I’ve spent the last few months combining my time between reading critical theorists on finance and reading financial theorists on finance, both of which I find strangely entertaining and interesting. I have an empty empty life.
Anyway, reading Andrew Leyshon and Nigel Thrift’s ‘The Capitalisation of Almost Everything’ (published in Theory Culture & Society in 2007, but a pdf draft is here) I came across this very interesting point. Leyshon and Thrift are interested in countering arguments that financialised capitalism is pure speculation. Rather, it is connected to predictions about more or less definite income streams (from mortgages, rents, PFI contracts etc), all of which can be bundled up and sold on as what used to be thought of as low-risk bonds.
Part of the article is devoted to Northern Rock and its switch from building society to aggressive mortgage retailer. As with everyone else in the mortgage game in recent years, Northern Rocks’ business model was based on the debt-as-revenue model involving borrowing in the wholesale banking market in order to sell mortgages that could be repackaged and sold on as bonds. Anyway, this is where sponsorship of Newcastle United came in:
The change in the business model of the bank, from marketing for depositors to fund its mortgages, to marketing for investors to buy its securities, was symbolized by Northern Rock’s sponsorship of the English Premier League football club, Newcastle United, which advertises the bank’s logo on the chest of the team’s strip. This sponsorship was designed not to link the organization to the area in which both it and the football team are based, but rather to raise the profile of the bank’s brand in Asia – where Premier League football is keenly followed – because the financial markets of that region are where it sold a large proportion of its securitized mortgage bonds, which are based on the monthly repayments of UK home-owners.
I’ve been asked to give a ten minute talk (as one of a panel of three) in QUB’s School of Sociology tomorrow on the Global Financial Crisis. What can you cover in ten minutes? Not much, I’d say, but my brief is to include something about how we study societies. So I’ll make two points:
Maman Poulet quite rightly questions how many goes RTÉ gives Ministers to answer questions after last night’s ‘technological’ debacle involving Minister of State Maire Hoctor on Primetime:
I’ve nothing at all to add to what she says except: wouldn’t it have been so much better if something like this had happened instead?:
I’ve just read on the excellent Stephen Kinsella’s blog that he and others have set up Irish Recovery.ie, which is “a portal for people with specific ideas that will improve people’s lives and aid the process of recovery in the irish economy.” Good stuff I say.
One thing, however. The site welcomes “specific well-argued projects that are properly costed, based on good practice and have definable and measurable outcomes are the solution to many structural weaknesses in the Irish Economy.” I don’t think anyone can argue with the general point here: make sense and be realistic. So this is not the forum for “national strike…world revolution” style arguments.
Still, I wonder how the ‘properly’ in properly costed is to work itself out. Would Stephen think, for instance, that the Bank of England’s quantitative easing experiment is properly costed? How? Over what timescale? Assuming what outcomes? I’m not sniping here: without at all denying the serious intentions here, some guidance as to what it is to ‘properly’ cost structural reforms to an economy would be welcome. Indeed, once we get beyond Dragon’s Den level ideas, I’m not convinced that structural reforms/adjustments/what have you have ever been properly costed anywhere. They’ve been tried and then people have been either hailed as heroes, villains, or both.
On a macro note, I don’t think that the Irish actually have an important role to play in determining how their economy is to be shaped over the next decade or more. The two of the three Irish national business models have depended entirely on the structures of global capitalism for two decades. We have exploited our location in Europe to act as a magnet for American FDI and we have maintained, at best, a quasi-offshore status to facilitate the movement of global financial capital through the IFSC etc (the third involves the exporting of Irish national resources in the form of food production and tourism).
As such, Irish prosperity relies to some extent on the decisions that Barack Obama makes about the functioning of American global and domestic capitalism. To an even greater extent, the global financial crisis provides a major opportunity for the Europeanisation of corporate governance and capitalism - an opportunity for harmonisation of standards that the McCreevy’s DG in the European Commission is grasping. Have a look at the De Larosière Report for a sense of where things might move on some issues. The Commission also has an interest in the audit, tranparency and a rake of other issues. I touch on this in my chapter for O’Neill’s and Keane’s Corporate Governance: An Irish Perspective.
Anyway, all that’s for drawing out in another post. The main point is that the Irish just have to ride the storm and then choose whether they want to compete in whatever climate the find on the other side. Sad but true.
Am I dreaming or something: without at all denying that Ireland has a pensions crisis (with about 1/3 to be added to the pensions bill in the next 25 years, as opposed to the UK’s ±10%), why is it that the financial meltdown has focused people’s attention on public sector pensions? More particularly, people are absolutely right that it is unfair that workers in the public sector have good pensions while those in the private sector have ones where the individual takes on all the risk associated with posting their savings in the casino door in the hope that, when they retire, the markets will be on a good run. It is very unfair.
But since when is it a good solution to insist that, if I have a shit pension and you have a good one, we should both have shit pensions?
Surely people would be better served to ask why it is that a return to a decent state pension, paid for out of taxes, is not an option. Why are they forced to bet their savings on the markets? And added to that, why are the people who manage those savings doing such a bad job?
I’m pretty perplexed by Eamon Ryan saying that Anglo debtors will be compelled to pay back their loans and “failing this any assets provided in security for the loans would come under State control.” Isn’t the whole point about the Anglo 10 that they were given win-only bets on their loans? If the share price had staged a miraculous recovery, they would sell the shares they bought, pay the loans back and pay the profits; if the share price fell they could default and - since the shares are the only security - they would default and leave the bank, as Anne Robinson might say, with nothing.
I don’t have my trusty Ronan Keane with me so I can’t verify, but I can’t for the life of me imagine that effectively doing an Enron is legal. So the only reason these people shouldn’t be named, or details shouldn’t emerge, is if it would queer either a criminal prosecution or a suit by the nationalised bank.
There’s an interesting passage at the bottom of this article in the FT (you may have to register to access) on IL&P alleging that (UK) analysts are using inaccurate figures on Irish government exposure to banking liabilities:
Rossa White, economist with Davy stockbrokers, believed the markets were overstating the exposure of the state to the Irish banks.
He said UK analysts were using a “bogus” claim that Irish bank liabilities are close to 900 per cent of gross domestic product. “If we’re looking at this from a sovereign risk point of view, two-thirds of the figure people are using is irrelevant.”
Mr White pointed out total bank liabilities included €849bn on the balance sheets of foreign banks operating in Dublin and that, even if the undated bonds and other debt of Irish lenders were added in, total liabilities stood at €575bn, or 309 per cent of GDP, lower than the Netherlands’ 380 per cent and Belgium’s 365 per cent.
He added that Ireland’s debt interest payments would consume about 17 per cent of tax revenues in 2010. “That’s about half the amount of debt service burden experienced in the 1980s, and we never came close to defaulting then,” he said.
I’ve spent the last few months combining my time between reading critical theorists on finance and reading financial theorists on finance, both of which I find strangely entertaining and interesting. I have an empty empty life.