed…
As he attempted to do with health care reform last week, the President is trying to breathe new life into financial reform. He’s using the anniversary of the death of Lehman Brothers and the near-death experience of the rest of the Street, culminating with a $600 billion taxpayer financed bailout, to summon the political will for change. Yet the prospects seem dubious. As with health care reform, he has stood on the sidelines for months and allowed vested interests to frame the debate. Nor has he come up with a sufficiently bold or coherent set of reforms likely to change the way the Street does business, even if enacted.
Let’s be clear: The Street today is up to the same tricks it was playing before its near-death experience. Derivatives, derivatives of derivatives, fancy-dance trading schemes, high-risk bets. “Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same,” says Goldman Sach’s chief financial officer.
The only difference now is that the Street’s biggest banks know for sure they’ll be bailed out by the federal government if their bets turn sour — which means even bigger bets and bigger bucks.
Meanwhile, the banks’ gigantic pile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more jobless Americans can’t pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forget any new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can’t get loans. Even credit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.
The mega-bailout of Wall Street accomplished little. The only big winners have been top bank executives and traders, whose pay packages are once again in the stratosphere. Banks have been so eager to lure and keep top deal makers and traders they’ve even revived the practice of offering ironclad, multimillion-dollar payments – guaranteed no matter how the employee performs. Goldman Sachs is on course to hand out bonuses that could rival its record pre-meltdown paydays. In the second quarter this year it posted its fattest quarterly profit in its 140-year history, and earmarked $11.4 billion to compensate its happy campers. Which translates into about $770,000 per Goldman employee on average, just about what they earned at height of boom. Of course, top executives and traders will pocket much more.
Every other big bank feels it has to match Goldman’s pay packages if…
Whatever President Obama says today about financial reform, Charlie Gasparino says the U.S. government is sowing the seeds of another financial crisis — and it’s nothing new.
NY Post: But the biggest villain, in my view, is that ultimate enabler of Wall Street’s greed and stupidity — the federal government, in the form of the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department.
Throughout the last 30 years of market ups and downs, the feds have bailed out the financial system by cutting interest rates to excessively low levels or, when Long-Term Capital was about to explode, by orchestrating a bailout of a hedge fund that had spread its virus throughout the banking system.
Each time, the financial bureaucrats told us the bailout was necessary to prevent total financial calamity — and that Wall Street had finally learned its lesson and wouldn’t engage in the risky practices again.
Well, not quite. Here’s Gasparino’s solution:
Goldman, Morgan and the rest of the “banks” should either become hedge funds — with no backing from the federal government and taxpayer funds when they engage in risk — or start handing out debit cards and toasters and become real commercial banks by concentrating on signing people up for checking accounts, instead of trading esoteric bonds If we don’t impose such hard rules, expect a repeat of what happened last year. If history is any guide, that implosion will be bigger and more dangerous than ever before.
James Kunstler discusses his Sunday morning moment-of-nausea. I’ve been feeling this way for a while, and James is always up to the task of identifying causes.
One national moment-of-nausea this Labor Day weekend struck Sunday morning, when CNN’s John King led off his 10 a.m. State of the Union show with a valentine to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, on her becoming anchor of that network’s evening news. (This was the most important news of the week???) The old legacy networks have taken on the role of dishing out reassurance to an anxious and insecure public as job number one, and the subtext of the Sawyer lede was that a Mommy figure would soon be in place to soothe the multitudes even as the nation free-falls into bankruptcy and disorder. This is supposed to be a counterpoint to the chorus of smug, braying rabble-rousers who inflame the crowds on Fox News and MSNBC, and CNBC — the Glen Becks and Keith Olbermans and Dennis Kneales — who work the anger regions of the brain.
The inherent conflicts arise from a nation that simply cannot bring itself to try getting its house in order. Instead of adult leadership, we prefer good parent / bad parent therapy — a psychodrama of alternating messages of reassurance and punishment that provides distraction from problems and conundrums too horrible to face. One unfortunate result is the evaporating legitimacy of anyone or anything in authority, and that is extremely dangerous at a time like this because it creates the perfect opportunity for the rise of a corn-pone Hitler who will beat a path straight into a national ordeal-by-fire, and make everybody feel better by telling them clearly what to do.
President Obama rolls out his much-awaited message on health care reform to a joint session of congress this week after a summer of chaotic and often mendacious debate. The system now running is so unjust and ruinous that a citizenry unmedicated by psychotropic drugs would have burned down the insurers by now (and perhaps torched their doctors’ BMWs). As a tactical matter, the best Mr. Obama can do about the "public option" is to endorse it while kicking the can down the road, since the stark insolvency of the US treasury obviates any real ability to make it happen.
But I believe the public would be greatly appeased (and helped!) by…
Those lovable Wall Street ghouls have cooked up a new asset class to securitize — life insurance policies. I am not kidding you, they’re going into the business of buying life insurance policies from sick people, pooling them and then selling the securities to investors.
The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.
The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.
Either way, Wall Street would profit by pocketing sizable fees for creating the bonds, reselling them and subsequently trading them. But some who have studied life settlements warn that insurers might have to raise premiums in the short term if they end up having to pay out more death claims than they had anticipated.
If you find that last paragraph confusing, the reason it could upset the insurance companies’ apple cart is that many policyholders let their policies lapse as they get older. For a variety of good reasons they quit paying the premiums. If the policies are bundled into a security, the new owners of the policy will continue to pay the premiums religiously and thus alter the actuarial assumptions of the insurance companies.
This business has been around for some time but it’s always been on the fringes. There are some good arguments in favor of it but at the same time, it’s always seemed just a bit tawdry. Then again, a bunch of guys who flooded the world with fraudulent mortgages probably aren’t too bothered about that.
I guess the contra argument would be that while smaller outfits have been doing this for some time with no apparent ill effects, that’s not a valid argument that there won’t be unforeseen consequences if it’s done on a massive scale. I’m not in the no financial innovation camp but this time I wonder if the benefit is really worth a roll of…
Still at work and waiting for your long weekend to begin?
We are too.
So we decided to help you do what we’re doing: reading funny Dilbert cartoons. We’ve selected almost a score of Dilbert strips that are appropriate to the theme of the meltdown on Wall Street. It seems an appropriate way to honor the anniversary of the September Panic of 2008.
After one too many face-rippings by the merry Pranksters of Wall Street, China’s state-owned companies have run to their government to complain about the fraudulent nature of their derivatives contracts.
The hearty capitalists of Wall Street wouldn’t run to their government and whine and complain if the market went against them.
Except of course if they needed several trillion dollars because they lost all their money gambling. Then they would just threaten to hold their breath and wreck the economy until the Great Reformer gave them all the change the country could spare, and then some.
If the US will not put its house in order, the rest of the world will increasingly start to rein in the the US financial institutions.
For banks that are hoping to sell more derivatives hedges in China, the world’s fastest-expanding major economy and top commodities consumer, the danger goes beyond the immediate risk to existing contracts to the longer-term precedent that suggests Chinese companies can simply renege on deals when they like.
The report follows an order from SASAC in July that required all central government-controlled state companies engaged in trading derivatives to make quarterly reports…
"If we were among the banks receiving that letter, we would be very angry. But now the key is to find out more details on the letter: In whose name the letter was issued, the government or the corporate’s? And under what was the reason for defaulting?" said a Singapore-based marketing executive with a foreign bank.
The source, whose bank did not receive a letter, said that Air China, China Eastern and shipping giant COSCO — among the Chinese companies that have reported huge derivatives losses since last year — had issued almost identical notices to banks.
"If it’s in the name of the government, the impact will be very negative," said the source, who declined to be named.
Beijing-based derivatives lawyers said the so-called "legal letter" has no legal standing — SASAC as a shareholder has no business relationship with international banks.
"It’s like the father suddenly told the creditors of his debt-ridden son that his son won’t pay any of his debt," said a lawyer from the derivatives risks committee of the Beijing Lawyers Association. (or perhaps its more like a son who has been cheated by unscrupulous businessmen going to his father…
Christopher Whalen’s Institutional Risk Analytics came up with his second quarter 2009 stress test results today, and the results aren’t pretty.
Whalen says that the US banking industry is still sinking steadily and neither the Obama Administration nor the Federal Reserve seem to have any more bullets to fire at the “deflation monster.” While there was some improvement in the previous quarter, we are now back to stress patterns of 2008.
With the Fed having spent all the liquidity to prop up the Street’s toxic asset waste pile, Main Street employers , private investors and smaller banks must now go begging for capital and liquidity in a market where the government is the only player left.
The notion that the Fed can even contemplate reversing the massive bailout for the OTC markets, this to restore normalcy to the monetary models that supposedly inform the central bank’s deliberations, is ridiculous in view of the capital shortfall in the banking sector and the private sector economy more generally.
Not surprisingly, Whalen rated Citi, “the queen of the zombie dance party ,” F for the quarter, down from C in the first quarter due to a deterioration in score for loan defaults.
Credit losses at C could require additional injections of capital a la Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac even with the flow if subsidies that has increased C revenue greatly from 2008 run rates.
He also raises the question as to why serious people on the buy side are still seeing value in the doomed bank which is “halfway in the grave via the loss sharing agreement with the FDIC."
Whether or not there is value inside C is not the issue; it is just not kosher, to us, for a manager to put investment grade investors into a situation that is basically a restructuring, with the government as the largest, senior creditor - and one in which the ultimate liabilities are as yet to be quantified.
When you here this kind of quote in context with the mortgage business it should be clear that in the not so distant future another not so "insignificant" bailout is already in the cards..... Looks like the Phony Mae & Fraudie Mac pain wasn´t enough.......
We know you are busy, we also know you are hell bent on intercepting IOI manipulation as per Mr. Jon Kroeper's recent media appearances. Which is why we kindly request that you get back to us at your earliest convenience with information on how many of the IOIs disclosed below are, in fact, "natural." We will make this a recurring topic on Zero Hedge until such time as you respond to our information request. You can contact us at outsourcefinra@zerohedge.com
After dropping from the 1063.75-1064.25 PowerZone just before stocks opened on Monday, the ES was sold on the open and fell to the 1056.25-1055.50 PowerZone. As stated last night: "if a pullback can hold the initial support, the up-trends will remain intact and the market should head back up." That was reversed and after getting over the 1063.50-1064.00 area the move continued to a 1068.50 high. After a small dip, a 123 top set up from 1068.00 and the ES dropped to the new support at 1064.00-1063.50 zone. A bounce failed at 1067.00 and that was it for the upside. The market rolled over and all of the bounces failed as the ES went trend-down to 1053.00 at the 4pm close for stocks. The early rally off of a good support area was sold on Monday, and for the second half of the day it was all down hill. After the Friday run-up, that was not impressive for a follow-up. The market is back into oversold status, but for now it looks lik...
Tuesday was good and bad for the Oxen Report. Our short sale of the day worked very well for us. I chose Ultrashort Proshares Oil and Gas for our short sale of the day due to my expectation...
BPOP - The ‘popular’ bank popped up on our screens this afternoon after a large-volume risk reversal was established on the stock. The massive trade was likely the work of an investor with knowledge of commercial banks as approximately 60,000 contracts were exchanged on BPOP amid a more than 12% rally in shares of the underlying to $2.60. It appears the trader purchased 30,000 now in-the-money October 2.5 strike calls for an average premium of 33 cents apiece. He funded the purchase of the calls by selling 30,000 puts at the January 2.5 strike for 43 cents each. The investor received a net credit on the transaction of 10 pennies per contract. The motivation is perhaps that this individual is swimming with the rising tide of financial names today and expects a far larger...
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The flip side, of course, is what makes Wall Street so dangerous. You lose money for the firm and you’re a heel. Do it again and you don’t get paid that year. Do it a third time and you’re out of a job. Just like that. Gone. I’ve seen it happen to friends and acquaintances at just about every firm up and down Wall Street. There is no tenure on Wall Street, no job security, no long-term guarantees. Ten- and 20-year careers end in a flash. Happens all the time, and everybody who works in the business knows this.
Meanwhile, the banks’ gigantic pile of non-performing loans is also growing bigger, as more and more jobless Americans can’t pay their mortgages, credit card bills, and car loans. So forget any new lending to Main Street. Small businesses still can’t get loans. Even credit-worthy borrowers are having a hard time getting new mortgages.
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If you find that last paragraph confusing, the reason it could upset the insurance companies’ apple cart is that many policyholders let their policies lapse as they get older. For a variety of good reasons they quit paying the premiums. If the policies are bundled into a security, the new owners of the policy will continue to pay the premiums religiously and thus alter the actuarial assumptions of the insurance companies.
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW. She manages the Favorites backup site
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