Analysis of the global economy
Energy Burrito writes that gasoline prices have fallen nearly 30 cents from their Summer highs:
Why is this good? Because of the one-penny-to-one-billion spending rule. The rule of thumb is that a one-penny change in the price of gasoline leads to a $1 billion increase in household consumption on an annualized basis….gasoline accounts for $2,500 of household spending each year.
Read more at Bad Has Never Looked So Good | Oilprice.com.
From Chris Joye at AFR:
UBS’s more likely scenario of a 3 per cent TBTF capital buffer combined with an increase in the average mortgage risk weight to 25 per cent gives a total capital shortfall of $41.1 billion for the majors.
Risk-weightings, especially for residential mortgages are coming under increased scrutiny. The big four banks have a major advantage in this area, employing risk-weightings as low as 15% to 20% based on their historical record of low defaults. But that history includes a credit boom lasting more than 2 decades which fueled an unprecedented rise in housing prices and is unlikely to be repeated in the future.
APRA alluded to this problem in its second FSI submission:
..APRA also highlighted the problem with the major banks’ predicting their own probabilities of defaults on home loans in the absence of a recession in 23 years and the much lower levels of housing leverage in 1991.“The Basel Committee is currently reviewing the validity and reliability of risk weights generated under the IRB approach [used by the majors] in response to studies showing that the variability … is much greater than could be explained by differences in underlying risks,” APRA said.
Only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming naked. ~ Warren Buffett
Read more at Big banks may need $41b more capital, UBS says.
Richard Koo in a 2012 paper identifies 3 challenges facing the eurozone:
The current crisis in the eurozone consists essentially of two macroeconomic problems and one capital flow problem. The first macro problem is profligate government spending, as exemplified by Greece. In such cases austerity is required: the government must cut spending and raise taxes to regain its financial health and credibility.The second macro problem is massive private sector deleveraging in spite of record low interest rates observed in countries such as Spain, Ireland and Portugal following the bursting of their real estate bubbles.
The problem with capital flows is specific to sharing a common currency in the eurozone:
When presented with a deleveraging private sector, fund managers in non-eurozone countries can place their money only in their own government’s bonds if constraints prevent them from taking on more currency risk or principle risk. Consequently, a large portion of excess private savings must be invested in JGBs in Japan, Gilts in the UK, and Treasuries in the US. In contrast, eurozone fund managers who are not allowed to take on more principle risk or currency risk are not required to buy their own country’s bonds: they can also buy bonds issued by other eurozone governments because they all share the same currency. Thus, fund managers at French and German banks were busily moving funds into Spanish and Greek bonds a number of years ago in search of higher yields, and Spanish and Portuguese fund managers are now buying German and Dutch government bonds for added safety, all without incurring foreign exchange risk. The former capital flow aggravated real estate bubbles in many peripheral countries prior to 2008, while the latter flow triggered a sovereign debt crisis in the same countries after 2008.
His solution:
There is a simple and straightforward solution to the two macro problems and one capital flow problem described above: eurozone governments should limit the sale of their government bonds to their own citizens. In other words, only German citizens should be allowed to purchase Bunds, and only Spanish citizens should be able to buy Spanish government bonds. If this rule had been in place from the outset of the euro, none of the problems affecting the single currency today would have happened.
Read more at Richard Koo, Revitalizing the Eurozone without Fiscal Union, April 2012.
Martin Wolf on how much capital banks should be required to hold:
The new regulatory regime is an astonishingly complex response to the failures of this model. But “keep it simple, stupid” is as good a rule in regulation as it is in life. The sensible solution seems clear: force banks to fund themselves with equity to a far greater extent than they do today.
So how much capital would do? A great deal more than the 3 per cent ratio being discussed in Basel is the answer. As Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig argue in their important book, The Bankers’ New Clothes, significantly higher capital – with true leverage certainly no greater than 10 to one and, ideally, lower still – would bring important advantages: it would limit the implicit subsidy to banks, particularly “too big to fail” ones; it would reduce the need for such intrusive and complex regulation; and it would lower the likelihood of panics.
An important feature of higher capital requirements is that these should not be based on risk-weighting. In the event, the risk weights used before the crisis proved extraordinarily fallible, indeed grossly misleading…..
There is no magic in the number of 10 times leverage (or 10% Tier 1 Capital to Total Assets) but the larger the buffer, the greater the protection against fluctuations in asset values. The Basel III minimum leverage ratio of 3% is too low to offer adequate protection, even with the highest quality assets, and while 10% is not readily attainable in the short-term, it makes a suitable long-term target.
Read more at Financial reform: Call to arms – FT.com.
From The Economist review of Martin Wolf’s new book “The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned–and Have Still to Learn–from the Financial Crisis”:
To make finance safer, Mr Wolf suggests replacing a fractional reserve banking system, which takes in deposits and lends most of them out in longer-term loans, with a system of “narrow banking”, where deposits must be backed by government bonds. To sustain demand without relying on dangerous asset bubbles, he proposes permanent “helicopter money”, where governments run deficits that are financed by the central bank. For a man of the mainstream, this is brave stuff.
Fractional reserve banking is inherently unstable and responsible for many of the problems in our economic system, but abandoning it completely in favor of “narrow banking”, where deposits are fully-backed by government bonds, seems unnecessary. Increasing Tier 1 capital requirements to 10 percent of total exposure, from the current 3 to 5 percent, should provide a sufficient buffer to withstand most financial shocks. Rapid expansion of credit during an asset bubble would be difficult, with high capital requirements forcing banks to be more selective in their lending. Even more so if supplemented by central bank monetary policy to counteract rapid deposit growth.
Read more at A Prominent Financial Columnist Is Calling For Radical Reforms To The Global Economy | Business Insider.
From Joseph Stiglitz:
What we have been observing – wage stagnation and rising inequality, even as wealth increases – does not reflect the workings of a normal market economy, but of what I call “ersatz capitalism.” The problem may not be with how markets should or do work, but with our political system, which has failed to ensure that markets are competitive, and has designed rules that sustain distorted markets in which corporations and the rich can and unfortunately do exploit everyone else.
Read more at Democracy in the Twenty-First Century by Joseph E. Stiglitz – Project Syndicate.
Chris Joye explains why risk-weighted capital ratios used by Australia’s major banks are misleading and why true leverage is more than 20 times tier 1 capital.
It was only after 2008 when regulators allowed the majors to slash risk-weightings on home loans from 50 per cent to 15 per cent today that we have seen their reported and purely academic tier one capital measured against these newly “risk-weighted” loan assets which shrunk in value spike from 6.7 per cent in December 2007 to 10.5 per cent in June 2014.
By arbitrarily boosting the risk-free share of major bank home loans from 50 per cent to 85 per cent via the regulatory artifice that is a risk-weighting, one gets the fictional jump in their tier one capital that everyone believes is real.
Read more at Banks hold more risk than before GFC.
From Christopher Joye:
One of Australia’s top economic experts, Jeremy Lawson, says the housing market is 20 per cent to 30 per cent overvalued and has left Australia vulnerable to a big international economic shock.
Mr Lawson is the global chief economist of Standard Life, a massive British fund manager with $460 billion in assets under management. He was previously a senior economist at the Reserve Bank of Australia and the OECD, and in 2007 advised then opposition leader Kevin Rudd…
Read more at Houses overvalued by up to 30 per cent, says ex-RBA official.
Tom Devine, Scotland’s most celebrated historian of recent years, reveals why he now intends to vote in favor of independence on September 18:
I come from a Labour background that includes my grandfather, mother and father and I was very much anti-independence at the start of the campaign. For me, the catalyst for change has been how threadbare the union has become since the early 1980s and linked to that is the transformation of Scotland. I wouldn’t have voted for this in the Scotland of the 1970s or 80s. It’s the Scotland that has evolved since the late 80s and 90s that is fuelling my yes vote. It now seems to me to be in a fit condition to run a successful economy. There is a list of reasons for this.
There has been a Scottish parliament which has demonstrated competent government and that parliament has also indicated, by the electoral response to it, that the Scottish people seem to be wedded to a social democratic agenda and the kind of political values which sustained and were embedded in the welfare state of the 1950s. In fact, you could argue that it is the Scots who have tried to preserve the idea of Britishness in terms of state support and intervention, and that it is England that has chosen to go on a separate journey since the 1980s.
There has been an enormous increase in a sense of Scottishness and pride in Scottish identity which has itself been sustained by an explosion in Scottish writing and creative arts since the 1980s, especially in relation to my own subject. We now have a proper modern history of Scotland which we didn’t have until as late as the 1970s and 1980s. We now have a clear national narrative sustained by objective and rigorous academic research. In 1964, one of my great predecessors Professor Hargreaves said that the history of modern Scotland is less studied than the history of Yorkshire.
There has also been a silent transformation of the Scottish economy. As late as early 1980s it was not sustainable owing to the continuing domination of the dinosaur heavy industries. The problem there was simply that labour costs not be sustained in an emerging global economy where goods and machines could be made cheaper elsewhere. Of course the process could have been managed much more sensitively and more thoughtfully by a Labour government, instead it was the radical surgery of Thatcherism and Toryism that had its way. What we have now – and this has been the case since the mid-1990s and de-industrialisation – is a diversified economy in which heavy industry, light manufacturing, the electronics sector, tourism, financial services have come together. And the vibrant public sector is important in terms of employment. We now have a resilient economic system.
We also have considerable reserves of one of the most important things for an independent state and that is power; power through the assets of oil and also through the potential of wind energy. Scotland is disproportionately endowed with these, compared to almost all other European countries. So, in other words, because of this economic transformation, which has undoubtedly led to social dislocation for many communities – and let’s not forget that – we now have an economy that can sustain itself in a resilient way in world markets.
I support his decision, but am concerned that Devine doesn’t seem to realize that Scotland has a thriving and vibrant economy precisely because it has moved away from the welfare state policies of the 1950s and 60s. Oil will obviously play a part, but Scotland has no future as an independent nation unless it follows the Irish model of an open economy, encouraging global industries to locate there. Nothing would discourage global industry faster than a glimpse of 1960s-style British Labour policies.
Read more at Tom Devine: why I now say yes to independence for Scotland.
Julian Adler discusses alternative sentencing:
Any time spent behind bars is harmful to individuals, families and communities. In many cases, the use of jail makes society less safe: studies have consistently found that incarceration does not deter re-offending, with some research indicating that it actually increases the odds of recidivism. Further, while most people tend to be released after relatively short sentences, the consequences of incarceration are lasting and damaging. The fact is we could divert a significant percentage of the American jail population without appreciably increasing risk to public safety. Alternatives to detention and incarceration will improve the life trajectories of people living in poverty.
Read more at Why Cutting Down Jail Time is Key to Fighting Poverty | Perspectives | BillMoyers.com.
