Time for a book review.

I’ve just finished Michael Lewis’s “The Big Short”. It’s an amazing book, not just because it informs us of the road to the subprime mess but he creates a story around the protagonists. He also manages to expose the whole wretched mess, the fictionalisation of risk and yield laid bare. He introduces us to the main players in the debacle through the eyes of a few weird and wonderful players who worked out that something was terribly wrong and bet against it. These colourful characters expose the whole damn scheme as nothing more than a paper pyramid.

As Lewis sums up the Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO) on page 73:

“The CDO was, in effect, a credit laundering service for the residents of Lower Middle Class America. For Wall Street it was a machine that turned lead into gold”.

Simply put a CDO was a collection (a tower) of subprime loans that had miraculously transformed from junk status to triple A (AAA) credit and therefore it was investible by major funds (referred to in the book as dopey Germans).

So what was the short? Well on one hand you had investors who sold insurance on these debts defaulting. They believed (incorrectly) that it could never happen and therefore they were picking up free money. The shorters realised the were getting amazing odds on the loans defaulting and piled in.

At the bottom of this was an average person with no money and a big mortgage, usually 100% or more. Any fall in the price of their property would immediately put them in a default position. Yes it was a giant pyramid scheme. The real laugh is that even the guys going short didn’t really understand what it was they were shorting so opaque was the structure and process.

I recommend the book very highly. It’s a gripping read and manageable for the layperson.

You’re left wondering how the bankers got away with it. The answer given by the bankers (well laid out in Sorkin’s book) was that they were too big to fail.

This sets us up nicely for the next round.

P.S.

Today the SEC is launching a case against ICP Asset management for their role in handling CDO investments. Along with the case against Goldman Sachs we can expect more companies to be investigated for their role in this financial fraud. It will also be interesting to see when the rating agencies themselves will come under review. They were the ones who gave the AAA blessing to these products they really knew very little about. Makes you wonder about the whole darn shooting match!

It’s taken me a long time to get round to this post. My eyes have been glued to the train wreck that is European fiscal management. Who could forget the financial gymnastics performed by many EU wanna-bees prior to EMU integration. 3% budget deficit….no problem said Greece….we have some very good accountants in Athens.

So the chickens have finally come home. And now the Euro project is in harms way. Or is this just the next stage in complete sovereign consilience? It’s fiscal consolidation or that’s the end of the road.

The real problem, if you look hard enough under the falling limbs of the EU forest, is simply debt and its modern bedfellow, leverage. The financial binge of the last decade, built upon market deregulation in the 80s, has simply finished. Apres le binge, le deluge as they might say in Paris. A bad hangover is one thing but watching bankers get on the big white telephone is no fun at all.

The debt binge primarily was brought about not so much by low interest rates (though that helped) but by the belief that capital gain was guaranteed. Stocks always go up in the long run, property always goes up in the long run…..don’t worry about income, just borrow as much as you can and buy an asset. These financial assets have become a magnet for all investors and, naturally, sellers of investment products. I wonder how many people are holding derivative products which allow them to catch the upside of the stock market with no risk unless the market falls 50%….oops. Certainly Mr Buffet has a few of those.

The return to a time when people invested in companies based on their fundamental performance and bought houses to live in is long overdue. That people cannot afford to buy a home is without doubt the result of excessive lending by banks over the last 30 years. This is the root cause of the problem. Banks have actually created the inflation we have seen in financial assets….unearned income to be exact. That asset price inflation has seen real wages fall heavily over the years consigning the average wage earner or those unable to access leveraged credit to a lifetime of renting and debt.

The maths of excessive leverage is the simple maths of compound interest….compounded.

As Paul Volcker noted in this recent piece,

“There was one great growth industry. Private debt relative to GDP nearly tripled in thirty years. Credit default swaps, invented little more than a decade ago, soared at their peak to a $60 trillion market, exceeding by a large multiple the amount of the underlying credits potentially hedged against default.”

The bottom line is very simple: we have spent our GDP already….for many years hence.

Now it’s payback time. The payback process could take many forms: bankruptcy, forced asset sales or a slow descent back to a normalized level of activity – actually living within our means. Stripping away the financial sector so it works for people and business rather than conspiring against them will be the first requirement: not so much regulation as reengineering.

Whichever route we take it will be a painful adjustment made worse by the fact that those who are in charge are actually responsible for perpetuating the current system or refusing to question and change it.

2 years seems a long time but feels like yesterday. In that period the NZ$ fell from 0.82 to 0.49 and now is back trading just below 0.68. Wow…talk about currency whiplash.

So back then I suggested the RBNZ should think about selling as much NZ$ as they could. Why? Why go against prevailing market sentiment which is that intervention doesn’t really work and simply provides a target for the speculating hordes which incidentally account for 95% of the volume of daily trades.

That’s a fair sentiment when your currency is falling but when it’s rising? And when you have an eye popping foreign debt of almost 140% of GDP……that’s foreign debt not overall debt.

And yet the punters keep buying the NZ$. Perhaps they know something I don’t. Maybe 50 years worth of oil has been discovered in the Southern Basin. Who knows?

The point is that at some point that money has to be paid back and at the moment, due to the sneaky monster that is compound interest, we can’t even get close to reducing it.

But now is the time to strike.

Again I would like to suggest that the RBNZ starts selling NZ$. When you have a lot of something to sell it’s always best to do it when others are keen to buy. Now is that chance.

By selling NZ$ now and paying back, or at least holding for that same purpose, it will take the pressure off the very precarious dependency we have on overseas lenders.

This doesn’t eliminate the debt but simply transfers it to a domestic situation where it can be managed at lower rates and where there is no threat of having to suddenly repay.

How can the RBNZ do this? Again this is very simple. Print NZ$ and buy US$. There is no change to the actual money supply just how the debt is denominated.

Considering the implosion Iceland experienced and the unfolding disaster that is Ireland (surviving only due to its membership of the Euro), it makes complete sense just to get on with this now.

To allow foreign debt to be run at such a level is financial mismanagement of the highest level.

It also shows a willingness to be dictated to and dependent on overseas interests. This makes no sense at all when the country’s economy security is at stake.

Pretty bubbles in the air.

They fly so high,

Nearly reach the sky,

Then like my dreams,

They fade and die.

Fortune’s always hiding,

I’ve looked everywhere,

I’m forever blowing bubbles,

Pretty bubbles in the air.

Never did I believe the mighty Hammers would have understood the machinations of central banking so well. Maybe they knew?

Reading the recent Fed statement, one may feel that the lessons of the recent crisis have not been fully understood or learnt. That’s the problem with the ability to print new money to replace old. It gives a feeling of relief and so help the markets to recover, in fact recover strongly. But there is nothing here that suggests the policymakers know what they are doing.

Crisis dealt with? For now.

To the joy of conspiracy theorists everywhere, the new “United Future World Currency” coin was presented at the recent G8 summit in Italy. So far though its just a piece of alloy metal but hey value is in the eye of the holder.

As usual it was the Russian President, Dimitry Medvedev, giving the $ a good roasting and moving the debate forward to the minting process. But really how far advanced is this process and how serious are they? More to the point what would a global currency unit look like?

To answer the first question is simple: I have no idea. At the political level it is mere grandstanding usually for the domestic audience. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that most politicians have little understanding of how the global financial system works (no different from anyone else!) but back in the offices of Treasuries and Central Banks it may be a different story.Though I was struck by the recent bizarre questioning of Bernanke over the issue of $ currency swaps with central banks. It’s a classic.

I do think though that the Eurasian block are serious about making this move. Each step is a step closer to creating a multipolar currency whether its based on the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), a Commodity Backed Currency (CBC) or an Energy Backed Currency (EBCU). Even the Amero could be a consideration.

But the key outcome will be whether we move from a Fiat based system to a hard currency system. That would make a major change in the structure to the global system perhaps taking us back to Keynes’s suggestion, the Bancor. If we stay with a Fiat system then we simply exchange one piece of paper for another.A hard backed system would certainly restore some much needed reality to the meaning and value.

What’s clear is that the US has become a fiscal disaster and holders of paper issued by the US have said enough is enough: your paper is not “as good as gold“.

I’m just back from 3 lovely days in Wellington (nice weather for a change!) at the NZ Association of Economists Conference. It had a good vibe and felt like there was a wider range of interesting papers than the last one I attended. The topics of interest for me are listed below (I will post in more detail once the papers have been uploaded to the NZAE website):

- Tax Reform: The perennial favourite, Capital Gains Tax, made some waves as did some more detailed examination of a possible Land Tax. This initially popped up 18 months ago as a floated idea and more recently was discussed at length over at Interest.co.nz.  The session on Tax Reform was sponsored by the Treasury so expect more debate on this in the near future.

- Aid and Development: There were a few papers on corruption and developmental outcomes which were worth following (though I haven’t seen anything to rival Paul Collier’s work). I especially enjoyed a paper on whether aid was helping to achieve the Millenium Development Goals. To me it was clear that whilst aid can make some contribution, targeted p2p actions such as microfinance and giving are more likely to have a lasting impact as they tunnel through the swathe of government and administration on both ends of the aid pipleline. Message to Government: Let people do the giving.

- Business and Innovation: It’s good to see economists looking at this topic since it’s of major importance to NZ. Again lack of capital and R+D incentives for business was a clear problem. We simply can’t compete with countries like Finland or Israel when all our capital is tied up in housing.

- Health: One good paper on “fat” taxes or food “subsidies”. It simply reinforced my position of taking a supply side approach. It’s hard to influence demand through pricing strategies when the underlying commodity (food) is experiencing huge swings in price. As with oil and carbon taxes, the prices movements in food prices will overwhelm any attempt to reduce demand by taking away GST for example (12.5%). Perhaps incentives like gift vouchers/cash in savings accounts will help focus (a bit like the idea to pay girls an annual stipend for each year they don’t get pregnant). We have to get our future health costs down somehow and creative solutions may be required. Time to call in the behavioral psychologists methinks.

- The Financial Crisis: Nice paper looking back at financial collapses over the last 200 years. Yes they happen with regularity…..whoa…yes we know that. The cycle goes back as far as records allow. Even the Bank of England was not immune from overstretching itself… a run on the Central Bank itself. Ooops. So my simple question is: When are we going to change the system?

Overall it was a good conference and a lot came out of it. For next year I can see more focus on the impact of microfinance and p2p activities, more focus on tax reform, more focus on the debt based financial system and hopefully we will have some more ideas to contribute ourselves.

Also good to see someone with a laptop on the go! Surely a first for the NZAE.