www.1818france.org

Same beer, different bottles.
Like beer, financial crises may be packaged in very different bottles, but they are mostly of very similar substances. They are triggered by the discovery that substantial assets are worth much less than the majority of financial agents had thought or pretended. The difference between the pre crisis and post-crisis perceptions of value is due to changes in the perception of real underlying earning prospects, or to changes in the valuation markets put on essentially unchanged earning prospects.
Earning prospects can change for many different reasons, but these all relate to rising costs or falling revenues, in turn due to different combinations of changes affecting real product and costs, or prices. A fairly typical example is the Channel Tunnel – as an early investor, I use the example with some feeling. Its real costs went up: it took longer and more real expenditure from inception to operations than had been foreseen. The higher expenditure raised borrowing needs; the longer delay vastly increased interest accumulated during construction. Meanwhile, competing ferry operators modernized and reduced their costs. Tunnel traffic remained well below projections, at lower than projected prices. Accordingly, lenders had to write down their loans significantly, and shareholders lost, in practice, most of their investments.
The dotcom bubble was a concatenation of similar phenomena. Everything connected with the treatment and transmission of information appeared to have brilliant prospects. When projected prices and volumes both had to be revised down, this drastically reduced the perceived values of future revenue streams and of their earners. Many corporations, both competing and complementary, were concerned; one downward revision immediately led to another, creating the typical crisis phenomenon of a sudden deflation of values.
Sometimes, investors raise or lower the valuations they put on unchanged expected future earning streams. The most rational such changes react to interest rates. When the long-term interest rate is 3%, a risk-free future income stream of 1 has a present value of 331/3. This value falls by half if the interest rate doubles to 6%.
Few valuations are so simple and so rational. Even the previous example depends on the interest rate being thought everlasting. Few things are. At today’s interest rate of 3%, a risk-free (and few are!) future income stream of 3 should be worth 100. But what will the interest rate be tomorrow? If it moves to 6%, the value of this asset would fall by half. This risk influences its present price, and renders hazardous the acquisition even of assets yielding risk-free income streams. Further risks are introduced by uncertainties affecting the income stream itself. What often counts most is what Keynes called “animal spirits” – the buoyancy or pessimism of market participants.
Finance, loans and asset prices.
One main component of animal spirits is the market’s view of the creditworthiness of borrowers. Confidence in being repaid depends in part on the value of assets that informally or formally (through pledges or mortgages) form counterparts to loans. However, as we have seen, the value of these assets is uncertain. It can be depressed by collective events affecting a large class of creditors. Pledged shares form a pretty good counterpart to loans intended to finance the purchase of a machine, a marriage or a new house. They do not form very good counterparts to loans intended to finance the purchase of other shares, because many such loans drive up the price of shares, and attempts to sell the counterpart would drive their price down. Similarly, residential mortgages constitute a pretty good counterpart to housing loans, except if any collective event – depressed consumer incomes or depressed house prices – makes it expedient for many lenders actually to realize this counterpart. The price of houses is then likely to fall, making it both difficult to recover loan values and pushing other lenders in turn to call in their loans.
Financial mechanisms and phenomena often exaggerate the upward and downward movements of valuations. When investors bid for shares of an asset, this pushes up its price, sometimes giving other potential investors the idea that these shares are worth more than their past price, and even than their present one. They bid for it in turn, thus pushing up its price even further, and thus feeding the movement, until it stops and often reverses itself: bubbles inflate until they burst.
When those who buy shares in an asset have to use their own money, this firmly limits their potential investment, and also concentrates its risks on the investor. But credit often intervenes. The 1929 stock market crisis was vastly amplified by the practice of buying shares on “margin”, financing up to two thirds of their value with borrowed money. While the balloon was inflating, such borrowings could be frequently renewed: as a share’s price went from 100 to 200 and the purchaser’s equity rose to 1331/3 , he could – and often did – borrow 200 more to buy more shares, his holdings rising to 400 shares, with a debt of 266.67. Despite the valiant efforts of promoters creating new assets to help absorb such funds (emulating the South Sea Bubble’s “venture whose purpose will be revealed later”) such purchases contribute to inflating asset prices further, thus raising the notional value of investor’s equity and allowing them to borrow further.
Investors of their own money can choose to hold or sell assets whose price is falling. Investors of borrowed money do not have that option. Just as a unit rise in price allows multiple further purchases if two thirds of the asset price can be borrowed, a fall in price compels multiple sales. Note the two words allow and compel. With inflating prices, further purchases are optional, and are often preceded by small pauses for reflection. When prices fall, sales must take place immediately. This is why bubbles generally take longer to inflate than to burst.
Borrowing not only amplifies the risk incurred by the purchaser of assets; it also spreads the risk beyond the investor, but without reducing it. The banks that finance share purchases “on margin” may think their own funds safe; but when the bubble bursts and assets are frantically sold to pay off the corresponding debts, their prices may well fall faster than debts can be repaid: banks then lose their own funds, and may go bankrupt with their borrowers.
Loans, trust, creditworthiness.
Borrowing to buy assets takes many forms. When in 1345 Edward III of England defaulted on his debt to Florentine bankers (he had borrowed 600,000 gold florins from the Peruzzi and 900,000 from the Bardi), not only these two banking houses went bankrupt, but many of their depositors too, and even some lenders to those. The Dutch tulip craze reached the heights it did, and the depths that followed, because a futures market had been created: buyers could bid for promises to deliver bulbs in future, putting down only a fraction of the price. The danger that losses may spread makes them spread faster. The Peruzzi’s may have weathered the English bankruptcy if their depositors had not sought to withdraw their deposits for fear of losing them. The banking crises of the early 1930s resulted as much from the fear of bank closures than from the banks’ actual losses.
Cash flow is often used as an indicator of creditworthiness. Many developing countries borrowed heavily from commercial banks in the 1970s, largely because such bank loans could be used for any purpose, including servicing prior loans. New loans could service old loans, old loans were serviced, very profitably for the lenders – so newer loans could be obtained, again facilitating debt service. The claims remained solid, and were accepted as such by regulators and rating agencies, ultimately because newer claims were providing new cash.
Creditworthiness was ensured by new loans, themselves dependent on creditworthiness, which they in turn ensured – a wonderful money machine as long as it runs. But once doubts are raised – and at some time someone does wonder whether it is quite healthy to make a new loan to be used entirely to finance service, including interest payments, on prior loans – new loans become more difficult to come by, old loans more difficult to service, and the lending bubble deflates into a debt crisis.
Sub-prime and its newish bottles.
The substantially similar beer of the present “sub-prime” mortgage crisis can be seen in the previous descriptions. What about the different bottle?
Much is made of globalization, the interconnected nature of today’s financial market. It is indeed true that the impact of the subprime crisis is turning up in some unlikely quarters, with losses to provincial German banks and Swiss credit giants springing from risky loans by American financial institutions to American homeowners. But the novelty of this internationalization should not be exaggerated. The Bardis’ and Peruzzis’ operations reflected international integration in some ways more intricate than any today: in terms of travel and the transmission of information, Florence was a thousand times farther from England than any subprime mortgagee in Oshkosh from his ultimate lender in Zurich, Dubai or Shanghai. So were Roman knights from the Delos slave market and Syrian publicans they financed.
Deregulation, the relaxation or absence of significant controls over many financial institutions is another novelty. It is indeed new – well, newish – relative to the 1960s, but not relative to periods before the Great Depression. Even relative to recent decades, the movement has not been one way only, and many regulations have been made tighter and more closely internationally harmonized. Somewhat contradictorily, features of these new and stricter regulations are even blamed for the severity of the present crisis, in particular the “mark to market” rules that compel many financial institutions to value assets at their present market price rather than, as they used to, at their purchase value.
The complexity of present instruments is also often blamed. This has two aspects. Debt instruments themselves used to be relatively straightforward: A owed X to B, straight up or on certain conditions (if, say, the price of a commodity rose of fell). Both A and B had pretty shrewd ideas of what was what. But let us not idealize this simple world, because the chain of transactions seldom stopped there. C in turn lent to B, and did not necessarily have a clear idea of B’s true worth, including true value of B’s claims on A. And D lent to C, E lending to D, the true recoverable value of all these claims depending ultimately on A’s respect of his obligations to B. Depositors with the Peruzzis, let alone the tradesmen to whom they in turn owed money, had very little knowledge of Edward III’s debt servicing willingness and ability.
To the uncertainties of the credit chain, modern finance has added greater uncertainties on the very nature of the debt instruments. Not only have relatively simple claims on home-owners and consumers passed on through several layers of creditors; they have been “repackaged”.
The simplest form of repackaging, long practiced, is separating interest from principal. Many other forms have been created, often valued on the basis of the probability of future default. Mathematical formulae have given the artistic evaluation of creditworthiness the appearance of science; the frequency of past events over a limited observation period has been mistranslated into probability of occurrence over the indefinite future. Unfortunately, there exists an infinite range of events never observed during the base period which can nevertheless occur in future.
High leveraging is a feature, and often the very purpose, of many new instruments and new institutions (special investment vehicles {SIV}, hedge funds…). Their value can rapidly fall to zero, even to negative levels when forward trades and swaps are involved. Many partners are sometimes involved in a single instrument (debtor; swap partners; guarantor…), thus making the instrument’s value dependent on each partner’s creditworthiness, and sometimes even on its understanding of the nature of his obligations. Added to the old dimension of the chain of debt, this enhances market uncertainty and doubts over every participant’s creditworthiness. And the old rule still holds, creditworthiness cannot be demonstrated; when in doubt, it is already lost.
Asymmetrical rewards to decision-makers.
These are eye-catching novelties, and much has been made of them. The losses made by supposedly sophisticated banks and other financial institutions are indeed striking, and tend to reinforce the conclusion that they did not understand the nature of the assets they were acquiring or of the risks they were assuming.
Yet the nature of the risk or the complexities of the instruments are not this crisis’s distinguishing feature. Rather, that distinguishing feature – differing from the past by degrees only, but so many degrees as to make it into a novelty – is the system of incentives.
The heads of the Bardi and Peruzzi families themselves took all important decisions, like those concerning loans to the English Crown. Much of the potential reward was theirs; they had all to lose if they went wrong, and indeed they did lose all.
As limited liability corporations came to dominate business worldwide, decisions and ownership were gradually dissociated, though often corporate heads continued to own substantial interests in their corporations. Decision-making formally became the business of employees, agents of the corporation and of its owners. These agents benefited from good decisions through rising salaries and prestige, and suffered from bad decisions through stagnating incomes and positions, even dismissal. With reasonable salaries – large but not exorbitant multiples of those of line workers – there was a rough symmetry between the rewards and punishments of decisions that resulted in gains or losses for the corporation.
Not so today. In every branch of activity, high corporate managers get exorbitant rewards; in finance, this extends to quite low level decision-takers. The punishment of bad decisions, however, has hardly changed – stagnating pay and positions, or dismissal.
Imagine a professional poker player commissioned to play with your capital and his, dividing gains and losses according to your respective contributions to the original kitty. Disregarding possible differences in the value of money to him and you (he may be playing for fun while you are risking your life savings, or vice versa) your interests would be similar; any strategy aimed at maximizing his expected gains would also maximize yours.
Now imagine the same player with a different contract: he plays with your money and keeps a percentage of the gains. If he loses, he neither wins nor earns any money; if he wins, five percent of the gains are his (in hedge funds, closer to one third!). The player then has every incentive to pursue very risky game strategies, aiming at either high gains (five percent is his!) or losses (which are entirely yours).
Corporate managers in general, and a vast array of finance specialists, are exactly in this situation. They quite rationally, and arguably perhaps even honestly, pursue strategies that can earn superb rewards for them and spectacular losses for investors.
In the short run, we can pretend we are not dead.
The problem such asymmetry creates is compounded by short-term nature of the definitions of success, and by the nature and flexibility of accounting conventions. The asymmetry of rewards and punishment would exist, and draw its unavoidable behavioral implications, even if the poker player (and financial managers) were only judged on very long runs of play, or many years’ results. In reality, they are judged yearly – billions of dollars of bonuses are distributed on the basis of annual profits, and stock options and other modes of contingent payments lag hardly longer. This gives every incentive to tweak results, and accounting techniques provide the means.
In “The Money Game”, Adam Smith (not the dour Scot – a genial American’s pen-name) recounts the story of American Machine and Foundry and its rising profits linked to the sale of automatic pin-spotters to bowling-alleys – rising profits, that is, until the company suddenly went bankrupt. Fast-growing sales to all comers had been on credit. Then, with a bowling alley in (almost) every street, all these loans went unpaid.
Today’s beer is similar, but the number and complexity of bottles has much increased. As soon as credit is introduced, this year’s profit really depends on future events. These must be gauged and evaluated; and it is only human for the evaluator to be optimistic if his present earnings depend on his perception of the future. But modern financial techniques have vastly enhanced accounting’s creativity potential. Enron had booked vast profits corresponding to its estimate of the difference between forward sales and purchases stretching many years – many of these then turned to huge losses when prices changed, the same beer as AMF’s profit on sales made on credit and long-term leases, but in vastly more complicated bottles.
La Fontaine’s Perrette was only dreaming of the wonderful chain of profitable business ventures in which she was to engage thanks to the profitable sale of her jug of milk. Modern financial corporations engaged in similar ventures book the profit on their way to the market and distribute huge rewards to a long chains of employees, up to the highest. When later the jug falls and the milk is spilled, none of the past rewards have to be returned; the loss is entirely the shareholders’, including the shareholders of other entities that may have made loans to Perrette.
The business rules whose application could prevent such catastrophes are not of extraordinary complexity. They boil down to not counting one’s chickens before the eggs hatch.
Easy money.
Monetary laxity over the past decade, particularly in Japan and the United States, further encouraged such speculation. During the debt crisis of the nineteen eighties, we were reminded of nineteen century episodes of low rates for British consols, pushing savers into more risky ventures in Turkey, China and Latin America, with similar endings. Low interest rates and lax monetary policies provided both the incentive and the wherewithal to go into riskier and seemingly more remunerative ventures. In the 1920s, the American Federal Reserve Bank had failed to rein in speculation out of solidarity with Britain, so as not to weaken the pound by attracting funds into the US. During the decade and more leading to the present crisis, no such rationale was needed. Commodity prices and base wages were stable, thanks to previous over-investment and increased global competition, and the Fed (and the Bank of England, too) simply proclaimed that preventing asset price inflation was not part of their mission.
Sub-prime and all that, again.
Sub-prime mortgages – loans to finance house purchases under conditions less stringent than those previously demanded – gave their name to the past few years’ practices and were the locus of the pinprick that caused the bubble to burst. Old rules demanded secure incomes well in excess of likely mortgage payments, and sizable down-payments ensuring that borrowers owned a large share of their houses, net of the loan. Such rules protected borrowers from being excessively strained by their debt service payments, but their main aim, of course, was to protect lenders.
As house prices rose in recent years, the net value of the house, its putative price minus the outstanding principal of mortgage loans, rose even faster. Those just unable to buy a house – or a larger house – under past rules regarded with envy those just able to do so, whose net worth was rising vertiginously. Banks and other lenders, and builders and real estate agents regarded with even greater envy this potential source of business. Relaxing the rules seemed all the more easy as, with rising house prices, yesterday’s barely adequate down-payment turned into today’s high net worth.
So down-payment and income rules were relaxed, more people could afford to move into new or bigger houses than ever before, and this higher demand pushed up prices further, thus reinforcing the movement. Homeowners with the lowest original down-payments watched their net worth increase fastest (after a down payment of fifty percent, a doubling of house prices raised his house’s net worth to the homeowner threefold, but a down-payment of only ten percent would have multiplied it by eleven). Lenders felt reassured: the ratio of loan values to house prices was rapidly falling back to conventional levels. Even consumption needed not be restrained by loan payments that absorbed large parts of current incomes (or all: some borrowers were caricatured as NINJA: No Income, No Job), as homeowners could easily borrow again on the basis of the higher net worth of their loans, and spend the loan proceeds on consumption.
As the ratio of loans to home values was falling with rising house prices, helpful lenders offered second loans or refinanced mortgages to reconstitute the original high ratios. Such practices had long existed in the English-speaking countries (though not in financially backward, or some would say prudent, ones like France); but they much grew in importance in recent years. So the money machine was turning: consumers borrowed, lenders made seemingly safe and profitable loans, consumers consumed and thanks to rising house prices everyone looked prudent. Meanwhile, just in case housing-based loans were not enough, credit card loans also rose, and criteria for them were lowered.
Much has been made of the financial engineering to which such loans were subjected. In this case, the bottles were truly new and innovative. By the time a large part of mortgage and credit-card loans had been repackaged, split up, and resold and bought a few times, their own mothers would not have recognized them –indeed, they often did not.
The main purported objective of all this financial engineering had been to spread risk and thus facilitate financing. The large losses admitted in recent months by many banks do not seem to indicate that the risks had been spread very far.
Perhaps more to the point is the nature of accounting profit. In a classical loan, each year the lender books a profit corresponding to the difference between its financing and other costs, and the interest received on the loan. The new methods allowed the repackaged loan to be resold, and while the lender often retained or re-acquired the risk, the operation allowed it to book a profit immediately, to the greater glory (and not inconsiderable personal financial benefit) of the individuals involved, from trader to CEO.
Of course, even this was not entirely new. During the later stages of the boom in lending to developing countries, before the 1981 debt crisis, beneficiaries (not a truly appropriate word!) of new Eurodollar loans often had to pay up front a commission, immediately deducted from the loan amount and booked by the lender as a profit. However, the bankers’ incentives to engage in such practices were then chickenfeed compared to the more recent scale of remunerations and bonuses.
Sub-prime loans are not only for housing.
While consumer credit certainly was the main ingredient of the financial boom – consumer debt reached record ratios to income in the US and UK – it was not the whole story. Easy credit had other effects, the most remarkable being an increase of take-overs and buy-outs of existing corporations, almost invariably financed in part by borrowing – sometimes highly leveraged borrowing. When business conditions do not improve in line with the most sanguine expectations, some of these loans – generally also repackaged and reengineered – also get into trouble. Like in all such cases, the machine continued to turn until it stalled – the bubble continued to inflate until it was pricked.
Marking to market.
Recent regulatory changes may have accelerated the unfolding of the story. Banks and some other financial agencies must now “mark to market” their assets; accounts reflect the assets’ current market prices, rather than, as used to be the case, their purchase prices. The old accounting technique sometimes allowed banks to show at their full original values claims that were patently never going to be repaid. However, “mark to market” reflects potential losses before they are realized – even if they may never be realized, because markets do overreact downwards as well as up. Also, marking to markets is particularly difficult when markets become illiquid, and even more so for complex instruments whose value must be derived from other prices through mathematical formulae. During crises appearances are all; by “marking to market” banks may have exaggerated the appearance, and thereby amplified the reality of crisis.
Macroeconomic strains.
In the US, the credit boom helped raise residential construction, though this peaked by late 2005. Helped by tax cuts, private consumption rose markedly. As a share of GDP, it passed 70 percent in late 2001 for the first time since national accounts began, and almost touched 72 percent in early 2007. Corporate savings did not make up for the difference, and government budgets are in deficit. Net imports of goods and services – broadly, the deficit of international payments on current account – had hovered around 2 tenths of 1 percent of GDP in the early 1990s. Despite the Clinton years’ budget surplus, it had reached 4 percent by the third quarter of 2000, and neared 6 percent in 2006 before falling to 4.3 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007. That still amounts to a couple of billion dollars each working day, which need to be financed from abroad.
In other countries, such a situation would call for sharp restrictions to domestic demand, through reduced budget deficits and tighter monetary policies. Yet the public, politicians and even monetary and intellectual authorities are calling for the reverse in the US, abundant money and various combinations of reduced taxes or higher public expenditures to deal with the financial crisis and its impact on domestic demand. This is certainly less painful than the belt-tightening recommended, and needed, elsewhere. The question is whether it is sustainable.
For the past half-century and more that US has needed capital from abroad, this has always been forthcoming. The rest of the world has happily accumulated dollars, albeit providing for each dollar sharply reduced amounts of other currencies or real resources.
How now?
The main alternatives now are the following. What has continued for so long can continue somewhat further. It is possible that despite fiscal and monetary laxity and glaring disregard of external imbalances, the rest of the world will continue to pump money into the US, in the form of financial and real assets both. The US would then continue to live above its means, expenditures exceeding income. It would have the consolation that the financial assets flogged to foreigners would depreciate, both with exchange rates and with periodic financial crises.
Or the rest of the world may decide that enough is sufficient. This need not come as a sudden conversion of dollar assets; the rest of the world could merely reduce its desired acquisition of new dollar assets (including real assets based in the US or owned by Americans) significantly below $ two billions per working day. This would cause the dollar to fall further, at some point creating (through rising trade prices and speculation) domestic inflationary pressures even American financial authorities could not ignore. That would also accelerate the fall in value of the US-based assets already owned by the rest of the world, and perhaps amplify its reluctance to acquire new ones.
In this alternative, there are again two scenarios (and of course and infinity of blends between all the scenarios outlined here). American firms may continue their strange reluctance to export and their stranger inability to compete with imports. This is quite possible: despite all the hymns about rising American exports, they have in fact so far reacted quite modestly to the dollar’s huge depreciation relative to the Euro and even other currencies. The US is still everyone’s market, attracting special efforts by its very hugeness; while American firms (perhaps underestimating the oneness of the European Union), still can rarely be bothered to try their luck in what they seem to consider fragmented and minor markets.
Alternatively, the US may be able, like the countries affected by last decade’s so-called Asian crisis, to turn the combination of financial crisis, (mildly) depressed domestic demand and depreciated exchange rate into an opportunity to raise domestic savings and exports, and climb out of the financial crisis with improved macroeconomic balance. For a time, lenders and borrowers may become more prudent; consumers may consider their retirement and actually save for it; firms may improve their competitiveness in foreign markets and at home. The financial crisis may then be resolved without an excessively burdensome aftermath.
Prologue or epilogue.
When will the crisis be put behind us? It took a quarter century, the New Deal, Keynes, the second World War and inflation for the Dow Jones index again to reach its 1929 peak in current prices; perhaps one more decade in real terms. Of course, the situation is now very different, and policy makers dispose of vastly more knowledge and a better array of tools.
And yet… In macroeconomic circumstances very different from the present American ones – it mostly had savings and balance of payments surpluses – in the late 1980s Japan experienced an epic bubble closely related to real estate prices. Those were the days when one’s Japanese friends boasted that at prevailing real estate prices the Imperial Palace grounds in Tokyo were worth more than California.
Their real estate holdings boosted the market value of corporations, further raised by a partly autonomous stock market bubble. The Japanese practice of cross-holdings of shares amplified the rise in corporate asset values: corporation A’s assets included corporation B’s shares, so when B’s share price rose, A’s asset values increased. This in turn boosted the value of B’s assets, which included shares in A, and its share prices… Meanwhile, banks could lend corporations any amount; their loans remained well below prudent-looking ratios to the (inflated) value of the borrowers’ assets. Consumer demand was also buoyant. Japanese consumers never went so far as to borrow on their real estate or other assets, but they thought themselves rich and spent accordingly.
The Nikkei index hit 38,915.87 on December 29, 1989. By 1992 it had fallen by well over half; nineteen years on, it hovers around 12 000, a depth only reached in this decade, as protracted misery followed the crisis. Real estate prices cannot be measured so accurately, but they are said to have fallen even more sharply, and recovered even less. Hubris there had been a-plenty, duly followed by nemesis; but catharsis has not yet come.
I do not base my handling of my personal assets on the assumption that US and European assets face a similar future. But it is only fair to note that I once thought that the Nikkei at 18000 presented a good buying opportunity.

J’ai trouvé le message de Jean Baneth instructif et humoristique. Il situe la crise dans un contexte historique. Il en analyse clairement les différents aspects et causes. Il termine en exposant les différents éléments qui pourraient affecter la suite des évènements.
Juste un point qui n’est pas très clair pour moi qui ne suis pas économiste, le paragraphe sur la dérégulation me semble plus faire état de régulation que de dérégulation. Quels ont été les relâchements récents dans le contrôle des institutions financières ?
Daniel Coyaud

Tout d'abord, pour répondre à Daniel Coyaud, ce n'est pas tellement le relachement dans le controle des institutions financieres qui pose des problemes, mais le fait qu'aux Etats Unis, du moins, seules les banques sont controlees, alors que les maisons de Wall Street, qui ne sont pas controlees par la banque cebntrale, ont depasse les banques en importance dans les marches financiers.

Quant a Jean Baneth, j'ai un desaccord total avec lui en ce qui concerne la bière. Le reste de son anaylse est magistrale.

Quelques commentaires. La racine des crises financières, à mon avis, est l'argent bon marché. Quand les taux d'intérets sont très bas pour les épargnants - ou même négatifs en termes réels, ce qui est de plus en plus le cas aux Etats Unis- il n'est guère surprenant que deux choses se passent, comme l'indique Jean: (a) seuls les imbéciles (moi inclu) épargnent; et (b) les gens cherchent désespérément à trouver des "investissements" qui "promettent" de générer un flux de revenus supérieur au bas taux d'intérêt. Le premier facteur contribue à créer, puis à exacerber, les déséquilibres macoéconomiques; le second encourage des placements de plus en plus risqués (souvenez-vous de la fin des années 70, quand les hôtels de Santiago louaient des baignoires aux banquiers de toute engeance. La gueule de bois suit toujours, surtout si l'inflation américaine atteint des niveaux inquiétants. Mr. Volker ayant dû augmenter les taux d'intérêt brutalement, le chien (les pays industriels) furent économiquement déprimés. Quant aux pays en voie de développement, ils formaient la queue de ce chien, et subirent des déflations encore plus accentuées, leurs économies étant plus fragiles.

Quant à la crise actuelle, les gens ont - comme d'habitude - réagi de façon tout à fait rationnelle. Les taux d'intérêt étant bas, ils se sont d'abord jetés dans les actions. Ensuite, quand Wall Street devint moins attrayant, ils se sont tournés vers "la pierre". Les banques centrales font face à d'énormes problèmes quand il s'agit de modérer des hausses soudaines d'avoirs de tout genre. Elles ne sont pas "étudiés pour".

Pourquoi bien de grosses compagnies américaines n'exportent pas beaucoup ? En partie parce qu'elles ont investi depuis bientôt un siècle dans tous les pays du monde. Pourquoi GM essayerait-il d'exporter de mauvaises voitures en Europe, quand elle y fabrique de bien meilleures Opel et Vauxhall ?

Finalement, ce qui nous pend au nez. Jean espère que les Etats Unis épargneront davantage. Peu probable, à mon avis. L'épargne vient des ménages, des entreprises et du secteur public. Le secteur public américain continue à financer deux guerres énormément coûteuses, et à même temps vient de réduire les impôts (et tous les politiciens promettent davantage de réductions). Les ménages ne vont pas économiser davantage tant que les taux d'intérêt resteront négatifs - tout au contraire encourage à la consommation. Quant aux entreprises, je doute que leurs profits augmentent fortement (sauf celles liées à l'agriculture et aux matières premières) en période de récession.

Tout ceci pour applaudir l'exposé de Jean Baneth.

Guy Pfeffermann

May I draw your attention to today's article in the Washington Post: Firms Gone Wild. It attributes much of the financial trouble to the transition of investment partnerships, where partners were fully responsible, into publicly-traded investment banks, where shareholders "carried the bag". Here is the article.

Guy Pfeffermann

The Big Brokers Blew It. They Should Bear the Cost.

By William D. Cohan
Sunday, April 6, 2008; B01

Once upon a time on Wall Street, in the days when investment banks were small private partnerships, a simple but ingenious idea kept bankers and traders accountable for their actions: the collective-liability clauses in their partnership agreements. A mistaken trade here or bad advice there, and all the partners suffered. Conversely, if things went well -- as they mostly did -- these same agreements rewarded them with lavish compensation that soon included Fifth Avenue apartments, ocean-front estates in the Hamptons and priceless art collections.

This is worth remembering as Wall Street and Washington take increasingly desperate and historic measures -- even using taxpayers' money -- to stanch the financial meltdown now occurring before our eyes, including the near-bankruptcy of global investment bank and brokerage firm Bear Stearns & Co. Accountability has been absent from Wall Street for too long. Unless we restore it to the equation -- amid all the other proposals for fixing the capital markets now being bandied at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue -- the chances are high that the cycle of boom and bust will keep churning.

Since 1792, when a group of 24 traders met under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street, various forms of the collective liability clause's legal alchemy have worked magically. Take Lazard Frères & Co., the last major private partnership on Wall Street. For 157 years, its partners became extraordinarily wealthy by spinning their whispered advice about deals into ever-increasing high-margin fees. Among the earliest Lazard partners were Marc Eugene Meyer and his son, Eugene Isaac Meyer, a wealthy financier who bought this newspaper out of bankruptcy in 1933 for $825,000 and who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve and the first president of the World Bank.

Such was the clarity of the partnership agreement's liability clause that when star mergers and acquisitions banker Ira Harris left the Salomon Brothers partnership -- where he had earned his first fortune -- to join Lazard in 1988, he made exemption from the clause an express condition of his employment. ("Not having made my capital there, I didn't want to lose it there," he said after he retired.) But Harris was the only Lazard partner so exempted. When another marched into general counsel Tom Mullarkey's office to ask about Harris's special arrangement, Mullarkey snapped, "It's none of your goddamn business."

Harris was prescient about the potential for rogue behavior among his fellow partners. A few years after he arrived, Lazard found itself at the epicenter of three separate scandals involving a few partners in its municipal finance department. By the end of the 1990s, Lazard's partners had coughed up roughly $100 million to settle the legal actions that resulted. And only because of the senior partners' direct appeals to the U.S. attorney did Lazard narrowly avoid a federal racketeering lawsuit that would have put it out of business. The magnitude of these mistakes was communicated to the Lazard partners (Harris excepted) in a language they understood perfectly: through their diminished bank accounts. That's accountability.

In May 2005, Lazard became a public company, a milestone event for the secretive firm and one that marked Wall Street's final substantive transformation -- begun a generation earlier with the initial public offering of the Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette brokerage -- from a clubby world of private partnerships to the global, shareholder-owned, (supposedly) hugely capitalized behemoths that roam the Earth today.

Recapitalizing Wall Street has provided substantial and lasting benefits, from the ability to provide capital wherever in the world it is demanded to employing more than a million people. But something has been lost as well, and that something is the collective accountability for individual actions that was handled so well by Wall Street partnership agreements. Nowadays, senior bankers and traders are paid millions of dollars in annual compensation based on their short-term performance. But there is no longer any corresponding way for these masters of the universe to be held accountable for their actions. Should something go terribly wrong -- say, too big an inventory of illiquid mortgage securities or a hung "bridge loan" on a big leveraged buyout -- the liability for these mistakes now rests with the non-employee shareholders, and even with U.S. taxpayers.

Like Lazard, Bear Stearns was once a private partnership. Founded in 1923, with $500,000, as an equity-trading house, Bear survived the 1929 crash without a loss or a layoff. The firm thrived under the meticulous stewardship of its second- and third-generation leaders, Salim "Cy" Lewis and Alan "Ace" Greenberg. In 1978, after the deaths of Lewis and another senior partner, who together owned 30 percent of the firm, the remaining partners arranged to buy out their families' stakes in the firm over five years. "We had to work like the sheiks to make enough money to pay out those families, which we did, and to survive," Greenberg explained in 2004. That's accountability, too.

Greenberg was said to be so tight with a buck that he ordered that new employees be given a bag of paper clips and rubber bands and told to re-use them. While other Wall Street firms took only the best and the brightest, Greenberg wanted people with "PSD" degrees: "poor, smart and with a deep desire to get rich."

Bear Stearns joined the ranks of the publicly traded Wall Street firms in October 1985. Its initial public offering was priced at $6 per share; the stock peaked at $171.50 in January 2007. The firm did not have a single losing quarter in its history until the one that ended in November 2007, when it incurred a net loss of $854 million after lowering the valuation of its inventory of mortgage securities because of a deterioration in the credit markets.

The extraordinary events of the past several weeks -- with the Federal Reserve Bank and the Treasury pushing a near-bankrupt Bear Stearns into the opportunistic arms of J.P. Morgan Chase over the Ides of March -- show that it is truer than ever that the ongoing lack of accountability on Wall Street is a serious problem for us all. Our tax dollars are being committed to pay for investment bankers' mistakes. As Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, explained to National Public Radio: "What's going on here is that we're in uncharted territory, a world where the Fed and the Treasury are making up the rules as they go along, where accountability is being ignored and a world where the government bails out Bear Stearns and its creditors rather than letting those who have been reckless learn a lesson for the next time."

To be sure, the shareholders of Bear Stearns -- more than 30 percent of whom are Bear Stearns employees -- believe that a collective suffering has been parsed out, given the sickening fall of Bear's stock from its January 2007 high to the $10-a-share deal that J.P. Morgan and Bear's board of directors have now agreed upon.

But must it always come to this? Must Wall Street's fixation on short-term profits always inflate the bubble to the point that only an explosion can result? At a March 7 hearing on corporate executives' compensation before Rep. Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, nobody on either side of the microphones dared ask or answer these questions, or one about how to return accountability to Wall Street. Nell Minow, the corporate governance watchdog, came the closest. "If you make the compensation all upside and no downside, that will affect the executive's assessment of risk -- or, rather, it will make it clear to him that he can easily offload the risk onto the shareholders without much in the way of adverse consequences to himself," she told the congressmen. "It is heads they win, tails we lose."

Last week, this issue of accountability again failed to come up during hearings on the Bear Stearns bailout before the Senate Banking Committee.

To change this unacceptable calculus -- which seems to be the lone common denominator behind any number of the past decade's financial upheavals -- Wall Street's boards of directors should rapidly adopt new compensation plans that both reward bankers and traders and make them accountable for their actions.

One modest proposal -- a throwback to the partnerships of yore -- would be to keep half the compensation paid to Wall Street's best performers and executives (say those earning more than $500,000 a year) in interest-bearing annual escrow accounts and then use that cash to absorb any ensuing financial losses or to pay any legal judgments or fines that result from the firm's activities that year. At the end of three years, the contents of the escrow accounts -- if any -- could be distributed back to those still at the firm based upon their original contributions. That would get Wall Streeters thinking about their actions.

Of course, I can already hear the reaction from the beneficiaries of the current flawed system: Blasphemy! Unworkable! Insanity! But to the U.S. taxpayers whom the Fed and the Treasury have now put on the hook -- to the potential tune of $29 billion -- for the poor judgments made across Wall Street in the past few years and who, along with shareholders, end up bearing the brunt of the pain for the foibles of the excessively paid bankers and traders, the time has come for serious reform.

Why must everyone else be made to suffer the consequences of a compensation system that encourages extreme behavior and has proved repeatedly in the past 25 years how good it is at inflating a balloon until it explodes? Accountability must be returned to Wall Street now, well before this pathetic vicious cycle gets a chance to get off the ground again.

"Something doesn't smell right," said Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) at the March 7 hearing on the Hill. He was onto something.

j'aime beaucoup la comparaison entre le trader et le joueur de Poker. Amitiés à tous . Michel

Pour ceux qui lisent l'allemand. Une contribution d'un ami de Bâle.


Guy



Prof. em. Dr.Dr.h.c. Peter Bernholz



War die gegenwärtige Finanzkrise voraussehbar oder vermeidbar?

Die Unvermeidbarkeit von Krisen

Finanz- und Kreditkrisen werden mit Sicherheit ebenso wie Konjunkturschwankungen mit Boom oder Überschwang und Rezession oder Depression immer wieder auftreten. Sie wurden bereits seit Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts (Southsea Bubble) beobachtet und sind historisch gesehen ungefähr in zehnjährigen Abständen aufgetreten, wobei es nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg zunächst schien als ob sie seltener geworden seien. Ebenso unvermeidlich ist es, dass Finanzkrisen und Konjunkturschwankungen sich gegenseitig beeinflussen. Ein komplexes dezentralisiertes System wie das der modernen Marktwirtschaft neigt wegen seiner vielen Rückkoppelungen (oder „feedbacks“) notwendigerweise zu Schwingungen, deren Auftreten und Verlauf nicht vorausgesagt werden kann. Zwar glaubten selbst führende Wirtschaftswissenschaftler, darunter der frühere deutsche Wirtschaftsminister Karl Schiller, in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren des vergangenen Jahrhunderts, dass man Konjunkturschwankungen rechtzeitig erkennen und mittels einer wirtschaftspolitischen Feinsteuerung zumindest erheblich begrenzen könne, doch hat sich dies als Irrtum erwiesen. Die Chaostheorie hat seither eindeutig gezeigt, dass vielfach rückgekoppelte Systeme selbst bei kleinen Anstössen zu unvorhersehbaren, sogar zufallsähnlichen Schwingungen übergehen können. Worin bestehen diese Rückkoppelungen? Da sind einmal Investitionen, die in Abhängigkeit vom heutigen Absatz vorgenommen werden, zu nennen Damit verbunden sind Erwartungen über die Entwicklung von Absatz, Preisen, Börsen- und Devisenkursen, aber auch die Aufnahme von Krediten, die ihrerseits wieder durch Kredite bei Dritten bis hin zur Nationalbank finanziert werden. Dazu gehören aber auch geldpolitische und fiskalpolitische Reaktionen auf erwartete Inflationsraten und Staatseinnahmen ebenso wie Änderungen von Staatsausgaben mit dem Ziel der Beeinflussung von kommenden Wahlen.

Gemeinsame Charakteristiken von Finanzkrisen

Obwohl keine Finanzkrise der anderen gleicht, weisen doch alle gemeinsame Züge auf. Sie werden ausgelöst durch bestimmte neuartige Ereignisse, die profitable Möglichkeiten für Investitionen versprechen und anfänglich wenige, dann aber immer mehr Investoren und schliesslich Spekulanten anlocken. Solche Auslöser können sowohl monetärer als auch realer Natur sein. Monetäre Auslöser sind z. B. eine expansive Geldpolitik oder die Entwicklung neuer Finanzinstrumente. Als realer Auslöser kommt die Entwicklung bahnbrechender neuer Güter und Technologien in Frage, die im Zeitablauf zu völlig neuen Industrien führen können: die Entwicklung der Eisenbahnen, des Elektrizitätswesens, der Chemie, des Automobilbaus, des Radios und Fernsehens, der Computer und der modernen Informationstechnologie.
Es ist nahe liegend, dass die beteiligten Zeitgenossen jeweils überzeugt waren, dass in diesen Fällen ein neues goldenes Zeitalter angebrochen sei, wie es vorher nie existiert habe und dessen Ende nicht abzusehen sei. Als Folge dieser Überzeugung stellt sich eine Phase der Euphorie ein, die immer mehr Leute in ihren Bann zieht und zu Investitionen bzw. zu ihrer Finanzierung durch Kredite veranlasst. Diese Kreditexpansion belebt ihrerseits andere Sektoren der Wirtschaft, Preiserhöhungen werden möglich und die Vermögenswerte steigen, besonders natürlich in den neuen Sektoren.
In einer dritten Phase beginnen einige Beteiligte sich Gedanken zu machen, ob die Entwicklung wirklich auf Dauer so weiter gehen könne und ob die aufgenommenen Kredite nicht doch mit Gefahren verbunden seien. Sie beginnen vorsichtig, ihre Investitionen ab- und Liquidität aufzubauen. Das ist die Phase der Besorgnis. Wenn diese Besorgnis allmählich um sich greift und mehr und mehr Leute ihre erworbenen Vermögenswerte oder Spekulationsobjekte (Aktien der neuen Sektoren, Immobilien) zu verkaufen und ihre Schulden zu reduzieren suchen, ergibt sich schliesslich eine Dilemma, aus dem die Panik oder der Zusammenbruch resultiert. Denn Vermögenswerte besitzen nur insoweit einen Wert, als es Personen gibt, die bereit sind, sie zu halten. Wenn z. B. niemand mehr eine bestimmte Aktie oder ein bestimmtes Grundstück halten möchte, so würde der Wert auf Null sinken. Und eine Panik ist gerade dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass immer weniger Leute die entsprechenden Vermögen mit ihrem nun rasch fallenden Wert halten möchten. Und wegen dieses Wertverlustes erleiden jetzt selbst Investoren wie Banken, Versicherungen und Immobiliengesellschaften, die die entsprechenden Vermögensbestandteile nicht verkauft haben, Verluste auf dem Papier,. Sind sie genügend verschuldet, so können sie sogar in Konkurs geraten, da die Schulden die verbliebenen Vermögenswerte übersteigen. Und solche Konkurse wirken ansteckend, da Kreditgeber oder Lieferanten ebenfalls in Mitleidenschaft gezogen werden. Die Krise breitet sich durch die ganze Wirtschaft, ja sogar international aus.
.....Irgendwann wird jedoch auch die Phase der Panik und des Zusammenbruchs enden. Das kann auf verschiedene Weise erfolgen: Bestimmte Personen oder Firmen mit liquiden Mitteln beginnen wieder vorsichtig zu investieren, da sie sich bei den niedrigen Vermögenswerten eine künftige Wertsteigerung versprechen. Oder die Zentralbanken stellen als Lender of Last Resort so viel liquide Mittel in Form von Zentralbankgeld zur Verfügung, wie die Märkte in ihrer Panik wünschen. Oder der Staat greift zur Rettung von bankrotten Finanzinstituten ein. Oder ein staatliches Konjunkturprogramm schafft neuen Mut. Damit ist die Phase der Beruhigung erreicht und der Zyklus kann nach einer gewissen Zeit aufs Neue beginnen.

Lehren aus der gegenwärtigen Finanzkrise

These losses [of the firm Overend, Gurney, which crashed on Black Friday in May
1866] were made in a manner so reckless and so foolish that one would think a
child who had lent money in the city of London would have lent it better.
Walter Bagehot (Lombard Street: A Description of the Money
Market (1873, reprint ed., London: John Murray, 1917, S. 18.

Die generelle Unvermeidbarkeit von Krisen bedeutet keineswegs, dass man gar nichts zu ihrer Vermeidung oder Milderung tun könnte, und erst recht nicht, dass private Unternehmungen, Versicherungen und Banken nicht durch ein geeignetes vorbeugendes Verhalten ihre Verluste in einer Finanzkrise oder bei einem Konjunktureinbruch begrenzen könnten. Um dies zu verdeutlichen, sei die gegenwärtige Finanzkrise näher betrachtet.
Was waren zunächst die Auslöser? Hier muss als erstes auf die übermässig expansive Geldpolitik der Zentralbanken, besonders des Federal Reserve Systems, aber auch der Bank of England in den vergangenen Jahren hingewiesen werden, die teilweise durch eine kaum gerechtfertigte Deflationsangst genährt wurde. Diese Politik erlaubte die Finanzierung einer massiven Erhöhung der Vermögenswerte, eine so genannte asset bubble, besonders auf den Märkten für Immobilien in den USA und Grossbritanniens, aber auch auf den Aktienmärkten. Die Zunahme des Wertes von Häusern führte als Folge besonders in den USA nicht nur zu gesteigerten Konsumausgaben, sondern auch zu weitgehend durch Kredite finanzierte Käufe von neuen Objekten durch weniger bemittelte Bevölkerungskreise. Diese Inflation von Vermögenswerten trat mit der üblichen Verzögerung vor der an einer Erhöhung der Lebenshaltungskosten gemessenen Inflationszunahme auf. Die damit verbundenen Gefahren wurden von verschiedenen Beobachtern relativ früh erkannt und diskutiert. So schrieb etwa die BIZ in ihrem 77. Jahresbericht vom 24.6.2007: Hier geht es (bei den Herausforderungen für die Geldpolitik) darum, zu reagieren, wenn eine Reihe von Indikatoren -nicht nur die Preise von Vermögenswerten, sondern auch das Kreditwachstum und die Ausgabenentwicklung – alle gleichzeitig auf steigende Risiken hindeuten. (S. 170).
Ein weiterer Auslöser dürfte die Entwicklung neuer Finanzinstrumente gewesen sein. Unter diesen ist besonders die Verbriefung von Hypothekarkrediten zu nennen, die viele Anleger angesichts ihrer Einstufung durch die Rating Agenturen in der Sicherheit wog, sich auf ein risikoarmes Geschäft einzulassen. Nun hat die Verbriefung zwar den Vorteil, das Risiko von Hypotheken auf viele Anleger zu verteilen, dies allerdings nur dann, wenn solche Anlagen tatsächlich von vielen Personen und Firmen übernommen, also breit gestreut werden. Deshalb war es geradezu pervers, dass sich grosse Banken wie die UBS ein Klumpenrisiko in Höhe von zig-Milliarden Dollar dieser Anlagen zulegten, deren Risiko nur bei einer breiten Verteilung vermindert wird. Auf diese Weise wurden die einfachsten Regeln für die Schaffung und Aufrechterhaltung eines ausgewogenen Portfolios verletzt.
Besonders überraschend muss es wirken, dass von den Verantwortlichen vieler grosser Finanzinstitute auch in den Phasen der Euphorie und der Besorgnis keine korrigierenden Schritte unternommen wurden. Und dies, obwohl schon lange zuvor von den Gefahren des Immobilienbooms und der dadurch ausgelösten Konsumnachfrage in den USA gesprochen wurde. Dieses Versagen kann wohl nur durch zwei Faktoren erklärt werden. Erstens durch die mangelhaften historischen Kenntnisse in den Führungsetagen und zweitens durch falsche Anreiz- und Kontrollsysteme. Ein Anreizsystem, dass Boni nur von der kurzfristigen jährlichen Steigerung der Vermögenswerte und nicht auch von möglichen Verlusten abhängig macht, muss gerade in der Phase der Euphorie zu immer weiteren Investitionen in riskante, aber stark im Wert steigende Vermögensobjekte verleiten. Und ein Kontrollsystem, das nicht die Alarmglocken bei der obersten Führung läuten lässt, wenn gewisse Vermögenswerte einen explosiv wachsenden Anteil am gesamten Portfolio eines Finanzinstituts einnehmen, hat schlicht versagt. Denn es ist eine erste Regel der Portfoliotheorie, für eine ausreichende Streuung von Risiken zu sorgen.
Eine mangelnde Kenntnis der Geschichte als Ursache des Fehlverhaltens reicht tiefer. Diese Kenntnis ist deshalb unerlässlich, weil die Erfahrungen einer Generation für Manager in der Regel nicht ausreichen, um genügende Erfahrungen über frühere Krisen zu sammeln. Vorsichtige ältere Mitarbeiter werden daher oft als übermässig ängstlich verlacht und ausgeschaltet, da sie nicht erkennen würden, dass jetzt eine ganz andere Zeit angebrochen sei und sie durch ihre Bedenken nur die besten Gewinnchancen versäumten. Einer solchen Auffassung kann nur durch ausreichende Kenntnisse der Wirtschaftsgeschichte entgegen gewirkt werden. Denn das Wissen, dass Finanzkrisen immer wieder auftreten, gemeinsame Züge aufweisen und dass kein Aufschwung ewig dauert, würde gewiss zu grösserer Vorsicht mahnen. Schon eine Lektüre durch leitende Manager von Charles Kindlebergers Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises aus dem Jahre 1978 könnte eine heilsame Wirkung entfalten. Kindleberger beschreibt für den Zeitraum von 1720 bis 1975 nicht weniger als 29 Finanzkrisen. So ist es vermutlich kein Zufall, dass die Verluste der Deutschen Bank sich anscheinend in engen Grenzen halten, hat doch Hugo Bänziger, der für das Risikomanagement ihres Investment Bankings zuständig ist, in seiner Arbeit Die Entwicklung der Bankenaufsicht in der Schweiz seit dem 19. Jahrhundert (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1986) auch die Weltwirtschaftskrise ausführlich behandelt (siehe besonders S. 84-92). In diesem Zusammenhang muss allerdings auch die Politik unserer Universitäten und Business Schools als problematisch bezeichnet werden, besteht doch die Tendenz, den Unterricht in Wirtschaftsgeschichte immer weiter einzuschränken.

Wie wird die gegenwärtige Finanzkrise weiter verlaufen?

Im gegenwärtigen Zeitpunkt ist die Frage von entscheidender Bedeutung, wie lange die Finanzkrise noch andauern könnte, mit welchem Ausmass derselben zu rechnen ist und wie stark sie auf die reale Wirtschaft übergreift. Angesichts der Komplexität des wirtschaftlichen Gesamtsystems kann natürlich niemand diese Frage schlüssig beantworten. Aber einige relevante Gesichtspunkte können durchaus erörtert werden.
Zunächst ist festzustellen, dass die Entwicklungen am Immobilienmarkt in den USA ein wesentlicher Ausgangspunkt der Krise waren und sind. Nun stellen jedoch die Immobilien einen beträchtlichen Teil des jeweiligen Volksvermögens dar. Das bedeutet, dass ein übermässiger Investitionsboom in Immobilien regelmässig dazu führt, dass längere Zeit verfliessen muss, bis sich ein neues Marktgleichgewicht einstellen kann. Die Investitionen werden also stark reduziert, was nicht ohne Folgen für die übrige Wirtschaft bleiben kann. Dazu kommt der Rückgang der Konsumnachfrage durch die von dem Wertverlust ihrer Häuser betroffenen Eigentümer und die möglicherweise wegen der Krise arbeitslos Gewordenen. Denkt man zusätzlich an die Erhöhung des Öl- und Benzinpreises sowie die nun in den USA einsetzenden stärkeren Erhöhungen der Konsumgüterpreise, so muss dort mit einer eher kräftigen Rezession gerechnet werden, die vermutlich sogar schon begonnen hat.
Von entscheidender Bedeutung wird daher sein, wie stark diese Rezession durch einen Rückgang der Exporte auf die übrige Welt übergreift. Einerseits ist es richtig, dass der Anteil der amerikanischen Wirtschaft an der Weltproduktion, besonders durch die Entwicklungen in China, Indien und anderen Ländern, zurückgegangen ist. Andererseits dürfte es entscheidend werden, wie stark die Finanzkrise auf die übrige Welt übergreift und zu einer Einschränkung der Kreditgewährung an die Produktionsunternehmungen führt. Bisher scheinen besonders europäische Finanzinstitute, nicht aber solche in Entwicklungsländern von der Krise betroffen zu sein. In Europa hat denn auch der Staat bereits massiv in die Entwicklung eingegriffen. So wurde die Sächsische Landesbank von der Baden-Württembergischen übernommen , die Westdeutsche Landesbank massiv vom Land Nordrhein-Westfalen und den zugehörigen Sparkassen gestützt und die staatliche Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau musste eine weitere Bank vor dem Konkurs bewahren, bei der sie Mehrheitsaktionär ist. In England wurde das führende Hypothekarinstitut verstaatlicht. In den USA und der Schweiz besorgten sich Grossbanken zusätzliches Kapital in Milliardenhöhe zu „Strafzinsen“ von staatlichen Finanzfonds z. B. aus Singapur. Letzte Woche wurde die New Yorker Investmentbank Bear Stearns von der Federal Reserve Bank of New York und von J.P. Morgan gestützt, die sie dann für ein „Butterbrot“ kauften..
Trotzdem oder gerade deshalb ist in den USA und Europa offenbar das gegenseitige Misstrauen der Banken nach wie vor so gross, dass sie nicht bereit sind, sich in ausreichendem Masse kurzfristige Kredite am Geldmarkt zur Verfügung zu stellen. Auch diese Erscheinung ist nicht neu. Kindleberger erwähnt in der genannten Arbeit solche Vorgänge in neun Krisen von 1763 bis 1884 (S. 140 ff.). So heisst es schon für 1825: „A panic seized upon the public, such as had never been witnessed before: everybody begging for money – money – but money was hardly on any condition to be had. `It was not the character of the security,`observes the Times, `that was considered , but the impossibility of producing money at all.`“ (Joplin, Thomas (after 1832): Case for Parliamentary Inquiry into the Circumstances of the Panic; quoted from Kindleberger, p. 140). Bei der gegenwärtigen Krise hat diese Lage dazu geführt, dass verschiedene Zentralbanken mit riesigen Beträgen auf dem Geldmarkt intervenierten und letzte Woche auf Veranlassung des Federal Reserve Systems mehrere Zentralbanken, darunter auch die Europäische Zentralbank und die Schweizerische Nationalbank zum zweiten mal viele Milliarden Dollar zur Verfügung gestellt haben. Damit folgen sie der Regel, die von Walter Bagehot in seiner Lombard Street 1873 aufgestellt wurde, in Zeiten von Liquiditätskrisen unbeschränkt Zentralbankgeld zu verleihen. Das ist durchaus positiv zu beurteilen, jedoch mit einer Ausnahme. Bagehot verlangte zu Recht, dass diese Hilfe nur zu einem Strafzins, also zu einem höheren als dem üblichen gewährt werden dürfe. Sonst ergibt sich die Gefahr des moral hazard, was bedeutet, dass Finanzinstitute im Vertrauen auf Hilfe bei nächster Gelegenheit noch leichtfertiger Risiken eingehen. Diese Regel Bagehots wurde besonders vom Federal Reserve System verletzt, das bekanntlich die Zinsen massiv gesenkt hat, vermutlich um nicht nur eine Rezession zu verhindern, sondern auch, um den Konkurs von vielen weiteren Hypothekenschuldnern zu vermeiden. Diese Politik hat jedoch den Dollarkurs im Euroraum und der Schweiz weiter stark fallen lassen und bedroht die Exporte in den Dollarraum. Ferner ist es durchaus möglich, dass dadurch die Gefahr einer zunehmenden Inflation und einer späteren asset bubble erhöht wird. So ist es denn nicht erstaunlich, dass der bekannte amerikanische Monetarist Allan Meltzer vor wenigen Tagen in einem Brief an das Wall Street Journal die entsprechende Politik des Fed scharf kritisiert hat.
Angesichts all dieser Faktoren ist es unmöglich, zu einem abschliessenden Urteil über das noch zu erwartende Ausmass und die Dauer der Krise zu gelangen. Es ist zu befürchten, dass weitere negative Entwicklungen auftreten und anhalten können. Zusätzliche Unsicherheiten gibt es ja zur Genüge. Als weitere Klumpenrisiken werden etwa die Schulden amerikanischer Kommunen genannt. Oder was würde z. B. geschehen, wenn China, Japan und andere Länder ihre riesigen Devisenreserven in stärkerem Ausmass von Dollar in Euro und auch Franken umwandeln würden? Mit welchen Folgen für den Dollarkurs in diesen Währungen? Was würde dann mit den Exporten in den Dollarraum geschehen? Andererseits ist es jedoch sicher, dass irgendwann die Beruhigung, eintreten wird. Aber wird das in einem halben oder erst in zwei Jahren der Fall sein? Immerhin, wer in der Krise einen kühlen Kopf bewahrt, über Liquidität verfügt und bei niedrigen Preisen und Kursen kauft, wird nachher mit Genugtuung auf seine Erfolge zurückblicken. Wichtiger wäre es jedoch, wenn die Verantwortlichen endlich bereit wären, als Folge der gegenwärtigen Finanzkrise wenigstens für die Zukunft die Lehren der Geschichte zu nutzen.