Bulls, Bears & Bucks #65 : Vastgoed of straks in je ondergoed

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Op vrijdag 4 december 2009 16:13 schreef zoost het volgende:
Als zelfs CNBC zegt: Jobs Report: 'Numbers Are Almost Too Good to Be True' Dan is enige twijfel gerechtvaardigd.

Volgens het Bureau of Labor Statistics komen de banen uit de volgende sectoren:

<snip>

Ik kan me daar helemaal niets bij voor stellen. ....Administrative and waste
services.....

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Op vrijdag 4 december 2009 16:13 schreef zoost het volgende:
Als zelfs CNBC zegt: Jobs Report: 'Numbers Are Almost Too Good to Be True' Dan is enige twijfel gerechtvaardigd.

Total change in non-farm payroll = - 11,000

* Private Sector = - 18,000
o Natural Resources & Mining = - 1,000
o Construction = - 27,000
o Manufacturing = - 41,000
+ Durable goods = - 33,000
+ Non-durable goods = - 8,000
o Services = + 58,000
+ Wholesale Trade = - 11,700
+ Retail Trade = - 14,500
+ Transportation & Warehousing = - 5,300
+ Utilities = - 2,400
+ Information & Media = - 17,000
+ Financial Svcs & Real Estate = - 10,000
+ Professional & Business Svcs = + 86,000
+ Education = + 11,100
+ Health Svcs = + 28,100
+ Leisure = - 11,000
* Government = + 7,000


Volgens het Bureau of Labor Statistics komen de banen uit de volgende sectoren:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t14.htm

Administrative and waste
services...................... 7,886.9 7,413.9 7,494.7 7,507.2 7,778.3 7,205.8 7,214.1 7,242.9 7,288.1 7,375.1 87.0
Administrative and support
services (1)................. 7,522.7 7,046.7 7,127.3 7,141.2 7,414.2 6,843.7 6,851.6 6,877.8 6,923.6 7,010.5 86.9
Employment services (1)...... 2,998.2 2,586.9 2,669.7 2,699.8 2,896.7 2,459.5 2,465.6 2,486.9 2,529.6 2,590.7 61.1
Temporary help services..... 2,214.8 1,851.6 1,923.2 1,952.5 2,128.5 1,745.2 1,748.4 1,765.6 1,809.7 1,862.1 52.4


Ik kan me daar helemaal niets bij voor stellen. ....Administrative and waste
services.....

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Op vrijdag 4 december 2009 16:13 schreef zoost het volgende:

Ik kan me daar helemaal niets bij voor stellen. ....Administrative and waste
services.....

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Worse Than Enron?
Wall Street’s big banks are playing dangerous new accounting games—and this time taxpayers are on the hook for hundreds of billions. Nomi Prins uncovers a scandal in the making.

Enron was the financial scandal that kicked off the decade: a giant energy trading company that appeared to be doing brilliantly—until we finally noticed that it wasn’t. It’s largely been forgotten given the wreckage that followed, and that’s too bad: we may be repeating those mistakes, on a far larger scale.

Specifically, as the largest Wall Street banks return to profitability—in some cases, breaking records—they say everything is rosy. They’re lining up to pay back their TARP money and asking Washington to back off. But why are they doing so well? Remember that Enron got away with their illegalities so long because their financials were so complicated that not even the analysts paid to monitor the Houston-based trading giant could cogently explain how they were making so much money.

The nation’s biggest banks, plumped up on government capital and risk-infused trading profits, have been moving stuff around their balance sheets like a multi-billion dollar musical chairs game.

After two weeks sifting through over one thousand pages of SEC filings for the largest banks, I have the same concerns. While Washington ponders what to do, or not do, about reforming Wall Street, the nation’s biggest banks, plumped up on government capital and risk-infused trading profits, have been moving stuff around their balance sheets like a multi-billion dollar musical chairs game.

I was trying to answer the simple question that you'd think regulators should want to know: how much of each bank’s revenue is derived from trading (taking risk) vs. other businesses? And how can you compare it across the industry—so you can contain all that systemic risk? Only, there's no uniformity across books. And, given the complexity of these mega-merged firms, those questions aren’t easy to answer.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley
for example, altered their year-end reporting dates, orphaning the month of December, thus making comparison to past quarterly statements more difficult. In the cases of Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, the preferred tactic is re-classification and opaqueness. These moves make it virtually impossible to get an accurate, or consistent picture of banks ‘real money’ (from commercial or customer services) vs. their ‘play money’ (used for trading purposes, and most risky to the overall financial system, particularly since much of the required trading capital was federally subsidized).

Trading profitability, albeit inconsistent and volatile, is the quickest way back to the illusion of financial health, as these banks continue to take hits from their consumer-oriented businesses. But, appearance doesn’t equal stability, or necessarily, reality. Here’s how BofA, Citi and Wells Fargo play the game:

Bank of America
The firm reclassified its filing categories upon acquiring Merrill Lynch, but it doesn't break down the trading vs. investment banking revenues of Merrill. This either means the firm doesn’t truly know what's going on inside its new problem child, or doesn’t want to tell. (No wonder no one’s jumping for the upcoming CEO vacancy.) That said, despite the obvious information clouding, new acquisitions generally don’t have their activities broken out, which makes it a lot harder for regulators, shareholders, or we, taxpaying subsidizers, to know whether the merger was a success or not.

According to Scott Silvestri, Bank of America’s spokesman, “On our second quarter's earnings release, there was a note explaining why we changed reporting structure. But, with every quarter that passes, it's harder to unscramble the egg. It's been a merged entity since January 1, 2009.”

He added that “we have an earnings supplement. Every quarter, we put out a standalone Merrill 10-Q that shows its profitability.” True, but what’s the point of issuing a separate Merrill report, without delineating Merrill’s contribution in its main books so that you can clearly see how specific parts of Merrill’s business impact similar ones in the merged entity? Furthermore, we can’t even figure this out ourselves—the Merrill results in the 10-Q don’t map directly to those of BofA’s books. This all just creates more complexities for a bank that still floats on $63.1 billion in various government subsidies.

When it wants to, it appears that BofA can merge and then break out Merrill’s numbers. Under the "Global Wealth & Investment Management ” classification, we discover that Merrill contributed three-quarters of the $12 billion BofA took in over the first nine months of 2009. According to Silvestri, “The numbers of the old Merrill are there because the brand name was kept, vestiges of the old Merrill Lynch exist.”

Talk about semantics. Why not also break out the area where revenues tripled and trading account profits jumped significantly (from a $6 billion loss in 2008 to an almost $14 billion gain in 2009)? Something is clearly going on there: the best measure of trading risk, VaR (“value at risk” or a firm’s daily trading variation) doubled between 2008 and 2009. If I was the CEO, I’d want to see this critical comparison on my merged company filing.

Elsewhere, the sum of Bank of America’s quarterly figures doesn’t quite add up to the nine months totals. (A few hundred million of discrepancies between friends.) Another item "all other" is off by nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. And so on. The firm also declared, that it “may periodically reclassify business segment results based on modifications to its management reporting methodologies and changes in organizational alignment." In other words, whenever it feels like it. Comforting, isn’t it?

Citigroup
Another balance-sheet renovation, this time because of a sale (Smith Barney, which it offloaded to Morgan Stanley) rather than a purchase, and another trading miracle. Citigroup’s main trading arm, housed in what it calls the Institutional Clients Group (ICG), made $31.5 billion in net revenue for 2009, compared with a $7.8 billion loss in 2008. Its average daily value at risk jumped too, though “only” by 15 percent or so.

That’s a huge and extremely fast trading rebound for the main recipient of government subsidies (at $373.7 billion). But, there is no overall breakdown present in the summaries of Citigroup’s latest filings. And the sum of the trading totals doesn’t equal the parts, because the firm also noted that certain numbers deemed an “integral part of profitability” weren’t included in those computations, without giving any apparent reason. (After adding the missing number, it still didn’t add up.)

Again, it’s “just” a couple billion of discrepancies, but with books this massive at banks this big and risky, accuracy matters. Plus, such nuances make it extremely difficult to understand its books for regulators or the public.

Citigroup's Danielle Romero-Apsilos said that they periodically change reporting. "ICG existed, but after Smith Barney's joint venture with Morgan Stanley, we moved the private bank into the securities and banking reporting line in the ICG."

That describes the chain of events, but doesn’t get closer to determining trading related revenue. Romero-Apsilos said, “We don’t break up the financials specifically for those businesses. Over the years, we may have broken out different things."

Wells Fargo
Yet more innovative accounting maneuvers. For example, the innocuous sounding category, “wholesale banking” which provides traditional lending, finance and asset management services, was expanded (following the Wachovia acquisition that completed on December 31, 2008) to include more speculative activities like fixed-income and equity trading. But, those activities aren’t broken down in the firm’s SEC filing, making it difficult to determine which portion comes from trading vs. commercial or investment banking.

Wells Fargo spokesperson, Mary Eshet (who still has a Wachovia email address) confirmed there is no separate Wachovia 10-Q (like there is for Merrill Lynch), but that it wasn't the case that "Wells Fargo broke out trading related revenue previously either."

In fact, Wells just provides totals for their four main business segments, each of which increased sharply. Community banking rose from $33 billion in 2008 to an annualized $59 billion in 2009. Wholesale banking shot up from $8.2 billion in 2008 to $20 billion in annualized 2009. And, wealth, brokerage and retirement quadrupled from $2.7 billion in 2008 to $11.6 annualized for 2009. (The fourth segment is called ‘other.’) Yet, all these rosy numbers come with no specific breakdowns for their various trading business areas.

Separately, Wells states in its filing that its management accounting process is “dynamic” and, not “necessarily comparable with similar information for other financial services companies.” This statement should give lawmakers pause: if banks are so complex as to constantly fluctuate their own reporting, deciphering figures just before a crisis won’t exactly be a walk in the park.

With taxpayers now on the hook, we need an objective, consistent evaluation of bank balance sheets complete with probing questions about trading and speculative revenues, allowing for comparisons across the banking industry. This lack of transparency leaves room to misrepresent risk and trading revenue.

The long-term solution is bringing back Glass-Steagall. Being big doesn’t just risk bringing down a financial system—it means you can also more easily hide things. Remember the lesson from the Enron saga: when things look too good to be true, they usually are.

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en dat banken elkaar weer geld gaan lenen.

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Op maandag 7 december 2009 14:30 schreef knnth het volgende:
De zoveelste nagel aan de doodskist van de dollar.

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Op maandag 7 december 2009 14:50 schreef pberends het volgende:
Bos verlengt garantieregeling voor banken

Ik snap iets niet:
[..]

Waarom lenen banken aan elkaar? Waarom lenen ze hun eigen geld niet ?

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Op maandag 7 december 2009 19:26 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:

[..]

te hoog risico.

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Op maandag 7 december 2009 22:36 schreef pberends het volgende:
Is dit niet die leverage die we niet meer wilden hebben?

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Op maandag 7 december 2009 22:36 schreef pberends het volgende:

[..]

Hahaha... maar dit is toch absurd. Banken die aan ELKAAR geld lenen...

Hoe moet ik dat zien, Jopie wil een hypotheek bij ABN Amro, maar ABN Amro leent het geld bij ING, en bij ING wil een bedrijf een krediet hebben, maar die leent het weer van de Rabobank? Wat is dit voor onzin? Is dit niet die leverage die we niet meer wilden hebben?

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Op dinsdag 8 december 2009 09:27 schreef capricia het volgende:
tvp

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Op dinsdag 8 december 2009 09:54 schreef Basp1 het volgende:
Dan ben je echt op je achterhoofd gevallen als je geld pint met je CC, dat koste mij in ieder geval een paar jaar gelden nog 7.50¤ per pintransactie. En dan hebben we het nog niet over de woekerrentes die CC maatschappijen rekenen.

Mij is het bij de ING nog steeds niet gelukt om automagisch het CC credit voor het eind aan de maand aan te laten vullen van de genoeg gevulde lopende rekening. Wat ik dan wel met enkele klikken voor elkaar kan krijgen is het verhogen van de CC limiet en de roodstaan limiet op mijn lopende rekening. Maar het verlagen daar doet men op internet niet meer aan.

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Op dinsdag 8 december 2009 09:59 schreef simmu het volgende:

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tis ook een duur geintje, maar je moest ze eens de kost geven die het allemaal doen! en banken doen dus iets soortgelijks....

en ik ga weg bij die rot ing. ik ben die beroerde kut service (welke service....) helemaal spuugzat. laatst kon ik opeens niet meer pinnen omdat ik nog een oude (blauwe postbank) pas had. die ik al dik een jaar probeerde te vervangen. en dan heb ik het er nog niet over gehad dat ik inmiddels al 3 x geprobeerd heb dat rotbetaalpakket op te zeggen (heej, als ik geen cc krijg ga ik er toch zeker niet voor betalen!). stelletje kutuitzuigers.

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Volgens Bos heeft wereldwijd heel veel herstel te maken met de miljarden die overheden in de economie hebben gestopt. Als die stimuleringsmaatregelen in 2011 stoppen, is het volgens Bos de vraag of de economie uit zichzelf al sterk genoeg is om verder te herstellen.

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Op dinsdag 8 december 2009 09:54 schreef Basp1 het volgende:
Dan ben je echt op je achterhoofd gevallen als je geld pint met je CC, dat koste mij in ieder geval een paar jaar gelden nog 7.50¤ per pintransactie. En dan hebben we het nog niet over de woekerrentes die CC maatschappijen rekenen.

Mij is het bij de ING nog steeds niet gelukt om automagisch het CC credit voor het eind aan de maand aan te laten vullen van de genoeg gevulde lopende rekening. Wat ik dan wel met enkele klikken voor elkaar kan krijgen is het verhogen van de CC limiet en de roodstaan limiet op mijn lopende rekening. Maar het verlagen daar doet men op internet niet meer aan.

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Op dinsdag 8 december 2009 18:09 schreef pberends het volgende:
Bos: motortje economie begint te lopen

Deze uitspraken kunnen ook weer de geschiedenisboeken in:
[..]

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Labor Dept: Available Labor Rate Increases To 10.2%

In what is being touted by the Labor Department as extremely positive news, the nation’s available labor rate has reached double digits for the first time in 26 years, bringing the total number of potentially employable Americans to an impressive 15.7 million . . . According to the Department of Labor’s report, nearly 200,000 more Americans suddenly became fully hirable in October alone. And November saw unprecedented gains in the number of high-quality auto workers, teachers, lawyers, part-time retailers, and even doctors who could be employed.

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Op donderdag 10 december 2009 07:05 schreef Q. het volgende:
R.I.P. E.U.

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For Global Finance, Global Regulation

We have found that a huge and opaque global trading network involving complex products, short-termism and too-often excessive rewards created risks that few people understood. We have also learned that when crises happen, taxpayers have to cover the costs. It is simply not acceptable for them to foot the bill for losses in a deep downturn, while institutions' shareholders and employees enjoy all the gains as the economy recovers.

Better regulation and supervision are the means by which the risk to the taxpayer can be reduced for the longer term.

There is an urgent need for a new compact between global banks and the society they serve:

A compact that recognizes the risks to the taxpayer if banks fail and recognizes the imbalance between risks and rewards in the banking system.

A compact that ensures the benefits of good economic times flow not just to bankers but to the people they serve; that makes sure that the financial sector fosters economic growth.

A compact that ensures financial institutions cannot use offshore tax havens to negate the contribution they justly owe to the citizens of the country in which they operate—and so builds on the progress already made in ending tax and regulatory havens.

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Op woensdag 9 december 2009 21:01 schreef pberends het volgende:
'Griekenland bijna failliet'

RIP Griekenland.

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Op vrijdag 11 december 2009 18:48 schreef icecreamfarmer_NL het volgende:
hoezo is duitsland trouwens failliet gegaan in 1948 en niet in 1945