Bancos españoles: resultados favorables de la regulación

El rumor es que la banca española ha tenido mejores resultados que la de otros países gracias a la buena regulación:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124888970256290699.html

Spanish GDP is forecast to fall 4% this year, unemployment is already around 18% while house prices have so far fallen 18% from their peak. Yet remarkably, BBVA is the only major bank in Europe not to have had to raise fresh capital, while none of the listed domestic banks has required a government bail-out.
The Bank of Spain takes much of the credit, both for forcing Spanish banks to build substantial buffers of generic provisions during the good times -- and for stopping local banks piling into mortgage securities. The banks also played their part, focusing on the retail market rather than risky investment banking. It helps that Spain has only a small credit-card and commercial-property market. And the banks' impressive ability to control costs -- BBVA and Santander both have domestic cost/income ratios below 40% -- has helped them earn their way though the crisis.
But the final piece of the jigsaw is clear from this year's second-quarter results: low eurozone interest rates have made a real difference. Not only has the relief provided to stressed holders of residential variable-rate mortgages helped keep non-performing loans levels much lower than forecast earlier this year, but the lag between interest-rate cuts and mortgage-rate resets has helped support bank margins. The rate of growth in non-performing loans slowed in the second quarter, in the case of Santander falling by 29% from the first quarter, while the spread it earned on its loan book rose to 3.32%, up from 3.18%.
Even so, Spain's banks are not completely out of the woods. The pace of non-performing loan growth may be slowing, but bad loans are still rising and are not expected to peak until at least 2010. Losses on some of those loans could still turn out to be high. Most banks have now written down or restructured their exposures to real estate developers and residential mortgages are typically well-collateralized. But the emerging problem area is loans to small and medium sized companies, which are sensitive to the state of the economy. Meanwhile, margins will be squeezed as mortgage rates are reset.
That suggests further pain may yet lie ahead for purely domestic banks, such as Sabadell, Bakinter, Popular and Banesto. But BBVA and Santander now look increasingly likely to ride out this crisis. Not only do they have higher quality loan books, lower rates of non-performing loans, resilient pre-provision profits, substantial provisions, high returns on equity and strong balance sheets, but they also offer exposure to emerging economies in Latin America such as Mexico and Brazil, where margins are strong and growth is potentially higher.

Los programas anti-empleo: regulación al transporte federal

De acuerdo a esta serie de artículos en Milenio, el transporte de pasajeros es una fuente muy importante de empleo y servicio: si hay más de 12,000 autobuses haciéndolo, eso significa varias decenas de imles de empleos diarios y posiblemente más de un millón de pasajeros transportados. Vemos algunas peculiaridades de la regulación: i) un autobús circula por la ciudad, pero está regulado federalmente, así que las autoridades locales no lo pueden revisar; ii) existe una regulación que especializa al vehículo en "carga" o "pasajeros", pero evidentemente esta es ignorada por transportistas formales e informales; iii) algunas autoridades piensan que todo el transporte debería pasar por centrales autorizadas; iv) el problema parece ligarse a una caída en el volumen de negocio por la recesión y el problema de la influenza. Parece que el empleo podría ser aún más grande y de mejor calidad, pero que la regulación lo limita.


http://www.milenio.com/node/253310

http://www.milenio.com/node/252652
http://www.milenio.com/node/47850

Nueva visión de la "trampa de la liquidez"

Este artículo de KENNETH E. SCOTT y JOHN B. TAYLOR, profesores de Stanford, nos habla sobre el problema de "la trampa de la liquidez" en el contexto actual:

Despite trillions of dollars of new government programs, one of the original causes of the financial crisis -- the toxic assets on bank balance sheets -- still persists and remains a serious impediment to economic recovery. Why are these toxic assets so difficult to deal with? We believe their sheer complexity is the core problem and that only increased transparency will unleash the market mechanisms needed to clean them up.

The bulk of toxic assets are based on residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS), in which thousands of mortgages were gathered into mortgage pools. The returns on these pools were then sliced into a hierarchy of "tranches" that were sold to investors as separate classes of securities. The most senior tranches, rated AAA, received the lowest returns, and then they went down the line to lower ratings and finally to the unrated "equity" tranches at the bottom.
But the process didn't stop there. Some of the tranches from one mortgage pool were combined with tranches from other mortgage pools, resulting in Collateralized Mortgage Obligations (CMO). Other tranches were combined with tranches from completely different types of pools, based on commercial mortgages, auto loans, student loans, credit card receivables, small business loans, and even corporate loans that had been combined into Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLO). The result was a highly heterogeneous mixture of debt securities called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO). The tranches of the CDOs could then be combined with other CDOs, resulting in CDOs.

Each time these tranches were mixed together with other tranches in a new pool, the securities became more complex. Assume a hypothetical CDO held 100 CLOs, each holding 250 corporate loans -- then we would need information on 25,000 underlying loans to determine the value of the security. But assume the CDO held 100 CDOs each holding 100 RMBS comprising a mere 2,000 mortgages -- the number now rises to 20 million!

Complexity is not the only problem. Many of the underlying mortgages were highly risky, involving little or no down payments and initial rates so low they could never amortize the loan. About 80% of the $2.5 trillion subprime mortgages made since 2000 went into securitization pools. When the housing bubble burst and house prices started declining, borrowers began to default, the lower tranches were hit with losses, and higher tranches became more risky and declined in value.

With so much complexity, and uncertainty about future performance, it is not surprising that the securities are difficult to price and that trading dried up. Without market prices, valuation on the books of banks is suspect and counterparties are reluctant to deal with each other.
The policy response to this problem has been circuitous. The Federal Reserve originally saw the problem as a lack of liquidity in the banking system, and beginning in late 2007 flooded the market with liquidity through new lending facilities. It had very limited success, as banks were still disinclined to buy or trade such securities or take them as collateral. Credit spreads remained higher than normal. In September 2008 credit spreads skyrocketed and credit markets froze. By then it was clear that the problem was not liquidity, but rather the insolvency risks of counterparties with large holdings of toxic assets on their books.

The federal government then decided to buy the toxic assets. The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was enacted in October 2008 with $700 billion in funding. But that was not how the TARP funds were used. The Treasury concluded that the valuation problem seemed insurmountable, so it attacked the risk issue by bolstering bank capital, buying preferred stock.
But those toxic assets are still there. The latest disposal scheme is the Public-Private Investment Program (PPIP). The concept is that private asset managers would create investment funds of half private and half Treasury (TARP) capital, which would bid on packages of toxic assets that banks offered for sale. The responsibility for valuation is thus shifted to the private sector. But the pricing difficulty remains and this program too may amount to little.

The fundamental problem has remained untouched: insufficient information to permit estimated prices that both buyers and sellers find credible. Why is the information so hard to obtain? While the original MBS pools were often Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) registered public offerings with considerable detail, CDOs were sold in private placements with confidentiality agreements. Moreover, the nature of the securitization process has made it extremely difficult to determine and follow losses and increasing risk from one tranche and pool to another, and to reach the information about the original borrowers that is needed to estimate future cash flows and price.

This account makes it clear why transparency is so important. To deal with the problem, issuers of asset-backed securities should provide extensive detail in a uniform format about the composition of the original pools and their subsequent structure and performance, whether they were sold as SEC-registered offerings or private placements. By creating a centralized database with this information, the pricing process for the toxic assets becomes possible. Making such a database a reality will restart private securitization markets and will do more for the recovery of the economy than yet another redesign of administrative agency structures. If issuers are not forthcoming, then they should be required to file the information publicly with the SEC.

Organización de vagoneros del metro

Aquí vemos un mercado de servicios que parece ser altamente competitivo, con problemas para que el gobierno defina adecuadametne su marco de funcionamiento:


http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/ciudad/96511.html

Posner y Pelzman sobre regulación y crisis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVuNio9nbo8&feature=related

Entrevista con Samuelson

En este video y en esta entrevista tenemos acceso a la opinión de uno de los economistas más importantes de todos los tiempos a algunos temas de regulación. Samuelson opina que:

1. Las aportaciones de la economía conductista y sus hipótesis de irracionalidad se aplican con frecuencia, pero la naturaleza del proceso económico determina que no sean importantes a nivel del equilibrio de mercado (esto es parercido a la opinión de Becker).
2. Sin embargo, a nivel macro hay desviaciones muy importantes de conductas óptimas y se requiere una regulacion centralizada importante para evitar fenómenos como las burbujas especulativas. En particular se requiere un gran avance para regular en la actualidad a los mercados financieros, pues la introducción de derivados hace imposible para las firmas y consumidores conocer el valor de las cosas.

El video también incluye a Robert Merton, quen difiere de la opinión de Samuelson. Él piensa que la regulación detendrá la innovación. Sin embargo, su opinión no es clara, pues también dice que hay que regular a los mercados de derivados porque han fracasado.


http://www.videosurf.com/video/paul-samuelson-and-robert-merton-differ-on-the-causes-of-the-financial-crisis-67020396?vlt=daylife

http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/conor_clarke/2009/06/an_interview_with_paul_samuelson_part_one.php

Restricciones comerciales derivadas de la regulación ecológica

Aún es temprano para conocer los detalles de cómo se implementarán las restricciones al comercio internacional asociadas a las regulaciones sobre calentamiento global. Sin embargo, el siguiente análisis se refiere a una de las principales propuestas existentes. Por ejemplo, ¿qué pasa si los exportadores reciben asignaciones gratuitas de emisiones? ¿Es eso una forma de dumping? ¿Qué pasa si todos los países siguen esa estrategia de subsidiar las emisiones de los exportadores?

http://www.harryrclarke.com/2009/07/13/trade-restrictions-in-the-waxman-markey-bill/#more-484

Calentamiento global: serpientes y escaleras

En nuestras discusiones sobre la organización de las iglesias revisamos que entre las caractarísticas de los servicios religiosos que los hacen exitosos es evitar predicciones precisas. Así, las religiones que perduran no pueden basar su éxito en señalar fechas del fin del mundo o de un cataclismo global, y tienen que dejar el riesgo de castigo para el más allá. En ocasiones se dice que algunos movimientos ecologistas tienen tintes religiosos, Ustedes juzgen acerca de lo ocurrido el 8 de julio de 2009 en una reunión de jefes de estado:

• When King Canute of lore wanted to teach his citizens a lesson, he set his throne by the seashore and commanded the tides to roll out. Canute's spirit was back in business this week at the G-8 summit in Italy, where the assembled leaders declared that the world's temperature shall not rise: "We recognize the scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees [Celsius]," or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, said the summit declaration.
  So let it be written, so let it be done.
  As for how they will achieve this climate-defying feat, well, the leaders were somewhat less definitive: "we will work . . . to identify a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050."
  Translation: Since the heads of the world's leading economies couldn't agree on an actual policy on climate change, they opted instead to command the clouds, the seas and all of the Earth to cool. Or maybe they were finally admitting that this whole climate business is getting too expensive, so let's just throw out a goal that everyone knows is beyond the reach of kings, much less democratic leaders.
  The politics of climate change have always been long on apocalyptic rhetoric but short on policy realism. But a global economic crisis does have a way of shearing away illusions about the price people and their leaders, elected or otherwise, are willing to pay in higher taxes, higher prices and economic competitiveness to perhaps make a fractional dent on the temperature.
  Concerns about high costs and lost jobs have already threatened or killed carbon-emissions control schemes in enviro-conscious Australia and New Zealand. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, another sunshine environmentalist, insisted on exemptions for German industry, including cement and steel, from last year's EU climate deal, which pledged to reduce carbon emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by 2020. Italy engineered its own escape clause, requiring the EU to renegotiate its climate policy after a U.N. climate change summit in Copenhagen later this year. That probably kills the European deal, since China (the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases), India and other developing countries showed this week that they are unlikely to agree to any draconian emissions cuts.
  A recent paper from Spanish economist Gabriel Calzada Álvarez noted that since Spain started investing in a "green jobs" policy nine years ago, the country has lost 110,500 jobs in other parts of the economy. That amounts to 2.2 jobs lost for every green job created.
  In the legend of Canute, the king, after failing to stop the rising tide, told the assembled crowd: "Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth and sea obey by eternal laws." If a medieval monarch could draw the right conclusion, how hard can it be for his sophisticated 21st-century successors?

Entrevista con Kevin Murphy

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4208