The banks’ secret endgame
gregpalast.com
gregpalast.com
Firstly derivatives have been in use for thusands of years - first employed to lock in prices for future crop harvests. Now millions of businesses rely on derivatives to manage fx exposures, commodity exposures, interest rate exposures and so on. Without recourse to such products companies future cash flows would be much less predictable and expose companies to material risks. Contrary to what you might hear, derivatives ARE socially useful (e.g think the S.Korean business who hedges his USD-denominated payroll liabilities).
Secondly, IBs are not casinos. They take risks, but so do retail banks (they borrow short and lend long so you have a duration mis-match leading to credit, liquidity and interest rate exposures). The financial crisis was born out of over-enthusiastic mortgage lending - i.e your basic retail product. Even lehman brothers, a classic IB, went down due to it's large commercial property portfolio which tanked in the crisis (again, nothing to do with derivatives).
In all crises governments and the media need someone to blame. IBs are the scape goat this time. But the reality is a heck of a lot more complex than a simplistic "greedy IB assholes running amoke and stealing the world's wealth with nasty derivatives".
Indeed all the regulation that's now been implemented is incredibly counter-productive. It doesn't make banks safer (people can and will always make stupid business decisions no matter how much regulation you deploy), it increases costs and restricts lending - the very opposite of what's needed to finance a return to, or increase in growth.
How can you possibly say this? It was mortgage backed securities (derivatives) and collateralized debt obligations (derivatives of derivatives) that were the main product that allowed excessive lending, by obscuring the true risks. It was the markets for these securities that froze, causing the liquidity crisis that drove the financial crisis.
Take the Greek and Spanish economic problems. Spain was in massive property bubble mode for the entire 2000s. The Greek government was willfully deceiving both it's people and the EU about it's finances. We're expected to believe that these issues would all have worked out fine, and these economies would have naturally stabilized all by themselves if it weren't for the wicked machinations of the US treasury? Really?
Of course Lehmans and the other banks badly underestimated their exposure, but the regulators that are cracking down on the banking industry now and ticking them off for being so greedy, were themselves willfully ignoring all the signs of danger before the crash because it was politically expedient to do so. It was politically expedient because that's what the voting public wanted to believe. Nobody came out of the crash smelling of roses.
Ultimately it was mortgage brokers and the retail banks (or retail arms of universal banks) that sanctioned these mortgages and lent money to highly unsuitable people. Yes they were securitised and sold on but as I say above this is just a funding mechanism. Yes the IBs have some responsibility for not checking the quality of the loans but then there's an argument that should have been done already by the retail side. And of course no-one imagined that default rates would ever get as high as they did - which did wipe out some MBS and CDO tranches resulting in large losses for the holders. As an indication these types of issuance were typically stressed at default rates of 10% - and that was considered extremely conservative. What actually happened was some of these mortgage pools were so crappy default rates hit 80% or 90%.
A stock option on the other hand is most definately NOT a cash product, although the underlying is. The stock itself is not traded , it's just a financial contract whose value is a function of the stock price.
[1] Except incidentally.
By my lay persons reasoning it seems clear that the new forms of mortgage backed securities played a significant role in perpetuating the mortgage bubble, as their complicated structures enabled,at the least, shady practices on the part of the ratings agencies, loan originators, and banks.
Derivatives did have some role in the crisis, as they were at the root of the highest profile firm failure, AIG (credit default swaps).
Apart from that most were locked at the Euribor rate. You know, the one they forged...
And what is not transparent about derivatives? Every one I've ever seen has a very specific and detailed contract. Some of them are complicated, but that's not the same thing as non-transparent.
Commodities futures are derivatives, and all of their contract specifications are available on the web, and easy to read by a layman.
It is also arguably the case that loans were too cheap because the banks were like a supermarket selling one product at a loss (debt) to get customers in the store (so called "loss-leader" product). And then they took advantage of the less educated consumers (ie, selling derivatives to people that should have known better). This is of course, why glass-stegal was in fact originally law. To prevent ths type of bundling.
One thing this article fails to point out, though, is that the clinton administration got this model by copying it from the brits and europeans who long favoured the so-called "universal banking" model. so in that sense, its dis-ingenous to imply the usa was imposing or exporting this model via the WTO (it was the staus quo in Asia, too). For historical reasons, the continentals (eg, Germany), the Japaneese and others, never split off teh i-banks from the lending banks [1,2]. As a rsult, the CEOs of those combined banks were paid more than their US counterparts. This whole fiasco was driven by the US ceo's of the debt banks who were missing out on the windfalls accorded to the Investment Bank CEOs during internet 1.0 bubble. If you look at the history, the banks bought up the i-banks (as they had much larger balance sheets) and the CEO pay skyrocketed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_bank [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keiretsu
They are different things. Retail banks take risks with their money (if a lend doesn't pay off, they are the ones that pay for it), IBs take risks with other people's money.
In principle, there is nothing wrong with that, but IBs get money when they get positive returns for your investment, but don't suffer when the return is negative.
That, again, is not a problem by itself, but it's an incentive for the IBs to assume the highest risks they can find around. And if left unchecked, they do become casinos.
Huh? No! They are taking risks with YOUR money. When they lend on a mortgage, or make a corporate loan to a business they're doing that with YOUR deposits. This is how a savings account pays interest. They take your money, lend it at some interest rate and pay you a slightly lesser one. If the bank goes bust it's YOUR money which is lost: and this is why in most countries there are Federal Deposit Guarantees (i.e the govt will cover you up to some level if a retail bank goes bust)
Ironically this is precisely the OPPOSITE of the IB business model. They are NOT taking risks with your money: they fund in the money and debt markets, i.e they borrow the money to fund their activities.
When I buy stock in, say, Google or General Motors, whose money are they taking risks with? I didn't tell Google that I wanted them to put money into Uber, nor do I think it's a great idea. Too bad for me I guess.
And what do you mean "they pay for it"? Do you think when Joe Public defaults on his mortgage it comes out of the broker's bonus? No, the default risk is priced into every transaction the bank does. You and I and every other shareholder or bondholder pay for it.
Investing is investing.
I guess Australia doesn't exist in conspiracy theories.