Until the end of the world: punks and plutocrats...

Fatta la riforma sanitaria sono le nuove regole per le banche e l'industria finanziaria USA a essere nel mirino della Casa Bianca. Dalle colonne del New York Times Paul Krugman non usa mezze misure per descrivere la polarizzazione delle posizioni tra punks and plutocrats:

 Some background: we used to have a workable system for avoiding financial crises, resting on a combination of government guarantees and regulation. On one side, bank deposits were insured, preventing a recurrence of the immense bank runs that were a central cause of the Great Depression. On the other side, banks were tightly regulated, so that they didn’t take advantage of government guarantees by running excessive risks.
From 1980 or so onward, however, that system gradually broke down, partly because of bank deregulation, but mainly because of the rise of “shadow banking”: institutions and practices — like financing long-term investments with overnight borrowing — that recreated the risks of old-fashioned banking but weren’t covered either by guarantees or by regulation. The result, by 2007, was a financial system as vulnerable to severe crisis as the system of 1930. And the crisis came.
Now what? We have already, in effect, recreated New Deal-type guarantees: as the financial system plunged into crisis, the government stepped in to rescue troubled financial companies, so as to avoid a complete collapse. And you should bear in mind that the biggest bailouts took place under a conservative Republican administration, which claimed to believe deeply in free markets. There’s every reason to believe that this will be the rule from now on: when push comes to shove, no matter who is in power, the financial sector will be bailed out. In effect, debts of shadow banks, like deposits at conventional banks, now have a government guarantee.
The only question now is whether the financial industry will pay a price for this privilege, whether Wall Street will be obliged to behave responsibly in return for government backing. And who could be against that?
Well, how about John Boehner, the House minority leader? Recently Mr. Boehner gave a talk to bankers in which he encouraged them to balk efforts by Congress to impose stricter regulation. “Don’t let those little punk staffers take advantage of you, and stand up for yourselves,” he urged — where by “taking advantage” he meant imposing some conditions on the industry in return for government backing.
Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, promptly had “Little Punk Staffer” buttons made up and distributed to Congressional aides.(...)



The only question is whether we’re going to regulate bankers so that they don’t abuse the privilege of government backing. And it’s that regulation — not future bailouts — that reform opponents are trying to block.
So it’s the punks versus the plutocrats — those who want to rein in runaway banks, and bankers who want the freedom to put the economy at risk, freedom enhanced by the knowledge that taxpayers will bail them out in a crisis. Whatever they say, the fact is that people like Mr. Shelby are on the side of the plutocrats; the American people should be on the side of the punks, who are trying to protect their interests. 

Sul ruolo che lo shadow banking system ha svolto nella crisi e sulla necessità di cambiare in profondità il suo modus operandi si occupa anche l'Economist anche se con accenti molto diversi da quelli di Krugman e dei liberals americani: 


This “shadow” banking system is huge, particularly in America—too big for the banks to be able to replace it. In the summer of 2007 assets funded through the capital markets were larger than those held by America’s banks. Only one-third of the country’s home mortgages were on banks’ balance-sheets. The bank bail-outs hog attention, but many of the government’s crisis measures were designed to prop up the shadow system. Even so, many bits of it, especially private mortgage-backed securities, remain moribund (see article).
That is a bad thing. The intellectual case for securitisation, the process of pooling lots of different loans and selling the cashflows to investors, remains strong. Done properly, it should enable banks and investors to diversify their exposures. In Europe, where bank lending is more important, it offers a useful, alternative source of financing. But the shadow system has to become far more stable.(...)

Towards a penumbral banking system

So far the reformers of finance have neglected the shadow system. Some changes are on the way—new liquidity rules for money-market funds, for instance.(...)

So more attention is needed. But what should be done? Two things stand out. The first is the need to project some light into the shadows. (...)  Investors need to have up-to-date information on the quality of the loans inside securities: central banks can help by mandating disclosure requirements for collateral that they accept at the discount window. And regulators need better data on obscure areas like triparty repo and stock lending.
The other imperative is to make sure that the bits of the shadow system that act just like banks are regulated accordingly. That shift in thinking has already happened for investment banks, but needs to go further. Money-market funds are an obvious example. Investors in these funds expect to get their money back on demand, just like depositors in a bank. The post-Lehman run started after one fund “broke the buck”; it stopped when the government said it would guarantee investors against losses. So these funds should be forced to make a choice: keep the commitment to pay up and set aside capital and insurance funds (like banks have to do); or drop the commitment and put the burden of losses on investors. 

Lasciando da parte il dibattito sulla regolamentazione vi segnalo brevemente alcuni articoli:

• da più parti ci si interroga sempre più perplessi sulle ragioni del prplungarsi del rally azionario: qui trovate un ventaglio di opinioni raccolte dal New York Times; 
• Lavoce propone un articolo di Yiping Huang contrario alle rappresaglie USA contro la sottovalutazione della valuta cinese; per altre notizie su come il cambio sia visto da Pechino potete leggere qui;
• la capitalizzazione delle borse mondiali si aggira intorno ai 47000 miliardi di dollari USA, la borsa di Milano si ferma ad appena 650 miliardi. Date un'occhiata qui al confronto tra le diverse borse e scoprirete che la borsa di Seoul vale il 30% in più di Milano.