Και φυσικά η Citi τα βλέπει μαύρα. Ανεργία στα ύψη, ύφεση τουλάχιστον έως το 2015.
Ωστόσο οι Έλληνες ελπίζουν. Σε τι ακριβώς δεν έχω καταλάβει.

Ο χρήστης rx8_drifter έγραψε:
Πώς πάει η εφεδρεία? Απολύονται οι ρεμπεσκέδες? Ικανοποιήθηκε το βίτσιο της μείωσης του Δημόσιου?

Σήμερα πάντως στη ΔΟΥ Καλαμαριάς, λόγω εφεδρείας και πρόωρων συνταξιοδοτήσεων (όπως μου είπε ο υποδιευθυντής) τα περισσότερα γραφεία ήταν άδεια, οι υπάλληλοι που ήταν εκεί έτρεχαν σαν τον Βέγγο και φυσικά οι ουρές ήταν τεράστιες... Έφαγα πάνω από 2 ώρες στις ουρές. Οι υπάλληλοι πάλι ευγενέστατοι και εξυπηρετικότατοι (παρά το χαμό), αλλά τι να σου κάνουν τη στιγμή που χρειάζονται τουλάχιστον άλλοι τόσοι...

Για να κόψουν χρήμα (όπως και για ευρωομόλογο) βέβαια πολύ δύσκολο, προτιμούν να σπάσει στα 2 η ευρωζώνη παρά να το κάνουν αυτό.

Προσωπική άποψη: Αν δεν γίνει κάτι άμεσα, σε λίγο καιρό θα τρέχουν πανικόβλητοι να αυξήσουν την ποσότητα του κυκλοφορούντος χρήματος και τότε ο πληθωρισμός θα είναι πολύ πιο επικίνδυνος...

Για κοιτάξτε κι αυτό εδώ.
Γαλλία + Γερμανία = Κίνα
2.562,74 + 3.286,46 = 5.849,20 περίπου ίσο με 5.878,26. Αν δε προσθέσεις και της Ιταλίας 2,055,114 πας στο μισό των ΗΠΑ.
Ποιος άραγε έχαψε το ότι η Γερμανία είχε ανάγκη από 6 δις ευρώ και δεν μπόρεσε να τα δανειστεί; Μάλλον οι αμερικάνικες κανονιοφόροι των εταιριών αξιολόγησης βαράνε στου καραγκιόζη το γάμο.

Αν οι όροι (= επιτόκιο) δεν ήταν ικανοποιητικοί (πχ. η Γερμανία έδινε 2% και οι επενδυτές ήθελαν 3%) ποιό είναι το παράξενο ? Δεν είναι υποχρεωτικό να επενδύσει κάποιος κάπου.
Η Γερμανία έχει ΑΑΑ αξιολόγηση και κατά πάσα πιθανότητα θα τη διατηρήσει περισσότερο από τις ΗΠΑ.

Εγώ άλλο ρώτησα. Αν και φαίνεται στο quote το ξαναλέω: Είχε ανάγκη από 6 δις;

Είναι θέμα ταμειακών ροών. Μπορεί π.χ. να περιμένουν περισσότερες εισπράξεις (πχ 10δις), αλλά αργότερα και τώρα να έχουν κάποιες πληρωμές. Συνολικά (στο έτος) μπορεί να μην χρειάζονται ή και να έχουν πλεόνασμα, αλλά μπορεί τα έσοδα να μην είναι συγχρονισμένα με τα έξοδα.

Ο χρήστης imago έγραψε:
Και φυσικά η Citi τα βλέπει μαύρα. Ανεργία στα ύψη, ύφεση τουλάχιστον έως το 2015.
Ωστόσο οι Έλληνες ελπίζουν. Σε τι ακριβώς δεν έχω καταλάβει.

Οι Ελληνες επαψαν να ελπιζουν,και αυτο ειναι το χειροτερο.

Ο χρήστης wannabe έγραψε:
θέλω να μου εξηγήσει κάποιος τη στάση Γαλλίας που προτιμά να είναι french maid σε Γερμανική τσόντα απο το να γίνει βασίλισσα του Νότου.
qu'est ce que c'est ρε garcon?

http://www.economist.com/node/17675940

ειλικρινα δεν γνωριζω πως θα πανε τα πραγματα στην Ευρωπη...αλλα εμας μας πηρε και μας σηκωσε πλεον.

Και το χειροτερο ειναι οτι ο κοσμος μαλλον ξεχναει....ΠΑΛΙ....

**ΣΒΒΕ: Στα Βαλκάνια αναζητούν καλύτερη τύχη οι ελληνικές επιχειρήσεις
**
Για κίνδυνο «μετανάστευσης» ελληνικών βιομηχανιών σε γειτονικές βαλκανικές χώρες, σε αναζήτηση καλύτερης τύχης μίλησε ο πρόεδρος του Συνδέσμου Βιομηχανιών Βορείου Ελλάδος Ν.Πέντζος.

Εξέφρασε την απογοήτευσή του για τη μη υιοθέτηση μέτρων ανάπτυξης και άλλων ζητημάτων που απασχολούν την επιχειρηματικότητα (αποπληρωμή χρεών, συμψηφισμός και θεσμικές μεταβολές), ενώ δήλωσε βέβαιος πως αν δεν γίνουν κινήσεις υπέρ της ανάπτυξης, το 2012 θα είναι χειρότερο και «θα κλείνει η μια επιχείρηση μετά την άλλη».

«Ελάχιστες επιχειρήσεις δουλεύουν πλέον με κέρδη. Ο χρηματοπιστωτικός κλάδος ανασχηματίζεται και δεν έχει λεφτά για την πραγματική οικονομία. Το ενεργειακό κόστος έχει φτάσει σε δυσθεώρητα ύψη. Έχει στερέψει η οικονομική δραστηριότητα στη χώρα», είπε και ζήτησε «να πέσουν κάποια λεφτά στην αγορά» από τις επόμενες 2 δόσεις του δανεισμού της τρόϊκας.

http://www.imerisia.gr/article.asp?catid=12334&subid=2&pubid=112743464

Edit: Τσάμπα χαρήκατε.

Θαυμάστε: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid= ... l=el&pli=1

Από τα ανωτέρω σαφώς συνάγεται ότι η ανταποδοτικότητα του τέλους (σ.σ. ακινήτων) συνίσταται στη διατήρηση της πραγματικής αξίας της περιουσίας επί της οποίας επιβάλλεται το τέλος, η οποία βρίσκεται σε άμεση συνάρτηση με την επίτευξη των δημοσιονομικών στόχων του Μεσοπρόθεσμου Πλαισίου Δημοσιονομικής Στρατηγικής 2012-15 και την εκτέλεση του προϋπολογισμού του 2011

Εδώ εκαντοντάδες οικονομολόγοι δεν μπορούν να μας πουν τι αξία θα έχουν οι περιουσίες στην Ελλάδα αύριο (όταν οι μισθοί θα έχουν κοπεί 50%), μας το λένε σε 2 γραμμές κάποιοι δικηγόροι. Παρατηρήστε την πλήρη απουσία στοιχείων που να επιδεικνύουν την αξίωση αυτή ή που να συνδέουν την επίτευξη των δημοσιονομικών στόχων μιας χώρας με την αξία της περιουσίας (να χαρώ εγώ 'επιστήμονες' με 'τεκμηριωμένη άποψη').

Λοιπόν ιδού το πραγματικό ρεζουμέ: ή μου δίνεις μέρος της περιουσίας σου σε μετρητά, ή αρνούμαι να βρω άλλο τρόπο να εκπληρώσω τους στόχους μου και εν συνεπεία υποβαθμίζεται η αξία της περιουσίας σου. Οι λέξεις ΜΑΦΙΟΖΟΙ σας θυμίζουν τίποτα;

Σκεφτείτε επίσης ότι οι φόροι σας πληρώνουν τους ανθρώπους που συνέταξαν αυτή την έκθεση. Συνεχίστε τώρα να πληρώνετε αδιαμαρτύρητα τους φόρους σας, είναι για το καλό σας.

Ο χρήστης markvag έγραψε:

Πώς πάει η εφεδρεία? Απολύονται οι ρεμπεσκέδες? Ικανοποιήθηκε το βίτσιο της μείωσης του Δημόσιου?

Σήμερα πάντως στη ΔΟΥ Καλαμαριάς, λόγω εφεδρείας και πρόωρων συνταξιοδοτήσεων (όπως μου είπε ο υποδιευθυντής) τα περισσότερα γραφεία ήταν άδεια, οι υπάλληλοι που ήταν εκεί έτρεχαν σαν τον Βέγγο και φυσικά οι ουρές ήταν τεράστιες... Έφαγα πάνω από 2 ώρες στις ουρές. Οι υπάλληλοι πάλι ευγενέστατοι και εξυπηρετικότατοι (παρά το χαμό), αλλά τι να σου κάνουν τη στιγμή που χρειάζονται τουλάχιστον άλλοι τόσοι...

Μια μέρα πριν, στον ίδιο τόπο, άκουσα το εξής ωραίο:

'Δεν μπορείτε να έρχεστε εδώ και να [τελειώνετε τη δουλειά ΜΑΣ μέσα σε μερικά δευτερόλεπτα, χωρίς ουρές και ουρλιαχτά], κανονικά θέλει αίτηση και χαρτί σε 15 μέρες (διαδικασία που πρέπει να γίνεται 2-3 φορές μέσα στο μήνα), αλλιώς να μας παίρνετε τηλέφωνο [μπλα μπλα] και να βγάζετε ΕΣΕΙΣ άκρη ΜΟΝΟΙ ΣΑΣ.'

Δηλαδή, γραφειοκρατία (άρα περισσότερη δουλειά και για αυτήν εκτός από εμάς) over αποτελεσματικότητα. Για την λανθασμένη επιλογή λέξεων (βγάζετε ΕΣΕΙΣ άκρη, ΜΟΝΟΙ ΣΑΣ κλπ.) να τονίσω ότι εγώ δεν πληρώνομαι από την εν λόγω υπηρεσία, η κυρία που τα ξεστόμισε πληρώνεται. Μάλλον. Εμφανίστηκαν αρκετά στραβόξυλα εκεί Μάρκο το τελευταίο 2μηνο, έχε το νου σου.

Youtube Video

Λιώστε

Για τους μη γαλλομαθείς τα ωραία σημεία είναι

1. Οι πολιτικοί φταίνε περισσότερο από τους άλλους Έλληνες (για το μαζί τα φάγαμε) επειδή είναι... πιο ευφυείς(!)
2. Μου επιτρέπετε να μιλήσω ευθέως, σαν τον στρατηγό Ντε Γκωλ; Οι αγανακτισμένοι είναι κομμουνιστές, φασίστες και μαλάκες (3 σε 1).

The eurozone really has only days to avoid collapse
In virtually all the debates about the eurozone I have been engaged in, someone usually makes the point that it is only when things get bad enough, the politicians finally act – eurobond, debt monetisation, quantitative easing, whatever. I am not so sure. The argument ignores the problem of acute collective action.

Last week, the crisis reached a new qualitative stage. With the spectacular flop of the German bond auction and the alarming rise in short-term rates in Spain and Italy, the government bond market across the eurozone has ceased to function.

The banking sector, too, is broken. Important parts of the eurozone economy are cut off from credit. The eurozone is now subject to a run by global investors, and a quiet bank run among its citizens.

This massive erosion of trust has also destroyed the main plank of the rescue strategy. The European Financial Stability Facility derives its firepower from the guarantees of its shareholders. As the crisis has spread to France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria, the EFSF itself is affected by the contagious spread of the disease. Unless something very drastic happens, the eurozone could break up very soon.

Technically, one can solve the problem even now, but the options are becoming more limited. The eurozone needs to take three decisions very shortly, with very little potential for the usual fudges.

First, the European Central Bank must agree a backstop of some kind, either an unlimited guarantee of a maximum bond spread, a backstop to the EFSF, in addition to dramatic measures to increase short-term liquidity for the banking sector. That would take care of the immediate bankruptcy threat.

The second measure is a firm timetable for a eurozone bond. The European Commission calls it a “stability bond”, surely a candidate for euphemism of the year. There are several proposals on the table. It does not matter what you call it. What matters is that it will be a joint-and-several liability of credible size. The insanity of cross-border national guarantees must come to an end. They are not a solution to the crisis. Those guarantees are now the main crisis propagator.

The third decision is a fiscal union. This would involve a partial loss of national sovereignty, and the creation of a credible institutional framework to deal with fiscal policy, and hopefully wider economic policy issues as well. The eurozone needs a treasury, properly staffed, not ad hoc co-ordination by the European Council over coffee and desert.

[spoiler=...:3jn5n2t7]I am hearing that there are exploratory talks about a compromise package comprising those three elements. If the European summit could reach a deal on December 9, its next scheduled meeting, the eurozone will survive. If not, it risks a violent collapse. Even then, there is still a risk of a long recession, possibly a depression. So even if the European Council was able to agree on such an improbably ambitious agenda, its leaders would have to continue to outdo themselves for months and years to come.

How likely is such a grand deal? With each week that passes, the political and financial cost of crisis resolution becomes higher. Even last week, Angela Merkel was still ruling out eurobonds. She was furious when the European Commission produced its owns proposals last week. She had planned to separate the discussion about the crisis from that of the future architecture of the eurozone. The economic advice she has received throughout the crisis has been appalling.

Her own very public opposition to eurobonds has now become a real obstacle to a deal. I cannot quite see how the German chancellor is going to extricate herself from these self-inflicted constraints. If she had been more circumspect, she could have travelled to the summit with the proposal of the German Council of Economic Advisers, who produced a clever, albeit limited and not yet fully worked-out-plan. They are a proposing a “debt redemption” bond – another candidate for this year’s top euphemism award. The idea is to have a strictly temporary eurobond, which member states would pay off over an agreed time period. At least this proposal would be in line with the more restrictive interpretation of German constitutional law.

Ms Merkel’s hostility to eurobonds certainly resonates with the public. Newspapers expressed outrage at the commission’s proposal. I thought both the proposal itself and its timing were rather clever. The Commission managed to change the nature of the debate. Ms Merkel can get her fiscal union, but in return she will now have to accept a eurobond. If both can be agreed, the problem is solved. It is the first intelligent official proposal I have seen in the entire crisis.

I have yet to be convinced that the European Council is capable of reaching such a substantive agreement given its past record. Of course, it will agree on something and sell it as a comprehensive package. It always does. But the half-life of these fake packages has been getting shorter. After the last summit, the financial markets’ enthusiasm over the ludicrous idea of a leveraged EFSF evaporated after less than 48 hours.

Italy’s disastrous bond auction on Friday tells us time is running out. The eurozone has 10 days at most.[/spoiler:3jn5n2t7]

Should the Fed save Europe from disaster?
The Euribor/OIS spread or`fear gauge’ is flashing red warning signals. Dollar funding costs in Europe have spiked to Lehman-crisis levels, leaving lenders struggling frantically to cover their $2 trillion (£1.3 trillion) funding gap.

America’s money markets are no longer willing to lend to over-leveraged Euroland banks, or only on drastically short maturities below seven days. Exposure to French banks has been slashed by 69pc since May.

Italy faces a “sudden stop” in funding, forced to pay 6.5pc on Friday for six-month money, despite the technocrat take-over in Rome.

German Bund yields have risen to 59 basis points above Swedish bonds since Wednesday’s failed auction. German debt has been relegated suddenly against Swiss, Nordic, Japanese, and US debt. As the Telegraph reported two weeks ago, Asian central banks and sovereign wealth funds are spurning all EMU bonds because they have lost confidence in a monetary system with no lender of last resort, coherent form of government, or respect for the rule of law.

Even if EU leaders could agree on fiscal union and joint debt issuance – which they can’t – such long-range changes cannot solve the immediate crisis at hand. The push for treaty changes has become a vast distraction.

Unless Germany agrees to the full mobilization of the European Central Bank very fast, the eurozone will spiral out of control. As The Economist put it, “The risk that the currency disintegrates within weeks is alarmingly high.”

Theoretically, EMU can limp on though the Winter until the Italian debt auctions of €33bn in the last week of January, and €48bn in the last week of February. The reality is that sovereign contagion to the financial system may well bring matters to a head more swiftly.

[spoiler=...:3jn5n2t7]If break-up occurs in a disorderly fashion, with Club Med states and Ireland spun into oblivion one by one, the chain reaction will cause an implosion of Europe’s €31 trillion banking nexus (S&P estimate), the world’s biggest and most leveraged. This in turn risks an almighty global crash – first class passengers included.

So the question arises, should the rest of the world take over management of Europe to prevent or mitigate disaster? Specifically, should the US Federal Reserve assume leadership as a monetary superpower and impose policy on a paralyzed ECB, acting as a global lender of last resort?

In essence, the US would do for EMU what it did in military and strategic terms for the Europe in the 1990s when Washington said enough is enough after squabbling EU leaders had allowed 200,000 people to be slaughtered in the Balkans. The Pentagon settled matters swiftly with “Operation Deliberate Force”, raining Tomahawk missiles on the Serb positions. Power met greater power.

Personally, I have not made up my mind about the wisdom of a Fed rescue. It is fraught with dangers, and one might argue that resources are better deployed breaking EMU into workable halves with minimal possible damage.

However, debate is already joined – and wheels are turning in Washington policy basements – so let me throw this out for readers to chew over.

Nobel economist Myron Scholes first floated the idea over lunch at a Riksbank forum in August. 'I wonder whether Bernanke might not say that `we believe in a harmonized world, that the Europeans are our friends, and we know that the ECB can't print money to buy bonds because the Germans won't let them. And since the ECB will soon run out of money, we will step in and start buying European government bonds for them'. It is something to think about,' he said.

This is not as eccentric as it sounds. The Fed’s Ben Bernanke touched on the theme in a speech in November 2002 – “Deflation: making sure it doesn't happen here” – now viewed as his policy `road map' in extremis.

'The Fed can inject money into the economy in still other ways. For example, the Fed has the authority to buy foreign government debt. Potentially, this class of assets offers huge scope for Fed operations,' he said.

Berkeley’s Brad DeLong said it is time for Bernanke to act on this as the world lurches straight into 1931 and a Great Depression II. “The Federal Reserve needs to buy up every single European bond owned by every single American financial institution for cash,” he said.

The Fed could buy €2 trillion of EMU debt or more, intervening with crushing power. The credible threat of such action by the world’s paramount monetary force might alone bring Italian and Spanish yields back down below 5pc, before one bent nickel is even spent.

One presumes that the Fed would purchase both the triple AAA core and Club Med in a symmetric blast of monetary stimulus across the board, avoiding the (fiscal) error of targeting semi-solvent states. In sense, the Fed would do quantitative easing for the Europeans, whether they liked it or not.

David Zervos from Jefferies has proposed an extreme variant of this, accusing Germany’s fiscal Puritans of reducing Europe’s periphery to “indentured servants” and driving the whole region into depression with combined fiscal and monetary contraction.

“We in the US need to snuff out these sado-fiscalists and fast, they are a danger to the world. The US can force monetisation at the ECB. We should back up the forklift and buy Euro area bonds. Lots of them,” he said.

Some of the purchases could be achieved by tapping the Fed’s euro account at the ECB, flush with funds as a result of currency swaps provided by Washington to help Europe shore up its banks. Ultimately mass EMU bond purchases would cause a sudden and potentially dangerous spike in the euro against the dollar. There lies the rub. If the ECB failed to loosen monetary policy drastically to offset this, the experiment could go badly wrong.

A pioneering school of “market monetarists” - perhaps the most creative in the current policy fog - says the Fed should reflate the world through a different mechanism, preferably with the Bank of Japan and a coalition of the willing.

Their strategy is to target nominal GDP (NGDP) growth in the United States and other aligned powers, restoring it to pre-crisis trend levels. The idea comes from Irving Fisher’s “compensated dollar plan” in the 1930s.

The school is not Keynesian. They are inspired by interwar economists Ralph Hawtrey and Sweden’s Gustav Cassel, as well as monetarist guru Milton Friedman. “Anybody who has studied the Great Depression should find recent European events surreal. Day-by-day history repeats itself. It is tragic,” said Lars Christensen from Danske Bank, author of a book on Friedman.

“It is possible that a dramatic shift toward monetary stimulus could rescue the euro,” said Scott Sumner, a professor at Bentley University and the group’s eminence grise. Instead, EU authorities are repeating the errors of the Slump by obsessing over inflation when (forward-looking) deflation is already the greater threat.

“I used to think people were stupid back in the 1930s. Remember Hawtrey’s famous “Crying fire, fire, in Noah’s flood”? I used to wonder how people could have failed to see the real problem. I thought that progress in macroeconomic analysis made similar policy errors unlikely today. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We’re just as stupid,” he said.

Needless to say, reflation alone will not make Euroland a workable currency area. Nor will fiscal union, Eurobonds, and debt pooling down the road.

'Even if they do two years of fiscal transfers, and the ECB buys all the bonds, and the problems are swept under the carpet, we are still going to be facing a crisis at the end of it,' said professor Scholes.

None of the “cures” on offer tackle the 30pc currency misalignment between North and South, the deeper cause of this crisis. What Fed-imposed QE for Euroland can do is make a solution at least possible stoking inflation deliberately.

This means inflicting a boomlet on the German bloc, while allowing the South to take its fiscal punishment without crashing further into self-defeating debt deflation. It forces up prices in the North, compelling the neo-Calvinists to accept their share of the intra-EMU price readjustment.

The Germans will not like this. If inflation causes them rise up in revolt and leave EMU to the Latins, so much the better. That is the best solution of all.

What we know for certain is that Europe’s current policy settings must lead ineluctably to ruin and perhaps to fascism. Nothing can be worse.[/spoiler:3jn5n2t7]

meanwhile in da US

Bond Dealers See Fed Buying $545 Billion of Home-Loan Debt in Third Easing
The biggest bond dealers in the U.S. say the Federal Reserve is poised to start a new round of stimulus, injecting more money into the economy by purchasing mortgage securities instead of Treasuries.

Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his fellow policy makers, who bought $2.3 trillion of Treasury and mortgage-related bonds between 2008 and June, will start another program next quarter, 16 of the 21 primary dealers of U.S. government securities that trade with the central bank said in a Bloomberg News survey last week. The Fed may buy about $545 billion in home-loan debt, based on the median of the firms that provided estimates.

[spoiler=...:29tztenj]While mortgage rates are already at about record lows, housing continues to constrain the economy, with the National Association of Realtors saying in Washington last week that the median price of U.S. existing homes dropped 4.7 percent in October from a year ago. Borrowers with a 30-year conventional mortgage would save $40 billion to $50 billion annually in aggregate if they could all refinance into a new loan with a 3.75 percent rate, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

“We need to see a bottom in home prices,” said Shyam Rajan, an interest-rate strategist in New York at Bank of America Corp., a primary dealer, in a Nov. 22 telephone interview. “These are not numbers that are going to get down your unemployment rate,” which has held at or above 9 percent every month except two since May 2009, he said.
New Urgency

The company forecasts the Fed will buy $800 billion of securities, which may include Treasuries.

Efforts to bolster the economy are taking on new urgency with $1.2 trillion in automatic government spending cuts slated to begin in 2013. The Commerce Department said last week that gross domestic product expanded at a 2 percent annual rate in the third quarter, less than the 2.5 percent it originally projected, and Europe’s worsening debt crisis threatens to further curb global growth.

The Fed is taking the view that “even if U.S. fundamentals look to be relatively OK, we’ve got to keep our eye on any contagion from the European stresses,” Dominic Konstam, head of interest-rate strategy at the primary dealer Deutsche Bank AG in New York, said in a Nov. 22 telephone interview. “It’s in that context that they’re willing to do more.”

Treasuries rose last week on those concerns, with the 10-year yield dropping five basis points, or 0.05 percentage point, to 1.97 percent, according to Bloomberg Bond Trader prices. The yield rose 10 basis points to 2.06 percent today at 9:23 a.m. in New York. The 2 percent security due in November 2021 fell 7/8, or $8.75 per $1,000 face amount, to 99 13/32.
Inflation Outlook

Policy makers have scope to print more money to buy bonds in a third round of quantitative easing, or QE, as the outlook for inflation eases.

A measure of traders’ inflation expectations that the Fed uses to help determine monetary policy ended last week at 2.25 percent, down from this year’s high 3.23 percent on Aug. 1. The so-called five-year, five-year forward break-even rate, which projects what the pace of consumer-price increases will be for the five-year period starting in 2016, is below the 2.83 percent average since August 2007, the start of the credit crisis.

“There is a significant chance that QE3 will be deployed, especially in the form of MBS purchases, if inflation expectations fall enough,” Srini Ramaswamy and other debt strategists at JPMorgan in New York wrote in a Nov. 25 report.
Relative Growth

JPMorgan is one of the five dealers that don’t forecast the Fed will begin a third round of asset purchases to stimulate the economy. The others are UBS AG, Barclays Plc, Citigroup Inc. and Deutsche Bank.

After cutting its target interest rate for overnight loans between banks to a range of zero to 0.25 percent, the Fed bought about $1.7 trillion of government and mortgage debt during QE1 between December 2008 and March 2010, and purchased $600 billion of Treasuries between November 2010 and June through QE2.

The moves have helped. At 2.2 percent, U.S. GDP will expand more next year than any other Group of Seven nation except Japan, separate surveys of economists by Bloomberg show.

“Monetary policy is in part a confidence game,” said Chris Ahrens, head interest-rate strategist at UBS Securities LLC in Stamford, Connecticut. “At this point in time we don’t see the need for it, but if the situation were to evolve in a negative fashion they’re telling us they can come out and respond in a proactive fashion.”
‘Frustratingly Slow’

Minutes from the Nov. 1-2 meeting of the Fed’s Federal Open Market Committee showed some policy makers aren’t convinced the recovery will strengthen, saying the central bank should consider easing policy further.

“A few members indicated that they believed the economic outlook might warrant additional policy accommodation,” the Fed said in the minutes released Nov. 22 in Washington.

Bernanke, at a press conference after the meeting, said the “pace of progress is likely to be frustratingly slow,” while on Nov. 17 Fed Bank of New York President William C. Dudley said if the central bank opted to buy more bonds, “it might make sense” for much of those to consist of mortgage-backed securities to boost the housing market.

Mortgages were at the epicenter of the financial crisis that began in 2007 and resulted in more than $2 trillion in writedowns and losses at the world’s largest financial institutions based on data compiled by Bloomberg.

Sales of existing homes have averaged 4.97 million a month this year, little changed since 2008 and down from 6.52 million in 2007, according to the National Association of Realtors. The median price decreased to $162,500 in October from $170,600 a year earlier and from the record $230,300 in July 2006.
Housing Glut

At the current pace of sales it would take eight months to clear the inventory of available properties, compared with the average of 4.8 before 2007.

Fed purchases of mortgage bonds would dovetail with efforts by President Barack Obama, who has been promoting an initiative by the Federal Housing Finance Agency to let qualified homeowners refinance mortgages regardless of how much their houses have lost in value. The Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP, will eliminate some fees, trim others and waive some risk for lenders.

The difference between yields on Fannie Mae’s current-coupon 30-year fixed-rate securities, which influence loan rates, and 10-year Treasuries climbed to 121 basis points last week, from 84 basis points on Dec. 31, Bloomberg data show. The spread widened to 129 basis points in August, the most since March 2009.
‘Powerful Wildcard’

“The prospect of the Fed buying MBS under a QE3 program is a powerful wild card, and should limit the downside in the asset class,” the JPMorgan strategists wrote in their report last week. “Given attractive spreads currently, we recommend heading into 2012 with an overweight,” they said in reference to a strategy where investors own a greater percentage of a security or asset class than is contained in benchmark indexes.

Mortgage securities guaranteed by government-supported Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or the federal agency Ginnie Mae have financed more than 90 percent of new home lending following the collapse of the non-agency market in 2007 and a retreat by banks. The agency mortgage-bond market accounts for $5.4 trillion of the $9.9 trillion in housing debt outstanding.

The Fed, which owns about $900 billion of the securities, said in September it will reinvest maturing housing debt into mortgage-backed bonds instead of Treasuries. MBS holdings represent about 40 percent of the Fed’s balance sheet, down from a peak of about 66 percent.

“If the Fed’s position in MBS grew under QE3 to half of its balance sheet, this would imply that they would have to purchase on the order of $500 billion,” the JPMorgan strategists wrote in their report. The Fed’s “decision to reinvest paydowns back into the mortgage market suggests a comfort level with owning mortgages that seems to have grown,” they wrote.
Primary Dealer Forecasts for Likelihood of Fed Bond Purchases

Firm Fed Purchases Amount Timing

Bank of America Mortgages# $800 billion Q2/Q3 2012
Bank of Nova Scotia Treasuries $600 billion 1st half 2012
Barclays None
BMO Capital Markets Mortgages N/A Q1 2012
BNP Paribas Mortgages N/A April 2012
Cantor Fitzgerald Mortgages $750 billion June 2012
Citigroup None
Credit Suisse Mort/Tsys N/A Q1 2012
Daiwa Mort/Tsys $250 billion March 2012
Deutsche Bank None
Goldman Sachs Mortgages# N/A 1st half 2012
HSBC Mortgages N/A Q1 2012
Jefferies Mortgages $500 billion 2nd half 2012
JPMorgan Chase None
Mizuho Mort/Tsys $800 billion 1st half 2012
Morgan Stanley Mortgages# $100 billion June/July 2012
Nomura Mortgages $400 billion 1st half 2012
RBC Mortgages $750 billion 1st half 2012
RBS Mortgages $600 billion April 2012
Societe Generale Mortgages $500 billion 1st half 2012
UBS None
Average $545 billion

#May also include Treasury purchases[/spoiler:29tztenj]

SocGen Sees $600 Billion QE3 Starting In March 2012 Sending Gold Up Between $1900 And $8500/Oz
SocGen has released its much anticipated Multi Asset Portfolio Scenario/Strategy guide titled simply enough 'Patience: bad news will become good news' where, as the insightful can guess, the French bank makes the simple case that the worse things get, the stronger the response by global central banks will be. Here is the key quote for those worried that : 'A major liquidity crisis should not occur this time, as we think we are on the eve of major QE in the UK, US and (a bit) later on in the EZ.' We don't disagree and if there is anything that can send BAC higher it will be the announcement of QE3. Of course, BAC will first drop to a $2-3 handle so question is who has the balance sheet to hold on to the falling knife. The next question is 'How big will QE3 be'? Well, according to SocGen, the Fed will preannounce it in the January 2012 FOMC statement, the monetization will last from March 2012 until the end of the year, and will buy a total of $600 billion. We believe the actual LSAP total (not to be confused with the 'sterilized' QE3 known as Operation Twist) will be well greater, probably in the $1.5 trillion range as the Fed will finally say 'enough' to piecemeal solutions. As to what to do, besides going long some financial stock and hoping it is not the one that is allowed to fail, SocGen has some simple advice: 'Buy gold ahead of QE3 as money creation has a strong impact on prices' - in other words just as we suggested yesterday courtesy of the Don Coxe correlation chart. Why gold and not BAC? Because, 'Gold is highly sensitive to US QE, as every dollar of QE goes into M0, triggering the debasement of the USD. Gold = $ 8500/Oz: to catch up with the increase in the monetary base since 1920 (as it did in the early 80s). Gold = $1900/Oz: to close the gap with the monetary base increase since July 2007(QE1+QE2).' So go long a bank that may well go bankrupt and return nothing before it at best doubles, or go long a real asset, which will always have value and may quadruple in short notice? The answer seems simple to us...

[spoiler=...:29tztenj]From SocGen:

A combination of weak Q1 2012 GDP and softening inflation could push the Fed to another round of monetary expansion.

SG economists look for a two-step easing process:

1. In January 2012, a major announcement with the Fed promising to keep rates at zero until unemployment falls below 7.5% or inflation moves above 3% on aa sustained basis.

2. In March 2012, the announcement of another round of QE. We expect the next round of QE to be concentrated on MBS purchases and be worth about $600bn over six to eight months. This would increase the Fed’s securities portfolio from currently $2.65trn to $3.25trn by the end of 2012.sustained basis.

The specifics of what to expect from the Fed:

And why gold:

And the full presentation:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/74069786/Socgen-Patience-Bad-News-Will-Become-Good-News[/spoiler:29tztenj]

και λίγα στραγάλια που περίσσεψαν

Secret Fed Loans Gave Banks $13 Billion

The Federal Reserve and the big banks fought for more than two years to keep details of the largest bailout in U.S. history a secret. Now, the rest of the world can see what it was missing.

The Fed didn’t tell anyone which banks were in trouble so deep they required a combined $1.2 trillion on Dec. 5, 2008, their single neediest day. Bankers didn’t mention that they took tens of billions of dollars in emergency loans at the same time they were assuring investors their firms were healthy. And no one calculated until now that banks reaped an estimated $13 billion of income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its January issue.

Saved by the bailout, bankers lobbied against government regulations, a job made easier by the Fed, which never disclosed the details of the rescue to lawmakers even as Congress doled out more money and debated new rules aimed at preventing the next collapse.

A fresh narrative of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 emerges from 29,000 pages of Fed documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and central bank records of more than 21,000 transactions. While Fed officials say that almost all of the loans were repaid and there have been no losses, details suggest taxpayers paid a price beyond dollars as the secret funding helped preserve a broken status quo and enabled the biggest banks to grow even bigger.
‘Change Their Votes’

“When you see the dollars the banks got, it’s hard to make the case these were successful institutions,” says Sherrod Brown, a Democratic Senator from Ohio who in 2010 introduced an unsuccessful bill to limit bank size. “This is an issue that can unite the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. There are lawmakers in both parties who would change their votes now.”

[spoiler=...:1okxpq32]The size of the bailout came to light after Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, won a court case against the Fed and a group of the biggest U.S. banks called Clearing House Association LLC to force lending details into the open.

The Fed, headed by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, argued that revealing borrower details would create a stigma -- investors and counterparties would shun firms that used the central bank as lender of last resort -- and that needy institutions would be reluctant to borrow in the next crisis. Clearing House Association fought Bloomberg’s lawsuit up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the banks’ appeal in March 2011.

$7.77 Trillion

The amount of money the central bank parceled out was surprising even to Gary H. Stern, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis from 1985 to 2009, who says he “wasn’t aware of the magnitude.” It dwarfed the Treasury Department’s better-known $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. Add up guarantees and lending limits, and the Fed had committed $7.77 trillion as of March 2009 to rescuing the financial system, more than half the value of everything produced in the U.S. that year.

“TARP at least had some strings attached,” says Brad Miller, a North Carolina Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, referring to the program’s executive-pay ceiling. “With the Fed programs, there was nothing.”

Bankers didn’t disclose the extent of their borrowing. On Nov. 26, 2008, then-Bank of America (BAC) Corp. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth D. Lewis wrote to shareholders that he headed “one of the strongest and most stable major banks in the world.” He didn’t say that his Charlotte, North Carolina-based firm owed the central bank $86 billion that day.
‘Motivate Others’

JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon told shareholders in a March 26, 2010, letter that his bank used the Fed’s Term Auction Facility “at the request of the Federal Reserve to help motivate others to use the system.” He didn’t say that the New York-based bank’s total TAF borrowings were almost twice its cash holdings or that its peak borrowing of $48 billion on Feb. 26, 2009, came more than a year after the program’s creation.

Howard Opinsky, a spokesman for JPMorgan (JPM), declined to comment about Dimon’s statement or the company’s Fed borrowings. Jerry Dubrowski, a spokesman for Bank of America, also declined to comment.

The Fed has been lending money to banks through its so- called discount window since just after its founding in 1913. Starting in August 2007, when confidence in banks began to wane, it created a variety of ways to bolster the financial system with cash or easily traded securities. By the end of 2008, the central bank had established or expanded 11 lending facilities catering to banks, securities firms and corporations that couldn’t get short-term loans from their usual sources.
‘Core Function’

“Supporting financial-market stability in times of extreme market stress is a core function of central banks,” says William B. English, director of the Fed’s Division of Monetary Affairs. “Our lending programs served to prevent a collapse of the financial system and to keep credit flowing to American families and businesses.”

The Fed has said that all loans were backed by appropriate collateral. That the central bank didn’t lose money should “lead to praise of the Fed, that they took this extraordinary step and they got it right,” says Phillip Swagel, a former assistant Treasury secretary under Henry M. Paulson and now a professor of international economic policy at the University of Maryland.

The Fed initially released lending data in aggregate form only. Information on which banks borrowed, when, how much and at what interest rate was kept from public view.

The secrecy extended even to members of President George W. Bush’s administration who managed TARP. Top aides to Paulson weren’t privy to Fed lending details during the creation of the program that provided crisis funding to more than 700 banks, say two former senior Treasury officials who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak.
Big Six

The Treasury Department relied on the recommendations of the Fed to decide which banks were healthy enough to get TARP money and how much, the former officials say. The six biggest U.S. banks, which received $160 billion of TARP funds, borrowed as much as $460 billion from the Fed, measured by peak daily debt calculated by Bloomberg using data obtained from the central bank. Paulson didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The six -- JPMorgan, Bank of America, Citigroup Inc. (C), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC), Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) and Morgan Stanley -- accounted for 63 percent of the average daily debt to the Fed by all publicly traded U.S. banks, money managers and investment- services firms, the data show. By comparison, they had about half of the industry’s assets before the bailout, which lasted from August 2007 through April 2010. The daily debt figure excludes cash that banks passed along to money-market funds.
Bank Supervision

While the emergency response prevented financial collapse, the Fed shouldn’t have allowed conditions to get to that point, says Joshua Rosner, a banking analyst with Graham Fisher & Co. in New York who predicted problems from lax mortgage underwriting as far back as 2001. The Fed, the primary supervisor for large financial companies, should have been more vigilant as the housing bubble formed, and the scale of its lending shows the “supervision of the banks prior to the crisis was far worse than we had imagined,” Rosner says.

Bernanke in an April 2009 speech said that the Fed provided emergency loans only to “sound institutions,” even though its internal assessments described at least one of the biggest borrowers, Citigroup, as “marginal.”

On Jan. 14, 2009, six days before the company’s central bank loans peaked, the New York Fed gave CEO Vikram Pandit a report declaring Citigroup’s financial strength to be “superficial,” bolstered largely by its $45 billion of Treasury funds. The document was released in early 2011 by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a panel empowered by Congress to probe the causes of the crisis.
‘Need Transparency’

Andrea Priest, a spokeswoman for the New York Fed, declined to comment, as did Jon Diat, a spokesman for Citigroup.

“I believe that the Fed should have independence in conducting highly technical monetary policy, but when they are putting taxpayer resources at risk, we need transparency and accountability,” says Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee.

Judd Gregg, a former New Hampshire senator who was a lead Republican negotiator on TARP, and Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat who chaired the House Financial Services Committee, both say they were kept in the dark.

“We didn’t know the specifics,” says Gregg, who’s now an adviser to Goldman Sachs.

“We were aware emergency efforts were going on,” Frank says. “We didn’t know the specifics.”
Disclose Lending

Frank co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, billed as a fix for financial-industry excesses. Congress debated that legislation in 2010 without a full understanding of how deeply the banks had depended on the Fed for survival.

It would have been “totally appropriate” to disclose the lending data by mid-2009, says David Jones, a former economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York who has written four books about the central bank.

“The Fed is the second-most-important appointed body in the U.S., next to the Supreme Court, and we’re dealing with a democracy,” Jones says. “Our representatives in Congress deserve to have this kind of information so they can oversee the Fed.”

The Dodd-Frank law required the Fed to release details of some emergency-lending programs in December 2010. It also mandated disclosure of discount-window borrowers after a two- year lag.
Protecting TARP

TARP and the Fed lending programs went “hand in hand,” says Sherrill Shaffer, a banking professor at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and a former chief economist at the New York Fed. While the TARP money helped insulate the central bank from losses, the Fed’s willingness to supply seemingly unlimited financing to the banks assured they wouldn’t collapse, protecting the Treasury’s TARP investments, he says.

“Even though the Treasury was in the headlines, the Fed was really behind the scenes engineering it,” Shaffer says.

Congress, at the urging of Bernanke and Paulson, created TARP in October 2008 after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. made it difficult for financial institutions to get loans. Bank of America and New York-based Citigroup each received $45 billion from TARP. At the time, both were tapping the Fed. Citigroup hit its peak borrowing of $99.5 billion in January 2009, while Bank of America topped out in February 2009 at $91.4 billion.
No Clue

Lawmakers knew none of this.

They had no clue that one bank, New York-based Morgan Stanley (MS), took $107 billion in Fed loans in September 2008, enough to pay off one-tenth of the country’s delinquent mortgages. The firm’s peak borrowing occurred the same day Congress rejected the proposed TARP bill, triggering the biggest point drop ever in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (INDU) The bill later passed, and Morgan Stanley got $10 billion of TARP funds, though Paulson said only “healthy institutions” were eligible.

Mark Lake, a spokesman for Morgan Stanley, declined to comment, as did spokesmen for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs.

Had lawmakers known, it “could have changed the whole approach to reform legislation,” says Ted Kaufman, a former Democratic Senator from Delaware who, with Brown, introduced the bill to limit bank size.
Moral Hazard

Kaufman says some banks are so big that their failure could trigger a chain reaction in the financial system. The cost of borrowing for so-called too-big-to-fail banks is lower than that of smaller firms because lenders believe the government won’t let them go under. The perceived safety net creates what economists call moral hazard -- the belief that bankers will take greater risks because they’ll enjoy any profits while shifting losses to taxpayers.

If Congress had been aware of the extent of the Fed rescue, Kaufman says, he would have been able to line up more support for breaking up the biggest banks.

Byron L. Dorgan, a former Democratic senator from North Dakota, says the knowledge might have helped pass legislation to reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, which for most of the last century separated customer deposits from the riskier practices of investment banking.

“Had people known about the hundreds of billions in loans to the biggest financial institutions, they would have demanded Congress take much more courageous actions to stop the practices that caused this near financial collapse,” says Dorgan, who retired in January.
Getting Bigger

Instead, the Fed and its secret financing helped America’s biggest financial firms get bigger and go on to pay employees as much as they did at the height of the housing bubble.

Total assets held by the six biggest U.S. banks increased 39 percent to $9.5 trillion on Sept. 30, 2011, from $6.8 trillion on the same day in 2006, according to Fed data.

For so few banks to hold so many assets is “un-American,” says Richard W. Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “All of these gargantuan institutions are too big to regulate. I’m in favor of breaking them up and slimming them down.”

Employees at the six biggest banks made twice the average for all U.S. workers in 2010, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics hourly compensation cost data. The banks spent $146.3 billion on compensation in 2010, or an average of $126,342 per worker, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That’s up almost 20 percent from five years earlier compared with less than 15 percent for the average worker. Average pay at the banks in 2010 was about the same as in 2007, before the bailouts.
‘Wanted to Pretend’

“The pay levels came back so fast at some of these firms that it appeared they really wanted to pretend they hadn’t been bailed out,” says Anil Kashyap, a former Fed economist who’s now a professor of economics at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. “They shouldn’t be surprised that a lot of people find some of the stuff that happened totally outrageous.”

Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch & Co. at the urging of then-Treasury Secretary Paulson after buying the biggest U.S. home lender, Countrywide Financial Corp. When the Merrill Lynch purchase was announced on Sept. 15, 2008, Bank of America had $14.4 billion in emergency Fed loans and Merrill Lynch had $8.1 billion. By the end of the month, Bank of America’s loans had reached $25 billion and Merrill Lynch’s had exceeded $60 billion, helping both firms keep the deal on track.
Prevent Collapse

Wells Fargo bought Wachovia Corp., the fourth-largest U.S. bank by deposits before the 2008 acquisition. Because depositors were pulling their money from Wachovia, the Fed channeled $50 billion in secret loans to the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank through two emergency-financing programs to prevent collapse before Wells Fargo could complete the purchase.

“These programs proved to be very successful at providing financial markets the additional liquidity and confidence they needed at a time of unprecedented uncertainty,” says Ancel Martinez, a spokesman for Wells Fargo.

JPMorgan absorbed the country’s largest savings and loan, Seattle-based Washington Mutual Inc., and investment bank Bear Stearns Cos. The New York Fed, then headed by Timothy F. Geithner, who’s now Treasury secretary, helped JPMorgan complete the Bear Stearns deal by providing $29 billion of financing, which was disclosed at the time. The Fed also supplied Bear Stearns with $30 billion of secret loans to keep the company from failing before the acquisition closed, central bank data show. The loans were made through a program set up to provide emergency funding to brokerage firms.
‘Regulatory Discretion’

“Some might claim that the Fed was picking winners and losers, but what the Fed was doing was exercising its professional regulatory discretion,” says John Dearie, a former speechwriter at the New York Fed who’s now executive vice president for policy at the Financial Services Forum, a Washington-based group consisting of the CEOs of 20 of the world’s biggest financial firms. “The Fed clearly felt it had what it needed within the requirements of the law to continue to lend to Bear and Wachovia.”

The bill introduced by Brown and Kaufman in April 2010 would have mandated shrinking the six largest firms.

“When a few banks have advantages, the little guys get squeezed,” Brown says. “That, to me, is not what capitalism should be.”

Kaufman says he’s passionate about curbing too-big-to-fail banks because he fears another crisis.

‘Can We Survive?’

“The amount of pain that people, through no fault of their own, had to endure -- and the prospect of putting them through it again -- is appalling,” Kaufman says. “The public has no more appetite for bailouts. What would happen tomorrow if one of these big banks got in trouble? Can we survive that?”

Lobbying expenditures by the six banks that would have been affected by the legislation rose to $29.4 million in 2010 compared with $22.1 million in 2006, the last full year before credit markets seized up -- a gain of 33 percent, according to OpenSecrets.org, a research group that tracks money in U.S. politics. Lobbying by the American Bankers Association, a trade organization, increased at about the same rate, OpenSecrets.org reported.

Lobbyists argued the virtues of bigger banks. They’re more stable, better able to serve large companies and more competitive internationally, and breaking them up would cost jobs and cause “long-term damage to the U.S. economy,” according to a Nov. 13, 2009, letter to members of Congress from the FSF.

The group’s website cites Nobel Prize-winning economist Oliver E. Williamson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, for demonstrating the greater efficiency of large companies.
‘Serious Burden’

In an interview, Williamson says that the organization took his research out of context and that efficiency is only one factor in deciding whether to preserve too-big-to-fail banks.

“The banks that were too big got even bigger, and the problems that we had to begin with are magnified in the process,” Williamson says. “The big banks have incentives to take risks they wouldn’t take if they didn’t have government support. It’s a serious burden on the rest of the economy.”

Dearie says his group didn’t mean to imply that Williamson endorsed big banks.

Top officials in President Barack Obama’s administration sided with the FSF in arguing against legislative curbs on the size of banks.
Geithner, Kaufman

On May 4, 2010, Geithner visited Kaufman in his Capitol Hill office. As president of the New York Fed in 2007 and 2008, Geithner helped design and run the central bank’s lending programs. The New York Fed supervised four of the six biggest U.S. banks and, during the credit crunch, put together a daily confidential report on Wall Street’s financial condition. Geithner was copied on these reports, based on a sampling of e- mails released by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

At the meeting with Kaufman, Geithner argued that the issue of limiting bank size was too complex for Congress and that people who know the markets should handle these decisions, Kaufman says. According to Kaufman, Geithner said he preferred that bank supervisors from around the world, meeting in Basel, Switzerland, make rules increasing the amount of money banks need to hold in reserve. Passing laws in the U.S. would undercut his efforts in Basel, Geithner said, according to Kaufman.

Anthony Coley, a spokesman for Geithner, declined to comment.
‘Punishing Success’

Lobbyists for the big banks made the winning case that forcing them to break up was “punishing success,” Brown says. Now that they can see how much the banks were borrowing from the Fed, senators might think differently, he says.

The Fed supported curbing too-big-to-fail banks, including giving regulators the power to close large financial firms and implementing tougher supervision for big banks, says Fed General Counsel Scott G. Alvarez. The Fed didn’t take a position on whether large banks should be dismantled before they get into trouble.

Dodd-Frank does provide a mechanism for regulators to break up the biggest banks. It established the Financial Stability Oversight Council that could order teetering banks to shut down in an orderly way. The council is headed by Geithner.

“Dodd-Frank does not solve the problem of too big to fail,” says Shelby, the Alabama Republican. “Moral hazard and taxpayer exposure still very much exist.”
Below Market

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, says banks “were either in bad shape or taking advantage of the Fed giving them a good deal. The former contradicts their public statements. The latter -- getting loans at below-market rates during a financial crisis -- is quite a gift.”

The Fed says it typically makes emergency loans more expensive than those available in the marketplace to discourage banks from abusing the privilege. During the crisis, Fed loans were among the cheapest around, with funding available for as low as 0.01 percent in December 2008, according to data from the central bank and money-market rates tracked by Bloomberg.

The Fed funds also benefited firms by allowing them to avoid selling assets to pay investors and depositors who pulled their money. So the assets stayed on the banks’ books, earning interest.

Banks report the difference between what they earn on loans and investments and their borrowing expenses. The figure, known as net interest margin, provides a clue to how much profit the firms turned on their Fed loans, the costs of which were included in those expenses. To calculate how much banks stood to make, Bloomberg multiplied their tax-adjusted net interest margins by their average Fed debt during reporting periods in which they took emergency loans.
Added Income

The 190 firms for which data were available would have produced income of $13 billion, assuming all of the bailout funds were invested at the margins reported, the data show.

The six biggest U.S. banks’ share of the estimated subsidy was $4.8 billion, or 23 percent of their combined net income during the time they were borrowing from the Fed. Citigroup would have taken in the most, with $1.8 billion.

“The net interest margin is an effective way of getting at the benefits that these large banks received from the Fed,” says Gerald A. Hanweck, a former Fed economist who’s now a finance professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

While the method isn’t perfect, it’s impossible to state the banks’ exact profits or savings from their Fed loans because the numbers aren’t disclosed and there isn’t enough publicly available data to figure it out.

Opinsky, the JPMorgan spokesman, says he doesn’t think the calculation is fair because “in all likelihood, such funds were likely invested in very short-term investments,” which typically bring lower returns.
Standing Access

Even without tapping the Fed, the banks get a subsidy by having standing access to the central bank’s money, says Viral Acharya, a New York University economics professor who has worked as an academic adviser to the New York Fed.

“Banks don’t give lines of credit to corporations for free,” he says. “Why should all these government guarantees and liquidity facilities be for free?”

In the September 2008 meeting at which Paulson and Bernanke briefed lawmakers on the need for TARP, Bernanke said that if nothing was done, “unemployment would rise -- to 8 or 9 percent from the prevailing 6.1 percent,” Paulson wrote in “On the Brink” (Business Plus, 2010).
Occupy Wall Street

The U.S. jobless rate hasn’t dipped below 8.8 percent since March 2009, 3.6 million homes have been foreclosed since August 2007, according to data provider RealtyTrac Inc., and police have clashed with Occupy Wall Street protesters, who say government policies favor the wealthiest citizens, in New York, Boston, Seattle and Oakland, California.

The Tea Party, which supports a more limited role for government, has its roots in anger over the Wall Street bailouts, says Neil M. Barofsky, former TARP special inspector general and a Bloomberg Television contributing editor.

“The lack of transparency is not just frustrating; it really blocked accountability,” Barofsky says. “When people don’t know the details, they fill in the blanks. They believe in conspiracies.”

In the end, Geithner had his way. The Brown-Kaufman proposal to limit the size of banks was defeated, 60 to 31. Bank supervisors meeting in Switzerland did mandate minimum reserves that institutions will have to hold, with higher levels for the world’s largest banks, including the six biggest in the U.S. Those rules can be changed by individual countries.

They take full effect in 2019.

Meanwhile, Kaufman says, “we’re absolutely, totally, 100 percent not prepared for another financial crisis.”[/spoiler:1okxpq32]

Από τους FT πρέπει να διαβάζεις ορισμένα κομμάτια. Αν διαβάζεις αδιακρίτως (ιδίως τα τζάμπα) το τέλος του κόσμου, του γαλαξία, του σύμπαντος είναι θέμα ωρών. Χρόόόόνια τώρα η ίδια μανιέρα. Άμα πληρώσεις συνδρομή, το ύφος είναι μέρα με νύχτα.

Οι Άγγλοι έχουν έναν και μόνο διακαή πόθο: Την επιστροφή στα εθνικά κράτη. Τα οποία θα τρώγονται μεταξύ τους και αυτοί θα κάνουν κουμάντο. Όπως στο 1700 και στο 1800. Τι να πεις;

Αν θέλετε να δείτε την Αγγλοσαξωνική κολακεία εν δράσει (αλλά όπως πάντα με απώτερους στόχους) ιδού. Στην τελευταία παράγραφο λέει ότι μαράθηκε η καρδούλα των Αγγλοσαξώνων που μας βλέπουν να υποφέρουμε τόσο πολύ. Η κακιά μητριά η Γερμανία μας αδικεί εμάς τις σταχτοπούτες. Ωστόσο οι πραγματικοί θεοί βλέπουν τα βάσανά μας από εκεί ψηλά και το άδικο δεν το θέλει ούτε ο θεός κλπ κλπ κλπ.

Να δούμε ποιος θα το πιστέψει αυτή τη φορά.

Και εδώ οι λίστες με τα ratings. Είμαστε ο πάτος όλου του κόσμου (!) για S&P's (CC), Moody's (Ca) και Fitch (CCC) και την κινέζικη Dagong.

Ο χρήστης imago έγραψε:
Είμαστε ο πάτος όλου του κόσμου (!) για S&P's (CC), Moody's (Ca) και Fitch (CCC) και την κινέζικη Dagong.

Ο χρήστης imago έγραψε:

θέλω να μου εξηγήσει κάποιος τη στάση Γαλλίας που προτιμά να είναι french maid σε Γερμανική τσόντα απο το να γίνει βασίλισσα του Νότου.
qu'est ce que c'est ρε garcon?

Καλό!
Σαν απάντηση: Η Γαλλία έχει καταλάβει μετά από δύο πολέμους ότι δεν κάνει χωρίς Γερμανία.

Oρθότατο!
Η εντελώς ανιστόρητη και πολιτικώς μειωπική διαδικασία μισού αιώνα για 'ευρωπαϊκή ενοποίηση' ήταν μία γαλλική εμμονή για προληπτικό κατευνασμό της Γερμανίας.
Ανιστόρητη και μειωπική γιατί αγνοεί την απόλυτη κυριαρχία του εθνικισμού* στον κόσμο, εδώ και αιώνες, και για όλο το προβλέψιμο μέλλον [τα περί του αντιθέτου αποτελούν φθηνή προπαγάνδα του ισχυρότερου εθνικού κράτους του κόσμου, που εκμεταλλεύεται την παγκόσμια αποκλειστικότητά του να είναι ethnically heterogeneous μεν, nation state δε, προς αποδυνάμωση των homogeneous nation states της Ευρώπης].

Η Γερμανία δέχθηκε ασμένως την 'ευρωπαϊκή ιδέα' , ως ατιμασμένη χώρα δολοφόνων τότε, αλλά δεν τη χρειάζεται πολιτικώς σήμερα. Τη χρειάζεται, βεβαίως, οικονομικώς, αλλά όπως έγραψα σελίδες πριν, η Γερμανία δεν ήταν ποτέ σε θέση, για λόγους πολιτισμικούς, να αντιλαμβάνεται την πραγματικότητα, και το συμφέρον της το ίδιο.

Για τους Γάλλους: Κρίμα τη Μασσαλιώτιδα (γκουγκλάρετέ την, θα σας κάνει καλό...). Πολιτική υποτέλειας προς τη γοτθική-σαξωνική βαρβαρότητα και τον ζηλωτικό προτεσταντικό αυτισμό εδώ και μισό αιώνα, από το μεγαλύτερο σε έκταση και παλαιότερο εθνικό και κοσμικό κράτος της Ευρώπης...
Η ξεφτίλα (περισσότερο κι από την ίδια την ήττα) του Μαϊου του 1940 απεδείχθη στρατηγικώς καταστρεπτικότερη (και άρα μη αναστρέψιμη) κι από την ήττα του 1815.
Αλλά αυτά παθαίνουν αναπόφευκτα οι λαοί που δεν εξουδετερώνουν εγκαίρως προδοτικά προπαγανδιστικά ιδεολογήματα, πριν αυτά δηλητηριάσουν τη λαϊκή κουλτούρα (πχ το κομμουνστικό 'pourquoi' πριν και κατά τον Β' ΠΠ...)

• Ως εθνικισμός στην πολιτική επιστήμη ορίζεται η ιδεολογία αυτοπροσδιορισμού των ανθρώπων πρωτίστως βάσει του έθνους (=πολιτισμικού φαινομένου) στο οποίο ανήκουν.

Ο χρήστης imago έγραψε:
Και εδώ οι λίστες με τα ratings. Είμαστε ο πάτος όλου του κόσμου (!) για S&P's (CC), Moody's (Ca) και Fitch (CCC) και την κινέζικη Dagong.

ας συμπληρώσουν και πόσο!!! 2000, 2500, 3000?....turbo?. ατμοσφαιρικό? υβριδικό?.....

στην τελική, επειδή μας έχουν γίνει τσουρέκια, όλες αυτές οι λίστες δεν είναι τίποτε άλλο παρά οδηγός 'έξυπνων' επενδύσεων για βελτιστοποίηση κερδών....
όσο για τις προφητείες του μέγα κραχχχ, νέου παγκόσμιου πόλεμου και άλλες μαλακίες ας τα αφήσουν αυτά που μοναδικό σκοπό έχουν τον εκφοβισμό των λαών για μεγαλύτερη οικονομική του αφαίμαξη.
δηλ. αν είχαμε την ευχέρεια να μειώσουμε το έλλειμμα σε 10 χρόνια και όχι σε 10 μήνες τη στιγμή που απαιτείται κούρεμα άνω του 50%....
έχει ξαναγραφτεί, όλα αυτά που ζούμε στην ελλάδα γίνονται προς παραδειγματισμό ώστε να μην φθάσουν σε αυτό το σημείο χώρες που το μέγεθός τους θα τινάξει την μπάνκα στον αέρα....