My voice and noise on subprime bank regulations

To put risks in perspective, I would begin any risk managing session by asking the participants:

What are the risks you most consider you cannot afford not to take?

Capisce?

AN ACT OF HIGH TREASON was unwittingly committed against our economies

When do banks most need capital, when the risky turn out risky, or when the "not-risky" turn out risky? So?

One of you should create a School on the role of Risk-Taking in Economical Development

The challenge!

The most current version

Handcuffed by a triple-A rating

If Only the House Banking Committee Held a Hearing Like This

We Need a Speedy Catharsis on This Barclays Libor Affair

Basel III doubles down on Basel II's mistakes

Holy moly: Banks were drugged by Basel’s rulebook

Crazy bank regulations explained in red and blue

ON THIS BANK CRISIS, I am certainly NOT a Monday Morning Quarterback

The less the perceived risk of default is, and the higher the leverage allowed, the greater the systemic risk.

Q. "If Kurowski is right, why are his arguments so ignored? A. If I had argued that the regulators were 5 to 10 degrees wrong, I would be recognized, but since I am arguing they are 150 to 180 degrees wrong, I must be ignored.

The fundamental reasons why it is so hard to advance the otherwise so easy explainable truth of this financial crisis, is because of the deafening noise of the Agendas…

THE VIDEO EXPLANATION!!!

What is more dangerous in a systemic way, that which is perceived as risky or that which is perceived as not risky? Right!

Systemic risks is about something that can become as big so as to threaten the system… and our bank regulators in the Basel Committee are incapable or unwilling to understand that what has the largest possibilities of growing as big so as to threaten the system is what is perceived as having little or no risk, not what is perceived as risky… which makes their first and really only pillar of their regulations, that of capital requirements of banks that are lower when perceived risks are lower… so utterly dumb!

We must stop our gullible and naive financial regulators from believing in never-risk-land.

Whenever a credit rating corresponds exactly to real underlying risk neither borrower nor lender loses but the intermediary cannot make profits… it is only when the credit ratings are too high or too low that those margins that can generate that profitable stuff that bonuses are paid for exist.

The default of a debtor is about the most common, natural and even benign risk in capitalism, so it is so hard to really get a grip on what was going around in the minds of the regulators when they decided to construe capital requirements for banks based exclusively on discriminating against that risk as it was perceived by some credit rating agencies.

The AAA-bomb

The possible Big Bang that scares me the most is the one that could happen the day those genius bank regulators in Basel, playing Gods, manage to introduce a systemic error in the financial system, which will cause the collapse of the OWB (the only bank in the world) or of the last financial dinosaur that survives at that moment.

Currently market forces favors the larger the entity is, be it banks, law firms, auditing firms, brokers, etc. Perhaps one of the things that the authorities could do, in order to diversify risks, is to create a tax on size.”

We believe that much of the world’s financial markets are currently being dangerously overstretched through an exaggerated reliance on intrinsically weak financial models that are based on very short series of statistical evidence and very doubtful volatility assumptions.

In a world with so many different risks, some naïve gullible and outright stupid regulators thought everything would be fine and dandy if they just had some few credit rating agencies determine default risks and then gave the banks great incentives, by means of different capital requirements, to follow those credit risk opinions.

When experts bs..t the world that’s bad news, but when experts allowed themselves to be bs..ted by bs..ing experts that’s is when the world goes really bad.

This crisis resulted directly from the Potemkin credit ratings the market produced to satisfy the demand for AAAs created by the regulators.

the loans to those who had nothing to do with creating the current AAA crisis, like small businesses and entrepreneurs but are anyhow the ones which most suffer the current scarcity of bank capital

HERE I keep it updated with your help
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They were supposed to teach the world prudent risk-taking and instead they taught it imprudent risk-aversion.

This was the deal! If you convinced risky and broke Joe to take a $300.000 mortgage at 11 percent for 30 years and then, with more than a little help from the credit rating agencies, you could convince risk-adverse Fred that this mortgage, repackaged in a securitized version, and rated AAA, was so safe that a six percent return was quite adequate, then you could sell Fred the mortgage for $510.000. This would allow you and your partners in the set-up, to pocket a tidy profit of $210.000

A world that taxes risk-taking and subsidizes risk adverseness is a world that seems to want to lie down and die

If we are to keep on using Basel methodology for establishing the minimum capital requirements for banks, beside better risk weights, we must demand it also uses “societal purpose” weights.

If you would like to read more on this subject please go to http://teawithft.blogspot.com/ and there under the labels of “subprime banking regulations” and “credit rating agencies” you will find more than 300 letters that I have sent to the Financial Times about it.

Of course you could also buy my book Voice and Noise.

What other word could describe a bank regulatory system designed exclusively to avoid bank crisis as if that is the only purpose of banking. You might just as well order the kids to stay in bed all life so as to diminish the risk of them tripping.

The minimum capital requirements of Basel that are based on default risks as measured by the credit rating agency amount to a dangerous tax on the risk, the oxygen of development.

Blindly focusing on default and leaving out any consideration that a credit with a low default risk but for a totally useless or perhaps even an environmentally dangerous purpose is much more risky for the society than a credit with a higher default risk destined to trying to help create decent jobs or diminish an environmental threat, is just silly.

But do I have to be disrespectful and call them silly? Well, individually perhaps they are not, but, as a group, bank regulators are so full of hot air that someone has to help them to puncture their cocoon balloon and let them out.

Breathe!

By now the desperate bank regulators are throwing at us the third pillar of their Basel regulations which implies the need that we ourselves privately monitor our banks. Great, in my country, a couple of decades ago, I did just that and had a fairly good grip on whom of my banker neighbors were good bankers and whom to look out for.

But sincerely what am I supposed to do know when about 50 per cent of the retail deposits in my country are in hand of international banks (Spain) and that might be losing their shirt making investments in subprime mortgages in California?

It is very sad when a developed nation decides making risk-adverseness the primary goal of their banking system and places itself voluntarily on the way down but it is a real tragedy when developing countries copycats it and fall into the trap of calling it quits.

A bank should be more than a mattress!

When considering the role of the commercial banks should not the developing countries use development rating agencies instead of credit rating agencies?

Clearly more important than defending what we have is defending what we want to have.

Over the last two decades we have seen hundreds if not thousands of research papers, seminars, workshops conferences analyzing how to exorcize the risks out of banking; and if in that sense the bank regulation coming out from Basel was doing its job; and centred around words like soundness, stability, solvency, safeness and other synonyms. Not one of them discussed how the commercial banks were performing their other two traditional functions, namely to help to generate that economic growth that leads to the creation of decent jobs and the distribution of the financial resources into the hands of those capable of doing the most with it.

At this moment when we are suddenly faced with the possibilities that all the bank regulator’s risk adverseness might anyhow have come to naught, before digging deeper in the hole where we find ourselves fighting the risks, is it not time to take a step back and discuss again what it is we really want our commercial banks to do for us? I mean, if it is only to act as a safe mattress for our retail deposits then it would seem that could be taken cared of by authorizing them only to lend to the lender of last resort; but which of course would leave us with what to do about the growth and the distribution of opportunities.