Bulls, Bears & Bucks #26: De moeder van alle bail-outs.

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Deflation – A fall in the general price of goods and services. This problem, seen during the Great Depression, hurts economic growth as consumers wait for prices to fall. By contrast, "disinflation" is a benign reduction in the inflation rate.

Inflation – A rise in the general price of goods and services. When out of control, it constrains saving and investment in the economy. The rate of inflation is most often measured by changes in the Labor Department's consumer price index.

Recession – A sharp contraction in economic activity and employment. A common but informal measure is two consecutive quarters with a decline of national output. A recession is officially declared by a committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston – this occurs after the fact when final data have arrived and been analyzed.

Stagflation – A combination of stagnation (manifested as significant unemployment and slow or negative economic growth) and entrenched inflation – a phenomenon that characterized the 1970s in America.

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The realty trade group said in a report that as many as 2 in 5 home sales are by borrowers who have seen their property lose value or are facing foreclosure.

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5 Lies About Paulson’s Plan

Opinions abound when it comes to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposed $700 billion bailout plan for U.S. banks. And a lot of them are negative. But Cramer’s a strong supporter, and he used part of Tuesday’s Mad Money to clarify what he sees as people’s misconceptions about the plan.

1) It doesn’t address the real problems of people losing their homes.

Wrong. Declining home prices are the reason owners are either walking away or being forced out. Paulson’s plan puts a stop to the root cause of this: foreclosures. Other housing-related problems, from making mortgage money available to shrinking inventories, are being solved. This plan takes care of the last one.

2) The plan costs too much.

Actually, it might not cost anything. Once Paulson’s plan is put in motion, home-price depreciation should stop. That means the mortgage-related paper the government will then hold would no longer be worthless. Plus, the government can work with owners in any way necessary to keep them in their homes. And it looks like Washington will be taking an equity stake in any company that takes part in the plan, which means there’s even a chance to make money rather than lose it.

3) Executives will be overpaid.

Cramer’s suggestion: Create an executive compensation board. Or make the executives waive their salaries for 2009 if they participate. They can afford, and they probably don’t want to end up like Lehman Brothers’ Dick Fuld.

4) Banks will be forced to take huge write-downs once we discover what the government’s paying for these troubled assets.

Banks like Wells Fargo , Bank of America and US Bancorp have already written the loans down. So this plan helps them; it doesn’t hurt them. And if there are weaker banks out there that can’t take the hit, then so be it. Let the FDIC sell off their deposits and then absorb their bad assets. This type of arrangement is perfect, actually, for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs , Cramer said. Don’t listen to the naysayers who think the two former investment banks made a mistake by becoming bank holding companies. The new deposit base will increase their values.

5) There’s no rush here.

Last night, Washington Mutual’s debt was downgraded again. We need this legislation, Cramer said, to ensure that if the bank goes under that its deposits can be sold and mortgages put into a Resolution Mortgage Trust. Anything less could cause a 1930s-style run on all the banks.

Keep this in mind, too: There’s a good chance that all we need is for Congress to pass the legislation in order put a floor under this mess. Once that happens, Cramer thinks the private sector could jump in and the government won’t even have to buy any of these troubled assets. That’s how much confidence a Washington intervention could instill in this market.

Then again, there is the alternative.

“This plan must be passed and passed now,” Cramer said, “or I am giving you a prediction of a sequel to the Great Depression.”

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Op woensdag 24 september 2008 19:38 schreef SeLang het volgende:
BREAKING NEWS: Bush gaat een toespraak houden om het Amerikaanse publiek te overtuigen dat de bailout moet.

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Stopping a Financial Crisis, the Swedish Way


Published: September 22, 2008

A banking system in crisis after the collapse of a housing bubble. An economy hemorrhaging jobs. A market-oriented government struggling to stem the panic. Sound familiar?
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Swedish National Debt Office

Bo Lundgren, finance minister during the 1992 crisis.

It does to Sweden. The country was so far in the hole in 1992 — after years of imprudent regulation, short-sighted economic policy and the end of its property boom — that its banking system was, for all practical purposes, insolvent.

But Sweden took a different course than the one now being proposed by the United States Treasury. And Swedish officials say there are lessons from their own nightmare that Washington may be missing.

Sweden did not just bail out its financial institutions by having the government take over the bad debts. It extracted pounds of flesh from bank shareholders before writing checks. Banks had to write down losses and issue warrants to the government.

That strategy held banks responsible and turned the government into an owner. When distressed assets were sold, the profits flowed to taxpayers, and the government was able to recoup more money later by selling its shares in the companies as well.

“If I go into a bank,” said Bo Lundgren, who was Sweden’s finance minister at the time, “I’d rather get equity so that there is some upside for the taxpayer.”

Sweden spent 4 percent of its gross domestic product, or 65 billion kronor, the equivalent of $11.7 billion at the time, or $18.3 billion in today’s dollars, to rescue ailing banks. That is slightly less, proportionate to the national economy, than the $700 billion, or roughly 5 percent of gross domestic product, that the Bush administration estimates its own move will cost in the United States.

But the final cost to Sweden ended up being less than 2 percent of its G.D.P. Some officials say they believe it was closer to zero, depending on how certain rates of return are calculated.

The tumultuous events of the last few weeks have produced a lot of tight-lipped nods in Stockholm. Mr. Lundgren even made the rounds in New York in early September, explaining what the country did in the early 1990s.

A few American commentators have proposed that the United States government extract equity from banks as a price for their rescue. But it does not seem to be under serious consideration yet in the Bush administration or Congress.

The reason is not quite clear. The government has already swapped its sovereign guarantee for equity in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage finance institutions, and the American International Group, the global insurance giant.

Putting taxpayers on the hook without anything in return could be a mistake, said Urban Backstrom, a senior Swedish finance ministry official at the time. “The public will not support a plan if you leave the former shareholders with anything,” he said.

The Swedish crisis had strikingly similar origins to the American one, and its neighbors, Norway and Finland, were hobbled to the point of needing a government bailout to escape the morass as well.

Financial deregulation in the 1980s fed a frenzy of real estate lending by Sweden’s banks, which did not worry enough about whether the value of their collateral might evaporate in tougher times.

Property prices imploded. The bubble deflated fast in 1991 and 1992. A vain effort to defend Sweden’s currency, the krona, caused overnight interest rates to spike at one point to 500 percent. The Swedish economy contracted for two consecutive years after a long expansion, and unemployment, at 3 percent in 1990, quadrupled in three years.

After a series of bank failures and ad hoc solutions, the moment of truth arrived in September 1992, when the government of Prime Minister Carl Bildt decided it was time to clear the decks.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the opposition center-left, Mr. Bildt’s conservative government announced that the Swedish state would guarantee all bank deposits and creditors of the nation’s 114 banks. Sweden formed a new agency to supervise institutions that needed recapitalization, and another that sold off the assets, mainly real estate, that the banks held as collateral.

Sweden told its banks to write down their losses promptly before coming to the state for recapitalization. Facing its own problem later in the decade, Japan made the mistake of dragging this process out, delaying a solution for years.

Then came the imperative to bleed shareholders first. Mr. Lundgren recalls a conversation with Peter Wallenberg, at the time chairman of SEB, Sweden’s largest bank. Mr. Wallenberg, the scion of the country’s most famous family and steward of large chunks of its economy, heard that there would be no sacred cows.

The Wallenbergs turned around and arranged a recapitalization on their own, obviating the need for a bailout. SEB turned a profit the following year, 1993.

“For every krona we put into the bank, we wanted the same influence,” Mr. Lundgren said. “That ensured that we did not have to go into certain banks at all.”

By the end of the crisis, the Swedish government had seized a vast portion of the banking sector, and the agency had mostly fulfilled its hard-nosed mandate to drain share capital before injecting cash. When markets stabilized, the Swedish state then reaped the benefits by taking the banks public again.

More money may yet come into official coffers. The government still owns 19.9 percent of Nordea, a Stockholm bank that was fully nationalized and is now a highly regarded giant in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea region.

The politics of Sweden’s crisis management were similarly tough-minded, though much quieter.

Soon after the plan was announced, the Swedish government found that international confidence returned more quickly than expected, easing pressure on its currency and bringing money back into the country. The center-left opposition, while wary that the government might yet let the banks off the hook, made its points about penalizing shareholders privately.

“The only thing that held back an avalanche was the hope that the system was holding,” said Leif Pagrotzky, a senior member of the opposition at the time. “In public we stuck together 100 percent, but we fought behind the scenes.”

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Op woensdag 24 september 2008 17:45 schreef DJKoster het volgende:
Saaie DJ vandaag..

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NEW YORK, Sept 24 (Reuters) - Standard & Poor's on Wednesday cut its counterparty credit rating on Washington Mutual Inc deeper into 'junk' territory, citing concerns the company may be split up in a potential sale.

S&P cut the rating by five notches to 'CCC', the eighth-lowest speculative grade, from 'BB-'. The outlook is negative, meaning the agency could lower the rating again.