Bulls, Bears & Bucks #07: FED regelt bail-out voor 'n koopje.

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Op zaterdag 15 maart 2008 13:52 schreef simmu het volgende:
ik wil toch ffies iets kwijt over die hele "de VS is communistisch" discussie.

communisme houdt (heel erg grofweg!) in dat bedrijven staatseigendom zijn. in de VS zijn bedrijven geen staatseigendom, maar eigendom van china. well duhuh! there ya go!

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 02:31 schreef indahnesia.com het volgende:
USD als een baksteen: 1.5835

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 04:38 schreef indahnesia.com het volgende:

Goud op 1025 (+3%)

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 06:32 schreef NorthernStar het volgende:

[..]


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Zou er een verband bestaan? [afbeelding]

Gold Advances to Record in Asia as U.S. Dollar Falls

All the markets are in a real panic right now and I don't think there's anything to stop gold's rise given the flight to safe haven assets,'' Wallace Ng, chief trader for precious metals in Asia-Pacific at Fortis Bank, said from Hong Kong today by telephone

What the Fed did reflects how serious the situation is right now and I won't be surprised if gold gains another $100 this week because of all the financial turmoil and the uncertainty surrounding the U.S. economy,'' said Ng.

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 06:47 schreef Drugshond het volgende:
WTF

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The B Word

NY-times


O.K., here it comes: The unthinkable is about to become the inevitable.

Paul Krugman.

Last week, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, and John Lipsky, a top official at the International Monetary Fund, both suggested that public funds might be needed to rescue the U.S. financial system. Mr. Lipsky insisted that he wasn’t talking about a bailout. But he was.

It’s true that Henry Paulson, the current Treasury secretary, still says that any proposal to use taxpayers’ money to help resolve the crisis is a “non-starter.” But that’s about as credible as all of his previous pronouncements on the financial situation.

So here’s the question we really should be asking: When the feds do bail out the financial system, what will they do to ensure that they aren’t also bailing out the people who got us into this mess?

Let’s talk about why a bailout is inevitable.

Between 2002 and 2007, false beliefs in the private sector — the belief that home prices only go up, that financial innovation had made risk go away, that a triple-A rating really meant that an investment was safe — led to an epidemic of bad lending. Meanwhile, false beliefs in the political arena — the belief of Alan Greenspan and his friends in the Bush administration that the market is always right and regulation always a bad thing — led Washington to ignore the warning signs.

By the way, Mr. Greenspan is still at it: accepting no blame, he continues to insist that “market flexibility and open competition” are the “most reliable safeguards against cumulative economic failure.”

The result of all that bad lending was an unholy financial mess that will cause trillions of dollars in losses. A large chunk of these losses will fall on financial institutions: commercial banks, investment banks, hedge funds and so on.

Many people say that the government should let the chips fall where they may — that those who made bad loans should simply be left to suffer the consequences. But it’s not going to happen. When push comes to shove, financial officials — rightly — aren’t willing to run the risk that losses on bad loans will cripple the financial system and take the real economy down with it.

Consider what happened last Friday, when the Federal Reserve rushed to the aid of Bear Stearns.

Nobody expects an investment bank to be a charitable institution, but Bear has a particularly nasty reputation. As Gretchen Morgenson of The New York Times reminds us, Bear “has often operated in the gray areas of Wall Street and with an aggressive, brass-knuckles approach.”

Bear was a major promoter of the most questionable subprime lenders. It lured customers into two of its own hedge funds that were among the first to go bust in the current crisis. And it’s a bad financial citizen: the last time the Fed tried to contain a financial crisis, after the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, Bear refused to participate in the rescue operation.

Bear, in other words, deserved to be allowed to fail — both on the merits and to teach Wall Street not to expect someone else to clean up its messes.

But the Fed rode to Bear’s rescue anyway, fearing that the collapse of a major investment bank would cause panic in the markets and wreak havoc with the wider economy. Fed officials knew that they were doing a bad thing, but believed that the alternative would be even worse.

As Bear goes, so will go the rest of the financial system. And if history is any guide, the coming taxpayer-financed bailout will end up costing a lot of money.

The U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s ended up costing taxpayers 3.2 percent of G.D.P., the equivalent of $450 billion today. Some estimates put the fiscal cost of Japan’s post-bubble cleanup at more than 20 percent of G.D.P. — the equivalent of $3 trillion for the United States.

If these numbers shock you, they should. But the big bailout is coming. The only question is how well it will be managed.

As I said, the important thing is to bail out the system, not the people who got us into this mess. That means cleaning out the shareholders in failed institutions, making bondholders take a haircut, and canceling the stock options of executives who got rich playing heads I win, tails you lose.

According to late reports on Sunday, JPMorgan Chase will buy Bear for a pittance. That’s an O.K. resolution for this case — but not a model for the much bigger bailout to come. Looking ahead, we probably need something similar to the Resolution Trust Corporation, which took over bankrupt savings and loan institutions and sold off their assets to reimburse taxpayers. And we need it quickly: things are falling apart as you read this.

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Kredietcrisis in beslissende fase
Bron : Z24
Haalt Bear Stearns het einde van de week? En hoe groot is het gevaar dat andere zakenbanken door de liquiditeitsproblemen van Bear Stearns worden meegesleurd? De kredietcrisis dreigt om te slaan in een echte systeemcrisis.

Ze hebben de presentatie van de cijfers drie dagen naar voren gehaald. Zakenbank Bear Stearns zal al maandag, direct na het sluiten van de beurs, de resultaten van het eerste kwartaal naar buiten brengen.

Maar beleggers zullen er niet warm of koud van worden. Of de bank nu meer of minder winst heeft gemaakt kan niemand iets schelen. Gaat Bear Stearns ten onder? Dat is de vraag die beleggers bezig houdt.

Vrijdagmiddag moest de Fed plotseling bijspringen met een noodkrediet om Bear Stearns te redden. Omdat de bank zelf niet direct bij de Fed kan lenen gebeurde dit via zakenbank JP Morgan.

De Fed deed daarbij een beroep op een wet die sinds 1960 niet meer was gebruikt.

Dit is een nieuwe fase in de kredietcrisis. Tot vorige week had de Fed met algemene kredietverlening het bankwezen voldoende liquide weten te houden. Nu is het moment van de individuele reddingplannen aangebroken.

Daarmee is de al maanden sluimerende vraag plotseling zeer relevant: hoe groot is de kans op een echte systeemcrisis, waarbij de ene bank de andere meesleept in de ondergang?

Volgens de Nederlands-Britse topeconoom Willem Buiter is het nog niet zo ver. Op zijn weblog schrijft hij dat Bear Stearns niet belangrijk genoeg is om een echte systeemcrisis te veroorzaken. Andere economen sluiten zich bij dat oordeel aan.

Het is de vraag of deze sussende woorden beleggers gerust stellen. De problemen van Bear Stearns kwamen eind vorige week plotseling op. Een gerucht over liquiditeitsproblemen zorgden dat financiers hun geld besloten terug te trekken. Daarmee werden het gerucht vanzelf bewaarheid.

Dat kan andere Amerikaanse banken ook overkomen. Het aandeel van zakenbank Lehman Brothers ging afgelopen vrijdag vijftien procent omlaag, na een gerucht over geldtekorten. Met een nieuw krediet van twee miljard dollar van andere banken, hoopt de bank het lot van Bear Stearns te ontlopen.

Komende dinsdag publiceert Lehman Brothers de cijfers over het eerste kwartaal. Ongetwijfeld zal de bank zal die gelegenheid aangrijpen om de markt te overtuigen dat de kaspositie gezond is.

Ook Morgan Stanley komt dinsdag met cijfers. Deze bank heeft tot nu toe al 9,4 miljard dollar op de kredietportefeuille moeten afschrijven.

Goldman Sachs, de zakenbank die op tijd uitstapte en juist miljarden verdeinde aan de crisis, rapporteert woensdag.

Dinsdag komt het beleidscomité van de Fed bijeen om over het rentebesluit te vergaderen. Analisten verwachten een renteverlaging naar 2,25 procent.

Daarmee zou totale renteverlaging sinds eind januari uitkomen op twee procentpunten.

Ook het beleid van de Fed gaat dan een nieuwe fase in. De Amerikaanse kerninflatie (dat is inflatie zonder de invloed van volatiele energie- en grondstofprijzen) bedraagt nu 2,4 procent. Na de renteverlaging van de Fed is de op basis van kerninflatie berekende reële rente dus negatief. Sparen kost geld, lenen levert geld op. Veel stimulerender kun je het monetaire beleid niet krijgen.

Volgens econoom Joachim Fels van Morgan Stanley bewijst dit dat Fed-voorzitter Ben Bernanke de meest proactieve centrale bankier is aller tijden.

Normaal duikt de reële rente pas tegen het einde van de recessie onder de nul. Nu gebeurt dat al aan het begin.

Zelfs Alan Greenspan deed het na het knappen van de internetzeepbel in 2001 rustiger aan. Is dat geruststellend? Je zou het ook paniekvoetbal kunnen noemen.

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Wall Street fears for next Great Depression
Bron : independent.uk

By Margareta Pagano, Business Editor
Sunday, 16 March 2008

Wall Street is bracing itself for another week of roller-coaster trading after more than $300bn (£150bn) was wiped off the US equity markets on Friday following the emergency funding package put together by the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase to rescue Bear Stearns.

One UK economist warned that the world is now close to a 1930s-like Great Depression, while New York traders said they had never experienced such fear. The Fed's emergency funding procedure was first used in the Depression and has rarely been used since.

A Goldman Sachs trader in New York said: "Everyone is in a total state of shock, aghast at what is happening. No one wants to talk, let alone deal; we're just standing by waiting. Everyone is nervous about what is going to emerge when trading starts tomorrow."

In the UK, Michael Taylor, a senior market strategist at Lombard, the economics consultancy, said on Friday night: "We have all been talking about a 1970s-style crisis but as each day goes by this looks more like the 1930s. No one has any clue as to where this is going to end; it's a self-feeding disaster." Mr Taylor, who had been relatively optimistic, has turned bearish: "It really does look as though the UK is now heading for a recession. The credit-crunch means that even if the Bank of England cuts rates again, the banks are in such a bad way they are unlikely to pass cuts on."

Mr Taylor added that he expects a sharp downturn in the real UK economy as the public and companies stop borrowing. "We have never seen anything like this before. This is new territory for us. Liquidity is being pumped into the system but the banks are not taking any notice. This is all about confidence. The more the central banks do, the more the banks seem to ignore what's going on."

Mr Taylor added that the problems unravelling at Bear Stearns are just the beginning: "There will be more banks and hedge funds heading for collapse."

One of the problems facing the markets is that, despite the Fed's move last week to feed them another $200bn, the banks are still not lending to each other.

"This crisis is one of faith. We are going to see even more problems in the hedge funds as they face margin calls," said Mark O'Sullivan, director of dealing at Currencies Direct in London. "What we are waiting for now is for the Fed to cut interest rates again this week. But that's already been discounted by the market and is unlikely to help restore confidence."

Mr O'Sullivan added that the dollar's free-fall is set to continue and may need cuts in European interest rates to trim the euro's recent strength against the dollar. "But the ECB doesn't like cutting rates," he said.

On Europe, Mr Taylor said that while the German economy remains strong, others such as Italy's and Spain's are weakening. "You could see a scenario where the eurozone breaks up if economies continue to be so worried about inflation."

European financial markets were relatively unscathed by Wall Street's crisis but traders expect there to be a backlash when stock markets open tomorrow.

The Fed's plan will give 28 days of secured funding to Bear Stearns, which saw its value slashed over the week by more than a half to $3.7bn. JP Morgan will provide the funding, but the Fed will bear the risk if the loan is not repaid. Fed chairman, Ben Bernanke, who pumped $200bn of loans to cash-strapped institutions last week, said more would be available to help others in distress.

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 05:33 schreef NorthernStar het volgende:

We have to stop getting dragged into these black & white debates about "free-markets" and "communism" and decide for ourselves what is good for our own communities. The debate is rigged - and guess who it's rigged in favour of?

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 08:21 schreef freud het volgende:

Ben benieuwd wat de beurzen vandaag (en deze week) gaan doen. Ben best benieuwd wat het amerikaanse volk doet als ze erachter komen dat al die financiële reddingsacties feitelijk uit hun zak komen. Je zit al in een huis die zijn hypo niet waard is, creditcard maxed out, en dan een FED die de belastingcenten aan een bank geeft zodat ze BS kunnen kopen zonder risico? Ik zou best pissed zijn...

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Op maandag 17 maart 2008 08:49 schreef Basp1 het volgende:
Die renteverlaging die de fed heeft doorgevoerd van 0.25% komt er nog 1 aan de komende dagen of was dit het weer?