Draw Breath

Bethany McLean in her landmark article on Enron in 2001:

“Enron is a big black box,” gripes another analyst. Without having access to each and every one of Enron’s contracts and its minute-by-minute activities, there isn’t any way to independently answer critical questions about the company. For instance, many Wall Streeters believe that the current volatility in gas and power markets is boosting Enron’s profits, but there is no way to know for sure. “The ability to develop a somewhat predictable model of this business for the future is mostly an exercise in futility,” wrote Bear Stearns analyst Robert Winters in a recent report. To some observers, Enron resembles a Wall Street firm. Indeed, people commonly refer to the company as “the Goldman Sachs of energy trading.”

Now, Bethany McLean on Goldman Sachs in 2009:

Despite the public financial statements Goldman files every quarter, no outsider can tell how the firm really makes its money. You cannot see into “the black box” of the trading empire. Blankfein says that only about 10 percent of Goldman’s profits come from purely proprietary trades, but there is no way any outsider can confirm that independently.

McLean didn’t know that the black box obscured illegality (if it did) when she wrote about Enron in 2001 and, just as with McLean, I’m not at all, not even in a blogishly snide/oblique way, suggesting that Goldman is engaged in illegal activities. That wasn’t McLean’s point in 2001 (since at that stage no outsiders were aware of the extent of Enron’s problems) and it isn’t her point now. The problem is that financial institutions have come to a point where profits accrue from necessarily – and probably willfully – complicated vehicles. These vehicles, at least during the boom, were designed in part to avoid regulatory oversight.

So here’s the key political battle surrounding moves towards any new ‘macro-prudential’ regulatory regime: how to do global capitalism but in a manner that’s legible to regulators? In other words, the moves towards global regulation will involve regulators demanding that financial knowledge be constructed on their terms, not those of bankers. It doesn’t matter that the black box model involved bankers replacing knowledge with swagger: they will argue that obscurity and complexity are vehicles for efficiency and competitive advantage. In a rational world you’d think that investors would be inclined to perform proper oversight and argue against this outlook but they have historically been very poor at doing this kind of thing. They prefer to reap profits from trading shares and securities when they banks etc do well and litigate when they do badly. So the argument should lean towards ending black boxes. Any bets on regulators winning the argument?

Cross-posted from the Irish Left Review, perhaps to be read in the light of this not entirely surprising news from P. O’Neill on Irish Election.

"If you owe us £1,000, it’s your problem; if you owe us £1 million, it’s our problem" was how Justice Moriarty described the AIB’s attitude towards lending when he was chairing the tribunal investigating Charlie Haughey’s adventures with AIB.

How right he was. While we read the good news about the American government’s using vast amounts of Chinese money to rescue the global capitalist system from total collapse, we shouldn’t think that takes us all out of the path of disaster.

The Irish are bound to go the same way in 2009 that Spain is going at the moment. Like us, the Spanish have been enjoying an enormous property boom for the last few years. And, as in Ireland, it has just come stuttering to a halt, prompting a massive rescue from the Spanish government as the sector struggles "with high debt, plunging prices and an overhang of unsold houses and flats."

This is where Ireland is headed, but we’re probably going to experience something much worse.

As I pointed out in a comment thread in April 2007 on Slugger (itself following a post from here), construction constituted 23% of the Irish economy at the height of the boom. That was twice the EU average (which was 12%). So property going belly-up is very bad news indeed for us. While we talked up the role of investment and industry in the Celtic Tiger, we forgot that a whole lot of what looked like wealth was actually us sticking increasing amounts of our money into private debt. And if we have £1000 problems, it’s also given the banks £1m-style concerns (for a serious of discussions, see UCD’s Morgan Kelly). 30% of their loans are to property developers who now find that they can’t sell houses.

Ireland’s property development business model has proven very dangerous for the banks. They’ve been caught short in two directions. First, they lent to the developer who was essentially selling off the plans (or as good as), in the certainty of a quick return. Second, they’ve been busily lending increasing amounts to mortgage payers in the knowledge that they could repackage the risks from those high-stakes several-multiples-of-income 100% mortgages and sell it on the credit default swaps (CDS) markets. But these have all gone down the hole. Banks can’t lend on wholesale markets so they can’t borrow to feed the mortgage frenzy. And they can’t offset their risky bets. AND the property developers have no customers so can’t repay their loans. AND the risky mortgage-payers are going to default.

On property developers, with the country strewn with half-finished developments, the banks have a series of unpalatable choices. They can shut indebted developers down and repossess more or less worthless (for now) unfinished properties. Or they can continue to send good money after bad to developers who have no revenue. Neither option is good for the banks but they seem to be letting the small boys go to the wall and are propping the big boys up. The question is: how long can that keep going?

On mortgage debt, the real hike in Irish unemployment is yet to hit. And also, we haven’t yet seen the shakedown from all those people who borrowed to the max when interest rates are low – unless their mortgages are fixed they’re at risk of losing their homes (even if they don’t lose their jobs). In other words, the banks are looking at inheriting a whole load of property that they can’t sell as their debtors go bust.

This was all predicated on a global trend towards treating debt as if it was money. The Irish problem is that we’ve just done it more than most both domestically through the property market and globally through hosting businesses in the IFSC. So our trouble is a hybrid of what we’re seeing from London and what’s going on in Spain. We’re in the worst of both worlds.

No wonder everyone is on the blower to Leinster House. The governmental failures have all happened already and the only option left is a huge dig out. That will be no easy thing, especially as Irish company and income tax revenues plummet in 2009. But it will be the best possible solution in the current circumstances.

Then read this.

If ever people need an incentive to upgrade to firefox (3?) or to Internet Explorer 7, it's the British Banking Code. As LSN news points out (behind LexisNexis's paywall), section 12.11 of the code (here, pdf) tells you, regarding online banking. that "If you act without reasonable care, and this causes losses, you may be responsible for them. (This may apply, for example, if you do not follow section 12.5 or 12.9 or you do not keep to your account’s terms and conditions.)" Amongst other things, section 12.9 says "Keep your PC secure. Use up-to-date anti-virus and spyware software and a personal firewall" and "Treat e-mails you receive from senders claiming to be from your bank or building society with caution."

Apparently this policy has been in the code for a while, although it was updated in April just gone. While no bank seems to have invoked the clauses, you can pretty much bet that they will at some stage. Which will be bad news for the elderly and the ignorant when they discover that, having been pushed out of branches to save the banks money, they are also responsible for the security of the banks' alternative offerings.

While I of course recommend ditching dodgy Windows for altogether better operating systems, and while I find it perplexing that I still get hits from people using IE6 and IE5, I do think we ought to be sympathetic with people who simply don't know how the software on their machines works and who don't read the latest missives on internet security. If fraud does become sufficiently problematic as to make banks consider invoking the responsibility clause, there's an easy solution: publicly acknowledge that the internet, Windows-style, is not an appropriate venue for financial transactions and take steps to encourage people back into branches. In other words: the banks should just swallow whatever is the cheaper alternative.

There's an interesting converstation developing over on politics.ie about the exposure of Credit Unions in Ireland to risk in the midst of the ongoing credit crunch.

I'm developing a small interest in corporate governance questions surrounding Irish Credit Unions, but I really don't know enough to verify anything that's being said in the politics.ie thread. Still, I'm not entirely a pessimist.

At a guess you'd probably be initially inclined to think that credit unions would not be as sophisticated as banks at filtering for risk. I imagine that that thought has probably gone the same way as America's subprime market (which is to say, while risk assessments in credit unions may or may not be particularly great, they are certainly not great in a number of banks, though perhaps for different reasons).

Second, I'd guess that CUs tend to have larger numbers of people from lower-income groups on their books, and are therefore slightly more exposed to risk than retail banks. If so, that may not look like good news. But there's risk and there's risk

The Irish banking sector is sure to be exposed to subprime in the same way that Northern Rock was: some of them are heavily dependent on the wholesale credit market (as opposed to funding mortgages from their own customers' deposits). And lord knows what may happen when repossessions increase in line with interest rates and property price declines.

In this context, given that CUs are more narrowly focused on a (hopefully) more robust version of the subprime market (as in, they haven't been playing the risk fire-sale game) and given that they lack other forms of exposure, they may ironically be in a more secure position than the commercial banks. Not that that would stop a run on the community banks…

Update: As we're beginning to discover, nobody involved in the credit markets will get away scot free.

Well that's a good thing to see: in following up on figures cited by O'Neill, over on A Pint of Unionist Lite, on the costs of a United Ireland, I noticed that the Irish Department of Finance allows you to download its budget figures in OpenOffice format as well as the ubiquitous and monopolistic Microsoft. Good to see Irish government sites accounting for proper standards. 

I may be jumping the gun a bit here, but I’m finding it hard to tally the BBC’s World Stock Market Slump Hits Second Day with the BBC’s own stock market data, especially if you take this snapshot of the One-Month View (this is a snapshot at the time of writing. The current state of play is here). It’s quite a fall, but I wouldn’t call it a slump. Compare it, for example, to 1987 or 2001.

At least the FT has updated its story between last night and this afternoon.