Category: Banking Crisis

Financial Crisis Reading

The financial crisis has been going on long enough now that we are starting to see a lot of serious research and policy papers addressing the various issues that the crisis has raised.

This material may be a bit more complicated than most of the reports this blog usually links to but I think some of our readers may appreciate getting a sense of the stuff that we’re reading in trying to understand what’s going on and where we should be heading.

So, here’s some stuff I’ve been reading in between my nationalisation blogging …

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Arguments Against Nationalisation, Part 4: Continuous Stock Market Listing

Peter Bacon’s final argument against nationalisation in his Morning Ireland interview was the following:

Also, if you nationalise the bank, it’s gone. If the bank remains there, even if it comes to pass that in some cases there is majority ownership by the government, by the taxpayer, there will be a quotation on the Irish and London stock exchanges. There will be a price every day that bank shares will trade at and that will provide taxpayers with an exit mechanism out of their ownership of the banks in due course.

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Arguments Against Nationalisation, Part 3: Transparency

Peter Bacon outlined two other arguments against nationalisation in his Morning Ireland interview. The first related to the question of transparency:

You nationalise it and then you would still have to deal with it. You would be dealing with it behind closed doors. People have screamed “let’s have transparency with this”. The only place you will find transparency is if you do this in the open market.

Given the amount of public money at stake, I couldn’t agree more with Dr. Bacon that transparency is essential. However, I disagree with him regarding the levels of transparency that would prevail under nationalisation relative to his NAMA plan.

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Scope of NAMA

Much has been written about the pricing of the NAMA loan purchases and the consequences for shareholders (including by myself in tomorrow’s Sunday Business Post), but less on the scale and scope of the proposed purchases.

The announced plan is that

“The eligible land and development loans of each bank involved will be transferred – that is the eligible loans secured on development land and property under development. In addition, the largest property-backed exposures of all the banks in the scheme will be transferred.”

Ignoring, for a moment the undefined word “eligible” — which allows an attractive degree of flexibility — what about the two other distinctive features of this proposed scope of purchase:

First, it is not limited to non-performing or impaired or problem loans. Second, it excludes a large swathe of property-related and other loans, including problem loans.

Inclusion of performing loans
I can see that it is an attractive simplification for NAMA’s management to sweep in all of a clearly-defined category of loans, not least because that way you are sure of covering even those loans that have not gone bad yet.

I am less impressed by the argument that including performing loans is good for the taxpayer because they will be serviced. The inclusion of performing loans increases the gross scale of the NAMA operation, and with it the size of the National Debt. It may also, I suppose, complicate the operation inasmuch as both the banks and their non-delinquent borrowers may be very unhappy to be separated.

Exclusion of non-development-property loans
If the goal is to end up with unquestionably clean bank portfolio, should one not also be considering inclusion of other non-performing loans, given the deterioration in the overall economic prospects?

At this stage, I am not sure what to conclude, except that the scope of the purchased assets is an important issue. Clearly, that word “eligible” could come in very handy as the scheme moves towards statutory definition.

Meanwhile, another question worth considering is whether NAMA needs to wait until it has identified all of the loans to be purchased. Here the answer seems clear: best to go ahead with an initial purchase of the most problematic loans as soon as the agency is up and running (assuming, of course, all of the pricing & financial restructuring,  governance and transparency issues also sorted).

Arguments Against Nationalisation, Part 2: Baconian Equivalence

Probably the most common argument I have heard from influential Irish commentators when they argue against nationalisation is to quickly dismiss it on the grounds that it simply does not help in “solving the problem” or reducing the cost of the banking crisis for the taxpayer.  Yesterday’s Irish Times article by Scott Rankin provides one example of this argument.  Let me provide three other examples.  Here are two examples from Prime Time on March 19.

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