http://skepticaltexascpa.blogspot.com/2008/12/coming-depression.html
In the long run, a major economic effect of economic globalization is to reduce the income gap between rich and poor countries, by bringing the latter fully into the nexus of the global economy. ...
There is one snag, at least for rich countries such as the [US], Western Europe and Japan. If the world becomes more equal more quickly than it become richer, then living standards in rich countries must decline. If the world were suddenly to achieve equal income levels between countries, without a significant increase in output, U.S. living standards would fall by over three quarters. ...
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
IMF argues for large stimulus packages
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/da227bd0-d5d9-11dd-a9cc-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1Tax cuts needed to concentrate on individuals who were having difficulty getting access to credit rather than those who were saving instead of spending.
As the US Buys Less, Germany Suffers
http://www.cnbc.com/id/28430243
Virtually all economists expect 2009 to be a lost year for Germany, which will pay a heavy price for the downturn
Jacques Cailloux, chief Europe economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in London, has established a strong correlation between Chinese exports to the United States and German exports to China
The American trade deficit in 2007 was $708.5 billion; Germany’s $288.5 billion surplus and China’s $262.2 billion excess represent much of the other side of that equation.
Virtually all economists expect 2009 to be a lost year for Germany, which will pay a heavy price for the downturn
Jacques Cailloux, chief Europe economist at Royal Bank of Scotland in London, has established a strong correlation between Chinese exports to the United States and German exports to China
The American trade deficit in 2007 was $708.5 billion; Germany’s $288.5 billion surplus and China’s $262.2 billion excess represent much of the other side of that equation.
Monday, December 29, 2008
The collapse of financial globalization …
http://blogs.cfr.org/setser/2008/12/29/the-collapse-of-financial-globalization/ Private capital inflows to the US and private capital outflows from the US have collapsed. They have gone from a peak of around 15% of US GDP to around zero in a remarkably short period of time
But even if “private” Treasury purchases since mid-2007 are counted there still would have been a stunning fall in private capital flows. Direct investment flows have continued. Other financial flows though have largely gone in reverse, with investors selling what they previously bought. In the third quarter foreign investors sold about $90b of US securities (excluding Treasuries) and Americans sold about $85 billion of foreign securities. And the reversal in bank flows on both sides (as past loans have been called) has been absolutely brutal.
Note how closely gross inflows and gross outflows move together in the graph
Think of the process this way. Suppose a US bank lends a billion dollars to a bank in London that lends that money to a hedge fund domiciled the Caribbean that buys a billion dollars of US securities. That chain results in an outflow and inflow, but the outflow just financed the inflow — it doesn’t help to finance the current account deficit. By contrast, China’s purchases of Treasuries and Agencies reflect in large part China’s current account surplus — not Chinese banks borrowing from US banks. They certainly help to finance the US current account deficit
It was a largely unregulated system. And it was largely offshore, at least legally. SIVs and the like were set up in London. They borrowed short-term from US banks and money market funds to buyer longer-term assets, generating a lot of cross border flows but little net financing. European banks that had a large dollar book seem to have been doing much the same thing.** The growth of the shadow banking system consequently resulted in a big increase in gross private capital outflows and gross private capital inflows
But even if “private” Treasury purchases since mid-2007 are counted there still would have been a stunning fall in private capital flows. Direct investment flows have continued. Other financial flows though have largely gone in reverse, with investors selling what they previously bought. In the third quarter foreign investors sold about $90b of US securities (excluding Treasuries) and Americans sold about $85 billion of foreign securities. And the reversal in bank flows on both sides (as past loans have been called) has been absolutely brutal.
Note how closely gross inflows and gross outflows move together in the graph
Think of the process this way. Suppose a US bank lends a billion dollars to a bank in London that lends that money to a hedge fund domiciled the Caribbean that buys a billion dollars of US securities. That chain results in an outflow and inflow, but the outflow just financed the inflow — it doesn’t help to finance the current account deficit. By contrast, China’s purchases of Treasuries and Agencies reflect in large part China’s current account surplus — not Chinese banks borrowing from US banks. They certainly help to finance the US current account deficit
It was a largely unregulated system. And it was largely offshore, at least legally. SIVs and the like were set up in London. They borrowed short-term from US banks and money market funds to buyer longer-term assets, generating a lot of cross border flows but little net financing. European banks that had a large dollar book seem to have been doing much the same thing.** The growth of the shadow banking system consequently resulted in a big increase in gross private capital outflows and gross private capital inflows
一场金融危机带来了哪些改变? CNN总结幕后真凶
http://www.6park.com/news/messages/8794.html 于海说，从短期来看，还很难判断美国的社会结构会在这次金融危机中会发生什么新变化，但是美国的产业结构可能会出现一些调整。“上世纪以来，美国服务业一直处于高度发达的水平，然而制造业却在不知不觉中落后。在金融危机的冲击下，第二产业比例或许会有所上升。”
西方经济学诞生之初，节俭是一个重要的命题，美国社会起初也接受了这一观念。但是随着资本主义的繁荣，国家拥有巨大的生产力并积累了雄厚的物质财富后，这种节俭寡欲的心理动力就逐渐枯萎衰竭了。自上个世纪以来，以凯恩斯为代表的一些经济学家所持有的“储蓄增加将导致消费减少，并最终减少投资和社会财富”的观点更是日益成为发达国家的主流，并对美国现代经济和社会产生了深远影响。数据显示，在纽约，20%的市民根本没有任何积蓄，另有45%的人其积蓄只够维持 3个月的生活。复旦大学社会学系教授于海指出，“美国模式”有其文化的原因，即商业资本主义的逻辑。“商业资本主义就是不断地制造出产品，激发消费的欲望，然后再反过来刺激生产。美国是个消费主导的社会，为了拉动消费，美国创造出许多方便消费的手段，如信贷、邮政业务等都是它的首创。而健全的社会保障体制，则让个人无需太多的储蓄”。
前美欧日等发达经济体已相继陷入衰退。对于“寒冬”中的世界经济来说，现在迫切需要一个新的经济引擎。下一轮新经济的增长点在哪里？与前几轮相比，会有哪些不同？ www.6park.com
中国国际经济合作学会副会长陈德照认为，金融危机为何会爆发，与互联网革命后一直没有找到新的经济增长点有关。潘锐向记者进一步解释道：上世纪90年代兴起了新经济革命浪潮，以互联网为主的IT产业是这轮浪潮的龙头。但是到1999年，IT泡沫破灭，美国转而主要推动住房和抵押贷款。当时美国政府选了两批人作为主要对象，一批是大学三、四年级的学生，另一批则是新移民，为了分散风险，遂把金融业务证券化。2000—2001年，这一增长引擎获得了成功。但是 2001年“9·11”事件的爆发，海外移民这块没了，于是美国政府就将目光对准低收入者，次贷风险加大。但是，由于2001—2005年美国房价处于上升阶段，利率也较低，因此没出很大问题。然而，2005年以后房价开始下跌而利率不断上升，最终导致次贷风险爆发。 www.6park.com
如何转“ 危”为“机”，这不仅是一个短期应对问题，还应包含着长期战略性考虑。美国《基督教科学箴言报》曾撰文指出，安全渡过信贷危机将为今后另一些重大工作 ———振兴经济———奠定基础。潘锐认为，新一轮的经济增长点是新能源。“新能源不仅是指新型能源，也指对现有能源技术的改进，如减少耗能，与环保是相关联的。金融危机短期内会影响新能源的投入，而且由于油价下跌，人们会更倾向于利用现有的能源。但是目前这个时候也恰恰是调整能源政策的好时机。” www.6park.com
陈德照则认为，与上一轮不同，新一轮经济增长点的突破口可能不是一两个技术，而是多元的。“能源、环境和生物技术可能比较快一点，成为核心。这些技术之间不是孤立的，彼此成果是可以相互利用的。”陈德照同时指出，从长期来看，由于经济增长与科技创新关系密切，因此，在最困难的时期过去后，有关的投入还是会增加，而且还将成为各国的主要战略考虑。
西方经济学诞生之初，节俭是一个重要的命题，美国社会起初也接受了这一观念。但是随着资本主义的繁荣，国家拥有巨大的生产力并积累了雄厚的物质财富后，这种节俭寡欲的心理动力就逐渐枯萎衰竭了。自上个世纪以来，以凯恩斯为代表的一些经济学家所持有的“储蓄增加将导致消费减少，并最终减少投资和社会财富”的观点更是日益成为发达国家的主流，并对美国现代经济和社会产生了深远影响。数据显示，在纽约，20%的市民根本没有任何积蓄，另有45%的人其积蓄只够维持 3个月的生活。复旦大学社会学系教授于海指出，“美国模式”有其文化的原因，即商业资本主义的逻辑。“商业资本主义就是不断地制造出产品，激发消费的欲望，然后再反过来刺激生产。美国是个消费主导的社会，为了拉动消费，美国创造出许多方便消费的手段，如信贷、邮政业务等都是它的首创。而健全的社会保障体制，则让个人无需太多的储蓄”。
前美欧日等发达经济体已相继陷入衰退。对于“寒冬”中的世界经济来说，现在迫切需要一个新的经济引擎。下一轮新经济的增长点在哪里？与前几轮相比，会有哪些不同？ www.6park.com
中国国际经济合作学会副会长陈德照认为，金融危机为何会爆发，与互联网革命后一直没有找到新的经济增长点有关。潘锐向记者进一步解释道：上世纪90年代兴起了新经济革命浪潮，以互联网为主的IT产业是这轮浪潮的龙头。但是到1999年，IT泡沫破灭，美国转而主要推动住房和抵押贷款。当时美国政府选了两批人作为主要对象，一批是大学三、四年级的学生，另一批则是新移民，为了分散风险，遂把金融业务证券化。2000—2001年，这一增长引擎获得了成功。但是 2001年“9·11”事件的爆发，海外移民这块没了，于是美国政府就将目光对准低收入者，次贷风险加大。但是，由于2001—2005年美国房价处于上升阶段，利率也较低，因此没出很大问题。然而，2005年以后房价开始下跌而利率不断上升，最终导致次贷风险爆发。 www.6park.com
如何转“ 危”为“机”，这不仅是一个短期应对问题，还应包含着长期战略性考虑。美国《基督教科学箴言报》曾撰文指出，安全渡过信贷危机将为今后另一些重大工作 ———振兴经济———奠定基础。潘锐认为，新一轮的经济增长点是新能源。“新能源不仅是指新型能源，也指对现有能源技术的改进，如减少耗能，与环保是相关联的。金融危机短期内会影响新能源的投入，而且由于油价下跌，人们会更倾向于利用现有的能源。但是目前这个时候也恰恰是调整能源政策的好时机。” www.6park.com
陈德照则认为，与上一轮不同，新一轮经济增长点的突破口可能不是一两个技术，而是多元的。“能源、环境和生物技术可能比较快一点，成为核心。这些技术之间不是孤立的，彼此成果是可以相互利用的。”陈德照同时指出，从长期来看，由于经济增长与科技创新关系密切，因此，在最困难的时期过去后，有关的投入还是会增加，而且还将成为各国的主要战略考虑。
Sunday, December 28, 2008
Krugman's "hangover theory", revisited.
http://interfluidity.powerblogs.com/posts/1230410023.shtml
The obvious answer is that when there is a boom, entrepreneurs know into what sector resources must be reallocated, and pull already employed workers from existing jobs into the new big thing. During a bust, from a God's eye view, the same process must occur: resources must be shifted out of some sectors and into others. But entrepreneurs are only human. They do not know to where resources might be productively employed, only that they cannot be productively employed where they are. This is the asymmetry, I think, that explains mass unemployment during busts.
I'll end with an intuition: I think that there's a trade-off between microlevel diversification and macro-efficiency.
If the aggregate portfolio is disproportionately by the decisions of a relatively small group of people, there is no reason to suspect its quality would be better than that decided upon by a bureaucracy of planners. There is reason to suspect, in fact, that it would be worse, because at least the planners know they should at least pretend to serve a broad public interest, while private decisionmakers might quite legitimately think they're just trying to get a piece of next year's bonus pool.
The obvious answer is that when there is a boom, entrepreneurs know into what sector resources must be reallocated, and pull already employed workers from existing jobs into the new big thing. During a bust, from a God's eye view, the same process must occur: resources must be shifted out of some sectors and into others. But entrepreneurs are only human. They do not know to where resources might be productively employed, only that they cannot be productively employed where they are. This is the asymmetry, I think, that explains mass unemployment during busts.
I'll end with an intuition: I think that there's a trade-off between microlevel diversification and macro-efficiency.
If the aggregate portfolio is disproportionately by the decisions of a relatively small group of people, there is no reason to suspect its quality would be better than that decided upon by a bureaucracy of planners. There is reason to suspect, in fact, that it would be worse, because at least the planners know they should at least pretend to serve a broad public interest, while private decisionmakers might quite legitimately think they're just trying to get a piece of next year's bonus pool.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Fed Rate Cuts Dull Perceived Safety of Dollar: Chart of Day
趋势由此而变
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aR9Yf.fZy0EM&refer=economy
Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. dollar is poised to fall against other major currencies as the Federal Reserve’s “aggressive” rate cuts make the greenback less attractive to investors, Credit Suisse Group AG said.
The Fed’s “easing and very low U.S. rates will ultimately undermine the dollar across the board,” analysts Ray Farris and Daniel Katzive wrote in the report. “Perceptions of relative systemic risk” are declining, they said.
“One important implication of this is that the dollar-yen and dollar-euro, which had been inversely correlated throughout the period of deleveraging, have now become positively correlated again,” Farris and Katzive wrote yesterday.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how the euro and yen have begun to track each other more closely since the beginning of December. The two had been mostly moving in opposite directions between August and November as a global financial crisis prompted investors to sell higher-yielding currencies. The European Central Bank’s benchmark interest rate of 2.5 percent compares with as low as zero in the U.S. and 0.3 percent in Japan.
During the same period, the yen rallied against all of the world’s 16 most-active currencies as credit-market losses and a global stocks rout sparked a reversal in so-called carry trades, where investors get funds in a country with low borrowing costs and buy overseas assets.
“The yen continues to gain support from a repatriation of foreign assets by Japanese investors,” National Australia Bank Ltd. said in a report. “The ongoing narrowing of interest-rate differentials, with spreads between Japan and all major currencies collapsing towards zero, is yen positive.”
There is a 58 percent chance the BOJ will lower borrowing costs when a two-day policy meeting concludes tomorrow, according to calculations by JPMorgan Chase & Co. using overnight interest-rate swaps. The odds were 53 percent yesterday.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aR9Yf.fZy0EM&refer=economy
Dec. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. dollar is poised to fall against other major currencies as the Federal Reserve’s “aggressive” rate cuts make the greenback less attractive to investors, Credit Suisse Group AG said.
The Fed’s “easing and very low U.S. rates will ultimately undermine the dollar across the board,” analysts Ray Farris and Daniel Katzive wrote in the report. “Perceptions of relative systemic risk” are declining, they said.
“One important implication of this is that the dollar-yen and dollar-euro, which had been inversely correlated throughout the period of deleveraging, have now become positively correlated again,” Farris and Katzive wrote yesterday.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows how the euro and yen have begun to track each other more closely since the beginning of December. The two had been mostly moving in opposite directions between August and November as a global financial crisis prompted investors to sell higher-yielding currencies. The European Central Bank’s benchmark interest rate of 2.5 percent compares with as low as zero in the U.S. and 0.3 percent in Japan.
During the same period, the yen rallied against all of the world’s 16 most-active currencies as credit-market losses and a global stocks rout sparked a reversal in so-called carry trades, where investors get funds in a country with low borrowing costs and buy overseas assets.
“The yen continues to gain support from a repatriation of foreign assets by Japanese investors,” National Australia Bank Ltd. said in a report. “The ongoing narrowing of interest-rate differentials, with spreads between Japan and all major currencies collapsing towards zero, is yen positive.”
There is a 58 percent chance the BOJ will lower borrowing costs when a two-day policy meeting concludes tomorrow, according to calculations by JPMorgan Chase & Co. using overnight interest-rate swaps. The odds were 53 percent yesterday.
Saving Capitalism No Sure Thing as Statism Undermines Economy
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aDjmuEpDoctc&refer=economy By Simon Kennedy, Matthew Benjamin and Rich Miller
Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- What’s good for General Motors may not ultimately be best for the global economy.
The Bush administration’s $13.4 billion rescue of GM and Chrysler is a fitting finish to a year in which governments around the world expanded their role in the economy and markets after three decades of retreat.
The intervention comes at what may prove to be a steep price. Future investment may be allocated less efficiently as risk-averse politicians make business decisions. Whenever banks decide to lend again, they are likely to find new capital requirements that will curb how freely they can do it. Interest rates may be pushed up by government borrowing to finance trillions of dollars of bailouts.
“We’re seeing a more statist world economy,” says Ken Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “That’s not good for growth in the longer run.”
It’s not good for stocks either, says Paola Sapienza, associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Slower economic growth means lower profits. Shares might also be hurt by investor uncertainty about the scope and timing of government intervention in the corporate sector.
“If the rules of the game are changing, people are reluctant to invest in the stock market,” Sapienza says.
Record Lows
The bond market will also be affected as it is forced to absorb ever bigger increases in government debt. While yields on Treasury securities touched record lows last week, they eventually “will go up significantly and dramatically” under pressure from added supply, says E. Craig Coats, co-head of fixed income at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. in New York.
The increase in the government’s role in the economy has been breathtaking. The U.S. looks set to rack up a budget deficit of at least $1 trillion this fiscal year, while the Federal Reserve has already increased its balance sheet by $1.4 trillion since last December. By way of comparison, U.S. gross domestic product last year was $13.8 trillion.
Winding back the intervention may not be easy, says Sapienza, who has studied the effect of government ownership on bank lending.
When Italy nationalized banks in 1933, “the architects who designed the system envisaged it as temporary,” she says. “It was in place until the end of the 1990s.” More recently, the Japanese government injected capital into banks to get them to lend to big corporations, keeping alive “the zombie companies that economists talk about,” she says.
Investors ‘Gambling’
Already, investors trying to decide where to put their money are “gambling very much on what they think the government will do, not what they think about the company,” Sapienza says. “That’s why there’s so much volatility.”
GM shares plunged as much as 37 percent Dec. 12 after the U.S. Senate failed to pass an emergency loan plan. The shares recovered after George W. Bush said his administration would consider funding a rescue with money already set aside for bank bailouts, then shot up 23 percent on Dec. 19 when he announced the emergency loans.
The auto-industry lifeline is just the latest in an extraordinary year of market interventions that have redefined capitalism. The U.S. government previously seized control of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer American International Group Inc. and took stakes in the nation’s largest banks.
‘Necessary Evil’
Government activism has become a “necessary evil” to help pull the global economy out of recession, says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit MIB in London. Even Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency espousing smaller government, agrees. He told a CNN interviewer last week he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”
Policy makers elsewhere extended their reach, too. The U.K. nationalized mortgage lenders Northern Rock Plc and Bradford & Bingley Plc. French President Nicolas Sarkozy created a 6 billion-euro ($8.7 billion) fund to invest in “strategic” firms. And the European Commission last week relaxed rules on state aid to businesses.
It isn’t inevitable that bigger government will hamstring free enterprise, says William Niskanen, chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group that generally favors free markets over government solutions. Niskanen predicts that government intervention will prove to be “selective and temporary,” not “a long-term trend.”
Shy Away From Lending
Still, greater government involvement will make businesses less likely to deploy capital in ways that spur growth and profits, says Eric Chaney, chief economist at AXA SA in Paris and a former official at the French finance ministry. Carmakers may be slower to innovate or cut costs, and financiers may shy away from lending to entrepreneurs.
“It’s the job of companies, not governments, to take risk and accept the consequences,” Chaney says. “There is no incentive for governments to take risk, so they won’t.”
The history of public aid to automakers highlights the threat, says Stuart Pearson, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group in London.
While the U.S. rescue of Chrysler in 1979 gave then-Chief Executive Officer Lee Iacocca time to streamline the company and restore profitability, it also sustained an outsized U.S. auto industry, leading to its current woes, Pearson says. The 1975 bailout of British Leyland Motor Corp. ended up costing U.K. taxpayers 11 billion pounds ($16.8 billion) and failed to keep successor MG Rover Group Ltd. from sinking into bankruptcy two decades later.
Help, Obstruction
“Government help has only been an obstruction to getting the car industry into a more economic shape,” Pearson says.
Back in 1953, when the industry was booming, GM Chief Executive Officer Charles Wilson famously observed: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” If the automakers’ importance has declined, so -- until recently -- had the government’s.
Just a dozen years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” Sarkozy won election last year promising a “rupture” from France’s history of heavy regulation; these days, the French president has changed his tune. “Laissez-faire, it is finished,” he declared last month.
Role of Government
Until recently, “investors could, broadly speaking, ignore the role of the government when thinking about markets” says Alex Patelis, chief international economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in London. “This period is over.”
Regulation is back in style as policy makers seek to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis. Leaders from the Group of 20 nations are crafting a plan to require banks to maintain higher capital levels and disclose more about their holdings.
That likely means a lower “speed limit for growth,” as banks have less cash available to lend and invest, says Mohamed el-Erian, co-chief executive at Pacific Investment Management Co., the Newport Beach, California-based manager of the world’s biggest bond fund.
“There will be less lubrication in the form of credit creation,” he says.
Bailouts and economic-stimulus plans are also running up government borrowing. Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate the budget deficits of developed economies will more than double next year to 6.3 percent of gross domestic product.
Higher Taxes
Bigger deficits, while necessary now, could spell trouble down the road if they lead to higher borrowing costs or prompt consumers to save more now on the assumption that bigger shortfalls will mean higher taxes later.
“We’ll end a financial crisis with a fiscal crisis,” says Vito Tanzi, former director of fiscal affairs at the IMF. “We’ll get out with very large public debt and very large public spending. That, for sure, will slow down the rate of growth for the next 10 years or so.”
While bigger government is the unavoidable result of dealing with the turmoil, “it makes all of us economists uncomfortable seeing the government doing all these extraordinary things,” says Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
On the other hand, he says, “I would feel even more uncomfortable if they weren’t doing them.”
Dec. 22 (Bloomberg) -- What’s good for General Motors may not ultimately be best for the global economy.
The Bush administration’s $13.4 billion rescue of GM and Chrysler is a fitting finish to a year in which governments around the world expanded their role in the economy and markets after three decades of retreat.
The intervention comes at what may prove to be a steep price. Future investment may be allocated less efficiently as risk-averse politicians make business decisions. Whenever banks decide to lend again, they are likely to find new capital requirements that will curb how freely they can do it. Interest rates may be pushed up by government borrowing to finance trillions of dollars of bailouts.
“We’re seeing a more statist world economy,” says Ken Rogoff, former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund and now a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “That’s not good for growth in the longer run.”
It’s not good for stocks either, says Paola Sapienza, associate professor of finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Slower economic growth means lower profits. Shares might also be hurt by investor uncertainty about the scope and timing of government intervention in the corporate sector.
“If the rules of the game are changing, people are reluctant to invest in the stock market,” Sapienza says.
Record Lows
The bond market will also be affected as it is forced to absorb ever bigger increases in government debt. While yields on Treasury securities touched record lows last week, they eventually “will go up significantly and dramatically” under pressure from added supply, says E. Craig Coats, co-head of fixed income at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods Inc. in New York.
The increase in the government’s role in the economy has been breathtaking. The U.S. looks set to rack up a budget deficit of at least $1 trillion this fiscal year, while the Federal Reserve has already increased its balance sheet by $1.4 trillion since last December. By way of comparison, U.S. gross domestic product last year was $13.8 trillion.
Winding back the intervention may not be easy, says Sapienza, who has studied the effect of government ownership on bank lending.
When Italy nationalized banks in 1933, “the architects who designed the system envisaged it as temporary,” she says. “It was in place until the end of the 1990s.” More recently, the Japanese government injected capital into banks to get them to lend to big corporations, keeping alive “the zombie companies that economists talk about,” she says.
Investors ‘Gambling’
Already, investors trying to decide where to put their money are “gambling very much on what they think the government will do, not what they think about the company,” Sapienza says. “That’s why there’s so much volatility.”
GM shares plunged as much as 37 percent Dec. 12 after the U.S. Senate failed to pass an emergency loan plan. The shares recovered after George W. Bush said his administration would consider funding a rescue with money already set aside for bank bailouts, then shot up 23 percent on Dec. 19 when he announced the emergency loans.
The auto-industry lifeline is just the latest in an extraordinary year of market interventions that have redefined capitalism. The U.S. government previously seized control of mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and insurer American International Group Inc. and took stakes in the nation’s largest banks.
‘Necessary Evil’
Government activism has become a “necessary evil” to help pull the global economy out of recession, says Marco Annunziata, chief economist at UniCredit MIB in London. Even Bush, who ran for the U.S. presidency espousing smaller government, agrees. He told a CNN interviewer last week he has “abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system.”
Policy makers elsewhere extended their reach, too. The U.K. nationalized mortgage lenders Northern Rock Plc and Bradford & Bingley Plc. French President Nicolas Sarkozy created a 6 billion-euro ($8.7 billion) fund to invest in “strategic” firms. And the European Commission last week relaxed rules on state aid to businesses.
It isn’t inevitable that bigger government will hamstring free enterprise, says William Niskanen, chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, a Washington research group that generally favors free markets over government solutions. Niskanen predicts that government intervention will prove to be “selective and temporary,” not “a long-term trend.”
Shy Away From Lending
Still, greater government involvement will make businesses less likely to deploy capital in ways that spur growth and profits, says Eric Chaney, chief economist at AXA SA in Paris and a former official at the French finance ministry. Carmakers may be slower to innovate or cut costs, and financiers may shy away from lending to entrepreneurs.
“It’s the job of companies, not governments, to take risk and accept the consequences,” Chaney says. “There is no incentive for governments to take risk, so they won’t.”
The history of public aid to automakers highlights the threat, says Stuart Pearson, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group in London.
While the U.S. rescue of Chrysler in 1979 gave then-Chief Executive Officer Lee Iacocca time to streamline the company and restore profitability, it also sustained an outsized U.S. auto industry, leading to its current woes, Pearson says. The 1975 bailout of British Leyland Motor Corp. ended up costing U.K. taxpayers 11 billion pounds ($16.8 billion) and failed to keep successor MG Rover Group Ltd. from sinking into bankruptcy two decades later.
Help, Obstruction
“Government help has only been an obstruction to getting the car industry into a more economic shape,” Pearson says.
Back in 1953, when the industry was booming, GM Chief Executive Officer Charles Wilson famously observed: “For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” If the automakers’ importance has declined, so -- until recently -- had the government’s.
Just a dozen years ago, U.S. President Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” Sarkozy won election last year promising a “rupture” from France’s history of heavy regulation; these days, the French president has changed his tune. “Laissez-faire, it is finished,” he declared last month.
Role of Government
Until recently, “investors could, broadly speaking, ignore the role of the government when thinking about markets” says Alex Patelis, chief international economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. in London. “This period is over.”
Regulation is back in style as policy makers seek to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis. Leaders from the Group of 20 nations are crafting a plan to require banks to maintain higher capital levels and disclose more about their holdings.
That likely means a lower “speed limit for growth,” as banks have less cash available to lend and invest, says Mohamed el-Erian, co-chief executive at Pacific Investment Management Co., the Newport Beach, California-based manager of the world’s biggest bond fund.
“There will be less lubrication in the form of credit creation,” he says.
Bailouts and economic-stimulus plans are also running up government borrowing. Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate the budget deficits of developed economies will more than double next year to 6.3 percent of gross domestic product.
Higher Taxes
Bigger deficits, while necessary now, could spell trouble down the road if they lead to higher borrowing costs or prompt consumers to save more now on the assumption that bigger shortfalls will mean higher taxes later.
“We’ll end a financial crisis with a fiscal crisis,” says Vito Tanzi, former director of fiscal affairs at the IMF. “We’ll get out with very large public debt and very large public spending. That, for sure, will slow down the rate of growth for the next 10 years or so.”
While bigger government is the unavoidable result of dealing with the turmoil, “it makes all of us economists uncomfortable seeing the government doing all these extraordinary things,” says Barry Eichengreen, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
On the other hand, he says, “I would feel even more uncomfortable if they weren’t doing them.”
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Trepidation About Quantitative Easing, Version 2.0
Trepidation About Quantitative Easing, Version 2.0
The Fed made official its move to quantitative easing today, and said it will take no prisoners until it has lowered rates and credit spreads further:
The Federal Reserve will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth and to preserve price stability... The focus of the Committee's policy going forward will be to support the functioning of financial markets and stimulate the economy through open market operations and other measures that sustain the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet at a high level. As previously announced, over the next few quarters the Federal Reserve will purchase large quantities of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities to provide support to the mortgage and housing markets, and it stands ready to expand its purchases of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities as conditions warrant. The Committee is also evaluating the potential benefits of purchasing longer-term Treasury securities. Early next year, the Federal Reserve will also implement the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to facilitate the extension of credit to households and small businesses. The Federal Reserve will continue to consider ways of using its balance sheet to further support credit markets and economic activity.I (literally) have a very bad feeling in my stomach. This move is a sign of utter desperation. And it is on such a massive scale that if it does not work well, we will have a great deal of difficulty containing its effects.A conventional view of how this plays out comes from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: the Fed's extreme measures will of course prevail, but at the risk of considerable inflation:
Central banks may soon resort to their most powerful weapons against deflation: the printing press and the “helicopter drop” of money. It is a time for which Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has long prepared. Will this weaponry work? Unquestionably, yes: used ruthlessly, it will eliminate deflation. But returning to normality thereafter will prove far more elusive....Once inflation returns, the central bank will need to sell assets into the market, to mop up the excess money it has created in fighting deflation. Similarly, the government must reduce its deficit to a size it can finance in the market. Otherwise, deflationary expectations may swiftly turn into expectations of above-target inflation. This may also happen if the debt sold in efforts to sterilise the monetary overhang is deemed beyond the government’s ability to service.Countries without a credible currency may reach this point early. As soon as a central bank hints at “quantitative easing”, flight from the currency may ensue. As an aside, I had dinner with some well placed Japanese executives this evening (as in the host, for instance, co-authored papers with Eisuke Sakakibara, aka "Mr, Yen." and knows other policy officials personally), and all thought that the dollar would continue to be strong until the US economy started to recover, then investors would be more willing to hold riskier currencies. They dismissed the idea of a dollar crisis (there think there will be no substitute for over 20 years) or of the use of gold or commodities as possible substitutes/stores of value (not a gold standard, but increased monetization of "hard" assets), since those markets are small relative to the currency markets. I found the unwillingness to consider other than "business as usual" scenarios troubling. In addition, one of the executives was interviewing candidates from top schools in China for a US position, and asked what their outlook for the RMB was. To a person, they expect it to fall relative to the dollar. Each had his own reasoning, but the most consistent and compelling theme was that the Chinese government valued preserving employment above all, and was not going to let the RMB appreciate at a time when exports were weak.Now it is important to appreciate the Fed's emphasis in its version of quantitative easing, which we will call QE2. The Wall Street Journal Economics Blog gave additional detail from a press conference after the FOMC meeting:
But the senior Fed official said the central bank’s approach is distinct from quantitative easing and different from what the Japanese did. The Fed’s balance sheet has two sides, the official explained: assets with securities the Fed holds (including loans, credit facilities, mortgage-backed securities) and liabilities (cash and bank reserves). Japan’s quantitative easing program focused on the liability side, expanding cash in the system and excess reserves by a large amount. The Fed’s focus, however, is on the asset side through mortgage-backed securities, agency debt, the commercial paper program, the loan auctions and swaps with foreign central banks. That’s designed to improve credit-market functioning, the official said. By expanding the balance sheet by making loans, the official explained, the focus is not on excess reserves but on the asset side. That securities-lending approach directly affects credit spreads, which is the problem today — unlike Japan earlier, where the problem was the level of interest rates in general, the official said.What is NOT encouraging is the Fed has already made heroic measures in this direction, via the creation of its alphabet soup of facilities, and the results have been underwhelming. The results have been limited and short-lived (consider the successive acute phases of the credit crisis). Now admittedly, we do not appear to be having a year-end squeeze, which is a victory of sorts, but the Fed also expanded the Term Action Facility to massive size. A1/P1 commercial paper seems to be functioning reasonably well too, although the types not supported by the Fed are still under duress. Indeed, a Bloomberg story stresses the limited progress to date:
For all their efforts to liquefy credit markets, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury show no signs of ending the 18-month freeze, as evidenced by the unprecedented gap between what banks and the U.S. government pay to borrow money.The difference between the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that banks charge each other for three-month loans and Treasury bill rates is six times wider than before markets began to seize up in June 2007. Even though the so-called TED spread narrowed to 1.82 percentage points yesterday from 4.64 percentage points in October, prices of contracts to borrow money months from now show investors don’t expect lending to recover until at least the second half of 2009.“If you take a full assessment of the credit markets, conditions have certainly eased from their worst, but they still are at extraordinary tight levels, which are far from normal,” said Michael Darda, the chief economist at MKM Partners LP in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Short-term funding spreads are all still very wide relative to historical norms. There is a massive pullback going on in the private sector.”Several experts also say they expect the new programs will help in six months, with no explanation as to why.Before we get to the conventional worry, that the Fed will be reluctant to put on the brakes soon enough once the economy starts to recover and wind up with pretty bad inflation. there are other issues that are getting short shrift.The first is that the prescription presupposes that the problem is a liquidity crisis. It does not take seriously the notion that at least part (if not all) of the problem is that a lot of people and companies took on far more debt than they can afford to repay. Anna Schwartz, who was co-author with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the US, which is one of the definitive works on the Great Depression. It argued the Fed erred fatally then by not providing enough liquidity, .Schwartz took the Fed to task:
Credit spreads -- the difference between what it costs the government to borrow and what private-sector borrowers must pay -- are at historic highs.......even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue....Today, the banks have a problem on the asset side of their ledgers -- "all these exotic securities that the market does not know how to value."...[H]e's shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down."But the problem goes much further than "toxic securities". Remember the premise of how the Fed's program will work. It will buy various instruments to force spreads lower so as to lower cost to borrowers. The implicit logic is that if you lower rates enough, voila, the debt service cost drops and formerly dud borrowers are now viable. But how do borrowers get their hands on these new, better rates? Quite a few borrowers are up to their eyeballs already in debt, and no way to refinance. Take credit cards. Supporting credit card receivables may allow credit card companies to stop slashing consumer credit lines (although both Meredith Whitney and apparently industry sponsored studies agree that banks will cut credit card availability further due to pro-consumer changes that will make the product less profitable). But it does nothing for consumers carrying balances (unless we see a revival of, say, six month teaser offers). Similarly, for homeowners to get relief, they have to refinance. Now for many, that's a no-brainer. But the ones with no or negative equity have no ready solution, plus starting in 2009 and accelerating in 2010 are the option ARM resets. Even with low rates, many of these mortgages have enough negative amortization that consumers will suffer serious payment shock.But then again, we are assuming that lenders have more or less responsible standards. The powers that be may decide to run roughshod over that. As Accrued Interest noted:
The big wild card is government policy. There is talk that Treasury might allow for no-appraisal refinancing, basically lending based on original loan-to-value as opposed to current loan-to-value. Debate the wisdom of this policy as you might, it would case a massive refinancing wave that would make 2003 look like a a splash in the kiddie pool.And in other areas, stress is starting to get serious in types of debt not yet on the Fed's target list. From Eric Hovde in Institutional Risk Analyst:
One of the problems that is rapidly approaching is commercial real estate mortgages. Res mortgage are the largest asset class in the banking system. Commercial real estate mortgages are the second largest asset class in the banking system. Unfortunately much of the underwriting sins that started in the res market in 2002 crept into the commercial sector as well by 2004 and 2005, plus you never dealt with the massive excess inventory surplus of commercial office space post the Internet boom. Because financing costs became so low, real estate values kept shooting up and builders kept building more. So you have a national vacancy rate of 15%, which is moving higher every quarter. I think you are going to see major losses coming through the commercial real estate books of the banking industry.Commercial real estate is not yet on Bernanke's list. Neither is debtor-in-possession financing, and we and others have lamented that the death of it means that companies that fail and would ordinarily be able to get through Chapter 11 and preserve most of their employment will instead liquidate.Consider further: the Fed assumes it has no constraints, because it can bloat its balance sheet to any size. But it has limits of staff, focus, expertise that restrict what it can do. For it to succeed in its aims, it is going to have to intervene on behalf of every type of troubled credit and make allocation decisions among them. Going on auto pilot (that is, dealing with the "presenting problems", the ones that surfaced first, means that they get priority when that might not be the best use of collective resources (it is not desirable from a competitive standpoint to bloat our housing sector back to status quo ante).Other observers were lukewarm. The Economist questioned whether the Fed could in fact influence credit spreads as much as it hoped to:
....the creation and expansion of an array of lending programmes....have so far no doubt kept the interest rates that are charged to actual private borrowers lower than they otherwise would be, the effect has been difficult to detect, and certainly smaller than what the Treasury achieved through direct injections of public capital into banks.In theory, purchases of longer-term securities could have more impact by pulling down longer-term interest rates. The 10-year Treasury yield, for example, is 2.3%, and the 30-year conventional mortgage-rate is around 5.5%. But whereas the Fed knows more or less just what it has to do to move short-term interest rates up or down, it is in uncharted territory on longer-term interest rates. Indeed, theory suggests that the purchases would have to be spectacularly large to affect such large, globally integrated markets.A senior Fed official, briefing reporters after the FOMC meeting, rejected the notion that the Fed was trying explicitly to target lower long-term rates, and rather framed the Fed’s new actions as an extension of previous efforts at restoring liquidity and normal trading conditions. The official said that yields on Fannie’s and Freddie’s MBS, despite the explicit support of the Treasury, are much higher than Treasury yields because of a lack of liquidity. The Fed can narrow that spread, he said, by providing investors with the confidence that a committed buyer is in the market.Um, MBS have traded at high spreads at least in part due to volatility, which makes the prepayment option worth more, hence higher spreads. No doubt the Fed parsed that bit out. But as I understand it, foreign central banks, which used to be big buyers of agencies, have switched to Treasuries, not comfortable about the lack of a "full faith and credit" guarantee. The statutory authority for the conservatorship extends through the end of 2009, although it is widely assumed it will be renewed, plus Fannie and Freddie are NOT full faith and credit obligations of the US (the Treasury has instead entered into a "no negative net worth" guarantee. The differences may seem semantic, but they are seen as serious in some quarters. If that is the real issue, more Fed buying will not entice the key buyers, central banks, back into the pool.Jim Hamilton is also doubtful, and suggests that the Fed is working at cross purposes:
Will that strategy succeed if we just do it on a sufficiently large scale? I'm not at all convinced that it would. Our standard finance models treat interest rate spreads as governed primarily by fundamentals such as default risk and only secondarily by the volume of buyers or sellers.But while the Fed may have little control over the spreads between different interest rates, it does have a significant degree of control over the inflation rate. The 1.7% drop in headline CPI during November, and the -10% annual deflation rate for the last 3 months, should not be viewed as welcome developments in an environment where our primary concern is whether individuals and institutions are going to repay their debts. The Fed should want to generate enough inflation to pull those short-term interest rates above the zero floor. But to target inflation, the Fed would take exactly the opposite strategy from that outlined by the senior Fed official above. The goal would be to get cash into circulation rather than be hoarded by banks, and have the Fed's assets be ones that could be readily liquidated if the inflation starts to come in higher than desired.
The Fed made official its move to quantitative easing today, and said it will take no prisoners until it has lowered rates and credit spreads further:
The Federal Reserve will employ all available tools to promote the resumption of sustainable economic growth and to preserve price stability... The focus of the Committee's policy going forward will be to support the functioning of financial markets and stimulate the economy through open market operations and other measures that sustain the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet at a high level. As previously announced, over the next few quarters the Federal Reserve will purchase large quantities of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities to provide support to the mortgage and housing markets, and it stands ready to expand its purchases of agency debt and mortgage-backed securities as conditions warrant. The Committee is also evaluating the potential benefits of purchasing longer-term Treasury securities. Early next year, the Federal Reserve will also implement the Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility to facilitate the extension of credit to households and small businesses. The Federal Reserve will continue to consider ways of using its balance sheet to further support credit markets and economic activity.I (literally) have a very bad feeling in my stomach. This move is a sign of utter desperation. And it is on such a massive scale that if it does not work well, we will have a great deal of difficulty containing its effects.A conventional view of how this plays out comes from Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: the Fed's extreme measures will of course prevail, but at the risk of considerable inflation:
Central banks may soon resort to their most powerful weapons against deflation: the printing press and the “helicopter drop” of money. It is a time for which Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, has long prepared. Will this weaponry work? Unquestionably, yes: used ruthlessly, it will eliminate deflation. But returning to normality thereafter will prove far more elusive....Once inflation returns, the central bank will need to sell assets into the market, to mop up the excess money it has created in fighting deflation. Similarly, the government must reduce its deficit to a size it can finance in the market. Otherwise, deflationary expectations may swiftly turn into expectations of above-target inflation. This may also happen if the debt sold in efforts to sterilise the monetary overhang is deemed beyond the government’s ability to service.Countries without a credible currency may reach this point early. As soon as a central bank hints at “quantitative easing”, flight from the currency may ensue. As an aside, I had dinner with some well placed Japanese executives this evening (as in the host, for instance, co-authored papers with Eisuke Sakakibara, aka "Mr, Yen." and knows other policy officials personally), and all thought that the dollar would continue to be strong until the US economy started to recover, then investors would be more willing to hold riskier currencies. They dismissed the idea of a dollar crisis (there think there will be no substitute for over 20 years) or of the use of gold or commodities as possible substitutes/stores of value (not a gold standard, but increased monetization of "hard" assets), since those markets are small relative to the currency markets. I found the unwillingness to consider other than "business as usual" scenarios troubling. In addition, one of the executives was interviewing candidates from top schools in China for a US position, and asked what their outlook for the RMB was. To a person, they expect it to fall relative to the dollar. Each had his own reasoning, but the most consistent and compelling theme was that the Chinese government valued preserving employment above all, and was not going to let the RMB appreciate at a time when exports were weak.Now it is important to appreciate the Fed's emphasis in its version of quantitative easing, which we will call QE2. The Wall Street Journal Economics Blog gave additional detail from a press conference after the FOMC meeting:
But the senior Fed official said the central bank’s approach is distinct from quantitative easing and different from what the Japanese did. The Fed’s balance sheet has two sides, the official explained: assets with securities the Fed holds (including loans, credit facilities, mortgage-backed securities) and liabilities (cash and bank reserves). Japan’s quantitative easing program focused on the liability side, expanding cash in the system and excess reserves by a large amount. The Fed’s focus, however, is on the asset side through mortgage-backed securities, agency debt, the commercial paper program, the loan auctions and swaps with foreign central banks. That’s designed to improve credit-market functioning, the official said. By expanding the balance sheet by making loans, the official explained, the focus is not on excess reserves but on the asset side. That securities-lending approach directly affects credit spreads, which is the problem today — unlike Japan earlier, where the problem was the level of interest rates in general, the official said.What is NOT encouraging is the Fed has already made heroic measures in this direction, via the creation of its alphabet soup of facilities, and the results have been underwhelming. The results have been limited and short-lived (consider the successive acute phases of the credit crisis). Now admittedly, we do not appear to be having a year-end squeeze, which is a victory of sorts, but the Fed also expanded the Term Action Facility to massive size. A1/P1 commercial paper seems to be functioning reasonably well too, although the types not supported by the Fed are still under duress. Indeed, a Bloomberg story stresses the limited progress to date:
For all their efforts to liquefy credit markets, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury show no signs of ending the 18-month freeze, as evidenced by the unprecedented gap between what banks and the U.S. government pay to borrow money.The difference between the London interbank offered rate, or Libor, that banks charge each other for three-month loans and Treasury bill rates is six times wider than before markets began to seize up in June 2007. Even though the so-called TED spread narrowed to 1.82 percentage points yesterday from 4.64 percentage points in October, prices of contracts to borrow money months from now show investors don’t expect lending to recover until at least the second half of 2009.“If you take a full assessment of the credit markets, conditions have certainly eased from their worst, but they still are at extraordinary tight levels, which are far from normal,” said Michael Darda, the chief economist at MKM Partners LP in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Short-term funding spreads are all still very wide relative to historical norms. There is a massive pullback going on in the private sector.”Several experts also say they expect the new programs will help in six months, with no explanation as to why.Before we get to the conventional worry, that the Fed will be reluctant to put on the brakes soon enough once the economy starts to recover and wind up with pretty bad inflation. there are other issues that are getting short shrift.The first is that the prescription presupposes that the problem is a liquidity crisis. It does not take seriously the notion that at least part (if not all) of the problem is that a lot of people and companies took on far more debt than they can afford to repay. Anna Schwartz, who was co-author with Milton Friedman of A Monetary History of the US, which is one of the definitive works on the Great Depression. It argued the Fed erred fatally then by not providing enough liquidity, .Schwartz took the Fed to task:
Credit spreads -- the difference between what it costs the government to borrow and what private-sector borrowers must pay -- are at historic highs.......even though the Fed has flooded the credit markets with cash, spreads haven't budged because banks don't know who is still solvent and who is not. This uncertainty, says Ms. Schwartz, is "the basic problem in the credit market. Lending freezes up when lenders are uncertain that would-be borrowers have the resources to repay them. So to assume that the whole problem is inadequate liquidity bypasses the real issue....Today, the banks have a problem on the asset side of their ledgers -- "all these exotic securities that the market does not know how to value."...[H]e's shifted from trying to save the banking system to trying to save banks. These are not, Ms. Schwartz argues, the same thing. In fact, by keeping otherwise insolvent banks afloat, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have actually prolonged the crisis. "They should not be recapitalizing firms that should be shut down."But the problem goes much further than "toxic securities". Remember the premise of how the Fed's program will work. It will buy various instruments to force spreads lower so as to lower cost to borrowers. The implicit logic is that if you lower rates enough, voila, the debt service cost drops and formerly dud borrowers are now viable. But how do borrowers get their hands on these new, better rates? Quite a few borrowers are up to their eyeballs already in debt, and no way to refinance. Take credit cards. Supporting credit card receivables may allow credit card companies to stop slashing consumer credit lines (although both Meredith Whitney and apparently industry sponsored studies agree that banks will cut credit card availability further due to pro-consumer changes that will make the product less profitable). But it does nothing for consumers carrying balances (unless we see a revival of, say, six month teaser offers). Similarly, for homeowners to get relief, they have to refinance. Now for many, that's a no-brainer. But the ones with no or negative equity have no ready solution, plus starting in 2009 and accelerating in 2010 are the option ARM resets. Even with low rates, many of these mortgages have enough negative amortization that consumers will suffer serious payment shock.But then again, we are assuming that lenders have more or less responsible standards. The powers that be may decide to run roughshod over that. As Accrued Interest noted:
The big wild card is government policy. There is talk that Treasury might allow for no-appraisal refinancing, basically lending based on original loan-to-value as opposed to current loan-to-value. Debate the wisdom of this policy as you might, it would case a massive refinancing wave that would make 2003 look like a a splash in the kiddie pool.And in other areas, stress is starting to get serious in types of debt not yet on the Fed's target list. From Eric Hovde in Institutional Risk Analyst:
One of the problems that is rapidly approaching is commercial real estate mortgages. Res mortgage are the largest asset class in the banking system. Commercial real estate mortgages are the second largest asset class in the banking system. Unfortunately much of the underwriting sins that started in the res market in 2002 crept into the commercial sector as well by 2004 and 2005, plus you never dealt with the massive excess inventory surplus of commercial office space post the Internet boom. Because financing costs became so low, real estate values kept shooting up and builders kept building more. So you have a national vacancy rate of 15%, which is moving higher every quarter. I think you are going to see major losses coming through the commercial real estate books of the banking industry.Commercial real estate is not yet on Bernanke's list. Neither is debtor-in-possession financing, and we and others have lamented that the death of it means that companies that fail and would ordinarily be able to get through Chapter 11 and preserve most of their employment will instead liquidate.Consider further: the Fed assumes it has no constraints, because it can bloat its balance sheet to any size. But it has limits of staff, focus, expertise that restrict what it can do. For it to succeed in its aims, it is going to have to intervene on behalf of every type of troubled credit and make allocation decisions among them. Going on auto pilot (that is, dealing with the "presenting problems", the ones that surfaced first, means that they get priority when that might not be the best use of collective resources (it is not desirable from a competitive standpoint to bloat our housing sector back to status quo ante).Other observers were lukewarm. The Economist questioned whether the Fed could in fact influence credit spreads as much as it hoped to:
....the creation and expansion of an array of lending programmes....have so far no doubt kept the interest rates that are charged to actual private borrowers lower than they otherwise would be, the effect has been difficult to detect, and certainly smaller than what the Treasury achieved through direct injections of public capital into banks.In theory, purchases of longer-term securities could have more impact by pulling down longer-term interest rates. The 10-year Treasury yield, for example, is 2.3%, and the 30-year conventional mortgage-rate is around 5.5%. But whereas the Fed knows more or less just what it has to do to move short-term interest rates up or down, it is in uncharted territory on longer-term interest rates. Indeed, theory suggests that the purchases would have to be spectacularly large to affect such large, globally integrated markets.A senior Fed official, briefing reporters after the FOMC meeting, rejected the notion that the Fed was trying explicitly to target lower long-term rates, and rather framed the Fed’s new actions as an extension of previous efforts at restoring liquidity and normal trading conditions. The official said that yields on Fannie’s and Freddie’s MBS, despite the explicit support of the Treasury, are much higher than Treasury yields because of a lack of liquidity. The Fed can narrow that spread, he said, by providing investors with the confidence that a committed buyer is in the market.Um, MBS have traded at high spreads at least in part due to volatility, which makes the prepayment option worth more, hence higher spreads. No doubt the Fed parsed that bit out. But as I understand it, foreign central banks, which used to be big buyers of agencies, have switched to Treasuries, not comfortable about the lack of a "full faith and credit" guarantee. The statutory authority for the conservatorship extends through the end of 2009, although it is widely assumed it will be renewed, plus Fannie and Freddie are NOT full faith and credit obligations of the US (the Treasury has instead entered into a "no negative net worth" guarantee. The differences may seem semantic, but they are seen as serious in some quarters. If that is the real issue, more Fed buying will not entice the key buyers, central banks, back into the pool.Jim Hamilton is also doubtful, and suggests that the Fed is working at cross purposes:
Will that strategy succeed if we just do it on a sufficiently large scale? I'm not at all convinced that it would. Our standard finance models treat interest rate spreads as governed primarily by fundamentals such as default risk and only secondarily by the volume of buyers or sellers.But while the Fed may have little control over the spreads between different interest rates, it does have a significant degree of control over the inflation rate. The 1.7% drop in headline CPI during November, and the -10% annual deflation rate for the last 3 months, should not be viewed as welcome developments in an environment where our primary concern is whether individuals and institutions are going to repay their debts. The Fed should want to generate enough inflation to pull those short-term interest rates above the zero floor. But to target inflation, the Fed would take exactly the opposite strategy from that outlined by the senior Fed official above. The goal would be to get cash into circulation rather than be hoarded by banks, and have the Fed's assets be ones that could be readily liquidated if the inflation starts to come in higher than desired.
Fed May Buy Lower-Rated Assets to Ease Credit Crunch
By Craig Torres
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aTmjdz7_Zvno&refer=economy
Dec. 16 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve is open to the idea of buying lower-rated securities to ease the credit crunch, and plans to discuss possible strategies with President-elect Barack Obama’s Treasury.
Because the Fed must lend only against good collateral, the Treasury would need to take the credit risk of assets that are rated below AAA, a senior Fed official said today in a conference call with reporters in Washington.
Fed officials today shifted to using the size and composition of the central bank’s assets as the main tool of monetary policy after cutting the benchmark interest rate as low as zero. The senior official said that policy makers will make decisions on new lending programs or expanding existing ones based on how housing markets and the overall economy evolve.
The central bank can make a difference in credit markets where yields are higher than they would otherwise be because of a lack of liquidity due to the financial crisis, the official said on condition of anonymity.
The official said that the central bank will collaborate through the Federal Open Market Committee, which includes five presidents of Fed district banks, on policy decisions that grow the central bank’s balance sheet. The Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington has been the key decision-making body for emergency lending programs up to now.
Assets Soar
The central bank has expanded its balance sheet to $2.26 trillion from $868 billion in July 2007 through several facilities designed to ease liquidity in money markets and interbank lending markets.
The U.S. central bank has taken care to limit credit risk by financing only the highest-rated securities, having the Treasury post an equity stake that would take the first loss, or loaning less than the value of collateral when it is of less quality than U.S. Treasuries.
Fed lending programs could become larger, and even more targeted with the aid of the Treasury in the future, the official indicated. The approach will depend on discussions with the new Treasury team after Obama takes office, the person said.
Today’s press briefing by telephone set a new precedent for transparency, after decades of reluctance by Fed officials to explain their moves beyond the FOMC statement.
The official said the FOMC didn’t see deflation as an immediate risk, and added that the current policies of the U.S. central bank are distinct from Japanese-style quantitative easing in that the U.S. central bank is instead focusing on assets.
Asked why the Fed shouldn’t set a target for market rates such as mortgages, the official said that such a step could be dangerous because it might lead to the central bank owning a large part of the market. It’s better to set quantitative indicators and adjust the size of intended purchases as officials take in the markets’ responses, the official said said.
No determination has been made about what maturities of Treasury securities the Fed might buy, the official said when asked to define the FOMC’s reference today to possible purchases of “longer-term” Treasuries.
To contact the reporters on this story: Craig Torres in Washington at ctorres3@bloomberg.net;
Monday, December 15, 2008
Foreign Demand for U.S. Long-Term Assets Weakens
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aZlQVDJAUgoo&refer=economyBy John Brinsley
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- International demand for long-term U.S. financial assets weakened in October as foreign investors sold American stocks, corporate bonds and agency debt.
Total net purchases of long-term equities, notes and bonds slowed to a net $1.5 billion in October from $65.4 billion the previous month, the Treasury said today in Washington. Including short-term securities such as stock swaps, foreigners bought a net $286.3 billion, compared with net buying of $142.6 billion the previous month.
Foreigners sold a record amount of debt issued by mortgage- finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other agencies, offsetting demand for Treasuries. The rise in short-term holdings reflected investor demand for dollars as they sold longer-term assets, said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
“Global investors, whether in the U.S. or not, are selling U.S. assets whether they are stocks or bonds,” Woolfolk said. “The radical swing between the long-term and short-term data reflects investors scared of being long anything and getting into cash.”
Economists predicted international investors would buy a net $40 billion of long-term securities in September, based on the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg News survey.
Stock Selling
Investors abroad sold equities for the fourth month in five, reflecting the biggest decline in stocks in 21 years in October. The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate to 1 percent on Oct. 29, its second reduction in three weeks and cited downside risks to growth.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 17 percent in October, with the sell-off erasing more than $9.5 trillion in value of stocks worldwide. The dollar rose 4.9 percent in October, the third straight month of increases, according to a trade-weighted index of major currencies.
The Treasury’s reporting on long-term securities captures international purchases of government notes and bonds, stocks, corporate debt and securities issued by U.S. agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy mortgages.
Foreign purchases of Treasury notes and bonds increased by a net $34.6 billion, compared with purchases of $20.7 billion a month earlier. Net foreign official selling of Treasury bonds and notes totaled $1.1 billion, after net purchases of $4.9 billion the previous month.
Treasuries
Two-year securities returned 1.1 percent in October, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Treasury Master Index, for their fifth straight monthly advance.
Foreign demand for U.S. agency debt from companies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fell from a month earlier. Sales of long-term agency debt totaled a net $50.2 billion, compared with net purchases of $6.2 billion in September.
The Treasury’s figures include both agency debt and mortgage-backed securities and aren’t restricted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. Mortgage-backed securities of Ginnie Mae and corporate debt of the Federal Home Loan Bank System are also included in the report.
U.S. residents sold a net $36.3 billion of long-term foreign securities in October, compared with net sales of $35.4 billion a month earlier, the report showed.
China remained the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, after its holdings rose by $65.9 billion to $652.9 billion. Japan, the second-largest holder, increased its holdings by $12.3 billion to $585.5 billion.
U.K., Caribbean
The U.K., which through London acts as a transit point for international investors, especially those in the Middle East, bought $21.9 billion of Treasuries, bringing holdings to $360.2 billion.
Caribbean banking centers, where many hedge funds are based, expanded holdings by $34.2 billion to $219.5 billion, the report showed.
Some economists say the difference between the trade deficit and securities purchased by foreigners is an indicator of how easily the U.S. can finance its external obligations.
The U.S. trade gap unexpectedly widened 1.1 percent in October to $57.2 billion as faltering global demand led to a third consecutive drop in exports, the Commerce Department said on Dec. 11.
Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) -- International demand for long-term U.S. financial assets weakened in October as foreign investors sold American stocks, corporate bonds and agency debt.
Total net purchases of long-term equities, notes and bonds slowed to a net $1.5 billion in October from $65.4 billion the previous month, the Treasury said today in Washington. Including short-term securities such as stock swaps, foreigners bought a net $286.3 billion, compared with net buying of $142.6 billion the previous month.
Foreigners sold a record amount of debt issued by mortgage- finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other agencies, offsetting demand for Treasuries. The rise in short-term holdings reflected investor demand for dollars as they sold longer-term assets, said Michael Woolfolk, senior currency strategist at Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
“Global investors, whether in the U.S. or not, are selling U.S. assets whether they are stocks or bonds,” Woolfolk said. “The radical swing between the long-term and short-term data reflects investors scared of being long anything and getting into cash.”
Economists predicted international investors would buy a net $40 billion of long-term securities in September, based on the median of five estimates in a Bloomberg News survey.
Stock Selling
Investors abroad sold equities for the fourth month in five, reflecting the biggest decline in stocks in 21 years in October. The Federal Reserve cut its benchmark rate to 1 percent on Oct. 29, its second reduction in three weeks and cited downside risks to growth.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index fell 17 percent in October, with the sell-off erasing more than $9.5 trillion in value of stocks worldwide. The dollar rose 4.9 percent in October, the third straight month of increases, according to a trade-weighted index of major currencies.
The Treasury’s reporting on long-term securities captures international purchases of government notes and bonds, stocks, corporate debt and securities issued by U.S. agencies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which buy mortgages.
Foreign purchases of Treasury notes and bonds increased by a net $34.6 billion, compared with purchases of $20.7 billion a month earlier. Net foreign official selling of Treasury bonds and notes totaled $1.1 billion, after net purchases of $4.9 billion the previous month.
Treasuries
Two-year securities returned 1.1 percent in October, according to Merrill Lynch & Co.’s Treasury Master Index, for their fifth straight monthly advance.
Foreign demand for U.S. agency debt from companies such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac fell from a month earlier. Sales of long-term agency debt totaled a net $50.2 billion, compared with net purchases of $6.2 billion in September.
The Treasury’s figures include both agency debt and mortgage-backed securities and aren’t restricted to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds. Mortgage-backed securities of Ginnie Mae and corporate debt of the Federal Home Loan Bank System are also included in the report.
U.S. residents sold a net $36.3 billion of long-term foreign securities in October, compared with net sales of $35.4 billion a month earlier, the report showed.
China remained the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, after its holdings rose by $65.9 billion to $652.9 billion. Japan, the second-largest holder, increased its holdings by $12.3 billion to $585.5 billion.
U.K., Caribbean
The U.K., which through London acts as a transit point for international investors, especially those in the Middle East, bought $21.9 billion of Treasuries, bringing holdings to $360.2 billion.
Caribbean banking centers, where many hedge funds are based, expanded holdings by $34.2 billion to $219.5 billion, the report showed.
Some economists say the difference between the trade deficit and securities purchased by foreigners is an indicator of how easily the U.S. can finance its external obligations.
The U.S. trade gap unexpectedly widened 1.1 percent in October to $57.2 billion as faltering global demand led to a third consecutive drop in exports, the Commerce Department said on Dec. 11.
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Shinohara Says U.S. Must Cut Deficits to Help Dollar
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=a9HKdNUxMCbs&refer=economy
By Keiko Ujikane
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Japan's top currency official said the U.S. should work to reduce its deficits to ensure the world's reserve currency remains strong.
``We want the key currency to be stable. We want the key currency to be strong,'' Naoyuki Shinohara vice finance minister for international affairs, said at a conference in Sydney today. ``We do not want the key-currency country to continue running huge current-account deficits. We do not want the key-currency country to keep borrowing large amounts of money from abroad.''
Japan is defending the dollar in response to suggestions by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that there are alternatives. The U.S. currency fell to a 13-year low against the yen last month, reducing the value of Japan's U.S. government debt holdings and threatening exporters' earnings.
``Japan wants to avoid the yen's appreciation,'' which would hurt exporters and stocks, said Tomoko Fujii, head of economics and strategy at Bank of America in Tokyo. Japan's investment of its foreign reserves in U.S. debt is another reason, Fujii said.
``Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no other currency that can replace the U.S. dollar at least for the foreseeable future,'' Shinohara said, adding that ``global efforts'' are required to ensure the ``sustainability'' of the reserve system.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso said at last weekend's Group of 20 leadership summit in Washington that ``we need to support the dollar-centered currency system,'' while Sarkozy asked whether the euro or China's yuan should be discussed.
Root Causes
Japan held $573.2 billion of U.S. Treasuries in September, second only to China, the U.S. Treasury said yesterday.
Reducing U.S. deficits would also help to alleviate the lopsided trade flows that are one of the ``root causes of the current financial market turmoil,'' Shinohara said.
The U.S. needs to attract $2 billion a day from abroad to fund the deficit in its current account, the broadest measure of trade. The gap was the widest in a year in the second quarter.
Shinohara also said he was surprised at the scale of the yen carry trade's unwinding since the financial crisis began in August 2007 and intensified following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. two months ago.
``The size of carry trades was larger than we had expected,'' he said. ``The unwinding of carry trades was naturally larger'' and longer in duration than he anticipated.
Yen's Gains
Investors' retreat from the trades, in which they get funds cheaply in one country to buy assets where returns are higher, has caused the yen to strengthen against all 15 other major currencies this year.
The Japanese currency surged 36 percent against Australia's dollar since the end of September as investors sold Australian assets they had bought using money borrowed in yen. Japan's 0.3 percent key interest rate is the lowest in the industrialized world, and compares with Australia's 5.25 percent.
The yen has also gained 9.9 percent against the U.S. dollar this quarter and 23 percent versus the euro. It rose to 96.58 per U.S. dollar at 3:14 p.m. in Tokyo from 97.03 late yesterday.
The Australian dollar fell to 62.25 yen from 63.30 as the deepening global economic slump spurred Asian stock losses.
By Keiko Ujikane
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Japan's top currency official said the U.S. should work to reduce its deficits to ensure the world's reserve currency remains strong.
``We want the key currency to be stable. We want the key currency to be strong,'' Naoyuki Shinohara vice finance minister for international affairs, said at a conference in Sydney today. ``We do not want the key-currency country to continue running huge current-account deficits. We do not want the key-currency country to keep borrowing large amounts of money from abroad.''
Japan is defending the dollar in response to suggestions by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that there are alternatives. The U.S. currency fell to a 13-year low against the yen last month, reducing the value of Japan's U.S. government debt holdings and threatening exporters' earnings.
``Japan wants to avoid the yen's appreciation,'' which would hurt exporters and stocks, said Tomoko Fujii, head of economics and strategy at Bank of America in Tokyo. Japan's investment of its foreign reserves in U.S. debt is another reason, Fujii said.
``Fortunately or unfortunately, there's no other currency that can replace the U.S. dollar at least for the foreseeable future,'' Shinohara said, adding that ``global efforts'' are required to ensure the ``sustainability'' of the reserve system.
Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso said at last weekend's Group of 20 leadership summit in Washington that ``we need to support the dollar-centered currency system,'' while Sarkozy asked whether the euro or China's yuan should be discussed.
Root Causes
Japan held $573.2 billion of U.S. Treasuries in September, second only to China, the U.S. Treasury said yesterday.
Reducing U.S. deficits would also help to alleviate the lopsided trade flows that are one of the ``root causes of the current financial market turmoil,'' Shinohara said.
The U.S. needs to attract $2 billion a day from abroad to fund the deficit in its current account, the broadest measure of trade. The gap was the widest in a year in the second quarter.
Shinohara also said he was surprised at the scale of the yen carry trade's unwinding since the financial crisis began in August 2007 and intensified following the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. two months ago.
``The size of carry trades was larger than we had expected,'' he said. ``The unwinding of carry trades was naturally larger'' and longer in duration than he anticipated.
Yen's Gains
Investors' retreat from the trades, in which they get funds cheaply in one country to buy assets where returns are higher, has caused the yen to strengthen against all 15 other major currencies this year.
The Japanese currency surged 36 percent against Australia's dollar since the end of September as investors sold Australian assets they had bought using money borrowed in yen. Japan's 0.3 percent key interest rate is the lowest in the industrialized world, and compares with Australia's 5.25 percent.
The yen has also gained 9.9 percent against the U.S. dollar this quarter and 23 percent versus the euro. It rose to 96.58 per U.S. dollar at 3:14 p.m. in Tokyo from 97.03 late yesterday.
The Australian dollar fell to 62.25 yen from 63.30 as the deepening global economic slump spurred Asian stock losses.
Monday, November 17, 2008
专家：金融架构已受重创 美元未来或许会报复性大跌
http://www.6park.com/news/messages/2770.html 历史上每次货币乘数大降都与美国衰退相伴,本次看来也不例外。更重要的是,本次危机对金融结构冲击空前,未来货币乘数可能恢复到超过危机前的水平,美元也将出现大跌。 www.6park.com
全球金融大动荡,各国中央银行纷纷大举救市,尤其是美联储向金融市场注入大量流动性,但全球金融市场中的美元依然匮乏。 www.6park.com
各国为满足各种交易需要,纷纷抛售本国货币购买美元,从而导致近期美元暴涨。与美国贸易关系越紧密,外汇储备量并不充足的国家,货币贬值幅度就越大。日元和人民币得益于拥有大量的外汇储备,而在这场美元争夺战中能够保持币值的坚挺。 www.6park.com
我们通过分析发现,与美元暴涨一致的是美国货币乘数大幅下降,由9左右的正常水平迅速下降到6.8。因此,未来美元走势,关键取决于美国金融市场尤其是货币市场能否恢复,并使货币乘数恢复到正常水平。 www.6park.com
我们认为,鉴于危机还在不断深化,货币乘数短期恢复可能性不大,美元仍有一定上涨空间。美联储与各国央行货币互换措施只能暂时缓解外汇市场的大幅波动。 www.6park.com
如果次贷危机导致深度金融调整,极可能导致美国金融结构回到以商业银行为主的时代,货币乘数恢复到的水平可能不只是之前的8.5,而是上世纪80年代的12左右。 www.6park.com
而在危机和货币乘数下降期间,美联储向金融市场释放的大量流动性,在货币乘数恢复甚至提高之时,则可能成为未来美元泛滥的源头,美元长期内很可能再次进入贬值通道。 www.6park.com
货币乘数大降 www.6park.com
我们分析发现,伴随着金融危机深化,尤其是贝尔斯登倒闭之后的2008年4月开始,美国货币乘数一改2003年稳步上升态势（从8.5上升至9.5）,开始下降,尤其在9月中旬后不到一个月里出现罕见萎缩,从9降至6.8。 www.6park.com
与此同时,今年以来基础货币一直稳定在8300亿美元的水平上,9月中旬以来则大幅加快,一个月内增加2000亿美元,这才勉强把M2维持在往常的水平。 www.6park.com
如果我们仔细观察就会发现,9月份以来美联储密集政策无不是针对货币市场萎缩。一方面,美联储10月8日和29日连续下调基准利率达到100个基点,试图降低货币市场借贷成本。另一方面,10月7日购买商业票据机制（CPFF）,10月21日建立货币市场投资者融资机制（MMIFF）,直接干预货币市场借贷,并加大了基础货币投放量。 www.6park.com
美元反弹俑者 www.6park.com
上述分析,我们提到美联储通过投放大量基础货币,降低利率等一系列措施来应对美国货币市场萎缩和流动性缺乏。全球其他各国能否采取其他同样措施缓解本国去杠杆化带来的流动性缺乏呢？ www.6park.com
我们注意到,美元作为国际货币与其他货币有本质差别,国际贸易和金融交易活动都依赖于美元计价和美元头寸作为交易保证。由于美元货币乘数下降带来的全球美元缺乏,是其他国家央行无法自行解决的。 www.6park.com
于是,各国被迫纷纷卖出本币,买入美元。我们发现,凡是与美国有着密切贸易关系的国家,对于美元需求量较大,本币贬值幅度就越大。 www.6park.com
欧元具有一定储备货币职能和国际计价功能,跌幅相对小些,欧元和英镑兑美元近期贬值近20%。而韩国、墨西哥等与美国有着巨大贸易额的新兴市场国家货币跌幅就要大得多。墨西哥比索、澳元、加元都跌了30%左右。 www.6park.com
目前美联储已和10多个国家签订了货币互换与远期协议,其目的是为了使各国能通过非市场化方式获得美元。这在一定程度上可以稳定外汇市场的剧烈波动,上周美元就出现一定回调。 www.6park.com
但美国两个最大顺差国——中国和日本的货币却在上涨,日元兑美元却上涨了11%,人民币兑美元的名义汇率也保持基本稳定,人民币有效汇率也是上涨的。难道日本和中国不需要美元？ www.6park.com
对日元上涨,市场普遍认为,原因在于日元套利交易平仓。从历史经验来看,这确实是日元上涨的一个重要原因。不过,如果我们把日元上涨和人民币同时坚挺联系在一起,就会发现中国和日本是外汇储备最多国家,而且远远多于其他国家外汇储备的量。 www.6park.com
这就使得他们在如今美元匮乏阶段,不需要大量抛售本币来购买美元。这也是美联储对其他一些主要贸易伙伴都进行货币互换和远期协议,而没有对中国进行类似协议的重要原因。 www.6park.com
货币乘数超反弹 www.6park.com
在近30年来美国货币乘数走势中,我们发现,短期内货币乘数大幅下滑只在近期和9•11事件期间出现过。在上世纪90年代初,货币乘数出现持续的长时间下滑,由原来的12下降到了8.5左右。 www.6park.com
这一过程中,美国金融市场的一个重要变化是投资银行的逐渐兴起,它们打破传统的以商业银行为主的金融市场结构。金融市场结构调整导致以M2为基准的货币乘数下降,随后10多年里,美国货币乘数都维持在8.5左右的水平。 www.6park.com
我们还发现,美国历史上每一次货币乘数下降,几乎都与美国经济衰退相伴。1990~1991年,货币乘数持续下降时,美国GDP负增长近1年半;9•11期间,货币乘数短期下滑,美国也出现了衰退;如今三季度GDP为-0.3%,也基本表明美国进入了衰退。 www.6park.com
我们认为,本次危机必然导致美国金融体系深度调整,随着美国各大投资银行破产,美国金融体系很可能会回到以商业银行为主的模式。如果对比美国上世纪90年代以前的状况,深度金融结构调整会导致货币乘数发生根本性变化。美国货币乘数在危机后很可能会恢复到比原来更高水平。 www.6park.com
美元长期看贬 www.6park.com
那么,美国货币乘数何时能恢复？在9•11事件期间,美国货币乘数下降之后很快就恢复了,对当时美元汇率的影响也就不大。而如今危机的冲击显然是罕见的,货币乘数恢复情况,并非想象的那样乐观,虽然美联储已经做出了各种改善货币市场措施。 www.6park.com
正因为此,我们认为,在短期内,美元还有上涨空间,但货币乘数恢复之后的美元需求将会大降,这也为未来美元贬值埋下隐患。 www.6park.com
全球金融大动荡,各国中央银行纷纷大举救市,尤其是美联储向金融市场注入大量流动性,但全球金融市场中的美元依然匮乏。 www.6park.com
各国为满足各种交易需要,纷纷抛售本国货币购买美元,从而导致近期美元暴涨。与美国贸易关系越紧密,外汇储备量并不充足的国家,货币贬值幅度就越大。日元和人民币得益于拥有大量的外汇储备,而在这场美元争夺战中能够保持币值的坚挺。 www.6park.com
我们通过分析发现,与美元暴涨一致的是美国货币乘数大幅下降,由9左右的正常水平迅速下降到6.8。因此,未来美元走势,关键取决于美国金融市场尤其是货币市场能否恢复,并使货币乘数恢复到正常水平。 www.6park.com
我们认为,鉴于危机还在不断深化,货币乘数短期恢复可能性不大,美元仍有一定上涨空间。美联储与各国央行货币互换措施只能暂时缓解外汇市场的大幅波动。 www.6park.com
如果次贷危机导致深度金融调整,极可能导致美国金融结构回到以商业银行为主的时代,货币乘数恢复到的水平可能不只是之前的8.5,而是上世纪80年代的12左右。 www.6park.com
而在危机和货币乘数下降期间,美联储向金融市场释放的大量流动性,在货币乘数恢复甚至提高之时,则可能成为未来美元泛滥的源头,美元长期内很可能再次进入贬值通道。 www.6park.com
货币乘数大降 www.6park.com
我们分析发现,伴随着金融危机深化,尤其是贝尔斯登倒闭之后的2008年4月开始,美国货币乘数一改2003年稳步上升态势（从8.5上升至9.5）,开始下降,尤其在9月中旬后不到一个月里出现罕见萎缩,从9降至6.8。 www.6park.com
与此同时,今年以来基础货币一直稳定在8300亿美元的水平上,9月中旬以来则大幅加快,一个月内增加2000亿美元,这才勉强把M2维持在往常的水平。 www.6park.com
如果我们仔细观察就会发现,9月份以来美联储密集政策无不是针对货币市场萎缩。一方面,美联储10月8日和29日连续下调基准利率达到100个基点,试图降低货币市场借贷成本。另一方面,10月7日购买商业票据机制（CPFF）,10月21日建立货币市场投资者融资机制（MMIFF）,直接干预货币市场借贷,并加大了基础货币投放量。 www.6park.com
美元反弹俑者 www.6park.com
上述分析,我们提到美联储通过投放大量基础货币,降低利率等一系列措施来应对美国货币市场萎缩和流动性缺乏。全球其他各国能否采取其他同样措施缓解本国去杠杆化带来的流动性缺乏呢？ www.6park.com
我们注意到,美元作为国际货币与其他货币有本质差别,国际贸易和金融交易活动都依赖于美元计价和美元头寸作为交易保证。由于美元货币乘数下降带来的全球美元缺乏,是其他国家央行无法自行解决的。 www.6park.com
于是,各国被迫纷纷卖出本币,买入美元。我们发现,凡是与美国有着密切贸易关系的国家,对于美元需求量较大,本币贬值幅度就越大。 www.6park.com
欧元具有一定储备货币职能和国际计价功能,跌幅相对小些,欧元和英镑兑美元近期贬值近20%。而韩国、墨西哥等与美国有着巨大贸易额的新兴市场国家货币跌幅就要大得多。墨西哥比索、澳元、加元都跌了30%左右。 www.6park.com
目前美联储已和10多个国家签订了货币互换与远期协议,其目的是为了使各国能通过非市场化方式获得美元。这在一定程度上可以稳定外汇市场的剧烈波动,上周美元就出现一定回调。 www.6park.com
但美国两个最大顺差国——中国和日本的货币却在上涨,日元兑美元却上涨了11%,人民币兑美元的名义汇率也保持基本稳定,人民币有效汇率也是上涨的。难道日本和中国不需要美元？ www.6park.com
对日元上涨,市场普遍认为,原因在于日元套利交易平仓。从历史经验来看,这确实是日元上涨的一个重要原因。不过,如果我们把日元上涨和人民币同时坚挺联系在一起,就会发现中国和日本是外汇储备最多国家,而且远远多于其他国家外汇储备的量。 www.6park.com
这就使得他们在如今美元匮乏阶段,不需要大量抛售本币来购买美元。这也是美联储对其他一些主要贸易伙伴都进行货币互换和远期协议,而没有对中国进行类似协议的重要原因。 www.6park.com
货币乘数超反弹 www.6park.com
在近30年来美国货币乘数走势中,我们发现,短期内货币乘数大幅下滑只在近期和9•11事件期间出现过。在上世纪90年代初,货币乘数出现持续的长时间下滑,由原来的12下降到了8.5左右。 www.6park.com
这一过程中,美国金融市场的一个重要变化是投资银行的逐渐兴起,它们打破传统的以商业银行为主的金融市场结构。金融市场结构调整导致以M2为基准的货币乘数下降,随后10多年里,美国货币乘数都维持在8.5左右的水平。 www.6park.com
我们还发现,美国历史上每一次货币乘数下降,几乎都与美国经济衰退相伴。1990~1991年,货币乘数持续下降时,美国GDP负增长近1年半;9•11期间,货币乘数短期下滑,美国也出现了衰退;如今三季度GDP为-0.3%,也基本表明美国进入了衰退。 www.6park.com
我们认为,本次危机必然导致美国金融体系深度调整,随着美国各大投资银行破产,美国金融体系很可能会回到以商业银行为主的模式。如果对比美国上世纪90年代以前的状况,深度金融结构调整会导致货币乘数发生根本性变化。美国货币乘数在危机后很可能会恢复到比原来更高水平。 www.6park.com
美元长期看贬 www.6park.com
那么,美国货币乘数何时能恢复？在9•11事件期间,美国货币乘数下降之后很快就恢复了,对当时美元汇率的影响也就不大。而如今危机的冲击显然是罕见的,货币乘数恢复情况,并非想象的那样乐观,虽然美联储已经做出了各种改善货币市场措施。 www.6park.com
正因为此,我们认为,在短期内,美元还有上涨空间,但货币乘数恢复之后的美元需求将会大降,这也为未来美元贬值埋下隐患。 www.6park.com
Friday, November 14, 2008
Euro Area Suffers First Recession; `Worst' May Follow
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=a1L1PCf2mE_E&refer=economy By Fergal O'Brien and Simon Kennedy
Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The European economy is down and may be out for some time.
After falling into its first recession since the introduction of the single currency almost a decade ago, economists at Bank of America Corp., Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. say the euro-area economy will worsen in the current quarter and growth is unlikely to return before the end of next year.
``The worst is yet to come,'' said Gilles Moec, an economist at Bank of America in London and a former official at the Bank of France.
The downturn leaves policy makers scrambling to limit its depth. The European Central Bank is set to cut interest rates again next month, having raised them as recently as July, while governments are lining up fiscal stimulus programs. Their efforts may come too late to prevent the recovery from lagging behind that of the U.S.
Gross domestic product in the 15 euro nations shrank 0.2 percent for the second straight quarter in the three months through September, the European Union's Luxembourg-based statistics office said today. Germany, Ireland and Italy are now suffering a recession, while Spain's economy contracted for the first time in 15 years and the Netherlands and Portugal stagnated. The French economy unexpectedly expanded.
Multiple Shocks
Europe's economy is suffering from multiple shocks, including the euro's rise to a record $1.60 in mid-summer and oil's jump to an unprecedented $147 a barrel in July. The cost of credit then surged globally after the September collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., forcing banks to cut lending to businesses and households and shattering demand for euro-area exports from America to Hungary.
The ECB last week lowered its benchmark rate by a half- point to 3.25 percent, the second such reduction in a month. As inflation ebbs, policy makers are now signaling further cuts when they meet in Frankfurt on Dec. 4.
Economists at Citigroup expect a reduction of at least 75 basis points next month, while those at JPMorgan Chase & Co. today revised their forecast to show the main rate reaching 1 percent next year, the lowest since the ECB took the reins of monetary policy a decade ago.
The ECB is still cutting too slowly and the recession proves the bank was wrong to raise rates in July, even though inflation was at its strongest in almost 16 years at the time, said Marco Annunziata, chief economist at Unicredit MIB in Milan.
`Painful Proof'
``We now have painful proof that there has been an excessive degree of complacency, which implies that the policy response in Europe is well behind the curve,'' he said.
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Frankfurt today that the central bank's ``considerable'' policy action, which extends to lending cash to banks, would help restore sentiment in the economy. ``Confidence will grow back,'' he said.
Governments that once bet their economy would avoid a recession are also looking to act although their ability to do so is limited by EU budget-deficit limits with Italy and France among those already running shortfalls. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that she is considering boosting her 50 billion-euro ($63.3 billion) stimulus program.
Merkel and other leaders from the world's largest nations meet in Washington today to discuss increased government spending and other ways to stop the rot. Retail sales in the U.S. dropped in October by the most on record as the economy headed for its worst slump in decades, data showed today.
Sluggish Reaction
The sluggish reaction of European policy makers means growth won't return to the euro region until the final three months of next year, said Thomas Mayer, chief European economist at Deutsche Bank. That is two quarters later than what he expects in the U.S. where the Federal Reserve has already cut its benchmark interest rate to 1 percent.
``Policy in the euro area has been less flexible than in the U.S.,'' said Mayer. ``Things aren't going to get much better next year in Europe.''
Europe's downturn surprised even economists who in July saw just a 35 percent chance of a recession occurring in 2008, according to the median of 26 forecasts. Policy makers expressed confidence earlier in the year that the economy would dodge a recession even as the U.S. faltered. The European Commission began the year predicting growth of 1.5 percent in 2009, only to cut its forecast to just 0.1 percent as the financial crisis escalated.
European car sales plunged almost 15 percent in October, the sixth straight monthly decline, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association said today. Bulgari SpA, the world's third-largest jeweler, today scrapped its forecast for increased 2008 profit as consumers curb purchases of its luxury products, while companies including German chemicals supplier BASF SE and French tire maker Michelin & Cie. are cutting output and jobs
Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The European economy is down and may be out for some time.
After falling into its first recession since the introduction of the single currency almost a decade ago, economists at Bank of America Corp., Deutsche Bank AG and Citigroup Inc. say the euro-area economy will worsen in the current quarter and growth is unlikely to return before the end of next year.
``The worst is yet to come,'' said Gilles Moec, an economist at Bank of America in London and a former official at the Bank of France.
The downturn leaves policy makers scrambling to limit its depth. The European Central Bank is set to cut interest rates again next month, having raised them as recently as July, while governments are lining up fiscal stimulus programs. Their efforts may come too late to prevent the recovery from lagging behind that of the U.S.
Gross domestic product in the 15 euro nations shrank 0.2 percent for the second straight quarter in the three months through September, the European Union's Luxembourg-based statistics office said today. Germany, Ireland and Italy are now suffering a recession, while Spain's economy contracted for the first time in 15 years and the Netherlands and Portugal stagnated. The French economy unexpectedly expanded.
Multiple Shocks
Europe's economy is suffering from multiple shocks, including the euro's rise to a record $1.60 in mid-summer and oil's jump to an unprecedented $147 a barrel in July. The cost of credit then surged globally after the September collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., forcing banks to cut lending to businesses and households and shattering demand for euro-area exports from America to Hungary.
The ECB last week lowered its benchmark rate by a half- point to 3.25 percent, the second such reduction in a month. As inflation ebbs, policy makers are now signaling further cuts when they meet in Frankfurt on Dec. 4.
Economists at Citigroup expect a reduction of at least 75 basis points next month, while those at JPMorgan Chase & Co. today revised their forecast to show the main rate reaching 1 percent next year, the lowest since the ECB took the reins of monetary policy a decade ago.
The ECB is still cutting too slowly and the recession proves the bank was wrong to raise rates in July, even though inflation was at its strongest in almost 16 years at the time, said Marco Annunziata, chief economist at Unicredit MIB in Milan.
`Painful Proof'
``We now have painful proof that there has been an excessive degree of complacency, which implies that the policy response in Europe is well behind the curve,'' he said.
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet said in an interview with Bloomberg Television in Frankfurt today that the central bank's ``considerable'' policy action, which extends to lending cash to banks, would help restore sentiment in the economy. ``Confidence will grow back,'' he said.
Governments that once bet their economy would avoid a recession are also looking to act although their ability to do so is limited by EU budget-deficit limits with Italy and France among those already running shortfalls. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this week that she is considering boosting her 50 billion-euro ($63.3 billion) stimulus program.
Merkel and other leaders from the world's largest nations meet in Washington today to discuss increased government spending and other ways to stop the rot. Retail sales in the U.S. dropped in October by the most on record as the economy headed for its worst slump in decades, data showed today.
Sluggish Reaction
The sluggish reaction of European policy makers means growth won't return to the euro region until the final three months of next year, said Thomas Mayer, chief European economist at Deutsche Bank. That is two quarters later than what he expects in the U.S. where the Federal Reserve has already cut its benchmark interest rate to 1 percent.
``Policy in the euro area has been less flexible than in the U.S.,'' said Mayer. ``Things aren't going to get much better next year in Europe.''
Europe's downturn surprised even economists who in July saw just a 35 percent chance of a recession occurring in 2008, according to the median of 26 forecasts. Policy makers expressed confidence earlier in the year that the economy would dodge a recession even as the U.S. faltered. The European Commission began the year predicting growth of 1.5 percent in 2009, only to cut its forecast to just 0.1 percent as the financial crisis escalated.
European car sales plunged almost 15 percent in October, the sixth straight monthly decline, the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association said today. Bulgari SpA, the world's third-largest jeweler, today scrapped its forecast for increased 2008 profit as consumers curb purchases of its luxury products, while companies including German chemicals supplier BASF SE and French tire maker Michelin & Cie. are cutting output and jobs
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
美国救市资金仅剩600亿美元 众巨头濒临破产
http://www.6park.com/news/messages/1976.html
据香港商报报道，随著愈来愈陷入困境的公司暗示需要得到资助，美国政府的金融体系救市计划也面临著巨大压力，资金捉襟见肘。据知情人士透露，财长保尔森计划本周后期公布救市计划的最新进展情况，并可能会专注于资本投资。 www.6park.com
获美国政府拯救的房贷巨擘房利美第三季度共亏损了290亿美元(约2,260亿港元)，并表示其现金消耗速度非常快，可能在年底前需要财政部再注入现金。另一个显示金融公司所面临困境的迹象是，美国运通公司转变为银行控股公司的申请迅速获得了联邦储备局的批准。此举为这家信用卡巨头从财政部获得纳税人资金的注入铺平了道路。 www.6park.com
一直在积极游说政府资助的通用汽车公司亦称，如果其财务状况不能保持稳定，可能会在年底前无法偿还部分到期债券。仅剩600亿美元 www.6park.com
这种此起彼伏要求资助的呼声可能给布什政府带来扩大“问题资产救助计划”(TARP)范围的压力。这项7,000亿美元的计划是在10月份获国会通过后，财政部不理国会极力游说，一直拒绝向美国汽车制造商开放TARP。 www.6park.com
在国会按照TARP计划批准的首批3,500亿美元(约2.7万亿港元)资金中，财政部目前还剩下600亿美元(4,680亿港元)。面对愈来愈多公司财困，保尔森向国会申请另一半救助资金的可能性大大提高。消息人士透露，保尔森计划本周后期公布救市计划最新进展，可能专注于资本投资。 www.6park.com
另外，美国经济陷入危机，但政府拍卖政府债券预期将会吸引大量需求，财政部本周将出售550亿美元(约4,290亿港元)政府债券，为救市措施融资。 www.6park.com
坏消息频传 美股再挫 油价创20个月来新低 www.6park.com
导读： www.6park.com
美企频传坏消息 金融危机冲击实体经济 www.6park.com
快讯：纽约股市11日继续下滑 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低 www.6park.com
快讯：11日纽商所12月黄金期货价格下跌1.8% www.6park.com
国际油价11日创出20个月来新低 www.6park.com
美企频传坏消息 金融危机冲击实体经济 www.6park.com
通用面临破产危险 AIG爆出巨亏 电子零售商申请破产保护 www.6park.com
美车企巨头通用汽车公司(GM)继上周五发布巨额亏损后，周一股价盘中一度狂跌31%，到达62年低点。通用汽车在一份提交给政府的文件中承认，如果在今年年底前无法稳定其日益恶化的财务状况，它很可能被迫破产。危急关头，通用汽车步步紧逼联邦政府要求其出手金援，该公司董事长兼首席执行长瓦格纳表示，"通用汽车需要在当选总统奥巴马1月20日就任前获得财务上的帮助"。 www.6park.com
通用汽车财政恶化并不是一个个案。最近一段时间，美国企业界频频传出坏消息。近期集中爆出巨额亏损的还有美金融巨头美国国际集团(AIG)以及房贷巨头房利美；昨日美第二大电子产品零售商电路城(Circuit City)申请破产保护；华尔街也在酝酿涉及7万人的大手笔裁员。分析人士指出，来自金融业和企业界的糟糕消息凸显出这场危机的范围正不断扩大，"此次危机的首批受害者是银行和保险公司，如今正扩大到全球经济的其他领域"。 www.6park.com
通用乞求政府金援 www.6park.com
周一通用汽车股价重挫至62年低点，反映了外界对这家汽车厂商可能会陷入现金流枯竭、被迫申请破产保护境地的担忧。通用汽车日前表示，一旦违反债务合约，债权方有权要求其偿还60亿美元债务，这个金额可能会使这家汽车厂商不得不申请破产保护。 www.6park.com
德意志银行的分析师拉奇在一份报告中写道，如果没有政府的帮助，通用汽车的崩溃将不可避免，它还可能导致汽车厂商、供应商、零售商以及美国经济其他领域面临难以克服的系统性风险。 www.6park.com
周一，通用汽车和同情其境遇的国会议员们大力呼吁联邦政府，要求其出手救助。国会议员们建议，作为对救助的回报，政府可以入股这家汽车厂商、限制其高管薪酬，并要求通用汽车加快推出节油型汽车的步伐。 www.6park.com
瓦格纳对行业刊物《汽车新闻》表示，通用汽车需要在当选总统奥巴马1月20日就任前获得财务上的帮助，但他拒绝以辞职作为获得救助的交换条件。 www.6park.com
在华盛顿，密歇根州国会代表致函美国财政部长保尔森，敦促后者从7000亿美元金融机构救助资金中拿出一部分为三家美国汽车巨头提供低息贷款。布什政府迄今尚未同意上述提议，并指出已经通过能源部负责的一个项目向汽车行业提供了250亿美元来提振节能型汽车的生产。奥巴马虽已表示支持救助汽车厂商，但尚未公布具体措施。 www.6park.com
通用汽车股价周一在纽约证交所收低1美元至3.36，此前一度下滑至3.02美元，为1946年以来最低。巴克莱将通用汽车的评等由"中性"调降至"减持"，并将其目标股价由4美元调降至1美元。该行称，通用汽车到2008年底的现金水平预期为133亿美元，到明年第一季度将低于110亿-140 亿美元的最低额度。尽管政府在财政上的救助能帮助通用走出困境，但巴克莱分析师约翰逊在研究报告中称，这将明显稀释通用汽车的股权。德意志银行将通用汽车的评等由"持有"调降至"卖出"，并将其股权估值由4美元调降至零，称通用汽车12月以后可能很难为其运作募集到资金。 www.6park.com
上周五，通用汽车公布，第三财季亏损25亿美元。该公司还表示，当季使用流动资金69亿美元，现金储备因此下降至162亿美元。通用汽车称，至少需要110亿美元至140亿美元来维持业务运转。 www.6park.com
与通用并称为"底特律三巨头"的福特和克莱斯勒同样现金流告急，同时向政府乞求援助，希望在国会此前拨款250亿美元的基础上再提供250亿美元低息政府贷款。 www.6park.com
金融巨头频报巨亏 www.6park.com
处于重灾区的金融行业频频爆出巨额亏损。 www.6park.com
10日，美国住房抵押贷款融资巨头房利美发布其被政府接管以来的首份季报。报告显示，今年第三季度该公司净亏损290亿美元，创年内美国各公司亏损额之最。 www.6park.com
财报显示，房利美第三季度的信贷损失达到92亿美元，远高于去年同期的12亿美元。截至9月底，其资产净值已经从去年年底的441亿美元骤降至94亿美元。 www.6park.com
房利美预计，其资产净值或将在下个季度末由正转负，从而不得不寻求政府资助。该公司称，截至11月7日，其并未动用任何政府援助。 www.6park.com
美国财政部9月初宣布接管陷入困境的房利美和房地美，并承诺如有需要，财政部将向这两家机构分别注入高达1000亿美元的资金。 www.6park.com
但房利美表示，如果公司进一步出现重大亏损，或者没有能力出售那些无担保债务，那么财政部承诺的1000亿美元注资有可能不足以使公司避免破产命运。 www.6park.com
同一天，美国国际集团(AIG)发布财报说，今年第三季度该集团亏损245亿美元，而去年同期为盈利30.9亿美元。其中，信贷违约互换(CDS)业务当季的资产减记额超过70亿美元。 www.6park.com
在美国国际集团(AIG)公布巨额季度亏损后，美国政府及美联储将对AIG的救援金额提高至1500亿美元以上。 www.6park.com
由于次贷危机导致AIG陷于破产边缘，美联储9月份宣布向该集团提供850亿美元紧急贷款，同时美国政府获得AIG近80%的股份，正式接管这家全球最大的保险公司。 www.6park.com
美电子零售商申请破产 www.6park.com
临近年底消费旺季，原本应该是零售商们大赚一笔的好机会，但就在周一，美国第二大消费电子零售商电路城(Circuit City)申请破产保护，成为自2002年凯马特以来根据破产法第11章申请破产保护的最大零售商。自2007年1月以来，该公司股价已缩水99%，目前股价不到50美分，周一该股在纽约证交所停牌。 www.6park.com
当天，总部位于弗吉尼亚的"电路城"公司根据破产法第11章向当地法院申请破产保护。在向法院提交的破产申请中，公司首席财务官布鲁斯·贝赞可承认，供货商信心衰减、流动性问题以及全球金融危机是导致公司破产的主要原因。他说，如果问题不能得到及时解决，公司将无法获得供货来满足年末消费旺季的销售，这将对公司乃至股东造成损害。 www.6park.com
不过，业内人士认为销售不畅以及公司流动资金短缺无法解决商店租金问题是导致其申请破产的主要原因。 www.6park.com
截至今年8月31日，拥有59年历史的"电路城"公司的财务报表显示公司资产为34亿美元，债务为23.20亿美元。申请破产后，公司获准暂停支付150家商店的租金，这些费用大约为4000万美元。 www.6park.com
在此前一周，"电路城"曾宣布将在年底前关闭旗下五分之一(共155家)的连锁店，同时裁员7300人。 www.6park.com
分析人士认为，如果"电路城"能够处理好与供货商关系以及商店用地租赁等事宜，公司最早有望于明年夏天走出破产保护，最终决定是否继续独立运作或被人收购。此前，该公司的主要对手--美国第一大消费电子产品零售商"百思买"曾表示有意收购对手。不过，由于"电路城"为了缓解危机可能在圣诞购物旺季期间甩卖存货，"百思买"的销售情况将受到影响，公司前景尚存变数。 www.6park.com
华尔街近7万人将失业 www.6park.com
目前正值下一年财务预算制定之时，受金融市场动荡及2009年经济形势可能进一步恶化的影响，华尔街将展开新一轮裁员风暴。预计金融部门将裁掉7万人，而据估计在之前全球金融行业已裁员15万人之多。 www.6park.com
预计新一轮裁员将主要集中于投资银行业和证券交易部门，而上述部门已经经历了资本市场几乎冻结及破产收购等一系列事件的打击。 www.6park.com
银行业的持续萎缩将进一步加剧纽约、伦敦和香港等全球金融中心的灾难，他们的税收大幅缩水，同时对当地的房地产市场也形成极大压力。"第四季度破坏性非常巨大，"Oppenheimer分析师梅雷狄斯·惠特尼表示，"许多业务集中于资本市场的机构裁员比例将达25%至30%。" www.6park.com
上周，高盛启动裁员10%的计划。据彭博数据，美林已裁员5700名，占员工总数近9%，摩根士丹利已裁员4400名。据估计，此前在贝尔斯登和雷曼兄弟倒闭后，已有2.3万员工失去工作。花旗集团也正拟定新一轮裁员名单。 www.6park.com
多数银行拒绝就其裁员计划置评，表示迄今尚未最终敲定。但业内人士表示，未来将出现更多裁员，因金融业第四季度收入继续下滑，同时几乎没有显示出任何明年将出现好转的迹象。一位公司高层表示，根据公司的估计，美国金融业下一轮裁员的数额估计超过7万人。据美国联邦储备署的最新一项研究显示，今后几年内，仅纽约市的金融行业将裁减5.5万-7.8万个职位。 www.6park.com
新华网：由于企业盈利下滑幅度超过市场预期，纽约股市11日继续下滑，三大指数跌幅均在2%左右，其中道琼斯指数下跌超过170点 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低，有关全球经济放缓的担忧拖累银行及石油类股下挫。英国富时100指数跌3.6%，德国DAX 30指数跌5.3%，国CAC-40指数跌4.8%。 www.6park.com
综合外电11月11日报道，欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低，主要因为有关全球经济放缓的担忧拖累银行及石油类股下挫。 www.6park.com
道琼斯斯托克600指数跌4%，至212.17点，连续两个交易日的涨势由此中止。英国富时100指数跌3.6%，至4,246.69点。德国DAX 30指数跌5.3%，至4,761.58点。法国CAC-40指数跌4.8%，至3,336.41点。 www.6park.com
欧洲市场中，大型油气股跌幅居前，一改周一上涨态势，原因是在有关经济放缓将抑制大宗商品需求的担忧拖累下，原油期货跌破每桶60美元。BG Group跌11%；道达尔(Total)跌7.2%。 www.6park.com
11日公布的疲弱经济数据显示，英国10月份房屋销售量跌至英国皇家特许测量师学会(Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors)自1978年开始统计以来的最低水平。另据英国零售商协会(British Retail Consortium)的数据，英国10月份零售额下挫2.2%。 www.6park.com
德国方面，11月份ZEW经济预期指数从10月份的-63点升至-53.5点，不过仍远低于历史平均水平27点。 www.6park.com
银行类股受到冲击，意大利的情况尤为明显，其中，Intesa Sanpaolo收盘下挫近17%，UniCredit收盘跌11%。 www.6park.com
西班牙国家银行(Banco Santander, STD) 和汇丰控股(HSBC Holdings, HBC)继续延续10日跌势，分别下挫7.1%和5.3%。 www.6park.com
美林(Merrill Lynch)和瑞士信贷(Credit Suisse)均下调了对汇丰控股的评级，而西班牙国家银行的评级也遭到WestLB下调。 www.6park.com
无线电信巨头沃达丰空中通讯公司(Vodafone Group, VOD)涨6.2%，该公司上调本财年现金流预期及宣布10亿英镑成本节省计划受到投资者欢迎。 www.6park.com
快讯：11日纽商所12月黄金期货价格下跌1.8% www.6park.com
新华网快讯：11日纽约商品交易所12月份交割的黄金期货下跌13.7美元，报收于每盎司732.8美元，跌幅为1.8%。(新华网) www.6park.com
国际油价11日创出20个月来新低 www.6park.com
新华网纽约11月11日电(记者 杨蕾)对世界经济衰退影响能源消费的担心使国际油价11日再度大幅下跌，纽约市场油价收盘价跌破每桶60美元，创出20个月来新低。 www.6park.com
当天，纽约商品交易所12月份交货的轻质原油期货价格下跌3.08美元，收于每桶59.33美元，是自2007年3月以来的最低收盘价格。伦敦国际石油交易所12月份交货的北海布伦特原油期货价格下跌3.37美元，收于每桶55.71美元。 www.6park.com
油价11日创出新低的最主要原因仍然是投资者担心全球经济衰退抑制能源消费。当天，由于企业盈利下滑幅度超过市场预期，纽约股市三大指数跌幅均在2%左右，加剧市场对美国经济衰退情况的担忧。 www.6park.com
此外，由于有关全球经济的负面消息不断出现，当天美元在避险情绪支持下对多数主要货币上涨，被市场作为对冲美元贬值风险的原油期货也随之下跌。 www.6park.com
11日，纽商所12月份交货的汽油期货价格每加仑下跌6.11美分，收于1.3059美元。12月份交货的取暖油期货价格每加仑下跌7.1美分，收于1.9290美元。12月份交货的天然气期货价格每千立方英尺下跌53.5美分，收于6.705美元。 www.6park.com
国际油价自7月11日创下每桶147.27美元的历史最高纪录以来已经累计下跌了约60%。为了稳定油价，石油输出国组织(欧佩克)10月决定将原油日产量削减150万桶，但收效不大。据报道，欧佩克日前表示，在12月份举行的紧急会议上可能作出再次减产100万桶的决定。 www.6park.com
据香港商报报道，随著愈来愈陷入困境的公司暗示需要得到资助，美国政府的金融体系救市计划也面临著巨大压力，资金捉襟见肘。据知情人士透露，财长保尔森计划本周后期公布救市计划的最新进展情况，并可能会专注于资本投资。 www.6park.com
获美国政府拯救的房贷巨擘房利美第三季度共亏损了290亿美元(约2,260亿港元)，并表示其现金消耗速度非常快，可能在年底前需要财政部再注入现金。另一个显示金融公司所面临困境的迹象是，美国运通公司转变为银行控股公司的申请迅速获得了联邦储备局的批准。此举为这家信用卡巨头从财政部获得纳税人资金的注入铺平了道路。 www.6park.com
一直在积极游说政府资助的通用汽车公司亦称，如果其财务状况不能保持稳定，可能会在年底前无法偿还部分到期债券。仅剩600亿美元 www.6park.com
这种此起彼伏要求资助的呼声可能给布什政府带来扩大“问题资产救助计划”(TARP)范围的压力。这项7,000亿美元的计划是在10月份获国会通过后，财政部不理国会极力游说，一直拒绝向美国汽车制造商开放TARP。 www.6park.com
在国会按照TARP计划批准的首批3,500亿美元(约2.7万亿港元)资金中，财政部目前还剩下600亿美元(4,680亿港元)。面对愈来愈多公司财困，保尔森向国会申请另一半救助资金的可能性大大提高。消息人士透露，保尔森计划本周后期公布救市计划最新进展，可能专注于资本投资。 www.6park.com
另外，美国经济陷入危机，但政府拍卖政府债券预期将会吸引大量需求，财政部本周将出售550亿美元(约4,290亿港元)政府债券，为救市措施融资。 www.6park.com
坏消息频传 美股再挫 油价创20个月来新低 www.6park.com
导读： www.6park.com
美企频传坏消息 金融危机冲击实体经济 www.6park.com
快讯：纽约股市11日继续下滑 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低 www.6park.com
快讯：11日纽商所12月黄金期货价格下跌1.8% www.6park.com
国际油价11日创出20个月来新低 www.6park.com
美企频传坏消息 金融危机冲击实体经济 www.6park.com
通用面临破产危险 AIG爆出巨亏 电子零售商申请破产保护 www.6park.com
美车企巨头通用汽车公司(GM)继上周五发布巨额亏损后，周一股价盘中一度狂跌31%，到达62年低点。通用汽车在一份提交给政府的文件中承认，如果在今年年底前无法稳定其日益恶化的财务状况，它很可能被迫破产。危急关头，通用汽车步步紧逼联邦政府要求其出手金援，该公司董事长兼首席执行长瓦格纳表示，"通用汽车需要在当选总统奥巴马1月20日就任前获得财务上的帮助"。 www.6park.com
通用汽车财政恶化并不是一个个案。最近一段时间，美国企业界频频传出坏消息。近期集中爆出巨额亏损的还有美金融巨头美国国际集团(AIG)以及房贷巨头房利美；昨日美第二大电子产品零售商电路城(Circuit City)申请破产保护；华尔街也在酝酿涉及7万人的大手笔裁员。分析人士指出，来自金融业和企业界的糟糕消息凸显出这场危机的范围正不断扩大，"此次危机的首批受害者是银行和保险公司，如今正扩大到全球经济的其他领域"。 www.6park.com
通用乞求政府金援 www.6park.com
周一通用汽车股价重挫至62年低点，反映了外界对这家汽车厂商可能会陷入现金流枯竭、被迫申请破产保护境地的担忧。通用汽车日前表示，一旦违反债务合约，债权方有权要求其偿还60亿美元债务，这个金额可能会使这家汽车厂商不得不申请破产保护。 www.6park.com
德意志银行的分析师拉奇在一份报告中写道，如果没有政府的帮助，通用汽车的崩溃将不可避免，它还可能导致汽车厂商、供应商、零售商以及美国经济其他领域面临难以克服的系统性风险。 www.6park.com
周一，通用汽车和同情其境遇的国会议员们大力呼吁联邦政府，要求其出手救助。国会议员们建议，作为对救助的回报，政府可以入股这家汽车厂商、限制其高管薪酬，并要求通用汽车加快推出节油型汽车的步伐。 www.6park.com
瓦格纳对行业刊物《汽车新闻》表示，通用汽车需要在当选总统奥巴马1月20日就任前获得财务上的帮助，但他拒绝以辞职作为获得救助的交换条件。 www.6park.com
在华盛顿，密歇根州国会代表致函美国财政部长保尔森，敦促后者从7000亿美元金融机构救助资金中拿出一部分为三家美国汽车巨头提供低息贷款。布什政府迄今尚未同意上述提议，并指出已经通过能源部负责的一个项目向汽车行业提供了250亿美元来提振节能型汽车的生产。奥巴马虽已表示支持救助汽车厂商，但尚未公布具体措施。 www.6park.com
通用汽车股价周一在纽约证交所收低1美元至3.36，此前一度下滑至3.02美元，为1946年以来最低。巴克莱将通用汽车的评等由"中性"调降至"减持"，并将其目标股价由4美元调降至1美元。该行称，通用汽车到2008年底的现金水平预期为133亿美元，到明年第一季度将低于110亿-140 亿美元的最低额度。尽管政府在财政上的救助能帮助通用走出困境，但巴克莱分析师约翰逊在研究报告中称，这将明显稀释通用汽车的股权。德意志银行将通用汽车的评等由"持有"调降至"卖出"，并将其股权估值由4美元调降至零，称通用汽车12月以后可能很难为其运作募集到资金。 www.6park.com
上周五，通用汽车公布，第三财季亏损25亿美元。该公司还表示，当季使用流动资金69亿美元，现金储备因此下降至162亿美元。通用汽车称，至少需要110亿美元至140亿美元来维持业务运转。 www.6park.com
与通用并称为"底特律三巨头"的福特和克莱斯勒同样现金流告急，同时向政府乞求援助，希望在国会此前拨款250亿美元的基础上再提供250亿美元低息政府贷款。 www.6park.com
金融巨头频报巨亏 www.6park.com
处于重灾区的金融行业频频爆出巨额亏损。 www.6park.com
10日，美国住房抵押贷款融资巨头房利美发布其被政府接管以来的首份季报。报告显示，今年第三季度该公司净亏损290亿美元，创年内美国各公司亏损额之最。 www.6park.com
财报显示，房利美第三季度的信贷损失达到92亿美元，远高于去年同期的12亿美元。截至9月底，其资产净值已经从去年年底的441亿美元骤降至94亿美元。 www.6park.com
房利美预计，其资产净值或将在下个季度末由正转负，从而不得不寻求政府资助。该公司称，截至11月7日，其并未动用任何政府援助。 www.6park.com
美国财政部9月初宣布接管陷入困境的房利美和房地美，并承诺如有需要，财政部将向这两家机构分别注入高达1000亿美元的资金。 www.6park.com
但房利美表示，如果公司进一步出现重大亏损，或者没有能力出售那些无担保债务，那么财政部承诺的1000亿美元注资有可能不足以使公司避免破产命运。 www.6park.com
同一天，美国国际集团(AIG)发布财报说，今年第三季度该集团亏损245亿美元，而去年同期为盈利30.9亿美元。其中，信贷违约互换(CDS)业务当季的资产减记额超过70亿美元。 www.6park.com
在美国国际集团(AIG)公布巨额季度亏损后，美国政府及美联储将对AIG的救援金额提高至1500亿美元以上。 www.6park.com
由于次贷危机导致AIG陷于破产边缘，美联储9月份宣布向该集团提供850亿美元紧急贷款，同时美国政府获得AIG近80%的股份，正式接管这家全球最大的保险公司。 www.6park.com
美电子零售商申请破产 www.6park.com
临近年底消费旺季，原本应该是零售商们大赚一笔的好机会，但就在周一，美国第二大消费电子零售商电路城(Circuit City)申请破产保护，成为自2002年凯马特以来根据破产法第11章申请破产保护的最大零售商。自2007年1月以来，该公司股价已缩水99%，目前股价不到50美分，周一该股在纽约证交所停牌。 www.6park.com
当天，总部位于弗吉尼亚的"电路城"公司根据破产法第11章向当地法院申请破产保护。在向法院提交的破产申请中，公司首席财务官布鲁斯·贝赞可承认，供货商信心衰减、流动性问题以及全球金融危机是导致公司破产的主要原因。他说，如果问题不能得到及时解决，公司将无法获得供货来满足年末消费旺季的销售，这将对公司乃至股东造成损害。 www.6park.com
不过，业内人士认为销售不畅以及公司流动资金短缺无法解决商店租金问题是导致其申请破产的主要原因。 www.6park.com
截至今年8月31日，拥有59年历史的"电路城"公司的财务报表显示公司资产为34亿美元，债务为23.20亿美元。申请破产后，公司获准暂停支付150家商店的租金，这些费用大约为4000万美元。 www.6park.com
在此前一周，"电路城"曾宣布将在年底前关闭旗下五分之一(共155家)的连锁店，同时裁员7300人。 www.6park.com
分析人士认为，如果"电路城"能够处理好与供货商关系以及商店用地租赁等事宜，公司最早有望于明年夏天走出破产保护，最终决定是否继续独立运作或被人收购。此前，该公司的主要对手--美国第一大消费电子产品零售商"百思买"曾表示有意收购对手。不过，由于"电路城"为了缓解危机可能在圣诞购物旺季期间甩卖存货，"百思买"的销售情况将受到影响，公司前景尚存变数。 www.6park.com
华尔街近7万人将失业 www.6park.com
目前正值下一年财务预算制定之时，受金融市场动荡及2009年经济形势可能进一步恶化的影响，华尔街将展开新一轮裁员风暴。预计金融部门将裁掉7万人，而据估计在之前全球金融行业已裁员15万人之多。 www.6park.com
预计新一轮裁员将主要集中于投资银行业和证券交易部门，而上述部门已经经历了资本市场几乎冻结及破产收购等一系列事件的打击。 www.6park.com
银行业的持续萎缩将进一步加剧纽约、伦敦和香港等全球金融中心的灾难，他们的税收大幅缩水，同时对当地的房地产市场也形成极大压力。"第四季度破坏性非常巨大，"Oppenheimer分析师梅雷狄斯·惠特尼表示，"许多业务集中于资本市场的机构裁员比例将达25%至30%。" www.6park.com
上周，高盛启动裁员10%的计划。据彭博数据，美林已裁员5700名，占员工总数近9%，摩根士丹利已裁员4400名。据估计，此前在贝尔斯登和雷曼兄弟倒闭后，已有2.3万员工失去工作。花旗集团也正拟定新一轮裁员名单。 www.6park.com
多数银行拒绝就其裁员计划置评，表示迄今尚未最终敲定。但业内人士表示，未来将出现更多裁员，因金融业第四季度收入继续下滑，同时几乎没有显示出任何明年将出现好转的迹象。一位公司高层表示，根据公司的估计，美国金融业下一轮裁员的数额估计超过7万人。据美国联邦储备署的最新一项研究显示，今后几年内，仅纽约市的金融行业将裁减5.5万-7.8万个职位。 www.6park.com
新华网：由于企业盈利下滑幅度超过市场预期，纽约股市11日继续下滑，三大指数跌幅均在2%左右，其中道琼斯指数下跌超过170点 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低 www.6park.com
欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低，有关全球经济放缓的担忧拖累银行及石油类股下挫。英国富时100指数跌3.6%，德国DAX 30指数跌5.3%，国CAC-40指数跌4.8%。 www.6park.com
综合外电11月11日报道，欧洲股市11日收盘大幅走低，主要因为有关全球经济放缓的担忧拖累银行及石油类股下挫。 www.6park.com
道琼斯斯托克600指数跌4%，至212.17点，连续两个交易日的涨势由此中止。英国富时100指数跌3.6%，至4,246.69点。德国DAX 30指数跌5.3%，至4,761.58点。法国CAC-40指数跌4.8%，至3,336.41点。 www.6park.com
欧洲市场中，大型油气股跌幅居前，一改周一上涨态势，原因是在有关经济放缓将抑制大宗商品需求的担忧拖累下，原油期货跌破每桶60美元。BG Group跌11%；道达尔(Total)跌7.2%。 www.6park.com
11日公布的疲弱经济数据显示，英国10月份房屋销售量跌至英国皇家特许测量师学会(Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors)自1978年开始统计以来的最低水平。另据英国零售商协会(British Retail Consortium)的数据，英国10月份零售额下挫2.2%。 www.6park.com
德国方面，11月份ZEW经济预期指数从10月份的-63点升至-53.5点，不过仍远低于历史平均水平27点。 www.6park.com
银行类股受到冲击，意大利的情况尤为明显，其中，Intesa Sanpaolo收盘下挫近17%，UniCredit收盘跌11%。 www.6park.com
西班牙国家银行(Banco Santander, STD) 和汇丰控股(HSBC Holdings, HBC)继续延续10日跌势，分别下挫7.1%和5.3%。 www.6park.com
美林(Merrill Lynch)和瑞士信贷(Credit Suisse)均下调了对汇丰控股的评级，而西班牙国家银行的评级也遭到WestLB下调。 www.6park.com
无线电信巨头沃达丰空中通讯公司(Vodafone Group, VOD)涨6.2%，该公司上调本财年现金流预期及宣布10亿英镑成本节省计划受到投资者欢迎。 www.6park.com
快讯：11日纽商所12月黄金期货价格下跌1.8% www.6park.com
新华网快讯：11日纽约商品交易所12月份交割的黄金期货下跌13.7美元，报收于每盎司732.8美元，跌幅为1.8%。(新华网) www.6park.com
国际油价11日创出20个月来新低 www.6park.com
新华网纽约11月11日电(记者 杨蕾)对世界经济衰退影响能源消费的担心使国际油价11日再度大幅下跌，纽约市场油价收盘价跌破每桶60美元，创出20个月来新低。 www.6park.com
当天，纽约商品交易所12月份交货的轻质原油期货价格下跌3.08美元，收于每桶59.33美元，是自2007年3月以来的最低收盘价格。伦敦国际石油交易所12月份交货的北海布伦特原油期货价格下跌3.37美元，收于每桶55.71美元。 www.6park.com
油价11日创出新低的最主要原因仍然是投资者担心全球经济衰退抑制能源消费。当天，由于企业盈利下滑幅度超过市场预期，纽约股市三大指数跌幅均在2%左右，加剧市场对美国经济衰退情况的担忧。 www.6park.com
此外，由于有关全球经济的负面消息不断出现，当天美元在避险情绪支持下对多数主要货币上涨，被市场作为对冲美元贬值风险的原油期货也随之下跌。 www.6park.com
11日，纽商所12月份交货的汽油期货价格每加仑下跌6.11美分，收于1.3059美元。12月份交货的取暖油期货价格每加仑下跌7.1美分，收于1.9290美元。12月份交货的天然气期货价格每千立方英尺下跌53.5美分，收于6.705美元。 www.6park.com
国际油价自7月11日创下每桶147.27美元的历史最高纪录以来已经累计下跌了约60%。为了稳定油价，石油输出国组织(欧佩克)10月决定将原油日产量削减150万桶，但收效不大。据报道，欧佩克日前表示，在12月份举行的紧急会议上可能作出再次减产100万桶的决定。 www.6park.com
Monday, November 10, 2008
人民币国际货币本位—需要与必然—强国金融之梦
http://www.6park.com/news/messages/1674.html
提要:转型中的内需驱动性中国经济，必须要有人民币国际化货币本位的强国金融与之相配合，这是经济发展的需要与必然。 www.6park.com
在全球金融危机爆发的背景下，第七届亚欧首脑会议领导人对国际货币与金融体系进行有效和全面的改革已形成共识。国务院总理温家宝2008年10月28日在莫斯科第三届中俄经济工商界高峰论坛时也指出，建立国际金融新秩序是当务之急。在这种可能重构国际金融新秩序的关口，我方利益最大化的方案应该是适时推出建立人民币的国际货币本位币。 www.6park.com
一、国际货币本位币中的利益与争夺 www.6park.com
国际货币本位币享有从他国获得的巨大的铸币税收入[i]。以美元为例，如果我们将美国国债视为美国境外所持有的储藏美元，至2008年止，美国发行的国债总额为9.6万亿美元，欧洲美元约4万亿美元以上；另外，从1940年至2007年，美国累计财政赤字4.8万亿美元；还有部份美国境内的外国存款、境外流通的美元，以及境外所持有的约12万亿美元的企业债券，这些由于无法准确区分货币属性和统计，这里只好不计。也就是说，仅上述三项统计，美元国际货币本位币地位使美国获得的铸币税收入超过18.4万亿美元。此数字是美国2007年GDP总额的1.31倍。而没有国际货币本位币的中国就为其贡献了十分之一。 www.6park.com
国际货币本位币的这种巨大的铸币税收益，必将促使美国和欧盟都会努力去扩大自已的势力范围，既使引发了如此巨大的金融危机中的美国，在解决当前货币问题时，最多也只会提一个不伤大体的监管改进方案。对世界各国来说，重构国际金融新秩序最好的方案应该是建立一体化的世界元体系，但在目前的国际关系条件下这种可能性很小。以我国利益最大化而又比较现实的方案，应该是适时推出人民币国际货币本位币方案，以构建美元、欧元、人民币的多元化国际货币体系，才能应对二十一世纪世界经济发展的机遇与挑战。 www.6park.com
二、当前是人民币进军国际货币本位币的好时机 www.6park.com
在美元正遭受严重信任危机的当口，正是人民币进军国际货币本位币的极好时机: www.6park.com
1、在正常情况下推出人民币国际货币本位币，必然会遭受美国政府的打压。当年欧元出台，美国就不惜动用了政治、经济的一切手段，甚至包括战争手段。现在中国已成为美国的第一遏制目标，而人民币国际货币本位币则可能比欧元更能威胁到美元霸权。因为欧元是建立在欧盟松散的政治体上，而中国是一个集权、经济处于高速发展阶段的国家。而目前处于危机之中的美国，如果因货币问题打压中国，不管是从政治上还是从经济上，都会力不从心。而一旦危机缓解情况就不好说。估计美国从危机中恢复的时间不会太长，机会转瞬即逝。 www.6park.com
2、危机中的美元，已失去美元持有国对它的信心。为防美元危机转借和传导，多国政府都在谋求更安全的币种和储藏货币多元化。人民币国际货币本位币适时推出，正是国际社会有强劲需求之时。 www.6park.com
3、本次国际金融危机已明确标示着我国以低价劳动力“赚美元”的一个时代的结束。美国以增发美元救市，今后美元贬值也将是个常态，继续美元依附经济对我国经济发展已很不利。我国内需驱动型经济转型必须要有人民币国际货币本位币与之相配合。 www.6park.com
4、我国已为人民币成为国际货币本位币打下了坚实的物质基础。按照世界银行估算，以购买力平价计算，中国已跃居全球第二大经济体；2008年进出口贸易总额占世界贸易总额的比重已为7.7%，居世界位次第3位，我国已经是名副其实的对外贸易大国；而且，这种贸易在亚洲地区已有较强的人民币贸易结算要求；我国外汇储备已达到2万亿美元，巨大的外汇储备，已经能抵御大规模的国际金融冲击。 www.6park.com
三、美元依附经济已成为国民财富输出的巨大瘘管 www.6park.com
我国改革开放的前三十年，由于国力尚弱，缺乏资本金，选择“赚美元”战略是一种必然。但是，至2007年中国GDP总值已在世界排名第四，以当前的发展速度计，GDP排名2012年将超日本，2023年左右将超越美国。如果继续无视货币体系中的财富漏出，中国向国外输出的铸币税将会超过现在的五倍。成为不争的事实是，在美元作为国际储备货币的情况下，近年来美国一直以年财政赤字4200亿美元的速度贬值美元，并且有逐渐加快的趋势，例如，2008财年美国政府财政赤字将达到创纪录的4550亿美元。如果中国占其铸币税的十分之一，那么每年就要为美国财政赤字买单十分之一。中国日益增长的外汇储备已经成为国民福利损失的巨大黑洞。这种损失实际上还不仅仅是表现在美元贬值所造成的币值损失上，更主要的是中国的外汇资金主要应用于购买美国的各种债券，这对国内来说还是一种生产力的闲置，比币值损失更大。只有当人民币也成为国际货币体系中的一员并与之竞争，这种巨大的财富损失才可能中止。 www.6park.com
近年来的发展实践已经证明，受制于美元的中国经济继续发展已经十分艰难，并且越来越艰难。其根本原因在于，在美元体系下的中国经济，不可能有本国独立的货币政策。整个货币政策受制于美元的外汇储备，数额巨大的央票和高达17%的存款准备金率，美元贬值成为人民币通货膨胀的源头（详细论述请参见蔡定创《当代中美金融大战》第五章），一方面CPI高企，另一方面生产过剩、企业倒闭，通胀与通缩同时存在。本次国际金融危机对实体经济的影响我国反大于欧美，也从反方面说明了我国当前的货币体系和政策已经完全不能适应的经济发展的需要。国家发展战略必须向内需驱动型经济转型，而实现人民币国际本位币正是与这种发展战略转型相辅相成。在汇率自平衡机制作用下，人民币国际货币本位币能保证国民财富不外流。 www.6park.com
四、人民币国际货币本位币中的利益 www.6park.com
人民币国际货币本位币也能使我们获得一份铸币税收益。这个数量的大小主要取决于人民币与美元、欧元等其它国际化货币的竞争能力。人民币国际化的初期，可能先在亚洲地区形成一个人民币需求市场。这种对人民币的需求是直接的铸币税，需要通过扩展内需来实现。当人民币成为本位币后，由于对美元的需求减少，会引起美元的进一步贬值，人民币相对升值；人民币成为自由兑换货币后，其币值会渐向购买力平价靠近，此也会引起人民币升值。这二种升值因素的叠加，升值潜力不小，这时可通过赤字财政的办法来调低人民币值，使之保持与其他国际化货币汇价上的稳定，这时从赤字财政中所获得的是一种间接的铸币税。人民币如果币值稳定，所获得的国际储备货币的份额可能就最大，以中国的发展潜力所支持的人民币必将成为国际主要储备货币。仅这些铸币税收入，就足以使我国经济上一个台阶，并因为内需的扩张而加注新的经济发展动力。 www.6park.com
五、几点释疑 www.6park.com
1、人民币开放汇价后，汇率会走高，影响出口。 www.6park.com
实行自由汇价情况下的人民币币值也是可以随时调节的。美国就是用经常性的财政赤字贬值美元，财政赤字就是币值调节的工具。近年来美国政府财政赤字一直保持在4200亿美元左右，占GDP比率高达3.2%。这是一种凭借国际货币本位币地位白来的财富。我们如果在国际贸易中用调低后汇价出口，赤字财政中获得的财富是对这种低价出口的返还。如果需要调高汇价则有巨额的外汇储备支持。 www.6park.com
2、开放资本项下的自由兑换后，会受热钱的冲击。 www.6park.com
能否抗热钱的冲击，我认为主要同如下几个因素有关:一是与经济体的大小有关。有很多小国经济体的生产总值还不如美国一家对冲基金所管理的资产值，自然无法对抗热钱的冲击。处于不断增长之中的我国GDP总量当前已有约3.5万亿美元，虽然只有美国GDP的四分之一，但仍然是远远大于美国约1.9万亿美元的对冲基金总规模。因此用不着担心美元对人民币货币体系的冲击。 www.6park.com
二是与股市的对热钱的容量和管理有关。趋利性热钱主要冲击的是股市。我国股市的峰值已超过25万亿人民币，是美国对冲资金总量的二倍，股市已有足够的容量容纳热钱。当年泰国如此小的经济体，索罗斯实施攻击也必须借助于衍生品交易工具。因此，只要股指期货不开通，放开资本项下的自由兑换，热钱对股市的冲击作用也十分有限。目前的一些反热钱观念是十分错误的，股市反热钱主要是防止热钱抄中国股市的大底，特别是金融股权低价不设防敞开被热钱抄底，这与银行股权贱卖没有两样。在股市适当高的点位上不应该反热钱，而是要引进、鼓励热钱进来，让热钱为我所用。因为任何发达经济体股市的兴旺，都没有过拒热钱的行为，相反，怕的是热钱退出。股市能利用好热钱，有推动内需扩张、促进经济发展的好作用。 www.6park.com
三是与国家对金融股权的控制有关。只要国家绝对控股金融股权，包括银行、证券公司、基金公司、保险公司，热钱的任何流动都会在严格监控之中。这些年我们虽然政策不慎失去了部份金融股权，在绝对不再失去的情况下，到目前为止金融仍是由国家绝对控股。 www.6park.com
其实，资本项下的自由兑换貎似资金自由流动，实际上是并不自由，因为可以通过管理制度来控制资本流向。例如，美国是号称资本最自由的国家，但我们却买不到美国的金融、石油等股权，我们的资本项下不开放，但已有很多战略产业的股权却很轻易就失去。我们为什么不象美国一样，加强制度设防？例如在企业的准入、兼并、收购方面加强审查，在房地产方面设限等等。 www.6park.com
3、开放资本项下的自由兑换，会受金融危机传导。 www.6park.com
开放资本项下的自由兑换后，对金融危机传导肯定会比不开放自由兑换强一些，但这主要是因为同处于一个货币体系。过去各国同处于美元货币体系，当美元或美国经济危机时，其他同处美元体系的国家都会受到传染。比较来说，分处于不同货币体系的国家传导就会弱一些。我国目前并未开放资本项下自由兑换，但次贷危机对我国实体经济的影响反而大于对欧元区经济的影响。就连日本受次贷危机的影响也比我们小得多。因此，金融危机的传导与是否同处于一个货币体系关联更大，与资本项下是否自由兑换关联较小。 www.6park.com
4、人民币国际货币本位币后，给货币管理增加了难题。 www.6park.com
例如，当实际汇率与名义汇率出现偏离时，就会引起投机性资本的套利行动，国际间人民币流动还会削弱央行对国内人民币的控制能力，增加宏观调控的难度。这些都是实际性问题，但这些都是可以通过提高管理水平解决的。 www.6park.com
注释: www.6park.com
1、所谓铸币税，是指发行钞票国取得的钞票发行收入。这种发行收入等于用发行货币取得国外资产所产生的收益，减去外国人持有这一货币进行投资而由发行国支付的利息与货币管理费用之和。 www.6park.com
2、所谓人民币国际本位币，是指人民币能够跨越国界在境外流通，成为国际上普遍认可的价值尺度、支付手段、储备货币。我国人民币国际化，还需要开放汇价、自由兑换，开放资本项下的流动管制。 www.6park.com
3、人民币境外流通现状:人民币跨境流通量最大的是香港地区。人民币在香港可以通过多种途径自由兑换。与在周边其他国家不同的是，人民币在香港被用来作为投资的一种储备货币。在我国澳门地区人民币也在广泛使用。在西南边境地区，人民币已被当作硬通货使用。在老挝人民币基本可以替代其本国货币流通，在中缅边贸及旅游活动中，每年出入的人民币多达10多亿元。在越南人民市已经可以全境流通，越南国家银行也开展了人民币存储业务。在中亚五国、俄罗斯地区和巴基斯坦，人民币每年的跨境流通量已达二三十多亿元人民币。蒙古国已经把人民币作为主要外国货币，各个银行都开展了人民币储蓄业务。在与蒙古国的边境贸易中，人民币现金交易量占双边全部交易量的l/3强。朝鲜边境贸易中基本上都使用人民币。在欧洲一些国家和美国、加拿大等国的机场以及饭店也开展了人民币兑换业务。如纽约的机场、唐人街以及部分华人比较集中的地区。在日本华人比较集中的地区也已经开始收人民币。
提要:转型中的内需驱动性中国经济，必须要有人民币国际化货币本位的强国金融与之相配合，这是经济发展的需要与必然。 www.6park.com
在全球金融危机爆发的背景下，第七届亚欧首脑会议领导人对国际货币与金融体系进行有效和全面的改革已形成共识。国务院总理温家宝2008年10月28日在莫斯科第三届中俄经济工商界高峰论坛时也指出，建立国际金融新秩序是当务之急。在这种可能重构国际金融新秩序的关口，我方利益最大化的方案应该是适时推出建立人民币的国际货币本位币。 www.6park.com
一、国际货币本位币中的利益与争夺 www.6park.com
国际货币本位币享有从他国获得的巨大的铸币税收入[i]。以美元为例，如果我们将美国国债视为美国境外所持有的储藏美元，至2008年止，美国发行的国债总额为9.6万亿美元，欧洲美元约4万亿美元以上；另外，从1940年至2007年，美国累计财政赤字4.8万亿美元；还有部份美国境内的外国存款、境外流通的美元，以及境外所持有的约12万亿美元的企业债券，这些由于无法准确区分货币属性和统计，这里只好不计。也就是说，仅上述三项统计，美元国际货币本位币地位使美国获得的铸币税收入超过18.4万亿美元。此数字是美国2007年GDP总额的1.31倍。而没有国际货币本位币的中国就为其贡献了十分之一。 www.6park.com
国际货币本位币的这种巨大的铸币税收益，必将促使美国和欧盟都会努力去扩大自已的势力范围，既使引发了如此巨大的金融危机中的美国，在解决当前货币问题时，最多也只会提一个不伤大体的监管改进方案。对世界各国来说，重构国际金融新秩序最好的方案应该是建立一体化的世界元体系，但在目前的国际关系条件下这种可能性很小。以我国利益最大化而又比较现实的方案，应该是适时推出人民币国际货币本位币方案，以构建美元、欧元、人民币的多元化国际货币体系，才能应对二十一世纪世界经济发展的机遇与挑战。 www.6park.com
二、当前是人民币进军国际货币本位币的好时机 www.6park.com
在美元正遭受严重信任危机的当口，正是人民币进军国际货币本位币的极好时机: www.6park.com
1、在正常情况下推出人民币国际货币本位币，必然会遭受美国政府的打压。当年欧元出台，美国就不惜动用了政治、经济的一切手段，甚至包括战争手段。现在中国已成为美国的第一遏制目标，而人民币国际货币本位币则可能比欧元更能威胁到美元霸权。因为欧元是建立在欧盟松散的政治体上，而中国是一个集权、经济处于高速发展阶段的国家。而目前处于危机之中的美国，如果因货币问题打压中国，不管是从政治上还是从经济上，都会力不从心。而一旦危机缓解情况就不好说。估计美国从危机中恢复的时间不会太长，机会转瞬即逝。 www.6park.com
2、危机中的美元，已失去美元持有国对它的信心。为防美元危机转借和传导，多国政府都在谋求更安全的币种和储藏货币多元化。人民币国际货币本位币适时推出，正是国际社会有强劲需求之时。 www.6park.com
3、本次国际金融危机已明确标示着我国以低价劳动力“赚美元”的一个时代的结束。美国以增发美元救市，今后美元贬值也将是个常态，继续美元依附经济对我国经济发展已很不利。我国内需驱动型经济转型必须要有人民币国际货币本位币与之相配合。 www.6park.com
4、我国已为人民币成为国际货币本位币打下了坚实的物质基础。按照世界银行估算，以购买力平价计算，中国已跃居全球第二大经济体；2008年进出口贸易总额占世界贸易总额的比重已为7.7%，居世界位次第3位，我国已经是名副其实的对外贸易大国；而且，这种贸易在亚洲地区已有较强的人民币贸易结算要求；我国外汇储备已达到2万亿美元，巨大的外汇储备，已经能抵御大规模的国际金融冲击。 www.6park.com
三、美元依附经济已成为国民财富输出的巨大瘘管 www.6park.com
我国改革开放的前三十年，由于国力尚弱，缺乏资本金，选择“赚美元”战略是一种必然。但是，至2007年中国GDP总值已在世界排名第四，以当前的发展速度计，GDP排名2012年将超日本，2023年左右将超越美国。如果继续无视货币体系中的财富漏出，中国向国外输出的铸币税将会超过现在的五倍。成为不争的事实是，在美元作为国际储备货币的情况下，近年来美国一直以年财政赤字4200亿美元的速度贬值美元，并且有逐渐加快的趋势，例如，2008财年美国政府财政赤字将达到创纪录的4550亿美元。如果中国占其铸币税的十分之一，那么每年就要为美国财政赤字买单十分之一。中国日益增长的外汇储备已经成为国民福利损失的巨大黑洞。这种损失实际上还不仅仅是表现在美元贬值所造成的币值损失上，更主要的是中国的外汇资金主要应用于购买美国的各种债券，这对国内来说还是一种生产力的闲置，比币值损失更大。只有当人民币也成为国际货币体系中的一员并与之竞争，这种巨大的财富损失才可能中止。 www.6park.com
近年来的发展实践已经证明，受制于美元的中国经济继续发展已经十分艰难，并且越来越艰难。其根本原因在于，在美元体系下的中国经济，不可能有本国独立的货币政策。整个货币政策受制于美元的外汇储备，数额巨大的央票和高达17%的存款准备金率，美元贬值成为人民币通货膨胀的源头（详细论述请参见蔡定创《当代中美金融大战》第五章），一方面CPI高企，另一方面生产过剩、企业倒闭，通胀与通缩同时存在。本次国际金融危机对实体经济的影响我国反大于欧美，也从反方面说明了我国当前的货币体系和政策已经完全不能适应的经济发展的需要。国家发展战略必须向内需驱动型经济转型，而实现人民币国际本位币正是与这种发展战略转型相辅相成。在汇率自平衡机制作用下，人民币国际货币本位币能保证国民财富不外流。 www.6park.com
四、人民币国际货币本位币中的利益 www.6park.com
人民币国际货币本位币也能使我们获得一份铸币税收益。这个数量的大小主要取决于人民币与美元、欧元等其它国际化货币的竞争能力。人民币国际化的初期，可能先在亚洲地区形成一个人民币需求市场。这种对人民币的需求是直接的铸币税，需要通过扩展内需来实现。当人民币成为本位币后，由于对美元的需求减少，会引起美元的进一步贬值，人民币相对升值；人民币成为自由兑换货币后，其币值会渐向购买力平价靠近，此也会引起人民币升值。这二种升值因素的叠加，升值潜力不小，这时可通过赤字财政的办法来调低人民币值，使之保持与其他国际化货币汇价上的稳定，这时从赤字财政中所获得的是一种间接的铸币税。人民币如果币值稳定，所获得的国际储备货币的份额可能就最大，以中国的发展潜力所支持的人民币必将成为国际主要储备货币。仅这些铸币税收入，就足以使我国经济上一个台阶，并因为内需的扩张而加注新的经济发展动力。 www.6park.com
五、几点释疑 www.6park.com
1、人民币开放汇价后，汇率会走高，影响出口。 www.6park.com
实行自由汇价情况下的人民币币值也是可以随时调节的。美国就是用经常性的财政赤字贬值美元，财政赤字就是币值调节的工具。近年来美国政府财政赤字一直保持在4200亿美元左右，占GDP比率高达3.2%。这是一种凭借国际货币本位币地位白来的财富。我们如果在国际贸易中用调低后汇价出口，赤字财政中获得的财富是对这种低价出口的返还。如果需要调高汇价则有巨额的外汇储备支持。 www.6park.com
2、开放资本项下的自由兑换后，会受热钱的冲击。 www.6park.com
能否抗热钱的冲击，我认为主要同如下几个因素有关:一是与经济体的大小有关。有很多小国经济体的生产总值还不如美国一家对冲基金所管理的资产值，自然无法对抗热钱的冲击。处于不断增长之中的我国GDP总量当前已有约3.5万亿美元，虽然只有美国GDP的四分之一，但仍然是远远大于美国约1.9万亿美元的对冲基金总规模。因此用不着担心美元对人民币货币体系的冲击。 www.6park.com
二是与股市的对热钱的容量和管理有关。趋利性热钱主要冲击的是股市。我国股市的峰值已超过25万亿人民币，是美国对冲资金总量的二倍，股市已有足够的容量容纳热钱。当年泰国如此小的经济体，索罗斯实施攻击也必须借助于衍生品交易工具。因此，只要股指期货不开通，放开资本项下的自由兑换，热钱对股市的冲击作用也十分有限。目前的一些反热钱观念是十分错误的，股市反热钱主要是防止热钱抄中国股市的大底，特别是金融股权低价不设防敞开被热钱抄底，这与银行股权贱卖没有两样。在股市适当高的点位上不应该反热钱，而是要引进、鼓励热钱进来，让热钱为我所用。因为任何发达经济体股市的兴旺，都没有过拒热钱的行为，相反，怕的是热钱退出。股市能利用好热钱，有推动内需扩张、促进经济发展的好作用。 www.6park.com
三是与国家对金融股权的控制有关。只要国家绝对控股金融股权，包括银行、证券公司、基金公司、保险公司，热钱的任何流动都会在严格监控之中。这些年我们虽然政策不慎失去了部份金融股权，在绝对不再失去的情况下，到目前为止金融仍是由国家绝对控股。 www.6park.com
其实，资本项下的自由兑换貎似资金自由流动，实际上是并不自由，因为可以通过管理制度来控制资本流向。例如，美国是号称资本最自由的国家，但我们却买不到美国的金融、石油等股权，我们的资本项下不开放，但已有很多战略产业的股权却很轻易就失去。我们为什么不象美国一样，加强制度设防？例如在企业的准入、兼并、收购方面加强审查，在房地产方面设限等等。 www.6park.com
3、开放资本项下的自由兑换，会受金融危机传导。 www.6park.com
开放资本项下的自由兑换后，对金融危机传导肯定会比不开放自由兑换强一些，但这主要是因为同处于一个货币体系。过去各国同处于美元货币体系，当美元或美国经济危机时，其他同处美元体系的国家都会受到传染。比较来说，分处于不同货币体系的国家传导就会弱一些。我国目前并未开放资本项下自由兑换，但次贷危机对我国实体经济的影响反而大于对欧元区经济的影响。就连日本受次贷危机的影响也比我们小得多。因此，金融危机的传导与是否同处于一个货币体系关联更大，与资本项下是否自由兑换关联较小。 www.6park.com
4、人民币国际货币本位币后，给货币管理增加了难题。 www.6park.com
例如，当实际汇率与名义汇率出现偏离时，就会引起投机性资本的套利行动，国际间人民币流动还会削弱央行对国内人民币的控制能力，增加宏观调控的难度。这些都是实际性问题，但这些都是可以通过提高管理水平解决的。 www.6park.com
注释: www.6park.com
1、所谓铸币税，是指发行钞票国取得的钞票发行收入。这种发行收入等于用发行货币取得国外资产所产生的收益，减去外国人持有这一货币进行投资而由发行国支付的利息与货币管理费用之和。 www.6park.com
2、所谓人民币国际本位币，是指人民币能够跨越国界在境外流通，成为国际上普遍认可的价值尺度、支付手段、储备货币。我国人民币国际化，还需要开放汇价、自由兑换，开放资本项下的流动管制。 www.6park.com
3、人民币境外流通现状:人民币跨境流通量最大的是香港地区。人民币在香港可以通过多种途径自由兑换。与在周边其他国家不同的是，人民币在香港被用来作为投资的一种储备货币。在我国澳门地区人民币也在广泛使用。在西南边境地区，人民币已被当作硬通货使用。在老挝人民币基本可以替代其本国货币流通，在中缅边贸及旅游活动中，每年出入的人民币多达10多亿元。在越南人民市已经可以全境流通，越南国家银行也开展了人民币存储业务。在中亚五国、俄罗斯地区和巴基斯坦，人民币每年的跨境流通量已达二三十多亿元人民币。蒙古国已经把人民币作为主要外国货币，各个银行都开展了人民币储蓄业务。在与蒙古国的边境贸易中，人民币现金交易量占双边全部交易量的l/3强。朝鲜边境贸易中基本上都使用人民币。在欧洲一些国家和美国、加拿大等国的机场以及饭店也开展了人民币兑换业务。如纽约的机场、唐人街以及部分华人比较集中的地区。在日本华人比较集中的地区也已经开始收人民币。
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Governments May Have Caused Stocks Selloff: Dr. Doom
Now that deposits are guaranteed, basically I as an investor have no incentive to hold equities so I sell them and put my money in bank deposits,"
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27397168
http://www.cnbc.com/id/27397168
Europe Faces `Huge Threat' as Emerging Markets Slide (Update1)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aE4VJ5EtLNHk&refer=economy
Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) -- The European economy's close ties to emerging markets are turning from a blessing to a curse.
Already skirting recession, the 15 euro nations face greater pain as economies which gave them an edge over the U.S. and Japan stumble. Neighbors to the east, that buy about a third of the region's exports, are faltering as their banks weaken and currencies slide. Meanwhile, the halving of oil prices since a July record is slowing demand from the Middle East.
European companies such as France's Schneider Electric SA and Finland's Kone Oyj are saying orders will weaken as emerging-market countries from China to Argentina succumb to the credit crunch. Citigroup Inc.'s economists now expect deeper interest-rate cuts and a recession in the euro region.
``It's a huge threat to the euro area,'' said Nick Kounis, chief European economist at Fortis in Amsterdam. ``It had been hoped these markets would hold up better and drive European growth.''
As recently as Oct. 6, European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet was betting ``ongoing growth in emerging- market economies might support a gradual recovery'' next year. Yesterday, he said the bank may lower rates next week as the financial crisis damps inflation.
The 14-month credit crunch is prompting investors to sell riskier stocks, bonds and currencies, while punishing banks they view to be short of capital. Emerging-market stocks dropped to a four-year low yesterday.
Lines at IMF
Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus and Pakistan are seeking aid from the International Monetary Fund and Argentina's markets are in turmoil after its government tried to take over private pension funds. Russia has pledged more than $200 billion to stem its worst banking crisis since 1998 and China is slowing after expanding more than 10 percent for five years.
Europe's vulnerability to a downturn in emerging markets is reflected by how it benefited from their upswing. Exports to them were equivalent to about 6 percent of the continent's gross domestic product in 2006, compared with about 4.5 percent in 2000 and less than 4 percent in the U.S., says Juergen Michels, an economist at Citigroup Inc. in London.
The dozen, mostly Eastern European, nations which joined the broader European Union since 2004 account for 15.3 percent of the euro-area's foreign demand, up a third since the start of the decade, according to the ECB. The contributions of China and Russia have almost doubled. By contrast, the U.S. and U.K. portions have each dropped about 4 percentage points to 11.9 percent and 14.5 percent respectively.
`More Exposed'
``With a higher share of exports to emerging markets, the European countries benefited much more than the U.S. from booming emerging-market economies in recent years,'' said Michels. Now they are ``more exposed'' to their downturn.
The euro-area economy will contract for the first time since 1993 next year, forcing the ECB to cut its benchmark rate to at least 2 percent from 3.75 percent, he predicts. The Bank of England said in a report today that turbulence in emerging markets is posing heightened risks to Britain's financial stability.
Schneider Electric, the world's biggest maker of circuit breakers, now expects emerging markets to slow after four years. Even China ``isn't immune to external forces,'' Chief Executive Officer Jean-Pascal Tricoire said Oct. 22. Kone, a manufacturer of elevators, said the previous day that investment is slowing from Mexico to India to Qatar and that Russia is a ``question mark.''
Earnings Forecasts
Gareth Williams, an equity strategist at ING Bank NV in London, says more companies will downgrade earnings forecasts. Firms in Austria, Portugal and Spain have the most revenues from emerging markets, while Ireland, Greece and Italy have the least, he said in a report to clients yesterday.
Eastern Europe is ``rapidly becoming a key risk'' to the euro area, said Stephane Deo, chief European economist at UBS AG in London. He estimates 30 percent of euro-area exports at the start of this year went to its eastern trade partners, double the shipments to the U.S. Germany and the Netherlands are most at threat with 3.5 percent of their GDP accounted for by sales to the former communist bloc, he said.
Buoyant demand from Russia and the Middle East is ebbing as falling oil prices curb their purchasing power. Crude rose 625 percent from 2001 to a record $147.27 per barrel in July, enabling oil producers to buy equipment such as MAN AG's trucks and ``Made in Europe'' luxury goods including handbags from Gucci Group NV.
Oil Bill
The demand was strong enough for Europe to recoup two-thirds of its higher oil bill in the past five years, calculates Klaus Baader, chief European economist at Merrill Lynch & Co. While the drop in energy costs will ``be good in the short-term for domestic demand, over the medium term, reductions in demand for exports are going to weigh on the European economy,'' he said.
Already retrenching as they try to cover $221.8 billion in losses and writedowns, European banks also stand to be hurt more than most if emerging markets goes sour, said Stephen Jen, chief currency strategist at Morgan Stanley in London.
European banks lent $3.5 trillion to these economies, compared with $500 billion from the U.S. and $200 billion from Japan, according to his estimates. Those in Austria and Spain were particularly exposed, he said. Three quarters of loans to China and India originate in Europe.
``Pressures on emerging-market economies could have a particularly negative boomerang effect on European banks,'' Jen said.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Greenspan Concedes to `Flaw' in His Market Ideology
Oct. 23 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said a ``once-in-a-century credit tsunami'' has engulfed financial markets and conceded his free-market ideology shunning regulation was flawed.
``Yes, I found a flaw,'' Greenspan said in response to grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ``I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.'' Greenspan added he was ``partially'' wrong for opposing the regulation of derivatives.
Greenspan's contrition came after lawmakers and Fed watchers increasingly blamed the former Fed chairman for helping cause the crisis with lax oversight of the housing boom and derivatives markets. Normally afforded deference by Congress, he endured almost four hours of questions from lawmakers less than two weeks before a national election.
``Greenspan is finally taking some responsibility for his actions,'' said Paul Kasriel, director of economic research at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago and a former Fed official. ``The damage has been done. His reputation has definitely been tarnished.''
Greenspan, responding to questions, said only ``onerous'' regulation would have prevented the financial crisis. Stifling rules would have suppressed growth and hurt Americans' standards of living, he said.
Not Infallible
``We have to do our best but not expect infallibility or omniscience,' he said.
Part of the problem was that the Fed's ability to forecast the economy's trajectory is an inexact science, he said.
``If we are right 60 percent of the time in forecasting, we are doing exceptionally well; that means we are wrong 40 percent of the time,'' Greenspan said. ``Forecasting never gets to the point where it is 100 percent accurate.''
The admission that free markets have their faults was a shift for the former Fed chairman who declared in a May 2005 speech that ``private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation.''
Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said today that Greenspan had ``the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis.''
`Paying the Price'
``You were advised to do so by many others,'' he told the man hailed in the 1990s as the ``Maestro'' of the global financial system and awarded a knighthood in 2002. ``And now our whole economy is paying the price.''
Greenspan's devotion to free markets was nurtured in part by his association with Ayn Rand, the libertarian novelist and philosopher who espoused laissez-faire capitalism. He met Rand in the 1950s, becoming part of her inner circle of followers meeting regularly in her Manhattan apartment.
``Greenspan in a very, very kind of unwise, left-brain way, imputed pure rationality to markets,'' James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, said in an interview on ``Night Talk'' with Mike Schneider to be broadcast later today on Bloomberg Television. ``They are just as rational and just as efficient as the people that operated in them.''
Waxman echoed that sentiment to Greenspan: ``The mantra became government regulation is wrong. The market is infallible.''
Gramlich's Warnings
Former Fed Governor Edward Gramlich, who died in 2007, had urged Greenspan to strengthen oversight of banks during the record U.S. mortgage boom from 2004 to 2006.
Questioned about those warnings, Greenspan said ``Governor Gramlich said to me that he had problems'' and that he left the meeting expecting a Fed subcommittee dealing with consumer and community affairs to present recommendations, which didn't occur. ``I presumed at the time that essentially the subcommittee didn't think it rose to the higher level'' requiring action, Greenspan said.
Responding to criticism that he was too ideological, Greenspan said he sought as chairman to abide by laws passed by Congress, ``not my own predilections.''
He later added that he couldn't respond to every warning. ``There are always a lot of people raising issues, and half the time they're wrong.''
Regulatory Actions
Greenspan pointed out that he voted for every regulatory action the Fed moved on, drawing a rebuke from Waxman. ``On the other hand, you didn't get to vote on regulations that you didn't put before the Federal Reserve board, even though you had the legal authority for those regulations.''
Firms that bundle loans into securities for sale should be required to keep part of those securities, Greenspan said in prepared testimony. Other rules should address fraud and settlement of trades, he said.
Greenspan opposed increasing financial supervision as Fed chairman from August 1987 to January 2006. Policy makers are now struggling to contain a financial crisis marked by record foreclosures, falling asset prices and almost $660 billion in writedowns and losses tied to U.S. subprime mortgages.
Greenspan, 82, reiterated his ``shocked disbelief'' that financial companies failed to execute sufficient ``surveillance'' on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. The ``breakdown'' was clearest in the market where securities firms packaged home mortgages into debt sold on to other investors, he said.
Pricing Risk
``In this financial environment, I see no choice but to require that all securitizers retain a meaningful part of the securities they issue,'' Greenspan said. That would give the companies an incentive to ensure the assets are properly priced for their risk, advocates say.
Greenspan said the Fed didn't know the size of the subprime mortgage market until late 2005.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and former Treasury Secretary John Snow also appeared at the House committee hearing.
Snow said the economy is headed down a ``bad, bad path'' and he endorsed consideration of more fiscal stimulus. For the longer term, Snow said the global financial system should be reorganized by focusing on increasing transparency of ``excessive'' leverage to prevent institutions from creating too much risk.
The U.S. needs ``one strong national regulator'' to oversee firms and fix what Snow called ``a fragmented approach'' to regulation.
Addressing the trio that oversaw the U.S. financial markets as the housing bubble developed, Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky, characterized them as ``three Bill Buckners,'' referring to the Boston Red Sox first baseman whose fielding error some fans blame for the team's loss in the 1986 World Series.
``Yes, I found a flaw,'' Greenspan said in response to grilling from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. ``I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.'' Greenspan added he was ``partially'' wrong for opposing the regulation of derivatives.
Greenspan's contrition came after lawmakers and Fed watchers increasingly blamed the former Fed chairman for helping cause the crisis with lax oversight of the housing boom and derivatives markets. Normally afforded deference by Congress, he endured almost four hours of questions from lawmakers less than two weeks before a national election.
``Greenspan is finally taking some responsibility for his actions,'' said Paul Kasriel, director of economic research at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago and a former Fed official. ``The damage has been done. His reputation has definitely been tarnished.''
Greenspan, responding to questions, said only ``onerous'' regulation would have prevented the financial crisis. Stifling rules would have suppressed growth and hurt Americans' standards of living, he said.
Not Infallible
``We have to do our best but not expect infallibility or omniscience,' he said.
Part of the problem was that the Fed's ability to forecast the economy's trajectory is an inexact science, he said.
``If we are right 60 percent of the time in forecasting, we are doing exceptionally well; that means we are wrong 40 percent of the time,'' Greenspan said. ``Forecasting never gets to the point where it is 100 percent accurate.''
The admission that free markets have their faults was a shift for the former Fed chairman who declared in a May 2005 speech that ``private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation.''
Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said today that Greenspan had ``the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis.''
`Paying the Price'
``You were advised to do so by many others,'' he told the man hailed in the 1990s as the ``Maestro'' of the global financial system and awarded a knighthood in 2002. ``And now our whole economy is paying the price.''
Greenspan's devotion to free markets was nurtured in part by his association with Ayn Rand, the libertarian novelist and philosopher who espoused laissez-faire capitalism. He met Rand in the 1950s, becoming part of her inner circle of followers meeting regularly in her Manhattan apartment.
``Greenspan in a very, very kind of unwise, left-brain way, imputed pure rationality to markets,'' James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, said in an interview on ``Night Talk'' with Mike Schneider to be broadcast later today on Bloomberg Television. ``They are just as rational and just as efficient as the people that operated in them.''
Waxman echoed that sentiment to Greenspan: ``The mantra became government regulation is wrong. The market is infallible.''
Gramlich's Warnings
Former Fed Governor Edward Gramlich, who died in 2007, had urged Greenspan to strengthen oversight of banks during the record U.S. mortgage boom from 2004 to 2006.
Questioned about those warnings, Greenspan said ``Governor Gramlich said to me that he had problems'' and that he left the meeting expecting a Fed subcommittee dealing with consumer and community affairs to present recommendations, which didn't occur. ``I presumed at the time that essentially the subcommittee didn't think it rose to the higher level'' requiring action, Greenspan said.
Responding to criticism that he was too ideological, Greenspan said he sought as chairman to abide by laws passed by Congress, ``not my own predilections.''
He later added that he couldn't respond to every warning. ``There are always a lot of people raising issues, and half the time they're wrong.''
Regulatory Actions
Greenspan pointed out that he voted for every regulatory action the Fed moved on, drawing a rebuke from Waxman. ``On the other hand, you didn't get to vote on regulations that you didn't put before the Federal Reserve board, even though you had the legal authority for those regulations.''
Firms that bundle loans into securities for sale should be required to keep part of those securities, Greenspan said in prepared testimony. Other rules should address fraud and settlement of trades, he said.
Greenspan opposed increasing financial supervision as Fed chairman from August 1987 to January 2006. Policy makers are now struggling to contain a financial crisis marked by record foreclosures, falling asset prices and almost $660 billion in writedowns and losses tied to U.S. subprime mortgages.
Greenspan, 82, reiterated his ``shocked disbelief'' that financial companies failed to execute sufficient ``surveillance'' on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. The ``breakdown'' was clearest in the market where securities firms packaged home mortgages into debt sold on to other investors, he said.
Pricing Risk
``In this financial environment, I see no choice but to require that all securitizers retain a meaningful part of the securities they issue,'' Greenspan said. That would give the companies an incentive to ensure the assets are properly priced for their risk, advocates say.
Greenspan said the Fed didn't know the size of the subprime mortgage market until late 2005.
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and former Treasury Secretary John Snow also appeared at the House committee hearing.
Snow said the economy is headed down a ``bad, bad path'' and he endorsed consideration of more fiscal stimulus. For the longer term, Snow said the global financial system should be reorganized by focusing on increasing transparency of ``excessive'' leverage to prevent institutions from creating too much risk.
The U.S. needs ``one strong national regulator'' to oversee firms and fix what Snow called ``a fragmented approach'' to regulation.
Addressing the trio that oversaw the U.S. financial markets as the housing bubble developed, Representative John Yarmuth, a Democrat from Kentucky, characterized them as ``three Bill Buckners,'' referring to the Boston Red Sox first baseman whose fielding error some fans blame for the team's loss in the 1986 World Series.
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