The Irish Economy

Details of the much discussed recapitalization plan for the two main banks have finally been announced as approved by the Government.

In terms of financial restructuring the plan is modest enough. There is only modest dilution of shareholders; the government’s reluctance to take ownership is evident. And there is nothing yet on removing bad assets to be managed separately (though the government statement expresses interest in pursuing this line in light of international developments).

The bank’s books now imply that between them they will now have close to €20 billion in core Tier 1 capital. Out of the money options embedded in the scheme suggest that at least one side of the deal is anticipating a vigorous rebound in the banks’ ability to raise private capital.

Meanwhile Bank of Ireland have taken the opportunity to revise their estimates of prospective loan losses over the next two years by up to €2.2 billion — less than the injection of capital. Of course this is far less than the figures being bandied around by the more strident commentators, so we may look forward to seeing in due course who is right.

But negligible share price reactions so far this morning and over the past few days suggest that the market still assumes that the underlying value of the banks’ equity shareholders claims may not have moved out of the negative range.

An interesting feature is the way in which the Government is sourcing the funds. They could have just issued some new bonds and placed them in the banks’ portfolio, but they have gone for drawing on the NPRF. However, there’s a wrinkle: “€4 billion will come from the Fund’s current resources while €3 billion will be provided by means of a frontloading of the Exchequer contributions for 2009 and 2010.” I’m still trying to figure out what difference this wrinkle makes to the different measures of Government deficit/borrowing in 2009 and 2010.

Here are the latest comments from the Minister for Finance on the “bad bank” idea.  (And just to be clear, commenters, the bad bank proposal as currently understood in policy circles means governments overpaying for bad assets – a bad idea – and not the process of maximizing the sales value of these assets after banks have been nationalized – a good idea if nationalisation is indeed required.)

The headline “Lenihan says Government will consider setting up ‘bad bank’” confirms what anyone who watches RTE will already know (and what anyone who reads this blog will know I’m not very happy about).  However, the piece starts out promisingly.    “We can’t be jump-led by markets and market expectations into solutions that suit the banks rather than the people,” said Minister for finance Brian Lenihan last night, who noted banks were using the media to try to force politicians to adopt these types of state rescue plans.   Well said Minister!  Couldn’t have put it better myself.

And then some more good stuff: “Some of the proposals that have been advanced today such as risk insurance seem to involve a payment of a definite premium to the taxpayer in return for the assumption of an indefinite risk. And that is not something that any government could commit itself to,” said Mr Lenihan.   That’s the spirit!

But then things get a bit murky:  He said one of the difficulties with creating a scheme to deal with toxic assets was that it would add to the exposure of the state in relation to its sovereign debt. But he said it could be argued that if the Government had enough information on toxic assets – and Ireland was a small enough country to do this – and it could eliminate the risk then it would improve the risk posed by the existing Government bank guarantee scheme.  “We are at a great advantage that many of the larger (European) states have very extensive loan books and it is very difficult for them to do the type of comprehensive trawl through their banking system that we have been able to do,” said Mr Lenihan, who noted that a lot of the toxic assets held by European banks related to commercial paper, which was much harder to value than the property-based debts held by Irish banks.

This sounds a bit like grasping defeat from the jaws of victory, the minister bending over backwards to figure out why the current-vintage bad bank proposal — while generally a bad idea — might actually be a good idea here.  

I’m not exactly sure what the Minister is driving at here.  But I will point out that the most coherent argument put forward in comments yesterday in favour of bad banks rather than just re-capitalisation (from Mick Costigan) involved the Knightian uncertainty provoked by toxic assets.  Because people don’t know the distribution of losses, even a big re-capitalisation could still leave uncertainty about the potential for even bigger losses and thus doesn’t deliver confidence in the banking system. 

This is an interesting argument though I don’t think it’s relevant to the Irish case.   Firstly, there has to some figure for a large enough re-capitalisation (for instance, the full value of the bad assets) that gets rid of any Knightian uncertainty concerns.  Secondly, our toxic assets aren’t rocket science CDO-squareds built by physicists which can’t be valued because nobody understands them.  They’re bad loans to builders and we can go about making a reasonable guess at what they’re worth today.   Indeed, the minister seems to be making exactly this point.  So, as far as I can see, the Minister’s arguments seem to further point against the need for a bad bank scheme.