Qualche buona notizia dall'Economist e la guerra delle valute

L'Economist uscito ieri sera riporta qualche buona notizia sul fronte delle aspettative di crescita dell'economia mondiale. Secondo il settimanale britannico 

The IMF said that the global economy had grown faster than expected in the first half of 2010 and predicted that it would grow by 4.8% over the year as a whole. The fund forecast that global growth would slow to 4.2% in 2011, and warned that recovery remained fragile. America and other developed economies were set to experience more sluggish growth in the coming year because of budget cuts, it said. Emerging markets would continue to boom. See article

Il Fondo monetario internazionale prevede anche che i costi della crisi finanziaria, almeno per la parte relative alle perdite delle banche, saranno leggermente inferiori al previsto:

The IMF also revised its estimate for the total of bank write-downs and loan provisions related to the financial crisis. It said these would amount to $2.2 trillion between 2007 and 2010, down from $2.3 trillion in April. The fund put the value of write-downs still to be realised at roughly $550 billion.

Molto meno confortante è la situazione dei mercati valutari: non solo continua la manipolazione dei cambi da parte delle banche centrali ma da più parti si fa un gran parlare di guerre valutarie. Persino Martin Wolf, certamente non uso ai toni polemici, qualche giorno fa sul Financial Times non ha usato mezze misure parlando della manipolazione del cambio da parte della Cina. L'Economist riprende la questione riassumendo gli scambi polemici piùà recenti tra Wen Jiabao, Strauss-Kahn e Sarkozy:

FX-rated

Wen Jiabao, the Chinese prime minister, told European leaders during a visit to Brussels that an unstable yuan put the global economy in peril. He was responding to continuing criticism that the Chinese currency is artificially undervalued. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the president of the IMF, weighed in, alerting countries to the dangers of manipulating exchange rates to deal with domestic problems and sounding a warning against a “currency war”. France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who will be assuming the presidency of the G20 later this year, said he wanted reform of the international monetary system to be at the top of the agenda at the group’s November summit in Seoul.

Un uomo prudente.

Joseph Cassano era il responsabile dell'unità di A.I.G. che eseguiva le transazioni sui derivati legati al mercato dei mutui. E' proprio attraverso queste transazioni che A.I.G. accumulò straordinarie perdite che richiesero l'intervento della Fed e del Tesoro U.S.A. per evitarne il fallimento e l'innesco di uno straordinario "effetto domino" che avrebbe probabilmente portato al fallimento di molte altre banche, assicurazioni, ecc. Mercoledì scorso è stato interrogato dalla commissione che analizza le cause della crisi finanziaria e ha difeso con decisione le sue azioni, sostenendo che le sue decisioni erano state "prudenti" e che non c'era necessità di un bailout di A.I.G costato almeno 132 miliardi di dollari. In particolare Cassano sostiene di non aver commesso errori nella valutazione del rischio delle transazioni nel mercato dei derivati sui mutui subprime:
AIG's problems, he said, were brought on by a liquidity crisis when credit markets seized up— and weren't a result of lax underwriting practices or defaults among mortgage assets his unit had insured. When market values of those assets plunged, the firm was deluged by demands for cash collateral from banks that had bought the insurance from his unit, AIG Financial Products.  
"I think I would have negotiated a much better deal for the taxpayer than what the taxpayer got" when the government and AIG in late 2008 paid tens of billions of dollars to banks to cancel the insurance-like contracts AIG wrote on mortgage securities, said Mr. Cassano


Secondo il WSJ Cassano ha ricevuto 300 milioni di dollari di compensi da A.I.G. per il lavoro svolto.

Qui potete leggere il resoconto sul Wall Street Journale mentre qui sotto potete vedere un video sullo stesso argomento, anch'esso tratto dal portale del WSJ.

Bailouts senza fondo. La rivalutazione del cambio yuan/dollaro

Quanto costerà ai contribuenti USA il salvataggio di Freddie Mac e Fannie Mae? Le ultime stime si aggirano intorno ai 400 miliardi di dollari ma c'è chi prospetta anche cifre superiori.
Secondo l'analista e blogger di MSN Money Jim Jubak le cose potrbbero anche mettersi molto peggio:
In August, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated the two companies would need $389 billion in government money through 2019. Barclays Capital said in December that the price tag could run as high as $500 billion if housing prices dropped an additional 20%. (Housing prices as measured by the S&P/Case-Shiller 20-city index fell 3.2% in the first quarter of 2010 compared with the previous quarter.)

Sean Egan, the president of Egan-Jones Ratings, recently told Bloomberg that a 20% loss on mortgages and guarantees, which is in line with the losses at a mortgage lender such as Countrywide Financial -- now owned by Bank of America (BAC, news, msgs) -- could take a worst-case scenario to $1 trillion.

No one knows the exact number, but there's an awful lot of taxpayer money riding on housing prices.

The obligations are real, but none of it is in the federal budget. How long will the foreign money financing the U.S. deficit buy that one, do you think?

Jubak considera l'esplosione del bailout di Fannie e Freddie uno dei principali rischi di breve-medio termine per la ripresa dell'economia USA e mondiale, insieme all'aggravarsi della crisi del debito spagnolo e al rischio insolvenza del sistema bancario cinese. 

Come ho già anticipato ieri la banca centrale cinese ha annunciato la sua disponibilità a una maggiore flessibilità del cambio dello yuan. Ecco quanto scrive oggi il New York Times:

China announced on Saturday evening that it would allow greater flexibility in the value of its currency, a move that could deflect growing international criticism of its economic policies and defuse one of the greatest sources of tension between Beijing and Washington.

The statement, by China’s central bank, was the clearest sign yet that the country would allow its currency to appreciate gradually against the dollar. World leaders are due to meet next week in Canada for economic talks, and China’s currency policies had appeared a certain source of conflict.
The United States has been leading a chorus of countries urging China to let its currency fluctuate. Many members of Congress believe China’s exchange rate policy gives it an unfair trade advantage, and a movement has been growing to take retaliatory trade action if China did not make an adjustment.
President Obama and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, immediately praised China’s action. “China’s decision to increase the flexibility of its exchange rate is a constructive step that can help safeguard the recovery and contribute to a more balanced global economy,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. The European Commission also said it supported the move.
But it remains to be seen whether the move will significantly rebalance the global trade picture. The People’s Bank of China was cautious in its statement about how far its currency, the renminbi, might fluctuate, warning explicitly that “the basis for large-scale appreciation of the RMB exchange rate does not exist.” Chinese officials said the renminbi would move in relation to an unspecified basket of currencies, not just the dollar. Experts said that depending on how the system was designed, China could avoid rapid fluctuations.
Mr. Geithner alluded to this in a statement, saying, “This is an important step, but the test will be how far and how fast they let the currency appreciate.”
The first sign of how much currency appreciation will be tolerated is likely to come Monday morning, when the Chinese government will set the initial trading band for the value of the renminbi in Shanghai trading.
China has kept its currency value low since mid-2008 by pegging it to that of the dollar and not letting it fluctuate. Any trend in the renminbi’s value would have been higher without the peg, making China’s goods more expensive to foreign consumers and possibly slowing the country’s export-based economy.(...)
For China, a stronger renminbi will increase the buying power of its consumers and could make gasoline and other imported commodities seem less expensive. Faced with spreading labor unrest, particularly in the auto industry, the government has started to make an energetic effort to improve the standard of living of industrial workers.
But many economists inside and outside China have argued that currency appreciation is in China’s interest most of all. The country has been spending nearly one-tenth of its annual economic output to buy Treasury notes and bonds and other foreign securities while printing and selling renminbi, all in an effort to prevent the renminbi from rising against the dollar.
The renminbi has already risen with the dollar by 15 percent against the euro in the last two months. That has made Chinese officials nervous about the future competitiveness of Chinese sales to Europe, the biggest market for Chinese exports.
Cui Tiankai, a vice foreign minister, said on Friday that the value of the renminbi was not a subject for global discussion, the latest in a series of remarks by Chinese officials indicating strong nationalistic sensitivities about currency policy.
But people familiar with Chinese currency policy making have been saying for two months that the Chinese leadership agreed in early April to a change of direction. A devastating earthquake in western China in mid-April followed by worries about economic turmoil in Europe delayed action on the decision.

La struttura del bailout da 750 miliardi (dal New York Times)

Interessante l'editoriale del New York Times di oggi, dedicato al superpacchetto da 750 miliardi di euro approvato ieri dai leaders europei. Ecco come si conclude:

Meanwhile, the banks that caused much of this mess are getting all their money back. A more equitable approach would require the banks to pay at least part of the bill — writing down the debts of some European governments or extending their maturities into the future to allow battered European economies time to recover.
This lopsided distribution of costs is built upon a distorted narrative: profligate governments from Europe’s less responsible nations spent beyond their means and now can’t repay their debt. Except for Greece, that is not what happened.
In 2007, before the financial crisis, Spain had a budget surplus of 2 percent of G.D.P. Ireland had a balanced budget. Portugal’s deficit of 2.6 percent was well within the euro area’s accepted limits. Today their budgets are all deep in the red because the global collapse slashed economic activity, boosted unemployment and required a large-scale government response.
We understand why European governments are not demanding that the banks share the burden. Rescheduling Greece’s debt, or that of other governments, could weaken the balance sheets of European banks and make financial markets more unstable.
That’s the reason the Obama administration went so light on American banks. Still, Europe may not be able to solve its problems without bringing the bankers in to pay their share.