Bulls, Bears & Bucks #60: Viva Obama

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De Amerikaanse zakenbank Goldman Sachs boekte een recordkwartaalwinst. De bank verdiende 3,44 miljard dollar (2,45 miljard euro) in één kwartaal. Goldman Sachs profiteerde op een grandioze manier van de financiële crisis, een gebrek aan concurrentie en blijvende steun van de Amerikaanse overheid.
(tijd) - De verbluffende cijfers van Goldman Sachs zijn ongetwijfeld een opsteker voor de financiële wereld. Sommige instellingen hebben duidelijk de financiële crisis achter zich gelaten. Of toch niet?

Over de kwaliteit van de resultaten kan men altijd twisten. Goldman Sachs is een zakenbank en trading maakt dan altijd een substantieel deel uit van de winst. Maar uit de kwartaalcijfers blijkt dat de zakenbank het voorbije kwartaal wel erg grote risico’s heeft genomen, en daar ook voor is beloond.

De kanttekening die men kan maken, is dat de zakenbank officieel een bankholding is geworden en onder toezicht staat van de centrale bank, de Federal Reserve. Is het in de naweeën van de financiële crisis geoorloofd om onmiddellijk voor het volle risico te gaan?
Bovendien teert de zakenbank op impliciete en expliciete staatssteun. Goldman Sachs kreeg 10 miljard dollar overheidsgeld dat de bank inmiddels al terugbetaalde. Maar ze heeft nog altijd toegang tot de goedkope kredietlijnen die de centrale bank ter beschikking stelt. Het nemen van risico’s kan dus tegen een lage prijs voor de bank.

Goldman Sachs overleefde zonder een zichtbaar schrammetje de financiële crisis. Sterker nog, het adviseerde de overheid tijdens de woelige dagen tijdens het vorige najaar. Toenmalige minister van Financiën Henry Paulson was een gewezen topman van de zakenbank. Dat is ook een donker trekje van Goldman Sachs. De bank is hofleverancier van ministers en adviseurs van de Amerikaanse regering.
Daardoor beschikt ze over een indrukwekkend netwerk van kennis en macht. In hoeverre is sprake van collusie? Vele analisten stellen dat de macht van Goldman Sachs wel erg groot is voor een bank uit Wall Street.

Met het terugbetalen van de directe staatssteun bevrijdde Goldman Sachs zich ook van de strikte voorwaarden over het bonussenbeleid. De werknemers mogen gerust zijn. Het wordt weer prachtig in 2009. Tijdens de eerste jaarhelft zette Goldman Sachs de kokette som van 11,36 miljard dollar weg voor de verloning van het personeel. Dat is 1 miljard dollar meer dan de bank kreeg toegestopt door de overheid.

Bij dat soort cijfers rijst de vraag dan ook of de overheidssteun bij Goldman Sachs wel terecht was. Door die steun kon de bank met gemak de afstand met de gedecimeerde rivalen vergroten. De dominantie van Goldman Sachs blijft op die manier toenemen, met steun van de Amerikaanse regering. En te oordelen naar de cijfers lijken de bankiers niet van de crisis geleerd te hebben. De genomen risico’s blijven hoog en de verloning van dat gedrag ook. Alsof er niks gebeurd is in het najaar van 2008.

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Bovendien teert de zakenbank op impliciete en expliciete staatssteun. Goldman Sachs kreeg 10 miljard dollar overheidsgeld dat de bank inmiddels al terugbetaalde. Maar ze heeft nog altijd toegang tot de goedkope kredietlijnen die de centrale bank ter beschikking stelt. Het nemen van risico’s kan dus tegen een lage prijs voor de bank.

Goldman Sachs overleefde zonder een zichtbaar schrammetje de financiële crisis.

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Nordic Banks Sell Potholders, Plastics as Buyout Firms Squeezed

July 15 (Bloomberg) -- DnB NOR ASA, Norway’s largest bank, will soon sell candleholders, curtains and potholders, as well as mortgages and credit cards.
DnB will add the household products when it takes over Kid Interioer AS, a Norwegian retailer with more than 100 shops, after parent Nordisk Tekstil Holding breached terms of its loan. Nordisk Tekstil is owned by buyout firm IK Investment Partners.

Nordic banks, including Svenska Handelsbanken AB and Danske Bank A/S, are becoming plastics makers and building managers, as they try to protect more than $22 billion of loans to private equity firms squeezed by the global financial crisis. The region’s lenders are particularly vulnerable after helping finance a wave of acquisitions that made Scandinavia among Europe’s biggest private equity markets.

Passengers at Stockholm's main train station
“The banks will lose money no matter what happens,” said Robert Spliid, head of Saxo Bank A/S’s Zurich branch. “If the company goes bankrupt, the banks lose everything. If they keep it alive, they’ll have to sell it with a discount.”
Private equity “was a gold mine as long as the economy kept booming,” Spliid said.
Sweden’s economy, the biggest in the region, may shrink 5.5 percent this year as demand for the country’s exports wanes and unemployment rises, the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast last month.

Nordea Bank headquarters
The amount of money invested in venture capital and buyouts in Sweden increased more than fourfold to 48.8 billion kronor ($6.2 billion) from 2001 through 2007, according to data compiled by the Swedish Private Equity & Venture Capital Association in Stockholm. Defaults on European leveraged loans may rise to 15 percent in the next 18 months from 1.8 percent at the end of 2008, Fitch Ratings said in an April 22 report.
Banks Seize Companies

DnB NOR headquarters
That’s forcing Nordic banks to manage non-financial companies.
Copenhagen-based Danske Bank, Denmark’s largest lender, took control of Swedish facilities management firm Addici Holding AB last month after London-based Argan Capital Advisors LLP breached the terms on a 628 million-kronor loan.
Handelsbanken, Sweden’s second-biggest bank, seized parts of Plastal Group and Plastal Holding AB on July 2 after a cash infusion from Stockholm-based private equity firm Nordic Capital failed to save the plastic-parts maker from bankruptcy. Handelsbanken, which loaned the company 2.1 billion kronor, plans to merge Plastal’s Belgian, Norwegian and Swedish units into a new company.
The takeover is designed to “protect our collateral,” the Stockholm-based bank said in a statement.

Bigger Losses Ahead
Taking over defaulting borrowers, rather than letting them go bankrupt, may result in bigger losses if the banks fail to turn around their new enterprises, said Bjarne Jensen, a financial consultant at Bjarne Jensen Consult ApS in Copenhagen.
“This is the last thing banks want to do,” Jensen said. “They are essentially betting on a turn in the economy, and if that drags out they may have to foot an even bigger bill than if they had let the companies go down in the first place.”
Danske tried to mitigate that danger by naming John Dueholm, deputy chief executive officer of Stockholm-based SAS Group, owner of Scandinavia’s largest airline, as chairman of Addici. With experience as a management board member at security company Group 4 Falck A/S and ISS Global A/S, the world’s largest cleaning-services provider, Danske is betting Dueholm can turn around Addici before a sale.

‘Sensible Solution’
Danske doesn’t want to own non-financial companies, the bank said June 26, when it took over Addici, which provides management services for offices, airports and hospitals and is based in Bromma, Sweden.
“The bank wants to divest the operation when market conditions allow it,” Danske said in a statement. “At the moment, the takeover is the most sensible solution to secure the bank’s engagement and at the same time protect Addici, its employees, clients and suppliers.”
DnB NOR declined to comment on how it will run Kid Interioer, which had sales of about 860 million kroner ($133 million) last year. The bank has said it plans to complete the takeover by today.
“Generally, taking over companies as part of a financial solution is not ideal for most banks,” said DnB spokesman Morten Skauge, who declined to comment on why the company couldn’t reach a solution with Nordisk Tekstil.
The Oslo-based lender doesn’t rule out additional takeovers if they’re necessary to protect the bank’s interests, he said.

‘Lower Returns’
“We have said for quite some time now that the private equity industry is entering a period of lower returns compared to the ‘boom’ years when credit was readily available and cheap,” said Camilla Telander, a spokeswoman for London-based IK Investment, the majority owner of Nordisk Tekstil.

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What went wrong with economics

And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past


OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”

In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”

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Joe Biden: ‘We Have to Go Spend Money to Keep From Going Bankrupt’

“And folks look, AARP knows and the people with me here today know, the president knows, and I know, that the status quo is simply not acceptable,” Biden said at the event on Thursday in Alexandria, Va. “It’s totally unacceptable. And it’s completely unsustainable. Even if we wanted to keep it the way we have it now. It can’t do it financially.”

“We’re going to go bankrupt as a nation,” Biden said.

“Now, people when I say that look at me and say, ‘What are you talking about, Joe? You’re telling me we have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt?’” Biden said. “The answer is yes, that's what I’m telling you.”

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Ultimate Crisis Is Still Coming: Marc Faber
Published: Friday, 17 Jul 2009 | 3:51 AM ET

We haven't seen the last of the crisis despite all talk about green shoots, and the surge in markets was caused by nothing more than the excess liquidity coming from central banks, Marc Faber, author of the Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, told CNBC Friday.

"If you pump money into the system and you create large fiscal deficits, you create volatility," Faber said.

"We've seen an intermediate low in March, we'll rally for a year or so or maybe 18 months… the ultimate crisis will happen much later, and the ultimate crisis would clean the system," he added.

Asked when this would be, he said he could not forecast a precise timing: "it may be 5 years time, 10 years time, but that's not the last crisis."

There are two opposing views, those who believe deflation is the big danger, with asset prices and demand collapsing, and those who think the biggest risk is inflation and a weak dollar, Faber said.

"In general in a crisis such as we have today where there is a deficiency of demand and huge overcapacity under normal conditions you would have deflation… now comes in the government and creates these huge deficits," he added as an explanation for his belonging to the "inflationists" camp.

"Already you have money-printers Mr. Bernanke and Mervyn King… we have never had this experiment in the history of mankind, all governments throwing money at the system," Faber said.

One way of dealing with the crisis would be to fire half the government workers in the world, "because if you shift government activity to the private sector the economy becomes more dynamic," he said.

"It's a transition time that is maybe painful. Why does California have these problems? It's not that there are too many teachers in California but the education department is very bloated," Faber added.

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Op vrijdag 17 juli 2009 12:49 schreef simmu het volgende:
tsja. volgens mij hadden we hier in dit topic zo onderhand wel een redelijke consensus over het idee dat we in een gigantische suckerrally zitten.

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Op vrijdag 17 juli 2009 12:51 schreef pberends het volgende:

[..]

Dat is niet de bedoeling. De consensus moet worden dat we out of the problems zijn, zodat we daarna juist down gaan.

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Op vrijdag 17 juli 2009 14:58 schreef tony_clifton- het volgende:
Wat gaan jullie eigenlijk doen tijdens de supercrisis? Zou spaargeld veilig zijn op de bank of krijg je dan ook Kaupthing achtige taferelen? Spreiden dat je bij elke bank onder de limiet zit om gedekt te zijn door de overheid?

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Op vrijdag 17 juli 2009 14:58 schreef tony_clifton- het volgende:
Wat gaan jullie eigenlijk doen tijdens de supercrisis? Zou spaargeld veilig zijn op de bank of krijg je dan ook Kaupthing achtige taferelen? Spreiden dat je bij elke bank onder de limiet zit om gedekt te zijn door de overheid?

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Een CNN-analist wijt het verlies aan de mening van de Amerikanen over de manier waarop Obama de economie aanpakt. Een groeiend aantal Amerikanen vindt dat Obama geen helder plan heeft om de problemen van het land op te lossen.