McCarthy: This burden of bank debt is simply not sustainable

Colm writes another dinger of a piece for the Sunday Independent, it’s required reading. From the piece:

No other eurozone member has incurred bank-related debt under ECB duress. There are no provisions in the Maastricht Treaty, in the Stability and Growth Pact or in any other pact or international treaty which grant this power to the ECB, nor was any eurozone member state ever asked to accede to such an arrangement. Commissioner Rehn’s Latin phrase (“pacta sunt servanda”) has no pact to refer to, insofar as these imposed debts are concerned. Ireland never signed a pact or treaty which empowered the ECB to behave in this fashion.

One can only speculate as to the ECB’s motives, since it does not deign to explain. European banks have come to rely heavily on unsecured bond financing and the ECB may have felt that no bank bondholder should suffer losses, in order to encourage the survival of this market in bank debt. If this was the motive, the policy is being paid for, not by the ECB, but by Irish taxpayers and sovereign bondholders and financed by European taxpayers and the IMF. There is no pact which confers powers of taxation on the ECB.

All of the Greek debt relieved, to the tune of €100bn in recent weeks, was contracted, without duress, by the lawfully elected Greek government. The write-down was welcomed by Commissioner Rehn, who described himself as “very satisfied by the large positive turnout of the voluntary debt exchange in Greece”. The same “exchange” was described by one of the bankers enduring a 74 per cent haircut as “about as voluntary as the Spanish Inquisition”. The bondholders agreed only after punitive retrospective clauses had been inserted into bond contracts, with the agreement of the European Commission. Some of them are initiating court actions, presumably in jurisdictions cognisant of the “long European legal and historical tradition” to which Commissioner Rehn refers so approvingly.

The Financial Times, in a leader last Thursday, argued that Ireland should be afforded debt relief in order to ensure debt sustainability. “Pacta sunt mutanda” it intoned, which means treaties should be altered. The portion of the Irish debt in dispute here does not derive from any pact or treaty but was arbitrarily imposed by the ECB. There is no need to alter any treaties and the FT, uncharacteristically, has misunderstood the Irish case.

This whole sorry saga has raised once more the enduring policy dilemma of ensuring that central banks are both independent and accountable.

Best man for a job in finance is a woman?

Brian Lucey writes on this topic on his blog. Given the serious discussions around gender quotas in politics, and around female labour force participation more generally, the post is timely and worth a read.

By the way, are there any women who read this blog here today?

Guardians of Finance

This impressive new book includes a lengthy section on the Irish banking crisis.  One of its authors (Jerry Caprio) will speak about the book next Wednesday March 21 1pm-2pm in the IIIS seminar room, TCD. All welcome.

Summary:

The recent financial crisis was an accident, a “perfect storm” fueled by an unforeseeable confluence of events that unfortunately combined to bring down the global financial systems. And policy makers? They did everything they could, given their limited authority. It was all a terrible, unavoidable accident. Or at least this is the story told and retold by a chorus of luminaries that includes Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Robert Rubin, Ben Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan.

In Guardians of Finance, economists James Barth, Gerard Caprio, and Ross Levine argue that the financial meltdown of 2007 to 2009 was no accident; it was negligent homicide. They show that senior regulatory officials around the world knew or should have known that their policies were destabilizing the global financial system, had years to process the evidence that risks were rising, had the authority to change their policies–and yet chose not to act until the crisis had fully emerged.

The current system, the authors write, is simply not designed to make policy choices on behalf of the public. It is virtually impossible for the public and its elected officials to obtain informed and impartial assessment of financial regulation and to hold regulators accountable. Barth, Caprio, and Levine propose a reform to counter this systemic failure: the establishment of a “Sentinel” to provide an informed, expert, and independent assessment of financial regulation. Its sole power would be to demand information and to evaluate it from the perspective of the public–rather than that of the financial industry, the regulators, or politicians.

CDS Spreads in European Periphery – Some Technical Issues to Consider

This new IMF working paper is instructive.

Summary: This paper looks at some technical issues when using CDS data, and if these are incorporated, the analysis or regression results are likely to benefit. The paper endorses the use of stochastic recovery in CDS models when estimating probability of default (PD) and suggests that stochastic recovery may be a better harbinger of distress signals than fixed recovery. Similarly, PDs derived from CDS data are risk-neutral and may need to be adjusted when extrapolating to real world balance sheet and empirical data (e.g. estimating banks losses, etc). Another technical issue pertains to regressions trying to explain CDS spreads of sovereigns in peripheral Europe – the model specification should be cognizant of the under-collateralization aspects in the overall OTC derivatives market. One of the biggest drivers of CDS spreads in the region has been the CVA teams of the large banks that hedge their exposure stemming from derivative receivables due to non-posting of collateral by many sovereigns (and related entities).

State interests best served by ratifying fiscal treaty

John McHale provides his views in this IT article.