Parole, parole parole....

Da leggere in una giornata in cui ci si è alzati di buonumore: il NYTimes colleziona le scuse dei banchieri protagonisti della crisi finanziaria. Tra i migliori vi raccomando l'ex CEO di Countrywide Financial, secondo il quale la colpa è dell'housing market. La sua inarrivabile perspicacia gli è valsa 530 milioni di dollari di renumerazione.



Il governatore della Fed di Kansas City Hoenig critica la proposta di riforma finanziaria e in particolare la riduzione del ruolo di controllo della Fed nella supervisione bancaria, che nella proposta in esame viene limitata alle entità più grandi. Scrive Hoenig:


(...) proposed financial reform legislation would significantly narrow the supervisory role of the Federal Reserve, so that it would oversee only the very largest institutions, most of which are headquartered in New York City. Congress established the Federal Reserve System in 1913 with 12 banks in a federated structure, like our political system, so that it would include regional perspectives to counterbalance the influence of Wall Street and Washington. To now narrow the Fed’s supervision to just the largest banks would be to devalue those broader perspectives. The Federal Reserve would no longer be the central bank of the United States, but only the central bank of Wall Street.
The flawed logic of this proposed change is that only the biggest firms are systemically important; that only they require the contingency lending that the Fed provides at its discount window; that only they will be involved in future crises; and that overseeing these firms is sufficient to provide the “macro-prudential supervision” the central bank’s charter requires. By this reasoning, the 6,700 other banks and the communities they serve are of no immediate consequence to the mission of the Federal Reserve.
Who outside of Wall Street can legitimately support such thinking? As a commissioned examiner and head of supervision in the Fed’s Kansas City district in the 1980s, I am a veteran of financial crises involving energy, real estate and agriculture in the Midwest and West. I can say with confidence that a regional financial crisis and its accompanying loss of jobs is just as harmful as the current Wall Street crisis has been for communities like Santa Fe.
Because the Federal Reserve supervises banks and bank holding companies of all sizes, it is able to address regional as well as national banking problems when they erupt. In addition, I and other Fed presidents can take information about regional financial and economic conditions into monetary policy discussions.
Without the Fed seeing the view from every corner of America, without every bank knowing it will be treated the same, the Federal Reserve cannot do its job and direct the same attention to the smallest firms as the largest. It cannot serve Main Street.


Krugman non le manda a dire sul ruolo che l'imbroglio ha avuto nella crisi finanziaria: leggendolo non è difficile immaginare che presto ci saranno nuove denuncie di frode legate all'azione del fondo Magnetar


(...) Most discussion of the role of fraud in the crisis has focused on two forms of deception: predatory lending and misrepresentation of risks. (...)
We’ve known for some time that Goldman Sachs and other firms marketed mortgage-backed securities even as they sought to make profits by betting that such securities would plunge in value. This practice, however, while arguably reprehensible, wasn’t illegal. But now the S.E.C. is charging that Goldman created and marketed securities that were deliberately designed to fail, so that an important client could make money off that failure. That’s what I would call looting.
And Goldman isn’t the only financial firm accused of doing this. According to the Pulitzer-winning investigative journalism Web site ProPublica, several banks helped market designed-to-fail investments on behalf of the hedge fund Magnetar, which was betting on that failure.
So what role did fraud play in the financial crisis? Neither predatory lending nor the selling of mortgages on false pretenses caused the crisis. But they surely made it worse, both by helping to inflate the housing bubble and by creating a pool of assets guaranteed to turn into toxic waste once the bubble burst. (...)
The main moral you should draw from the charges against Goldman, though, doesn’t involve the fine print of reform; it involves the urgent need to change Wall Street. Listening to financial-industry lobbyists and the Republican politicians who have been huddling with them, you’d think that everything will be fine as long as the federal government promises not to do any more bailouts. But that’s totally wrong — and not just because no such promise would be credible.
For the fact is that much of the financial industry has become a racket — a game in which a handful of people are lavishly paid to mislead and exploit consumers and investors. And if we don’t lower the boom on these practices, the racket will just go on.


Qui trovate una breve analisi di Brad De Long sul caso Goldman-Abacus.


Il rischio di un cospicuo danno reputazionale per Goldman Sachs è davvero molto alto, tale da cancellare i profitti ottenuti dall'affare Abacus. Certamente assisteremo a una feroce battaglia legale:  scrive il New York Times:


(...) Marcel Kahan, a law professor at New York University, said the risk to Goldman’s reputation was greater than its legal exposure. For instance, he said that Goldman’s stock dropped nearly 13 percent on Friday, causing a greater loss in market capitalization than the worst imaginable S.E.C. fine. “I think the negative P.R. for Goldman is a multiple of the legal one,” he said. “It’s very bad for business. You don’t want to get the impression with your client that you are doing shady things.”

As a consequence, Professor Kahan said, Goldman had no incentive to settle the case and would hire the nation’s best lawyers to try to clear its name. Similarly, he said the S.E.C. had as much or more to lose, given its record in the last decade.

But just taking on Goldman Sachs is a sign the agency is more certain of its role as a tough watchdog for the markets, said Donald C. Langevoort, a law professor atGeorgetown University who formerly worked in the office of the agency’s general counsel.

“The S.E.C. has long lacked the kind of resources that would give them the confidence that they could take on a Goldman Sachs,” he said, “because if Goldman Sachs decides to litigate, you know it’s going to be a war.”

In questo articolo trovate un ulteriore approfondimento sulla discussione relativa ai mutui subprime e ai rischi del mercato immobiliare interna a Goldman Sachs nei mesi che hanno preceduto la crisi finanziaria,